3 ms·

"Shockingly" - hardly. It's code written years ago and has done it's job in the meanwhile. Recklessly refactoring it is probably equally dangerous. The article

"Shockingly" - hardly. It's code written years ago and has done it's job in the meanwhile. Recklessly refactoring it is probably equally dangerous. The article says something along the lines of "changes might break old scripts, but who cares, they are relying on bugs". This is a bad attitude, the broken old scripts might become new vulnerabilities which is what you are trying to prevent to begin with.

msie 12y ago
Yes, it's a wonder how civilization survived with all this "bad" code floating around.
UnoriginalGuy 12y ago
Agreed. Everyone likes to make a sport of bashing Microsoft (no pun intended), but that is simply WHY Microsoft is so darn successful: Backwards compatibility up the ying-yang. You buy a piece of software from 1995, it would likely have continued to work on any 32 bit Windows including Windows 7 released in 2009. The only reason why a lot of really old software has broken recently is that 16 bit support simply no longer exists on x86-64 CPUs in 64 bit mode (which can be somewhat mitigated with XP mode or Client Hyper-V in Windows 7 and 8 respectively). Linus Torvalds gets this concept: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/3/8/495 https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/3/8/495