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Slashdot Asks: Will You Need the Windows XP Black Market?
NicknamesAreStupid (1040118) writes "As Whoever57 pointed out, there are some who will still get support for Microsoft Windows XP — the 'haves'. However, most will be the 'have nots.' Anytime you have such market imbalance, there is opportunity. Since Microsoft clearly intends to create a disparity, there will certainly be those who defy it. What will Microsoft do to prevent bootleg patches of XP from being sold to the unwashed masses? How will they stop China from supporting 100 million bootleg XP users? And how easily will it be to crack Microsoft's controls? How big will the Windows XP patch market be?"
There are a lot of businesses still on Windows XP; if you work for one of them, will the official end of life spur actually cause you to upgrade? (And if so, to what?)
Seriously? Nobody even bothered to read the first sentence of the submission?
Looks like XP, mostly works like XP, closer to XP than Win 8, easier upgrade path than Win 8, lower rate of support calls from friends and family ...and in my experience, it's lighter and faster and more responsive than XP. So, no, I won't be laying out hundreds of pounds/dollars on a new machine or even more hundreds on replacing all the software that will not work on Win 8.
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
It costs a lot more than a new PC to upgrade thousands of PCs. Imaging, deployment, backup/restore processes for the end users is just the beginning. Upgrading dozens, hundreds, or thousands of individual customized applications to be compatible with Windows 7 is an absolute nightmare. I know all about this just from upgrading my relatively small workplace from XP to 7. It was a fight just to get core, mission critical apps to work with IE 9; 10 and 11 are out of the question. Lots of cash to vendors and app support folks, lots of cash to deployment specialists, lots of overtime. Adds up to a LOT of money.
By the way: $9 million over 680,000 PCs is $13 per PC. That's less than we paid per PC to have a contractor come in and physically install new machines at desks, and completely ignores the cost of OS licensing, hardware, support, and the thousands and thousands of man hours the IT department spent with associated tasks.
What will I do? Probably keep working from a known image and patch it up as best I can.
In other words, the same thing I've done with legacy DOS, 95, Novell, 98 and 2k systems.
My hope is that at some point I can find a low-overhead Linux or BSD system to use as a VM host, and then have access to every operating system since the dawn of the 4004.
Futurist Traditionalism
Arrrrr... Pirate support desk, XP division... What ken I do fer ya matey?
Yes hello, I'm trying to search for a pirate's favourite letter, but nothing's coming up under 'R'.
Yad think it's R but it's really the C.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
iTunes 11.1.3.8 is listed/rated "Gold" so, yes, iTunes works.
Then it must have changed very recently: garbage in 1.7.5 (December 2013), gold in 1.7.15 (April 2014). I wonder what breaking change Apple will introduce in the next version.
It clearly states that anyone supporting XP after Microsoft disowns to OS is a 'CRIMINAL'.
Under current copyright law, Microsoft could make a good faith case that anybody else providing modifications to its copyrighted operating systems is committing criminal infringement of copyright. I don't see how stating a reasonable interpretation of current law is "propaganda".
Actually, as tested in EU courts
Slashdot is subject to the jurisdiction of US courts, not EU courts.
you are just as entitled to use it with or without the official support of the original manufacturing company.
Using it doesn't include modifying it, which is what third parties providing support would have to do in order to let their clients keep using it without known security holes. And there's precedent against that: Apple successfully sued in the United States a company that was selling PCs along with the patch to run OS X on them. Put Apple v. Psystar in your favorite web search engine.
Nobody in their right mind is going to resort to the black market for XP support for a business -- it'd be like *inviting* the crackers into your network.
Home users either won't know how or won't care to bother. Most people I know who are still running XP have been virus-infected for months or even years. As long as it lets them play YouTubes, check their gMail, and surf Crackbook they just flat out don't *care* that the machine is infected.
Hell, most of them don't even realize the adware popups they keep seeing are due to an *infection*, not "bad behaviour" on the part of the aforementioned websites. One fellow I knew used to complain about the "popups from YouTube" all the time, 'cause all he ever did was YouTube and Crackbook. As far as he was concerned, it was YouTube that was putting up all the porn ads.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
"As Whoever57 pointed out, there are some who will still get support for Microsoft Windows XP pointed out, there are some who will still get support for Microsoft Windows XP — the 'haves'
what on earth does that sentence mean? this is even worse than Timothy's earlier oversight of re-running the same article less than a week after its first run. we know slashdot doesn't pay editors to edit, but could they at least show enough pride in their job to read what they post?
This kind of poor quality work is what long ago dissuaded me from ever paying for a Slashdot subscription. I block ads, too, since before my karma level gave me the option of having Slashdot do it for me. That was all before Malda sold out to Dice Holdings. It's not improved since.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Given that somebody clearly took the trouble to make Unofficial patch sets for Windows 98, we can fully expect unofficial patch sets for Windows XP
http://www.mdgx.com/upd98me.ph...
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Linux has a Dramatically better hardware support than XP,Vista,7 or 8 has combined.
Dramatically better on the whole? Perhaps. Better for every particular device? Not necessarily. There are probably plenty of edge cases that have an XP driver and no Linux driver at all. Does SANE support the Microtek ScanMaker 4850 flatbed scanner yet? It appears not.
Good day Cryacin, my name is John. I'm calling from Windows Service Center to talk to you about a problem with your Windows computer.
I beg your pardon sir?
No, I'm calling from Windows Service Center. We often call Windows users who have Windows computers that have been infect...
No, we are not within cannon range of your "ship"!
Sir, are you sitting in front of your Windows computer right now? It is urgent that you solve your malicious software infection urgently. Can you see a key on your keyboard with a Windows icon on it?
*Sound of distant thunder*
*Sound of glass shattering*
*Sound of wall collapsing*
Sir, we need to speed this up. Just Google "team viewer" and install it on your Windo...
*Sound of screams and cutlasses striking against metal*
Sir, I'm going to have to call you ba.....
*Static*
The objective of applying security updates from Microsoft is to make your OS safer by applying fixes delivered by a trusted party. MS may not be perfectly "trusted" but at least it has to worry about the liability of any fishy piece of software they install in your computer. On the other hand any source from the "black market" can simply deliver rootkits and any kind of malware disguised as security updates which certainly defies the purpose of applying updates.
Do you actually have experience or are you just making things up? Are are you willing to both write a driver and port the software for me that controls a chemistry instrument that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, uses some proprietary PCI card (or worse yet, ISA)? The instrument runs absolutely fine now, and will for years (I managed one instrument controlled by a Mac from the mid 80s), but would either cost a lot to upgrade to Windows 7, or require a new instrument. Instrumentation companies are like this. They do operate stupidly, are stuck in the 80s, and I'd love to smack them, but like it or not, in vertical industries, the choices are few and far between, and *very* expensive.
So what do you do? The hard part is some of these instruments generate a lot of data and require access to network servers. Dedicated, firewalled LANs will suffice here. Windows XP is going to be running for another ten years or more.
The whole problem revolves around the fact that in many industries computers are treated as "hardware" not "software." I mean you only replace a pump's pressure switch when it fails. We in the computer industry have been successful in pushing our technology into all kinds of places where it's invisible and just seen as a "controller" or a "switch" and treated as such. And it's not entirely the fault of the users of these devices either. The thought of securing and updating the firmware on these devices has really only been something anyone worried about recently. When was the last time you did a firmware update to your lawn sprinkler controller? Add internet capabilities to it, and suddenly it's a security hole requiring weekly software updates. How does this relate to XP? Well for a lot of people and industries, their instruments and devices are in their mind much like the sprinkler controller in your garage. They are just tools and they don't think about the software security, updates, EOL, etc. They've never had to before. It's a brave new world we've started, and this Windows XP EOL issue is just the beginning of our problems with this new "internet of things" idea. Which is brilliant, but fraught with all kinds of danger.
The year of the Linux desktop is finally here!
An actor named Robert Newton, from Dorset, played both Long John SIlver and Edward Teach (both from Bristol) in Disney movies in the 1950s. He used a West Country accent to be appropriate for the characters. Apparently, it stuck when other actors were designing their own performances.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.