Advance Notice: Logos Ending Windows XP Support October 26, 2012

Now I finally have a reason to upgrade.

January 2012:

Great Bob, it's the right move and I am happy we are moving finally to .NET 4+, that will be great for the product.

For those that would throw market surveys out, you can find one to prove anything. This one says installed base is only 13% XP:

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

And this one is Gartner, one of the prominent researchers not a non-name or un-sourced market survey like some would put out. In this article entitled, "Get off of Windows XP by 2013", they say XP is less than 5% of installed base, and they also mention by early 2014 Microsoft will no longer support XP and will not change that commitment:

http://redmondmag.com/articles/2012/05/22/get-off-windows-xp.aspx

I'm using windows 8 running logos 4, It's very good!

Awesome! I'm glad to hear this news, and I can't wait for Logos to start taking advantage of the new functionality this opens up for them.

Personally, I can't wait for Logos to drop support for OS X Leopard on the Mac side. I understand why they wouldn't do it just yet, since it would leave PPC users in the dust, but the majority of Mac software dropped support for 10.5 a while ago. I would love to see a version of Logos that takes advantage of Grand Central Dispatch, 64-bit memory allocation, and Lion's fullscreen feature.

'Fired within a month', huh. (That sound curiously familar ... a book title or something maybe).

Ah, but I'm not a marketeer (maybe a mouse-kateer).

But if I could go out and buy a Bible software package with the best resouses, complete with personally managed licenses, installs, does sophosticated searches and cross-linked running on all of the Windows platforms with virtually no support requirements (I've had none going back to Win 3.3).

Yeh, granted that sounds a lot like A-Company.  Definitely not the current offering.

DMB said:

'Fired within a month', huh. (That sound curiously familar ... a book title or something maybe).

Ah, but I'm not a marketeer (maybe a mouse-kateer).

But if I could go out and buy a Bible software package with the best resouses, complete with personally managed licenses, installs, does sophosticated searches and cross-linked running on all of the Windows platforms with virtually no support requirements (I've had none going back to Win 3.3).

Yeh, granted that sounds a lot like A-Company.  Definitely not the current offering.

Point taken. DMB does not approve. What else is new. Let's move on.

Bob Pritchett said:

Paul, those stats are for visitors of that particular web site. 

I know Bob, but W3 is often sited in statistical analysis [:)]

Bob Pritchett said:

We have our own stats that reflect actual Logos users, and XP usage is much lower.

I can believe this, given that a very high percentage of  XP hold-out is in business.

Looks like I will have to upgrade to a Win 7/8 netbook...

There are lots of people still out there using Windows XP it is very stable. I have tried Vista, and I find it as lots of bugs and the computer kept crashing. The cost of upgrading is impossible  for some  people I think it is a bad move, there must be many more features you can implement using .NET4



Will there be a safeguard in the new version that it will not  corrupt existing Windows XP uses, will the beta channel  be disabled for windows XP users?

Will all the bugs be fixed for the .net4 Windows XP users?

Most software companies normally make sure that they can run their software on most operating systems.

I've noticed a new version of Dragon natural speaking 4 has been released, and it still supported and runs on Windows XP. I enjoy using logos 4, I currently have the platinum version, with many add-on books which I purchased over several years, in my case. I would have to stop purchasing books, for quite some time to save up funds to enable me to upgrade to another Windows version there's no way I can use Vista.

I only purchase a few books every month,  I have some books on order in the community pricing
I am concerned that these books will not be supported
or even have problems running on Windows XP
Michael Parry-Thomas

Lynden Williams said:

Michael, if you upgrade your ox, skip Vista and straight to Windows 7. More stable and use less resources. 

   +1 

It's like night and day [Y]

Not happy. I lease an employer-provided laptop, from a government department here in Australia which is only just beginning to image their new rollouts with Windows 7. They are not prepared to offer support if I upgrade the system on my laptop to anything newer than XP. Interesting dilemma ... give up buying new Logos releases or lose customer support on my laptop until the next trienniel rollout.

Am hoping the same type of strategy for OSX - I'd like to be able to use the full future capability of my machine at 12 Cores/24 Threads and /96 Gig Ram and Dual Mercury Accelsior RAID 0 PCI Express SSD's running at 1.64 Gigabyte I/O transfer and 200,000 I/O operations  a second.

Right now I can only use 4Cores/4 threads and 2 Gig of RAM.Thats about 2% of the available RAM and 15% of the available CPU. The RAID Drives would be instantaneous for all practical purposes. If the application was  architected to utilize the operating system from Snow Leopard or higher  it would read my entire index into RAM in about 2 Seconds.

Larry Good said:

I'd like to be able to use the full future capability of my machine at 12 Cores/24 Threads and /96 Gig Ram and Dual Mercury Accelsior RAID 0 PCI Express SSD's running at 1.64 Gigabyte I/O transfer and 200,000 I/O operations  a second.

Holy hardware, Batman!

Will there be a safeguard in the new version that it will not  corrupt existing Windows XP uses, will the beta channel  be disabled for windows XP users? From what I can tell, Microsoft is discontinuing support of XP April 8, 2014. At that point, they will not guarantee or support any of THEIR updates, fixes , etc. on XP, including .NET updates.  Fixes or problems will not be addressed on the XP platform.

Will all the bugs be fixed for the .net4 Windows XP users? If it's a Logos bug that is across platforms, sure - but they won't be likely running XP, so if they can't duplicate it on a supported platform then they won't fix it. Same as Microsoft.

I've noticed a new version of Dragon natural speaking 4 has been released, and it still supported and runs on Windows XP. -> Once Microsoft stops support of XP, many software vendors will do the same. They can't really support the product any more if the operating system vendor no longer supports what they run on. They could hit a problem or need help and it's just not there. I suspect Logos has to do some things to the product that told them this is the time. Plus, if you read the web, even today support of the XP platform is considerably more expensive for software firms than Vista or Windows 7.

I am concerned that these books will not be supported or even have problems running on Windows XP - read Bob's post again. It's not about books, although new books will have new data types in them that will not work on XP.

Dave ... thank you for the heads up on L3. Currently all of my L3s are running on XP except for the single one on W7-64/internet. From what I've read about W8, I'm still looking for value-added (vs cutsie). Microsoft reminds me of the little boy who has almost all the candy, but sees another little boy with candy he doesn't have.

Regarding Bob's announcement, I think he deserves some credit (not that I'm any great expert). I guess some other forum member(s) felt threatened with the mention of Libronix (though I'm careful to screen the name with 'the best software ever written').

(1)  His announcement giving fair warning and asking for input is absolutely great. Name me another software company like that. There's probably some smaller ones but it's very refreshing.

(2) Common sense would suggest that Logos4 already pre-defined the operating environment (power!). So it's not surprising L4 has few XP platforms left, compared to industry.

(3) Given so many developers on the forum, it should be pretty obvious trying to sit over top W7 and XP for each update is a big headache. I guess there's still a group on Vista users but if not, I would have tried to sit on W7 so they could concentrate on W8.  I suspect Proclaim colors the decision.

(4) On another thread Bob 'finally' pierced the heart of WPF. I don't know why emotionally I find that gratifying but I do (I'm not talking about apologies etc; just recognifition that some users got beat up in the process, along with a lot of Logos developers; I'm sure they weren't too thrilled when bugs showed up periodically).

(5) And lastly, maybe regular L4 users didn't notice but I did. For whatever reason, after L3 resource format production stopped, Logos really sped up breaking up collections. So my Logos purchases have been continuing in a happy fashion. That's also been refreshing.

And I DO like Libronix (in addition to Logos4 of course).

Ben said:

I'm using windows 8 running logos 4, It's very good!

How are you able to use Windows 8? Is that a beta version?

I guess this means I need to get a new PC; I'm still running XP on a many-years-old PC with 3GB RAM.

Dave H - 

My basic point is that Logos does not use the available hardware that the Operating System can manage.

The CPU limit that I notice is 4 Threads spread over 4 Cores. Each Core can dispatch 2 Threads on my machine so in reality it is only using 2 Cores equivalent. It is obvious it is CPU bottlenecked for instance in a re-index operation.

The RAM limit  could possibly be overcome with a RAM Disk strategy but there are caveats to that approach.

Granted the Disk I/O is massive. 

The bottom line is that Logos has a very limited ability to use the hardware if it is there.

As a contrast in a completely  different knowledge domain, astrophotometry,  in the use of various digital tools for hunting variable stars, deep space objects, pointing maps, tracking control to sub-arc second accuracy, where the data sets can reach 10 gigabytes for a single image, (or in some cases 3600 images) the  software I use exploits all the hardware to accomplish that task. Logos on the other hand show's it is running with 2 hands tied behind its back.

 That is all I am really trying to point out with as little ambiguity as possible.

My Puter is Vista but my laptop is Xp. Perhaps its time to buy an IPad.[8-|]

Bradley Grainger (Logos) said:

It will not corrupt an existing installation on Windows XP.

Recent versions of Logos 4 include a check that prevents them from automatically downloading an update that is not supported by the current OS. (So if, hypothetically, Logos 4.7 is tagged as Vista-only, and you're running Logos 4.6 on Windows XP, running "update now" will display "No updates available".)

If you manually download the installer from the Internet and try to run it, it will check your OS and display an error message informing you that it's not supported.

 

Thank You for telling us that those checks are in place.  Please also post on the MAC item on the same subject that that code is in the MAC version.

I would concur about running Windows 8 too early. I have the preview version, I upgraded to production version today (developers can get it now). I have been running Logos (all of this on a backup computer), along with other stuff. It's not slower, not faster. But the user interface is frustratingly different. I keep thinking that everything takes 4 more mouse clicks to make happen. It's quite possible IMHO it's really only going to seem better for someone with a touch screen display, which mine is not. I really don't think I am going to upgraded any of my real computers to Win 8 for quite a while, and this is the first time I have ever done this. I think we may see a major customer negative reaction to the user interface, but that's just my opinion.  In any case, be sure and try it before you convert to it - you may not like it.