Why is this comment not modded all the way up?

Agreed. In the world of Monty Python, improperly quoting anything should have the same penalty as getting your favorite color wrong.

This is such an incredibly bad idea. To stick to a less-granular must-"keep moving"-just-because mindset is massively boneheaded considering how many things you aren't safe assuming these days with new software.

To try and justify that by saying new hardware is getting more difficult to get working with XP, that begs questioning with the following points:

1. Most hardware manufacturers without their heads up their asses are still writing stable drivers for XP and even NT/2000 (not quite that different anyway).

2. The trend of "new" is not limited to software anymore, and we're starting to see it in some places with hardware design that is layers upon layers of infantile "standards" that just came out and don't have any solid roots to legacy artitecture at all. Not that breaking ties with legacy is bad, but it is when support only lies with vista and above, and starts to completely destroy the ideas that things such as fixed resources operated upon. These things ALWAYS worked. Too much automation is what led to the magical reboot as a viable solution in the first place.

I was a Microsoft supporter until Vista came out. I would defend them at every turn through the days of 2000 which I still use. When XP arrived it took me quite a while to warm up to it until it was patched hundreds of times and stronger hardware showed up. However, it is still built on a solid base of usability and structure that anyone who isn't a help desk terrorist idiot appreciates.

Now, I've been pissed off to the point of diving head first into linux (Debian right now) and building a desktop at work with enough tools that I don't even need Windows on a workstation for an average week's worth of IT tasks. Just to prove a point.

Microsoft advertises with the phrase "people ready"...but this makes absolutely no sense when the same amount of brainpower it takes to mind all the bugs, patches, hangups and general arthritic-jointed nature of all of its software could be used better building something open-source. Having said that you'd come out with the same functionality, and quite a bit happier, retaining most of your hair too.

The entire idea of new just because needs to be re-evaluated and completely trashed in some cases. The companies today with the same names of yesterday are sometimes not even the same companies at all. It's not necessarily the companies you want to hang onto, which people do the most.... it's the "old" (read: actually working) idealisms that were great because you got a real return for actually reading and thinking.

This is making a stretch, but it proves a point: when I set a jumper on a card, I KNOW WHAT FUCKING IRQ IT'S GOING TO HAVE.