If you are wondering when Microsoft will release its next Service Pack for Windows XP, just relax because you have a long wait. Much to the surprise of almost everyone, the whizzes from Redmond announced that Service Pack 3 will not be available until the second half of next year. In other words, your wait time is at least 1 1/2 years. Service Pack 2 was released in August 2004 making it at least three years between fix releases. That's a long time, although Microsoft does release fixes and patches on a monthly basis.
A service patch is a large collection of fixes, patches and updates for a Microsoft operating system. Last year, Microsoft said that it would issue the next XP service pack before its next version of the Windows operating system, to be called "Windows Vista." Its looks like they have changed their minds as Windows Vista is now scheduled for release later this year.
To me, it looks like that Microsoft has already relegated Windows XP to second class status in favor of a new operating system that is not ready for market yet. A very unclassy move, but one designed to help stimulate upgrade demand for Vista. The company also announced that as of December 30, 2008, they will no longer support Windows XP.
Just for Fun:
In these long winter days of extended darkness, I got to wondering about how much difference there is in the number of daylight hours between summer and winter. After a quick Google search, I came across the answer on a web page that is part of the Old Farmer's Almanac web site. It gives you a daily look at sunrise/sunset times in most locations in the US plus the total time of daylight hours.
FYI...for Ephrata we have 8:28 hours of daylight on the shortest day of the year (Dec 22 this year) and 15:58 hours on the longest day of the year (June 21), a difference of almost 7 1/2 hours! In the nearly one month between December 22 and today, we have already increased our daylight time by over 1/2 hour. I dearly love trivia!
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