News Windows XP lives again via registry hack

From my understanding is that they go by IP. Hence why the service is available for companies not individuals.

But, what the registry does is change the name of the OS. In this case, it changes XP to XP for POS system. While some update may work (or fail, but acts like it worked, via a bug on the OS check), but XP POS system are a stripped down version of XP. You can have security issues somewhere else, and not be fixed. So it gives you a sense of false security. You think are protected against discovered exploits, but you are not, because they are holes somewhere else.

Imagine you are in a leaky house, and you are at the basement and you fixing all the leaks, but you have leaks on other rooms in the above floors, that you are ignoring, and think everything is fine.

But yea,. I guess you can say it is better than nothing, but saying "Hey! now you are good! Keep on staying on XP" is wrong.

 

The screens in the lifts at our office run on Win98!

 

This isn't actually a good thing for anyone. The more machines still running XP the worse off we all are.

 

Won't it just DIE!!!!!!!!!

 

It makes me think there is a market for an OS, probably a custom linux distro, that is as XP like as possible and comes with the promise that the UI will never, ever change. The backend will get updated, but the UI will always be the same.

What we're seeing here IMHO, is that people don't want to learn to use a new OS and once they've found something that works for them, they're sticking with it.

It also occours to me that the people who are still happily using XP are not going to be the most tech savvy folks and so they're likely already running infected computers. The end of support may well not make much difference.

 

Wasn't that already tried with Lindows/Linspire and was quickly shot down in flames by Microsoft?

 

Yup pretty much, you even find that the majority of USB enabled POS devices with USB (MEI Coin Readers, im looking at you) just have a cheapo USB to serial adapter connected, but dont get me started on the problems that the vendor Devs have getting their head around synchronous comms... hint i have had to reimpliment their drivers as they were trying to ignore the fact that the USB controller they were using was configured to read write not read then write as was the old serial way of doing it, gotta love fixing other people's bugs....

 

I think this is a really good idea.

But it could be much better.

The startup sound changes to the Asda 'pat your bottom' jingle.
When shutting down, you get reminded to take all your bags and thanked for shopping.
And a receipt pops out of the floppy drive.

 

Yes, but it is also used for "Point of Sale":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_of_sale