Today is the day that Windows 2000 is officially being laid to rest; it has reached end-of-life. There will be no more updates and security hotfixes released for the platform. That's also the case for Windows XP SP2, where users have to install SP3 if they want to continue receiving updates and support for the platform.
However, for businesses and fans of Windows XP, Microsoft just released some good news. They've decided to extend downgrade rights (http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/12/microsoft-says-74-percent-of-work-pcs-still-use-windows-xp-exte/) until the year 2020. Their own internal metrics show that about 75% of business desktops still use Windows XP on hardware that's 4-5 years old. What's not really clear is what's happening to the scheduled end-of-life for XP in 2014. I suppose one thing that could be done is the release of a new "rollup" service pack which would extend the lifecycle for another 10 years.
This fits in with discussions that we've been having about 64-bit code. While Windows 7 x64 has been doing well, it's still dwarfed by the install base for Windows XP, and will be for quite some time. If you think that 32-bit code is going away anytime soon, think again.
That is not surprising. 32 bit processing is ample for most computational needs. There are not too many multiGigabyte programs around and the step to 64 bit processing will only improve performance by about a factor of 2 while considerably increasing memory usage.
I am not enthralled with the 64 bit calling convention either. The Windows 64 bit API demands a stack frame alignment to 16 bytes when making SDK calls and also requires floats to be passed in the XMM (SIMD) registers, which is very inconvenient if you do most of your number crunching in the Floating Point Processor.
I think these rules were divised for the benefit of Operating system developers rather than we lesser mortals.
Charles
If we look in the past, we see that there are even still DOS Programms on Win 3.11 running out there.
Means we are living in a time where we van have anything between 16 and 64 bits :-).
Doesn't mean i would not take out my 8 bit Atari 800 once i have found some space for it.