5 ms·

I almost totally agree. If it wasn't for security fixes, there would be no value in updating almost any software. If it's already working OK, just leave it alon

by Nutmog 11y ago

I almost totally agree. If it wasn't for security fixes, there would be no value in updating almost any software. If it's already working OK, just leave it alone. 15 years ago when people had problems with their graphics cards, the standard "fix" was to update the driver. Now we're still updating drivers. Weren't the problems supposed to have been fixed many years ago? It seems they introduce as many new bugs as they fix, making the net effect of updates useless as far as bugs go. For security related bugs, stop using C++ for internet facing software.

my5thaccount 11y ago
It's hard to explain to people, who aren't techies, why I, as a programmer, don't have the latest and greatest software installed asap. I still use Visual Source Safe for my personal projects. It's never failed me in 20 years. Right click, check out, right click checkin. Perfect every time.
- robzyb 11y ago
  > I still use Visual Source Safe for my personal projects. It's never failed me in 20 years. Right click, check out, right click checkin. Perfect every time. 1st reaction: Horrified that you are still using VSS. 2nd reaction: Was that if it does what you need it to, well, then, who am I to judge? It doesn't matter whether the tool was created yesterday or 20 years ago. 3rd reaction: Does it really do what you need it to do? I would guess that maybe svn/git has some simple featured that would significantly improve your life. 4th reaction: Wasn't VSS known as being super buggy? Is it just luck that you've escaped failure in 20 years?
  - sk5t 11y ago
    This is horrifying indeed. I cannot imagine any reason to go on using VSS other than a very, very robust aversion to learning anything new. And yes, VSS is very buggy, although the bugs might not show up for a single-user environment always following the happy path.
    - my5thaccount 11y ago
      I've used git on several hosts and subversion back in the day. I have no problem learning new things. Tortoise, bitbucket, github, beanstalk to name a few. I think your reaction is more horrifying than me not having a compelling reason to change the way I've been doing things without flaw for decades.
      - Aloha 11y ago
        So long as it works for you, thats great - I just hope you have a migration path if/when it stops working. I do however get the objection to newer is better, I keep getting besieged to move my projects from svn to git - to which I usually respond "Why, tell me what feature we need in git, that svn doesn't do?" I've yet to get an answer.
        supercoder 11y ago
        Non centralized is probably the best one. But agree it's harder from there.
        cesarb 11y ago
        If you "keep getting besieged to move [your] projects from svn to git", I can guess that who is asking is probably downstream consumers of your projects. What they might actually be wanting: - Familiarity. Everyone uses git nowadays; like it or not, svn projects are the odd ones out. - Fast, offline querying of the project's history. With git, they have a full copy of the project's history in their local computer, while with svn, any query has to go to the server. This helps a lot when chasing regressions, or just when browsing the changes between one release and the other. - Easy branching. Branches in git are more lightweight than branches in svn, and git's merge functionality is quite good. When they want to propose some change to your code, they can just create a branch in their local copy, make the changes they want, publish the branch somewhere, and ask you to merge it; this is made even easier by sites like github. With svn, unless they have an account in your svn server, they have to do it the old-fashioned way.
        11y ago
- thought_alarm 11y ago
  > It's never failed me in 20 years. Right click, check out, right click checkin Right click, branch, right click, merge, right click, tire fire, right click, throw computer out window.
- daniel-cussen 11y ago
  Yeah, for real. People think that, like grease monkeys, people who work with computers, and like them, should have the latest and greatest whatever the hell app is going around. Because you know it's going around, like measles. Others, like worser diseases. A friend and I, him no longer on Facebook, me without it at this point, both have stickies on our cameras all day that we peel off to talk on Facetime. And as we were chatting, he mentioned someone who was a power user but didn't know much. He was downright promiscuous with the software he used, just, terrible. He never even thought of reading a EULA, had every app that fit on his phone (while my friend and I want nothing to do with smartphones), knew how to use all the features...Perhaps we're slightly paranoid users, but it's these tiny religions that keep us from spilling our guts to the whole planet. And it happens, and there's no undo. I know what computers can do, and it's not fun to think about what happens when yours is commandeered. Especially if you look at the situation antagonistically and as a programmer. I think of old applications, and old computers, the way I think of generic pills: you know what you're getting, the luster is gone from the competitor that once made it look like shit based on vaporware promises, you can trust it no problem, and it's super cheap. And you're used to it, you know the rules, you know how it works. New hardware is expensive, but new software is worse: you pay either in loss of data, highly-targeted advertising, price discrimination when you finally buy something, irresponsibility with data, worrying about getting hacked, getting hacked, countermeasures, getting spammed, or in a mundane but expensive way as with the $5 a month that Danish guy said every app should charge. But most apps just can't man up and charge you a fee, or tell you to go screw, instead, they play it sleazy, they want to traffic a tiny part of you.
- raverbashing 11y ago
  I believe you only use VSS because you never knew anything better (AND you work alone), because that's like cutting a steak with a butter knife
  - my5thaccount 11y ago
    Wow, the vitriol is thick tonight. I also work in teams and like I said in the other comment, I use different flavors of version control on those projects.
    - raverbashing 11y ago
      Ah now I saw your other comment Well, to each their own I suppose
- TwoBit 11y ago
  I'm amazed that you find VSS reliable. Everybody I've known who used it back in the 90s (including my team) had to dump it because it so easily got corrupted. Aside from git and mercurial, you can use Perforce personal for free.
- matwood 11y ago
  > I still use Visual Source Safe for my personal projects. It's never failed me in 20 years. Right click, check out, right click checkin. Perfect every time. Wait! What?! Make sure you do not run out of disk space or do any of the other things that instantly corrupt your VSS repo. Hopefully you were being sarcastic.
username223 11y ago
> I almost totally agree. If it wasn't for security fixes, there would be no value in updating almost any software. Software developers know this, which is why they maximize the scariness of all security fixes, and minimize your ability to separate security fixes from all other software changes. How much churn did you have to swallow to fix "algorithmic complexity attacks" you never saw, which would at worst result in a DoS? Did anyone actually attack your hash tables?
tasty_freeze 11y ago
"Now we're still updating drivers. Weren't the problems supposed to have been fixed many years ago?" Your statement makes sense if you believe that graphics card manufacturers were still working on drivers for 15 year old cards and 15 year old APIs. Manufacturers are always putting out new cards, and there are new APIs to support. Writing drives for dozens of chips spanning multiple generations of graphics architectures to work on multiple OSs and supporting multiple APIs is incredibly challenging. Even if there was just one chip and one OS and one API to support, getting maximum performance across multiple applications is non-trivial. Drivers have a lot of heuristics to try to maximize performance, and manufacturers invest heavily in tuning those heuristics even to specific games to get the best results. If you aren't a gamer, then, yeah, you can run three year old drivers and it won't affect the speed of scrolling the text in your browsers or whatever.
- JBiserkov 11y ago
  Also, most games have unbelievable bugs that currently get caught and mitigated by drivers. So whenever a new game is released (or updated) a new driver has to be released.

by Nutmog 11y ago

my5thaccount 11y ago

It's hard to explain to people, who aren't techies, why I, as a programmer, don't have the latest and greatest software installed asap. I still use Visual Source Safe for my personal projects. It's never failed me in 20 years. Right click, check out, right click checkin. Perfect every time.

robzyb 11y ago
> I still use Visual Source Safe for my personal projects. It's never failed me in 20 years. Right click, check out, right click checkin. Perfect every time. 1st reaction: Horrified that you are still using VSS. 2nd reaction: Was that if it does what you need it to, well, then, who am I to judge? It doesn't matter whether the tool was created yesterday or 20 years ago. 3rd reaction: Does it really do what you need it to do? I would guess that maybe svn/git has some simple featured that would significantly improve your life. 4th reaction: Wasn't VSS known as being super buggy? Is it just luck that you've escaped failure in 20 years?
- sk5t 11y ago
  This is horrifying indeed. I cannot imagine any reason to go on using VSS other than a very, very robust aversion to learning anything new. And yes, VSS is very buggy, although the bugs might not show up for a single-user environment always following the happy path.
  - my5thaccount 11y ago
    I've used git on several hosts and subversion back in the day. I have no problem learning new things. Tortoise, bitbucket, github, beanstalk to name a few. I think your reaction is more horrifying than me not having a compelling reason to change the way I've been doing things without flaw for decades.
    - Aloha 11y ago
      So long as it works for you, thats great - I just hope you have a migration path if/when it stops working. I do however get the objection to newer is better, I keep getting besieged to move my projects from svn to git - to which I usually respond "Why, tell me what feature we need in git, that svn doesn't do?" I've yet to get an answer.
      - supercoder 11y ago
        Non centralized is probably the best one. But agree it's harder from there.
      - cesarb 11y ago
        If you "keep getting besieged to move [your] projects from svn to git", I can guess that who is asking is probably downstream consumers of your projects. What they might actually be wanting: - Familiarity. Everyone uses git nowadays; like it or not, svn projects are the odd ones out. - Fast, offline querying of the project's history. With git, they have a full copy of the project's history in their local computer, while with svn, any query has to go to the server. This helps a lot when chasing regressions, or just when browsing the changes between one release and the other. - Easy branching. Branches in git are more lightweight than branches in svn, and git's merge functionality is quite good. When they want to propose some change to your code, they can just create a branch in their local copy, make the changes they want, publish the branch somewhere, and ask you to merge it; this is made even easier by sites like github. With svn, unless they have an account in your svn server, they have to do it the old-fashioned way.
        11y ago
thought_alarm 11y ago
> It's never failed me in 20 years. Right click, check out, right click checkin Right click, branch, right click, merge, right click, tire fire, right click, throw computer out window.
daniel-cussen 11y ago
Yeah, for real. People think that, like grease monkeys, people who work with computers, and like them, should have the latest and greatest whatever the hell app is going around. Because you know it's going around, like measles. Others, like worser diseases. A friend and I, him no longer on Facebook, me without it at this point, both have stickies on our cameras all day that we peel off to talk on Facetime. And as we were chatting, he mentioned someone who was a power user but didn't know much. He was downright promiscuous with the software he used, just, terrible. He never even thought of reading a EULA, had every app that fit on his phone (while my friend and I want nothing to do with smartphones), knew how to use all the features...Perhaps we're slightly paranoid users, but it's these tiny religions that keep us from spilling our guts to the whole planet. And it happens, and there's no undo. I know what computers can do, and it's not fun to think about what happens when yours is commandeered. Especially if you look at the situation antagonistically and as a programmer. I think of old applications, and old computers, the way I think of generic pills: you know what you're getting, the luster is gone from the competitor that once made it look like shit based on vaporware promises, you can trust it no problem, and it's super cheap. And you're used to it, you know the rules, you know how it works. New hardware is expensive, but new software is worse: you pay either in loss of data, highly-targeted advertising, price discrimination when you finally buy something, irresponsibility with data, worrying about getting hacked, getting hacked, countermeasures, getting spammed, or in a mundane but expensive way as with the $5 a month that Danish guy said every app should charge. But most apps just can't man up and charge you a fee, or tell you to go screw, instead, they play it sleazy, they want to traffic a tiny part of you.
raverbashing 11y ago
I believe you only use VSS because you never knew anything better (AND you work alone), because that's like cutting a steak with a butter knife
- my5thaccount 11y ago
  Wow, the vitriol is thick tonight. I also work in teams and like I said in the other comment, I use different flavors of version control on those projects.
  - raverbashing 11y ago
    Ah now I saw your other comment Well, to each their own I suppose
TwoBit 11y ago
I'm amazed that you find VSS reliable. Everybody I've known who used it back in the 90s (including my team) had to dump it because it so easily got corrupted. Aside from git and mercurial, you can use Perforce personal for free.
matwood 11y ago
> I still use Visual Source Safe for my personal projects. It's never failed me in 20 years. Right click, check out, right click checkin. Perfect every time. Wait! What?! Make sure you do not run out of disk space or do any of the other things that instantly corrupt your VSS repo. Hopefully you were being sarcastic.

username223 11y ago

> I almost totally agree. If it wasn't for security fixes, there would be no value in updating almost any software. Software developers know this, which is why they maximize the scariness of all security fixes, and minimize your ability to separate security fixes from all other software changes. How much churn did you have to swallow to fix "algorithmic complexity attacks" you never saw, which would at worst result in a DoS? Did anyone actually attack your hash tables?

tasty_freeze 11y ago

"Now we're still updating drivers. Weren't the problems supposed to have been fixed many years ago?" Your statement makes sense if you believe that graphics card manufacturers were still working on drivers for 15 year old cards and 15 year old APIs. Manufacturers are always putting out new cards, and there are new APIs to support. Writing drives for dozens of chips spanning multiple generations of graphics architectures to work on multiple OSs and supporting multiple APIs is incredibly challenging. Even if there was just one chip and one OS and one API to support, getting maximum performance across multiple applications is non-trivial. Drivers have a lot of heuristics to try to maximize performance, and manufacturers invest heavily in tuning those heuristics even to specific games to get the best results. If you aren't a gamer, then, yeah, you can run three year old drivers and it won't affect the speed of scrolling the text in your browsers or whatever.

JBiserkov 11y ago
Also, most games have unbelievable bugs that currently get caught and mitigated by drivers. So whenever a new game is released (or updated) a new driver has to be released.