4 ms·

In the comments, Jeff writes: I'm saying you should avoid using the rusted screwdriver which is liable to burst into fragments and cause a crippling hand wound

In the comments, Jeff writes: I'm saying you should avoid using the rusted screwdriver which is liable to burst into fragments and cause a crippling hand wound at any time! This is why friends don't let friends Comment While Defensive. XP is old technology but this analogy is absurd. It's not as if the code becomes brittle and starts to break down over time. Incidentally, Vista is what finally decided me to get off my ass and switch to Ubuntu. Now that I've invested a fair bit of energy familiarizing myself with it and customizing my system, there's no chance I'll switch back to Microsoft even if Windows 7 is a huge improvement.

TrevorJ 17y ago
Code may not break down over time, but maintaining it into the future can become burdensome with changes in hardware and peripherals.
kristiandupont 17y ago
I don't think the analogy is that absurd. It's true that code doesn't rust, but as time advances and other code is developed and improved, old code can become relatively less reliable. IE6 is "rusty" compared to modern browsers.
- philwelch 17y ago
  You know, when IE6 was new (edit: and after Firefox was released), it still sucked, and we pined for the day everyone would abandon IE for standards-compliant browsers. Now that IE7 and IE8 are more standards-compliant, that exact same complaint has just been indexed to IE6 in particular. It's not a matter of it being out of date at all.
  - blasdel 17y ago
    What are you talking about? IE5 and IE6 for Windows were awesome when they were released. They were way faster, more reliable, and more standards-based than the browsers of the day when released (like the NN4.7 shitpile). The last release of IE5 for OS X had one of the first usable CSS implementations, and some awesome UI innovations. The problem with IE is not that it sucked, but that it was abandoned before hundreds of millions of users started banging on it.
    - philwelch 17y ago
      IE5 maybe, but it was long before IE7 (i.e. during the IE6 era) when IE came under fire for poor standards compliance.
      - RyanMcGreal 17y ago
        Again, that's because in the huge interim between IE6 and IE7, the other browsers caught up to IE and then pulled way ahead.

TrevorJ 17y ago

Code may not break down over time, but maintaining it into the future can become burdensome with changes in hardware and peripherals.

kristiandupont 17y ago

I don't think the analogy is that absurd. It's true that code doesn't rust, but as time advances and other code is developed and improved, old code can become relatively less reliable. IE6 is "rusty" compared to modern browsers.

philwelch 17y ago
You know, when IE6 was new (edit: and after Firefox was released), it still sucked, and we pined for the day everyone would abandon IE for standards-compliant browsers. Now that IE7 and IE8 are more standards-compliant, that exact same complaint has just been indexed to IE6 in particular. It's not a matter of it being out of date at all.
- blasdel 17y ago
  What are you talking about? IE5 and IE6 for Windows were awesome when they were released. They were way faster, more reliable, and more standards-based than the browsers of the day when released (like the NN4.7 shitpile). The last release of IE5 for OS X had one of the first usable CSS implementations, and some awesome UI innovations. The problem with IE is not that it sucked, but that it was abandoned before hundreds of millions of users started banging on it.
  - philwelch 17y ago
    IE5 maybe, but it was long before IE7 (i.e. during the IE6 era) when IE came under fire for poor standards compliance.
    - RyanMcGreal 17y ago
      Again, that's because in the huge interim between IE6 and IE7, the other browsers caught up to IE and then pulled way ahead.