Windows XP fixes flaws for free if you turn PCs into CASH REGISTERS

It hasn't stopped, you can still pay for it.

It's Microsoft's product, they specify you have a perpetual use license, they don't specify you'll receive perpetual updates, many of which address issues that weren't even likely to be an issue or even known about in any real sense over a decade ago.

Presumably Apple should also still be providing updates for OS 9? Are they?

Are they even providing updates for older than 10.6 in any meaningful way? Nope...

@Pascal Monnett

"The proper lifecycle of a product is that it is retired when its market share becomes negligeable. Millions of customers are not negligeable. Software, as it has been said, has no date limit, so Microsoft should continue and support its product until at least 90% of XP users have switched to something else."

Would that be until 90% of the current users have moved to something different, or until 90% of the people who used XP in 2005 have moved to something different?

90% of people still using it is somewhat of a moving target!

- XP market share is down to between 8-20% depending on who you believe and how those stats are collected.

- Given that a proportion of those are either:

> Pirate copies (80+% of XP machines in China are on pirate copies)

> Embedded XP (which is still officially supported for most of this decade)

> Desktop XP being supported past EOL by the NHS et al paying M$ many dollars

(None of which count for the purposes of this discussion since freetards get what they deserve and the other two are supported).

It is entirely reasonable to suggest that actual legitimate desktop XP share is well below 10% as people have moved to Linux, OSX, or their laptops have died - whether by baking, battery dying or hinges cracking off and have been replaced with Vista, 7 or 8.

Therefore by your own criteria, MS are well within their rights to drop it as usage is below 90%.

It's no surprise that the big holdout for IE6 usage is China, still running hooky XP with the original browser and no updates.

"Updates for free ? Maybe not. But I certainly do not think that Microsoft has the right to arbitrarily decide to no longer support a product that millions of customers are still using."

Hardly arbitrary, MS have documented their life cycle policy for years, and in the case of XP they've already extended it far beyond when support should have ended.

It's interesting that people only seem to get worked up over MS stopping support for one of their products, but no one seems to put it into context. They're no different than other OS suppliers. Apple stopped support for OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard) last year (original release date 2009). RHEL 4 stopped being supported two years ago after only 5 years. Debian 5 after only 3 years.

Re: Personally I think

You need to think some more.

All your examples are for new features, not safety fixes.

If you want a valid non-software example look at recalls. I had my 11 year old cars airbag and some wiring replaced for free do to a recall. That's FAR past the warranty. They can't just say, your cars is old, go buy a new one.

Re: Personally I think

> Using that logic, your 1965 RCA television would need to be retrofitted by RCA to support digital signals.

Why? As long as your RCA television was able to receive RCA broadcasts the manufacturer has fulfilled their obligation. You might find it difficult to source broken down parts though

> Using that logic, your 1976 VHS player would need to be retrofitted by the vendor to support HDMI.

As long as my VHS player plays VHS videos I am happy.

> Using that logic, your 1903 Model A would need to be retrofitted by Ford to add seat belts, airbags and meet current emission standards.

True, but not by that logic. Current regulations might force you to retro fit seat belts but as long as your car complies with the specification of the 1903 Ford Model A there is nothing for Ford to do.

I've got one copy of XP running on one VM so I pretty much don’t care about it but ... When I purchased it it was supposed to, as an example, safely display images conforming to the JPEG 2000 standard, If, at some future date, it is discovered that it does not safely display images conforming to the JPEG 2000 standard then MS should fix it. However, MS should have no obligation to ensure it displays images conforming to a future JPEG standard as that is not part of XP.

Re: And so the countdown begins

I need to be clearer, sorry. I was actually talking about two different things. SteamBox and the stream of Linux games from Valve is nice and all which I wholly support.

Then you have evil developers like EA who for some reason doesn't want to support Linux directly (they will only support Linux if it's a casual freemium game for Android, or if someone forms a partnership to port their game to Linux ie Loki Games' scenario), or ActiBlizz who refuses to support Linux outright and has been said to even bans accounts from Battle.Net if they catch you running the game in WINE (although how they find out if you are indeed using WINE is a puzzle to me).

Re: And so the countdown begins

I agree. Smart Phones are virtually ubiquitous. I encounter very few, and far in between, people using tablets. Most of those have a tablet as an accessory, not a replacement. There is NO tablet currently or in the foreseeable future that can come close to competing with my high-end laptop. At work, the PC and Workstation will continue to dominate. There are different markets out there and one size fits all will not be attainable. For people, like myself, who are not screen zombies, have no need to be connected 24/7 nor have a higher end computing device with them everywhere they go. The hype needs to stop and the individual markets addressed.

Re: And so the countdown begins

""the majority"

Care to back that figure up with anything meaningful, like facts?"

Well, to be blunt, the writing is rather on the wall; there were on the order of 1 billion smartphones in use in 2012, with projections along the lines of 1.4-1.5 billion by the end of 2014 as prices continue to fall and the developing world sees smartphones drop into the affordability bracket currently occupied by feature phones.

210 million tablets were sold last year, and are expected to overtake notebooks by 2016. In 2008 Gartner predicted a maximum of 2 billion PCs in use by 2014. Either the combination of tablets and smartphones has already overtaken PC sales, or it will within months or a year or two at the outside.

People will always need something resembling PCs to create - but you only need a tablet or phone in order to consume, and there are far more people doing more consuming than creating.

Re: Gamers will still be using desktops for whatever reasons

Yeah, gamers are a bit of a special case. There are a massive number of PC gamers but they're still only a minority of PC users.

PCs aren't going anywhere, the "PC in every home" vision is still real but the thing was before tablets it was more like 2-4 PCs in each home. Now tablets and phones are cutting back, a household still probably needs a PC but only one.

Re: Is it not ethically and maybe legally questionable to provide this reg hack?

"freetards who expect free software and upgrades to an OS over ten years old"

Except that MS continued to sell new copies of XP (for netbooks) until late 2010. That's not 'over 10 years old' (even if you use Excel for the calculation).