Well, at least one of them: Internet Explorer 6.
Some interesting (depressing) stats: Worldwide, 12% of the world is still using IE6, as of Feb 2011.
However, one advanced nation is down to 2.9%, and leads the world on this measure of intelligence. USA! USA! USA!
(Except for Germany (2.9%), Portugal (2.4%), and the Czech Republic (1.4%), which don't count, because they're Old Europe. Oh, and except for Brazil (2.9%), Colombia (2.8%), Denmark (1.6%), Sweden (1.3%), Norway (0.7%), and Finland (0.7%), which also don't count, because socialism.)
<bush>
YOU FORGOT POLAND.
</bush>
Oh, yeah. 1.4%.
In all seriousness, if you're still using IE6, your machine is almost certainly pwned, and is likely part of a botnet, helping to send out spam and to do other nasty things, without your knowledge. So please. Be a good netizen and stop using IE6.
6 comments:
Some smart lawyer out there has gotta be able to sue Microsoft for letting that shit out there to spam people. If you can sue the actual spammers you should be able to sue the nimrods who couldn't fix their browser and knowingly left it out there in the public domain to use.
That has an emotionally appealing ring to it. Unfortunately, given that MS has done their level best to get people to stop using IE6, I think the legal system would find in their favor.
It might be nice if they could be persuaded to keep issuing patches for IE6, though. One of which would include a nag screen every time IE6 was started.
Also my goddam mouse!
ROFL. Great post.
One of the highlights of my year is that my company finally got around to replacing everyone's computers. That's some 100,000 PCs. We normally do it on a 3 year cycle, but when Bush and Cheney crashed the world economy, we had to delay it for something like 18 months. The last couple of years, putting up with hopelessly outdated technology (manufactured in 2004) has been hellish. The Friday before last, my group finally got our new PCs. What a relief.
But to the point: Those old machines were still running IE6. People were free to upgrade to IE7 or IE8 (but no other browser), but something like 55% of the user base (according to web site reporting data) were still using the archaic nightmare that is IE6. In my group, incidentally, the one and only person who refused to upgrade to IE7 was the ultraconservative Pentacostal homeschooler (about whom you've heard me speak in the past). I'm sure there's some connection between his extremist ideology and his refusal to upgrade, though I can't say exactly what the nature of that connection is. ;-)
Interesting. I was going to say something in the post about suspecting that most of the IE6 holdouts were poor saps stuck using it at work, but then I thought, nah, that can't be. It'd mean that they had to be running something less than XP, and that seemed hard to believe. Hard to imagine that people have willfully avoided upgrading to IE7 or 8. Sheesh. I mean, I know many people are nervous about moving to a new version of anything, because Computers Are Hard, but I would have thought your CTO or CIO or something would have mandated it.
I can, however, imagine the mindset of your fundie colleague. Graz was asking me just a short while ago, matter of fact, why so many wingnuts refuse to use spell-check and one of my guesses was that they refused to change to a proper browser, since Everyone Knows those browsers are built by liberals.
Brendan,
Thanks!
Jack said:
"the one and only person who refused to upgrade to IE7 was the ultraconservative Pentacostal homeschooler (about whom you've heard me speak in the past). I'm sure there's some connection between his extremist ideology and his refusal to upgrade, though I can't say exactly what the nature of that connection is. ;-)"
I think the problem is that the more frequently you upgrade any technology, the faster earth ages.
That explains why there's such a difference between eager-to-embrace-novelty/science-thirsty-heretics and devoted conformist young-earthers.
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