{"id":1308,"date":"2010-03-26T00:01:01","date_gmt":"2010-03-26T08:01:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=1308"},"modified":"2010-03-25T12:26:25","modified_gmt":"2010-03-25T20:26:25","slug":"the-coming-windows-xp-panic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=1308","title":{"rendered":"The Coming Windows XP Panic"},"content":{"rendered":"

Windows XP has hung on far too long. Someday soon, the panic will set in.
\n
\nMicrosoft recently announced<\/a> that their newest web browser, Internet Explorer 9, will not support Windows XP. That’s because the browser will have features that are incompatible with the way XP does things.<\/p>\n

Internet Explorer 9 won’t be the first program to deny XP users.<\/p>\n

XP is old. Very old as far as computer software in concerned.<\/p>\n

Microsoft introduced Windows XP in the autumn of 2001. If you were alive then, and using a computer, you would be using Office 2000 or Microsoft Works. A top-of-the-line computer would have a Pentium 4 processor, though most PCs probably had a Pentium 3 or Pentium 2. A 10GB hard drive would be just a ton<\/em> of room, and 256MB of RAM was more than you’d ever need.<\/p>\n

Windows XP isn’t so much stellar as Windows Vista was a disappointment. I didn’t mind Vista that much, and felt it was better than XP, but it wasn’t exciting. So lots of people stuck with XP and even today XP is the preferred operating system for netbook computers.<\/p>\n

But XP is very, very old.<\/p>\n

The problems with old software are always going to be support and compatibility. The support fades over time, but because of experience many users of old software don’t crave the support that new adopters need. Compatibility, however, is an issue.<\/p>\n

The longer you use a program, the more likely you are to be left in the digital dust. At some point, only your computer \u2014 and folks you who have your exact same setup \u2014 will be able to use your files. Case in point: The original WordPerfect document format cannot be read by a modern word processor.<\/p>\n

I have old graphics files from my early books that no program can read. On a lark, I wrote a program in NCurses that allows me to view the screen capture images I made when I used DOS. The program works, but because no one else probably has those same files (Hotshot Graphics), no one else needs the program.<\/p>\n

While hardware will die someday, software has a theoretically infinite lifespan. As long as you can find a platform to run the software, it will run. Look at all those emulators for the ancient computers I wrote about a few weeks back. They work!<\/p>\n

When you want to stay current, however, at some point you will need to update your computer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Windows XP has hung on far too long. Someday soon, the panic will set in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1308"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1308\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1322,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1308\/revisions\/1322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}