Windows XP

[Lagu]

According IDG.se Microsoft plan stop Window XP as is sold from chops July 30 2008.

PC developers are allowed sell XP to Dec 31 2008.

Microsoft will force factories to change to Wista which they not want. It cost a lot get 500 new licenses, reconfiguring and so on. And we It-peoples and other peoples perhaps feel they are satisfied using XP. It cost money for everyone buy new OS.

I got a mail from IDG.se where they had a "Save XP petition" as I have write under and sent.

IDG`s sistermagazine InfoWorld has a similar campaign in cooperation. You to can write and say you want to save XP. Here is the link:

http://weblog.infoworld.com/save-xp/...he_save_x.html

If Microsoft are serious how long takes it before they stop new patches?

Lagu

[Lagu]

Comments from their site:

We have got to save Windows XP. As of now, it is one of the most stable Windows systems, and there are plenty of software availability for it. Windows Vista has still not been debugged enough and a good deal of (rather important) software are still glitchy under Vista. So until the situation is improved on both Microsoft and Third Party Vendors sides, we need to preserve Windows XP some more time. I know Microsoft wants to make more money, but killing Windows XP right now might cause a lot of people to migrate to Linux (they have been improving greatly over the last two years, Linux Debian is more than a match for any Apple System, for instance)

I'm running Win'2K SP4 on a 1.6mhz Pentium, and see no reason to upgrade to Vista or XP for that matter. If the only way MicroSoft can make money is to keep coming out with non-compelling OS upgrades, and forcing people to upgrade, then they clearly have deteriorated into a truly pathetic company. What's even more embarrassing is Bill Gates himself spearheaded Vista development, and has little innovation to show for his efforts. No wonder that has-been is retiring.

Lagu

[Nflight]

http://www.dailytech.com/Microsoft+P...ticle11635.htm

My Blood Pressure just soared into the upper limit, you make your own decision as to why I hate Billy Bob Gates and his antics...!

[AMDave]

XP-SP3 is out and about.
Rather than post links to it, here is a link to the XP Wikipedia page which gives more information and jump-points to many other pages about it.
The delay on the official release is disappointing.

As for me I am like the guy who posted the message that Lagu has quoted above.
I locked down my Win2K-sp4 image and although I have tried XP and Vista I encountered so many things I didn't like about maintaining them that I stuck with with Win2K.

However, recently I have found that some driver updates are no longer available for the Win2K platform and even some software will now only run on XP and Vista. None of them are killer apps that would make me want to move to either of those OSs.

In the mean time, I have found that many flavours of Linux have become much more palatable. I have almost always had a linux or unix OS running on at least one machine in the house over several years. I have been impressed by recent efforts of the global FOSS programming communities, both commercial and volunteer, to start to integrate their applications with the desktop and to improve the overall look-and-feel and ease-of-use of their offerings. Sure it seems slow, but some critical components have made leaps and bounds and their improvements are making it easier for other groups to integrate and improve their applications.

Installing Linux on an off-the-shelf PC is still a bit of a gamble due to graphics chips, drivers, printers scanners and even that is being quite quickly addressed at the moment (no breath holding here though - that is a lot of work). The linux foundation is taking OpenPrinting to the "Google Summer of Code 2008" so we may finally see a great forward step here also. ATI have opened their code and tangible improvements have started to flow through, but Nvidia are holding their breath (and will likely go blue in the face if they miss the sales opportunity).

In the mean time Linux is a lot about choice. When you make the choice, you know that you can select the right hardware and peripherals that are proven to work with the OS and which have support behind them. Some of these "matching" combinations have produced pure excellence in home computing, media and production and new desktop interface designs have come where many of us had though innovation had been killed off by the Windows paradigm.

As more corporations integrate linux farms into their infrastructure, more applications are getting commercial support behind them.

This is definitely an exciting time of opportunity.

Just for fun:

$ uname -a
Linux dn06 2.6.25-8.fc9.x86_64 #1 SMP Wed Apr 23 03:20:41 EDT 2008 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Looks and feels great. Loving it so far ;-)
and

uname -a
Linux dn02 2.6.23.8-34.fc7 #1 SMP Thu Nov 22 23:05:33 EST 2007 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

Nice and comfy.

[Brucifer]

I just spent a *bunch* of hours doing updates, etc., to a few windows systems.... why? cause I wanted to dink around with the d2ol/tsc v3.0 releases for windows to see how things rock and roll there. In the process my disgust with the windows marketing model et al was firmly renewed. I had even been momentarily thinking about purchasing another copy of xp pro for recently purchased quad... $300 smackaroos is the price for xp-pro. Being plugged into linux for quite some time I've really become spoiled, and not because of the cost because I can spend $300 on linux in a heartbeat too. But what the difference is, is if I totally trash a hard drive and have to go through a re-install/backup, it isn't a massive time consuming drill. I suppose in all fairness to windows it can probably not be a massive time consuming drill either if one parts with many many more dollars/euros/pesos to purchase all the fancy backup stuff for windows. But I really have to question all that because a backup and restore is super simple on linux and I'm up and running very quickly, and cheaply. And if I have to go through a total re-install, I don't have to go through all the games and time consuming crap calling some soul on the other side of the planet to get authorization to re-install my purchased copy onto a new hard drive, blah blah.

Where do I have problems nowday with linux? Mainly in interfacing with other people or businesses that insist on doing a proprietary thing in the files used by their software. As for drivers for linux, one can always buy the commercially supported corporate versions of linux, and there is driver support for all but the few bleeding edge things and some of the graphics cards. No show stoppers though.

Some things I really like about linux.... if an installed software package suddenly becomes magically hosed up, it is nothing to verify the installation and see what file(s) are missing or damaged. That can be a real nightmare in the windows world. Another thing I have come to appreciate is that I don't have nightmare "registry" issues to mess with in linux. TAR is a poor man's lifesaver. It is included in every linux distro. It is nothing to tar off a user directory and compress it and shoot a copy off to another drive on another host system to save for a backup for a rainy day. In building crunchers, you can be back on line in minutes versus hours.

Yeah, in my begining corporate datacenter days it was a little bit of a learning curve to get used to the UNIX way of doing things. But it's a solid way of doing things, and it works, and it works very well. That was many years ago. And as the years went buy, and I retired, I just didn't realize how well it worked for me at home too until I brought up to date some of my extremely rarely used W2K, XP, XP-64, and Vista systems the other day, and suddenly was reminded what had driven me away from windows for my own home and farm use. Of course the cost of the O/S is the major up front issue for farmers.

I've been using Mepis-64 for my main desktop system. A little icon shows on the bottom screen bar when new updates for various stuff are released. I just click on that, and up pops the file manager tool, I click on what updates I want to install, and voila, it's done. No games with checking for the latest version of the update software, or the software validation tool, or packages that have to be installed one at a time and then rebooting the system and then going through the drill again. Linux just stops and restarts the updated app/service and you are off and running again. It spoils a person, it really does. Meanwhile all through the updating, my crunchers are still crunching away...

What's my beef now days??? I have an electrical outtage, the system boots up again, well it had been running so long before, that it goes into a file system check as times have been exceeded for the check filesystem. And if power went out during a file write, did it hose the filesystem??? Nope, cause transaction logs just rebuild the stuff on the fly.

Granted there is a learning curve with linux, but there is with most things anyway. But it is nice and comfortable for me now.... As AMDave said, "nice and comfy."

[mitchellds]

I whole heartedly agree. I love my ubuntu linux setups. Perfect for crunchers without all of the MS hassles to deal with.

[Danish Dynamite]

i understand and agree with what Brucifer said but these some loopholes with windows but they are painful as Brucifer pointed out but i don't know enough to successfully run Linux on all comps and from what have seen wife doesn't like Linux oh well lol