Happy to report
My Debian box is not running WindowsXP :-P
If you're wondering who is still running Windows XP in this day and age, given that support for the OS is ending soon, the answer is it might be YOU! Or at least, so Microsoft suspects. But fear not: Redmond has stepped up its outreach program with a new website that's designed to get to the bottom of this mystery, once and …
It tells you to sit completely still until you feel a stinging sensation in the neck and black out.
Oh, and if you think something happened to your room while you were knocked out, that's just your imagination. The Recovery Team will cut it out of your building and transplant it into a permanent exhibit in Redmond without even disturbing the dust under the bed...
> What about Windows XP64, that ran on 5.2 kernel?
Nope, according to MS XP64 ain't XP :D
According to WhatIsMyBrowser.com "Your web browser is: Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP SP2"
But according to http://amirunningxp.com "You are NOT running Windows XP"
Now that's interesting...
Also, I don't get the "submit" button when my useragent says IE6 on XP. El Reg doing Redmond's dirty work?
"Isn't XP64, by any other Name just Server 2003?"
Only in the same way that XP is Server 2003.
So, no, XP64 is a client OS and it goes out of support next month. Wags will argue that its driver support was so poor that it never came into support in the first place, but it is still rather sad to learn that even Microsoft have forgotten about it.
Was that the add-on that had an option to resize the desktop somehow ? I recall installing it, and breaking one of our companies products. It was only me that had the bug. Eventually the developers had to remove my machine, and install debug on it, to discover it was the Plus feature. I would have got a bollocking, only two customers reported the same thing a few days later, and I got a pat on the head for being so thorough in testing ....
Don't like it? Don't use it. If you must use Windows, use version 7, otherwise, there's Mac OS, Linux, Android, use them.
I'm getting sooo bored of the constant whinging about Windows 8.x and I strongly suspect that most of the people complaining about it haven't used it and will only be happy if it looks exactly the same as XP, even then I remember the bitching about XP when it was released.
>I'm getting sooo bored of the constant whinging about Windows 8.x
Whilst I tend to agree that we have extensively chewed over the Win8 UI abomination, what is interesting or concerning depending upon your viewpoint, is that MS are effectively only promoting Win8.1 to those still running XP. Whereas, 7, although not the latest and greatest version, is probably a more suitable and less traumatic upgrade and is still shipping and conveniently side steps all the public negativity and animosity towards Microsoft that Windows 8 has generated, which can only help MS to rehabilitate themselves in time for when Win7 drops off support in January 2020...
As for being happy if it looks exactly the same as XP; well after the recent el Reg look back at Win3, I'm actually quite keen to get back to the simplicity and functional cleanliness of interface the early windowing systems such as Win3, SunView, OpenLook and MOTIF exhibited! My only real limiting factor is the application software I have to run to facilitate working with various clients - much only runs under MS Windows so like others I have to get to grips with whatever UI MS decides to ship...
There was little bitching about XP. As I recall, it was widely regarded as about time Microsoft finally abandoned the atrocity that was 9x.
This bitching is more like that that followed Vista: A lot of people complaining about a new interface that seemed to be change for change's sake, and grumbling that the new version provided little if any benefit over the previous.
This bitching is more like that that followed Vista: A lot of people complaining about a new interface that seemed to be change for change's sake, and grumbling that the new version provided little if any benefit over the previous.
There was quite a lot of bitching about WGA and how it would only inconvenience paying customers. Enough that Microsoft didn't distribute WGA with their volume license customers. Oh, and that fucking awful fisher price colour scheme, which was at least trivially changeable back to something.. well.. else.
Win9x was bitched at because it took up 80 to 100MB at a time when a 210MB HDD was not unusual. Oh, that and the horrific compatibility issues with DOS software which was still bloody common at the time.
The only "Fisher Price" stuff I've ever seen was on Windows 8. Windows XP, Vista and 7. Have all felt like a logical evolution to the Product. Vista has it problems. the GUI wasn't really One of these though, and such problems that it DID have, were finally corrected with Windows 7. Perhaps instead of working on Blackcomb, and that other Codename, of which I forgot... Microsoft could have charged for all those Service Packs on XP. To otherwise fund their expenses.
I mean whatever became of all those rumors of MSFS Filesystem, from 10 Years ago? That were to make NTFS seem as dated as FAT is now? Only to be droped 'cause MSFS can't brain now hurrr!
"There was quite a lot of bitching about WGA and how it would only inconvenience paying customers. Enough that Microsoft didn't distribute WGA with their volume license customers. Oh, and that fucking awful fisher price colour scheme, which was at least trivially changeable back to something.. well.. else."
Hey.. Don't knock WGA. A very valuable and useful project.
It was WGA that gave me the final push to give Linux a proper go. And I've been using it ever since. Proof that some MS products do actually work.
I had the misfortune to use Windows 8 for a week, the highlight of which was to temporarily lend the laptop to someone else whose machine wouldn't drive the projector available for his presentation. I just sat there and smiled knowingly at all the things he tried to do but failed.
Now back to a Win7 machine, which I brought home for the weekend to set up the Linux VM for everything that doesn't insist on Windows. I wish a few more places would port their stuff to Linux, it's chicken and egg at the moment where people stick with Windows because of the software and vendors won't port because they don't see enough people using Linux. If MS insist on continuing with their headlong plunge into the Windows 8 approach, I can see a lot of people would make the switch away from MS if all their favourite programs would run on Linux.
Dear MS, stop twatting about with crap like this and FIX the abomination that is Windows 8-8.1-8.1a or whatever....
Whilst I understand what you're trying to say, I'm not entirely sure how the people with the skills required to design and build a website could contribute to fixing the problems with Windows 8.
I seriously doubt that Windows 8 developers were taken off the project to work on this.
You evidently have not had to deal with the bureaucracies of big corporate. It is so frustrating that sometimes I've seen people pay with their own personal money for things just to save them from the hells of the purchase process. Especially for low cost items.
Some places have tried to fix this by issuing prepaid credit cards, but then botched the whole thing by putting on top of that a contrived and tortuous process for getting one of these. End result is the same: penny wise and pound foolish. But the beancounters are delighted because they have done one more thing to get "costs under control" Of course when a multi million project needs three weeks of paperwork for buying a $20 domain they don't see any costs associated with that.
"Because for such a low priced product it would be more efficient to put it through as an expense claim then raise a Purchase order.. no crackpot conspiracy theory required"
That's well and good.... until the beancounters, in their insatiable need to breakdown and analyze everything, start to classify all expenses and you can't log that expense because it does not fit into one of the categories.
Or worse someone abuses expense claims and "something has to be done" to prevent it happening in the future.
Why the personal details?
It's a PR/Marketing exercise that was done as a last minute panic, the domain name was registered by some graduate in a PR/marketing company with the help of an IT person who has never registered a domain name. When they realise that they didn't want them there, another panic will start to remove them...
The source code for a LOT of MS sites is quite amusing. This one is not really one of the most interesting. I often keep display the comments on webpages; a lot of MS websites have, among other things, weird "legal disclaimers" embedded in there (3rd-party licence agreements, that kind of stuff). Strange to have them hidden away from normal users' eyes, ain't it?
True dat. Misunderstanding from my part. My point still stands, though. I find the following:
<!-- NOTICE: Third party scripts or code, linked to, called or referenced from this web site, online service or product, are licensed to you by the third parties that own such code, not by Microsoft. -->
On the Skype website funnier than the gravitational measurement explanation. Funny "funny", not funny "hahaha", obviously.
The source code for that site is quite an amusing read ....
Such as these little Gems...
this is the fault of daniel drucker dmd@3e.org
the first person to ask for an RSS feed gets a free black hole in their junk you are too late, people have already asked. ok fine i made one. rss.xml.
[ddrucker@scatter ~]$ host -t txt freon.3e.org freon.3e.org
descriptive text "Anesthetized monkeys exposed to 25,000 ppm or 50,000 ppm [of freon] for 5 minutes had [cardiac] [arrhythmia]s including [tachycardia] and decreased contractility (U.S. EPA 1983)" In their paper, Coleman and de Luccia noted: The possibility that we are living in a false vacuum has never been a cheering one to contemplate. Vacuum decay is the ultimate ecological catastrophe; in the new vacuum there are new constants of nature; after vacuum decay, not only is life as we know it impossible, so is chemistry as we know it. However, one could always draw stoic comfort from the possibility that perhaps in the course of time the new vacuum would sustain, if not life as we know it, at least some structures capable of knowing joy. This possibility has now been eliminated. The second special case ... applies if we are now living in the debris of a false vacuum ... This case presents us with less interesting physics and with fewer occasions for rhetorical excess than the preceding one.
S. Coleman and F. De Luccia (1980). "Gravitational effects on and of vacuum decay". Physical Review D21: 3305.
the crab always wins; it makes the baby syntacticians cry.
This web site (and the RSS feed) are in fact dynamically updated. Here's how it works -
Every 250 ms, a private satellite fleet measures gravitational distortion at 24 equally spaced points in LEO.
This distortion map is compared with the one computed by the Iridium constellation 1 hour prior. If they are equal, the system goes back to sleep for another 250 ms.
If they are not equal, the system enters an alert state and takes several more confirmation readings at 50 ms intervals. If after 5 seconds (100 readings) the configuration has not returned to within 1% of normal, the system enters the "armed" state; otherwise, it returns to baseline.
If we have entered the "armed" state, it is likely that an extreme gravitational distortion event has occurred. The network then localizes the event with respect to an Earth Centered Earth Fixed map. If the distortion is centered on the LHC, we enter the "active" state; otherwise, the event is logged, the system is put to sleep for 5 seconds (or longer, with a back-off algorithm), and returned to baseline.
If we have entered the "active" state, all satellites attempt to initiate a downlink to the nearest base station and set a flag. This flag triggers a stored procedure which updates the web site.
I hope this helps you better understand the functioning of this critical piece of the world's disaster-alerting infrastructure!
.... the kind of people who need this are the kind of people who read the register... or they probably won't even know about AmIRunningXP.com
To be frank, if you need to go to this site to see if you are running xp... you're probably not the kind of person to care if support is coming to an end.
The funny thing is that Microsoft, like a delusional middle manager alienated by his peers, seems to think it's all just a misunderstanding. "Why, of course people would have upgraded by now, if only they understood the situation, and were aware of just how awesome Windows 8 is. Surely they somehow missed our latest campaigns / notices / nagging dialogs / desperate cries." The thought that people might be holding on to Windows XP because they don't want Windows 8 seemingly never crosses their minds.
I think people are still using Windows XP because they have a computer they bought a few years ago (or maybe were given by someone who'd bought a new one?), and it works whenever they turn it on, and until it one day doesn't work when they turn it on they'll keep on using it because as far as they're concerned it's an appliance.
There are millions of computers running XP, owned by millions of people who don't give a rats arse what flavour of windows they are running.
This is aimed at them
They are called "normal people"
People who sit in dark server rooms worrying over shit like this and laughing at people who don't care about the version numbers of some bit of software are not "normal people"
That is all
Dont get me wrong, I aspire to be a normal person. I've just spent 2 days straight getting DFS fixed across a Govt domain. I am not normal. I live and die by the command prompt.
After wasting 20 years not being normal, I have learnt the error of my ways.
Thinking people care about anything other than "does it turn on and can I email with this" this is not a normal viewpoint. This is the viewpoint of someone who works in IT.
This is also the reason why most people working within IT cant get a shag
@Gordon - Don't worry, you're now in the best of all places - The self aware IT guy. When I released that I wasn't "normal" that enabled me to work out that problems at work between the business and the IT department were basically down to them not speaking the same language. I became valuable to the company by translating the requirements of one to the other. Since then my career has become more senior and well paid than it would have been had I remained the grumbling IT guy, producing excellent work, but being insular and uncommunicative, taking the piss out of those who didn't understand me. Now I manage a software product at a very large IT company because I can talk equally to the developers and the customers.
I had DFS working on my BBC Micro back in the mid-80s, nothing to it.
Was a bit limited though, just 31 files on a disc, 200KiB if using an 80T drive. No file permissions to speak of, and no hierarchical directories - and file names were a maximum of 7 characters, even shorter than the CP/M 8.3 naming system.
@ Gordon...
Well said.....how many people have a clue what the gaping of your spark plug should be (let alone how to change it),or how about how to find TDC, but I can promise you my local mechanic running XP on his PC could.
How about changing a seal on a washing machine? How to rewind a motor? What about making a butterfly joint?
A computer, for 99.99% of the world is a tool, be it speaking to someone on facebook or watching a streamed move, not a way of life.
"There are millions of computers running XP, owned by millions of people who don't give a rats arse what flavour of windows they are running."
Agreed. I don't give a rats arse what they are running either,
"This is aimed at them"
Well.. Aimed is a bit strong.
"They are called "normal people""
Who check on the internet to find out if they are running XP or not.. yes? Such an act would I think in most cases, excuse people from being considered normal. Do they also google "Am I wearing clean underwear"?
Just tried.. Don't.. Not useful.
"People who sit in dark server rooms worrying over shit like this and laughing at people who don't care about the version numbers of some bit of software are not "normal people""
True enough. Weird bastards.. Possibly due to spending far too much time in dark server rooms.. Those places are hot and noisy. Can't be good for anybody.
But people who sit in comfy chairs and hang out in web forums laughing at PR people who think such a site will be useful rather than an object of ridicule are I would say, well adjusted and in possession of a functioning sense of humour.
The PR people on the other hand.. Well.. they work in PR.
I'm sorry. It seems you have got the wrong end of the stick.
Not everybody is going to upgrade in a panic.
WE KNOW.. We get it. And really, in most cases, we don't care.
Or to put it more briefly...
Whoosh..
We are not laughing at "ordinary people".. We are laughing at Microsoft.
Personally, I'm waiting to see Crackergeddon not happen, and newspapers and websites be devoid of stories about breaches that happen the day after the final patch Tuesday.
I really don't care who upgrades or downgrades or switches platform. I'm having a lovely time watching indifferent users make Microsoft cry.
> NT4 had similar, but we didn't have the same pervasive access to the Internet.
Mmmmyes but NT4 was never a consumer OS. XP was the first "NT" consumer-grade Windows product, an effort from Microsoft to build on Windows2000's business success; especially after the very sorry failure of Windows MILLENIUM (all caps in celebration of one of the worst OSes in recorded history). Microsoft did listen to market trends in these days.
> And there has been an XP SE, it was called XP SP2.
N'Yah? I know Microsoft is in the habit of making names up to muddy the waters, but you're just taking the piss to a whole other level here. XP SP2 was called SV1 (Secure Version 1 - your mileage may vary). What is that XP SE you're talking about, exactly?
> Furthermore the problem with making an OS for legacy hardware is that you can't actually buy the hardware to develop it on.
O...K. You know, I don't really like Microsoft as an entity, but you're not making them any favor by trying to defend them. Unless I completely missed a hidden <irony> tag. Or did all x86 hardware suddently disappear while I was looking the other way?
The kind of people who are still running Windows XP are not the kind of people who know or care about operating system security patches. They'll continue to use the computer until it stops working.
If it's a corporate desktop, their IT department already has a plan.
If it's a consumer desktop, they'll either buy a new one, or take it to the "computer shop"
Smart people have already upgraded. VERY smart people don't run Windows at all.
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> Windows XP SP2 using IE8... 'You are not running XP'
I bet you a pint that you're using one of the 64-bit versions of XP. These are based on another kernel (Windows Server 2003's kernel, AKA NT5.2) and the website doesn't recognise their useragent string as XP (I tried, to answer a question higher in this thread). Apparently only NT5.1 is recognised as XP; it was the "consumer" version.
I installed the User Agent Switcher extension in Firefox and set it to "Internet Explorer 6 (Windows XP)" and managed to get the "You ARE running Windows XP" on a CentOS 6 desktop running Firefox :-)
Of course, being a Microsoft site, there was no way in hell they were going to tell you that there were any other routes away from XP other than installing, er, Windows 8.1?!
He who controls the proxy... don't need User Agent Switcher Firefox Extensions. Also, we spit on the Extension's general direction. Firefox extentions smell like elderberries, and we block them.
I like the proxy, and I like Perl. OK, I don't like Perl one bit, or the Proxy for that matter, but the lusers don't like me using Perl, especially on the Proxy, so I kinda have to do with it. To annoy them. It's all about power, you know.
I see Microsoft still haven't upgraded the Windows 8 Update Assistant. It brusquely informs me "platform not supported" and then quits despite (a) running fine on a similar but inferior and slightly older system from the same manufacturer, and (b) the subject system meeting all published specs for either Windows 8 or 8.1.
Sigh!
Guess I'll be staying with XP.
Aw c'mon, we don't get to have fun _that_ often. Don't be such a wet towel, let us prod promotionnal websites for inconsistencies -and fight over those. "Sysadminning" ain't a fun job, but someone has to do it. And you don't want to take your sysadmin's petty distraction away, you really don't. You may become it. You wouldn't like it.