Perhaps motivated by Duke Nukem Forever shipping after a decade-and-a-half of development and delays, Microsoft decided to finally patch a vulnerability dating back to the 1990s. Included in yesterday's Patch Tuesday bulletin bonanza is a little nugget listed as CVE-2011-1871, which according to ComputerWorld.com is a fix for the dreaded 'Ping of Death,' or at least it was dreaded some two decades ago.
It's no easy task remaining relevant for a decade, as Steven Seagal and Jean-Claude Van Damme can attest (and if you don't know who they are, it reinforces the point). Yet somehow, Windows XP is still a fan favorite 10 years after its release, at least according to its market share numbers. But is the love affair with XP finally starting to fizzle? Let's take a look.
Users still clinging to Windows XP like that fast and gnarly Trans Am from yesteryear that's just too familiar to part with have yet another reason to consider a new ride. According to security firm Avast, XP is a fertile breeding ground for cyber infection, especially for rootkits, of which 74 percent of infections originated from in a recent six-month study cataloging over 630,000 samples.
Some people thought Asus was downright crazy when it said it was building a $200 netbook. That's not a whole lot more than an eBook reader, and it's certainly cheaper than most tablet PCs that are supposedly cannibalizing the netbook market. Well, Asus is proving the skeptics wrong with its $199 Eee PC X101, an ultrathin netbook that now has an official product page.
Microsoft makes Windows, a closed source platform. Suse builds open source Linux distros aimed at enterprise users. On the surface, these two would appear the unlikely couple, but the two companies just renewed a pact dating back to 2006 that has Microsoft purchasing and reselling Suse licenses. As part of the four-year contract extension, Microsoft has agreed to invest $100 million in new Suse Linux Enterprise certificates for Microsoft enterprise customers receiving Linux support from Suse.
If you've been primarily a Windows user all your life, you probably don't have much experience with Linux. Perhaps you've dabbled with Ubuntu, either out of sheer curiosity or because you were pissed off with Vista pre-SP1. But there are other, more advanced Linux distros out there, Debian being one of them. Debian is now available as a configuration option on nearly every machine in AVADirect's stable.
We've lost count of how many times Windows XP has been sentenced to death, only to receive a stay of execution from Microsoft in some form or another. Give netbooks credit for keeping the popular OS alive longer than it probably would have been had netbooks never been popularized. But even those have migrated to Windows 7. Well, Microsoft has made the decision to finally retire Windows XP, for good, three years from now.
Microsoft's marketing machine tried to convince Windows users that Windows 7 was a collective effort based on your ideas. "Windows 7. Should have called it Windows Kevin. I'm a PC, and Windows 7 was my idea," an actor says in one of Microsoft's 
As the weeks go by, we continue to learn more about the next major Windows release, Windows 8. We know, for example, that Windows 8 will 
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