101–110 of 165 posts
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I have built applications that have been around for 10 to 15 years. The only thing that would have been good is to know in advance which ones will last that long - one was a temporary proof of concept!
The jerks always say that it will be 'temporary' and we can redo it later. HAH
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It is interesting that people don't think on these scales. What percentage of the HN crowd has developed something that has had (or will have) a 10, 20 or 40 year life span? Because I've seen a bit of that and it's what makes the world go round. There's certainly a lot of bad/crazy stuff out there but wonder if the ephemeral fashions of today will stand the tests of time.
Not a single comment in this comment section seems surprised by this - so probably a large percentage.
i'm surprised that people are surprised by this. i work for aerospace, and this is fairly typical -- albeit not floppy disk examples, but we keep a bunch of old laptops running win 7 and other examples around, hound around for them and spare parts. these machines are off the network, etc. these systems were developed 20+ years ago and per contract the a manufacture is obligated to maintain them for the service life,…
Google could never maintain an airplane.
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It is interesting that people don't think on these scales. What percentage of the HN crowd has developed something that has had (or will have) a 10, 20 or 40 year life span? Because I've seen a bit of that and it's what makes the world go round. There's certainly a lot of bad/crazy stuff out there but wonder if the ephemeral fashions of today will stand the tests of time.
The best-practices we teach our experimental physics students, whether they know it or not, are generally designed to yield experimental apparatus that can last a decade or more with minimal maintenance. After you've lived through it, a decade is a very short span of time. If you don't have to think about whether or not something is going to break, you have more free cycles to think about something else that needs do…
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Default state is never building it yourself. When you approach new problem, you don't go "ok, let's first start a fire, then melt some silicon to build me some transistors". You always start based on something. And as more stuff is moving to be cloud based services, you'll need to build more and more of that stuff yourself. Taking it to the extreme - will CPUs in 30 years be cloud connected and require my service pro…
Changing your assumption of "default state" doesn't change what I said. The point is that systems like this go through various analyses before being built. Reliance on outside services/components is one of those analyses. Let's say that a critical component is an online service. Someone will do the analysis of what happens when that service goes away. If the outcome is that you can expect to failover to something els…
And this isn't only talking about software you put on the devices. Developer environment is going to degrade even more and more. It's already bad experience to develop stuff for things that need long term support, and with cloud trends, it'll only get worse, as set of tools that you could possibly use will reduce.
Then, in 1995, Raytheon came out with Block III updates, which replaced the entire trunk filled with hardware (about as crowded as a standard engine bay of a modern car) with about 3 PC graphics cards-sized modules, each with an NSN price tag of $170,000 per (don’t worry, you’re paying for the IP, not the physical cards themselves, which iirc were MIL-spec versions of your standed PCI card from back then).
Made my job as a tech so easy, since the launchers never really broke down much after that, save for a hydraulic leak or two out in Dugway or White Sands during a shoot or Red Flag exercises at Nellis AFB. Didn’t see aliens out there but quite a lot of Soviet gear, which we acquired shortly after the USSR’s downfall. MiGs are really cool and reliable, though pilot/user comfort/convenience was not on their MVP list.
Not surprising at all, and not really a problem either provided it works. More modern aircraft use things like USB sticks but often with old file formats and they can’t use a stick bigger than 2GB (actually hard to find if you want to buy one). Aviation engineering vastly prefers “old but works” over “new and fancy” and this article is just one detailed example of that.
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I'm in my 30s, I've been a primarily web developer for 15 years, and I know there is software I wrote in 2008 that is still running today for processing the rent of 1000s of residents. It has been updated a few times, adding a console argument to automate the process more. It was originally a Bob-O-Matic process. At midnight on the first of the month, this old-timer Bob would launch the application, click one button…
Sounds like a nice, no-frills tool that does its job!
If I'm not mistaken, we even gave them our code back in 2009 or 2010.
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Sounds like a nice, no-frills tool that does its job!
It was meant to be a temporary solution until the online payments module was developed by the vendor. Yet, here we are in 2020 and that module still hasn't been delivered. And no one who worked there initially is even around any longer. If I'm not mistaken, we even gave them our code back in 2009 or 2010.
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Changing your assumption of "default state" doesn't change what I said. The point is that systems like this go through various analyses before being built. Reliance on outside services/components is one of those analyses. Let's say that a critical component is an online service. Someone will do the analysis of what happens when that service goes away. If the outcome is that you can expect to failover to something els…
You seem to forget about economy of scale. Sure, void will be filled, but you'll get worse, and more expensive solutions. Economy of scale is ruthless. And this isn't only talking about software you put on the devices. Developer environment is going to degrade even more and more. It's already bad experience to develop stuff for things that need long term support, and with cloud trends, it'll only get worse, as set of…