On the Windows XP EOL

I discovered that some problems people had connecting to our shiny new SHA-256 certificate in the wake of Heartbleed were not caused by “Windows XP” per se, but by the lack of Service Pack 3 on those systems.

SP3 itself was released in 2008, meaning that SP2 had a two-year “wind down” until it stopped receiving support in 2010. That means everyone who had problems with our certificate were:

1. Using an OS that has been obsoleted by three further OS versions if you include Windows 8.
2. Using an OS that had reached its actual end-of-life after ample warning and extensions from Microsoft.
3. Using a version of that OS which had been unpatched for nearly four years.

Combine the latter two, and you have people running an OS who never installed the SP3 update during its entire six-year support lifetime, which is longer than Windows 7 had been available.

In light of this, I can see why businesses haven’t been too worried about the end-of-life for Windows XP. It’s clear that those affected are not running SP3 on those systems, meaning they were already four years into their own unpatched period.

And if they “just happen” to get viruses and need cleanup, that just seems to be part of “having computers in the business.” Even if the machines were up-to-date, there would still be a few 0-days and plenty of user-initiated malware afflicting them. There’s little observable benefit to upgrading in that case… so little, in fact, that the business has opted not to take any steps toward it in half a decade.

Layer Juggling

Consider:

1. vim windows (Ctrl+W{w, W, h, j, k, l, ...})
2. vim tabs (gt, gT, :tab, ...)
3. screen session (Ctrl+Z ...) [because I liked Ctrl+A as beginning-of-line]
4. terminal window tabs (Ctrl+{PageUp, PageDown, Shift+PageUp, Shift+PageDown, ...})
5. application windows, e.g. other terminals (Alt+`, Alt+Shift+`) [a distinction newly required in Unity and Gnome-Shell’s defaults]
6. other applications (Alt+Tab, Alt+Shift+Tab) [may include all workspaces]
7. other workspaces (Ctrl+Alt+{↑, ↓} for gnome-shell and Unity, additionally Ctrl+Alt+{←, →} for Unity; also with Shift to drag a window with you)

My setup of Windows at work doesn’t have layers 4, 5, or 7, and it’s still too many to handle effectively.  Even if the command is right for the intent, the wrong result can still happen, for instance when I go to change window in vim and firefox closes a tab or two because it had the keyboard focus.

I get layers 2 and 3 mixed up so frequently that I typically only have tabs open in vim for a wide-ranging interface change inside my code, where I need to update model, validation, and view/controller all at once.  Each of those scopes gets a tab, and the tab is split into windows for each affected file of that particular scope.  If I have to muck around in more than two different layers at once, it gets extremely error-prone.

I think this is the reason people try to do everything inside emacs: if it’s run within a single frame, which I boldly claim is the common case, it combines layers 1 through 4 into a common framework, and leaves only layer 6 as important on the desktop.  You don’t need workspaces to tame a sprawling collection of windows anymore, because most of them are inside emacs.


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Perception

They say you don't get a second chance to make a first impression, but that depends on who you are.  Apple seems to have managed a couple of major architecture transitions and their own Vista without too much ill will, yet Microsoft was practically crucified for Vista with no architecture transitions.

Fair warning: many links in this post lead to tvtropes.