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Microsoft extends updates for Windows XP security products until July 14, 2015
- beedogs 13y agoUgh. This operating system is almost old enough to vote. Can't they just let it die?
- omegaworks 13y agoAnd provide more fodder for the botnets? Fun!
- jonlucc 13y agoThose computers become fodder in July 2015. I think this delays the inevitable.
- chaz 13y agoBut there will be fewer of them in 2015 than today.
- jonlucc 13y agoHopefully, but I think the rate of change decreases over time. Increasingly, the computers left on XP will be computers that won't be updated. One example is the following: we have a computer in my lab we have several computers that are controlling lab equipment. They will not be upgraded, as the software won't work on any modern OS. Our option is to stop using tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment or unplug them from the wall.
- anonymfus 13y agoSometimes such problems could be solved by reverse engineering and binary patching such software.
- anigbrowl 13y agoWhich has a non-negligible cost. I'm thinking of dedicating an old laptop I have with XP to running some audio hardware, for which driver support ended with XP but which is otherwise in good working order. Of course I could find other products to replace it, but I'd rather use the money for something else.
- userbinator 13y agoI hope the rate of change decreases... but I think it's going the opposite way. We are generating enough e-waste as it is already without a mass trashing of otherwise perfectly working machines not powerful enough to run a newer OS. Each new CPU model released is already providing smaller and smaller improvements in performance. The day when hardware stops getting faster and bigger couldn't come soon enough; maybe that's when software will actually get more efficient and we'll finally realize what a wasteful approach we've been taking with software development for the past few decades...
- pippy 13y agoThey likely only extended support in the fear another company snaps up their corporate customers. There are plenty of alternative supported distros that would work on older hardware, different methodologies (IE BYOD), or virtualization strategies that could cause a domino effect in corporate environments in which they become less dependant on MS products.
- huxley 13y agoI wonder how many these XP users are customers in any sense that involves money, it appears (from the outside) to be a worry about losing theoretical marketshare.
- jlgaddis 13y agoHeh, the machines still running XP in corporations are likely doing so because of the applications. If they were going to move to Linux, they'd just upgrade to Windows {7|8}.
- Fasebook 13y agoUntil linux can compete with an OS old enough to vote, we'll still need XP.
- Crito 13y agoEven assuming that Linux cannot compete with XP (what does linux have to do with this discussion anyway?), it is still ridiculous to think that we need XP. We have OSX, Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8....
- Fasebook 13y agoDon't you find it interesting that all your supposed alternatives are paid software? (never mind the fact that Vista, 7 and 8 are almost identical OSes)
- pikachu_is_cool 13y ago> Even assuming that Linux cannot compete with XP
- jonlucc 13y agoBut XP was a paid OS. I know it was paid for moons ago, but I don't think it is unreasonable to expect a $100 upgrade after 12 years. Alternatively, I think many Linux distros work better than XP will come August 2015.
- samolang 13y agoThe price of the OS you are upgrading to does not equal the total cost of upgrading your OS necessarily.
- rbanffy 13y agoJust the time you spend not working and making backups, doing the upgrade and dealing with the various historical artifacts it leaves behind will end up costing more than the license. The last time I upgraded my Fedora box (with fedup) I spent most of the duration working uninterrupted, then had the upgrade perform itself over lunch. The last time I did it on Ubuntu, I worked throughout the process, only having to stop for the reboot required to switch between major kernel versions. Minor kernel changes happen without rebooting.
- yahelc 13y agoXP was released in Fall of 2001. At best, it's going through puberty and is about to have its bar mitzvah.
- jbigelow76 13y agoL'Chaim!
- axefrog 13y agoWindows XP is Jewish?
- JohnTHaller 13y agoOnly the antivirus/antimalware definitions are being updated. Windows XP and Office 2003 are still on track for end of life on April 14, 2014 (88 days and counting down...)
- brudgers 13y agoHow old is BSD? Perl 5? XHTML? It is not as if software spoils.
- sb057 13y ago>BSD OpenBSD's latest significant version was less than 3 months ago >Perl 5 5.18.2 was released this year >XHTML 1.1 was released a bit more than four years ago The fact of the matter is that old, unupdated software holds everyone back.
- brudgers 13y agoWindowsXP was updated patch Tuesday.
- trobertson 13y agoThe common term "bitrot" suggests otherwise
- dllthomas 13y agoBitrot typically refers to individual bits flipping (due to cosmic rays or device failure or whatever), which spoils one copy of the software if you do nothing to correct it, but isn't the same thing as a version no longer being relevant.
- ams6110 13y agoAccording to Wikipedia, "[OpenBSD] was forked from NetBSD by project leader Theo de Raadt in late 1995."
- oblio 13y agoAs long as it interfaces with anything else, it does. If your software is completely isolated and self contained, sure, there's no practical bitrot. But the Internet changed the software world - software rots out in the wild.
- ars 13y ago> Can't they just let it die? Why? If it aint broke don't fix it. What new features do the newer versions of windows provide that makes it worth spending money, and worse time to upgrade? I don't use it myself but I know a TON of people on XP and the computer works fine, they use openoffice, a browser, and a few games. Computers used to get faster all the time, that's not true anymore. They are now appliances - you use them till the break, instead of upgrading all the time.
- agildehaus 13y agoIn April, when Microsoft stops devoting resources to fixing security issues, it very much is broken.
- stinos 13y agoThe OS itself might not be broken (though I find 7 way better) but for some native app developpers like me the continued XP support is not welcome at all, since it means some of our customers will probably still not upgrade which means we still have to support them. And that means we cannot use all C++/C# features we want or have to resort to ugly workarounds. Just compiling C++ for XP means having to set a flag in Visual Studio, and if you want to do that for multiple projects automatically you've gotta do it system wide. Thats' not nice. Worse is .Net 4.5 is simply not supported at all, so no new goodies which are quite welcome.
- taylodl 13y agoThat's your fault for choosing Microsoft as your development platform. You've put them in the driver's seat of your business, which is never a good thing.
- johnduhart 13y agoYeah! Who needs to target 75% of the desktop market! http://www.netmarketshare.com/os-market-share.aspx?qprid=9 http://www.netmarketshare.com/os-market-share.aspx?qprid=9
- AdamTReineke 13y agoSkip the blog and go right to the source: http://blogs.technet.com/b/mmpc/archive/2014/01/15/microsoft-antimalware-support-for-windows-xp.aspx http://blogs.technet.com/b/mmpc/archive/2014/01/15/microsoft... "To help organizations complete their migrations, Microsoft will continue to provide updates to our antimalware signatures and engine for Windows XP users through July 14, 2015. "This does not affect the end-of-support date of Windows XP, or the supportability of Windows XP for other Microsoft products, which deliver and apply those signatures."
- fotcorn 13y agoThey will only update antimalware signatures, nothing else. Direct link: http://blogs.technet.com/b/mmpc/archive/2014/01/15/microsoft-antimalware-support-for-windows-xp.aspx http://blogs.technet.com/b/mmpc/archive/2014/01/15/microsoft...
- japaget 13y agoI suspect Microsoft is planning to have Windows 9 available by then. I have a computer that is too old to run Windows 7, and was going to retire it. I'd rather not deal with Windows 8, and was considering replacing the old computer with a Mac or with a Linux machine. If Windows 9 is out by the time XP finally dies, I can stick with Microsoft Windows. Update: It's just anti-malware signatures, nothing else :-( I really hope the new Microsoft CEO decides to extend XP support until Windows 9 is out so I won't have a tough choice come April.
- zanny 13y agoI didn't know anyone liked using Windows. Especially when you can get almost any UX under the sun in linux, assuming any proprietary software you need runs under wine.
- deletes 13y agoYou are not thinking from an average user point of view. They don't know what any of those words mean, and even if they did they couldn't handle them; even installing windows is impossible for most people.
- pikachu_is_cool 13y agoThey don't have to know what those words mean. Most versions of Linux have everything that the average user needs right out of the box, and if most PCs were shipped with a popular user-friendly distro, 99% of people wouldn't even notice or care. Admittedly if you want to run native Windows programs that aren't available for Linux then you're kind of screwed. Wine usually does a pretty good job but it isn't usable by the average layman at all. But it's getting better. The only programs that aren't usable on Linux nowadays are basically games, MS Excel and Photoshop.
- jorts 13y agoJust curious, have you ever supported end users? My experience tells me that most people would freak out when presented with something as dissimilar as any linux variant after being a Windows user for a decade or more.
- sirkneeland 13y agoI guess we also just learned the release date for Windows 9...
- yuhong 13y agoIt is probably no coincidence this match the date of the end of support of Server 2003.
- becauseBloat 13y ago...mostly because newer versions of Windows are so absurdly bloated, and just as slow as a decades old machine on ever more powerful hardware, that there is almost zero benefit to upgrading beyond XP. Seriously. A single core 1.5GHz Pentium 4, with 512MB of RAM, running XP delivers all of the same features that Windows 7 delivers with a quad-core 3GHz iCore7 and 8GB or RAM. Notepad still chokes on 500KB of plain text wrapped to the window, Paint still struggles with images above 5000 pixels square, MS Office still takes eons to load, and one large document created by any particularly incompetant user will destroy 15 minutes of your day. One bad tab in a browser (any browser), and your entire system might grind to a halt for minutes on end. Starting and stopping windows services takes ages. Hard drives are still just as noisy as fuck, and god knows what the fuck is even being paged to disk anymore. Network traffic is relatively opaque, despite prettied up WYSIWYG spikes on logarithmic line graphs of monitors that provide meaningless information. And then Windows 8 comes along and tries to disenfrachise the common layman end user even further by covering everything up with a touch-based interface even for machines that have no touchscreen, and follows Ubuntu's lead of serving up ads in a local file search. If you want a version of Windows that doesn't embody this nightmare, call Microsoft directly and provision an Enterprise account with one of their helpful sales reps. What's the price tag? Why, the sales rep will inform you of that once you answer some simple questions. Gee, I wonder why "enterprises" refuse to budge off of XP.
- dubfan 13y agoHave you ever tried running a modern browser on a machine with less than 2GB of RAM? It's not pretty.
- becauseBloat 13y agoBut that sort of plays into my point. With a 64 bit version of XP, and 8GB of RAM, you could fit the entirety of the operating system in memory, paging file and all. A clean install of XP, with nothing else included, occupies about 3GB of disk space. You'd still have 4GB of RAM free to run the system. But as of Vista, the mandatory minimum RAM was escalated (from 64MB) to 1GB, and all to support a hideous UI, and not much else. The operating system sprawls across 64GB of disk space. With every new version, it feels just as shitty as before. Despite umpteen quadruplings of hardware resources, shit still feels like it's Windows 95, fucking again. Nothing gets faster. Drop $3,000 a year, just to swim against the tide, with incremental changes in the appearance of progress bars, so that ugly animations can actually flash periodically as they steal your youth from you, rather than inflicting anxiety whilst freezing intermittently. Every subsequent version of Windows fails to improve, continues to suck, and in some areas it actually gets worse than it already is. But christ almighty. After 20 god damned years. Why?
- naaaaak 13y agoIf I were MS I'd provide no updates to laggards. They either can't upgrade or they won't upgrade, so what's the point? What does another year of virus definitions really get them when the Fisher Price OS can already be exploited in so many other ways?
- sandworm101 13y agoMillions of machines about to loose MS support. Millions of machines unable to run windows 7/8/9. Millions of people suddenly very interested in linux. MS isn't worried that people won't upgrade. They are worried that they will. Also, this may have to do with the Target malware as the afflicted POS machines appear to be running XP.
- jorts 13y agoNot being a troll, but where do you think most of these people are going to buy these linux boxes? A quick search on bestbuy.com's top deals are all Windows 8 machines. I think these people are more likely do one of four things before migrating to linux: - Do nothing and use an un-patched machine - Buy a Windows 8 machine - Buy a tablet - Buy a Mac
- sandworm101 13y agolol, I meant to say that they will be installing linux on the old XP machines, without buying new hardware. There are plenty of tiny distros that could keep those XP machines running safely for many years.
- 72deluxe 13y agoI don't think that there will be a sudden mass conversion. Look at the mess of Vista and the unpopularity of Windows 8. There wasn't a mass migration to Linux. Home users will just buy an iPad because they realised that they didn't actually use Excel at home and so didn't need a PC. Businesses will just upgrade to Windows 7/8/9 and IT departments will moan/groan.
- panacea 13y agoFairly sure it's not shitty machines keeping XP alive... it's shitty custom software that only runs on XP and shitty IT departments.
- vvvVVVvvv 13y ago
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- alien3d 13y agoGot a client said ,their oracle form only work on win xp internet explorer 7. Thanks god for them . But to me it was disaster because to suggest web application compliance to internet explorer 7 :( Anybody knew about their activation for windows xp after april 2014. i still got laptop using windows xp.. 2008 laptop.
- fauigerzigerk 13y agoMicrosoft should spin off Windows XP (perhaps in combination with IE6) and sell it to some private equity firm for exploitation. It would live on for centuries ;-)
- dzhiurgis 13y agoWasn't able to get Windows XP updates for months now. Not quite sure where the issue lies, but forums are roaring.