The Technology newsbucket: Windows XP near death, data.ac.uk?, bad record stores and more

Holga VI taken with expired Fuji Pro camera. Photo by FotoChaotin on Flickr. Some rights reserved A quick burst of 11 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team Microsoft to end security support for Windows XP Service Pack 2 >> The Last Watchdog Mark 16 July in your calendar, because you know every hacker will (and so will we). If you're still using XP SP2 (or earlier) or Windows 2000 after that, you're on your own. It's a Friday, by the way, so look forward to an interesting weekend, or Monday 20th. Time for data.ac.uk? Or a local data.open.ac.uk? >> OUseful.Info Everyone's doing datastores. Or thinking about them. The Problem With Today's Record Store >> Flowering Toilet "I thought everything was fine until one day I had my credit card stolen. The joker who stole my card waltzed into this record shop and charged up almost a thousand dollars worth of stuff over the course of a single day. He told the owner he was buying the stuff for me. I would have thought the owner would know better because most of the stuff this joker bought was not to my taste at all." Guess the store. Editorial Notebook - Further Thoughts of a Novice E-Reader >> NYTimes.com "The entire impulse behind Amazon's Kindle and Apple's iBooks assumes that you cannot read a book unless you own it first — and only you can read it unless you want to pass on your device. "That goes against the social value of reading, the collective knowledge and collaborative discourse that comes from access to shared libraries. That is not a good thing for readers, authors, publishers or our culture. " The iPad and immersive computing >> O'Reilly Radar A contrary but interesting view: maybe what we do need is a single-tasking device, to make us focus on the task in hand, rather than flitting about between things. THE SECRET OF SUCCESS? / work less / sleep in / take more breaks / put down the blackberry >> globeandmail.com Yes, step away from the computer. Now. Or possibly later. Facebook: Advertisers Have Quadrupled Since 2009 >> Gigaom "Facebook hosted over 176 billion display ads in the U.S. in the first quarter of this year, comScore said, up from just 70 billion a year earlier. The latest figure gives the social network more than 16 percent of the market." Though if it's comScore.. we'd wonder how the data was collected. AMD and Intel Won't Let x86 Die Without a Fight >> Gigaom AMD is showing off a new processor which combines traditional processors with graphics processing units. The idea, though, is to make sure that x86 doesn't get killed off. Enjoy HTML5 excitement with PhpStorm & WebStorm >> WebStorm and PHPStorm blog Everyone's getting in on the act - including IDEs for Windows. Microsoft: Win 7 and Server 2008 R2 SP1 beta coming in July >> ZDNet Mary Jo Foley on what's been announced on the first day of Microsoft's TechEd conference. There's actually a lot, despite the blah headline. Introducing PowerPivot >> Microsoft Excel 2010 Site Just the sort of thing if you happen to have a 100-million-row spreadsheet going begging. You can follow Guardian Technology's linkbucket on delicious