Winner! This is BRILLIANT : )

This is the only time I have seen a *plausible* use of the "don't like it? fork it" on slashdot since my 1998 awakening to Slashdot*. The other 99.9% of the time the rest of you guys are just being jerks by asking us random non-coder slashdotters to fork stuff, like Firefox and Chrome. It's like being slapped in the face with a strawman and insult at the same time (fractaltiger *must be* lazy and dumb if he won't fork after pointing out some design flaw in that program, ignore its millions of lines of code).

Browsers change every month and are hugely un-maintainable by individual coders in the long term anyway :)

Crazy, isn't it?

Evidently, there is some unwritten law that states that Geolocation by IP address shall override any and all set preferences by the user on their device, and ignore any possibility that barring or redirecting the user makes no sense.

I get a version of this periodically on Spotify, where I'm informed that the particular album or single I'm looking at can't be played because it isn't licensed to my region. And of course there's the small matter of my being IP-blocked from Pandora Radio for the same reason.

I ran into a particularly nasty geolocation issue back in late 2012, when I was informed that I couldn't access my National Lottery account because they no longer believed that I was accessing it from the UK. Went back and forth between them and my ISP (VirginMedia), with each blaming the other for the problem.

I've also heard of situations where people have found the books on their Kindles vanishing because they're holidaying in an area where said books aren't licensed.

Glad to hear you survived! ^^;

Alerting you to login attempts from new locations or devices, and offer two-factor authentication, will slow down the hackers for a time.

But the answer, for most service providers, is to tell the user that it's their problem now.

Consider yourself lucky, then - SMS spam seems to be pretty common here in the UK. Even my parents occasionally get hit.

I've been fortunate so far - I don't have any fellow iPhone users that I regularly communicate with via said device. I've now turned off iMessage, so hopefully all texts should go out as SMS.

My personal bugbear with my iPhone is the number of steps required to block a number from Messages. As I use my mobile number as a contact for business, my number is public, and as a result I've started getting SMS spam and telemarketer calls. You would think that Apple, of all people, would make it easier to tell the iPhone "block this number from calling me again."

Hello there! :)

Well, as I'm a Mac person these days, I've swapped out those sorts of issues for the ones that Apple produce. ;) About the only thing I really miss from Windows is the certainty of knowing when the next lot of security updates are due - at the moment, they're so slack they make Adobe look on-the-ball.

...yeah, if I've gotten a slipstreamed install disc with SP3 on it, I could have saved myself a lot of time when I did the same experiment. *shrug*

Out of interest, which version of IE did it have after install completed? I see you were prompted to upgrade to IE8, but my memory is hazy on whether IE7 was ever included on later XP install discs.

I'm aware you can still get XP discs second-hand or ex-stock here in the UK - Amazon lists several versions, although some look suspiciously like they may be OEM versions that are tied to specific brand/model PCs. I'm not aware of any PC maker here in the UK offering an XP options, though - maybe Windows 7, for business systems and workstations.

I recently wiped my old (2003 vintage) laptop, which originally came with XP, and installed Linux Mint - considering the machine's specs, it works fairly well.

I've read about ReactOS, but given the slow pace of progress I regard it as curiosity rather than a viable alternative.

Seriously. I remember trying out the preview version on my then-XP-running PC back in 2009, and being blown away by a) how much easier it was to install and get going, b) how well it ran all my existing software, c) how it let me finally use all of the memory installed in my machine, d) how much better it was than Vista. I pre-ordered a copy soon after, and the rest is history. Now, on my Mac, I have my Windows 7 VM for running various applications I still use.

Installing Windows XP today is not nearly as fun as you might think, particularly if you've got a pre-SP2 copy. When I tried it, I had to manually install some patches just to get Windows Update working, then some more before I could install IE8, and some more before I could install MSE. And then all the patches to bring the whole lot up-to-date - that took hours and hours to finish. I'd only recommend trying it if you're installing onto a machine that you don't actually need to use for a good while.

As for the 'but it's tried and tested" argument for hanging onto XP, I would point to the number of flaws that are still being uncovered in the Windows codebase, many of which are also in XP. Yes, you can mitigate against some by hardening your system, running only as a standard user, etc. - but for most current XP installs that will probably mean extra aggravation caused by third-party software written back in the Bad Old Days that expects to run with full admin privileges.

The only excuse for continuing with XP, to my mind, other than sheer obstinacy, is where you've got systems that absolutely, positively require XP running on physical hardware - specialised hardware or software that won't work via a VM because they need direct access through physical ports. Such systems should be segregated from local networks and the Internet as much as possible.

Damn it /. - I logged in to post that message. WTF?!

NetCraft confirms it! ;)

...a Beowulf Cluster of Circular Refuges. Across all of the social networks. Covered in hot grits. ;)

I come at this from a completely different viewpoint, having only recently dipped my toes into Linux - for me, a package manager is a relatively new concept. The nearest I've come to it previously has been with Apple's App Store, both for iOS and now OSX - plenty of choice, sometimes too much choice.

As far as manually installing apps goes, it usually boils down to double-clicking on the DMG file to mount it, then either running the installation package or dragging the app file to your Applications folder.

In theory, uninstalling apps is as simple as dragging the app file to the Trash. I say 'in theory' because apps do leave behind some detritus formed by using them - thankfully not to the same degree as Windows, but it is there. For suites of apps like Microsoft Office or Adobe Creative Cloud, there tends to be a lot more extra stuff deposited onto your system besides the apps themselves.

Sadly, updates do tend to be on a per-app basis, with the exception of those acquired through the App Store, which handles the update process.