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The Threat of Discontinued Software (2021)
- Dwedit 3y agoYou can always detour the API calls, or even ASM-patch the code.
- Laforet 3y agoI am not too worried about anything pre-2000 as emulation has got really good over the last few years, just in time as the surviving legacy hardware became prohibitively expensive to acquire. The internet archive has also made it easier than ever to access old software. What concerns me are early 2000s stuff with DRM and server-side content to make preservation difficult if not impossible.
- throwaway48476 3y agoCloud anything is also a huge red flag for preservation. On the other hand there is a game I played on PowerPC macs but the developer released it on github and now it's been updated and compiled for ARM and x86. As long as source is available it's usually not very hard to port to a different architecture.
- nextos 3y agoThis post ignores the Lindy effect. Things that have been around for pretty long are likely to stick around for much longer. For example, Unix, Emacs, or Firefox (Netscape) are likely to be quite popular 10 or 20 years down the line. The OS or the editor du jour is not. This is a good rule of thumb for choosing what to invest your time in.
- eviks 3y agoEmacs and Firefox are not popular right now, and the author mentioned using even more niche apps with long history, and a lot of his challenges are with things that have been around breaking other things that have been around, so how does he ignore the effect?
- anonzzzies 3y ago> Emacs and Firefox are not popular right now They are a lot smaller % than vs code or chrome, but compared to most other software they have a huge user base. They are popular software.
- lodovic 3y agoDefinition nitpicking: They are only popular among a specific crowd. When less than 5% of all users use the software, I wouldn't call it popular globally.
- anonzzzies 3y agoFF was at 6% in 2021 apparently. And emacs, because it is not spyware, unlike most competitors of it, has an unknown user base. The definition (from the Oxford dictionary) is sufficiently vague though; you put a % on it, they don’t.
- eviks 3y agoSpying isn't the only method of gaining knowledge, polls exist And if the definition is vague enough to include both, you can't use it as an argument to exclude one
- anonzzzies 3y ago> polls exist Yes, and they are also notoriously unreliable. With KYCd users (which won’t be the case in voting ‘best coding editor’) it is even unreliable, let alone things like reddit polls.
- eviks 3y agoThey aren't as unreliable as to miss an elephant in the room of eternal ignorance, and you don't need to shift to "the best", a basic "have you even heard of this" is sufficient
- MilStdJunkie 3y agoHoly smokes! There's a formal name for it!! I always privately called it a "Legacy Tail". It was a factor in the selection of a lightweight markup language to support old-fashioned industry (aerospace), but I think it should be a factor in any software selection, to be honest. Thanks for teaching me a thing!
- gofreddygo 3y agoI came across that term from Nassim Taleb's books and talks. Fascinating.
- p_l 3y agoCan you say something more about the markup language case?
- MilStdJunkie 3y agoShort version? With a pile of XML docs, Asciidoc's DocBook XML backend represented the "Legacy Tail" or Lenny Effect (Lenny Tail?) that gave us some insurance we'd have a stable format. We didn't see that in the Markdown ecosystem - we would have had to pick and choose Markdown variants and extensions, anyway - and the ReStructuredText ecosystem had no such tail and too many Python/Sphinx dependencies (corporate infosec had a real chip on its shoulder about Python). There was a lot of nights and weekends spent prototyping and wrestling with various old aero/milspec formats, but at the end of the day we came out with a publications format that could do more than the original could, on common tooling, where everyone who wanted to could contribute. I put it in the "win" column.
- steve1977 3y agoYes and no. Windows and macOS are still around. But not really in the form I'd like them to be (and they once were).
- arsome 3y agoStop using a Mac. I still run Windows 95 apps on Windows 11 without issue.
- userbinator 3y agoTruth. The only other Big Tech company better at consistent breakage is Google. MS is known for its legendary backwards-compatibility, although sadly is also going in the same direction as the others.
- worthless-trash 3y agoWhat direction is its backwards compatability going ?
- tastyfreeze 3y agoWorse. Windows 10 dropped 16-bit application support.
- userbinator 3y agoYou mean Windows 11, since it has no 32-bit version - Windows 10 32-bit still supports 16-bit apps: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/compatibility/ntvdm-and-16-bit-app-support https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/compatibility/ntvd...
- bugbuddy 3y agoMy first thought was “what’s a 16-bit app?” That tells you my age range.
- creshal 3y agoGood(?) news: Even ten years from now, you'll find machine tools and other industrial applications running 16 bit software in prod.
- 3y ago
- anonzzzies 3y agoStop using closed software. Anything open will be around forever and can be compiled using old or new compilers. Mostly natively but if not possible, inside emulators. Also; Visual Age for Java ; I thought I was the only person in the world who thought it was much better that Eclipse. Seems there is 1 other person.
- BoomerMoment 3y agoOpen software gets abandoned all the time, its not magically immune to this. Open and standardised file formats are the win.
- anonzzzies 3y agoIt gets abandoned but unlike closed software, if you depend on it enough, you can continue using it forever. For some reason if GitHub says ‘updated 6 years ago’ it is not viable for people, but for many things, especially desktop apps, this doesn’t matter at all; it works fine and if you need updates, you can do them. The point is you can, while with closed software, you maybe can and sometimes with a lot of trouble. If the source is open, the file format is also open.
- BoomerMoment 3y agoI agree, provided the software isn't network reliant / accessible. If the software were to explicitly depend on <vulnerable library> and moving to <patched library> broke it that would be the nail in the coffin for me / make me question whether I want to spend the effort maintaining the project.
- anonzzzies 3y agoYes, but for desktop software this is usually less of an issue. And at least you could fix it. When people are running ancient closed source software on Windows (Win 95 software apparently runs on Win 11), they don’t even think about the vulnerabilities and if they do, they cannot fix them. If you are so married to a software like the author seems to be, open is your best bet. And the OP is retired (well, at least 2021), so tinker time!
- BoomerMoment 3y agoThis genuinely just reads like a bucket list of Mac user problems. The author would genuinely benefit from redhats decade long support models provided his desired tooling works on Linux. The real concerns are in the SaaS / Remote Resource / Online Activation Space. eg software that won't wake up if it can't call home, software that has reduced or no functionality if it can't stream remote data, "apps" that are just webkits loading a pre-set url for a completely online service.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- chris_wot 3y agoThis seems a bit out of date: "Nisus Writer Pro is also fully OS X featured while LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org/Microsoft Word are not." Word and LibreOffice work fine on MacOS.
- anonzzzies 3y agoAs others mention; cloud is a big problem; anything you depend on in the cloud will probably not exist in 10 years in the way you are using it now. It will be switched off, changed (pivoted they call it) or out priced so you cannot use it anymore.
- jazzyjackson 3y agoI switched from Lightroom to ACDSee since they still sell a perpetual license + they do AI face and scene detection on-device.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoUnderscores the importance of archival science, repair and maintenance of old hardware, and faithful emulation.