Re: The Eventual Famine
Blindndangerous, XP is actually more like 14 years old. I believe XP first began shipping on PCs in the fall of 2001, and that means this fall XP will be 14 years old. That is extremely old for an operating system considering most are only supported up to five years. XP certainly has outlived its predecessors and successors which is precisely why Microsoft is having troubles getting end users to migrate. Far too many people have gotten use to the OS, have enjoyed a very long support cycle, and don't want to be cut off the way previous versions of Windows were. Not even newer versions of Windows like Vista have enjoyed the same length of support, and Vista officially ended general support back in 2012 before XP did.
Of course, I do believe Microsoft has learned its mistake, and now its a little too late. With Windows 8 they are no longer releasing service packs to patch the OS the way they did with XP and are offering new versions of Windows like Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 8.2, but no service packs. I don't think they can put that particular genie back in that particular bottle now that people have gotten use to XP and getting service packs every so often rather than an entire operating system upgrade like Microsoft now plans.
Dark, I think you are being overly biased in your post above. Assuming people get an upgrade to satisfy his or her ego is a bit far fetched. Lots of people upgrade for various reasons, and usually because for most people there is a genuine benefit to upgrading not because they want to satisfy their ego.
To give you an example I use Linux on a couple of my machines. The upgrades are free, and I frequently upgrade them because there are genuine benefits to upgrades for Linux. Improvements in the Gnome desktop, improvements in the Orca screen reader, various other accessibility improvements, all means I am not doing it for my own ego. I am doing it out of a genuine and valid benefit to installing and config uring the upgrade.
Well, even though I have an interest in technology, often upgrade my OS with the purchase of a new PC, I will often migrate my other Windows computers to the new OS if there is a genuine improvement for me to do so. The laptop I am using at this moment came with Windows Vista, but is presently running Windows 7. The reason I went out and purchased an upgrade for this laptop is very simple. There were benefits in migrating from Vista to Windows 7 such as better system performance, bug fixes, and Windows 7 is still being supported by Microsoft where Vista is already nearing end of life. In short, if I didn't think upgrading this laptop to Windows 7 wasn't worth the $125 or so I paid for it I wouldn't have done it just to stroke my ego.
As far as security goes I don't think anyone needs to get hysterical about it, but I do think people should take the issue seriously. Ignoring the problem and acting as though nothing is wrong is the wo rst thing someone can do. In psychology we call that a normalcy bias. Its basically the mindset because nothing has ever happened before that it will never happen because of reason x. Maybe it will and maybe it won't, but that is only turning a blind eye to the problem and hoping nothing does ever happen. As for myself I just don't feel comfortable doing that, and always apply security patches and updates whenever possible to avoid those sorts of problems and issues.
URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=172396#p172396
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