The Threat of Discontinued Software (2021)
almy.us
almy.us
What concerns me are early 2000s stuff with DRM and server-side content to make preservation difficult if not impossible.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
And if the definition is vague enough to include both, you can't use it as an argument to exclude one
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.
And your last statement is true with just Chrome, so you can add any other browser there for the same effect
But broadly speaking you are right. I run software today on Windows 11 that I first acquired in the 90s. Some of it console based that run under the command prompt.
While Windows is justly famous for backward compatibility though, there are some exceptions.
Firstly 16 bit programs don't run on 64 bit Windows. (Well, unless I fire up a 32 bit Windows in a VM.) This is not a train smash for me, although I did have to replace some -really- old programs.
Secondly, games. MS removed a cdrom driver which a lot of my old games used for copy protection. I'll need to dual boot those into win 7 if I wanted to play them. But the urge to even bother only strikes about once a year.
Regarding word processors, I used Word Perfect in the DOS days and Word since then, and everything still opens fine.
Obviously everyone's path is different, and their experience is different, but if long-term commitment to running existing, and past, software matters to you the maybe select an OS that prioritizes that over one that very much does not.
And DOSBox iirc can run windows 3.x if necessary
winevdm: https://mendelson.org/otvdm.html
I guess that's the downside of vertical integration where the OS is basically just a means to sell hardware.
This is an architectural problem not an OS constraint.
And they're completely correct to abandon this software in my honest opinion as the developers already have.
If you need this run a 32bit VM under the 64bit OS so the virtualised CPUs can handle the 16bit application.
Where did you get that piece of misinformation from? 64-bit x86 can handle 64, 32, 16, and 8-bit data just fine, and its instructions are still byte-aligned.
Also, the decision to remove 16-bit support from 64-bit Windows was entirely political. NTVDMx64 adds it back.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/compatibility/ntvd...
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.
Word and LibreOffice work fine on MacOS.
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.
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.
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.