Help save Windows XP - sign the petition

You probably all know by now how much I dislike despise Windows Vista, even though I’ve been a Microsoft customer and systems integrator for years, this OS is useless for the kind of work I do and is a technical support nightmare. I only sell systems built on Windows XP for that reason.

Well now somebody is doing something to keep Windows XP alive. I run a business where I provide turn key systems. Having to supply Vista will be a technical disaster for many of the programs we rely on to do complex computer graphics work. So a vote for XP is essentially a vote to help me.

Vote here: SAVE XP

From Slashdot:

Computerworld Australia is running a story with a response from Microsoft to Infoworld’s SAVE XP petition Web site, which has gathered over 75,000 signatures so far. Apparently Microsoft is aware of the petition, but says it is “listening first and foremost to feedback we hear from partners and customers about what makes sense based on their needs, that’s what informed our decision to extend the availability of XP initially, and what will continue to guide us” — a somewhat strange response given that the vast majority of people signing the petition ARE Microsoft customers! The Save XP movement has attracted the attention of the software giant, despite its claims that Vista has sold more than 100 million copies and its adoption rate is in line with the company’s expectations. “We’re seeing positive indicators that we’re already starting to move from the early adoption phase into the mainstream and that more and more businesses are beginning their planning and deployment of Windows Vista,” the company said. Nevertheless vendors such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Fujitsu, and more recently NEC, all offer the opportunity to downgrade to XP Pro.”

UAH Satellite data for Jan08 in agreement with RSS data

University of Alabama, Huntsville (John Christy) just published their UAH lower troposphere data for January 2008. Like the RSS data set, it shows a negative anomaly, and a steep decline in the past 12 months though the magnitude of the anomaly is slightly lower at ∆T -.588 than the RSS ∆T -.629 degrees Centigrade.

I’ve plotted the UAH data below, as I did for the RSS data in the previous post:

And a zoomed version with the Delta T highlighted:

click for larger images

So as before, we have an indication that the huge La Niña event going on in the Pacific may be responsible for rapid temperature changes in our atmosphere. There’s also the ongoing solar minima thats dragging on.  But there’s more to it than that. Joe Bastardi of AccuWeather recently wrote this on ICECAP about the pattern that has emerged:

“It is straight out of the book of climate. The pattern is so much like the 1949-1950 La Nina, which was signaling the start of the reversal of the warming of the earth’s climate in the 1930s, ‘40s and early 50s. Only someone choosing to ignore it, or not wanting to see it, would not be cognizant of it. But because such a pattern leads to warmer than normal conditions in areas where the greatest centers of human induced global warming information comes out of, western Europe and the eastern part of North America, no attention is being called to the fact that the winter this year does have outstandingly large areas of colder than normal temperatures and in areas, the vast expanses of the tropical Pacific, and the vast expanse of the air above us.”

There’s a lot to be said for human pattern recognition, and when somebody of Joe Bastardi’s experience and skill makes a statement like the one above, we should give it credence.