But there are a lot of people using Windows XP prior to Service Pack 3, and they will have problems.
I think a lot of times people on HN and related sites are a little callous to the needs of users stuck on old platforms. But in this case even I'm like "screw those people". Is there any common legitimate reason to be on XP but not be able to go to SP3?
With the deah of XP, the whole "why would you still be running X?" thing is a very popular attitude lately. I myself enjoy poking fun of my friend who works somewhere that just recently upgraded from MSIE 6 on XP to MSIE 7 on XP. I have another friend who works somewhere that decided the fix was to install Firefox on everyone's XP machines. (Oh the irony of being somewhere that didn't allow firefox for "security reasons" having to install Firefox for security reasons.)
The truth is that Linux is actually mature enough now that is is facing many of the same issues. The inevitable competing interests of a stable base to support on one hand and the need for the latest features or hardware support on the other are very real even for Linux.
Need to run proprietary software on Linux? The supported distro is often still RHEL5. If you are lucky its RHEL6, but that often does not include RHEL6.5. The same goes for hardware driver support. I use something regularly that only supports Debian, but the version it supports was already known as Old-Stable at the time of release and its now Old-Old-Stable. (And its only through luck that its not Debian Old-Old-Old-Stable like it was originally going to be) Not every commercial linux vendor falls into this habit, but enough do that its a very real problem. Often you have conflicting requirements from different vendors, or even for different applications from a single vendor.
Think this is limited to proprietary software... Which version of python are you running? If you answer python3, do you also have python2 installed as well? Thats what I thought :) (Inevitably the 5 people who have succesfully and fully migrated to python3 will reply just to prove me wrong, but those 5 are the rare exceptions.)
You say callous, I say realistic about the prospect of selling things to people using 10 year old hardware. If you aren't my customer, and most likely aren't going to become my customer, I choose not to expend (often lots of) extra work to support you.
It's about startups and it's hosted by a VC startup accelerator. A huge number of startups fail because they aren't able to get paying customers, so yes, selling is a big topic here.
> But there are a lot of people using Windows XP prior to Service Pack 3, and they will have problems.
s/will// ; if you're running XP at all, let alone XP without the latest service pack, you have problems, and this is hardly the most prominent of them.
Some products are running XP - specially enterprise products. Its generally hard to move away from them and if the people you lease it from dont update youre screwed for a while. it can take major effort and time to switch.
I've heard that many many people in China use illegitimate copies of Windows XP SP2 because SP3 added "Genuine Windows" license checks. This is why Mozilla still supports Firefox on SP2.
Comments
I think a lot of times people on HN and related sites are a little callous to the needs of users stuck on old platforms. But in this case even I'm like "screw those people". Is there any common legitimate reason to be on XP but not be able to go to SP3?
With the deah of XP, the whole "why would you still be running X?" thing is a very popular attitude lately. I myself enjoy poking fun of my friend who works somewhere that just recently upgraded from MSIE 6 on XP to MSIE 7 on XP. I have another friend who works somewhere that decided the fix was to install Firefox on everyone's XP machines. (Oh the irony of being somewhere that didn't allow firefox for "security reasons" having to install Firefox for security reasons.)
The truth is that Linux is actually mature enough now that is is facing many of the same issues. The inevitable competing interests of a stable base to support on one hand and the need for the latest features or hardware support on the other are very real even for Linux.
Need to run proprietary software on Linux? The supported distro is often still RHEL5. If you are lucky its RHEL6, but that often does not include RHEL6.5. The same goes for hardware driver support. I use something regularly that only supports Debian, but the version it supports was already known as Old-Stable at the time of release and its now Old-Old-Stable. (And its only through luck that its not Debian Old-Old-Old-Stable like it was originally going to be) Not every commercial linux vendor falls into this habit, but enough do that its a very real problem. Often you have conflicting requirements from different vendors, or even for different applications from a single vendor.
Think this is limited to proprietary software... Which version of python are you running? If you answer python3, do you also have python2 installed as well? Thats what I thought :) (Inevitably the 5 people who have succesfully and fully migrated to python3 will reply just to prove me wrong, but those 5 are the rare exceptions.)
I was bitten recently when I found that CentOS 6.5+ actually still has Python 2.6 !!!! as the default python.
I thought I could get away with a few python2.7isms, but apparently not :-(
[root@vm-centos5 ~]# python
Python 2.4.3 (#1, Jan 9 2013, 06:47:03)
[GCC 4.1.2 20080704 (Red Hat 4.1.2-54)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
You say callous, I say realistic about the prospect of selling things to people using 10 year old hardware. If you aren't my customer, and most likely aren't going to become my customer, I choose not to expend (often lots of) extra work to support you.
So Hacker News is about selling?
I'd be interested to see if this is one of the big divides here.
It's about startups and it's hosted by a VC startup accelerator. A huge number of startups fail because they aren't able to get paying customers, so yes, selling is a big topic here.
That's a far cry from "the only topic that matters."
Aside: burn karma burn, if that's the community I don't want to be a part of it
s/will// ; if you're running XP at all, let alone XP without the latest service pack, you have problems, and this is hardly the most prominent of them.
Some products are running XP - specially enterprise products. Its generally hard to move away from them and if the people you lease it from dont update youre screwed for a while. it can take major effort and time to switch.
I've heard that many many people in China use illegitimate copies of Windows XP SP2 because SP3 added "Genuine Windows" license checks. This is why Mozilla still supports Firefox on SP2.
This is a myth. XP SP3 itself did not add any.