Death is something we have learnt to love to hate and apparently there is nothing we can do about it. The tech world is experiencing some very eminent deaths or maybe not. I will let you be the jury and judge because it is obvious the executioner will be somewhere in some board house.
Well we now know for sure that the clock is ticking for windows XP and fast for that matter. The deadline for its support is in 2014. In the US windows 7 use has superseded XP and now the 10 year old tradition is about to end. I have a desktop machine that I bought way back when I was an undergraduate. It stacked somewhere and I use when I want to test stuff here and there. So what now for my old guard? Does it mean I won’t have a use for it? Does it mean that I will no longer be able to work with it? It is obvious I can’t run windows 7 on it for its specifications are way below. Of course I can still be able to run windows XP on my machine. The problem is that once Microsoft stops its support then it will instantly become a hacker’s malware haven. Without patches on common known bugs then the only solution may only be keeping the system completely offline, disconnected from the rest of the world. But what is the use of keeping offline in the world where virtualization and the cloud are being mentioned in every second sentence.
But after reading this article by Microsoft http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/upgrade-to-windows-8, most of my worries were where quelled. They say that I and most of my kind will be able to upgrade to windows 8 without much of a hassle, expect that I will need to re-install the apps after the upgrade.
On the other hand our so much loved Open source DBMS MySql lies in murky waters after Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems. This is the greatest cause of anxiety as we all know that MySql is a direct competitor to Oracles proprietary products. If the resignations seen by various software engineers are anything to go by, then we know we are in for a ride of our lives.
During a discussion with a friend, he said that the death of MySql is improbable because the community is quite large and it could also serve as a publicity platform for Oracle. Beside several forks already exist with the leader in line being MariaDB. I actually am already playing around with it and am all loving. I should be blogging about it in the next few weeks’ right here.
Just as I said the execution of these two is totally out of our control. We can blog about it all we want and with Microsoft having already given an ultimatum we will keep our fingers crossed on what Oracle will say about MySql. So different Systems yet so similar destiny. #just saying.
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