2 ms·
Bingo! It’s boil-the-ocean level crazy to attempt to recreate the environment for a particular file, when the sensible approach would be to just have the file f
by ssivark 6y ago
Bingo! It’s boil-the-ocean level crazy to attempt to recreate the environment for a particular file, when the sensible approach would be to just have the file format and it’s reader/viewer software be open so it can be recompiled or ported to any new platform. The blame/responsibility lies not with those innovating on hardware, but those who have created brittle software systems which have no ability to adapt to the changing environment.
Yet another example of how holding binary artifacts is not functional equivalent to “owning” software.
- rubyfan 6y agoagree, the authors mention of hacking around activation servers on legacy products is as much the problem as anything. it’s an odd sort of expectation that we’d have to be able to emulate 3+ generations of hardware on top of one another just to access an old file. Should we expect to be able to do this as hardware gets more sophisticated? I’m not convinced we should.
- naravara 6y agoThis is probably a path dependent outcome from the process that brought us the the "personal computing" era. It really kicked into gear and achieved ubiquity with Microsoft selling both the main operating system AND the "standard" productivity software suite that was the primary reason people owned computers. MS made their money back then selling upgrades to Microsoft Office that broke backwards compatibility. Part of the strategy was owning the environment so they could work in some amount of engineered obsolescence into the software lifecycle. Of course, because Microsoft was a multi-headed chimera, Windows itself bent over backwards to keep everything not Office chugging along forever.