Old Machines and XP for Linux(not really a D topic)

[Steve Teale]

I was in a discussion here recently about 64 bit and how much 
memory people had in their machines these days.

A somewhat unrelated topic is that Microsoft are in the process 
of dumping XP.

Now all those old desktop boxes with only 500k of memory will 
increasingly migrate in containers to Africa, like the discarded 
mountain bikes, and old banger cars. When they get here they have 
traditionally had XP installed, since that is readily available 
for free - legal or not.

Microsoft might do itself a favour in the long term if instead of 
just dumping XP, it started from the Wine code, and made an XP 
lookalike Linux distro. That way, the old boxes would have an 
extended life, Microsoft would have goodwill from a lot of users, 
and would not have to spend a lot of money keeping the old OS, 
the spammers would be blocked in their process of taking over all 
those unprotected XP machines, and lots of young African girls 
and boys could learn to program in D ;=)

Steve