On Friday, 28 February 2014 at 04:31:01 UTC, Steve Teale wrote:
I was in a discussion here recently about 64 bit and how much
memory people had in their machines these days.
A somewhat unrelated topic is that Microsoft are in the process
of dumping XP.
Now all those old desktop boxes with only 500k of memory will
increasingly migrate in containers to Africa, like the
discarded mountain bikes, and old banger cars. When they get
here they have traditionally had XP installed, since that is
readily available for free - legal or not.
Microsoft might do itself a favour in the long term if instead
of just dumping XP, it started from the Wine code, and made an
XP lookalike Linux distro. That way, the old boxes would have
an extended life, Microsoft would have goodwill from a lot of
users, and would not have to spend a lot of money keeping the
old OS, the spammers would be blocked in their process of
taking over all those unprotected XP machines, and lots of
young African girls and boys could learn to program in D ;=)
Steve
Perhaps of interest:
http://www.reactos.org/
http://zorin-os.com/
