Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:What DOESN'T run on WindowsXP? (Score 2) 641

Anything that requires a 64-bit OS and, by extension, anything that needs more than ~3.5Gb of RAM to run (well) as well as anything that needs DX10+ and any new hardware that doesn't ship with XP drivers. This might not be that much now, but it will start to increase dramatically from today onwards.

And no, XP 64-bit does not count, it's a bastard hybrid of XP & 2003 Server and nothing really supports it properly.

If forced into it today, business just might adopt Linux and WINE to run their apps and find out they are safer and more stable because of it

No, they won't, at least not in statistically significant numbers. The cost and hassle of an XP->7 upgrade is much less than the cost and hassle of an XP->Linux upgrade due mostly to the retraining costs for both IT and users (deny it all you like but Linux is not similar enough to Windows that average users will just be able to run with it, most of them panic & phone support when one of their desktop shortcuts disappears) as well as the fact that most of the desktop hardware currently running XP is too old to run a modern Linux distro comfortably - a bunch of Celerons with 256Mb of RAM might be fine if you're running a stripped down install with XFCE and don't want to run any intensive applications, but Linux is not a magic bullet that makes old PCs run like new ones.

On top of all that, you lose integration with all the Windows-based server side systems you already have in place, which leads to either whole-sale replacement or lots of fudging things so they sort of work like before.

I honestly don't think most people advocating businesses should switch all their machines to Linux instead of upgrading from XP really appreciate just how much work would be involved in doing so. Home users are a different matter and it's much more practical for them to take that route, in theory.

Comment Re:You're a "brand new Linux user" (Score 1) 187

Because, like he said, iptables is easy to screw up without realising it and you don't really want to take that approach on a machine you care about and are using day to day, you ideally want kind of abstraction layer to break you in gently where there's less chance of fucking it up and you can learn how it works at a sensible pace.

Comment Re:Hmmmm (Score 1) 187

Well, there are lists of ranges known to be used by malware, etc. such as this: http://www.spamhaus.org/drop/ - it's not that it's a list of *all* ranges used for those things, just that these ranges are known *only* to be used for those things and so can safely be blocked outright.

Most of the rest of it comes from random compromised residential machines or hosted boxes and so is hard to block other than when you find a really shitty host like Nobis/Ubiquity who just don't care about shutting down compromised machines on their networks.

Comment Why? (Score 5, Insightful) 177

Presumably because of a deal struck with one of those weasel-word named "industry associations" like the "Really Helpful Consumer Notification Group" that represent shitty companies that do shitty things and who probably went to Microsoft and said "we need X amount of time to make sure our products meet your new standards so they don't get blocked" for which you can read "we need some time to find a way around your blocking so we can continue being shitty".

Comment Re:Why do companies buy then shutdown something (Score 2) 145

In situations where it's not blatantly trying to kill the competition, it's usually that someone unrelated to the industry in question buys a fairly popular but financially struggling service figuring "how hard can it be to make it profitable?" only to find out after a year or so that actually it's quite hard to make it profitable, which is why the previous owners couldn't do it, and now their options are to close it down or find some horribly insidious way to force money from its users, which invariably leads to a fairly quick death anyway a few months down the line.

Comment Re:AKA the I HATE AMERICA ACT (Score 1) 358

Except that's how it was and not only did every manufacturer have their own proprietary charger, but they tended to change them every couple of handsets just to keep things interesting. Your options were either to carry your charger everywhere with you (which somewhat defeats the point of having a mobile phone) or just hope that if you needed to charge your phone outside of your house that someone nearby had exactly the same charger as you so you could borrow it.

That's on top of the extra waste generated when you can't keep your old charger for use with your new phone.

There's nothing to stop the standard from being changed in the future as technology advances, it just means that you won't have 30 different proprietary cables to pick from.

Comment Re:Linux sales figures (Score 1) 132

Remember that, in terms of Steam at least, the majority of - if not all - games that are available on multiple platforms only require a single purchase to allow you to play them on any of those platforms (much like Sony's Crossplay) so while they may not see direct "Linux sales" I would imagine that Valve provides them with stats to show which platforms the games are being *played* on, which is probably more useful here.

Comment Re:Yes and No (Score 4, Insightful) 860

XP is over 12 years old, that's one hell of a *free* long term support package. Is there any other OS available that has a 12 year support lifecycle? Ubuntu's LTS releases have a 5 year support cycle, Apple doesn't have a published official policy for OSX but it's about 4 years on average. RHEL comes the closest I can find at between 10 & 13 years depending on the version, but you have to pay for that so it's not directly comparable.

XP has had a pretty good run of it, all things considered and if Windows 8 wasn't such a PR mess, this "forced" upgrade would probably a lot less contentious.

Slashdot Top Deals

A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable. -- Thomas Jefferson

Working...