4 ms·

Actually no, you are completely wrong. It might be a popular opinion but it's wrong. Some facts: 1. Firstly, there are a couple of COM APIs that were broken w

Actually no, you are completely wrong. It might be a popular opinion but it's wrong. Some facts: 1. Firstly, there are a couple of COM APIs that were broken with IE8 which mean that some horrible "intranet applications" that use ActiveX won't work with IE8 properly. They worked fine with IE6 and IE7. These are now no longer supported by the vendors with no upgrade path so people are stuck with IE7 whilst applications are rewritten or disposed of. This can take years. In fact I know a company that has taken 4 years to rewrite an ERP system away from this model. The compatibility flag deals with some rendering issues but it doesn't change the script engine or the ActiveX hosting situation. 2. No they can't install another browser side by side and just keep that for legacy. Chrome has a poor privacy and configuration support. The GPO side of it really is crappy. Firefox ESR is impossible to configure using GPO. Not only that users don't want to browser-juggle. Most of them don't actually give a shit about any of this as long as it works. 3. Also, IE7 was released in 2006. I personally maintain software that was written in 1988. People are very quick to hang software, particularly the non-engineering background trendy startup pushing culture. IE7 isn't going away until April 11, 2017. To be fair, I'm recommending people away from the web and the cloud for business critical applications these days. The churn, culture and attitude (as your post outlines so readily) is very negative and a realistic 10 year cycle isn't possible any more. People need stuff to work undisturbed for years for their investment to be recouped.

Nilzor 13y ago
I can respect your advice in this context with regards to the cloud, but I'm not so sure about web technology in general, if by web you mean HTML5/JS/CSS3. If you download Firefox 26 today along with your favourite OS and store it on a USB stick, you can restore it in 10 years an run the exact same web applications. That's not really technologically different from storing .NET Framework 4.0 or Java8 on USB stick, to ensure that you can run your that-other-compiled-LOB-program in 10 years. You may need an isolated virtual machine running, but you may need that for the other software as well. Anyone tried running a 16-bit VB6 app lately?
- csmithuk 13y ago
  Yes by web I mean HTML5, JS and CSS3, REST and HTTP/SPDY. Yes I can snapshot everything if I want but the problem with the web is that it is a general purpose tool. It should be a single portal into everything both local and remote sites and applications. Unfortunately, the rate of change is incredibly large for Internet-facing applications. Intranet-facing applications are left behind. As browsers evolve, which they do rapidly, unpredictably and without compromise[1] a disparity grows until you need two browsers. This is not a situation an enterprise wants to or can afford to maintain, simply because it's below the watermark of concern for 99% of users. This is my point. The difference between the CLR/JVM and a web browser is that they have a predictable shelf-life and can be maintained separately as they are separate portals into each world. To be fair (I exclude the CLR from this as it's too integrated into the OS), I can ship a JVM with a Java app and it'll run quite happily for another 15-20 years. And yes I have tried running a 16-bit VB4 (!!) app lately - one of our clients uses one. On 32-bit Windows 8.1, it still works absolutely perfectly (Windows Vista 64-bit+ has no 16-bit subsystem). [1] Apart from IE.
  - TheZenPsycho 13y ago
    You've come to exactly the wrong conclusion. web sites from 1992 still work on browsers today. it's IE proprietary activex stuff that's broken and changing rapidly.
    - csmithuk 13y ago
      Actually no they don't unless they are a really small subset of HTML/CSS. The box model was broken for years, don't even get me started on tables, JavaScript is the most loosely defined language to have ever existed, there have been several different document parser models (HTML, XHTML, HTML5) it's unreal. At best, most browsers these days estimate what they are doing, diving into some wierd mode full of edge cases purely by accident if you step on the wrong stone. As for proprietary extensions, they are the most stable in IE. The IE8 change was the first since IE4 and it was primarily a security model change. Now we have NaCl on the horizon (ActiveX v2) and every vendor fighting their own extensions into the "standard" by buddying up for a new "standards" group. It's a minefield which throwing critical applications into is a bad move both from a logical and risk perspective. I'm not saying it lacks utility, but it's a risky proposition for a product that needs a defined lifecycle.
mjolk 13y ago
>These are now no longer supported by the vendors with no upgrade path so people are stuck with IE7 whilst applications are rewritten or disposed of...I know a company that has taken 4 years to rewrite an ERP system away from this model. The compatibility flag deals with some rendering issues but it doesn't change the script engine or the ActiveX hosting situation. The company should light a fire under the ass of their vendor or development department if they're being forced to live with some very serious security risks. >I personally maintain software that was written in 1988. Why are you supporting software that is a quarter of a century old? If it has undergone significant rewrites to work on those new-fangled color monitors, then you understand why things need to be upgraded. >People are very quick to hang software, particularly the non-engineering background trendy startup pushing culture. IE7 isn't going away until April 11, 2017. What is "non-engineering background trendy startup pushing culture" supposed to mean? While HN has a charlatan element, you can't legitimately think that the startup culture here isn't dominated by engineers. >I'm recommending people away from the web and the cloud for business critical applications these days. Do you also scream "la la la" while the tips of your fingers are lodged in your ears whenever in architecture meetings? A web browser is an ideal consumer (ubiquitous, cross-platform, cheap) of a large number of business applications and high availability demands writing software that's internet-aware (that feels so strange to even have to type). >The churn, culture and attitude (as your post outlines so readily) is very negative and a realistic 10 year cycle isn't possible any more. It sounds like your perception of the industry is antiquated. A 10 year cycle without maintenance to keep the codebase secure/running on modern hardware/platforms?
- csmithuk 13y ago
  In the spirit of maintaining my argument... The company should light a fire under the ass of their vendor or development department if they're being forced to live with some very serious security risks. The vendor doesn't exist any more. This is a realistic problem. They had source escrow which results in them hiring a development team to port it. This has taken 4 years, including retraining all 5000 users and porting data. This isn't some shitty TODO list app or an Intranet - it's a full ERP with over 2 million lines of code and 500Gb of raw non-binary data. And yes this is still cheaper to run than SAP/Oracle. Why are you supporting software that is a quarter of a century old? If it has undergone significant rewrites to work on those new-fangled color monitors, then you understand why things need to be upgraded. Because the 30 year paid for and guaranteed support lifecycle isn't over yet. Not only that, it's tied to the specific hardware platform which is an embedded 80286. It doesn't have a monitor attached - it has a 40x8 text LCD screen and an RS232 port. New requirements and bugs do appear. What is "non-engineering background trendy startup pushing culture" supposed to mean? While HN has a charlatan element, you can't legitimately think that the startup culture here isn't dominated by engineers. I use the phrase engineer loosely with respect to software as it has in the last decade or so come to mean a different thing. It's gone from individual who carefully plans and creates something with meticulous attention to detail and extensive knowledge of requirements to individual who makes something with little thought. Note: this isn't every case but it changes the meaning of the word, much as you can say "I love you" too much... Do you also scream "la la la" while the tips of your fingers are lodged in your ears whenever in architecture meetings? A web browser is an ideal consumer (ubiquitous, cross-platform, cheap) of a large number of business applications and high availability demands writing software that's internet-aware (that feels so strange to even have to type). Yes, it's actually my job to ensure that due diligence is done and put good engineering standards and technology in place. La la la doesn't cut it but I have to think ahead 20 years in some cases and make a call. If something doesn't make sense in that timescale, then it gets discarded. Your personal opinion isn't necessarily that of a risk assessment. It sounds like your perception of the industry is antiquated. A 10 year cycle without maintenance to keep the codebase secure/running on modern hardware/platforms? Industry? There are two industries at the moment. The one in the technology press and everywhere else. I firmly circulate in the latter. There is not a noisy presence but a large and realistic one that makes critical cogs turn behind the scenes. Whether or not this is "antiquated" or not is purely conjecture.
al2o3cr 13y ago
I fail to see how Microsoft's decision to not fix these proprietary APIs in future IE releases is somehow the fault of "the non-engineering background trendy startup pushing culture". Your company bought into a single-vendor solution that was then (as is TYPICAL of said vendor) dropped like a rock. Tough.
- csmithuk 13y ago
  The two points are separate. The former is a fact, the latter is a general attitude. Not our company fortunately, but I have stuff to integrate with their systems. They had supply and maintenance contracts and soure escrow. The supplier went under rather than dropped the product - this is not typical. The replacement is being built by ex-members of the supplier working for the company. They won in a bad market so it's hardly a "tough" situation.
PopsiclePete 13y ago
Your argument applies to anything that has been obsoleted. What about the poor bastards who can't afford a car and depend on a horse and buggy? The highways are too dangerous for them. What about those "long-term" planners who standardizes their IT infrastructure on Jazz drives? And the poor sods who think all new laptops are awful because of that one printer they bought in 1987 that needs a serial port? IE7 and COM are fucking ancient. And they're both shitty technologies. COM, especially, is a sad, disgusting 1990's remnant of "guru"-level C++ shit-baggery that is the only technology I'm aware of where the boiler-plate code is 2x to 3x more than the actual code. I'm glad those are put on the back-burner by MS. Unix is from 70's and it's fucking solid. You wrote C code in 1975, you could probably port it to Ubuntu Linux without too much effort. You "standardized" on "enterprise" (a hilarious word, btw) technologies like IE7 + ActiveX? You deserve all the pain that is being dished out to you. The crying and stomping of feet that happened at my company after IT deprecated WinXP + IE6 was music to my ears. The world doesn't need IE6. It doesn't need IE7. It doesn't need COM. What it needs is fewer "enterprise architect" types who read too much MSDN Magazine and develop brittle "solutions" based on ActiveX and sell them to unsuspecting victims.
- csmithuk 13y ago
  You obviously have no idea what COM is. Everything in windows is COM. It's not some one off enterprise thing that is obsolete.

Nilzor 13y ago

I can respect your advice in this context with regards to the cloud, but I'm not so sure about web technology in general, if by web you mean HTML5/JS/CSS3. If you download Firefox 26 today along with your favourite OS and store it on a USB stick, you can restore it in 10 years an run the exact same web applications. That's not really technologically different from storing .NET Framework 4.0 or Java8 on USB stick, to ensure that you can run your that-other-compiled-LOB-program in 10 years. You may need an isolated virtual machine running, but you may need that for the other software as well. Anyone tried running a 16-bit VB6 app lately?

csmithuk 13y ago
Yes by web I mean HTML5, JS and CSS3, REST and HTTP/SPDY. Yes I can snapshot everything if I want but the problem with the web is that it is a general purpose tool. It should be a single portal into everything both local and remote sites and applications. Unfortunately, the rate of change is incredibly large for Internet-facing applications. Intranet-facing applications are left behind. As browsers evolve, which they do rapidly, unpredictably and without compromise[1] a disparity grows until you need two browsers. This is not a situation an enterprise wants to or can afford to maintain, simply because it's below the watermark of concern for 99% of users. This is my point. The difference between the CLR/JVM and a web browser is that they have a predictable shelf-life and can be maintained separately as they are separate portals into each world. To be fair (I exclude the CLR from this as it's too integrated into the OS), I can ship a JVM with a Java app and it'll run quite happily for another 15-20 years. And yes I have tried running a 16-bit VB4 (!!) app lately - one of our clients uses one. On 32-bit Windows 8.1, it still works absolutely perfectly (Windows Vista 64-bit+ has no 16-bit subsystem). [1] Apart from IE.
- TheZenPsycho 13y ago
  You've come to exactly the wrong conclusion. web sites from 1992 still work on browsers today. it's IE proprietary activex stuff that's broken and changing rapidly.
  - csmithuk 13y ago
    Actually no they don't unless they are a really small subset of HTML/CSS. The box model was broken for years, don't even get me started on tables, JavaScript is the most loosely defined language to have ever existed, there have been several different document parser models (HTML, XHTML, HTML5) it's unreal. At best, most browsers these days estimate what they are doing, diving into some wierd mode full of edge cases purely by accident if you step on the wrong stone. As for proprietary extensions, they are the most stable in IE. The IE8 change was the first since IE4 and it was primarily a security model change. Now we have NaCl on the horizon (ActiveX v2) and every vendor fighting their own extensions into the "standard" by buddying up for a new "standards" group. It's a minefield which throwing critical applications into is a bad move both from a logical and risk perspective. I'm not saying it lacks utility, but it's a risky proposition for a product that needs a defined lifecycle.

mjolk 13y ago

>These are now no longer supported by the vendors with no upgrade path so people are stuck with IE7 whilst applications are rewritten or disposed of...I know a company that has taken 4 years to rewrite an ERP system away from this model. The compatibility flag deals with some rendering issues but it doesn't change the script engine or the ActiveX hosting situation. The company should light a fire under the ass of their vendor or development department if they're being forced to live with some very serious security risks. >I personally maintain software that was written in 1988. Why are you supporting software that is a quarter of a century old? If it has undergone significant rewrites to work on those new-fangled color monitors, then you understand why things need to be upgraded. >People are very quick to hang software, particularly the non-engineering background trendy startup pushing culture. IE7 isn't going away until April 11, 2017. What is "non-engineering background trendy startup pushing culture" supposed to mean? While HN has a charlatan element, you can't legitimately think that the startup culture here isn't dominated by engineers. >I'm recommending people away from the web and the cloud for business critical applications these days. Do you also scream "la la la" while the tips of your fingers are lodged in your ears whenever in architecture meetings? A web browser is an ideal consumer (ubiquitous, cross-platform, cheap) of a large number of business applications and high availability demands writing software that's internet-aware (that feels so strange to even have to type). >The churn, culture and attitude (as your post outlines so readily) is very negative and a realistic 10 year cycle isn't possible any more. It sounds like your perception of the industry is antiquated. A 10 year cycle without maintenance to keep the codebase secure/running on modern hardware/platforms?

csmithuk 13y ago
In the spirit of maintaining my argument... The company should light a fire under the ass of their vendor or development department if they're being forced to live with some very serious security risks. The vendor doesn't exist any more. This is a realistic problem. They had source escrow which results in them hiring a development team to port it. This has taken 4 years, including retraining all 5000 users and porting data. This isn't some shitty TODO list app or an Intranet - it's a full ERP with over 2 million lines of code and 500Gb of raw non-binary data. And yes this is still cheaper to run than SAP/Oracle. Why are you supporting software that is a quarter of a century old? If it has undergone significant rewrites to work on those new-fangled color monitors, then you understand why things need to be upgraded. Because the 30 year paid for and guaranteed support lifecycle isn't over yet. Not only that, it's tied to the specific hardware platform which is an embedded 80286. It doesn't have a monitor attached - it has a 40x8 text LCD screen and an RS232 port. New requirements and bugs do appear. What is "non-engineering background trendy startup pushing culture" supposed to mean? While HN has a charlatan element, you can't legitimately think that the startup culture here isn't dominated by engineers. I use the phrase engineer loosely with respect to software as it has in the last decade or so come to mean a different thing. It's gone from individual who carefully plans and creates something with meticulous attention to detail and extensive knowledge of requirements to individual who makes something with little thought. Note: this isn't every case but it changes the meaning of the word, much as you can say "I love you" too much... Do you also scream "la la la" while the tips of your fingers are lodged in your ears whenever in architecture meetings? A web browser is an ideal consumer (ubiquitous, cross-platform, cheap) of a large number of business applications and high availability demands writing software that's internet-aware (that feels so strange to even have to type). Yes, it's actually my job to ensure that due diligence is done and put good engineering standards and technology in place. La la la doesn't cut it but I have to think ahead 20 years in some cases and make a call. If something doesn't make sense in that timescale, then it gets discarded. Your personal opinion isn't necessarily that of a risk assessment. It sounds like your perception of the industry is antiquated. A 10 year cycle without maintenance to keep the codebase secure/running on modern hardware/platforms? Industry? There are two industries at the moment. The one in the technology press and everywhere else. I firmly circulate in the latter. There is not a noisy presence but a large and realistic one that makes critical cogs turn behind the scenes. Whether or not this is "antiquated" or not is purely conjecture.

al2o3cr 13y ago

I fail to see how Microsoft's decision to not fix these proprietary APIs in future IE releases is somehow the fault of "the non-engineering background trendy startup pushing culture". Your company bought into a single-vendor solution that was then (as is TYPICAL of said vendor) dropped like a rock. Tough.

csmithuk 13y ago
The two points are separate. The former is a fact, the latter is a general attitude. Not our company fortunately, but I have stuff to integrate with their systems. They had supply and maintenance contracts and soure escrow. The supplier went under rather than dropped the product - this is not typical. The replacement is being built by ex-members of the supplier working for the company. They won in a bad market so it's hardly a "tough" situation.

PopsiclePete 13y ago

Your argument applies to anything that has been obsoleted. What about the poor bastards who can't afford a car and depend on a horse and buggy? The highways are too dangerous for them. What about those "long-term" planners who standardizes their IT infrastructure on Jazz drives? And the poor sods who think all new laptops are awful because of that one printer they bought in 1987 that needs a serial port? IE7 and COM are fucking ancient. And they're both shitty technologies. COM, especially, is a sad, disgusting 1990's remnant of "guru"-level C++ shit-baggery that is the only technology I'm aware of where the boiler-plate code is 2x to 3x more than the actual code. I'm glad those are put on the back-burner by MS. Unix is from 70's and it's fucking solid. You wrote C code in 1975, you could probably port it to Ubuntu Linux without too much effort. You "standardized" on "enterprise" (a hilarious word, btw) technologies like IE7 + ActiveX? You deserve all the pain that is being dished out to you. The crying and stomping of feet that happened at my company after IT deprecated WinXP + IE6 was music to my ears. The world doesn't need IE6. It doesn't need IE7. It doesn't need COM. What it needs is fewer "enterprise architect" types who read too much MSDN Magazine and develop brittle "solutions" based on ActiveX and sell them to unsuspecting victims.

csmithuk 13y ago
You obviously have no idea what COM is. Everything in windows is COM. It's not some one off enterprise thing that is obsolete.