waiting for resolution ED/RAZBAM Situation Info & Discussion

[MiG21bisFishbedL]

2 hours ago, Dragon1-1 said:

They were working on a P-40 at one point, though I didn't know they actually put up preorders for it (there definitely was a "box cover" for the store).

 

It always struck me as odd that they chose such a low-run variant of the P-40. Especially when other marks of P-40 were so prolific in European use.

19 minutes ago, bfr said:

No one said it did wear out. Maintaining backward compatibility can be a huge millstone though and its unfortunate that those modules are reaching a tipping point of not being able to be supported in their current state and can't be improved to a new standard either.

Very true, but, given that there exist modules older than even the Mirage 2000C, it's going to be stuck in a lot of craws. Magnitude 3, despite the bumpy road it took to get out the Corsair and its assets, remain clearly committed to supporting the Fishbed. I think the comparison to cars or any other piece of machinery is a bit flawed simply because scarcity impacts physical products much more acutely than digital ones.

[bfr]

1 minute ago, AndyJWest said:

My comment was directed at comments about 'decade old DLCs' in general, and the suggestion that somehow ED would be justified in no longer supporting them in 3.0. 

I would suggest its eventually inevitable. They've deprecated stuff before and taken it off sale to new users (albeit after offering upgrades to actively supported modules for a fairly nominal fee) and one day even just keeping the lights on for those deprecated legacy modules won't be worth it any longer to them either.

[bfr]

6 minutes ago, MiG21bisFishbedL said:

Very true, but, given that there exist modules older than even the Mirage 2000C, it's going to be stuck in a lot of craws. Magnitude 3, despite the bumpy road it took to get out the Corsair and its assets, remain clearly committed to supporting the Fishbed. I think the comparison to cars or any other piece of machinery is a bit flawed simply because scarcity impacts physical products much more acutely than digital ones.

Fortunately those modules are in the hands of active developers who have the means and motivation to address whatever breaking change is going to come up. The Razbam ones are not.

[Tank50us]

17 minutes ago, MiG21bisFishbedL said:

It always struck me as odd that they chose such a low-run variant of the P-40. Especially when other marks of P-40 were so prolific in European use.

it could just be that THAT was the version they had easy access to. It'd be like wanting to do an early P-47 (with the Razerback cockpit), but you could only find the D versions. Sure, if you looked around enough you could find the version you want to do... but at some point... money becomes an issue.

[Horns]

2 hours ago, Lucidus said:

Can you have two installed versions with same license in the one computer? That could be a solution. 2.9 for razbam and newest for others.

I remember that I did a long time ago, I think you could have two versions if they were on different hard drives back then, but maybe that was when OpenBeta and Release were separate streams

[Aapje]

1 hour ago, Nightdare said:

Software doesn't have a shelf life

It does not wear out like a real life product

Not true, in software development there are a whole lot of reasons for software to have a shelf life, including:

• The environment changing and code needing to be adapted or rewritten to just remain working in the new environment. For example, to keep working on a new version of Windows.
• Increasing or changing expectations. For example, visual quality that was acceptable in 2000 often isn't considered acceptable anymore. But also things like FFB becoming popular again and players expecting support. Or things like DLSS and related technologies.
• The software being built on obsolete libraries or with obsolete technology. Then it may become impossible to find developers who can work on the code and you will import the software rot of these libraries.
• People leaving who understand the code, and people making increasingly uninformed changes to the code (putting hacks on hacks), due to a lack of understanding, until the code becomes a bowl of spaghetti.
• Decisions having been made in the past that no longer fit the new requirements/environment/etc, but so much having become dependent on these changes, that attempts to change it are like pulling bricks from a Jenga-tower. With every additional change, the tower becomes less stable. And the cost of making changes can become enormous, for example, when you would have to alter every mission already made, to accommodate a change you want to make to the code.
• Vestigial code that just gets in the way and can cause bugs.

These things often intermingle and compound on each other.

One of the main parts of the job of software developers is to try to minimize these issues, but also making the hard choice between continuing on an ever more difficult struggle with ever more deteriorating code, versus making a partial or full clean start.

Edited 13 hours ago by Aapje

[freehand]

I think you will find if the remaining RB modules do not work in the future the **** will hit the fan big time.

[Raven (Elysian Angel)]

4 hours ago, spacefox said:

I mean is anyone using Windows XP these days

You'd be surprised... Home users probably moved on but I suggest you step into your local government building and look over the shoulder of the people working at their work PCs.
Many companies also still use Windows XP even to this day.

[Shibbyland]

Just now, Raven (Elysian Angel) said:

You'd be surprised... Home users probably moved on but I suggest you step into your local government building and look over the shoulder of the people working at their work PCs.
Many companies also still use Windows XP even to this day.

Off topic but I operated an air transport aircraft not that long ago that used an EFB with Windows XP.

[Nightdare]

9 minutes ago, Aapje said:

Not true, in software development there are a whole lot of reasons for software to have a shelf life, including:

• The environment changing and code needing to be adapted or rewritten to just remain working in the new environment. For example, to keep working on a new version of Windows.
• Increasing or changing expectations. For example, visual quality that was acceptable in 2000 often isn't considered acceptable anymore. But also things like FFB becoming popular again and players expecting support. Or things like DLSS and related technologies.
• The software being built on obsolete libraries or with obsolete technology. Then it may become impossible to find developers who can work on the code and you will import the software rot of these libraries.
• People leaving who understand the code, and people making increasingly uninformed changes to the code (putting hacks on hacks), due to a lack of understanding, until the code becomes a bowl of spaghetti.
• Decisions having been made in the past that no longer fit the new requirements/environment/etc, but so much having become dependent on these changes, that attempts to change it are like pulling bricks from a Jenga-tower. With every additional change, the tower becomes less stable. And the cost of making changes can become enormous, for example, when you would have to alter every mission already made, to accommodate a change you want to make to the code.
• Vestigial code that just gets in the way and can cause bugs.

These things often intermingle and compound on each other.

One of the main parts of the job of software developers is to try to minimize these issues, but also making the hard choice between continuing on an ever more difficult struggle with ever more deteriorating code, versus making a partial or full clean start.

 

When we have century+ old locomotives on the tracks, I fail to see the merit of your defense for the software industry

If anything, it shows how little initiative there is to upkeep the most sustainable industry humanity ever came up with

[bfr]

3 minutes ago, Nightdare said:

 

When we have century+ old locomotives on the tracks, I fail to see the merit of your defense for the software industry

If anything, it shows how little initiative there is to upkeep the most sustainable industry humanity ever came up with

Century old locomotives that are basically a labour of love and rely on armies of volunteers and donations to be kept running for the most part.  There is very good reason that those locomotives are now all on heritage railways or running the occasional enthusiast mainline day trip and not in day to day use.

What Aapje describes is pretty much spot on. Software often can and does eventually become uneconomic to maintain and/or unsupportable through a multitude of reasons.  Sometimes sustainability is throwing something in the bin after you've come with a more efficient replacement.

[bfr]

19 minutes ago, Raven (Elysian Angel) said:

You'd be surprised... Home users probably moved on but I suggest you step into your local government building and look over the shoulder of the people working at their work PCs.
Many companies also still use Windows XP even to this day.

And quite a few got royally bitten on the backside for continuing to use it. The UK NHS for example (who were also paying a substantial sum for some level of continuing support after it was originally retired by Microsoft).

[Dragon1-1]

1 hour ago, bfr said:

The line between 'new title' and 'new version' can be pretty blurred. 

It's pretty simple, really. If it's being sold as a new product, it's justified. DLCs are not separate from the base, and as long as it works, so should they. They also shouldn't interfere with one another.

I do mind when things go in the other direction, that is, a largely incremental new version being peddled as a fresh product. MS, incidentally, is very guilty of that. Flight sims aside, look at Windows Vista and 7, and at 8, 10 and 11. In fact, going by the internal version numbers, we're still on a really souped-up Vista.

[Dragon1-1]

36 minutes ago, bfr said:

What Aapje describes is pretty much spot on. Software often can and does eventually become uneconomic to maintain and/or unsupportable through a multitude of reasons.  Sometimes sustainability is throwing something in the bin after you've come with a more efficient replacement.

Tell that to fintech, their AS/400 mainframes and the associated software. Well-written software shouldn't have a shelf life, if it does its job adequately, replacing it just because a new thing exists is stupid. Updates should have a clear purpose, if the new version doesn't offer any actual improvements (be it for security, functionality or scalability), there's no need to spend thousands of dollars on the new shiny thing. 

1 hour ago, Aapje said:

One of the main parts of the job of software developers is to try to minimize these issues, but also making the hard choice between continuing on an ever more difficult struggle with ever more deteriorating code, versus making a partial or full clean start.

In enterprise software, when talking software that costs $100k apiece, "full clean start" is often simply not on the cards, and even if you do, good luck convincing the customers to spend that much for "works the same as before, but we made the source prettier". Also, when you're doing office work in a word processor, fancy new graphics tech is useless, and in fact MS Office had been steadily getting worse since the 2003 version or so. The only compelling reason to update is if you need to connect a given PC to the internet, and even that is mostly the result of both TCP-IP and Unix being used as if they were serious designs and not hacked together experiments. It's actually possible (if slow and expensive) to write a computer system that can be mathematically proven to be unhackable. Such systems are rare, but they do exist. Indeed, those hardware/software combinations tend to be in use for a very long time.

1 hour ago, Aapje said:

• Increasing or changing expectations. For example, visual quality that was acceptable in 2000 often isn't considered acceptable anymore. But also things like FFB becoming popular again and players expecting support. Or things like DLSS and related technologies.

Tell that to people who make 8-bit pixellated throwbacks. Flight sims need fancy visuals because they actually affect things like spotting, and because they aim for realism by definition. For other genres, it's a choice, and "as good as possible" is far from the only one. CMO, for instance, does perfectly well with entirely unimpressive graphics, they do exactly what they need and nothing more.

[freehand]

51 minutes ago, bfr said:

And quite a few got royally bitten on the backside for continuing to use it. The UK NHS for example (who were also paying a substantial sum for some level of continuing support after it was originally retired by Microsoft).

How many RB modules do you own ?

[bfr]

22 minutes ago, Dragon1-1 said:

It's pretty simple, really. If it's being sold as a new product, it's justified. DLCs are not separate from the base, and as long as it works, so should they. They also shouldn't interfere with one another.

Except for DCS then the base product is free. Nor is it likely the case that any/every other DLC will work with DCS 3.0 without any change. The problem is that the platform is moving on and the only DLC that absolutely can't move with it is the Razbam stuff because no one who can is currently willing to change it to keep up.

 

22 minutes ago, Dragon1-1 said:

I do mind when things go in the other direction, that is, a largely incremental new version being peddled as a fresh product. MS, incidentally, is very guilty of that. Flight sims aside, look at Windows Vista and 7, and at 8, 10 and 11. In fact, going by the internal version numbers, we're still on a really souped-up Vista.

I used to jokingly refer to Windows 7 as Vista Service Pack 2 (I didn't think Vista was actually as bad as the press it got once 3rd party driver support actually caught up with it).

[bfr]

6 minutes ago, Dragon1-1 said:

Tell that to fintech, their AS/400 mainframes and the associated software. Well-written software shouldn't have a shelf life, if it does its job adequately, replacing it just because a new thing exists is stupid. Updates should have a clear purpose, if the new version doesn't offer any actual improvements (be it for security, functionality or scalability), there's no need to spend thousands of dollars on the new shiny thing. 

Funnily enough you're talking to an ex-AS/400 dev and admin. Try getting devs for that platform if you've got a big project coming up. You'll find them surprisingly few in number and surprisingly expensive because its now incredibly niche.  I moved away to other stuff years ago because the market was only going one way.

 

6 minutes ago, Dragon1-1 said:

In enterprise software, when talking software that costs $100k apiece, "full clean start" is often simply not on the cards, and even if you do, good luck convincing the customers to spend that much for "works the same as before, but we made the source prettier". Also, when you're doing office work in a word processor, fancy new graphics tech is useless, and in fact MS Office had been steadily getting worse since the 2003 version or so. The only compelling reason to update is if you need to connect a given PC to the internet, and even that is mostly the result of both TCP-IP and Unix being used as if they were serious designs and not hacked together experiments. It's actually possible (if slow and expensive) to write a computer system that can be mathematically proven to be unhackable. Such systems are rare, but they do exist. Indeed, those hardware/software combinations tend to be in use for a very long time.

Tell that to people who make 8-bit pixellated throwbacks. Flight sims need fancy visuals because they actually affect things like spotting, and because they aim for realism by definition. For other genres, it's a choice, and "as good as possible" is far from the only one. CMO, for instance, does perfectly well with entirely unimpressive graphics, they do exactly what they need and nothing more.

Now try getting support for that 30 year old ERP suite you're still running. Or getting parts for your long since out of production mainframe when something goes pop.  An example would be when I first started out in my IT career my then employer was still using the AS/400's predecessor (System/38). We got rid of that for an AS/400 because:

- The OS and ERP software had zero support and we had to do 100% of everything ourselves if it needed changing

- The operational cost savings alone covered a lot of the considerable bill. System/38 ran on 3 phase, required a fully air-conditioned space to operate in, had no feasible UPS capability and a simple power cut during business hours took roughly 12 hours to get 100% availability back from. And when things did break (and believe me, they did) then parts were increasingly scarce and expensive.

- It was literally impossible to get any disaster recovery as no one else used that crap anymore (and a disaster did occur a while after I left when someone literally burnt the offices down, yet having pivoted to current kit meant the business was going again within a day and is still going now 25 years later)

- It was quite hard to recruit staff as no one really fancied working on hardware/software that was almost as old as they were

And I could go on for hours about how much better it is to write software now versus on those kinds of platforms. An awful lot of things we just take for granted now (testing frameworks, source control etc) just weren't really a thing on that vintage of platform.  Things have moved forward with bloody good reason.

 

[Aapje]

2 hours ago, Nightdare said:

When we have century+ old locomotives on the tracks, I fail to see the merit of your defense for the software industry

Those locomotives are really no different to the ancient games and software that people keep running on either preserved hardware, or emulators that mimic that hardware, including its many flaws. That evades exactly one of the issues I named, a changing environment.

But no one balances their sheets on Excel 1.0 and most gamers are not into the old games.

Note that no one uses those century+ old locomotives for their historic purpose, but they are only used for tourism and museums. It's really no different with old software.

2 hours ago, Nightdare said:

If anything, it shows how little initiative there is to upkeep the most sustainable industry humanity ever came up with

This is just due to supply and demand. There are programmers who love to do the same kind of programming that John Carmack did early on, where games were written in assembly, which is very close to the raw hardware (or at least the abstraction layer over the hardware). But aside from some rare exceptions, no one is willing to have programmers spend a ton of effort on relatively little functionality, nor do people nowadays tend to accept the limitations of the software of yesterday.

So it's as useful to blame programmers for not sticking with that old software, as it is to blame railroad engineers for moving to electric trains, with wifi, charge ports, etc.

[hitman]

4 hours ago, Nightdare said:

Software doesn't have a shelf life

It does not wear out like a real life product

just because software can be updated doesnt make it financially viable. This isnt GTA5, it doesnt get the billions of shark card revenues like R* gets.

[Aapje]

1 hour ago, Dragon1-1 said:

Tell that to fintech, their AS/400 mainframes and the associated software. Well-written software shouldn't have a shelf life, if it does its job adequately, replacing it just because a new thing exists is stupid. Updates should have a clear purpose, if the new version doesn't offer any actual improvements (be it for security, functionality or scalability), there's no need to spend thousands of dollars on the new shiny thing.

The entire software & hardware industry has been making innovations along the way. @bfr named a few, but there are many more examples, like decoupling the soft- and hardware ever more. It used to be that you ran one program at a time on a computer, so if that program didn't need all the power of the computer, the rest of the capacity would be wasted, even if you had something useful for the PC to do. You couldn't run multiple things at once. Then they developed multi-tasking, which in turn opened the way to having different users share a computer. And nowadays we have the cloud where you simply request resources and you don't even know or care anymore which real hardware your code runs on.

Note that some of these innovations that were intended for servers, actually benefit consumers today, since DOS, Windows 3.1 and Windows 95/98 (and the old MacOS) were unstable messes that didn't properly prevent software from damaging the system or other software on the computer. In servers where people share the system, that is not just a crash or data corruption risk, but a security risk. Both MS and Apple abandoned their consumer OS in favor of a new OS designed for servers, and thanks to that we have way more stable systems.

Another example is that in the past, we would set up servers manually, so we would never know exactly what was done to a server over the years, or where the files are that we added. So if a rebuild or migration or upgrade of a server was needed, it was always a pain to know how to set the new server up or how to keep things working. Nowadays we package server-software with a layered system, so we can see exactly what layers we have and what is in each layer. For example, you may have a OS layer that is maintained by one group, and then another group adds a Java runtime layer on top of that, and then you add your own software on top of those layers. All of that is created based on a sort of recipe, similar to how you can bake a cake by following a recipe. That way you can fairly easily do an OS or Java Runtime upgrade, since you just change the layers in the recipe, and rebake that software cake.

This is much quicker, safer and easier than to have to manually upgrade things.

On Windows and in gaming that is not yet copied, although for regular software on Linux, a light version of that solution is often used.

Now, to you it might seem that people are just changing things up for no reason, but there is actually a lot of innovation going on.

1 hour ago, Dragon1-1 said:

In enterprise software, when talking software that costs $100k apiece, "full clean start" is often simply not on the cards, and even if you do, good luck convincing the customers to spend that much for "works the same as before, but we made the source prettier".

That's why nowadays we try to build software in more maintainable, smaller chunks, so we can replace chunks, rather than all of it.

And you don't actually get it. The choice that customers/bosses have is not to have the exact same software, but with prettier source code, but to either have a system where changes cost immense effort (and thus lots of money), and run a big risk of causing problems, that programmers cannot prevent. Or alternatively, to make an investment that will pay itself back since you can then add new features at much lower cost and with much less risk of incidents.

You're like the old guy who is telling the builder that he is just trying to scam him for unnecessary work, when the old guy is living in a house with a hole in the roof, a rotten foundation and a DIY electricity system that can short-circuit and burn down the house at any moment.

1 hour ago, Dragon1-1 said:

 It's actually possible (if slow and expensive) to write a computer system that can be mathematically proven to be unhackable. Such systems are rare, but they do exist. Indeed, those hardware/software combinations tend to be in use for a very long time.

Only at very high cost, and by limiting the functionality of the software. In most cases that is simply not worth the cost, especially since you are wrong, and at most you can prevent some forms of hacking. One of the most successful forms of hacking is social engineering, where they hack the human, not the software. So no software is truly unhackable unless there is no human involves, but then what is the use of the software?

1 hour ago, Dragon1-1 said:

Tell that to people who make 8-bit pixellated throwbacks.

Yet those games are not actually build with old technology. They are just made to look retro. They also support high resolution displays.

And typically they also use modern gaming innovations that you don't tend to notice until you go back to the old games. I remember going back to Dune II, and my great memories were dashed a bit by how clunky the interface is, compared to newer RTS games. There is a reason why fans made an enhanced version (Dune Dynasty). So even that classic game suffers from software rot in the sense that people's expectations have moved on.