Oh you still use windows xp?
teganburns
Posts: 134
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9241585/XP_s_retirement_will_be_hacker_heaven
In 2014 Microsoft will stop patches and that same day tons of exploits are expected to be released.
I don't think it will be a huge deal but something to keep an eye on, especially if you use xp...
In 2014 Microsoft will stop patches and that same day tons of exploits are expected to be released.
I don't think it will be a huge deal but something to keep an eye on, especially if you use xp...
Comments
XP is an old OS now, and it's getting more difficult to find new exploits. Not to mention that the bad guys doesn't co-operate all that much, so that the 'supersploit' one hacker has laying in wait for that time is just as likely to be used by another before then, and trigger a new patch.
As there's a lot of older machines out there that still works well, but can't run anything newer, I expect XP to have a significant online user base for at least 3 or 4 years still.
That means there's a market for protection services still, so anti-virus SW and rootkit scanners will still be available.
now, if people could just learn to NOT use the default admin account, and work from behind a NATing fireWall...
Please tell me that you downloaded and installed the latest Service Pack, at least?
For a long time MS has been riding the improvements in microprocessors as a way selling customers up to new operating systems.
For example:
1) With the arrival of decent graphics and somewhat faster machines with more memory (Intel 286) MS could sell customers the early Windows. A nice upgrade from MSDOS.
2) Soon networking was available and it was time to buy into Win 3.1 (or was it Windows For Work Groups) to take advantage of that.
3) Micros grew to 32 bits so we could all shell out again for Windows 95.
4) USB arrived at we needed to buy Windows 98. (Even if OEM Win95 supported USB our retail versions did not, go figure)
5) Micros moved to 64 bit's. Oh boy it's time to buy Vista.
6) Somewhere along the line Micros went multi-core. Not sure when MS did.
And so on and so on.
Now we find a strange new world growing.
Processor clock frequencies are not going to be doubling every couple of years as they have in the past. Physics has put it's foot down and said "enough of that already".
There won't be so many "killer" features in PC hardware that MS can sell us an upgrade for.
Except: Moore's law will still give us double the number of transistors every two years for a while yet. We can't crank up the CPU clock so we will end up with more cores at the same clock rate. 4 or or 8 cores is already common. Imagine every two years that doubles: 8, 16, 23, 64, 128.
Problem is most software cannot use buckets of cores. 64 cores does not help you with Word or Power Point or Outlook etc etc. It's nice to have a couple of apps running on a couple of cores buts that's not enough to make use of the power that is coming with hundreds of cores.
The upshot is we won't feel the need to upgrade every two years, if the software cannot use those cores there is no point. Without that endless replacement tread mill of the past decades PC sales will plummet and with that so will MicroSoft's chance of making sales. Looks like we are already seeing that process start.
Unless some "killer" app arrives that make use of all those cores that we "must have" MS is in serious trouble.
Given the complexity of parallel programming that could take some time, if ever for the regular computer user.
Take the 32 bit to 64 bit transition. It was sold to users as a way to break the 3.5 GB barrier, but that's marketing baloney. The x86 architecture supported PAE for years which allowed 64 GB of physical RAM with a 4 GB virtual address space per process. The use case for 64 bits is a server that need to memory map large databases into RAM of a single process for fast retrieval. If you are not doing that then you really don't need 64 bits. But you'll pay a penalty of wider pointers which consumes RAM faster. Here's a blog post where the Visual Studio team had a blog post explaining why they weren't porting to 64 bits: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ricom/archive/2009/06/10/visual-studio-why-is-there-no-64-bit-version.aspx
Likewise multiple cores is really useful for a server cloud hosting many concurrent end users to prevent one user's workload from impacting another. But to a desktop user the major benefits are played out after a few cores. The primary benefit is no virus scanner induced lag.
To me the emergence of the mobile market segment is Moore's law working the other direction. This says that every two years you can buy a computer with the same power as your current one for half as much. Because end users only do certain kinds of tasks, they only need a certain amount of CPU power. So their needs can be satisfied on cheaper and cheaper hardware. This isn't good news for hardware vendors, but great news for someone like Google.
If PC users don't need to upgrade to get more Hz or MIPs, because that is no longer possible to do. And if they don't need to upgrade get more memory, they have enough. And need to upgrade to get 64 or 1024 or a million cores, because their software does not need it and cannot us it. Then, well, there will be no regular upgrading going on every two years.
That means that sales of future PC chips from Intel and co. will drop like a stone.
That means the huge amount of money required to push development forward will not be there. The server world is big but I don't believe it matches sales quantities provided by the purchasing power of billions of PC users over decades past.
That means, the development of those mega core chips may not happen so quickly due to the lack of money. That effectively slows Moore's law down a bit. The investment required to shrink transistors won't be there.
Hey, I just realized, that's a big thought. It has always been assumed that Moore's law would be halted by the laws of Physics. If what I have just outlined happened to be how things pan out then Moore's law would end up being halted by our inability to create compelling software for multi-core devices. That is to say, it's software not physics that might be the limit to Moore's Law!
This is all very bad news for those who want ever bigger and faster super computers, without the huge development that went into the PC for the mass market they are not going to be able to make progress economically.
Tada!!!!!
-Tor
Our new data center has staggering power and cooling capabilities. It's all being prepared to accept racks of servers, storage and network that you can just roll in and plug in. Watts add up quickly, so any saving is good in the server space.
It will be interesting to see how things play out in the different spaces.
Based on XP's current rate of decline, Computerworld has projected that the old OS will still run between 33% and 34% of the world's personal computers at the end of April 2014.
Couldn't they just say "a third"? I bet that's exactly what Computerworld said, and this pedantic author or editor felt a need to wordify.
I loaded Win8 on the wife's computer and she hated it so much that she made me put her back on XP (I kinda expected that, so I used a whole new hard drive for Win8 so I could easily swap back). Lord knows what she'll do when her XP world ends (XP-geddon?) in 2014.
So I turned to Linux. Even the old XP machine runs nicely with Linux as it does support legacy hardware. It seems that MS has always stair-stepped their up-grades with new hardware requirements to create perpetual expense to the end-user.
My cash-flow for computer software fell off dramatically with the switch to Linux, and security issues seem well managed. Linux seems to run faster (wthout the registry non-sense), and easier to get support from the community. It doesn't support the latest, greatest gadget or app; but I can live with that.
My Windows XP machine still have the XP in a dual boot with Linux, but I never use it.
If the worst comes to the worst, just re-image your VM and off you go. You do back up your data right?
Your trusty XP could be running for another hundred years. Just like we can run CP/M today or all those old game systems under emulation.
Not sure what to do about some funky hardware interfaces, like our dentist above, but there might be ways around.
The "killer" app that needs lots of cores is video coding. The current video standard, which is H.264/MPEG-4 can be done on a single core, or it can use a few cores to get better performance and higher resolution. However, the new video standard, H.265 will require much more processing power for the encoder. It is being developed with the intent to run it on multiple cores. A frame can be broken up into independent tiles, with one core dedicated to each tile. Decoding is not as compute-intensive, but multiple cores will allow for decoding several streams at the same time.
Edit: Another "killer" app that can use more cores is a threaded chess program.
One problem with more cores is that you need higher data read/write speeds, both to memory and to storage.
4 Cores is really asking for it and 8 is ludicrous unless you have some really
You summed up the situation nicely.
Even when the engineers in the company I worked at opened up the first IBM PC in 1981 they fell about laughing. Then reality hit them and they went into a depression as they realized this is what we will be stuck with for decades to come. As one of them said at the time "IBM always holds up progress in computing by at least 10 years"
I have one XP machine. I did run Windows 7 on it for a while. I will probably get it upgraded.
Anything built with the newer Windows 8 development tools will no longer work on XP. I think that's going to impact it very quickly. There will be niches pretty much forever, just like there are with everything else out there. It never really goes away, but the rush to end XP is serious now.
It's about function, not indulging in the latest upgrades that really don't do anything except provide job security to IT types and make my life miserable. By the time MS came out with XP, it really couldn't go any further. Enhancements after it were mostly cosmetic junk for revenue purposes only. There is nothing in 8 that changes anything for me. I still type at the same speed, read PDF files at the same rate, still do designs Quartus at a snail's pace, code on FreePascal, watch some videos on youtube.
BTW the x86 architecture was a disaster for the computer world as was the dominance of Microsoft/Intel which created a horrific monoculture.
I used to reinstall windoze every 3-6 months on my pcs, and upgrade every 6 months. Now they are plenty fast enough so that is not necessary.
MS and Intel were working hand in hand forcing upgrades regularly, but not any more. Servers are the only ones still on that path, and that is slowing too, except for cloud/hosting.
Coupled with that, many realise that tablets, some with keyboards, are the way of the futurefor alot of uses. Justlook at schools thatnow require ipads instead of laptops.
And tablets don't run windoze or useintel - yeah, I dont count the ms slate here.
Result - cheaper tablets using arm and ios or android - intel and ms are now big losers of $$$.
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/gg244199.html
The only good thing to say about Win 3.1 is that it was less unstable than 3.0
I was recently persuaded to reinstall Win 7 on a Fujitsu laptop, from the Fujitsu CD. Damn thing does not even come with a driver for the ethernet interface. Oh no you need the second CD with some wonky Fujitsu setup program on it to get that, What's up with that?
Now it's, why doesn't my program x, y, z from XP work on Win 7. I have no idea. I can't even get VLC to work properly on it.
I should have stuck to my guns "I don't do Windows".
How do normal people ever get these things to work?
P.S. This is funny. When I hit the offered help button when finding the was no ethernet driver the first suggestions on the list is "Ask a friend" WTF? All three of the suggestions required a working network connection!
Sponsored by Microsoft ?
Note this applies only to patches and updates.
I believe in some parts of the globe, Microsoft has been legally forced to continue a supply path for older operating systems.
They can still invoice at current OS price, but the user is permitted & entitled to download older versions.
This is important to minimize the waste stream, especially in refurbished machined for education.
I do allow Mac OSX updates, though. At least Apple knows what kind of computers all of its updates will be installed on, so they don't have to accommodate much variety.
-Phil