Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that can help answer the question.
Query: Is Windows XP abandonware?
On April 14, 2009, Windows XP exited mainstream support and entered the extended support phase; Microsoft continued to provide security updates every month for Windows XP, however, free technical support, warranty claims, and design changes were no longer being offered. Extended support ended on April 8, 2014, over 12 years since the release of XP; normally Microsoft products have a support life cycle of only 10 years. Beyond the final security updates released on April 8, no more security patches or support information are provided for XP free-of-charge; "critical patches" will still be created, and made available only to customers subscribing to a paid "Custom Support" plan. As it is a Windows component, all versions of Internet Explorer for Windows XP also became unsupported.
Microsoft Office 97 is a major milestone release of Microsoft Office, which includes hundreds of new features and improvements over its predecessor, Microsoft Office 95. Office 97 introduced "Command Bars," a paradigm in which menus and toolbars were made more similar in capability and visual design. It also featured natural language systems and sophisticated grammar checking. It was published on CD-ROM as well as on a set of 44 3½-inch floppy disks. Released on November 19, 1996,the suite runs on Windows NT 3.51 SP5, Windows 95, Windows NT 4.0 SP2, Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Windows ME. It is the last version to support Windows NT 3.51 as Office 2000 requires Windows 95, Windows NT 4.0 SP3 or a later version. Two service releases (SR-1 and SR-2) were released for Office 97. SR-2 solved the year 2000 problem in Office 97.
Microsoft launched the "Xbox Originals" program in December 2007 where Xbox 360 owners could purchase select original Xbox titles digitally if they did not own a game disc and could be found inside their own section in the Xbox Live Marketplace. Beginning in June 2009 the branding was phased out and the games were moved to the "Games on Demand" section of the store while Microsoft stating that they have "finished it's portfolio" of Xbox Originals.
The Amstrad CPC enjoyed a strong and long lifetime, mainly due to the machines use for businesses as well as gaming. Dedicated programmers continued working on the CPC range, even producing graphical user interface (GUI) operating systems such as SymbOS. Internet sites devoted to the CPC have appeared from around the world featuring forums, news, hardware, software, programming and games. CPC Magazines appeared during the 1980s including publications in countries such as Britain, France, Spain, Germany, Denmark, Australia, and Greece. Titles included the official Amstrad Computer User publication, as well as independent titles like "Amstrad Action", "Amtix!", "Computing with the Amstrad CPC", "CPC Attack", Australia's "The Amstrad User", France's "Amstrad Cent Pour Cent" and "Amstar". Following the CPC's end of production, Amstrad gave permission for the CPC ROMs to be distributed freely as long as the copyright message is not changed and that it is acknowledged that Amstrad still holds copyright, giving emulator authors the possibility to ship the CPC firmware with their programs.
Microsoft Product Activation was introduced in the Brazilian version of Microsoft Office 97 Small Business Edition and Microsoft Word 97 sold in the Hungarian market. It broadened that successful pilot with the release of Microsoft Publisher 98 in the Brazilian market. Microsoft then rolled out product activation in its flagship Microsoft Office 2000 product. All retail copies sold in Australia, Brazil, China, France, and New Zealand, and some sold in Canada and the United States, required the user to activate the product via the Internet. However, all copies of Office 2000 do not require activation after April 15, 2003. After its success, the product activation system was extended worldwide and incorporated into Windows XP and Office XP and all subsequent versions of Windows and Office. Despite independently developing its own technology, in April 2009 a jury found Microsoft to have willfully infringed Uniloc's patent. However, in September 2009, US District Judge William Smith "vacated" the jury's verdict and ruled in favour of Microsoft. This ruling was subsequently overturned in 2011.
Microsoft Office is a family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. It was first announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at COMDEX in Las Vegas. Initially a marketing term for an office suite (bundled set of productivity applications), the first version of Office contained Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint. Over the years, Office applications have grown substantially closer with shared features such as a common spell checker, OLE data integration and Visual Basic for Applications scripting language. Microsoft also positions Office as a development platform for line-of-business software under the Office Business Applications brand. On July 10, 2012, Softpedia reported that Office is used by over a billion people worldwide.
In 2001, Apple introduced Mac OS X (now known as macOS), an operating system based on NeXT's NeXTSTEP and incorporating parts of the FreeBSD kernel. Aimed at consumers and professionals alike, Mac OS X married the stability, reliability and security of Unix with the ease of a completely overhauled user interface. To aid users in transitioning their applications from Mac OS 9, the new operating system allowed the use of Mac OS 9 applications through the Classic environment. Apple's Carbon API also allowed developers to adapt their Mac OS 9 software to use Mac OS X's features.
In 1990, Microsoft introduced its office suite, Microsoft Office. The suite bundled separate productivity applications, such as Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. On May 22, Microsoft launched Windows 3.0, featuring streamlined user interface graphics and improved protected mode capability for the Intel 386 processor. Both Office and Windows became dominant in their respective areas.
When released in 1993, Cello was the only browser for the Microsoft Windows platform. Shortly after launch, Cello was being downloaded at a rate of 500 copies per day. As such, it achieved a fair amount of use and recognition within the legal community, including a number of PC users with between 150,000 and 200,000 users. In 1994, most websites were visited using either the Cello browser or the Mosaic browser. Despite having fewer features than Mosaic, Cello continued to be used due to its simpler interface and lower system requirements. Cello was praised for being easy to install, because it wasn't necessary to install Win32s or a TCP/IP stack for Windows 3.1. Following the release of Windows 95, which offered a much better TCP/IP interface, Cello fell into disuse and was abandoned.
The original Xbox was released on November 15, 2001, in North America, February 22, 2002, in Japan, and March 14, 2002, in Australia and Europe. It was Microsoft's first foray into the gaming console market. As part of the sixth-generation of gaming, the Xbox competed with Sony's PlayStation 2, Sega's Dreamcast (which stopped American sales before the Xbox went on sale), and Nintendo's GameCube. The Xbox was the first console offered by an American company after the Atari Jaguar stopped sales in 1996. The name Xbox was derived from a contraction of "DirectX Box", a reference to Microsoft's graphics API, DirectX.
The Mac OS X Public Beta (internally code named "Kodiak") was the first publicly available version of Apple Computer's Mac OS X (now named macOS) operating system to feature the Aqua user interface. It was released to the public on September 13, 2000 for US$29.95. Its release was significant as the first publicly available evidence of Apple's ability to ship the long-awaited "next-generation Mac operating system" after the Copland and Rhapsody failures. It allowed software developers and early adopters to test a preview of the upcoming operating system and develop software for the forthcoming operating system before its final release. The US version had a build number of 1H39 and the international version had build number 2E14.
Shortly after the partnership with Microsoft, Silicon Knights announced that "Too Human", a game originally conceived for the Sony PlayStation, would be coming to Microsoft's Xbox 360 console as a planned trilogy. The game, dramatically reworked from the original concept, married the ideas of Norse mythology with high technology. The company was subject to a successful countersuit from Epic Games in May 2012 over the development of games using Epic's Unreal Engine 3, and the latter was awarded US $4.45 million in damages. Silicon Knights was also ordered to destroy all copies of existing titles using the engine, as well as in-development games "The Sandman", "Siren in the Maelstrom" and "The Box/Rytualist".
At the computer science department at Aarhus University, three students, avid players of XPilot and of Sid Meier's "Civilization", which was a stand-alone PC game for MS-DOS, decided to find out whether the two could be fused into an X-based multiplayer Civilization-like strategy game. The students—Peter Unold, Claus Leth Gregersen and Allan Ove Kjeldbjerg—started development in November 1995; the first playable version was released in January 1996, with bugfixing and small enhancements until April. The rules of the game were close to Civilization, while the client/server architecture was basically that of XPilot.
On 7 July 1994, the Fraunhofer Society released the first software MP3 encoder called l3enc. The filename extension ".mp3" was chosen by the Fraunhofer team on 14 July 1995 (previously, the files had been named ".bit"). With the first real-time software MP3 player WinPlay3 (released 9 September 1995) many people were able to encode and play back MP3 files on their PCs. Because of the relatively small hard drives back in that time (≈500–1000 MB) lossy compression was essential to store non-instrument based (see tracker and MIDI) music for playback on computer. As sound scholar Jonathan Sterne notes, "An Australian hacker acquired l3enc using a stolen credit card. The hacker then reverse-engineered the software, wrote a new user interface, and redistributed it for free, naming it "thank you Fraunhofer"".
Prior to and after the mandate, all Xbox One consoles initially shipped with the Kinect sensor included. On June 9, 2014, cheaper Xbox One bundles were introduced, which did not include the Kinect sensor. Microsoft stated the decision to offer Xbox One bundles without Kinect was to "[offer] a choice to people that would allow people to buy an Xbox One and then ramp up to Kinect when they can afford to", while also allowing games to use processing power that was previously reserved for Kinect. An updated Xbox Development Kit issued in June 2014 allows developers to explicitly disable motion tracking functionality in games, allowing access to additional system resources that represent about 10% of the GPU processing power. These resources were previously reserved for Kinect skeletal tracking, regardless of whether the Kinect sensor was attached or in use.
The Macintosh Application Environment (MAE) was a software package introduced by Apple in 1994 that allowed users of certain Unix-based computer workstations to run Apple Macintosh application software. MAE used the X Window System to emulate a Macintosh Finder-style graphical user interface. The last version, MAE 3.0, was compatible with System 7.5.3. MAE was available for Sun Microsystems SPARCstation and Hewlett-Packard systems. It was discontinued on May 14, 1998.
When the Xbox launched on November 15, 2001, the as-yet unnamed online service was destined for a Summer 2002 deployment. Xbox Live was finally given a name at E3 2002 when the service was unveiled in its entirety. Sound-dampened booths and broadband-connected Xbox consoles—featuring an early version of "Unreal Championship"—demonstrated the service on the show floor. The Epic title was one of the flagship titles for the service, which was slated for a debut on November 15, 2002, marking the anniversary of the Xbox launch. Microsoft announced that 50 Xbox Live titles would be available by the end of 2003. Utilizing the required broadband bandwidth, Xbox Live featured a unified gaming "Friends List", as well as a single identity across all titles (regardless of the publisher), and standardized voice chat with a headset and communication, a feature that was still in its infancy.
Daydream Software was put through liquidation in February 2003 before closing in 2004. Most employees moving on to form a new development company: Resolution Interactive, which focused on iPhone games. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2012.
On February 4, 1997, Apple acquired NeXT and began development of the Rhapsody operating system. Rhapsody built on NeXTSTEP, porting the core system to the PowerPC architecture and adding a redesigned user interface based on the Platinum user interface from Mac OS 8. An emulation layer called Blue Box allowed Mac OS applications to run within an actual instance of the Mac OS and an integrated Java platform. The Objective-C developer tools and Frameworks were referred to as the Yellow Box and also made available separately for Microsoft Windows. The Rhapsody project eventually bore the fruit of all Apple's efforts to develop a new generation Mac OS, which finally shipped in the form of Mac OS X Server.
On June 4, 2018, Microsoft announced its intent to acquire GitHub for US$7.5 billion, and the deal closed on Oct. 26, 2018. GitHub will continue to operate independently as a community, platform and business. Under Microsoft, the service will be led by Xamarin's Nat Friedman, reporting to Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft Cloud and AI. Current CEO Chris Wanstrath will be retained as a "technical fellow", also reporting to Guthrie. Microsoft had become a significant user of GitHub, using it to host open source projects and development tools such as Chakra Core, PowerShell, and Visual Studio Code, and has backed other open source projects such as Linux, and developed Git Virtual File System—a Git extension for managing large-scale repositories (and itself has been adopted by GitHub).
In 1983 National Instruments reached an organizational milestone, developing their first GPIB board to connect instruments to IBM PCs. With the arrival of the Macintosh computer, however, the company felt ready to take advantage of the new graphical interfaces. Kodosky began a research initiative with the assistance of student researchers at the University of Texas into ways to exploit the new interface. This led to the creation of NI's flagship product, the LabVIEW graphical development platform for the Macintosh computer, which was released in 1986. The software allows engineers and scientists to program graphically, by "wiring" icons together instead of typing text-based code. By allowing people to use a more intuitive, less-structured development environment, their productivity greatly increased, making LabVIEW quite popular. The following year, a version of LabVIEW, known as LabWindows, was released for the DOS environment.
Windows XP Embedded, commonly abbreviated "XPe", is a componentized version of the Professional edition of Windows XP. An original equipment manufacturer is free to choose only the components needed thereby reducing operating system footprint and also reducing attack area as compared with XP Professional. Unlike Windows CE, Microsoft's operating system for portable devices and consumer electronics, XP Embedded provides the full Windows API, and support for the full range of applications and device drivers written for Microsoft Windows. The system requirements state that XPe can run on devices with at least 32 MB Compact Flash, 32 MB RAM and a P-200 microprocessor. XPe was released on November 28, 2001. As of October 2008, the newest release is Windows XP Embedded Service Pack 3.
Windows XP includes technology from Roxio which allows users to directly burn files to a compact disc through Windows Explorer. Previously, end users had to install CD burning software. In Windows XP, CD and DVD-RAM (FAT32 only for DVD-RAM) burning has been directly integrated into the Windows interface. Data discs are created using the Joliet and ISO 9660 file systems and audio CDs using the Redbook standard. To prevent buffer underrun errors, Windows XP premasters a complete image of files to be burnt and then streams it to the disc burner. Users can burn files to a CD in the same way they write files to a floppy disk or to the hard drive via standard copy-paste or drag and drop methods. The burning functionality is also exposed as an API called the Image Mastering API. Windows XP's CD burning support does not do disk-to-disk copying or disk images, although the API can be used programmatically to do these tasks. Creation of audio CDs is integrated into Windows Media Player. Audio CDs are burnt using track-at-once mode. CD-RW discs can be quick erased.
Windows XP has been criticized for its vulnerabilities due to buffer overflows and its susceptibility to malware such as viruses, trojan horses, and worms. Nicholas Petreley for "The Register" notes that "Windows XP was the first version of Windows to reflect a serious effort to isolate users from the system, so that users each have their own private files and limited system privileges." However, users by default receive an administrator account that provides unrestricted access to the underpinnings of the system. If the administrator's account is compromised, there is no limit to the control that can be asserted over the PC. Windows XP Home Edition also lacks the ability to administer security policies and denies access to the Local Users and Groups utility.
Windows XP can also encrypt files on a remote server with NTFS if the server is trusted for delegation in Active Directory and the user's certificate and private key are loaded in the local profile on the server. If a roaming user profile is used, it will be copied locally. On a WebDAV server mapped by a drive letter, Windows XP can encrypt the file locally and transport it as a raw encrypted file to the WebDAV server using the HTTP PUT command. Similarly, EFS encrypted files can be downloaded raw from the WebDAV and decrypted locally. The command line utilities "cipher", "copy" and "xcopy" have been updated in Windows XP. EFS can also be completely disabled in Windows XP through Group Policy (for a domain) or through the registry (for a non-domain computer).