The Trouble With Software Upgrades

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "When software makers urge upgrades, it isn't always in users' best interest, the Wall Street Journal reports. Many upgrades bring advertising or other unwanted features; some iTunes users felt this way about a recent upgrade. But for many programs, downgrading can be a headache--Yahoo generally doesn't link to old versions of software, and Apple says iTunes can't be downgraded. Some websites can help with the problem. OldVersion.com, for instance, offers more than 600 versions of about 65 different programs. The site's 16-year-old administrator says, 'Companies make a lot of new versions. They're not always better for the consumer.'"

Comments

The problem with software companies

[dada21]

Here is a problem for most software companies, and one reason I would never invest in a publicly traded software company. It is also the prime reason that I sold off my portion of a private software company I had owned.

The problem? Obsolescence.

Software seems to be obsolete almost immediately after it is released. If a better product doesn't replace it, the product itself contains bugs that require a new release or at least a patch. The difficulty in pricing software is figuring out what percentage of the sale profit needs to be held back to cover long term support (updates and customer service).

One way developers are recouping the expense of upgrades is by offering yearly support subscriptions, but these are better suited for corporations who desire a fixed budget. For the home user, I'm betting most prefer to buy a program once and desire a lifetime of upgrades. Recently I complained (to myself) about needing to rebuy a program that had been updated -- until I realized I hadn't bought a version from the company for 4 years!

The end result is for the company to find others willing to pay for the upgrades. Users who desire something at a discount should be willing to at least admit that they're also part of the problem -- they tell the developers that they'll buy a product at a certain price, and they give the developers reason for finding ways to pay for that product in the long haul.

In all the software I use (a ton of it between my businesses, my home, my side projects, my church congregation tech junk, and my family needs), very rarely does an upgrade work against me. In fact, I'd say 95% of upgrades I've performed in the past 10 years made me more efficient, even if they incorporated certain things I didn't like.

If software wants to do something you don't want it to do, block it with your firewall. For me, that's the only necessary step.

The final part of the quote: "They're not always better for the consumer" needs to be looked at differently. Updates that allow the developer to continue updating and supporting the software ARE good for the consumer, just maybe not in the "now" but in the long run. The time preference of the developer might be different than the consumer, but they have to be similar or the developer won't last.

Re:The problem with software companies

[Lumpy]

I'm betting most prefer to buy a program once and desire a lifetime of upgrades.

no they prefre to see that program simply work for as long as they need it.

Problem is that most "upgrades" are not that but bug fixes the software company decided to charge for. windows 98 for example was a windows 95 bugfix.

Good software (Calendar creator for example) get a insane following behind it. Because it works and does not break at every turn and version 2.0 works just fine compared to version 5.8 so the customer is not interested in upgrading. Give th ecustomer a reason to upgrade and they typically do.

But consumers look at their software like their camera. if it still takes pictures, why do I need to buy a new one?

Re:The problem with software companies

[tepples]

If software wants to do something you don't want it to do, block it with your firewall.

What if the new version won't run until it phones home? Half-Life 2 retail anyone?

Re:The problem with software companies

[kfg]

The final part of the quote: "They're not always better for the consumer" needs to be looked at differently.

No, it doesn't. Thank you for getting out of the business.

KFG

Re:The problem with software companies

[Baseball_Fan]

The end result is for the company to find others willing to pay for the upgrades. Users who desire something at a discount should be willing to at least admit that they're also part of the problem -- they tell the developers that they'll buy a product at a certain price, and they give the developers reason for finding ways to pay for that product in the long haul.

I could not disagree more strongly.

What if the market place decided that cars will sell best at $10,000? But auto makers want to make $15,000. Would it be okay to make the car with a non-functioning radio, and then tell the consumers "We have an upgrade, it's better", but the new upgrade is a radio you can't turn off, filled with advertising. Or they tell you "we have an upgrade for your engine", but it is a GPS that collects data about where you go, so they can tell if you prefer Best Buy or Circuit City?

If I want to spend $50 for software, then either there is software I can buy, or there is not. It is deceptive to sell software for $50, then turn around and hide spyware in it, invade my privacy, or find some other way to milk me for more money. If there is a security patch, or performance patch which corrects a programming mistake, then let me download the patch without any unwanted code.

One other thing I hate is when there is an upgrade, and the end user can't stop it. For example, use AOL. It will download "upgrades" in the background. Even if you try and exit AOL, the upgrade will continue to download unless you unplug the phone line.

There should be truth in advertising. And don't tell me there is an urgent security bug fix, but force me to accept a new EULA or take on new software. Just sell the software so it works. Stop double dipping.

Re:The problem with software companies

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with most of your points but I would draw a distinction that often gets lost. I feel that if I buy a piece of software and it has bugs in it, it is not living up to the expectations and is the responsibility of the developer to fix them at their expense. If the developer puts a new feature in 2.0, then I should expect to pay to get that new feature when I upgrade from 1.1. The problem (and I don't know that I have a solution for it) is that usually bug fixes and features are released at the same time in the same release. So all the people complaining that 1.1 is broken scream twice as loud that they have to pay for 2.0 just to get the fixes. Meanwhile the developer says "I did all this work and added XYZ and you want it for free?" Both sides have a legitamite argument. Since EULA haven't really had their day in court and most of them say "AS IS", most consumers get screwed when they buy a piece of software full of defects. Imagine if you bought a 2002 car only to learn the gas gauge was designed wrong and you have to buy a 2003 to get the fix. You'd scream Lemon-Law and the dealer/manufacturer would have to eat the cost. We need similar protection for all purchased items, software included. Separate the bug fixes from the new features when you talk about "upgrading".
-Will

Re:The problem with software companies

[mellon]

It does cost money to fix bugs, you know. You can argue that they ought not to have released the software with bugs, but it's just part of the cost equation - do I release now, with potential bugs, or release later, with no bugs? Do you want the software now, or later, or maybe not at all, because my company folded due to no revenue? Okay, so now you have the software, and it turns out not to be perfect. Do you want my company to stay in business so I can fix your problems, or go under?

"Should" is a fairly useless word when it comes to commerce. "Works" is a better word.

Anyway, if you don't like the process of using commercial software, there's a cure - go open source. :')

Re:The problem with software companies

[Lumpy]

Anyway, if you don't like the process of using commercial software, there's a cure - go open source. :') and I do. but the typical consumer either does not know about the OSS offerings, is brainwashed into thinking that they have to buy something that is called "office" or "quicken" or more likely simply lack the brainpower it takes for computer use and therefore want it to not be a computer but an appliance that simply "works"

that is where that attitude comes from. it works why should I buy an upgrade? and that is the prevalent attitude in the american consumer. It's why the HD adoption is extremely low, why "new tech" takes forever to get adopted and in the mainstream.

Re:The problem with software companies

[hackstraw]

Problem is that most "upgrades" are not that but bug fixes the software company decided to charge for. windows 98 for example was a windows 95 bugfix.

I'm not even a Microsoft user or customer, and even I know that is not true. Win98 had real features beyond Win95. Win98 SE2 was a bugfix of previous Win98 releases. I don't know the details, but 98 over 95 added things like USB (although it never worked right) and CD burning and other new stuff that was not common in August of 1995 when Win95 was released.

Now, as a system administrator who admins systems for users all over the world, I never "upgrade" software until I am convinced that it is broken and that the "upgrade" will fix what is broken. I will selectively apply patches if there is a known issue or if newly installed software requires a certain patch to be applied, but I do not upgrade an operating system or core software until it does not function anymore with newer software or something drastic has to happen before I do something drastic like break all of my user's applications and services.

Again, as a computer professional and administrator, I always "upgrade" and play around on my personal machines and test boxes to see what is new and to learn from broken crap. I am not paid to break crap.

Probably the worst company in the software industry that chronically breaks crap is Microsoft. It takes months for admins to verify if a service pack is acceptable for their 3rd party software and if it works at all. Probably the worst was when they changed their document formats between every release, and what really sucked was when people got new computers that came with the current release of Office and they could not exchange documents with the people that had an older version. Personally, I don't know why they had a single customer after the Office 95 to 97 fiasco or others. I have yet to understand why people accept broken software and telephones. My guess is that people have been conditioned to understand that they are always broken and that the "upgrade" will eventually fix these things. Perception and reality do not agree in this case.

Re:The problem with software companies

[Politburo]

Stop using car analogies. Thanks.

Re:The problem with software companies

[srmalloy]

However, if you buy a program with the expectation, based on the advertising, box description, and manuals stating that the program will do [insert desired function here], and the program does the wrong thing when you use that function -- i.e., when you sum a column of numbers in a spreadsheet, the total is wrong, or the contents of a cut-and-paste change between cut and paste in a word-processing or graphics program -- then you should have a reasonable expectation that the software company is obligated to release a patch that fixes the problem, because the product that you have purchased is not the product that was described.

Re:The problem with software companies

[Zigg]

I didn't see anything inappropriate about his analogy use. It's not like he was invoking to the old Microsoft gasoline canard. Perhaps you'd like to clarify just what you found troublesome?

Re:The problem with software companies

[Politburo]

Well first off, analogies in general should be avoided, and maybe my post should have omitted the word 'car'. Analogies tend to steer the discussion towards how accurate the analogy is and not the real issue (how many threads have there been where it goes back-and-forth: "This is like if a car.." "No, it's really more like if a phone company.." "Well I think it is like a car, but slightly different..") Analogies are meant to make a situation more easily understood by someone who is unfamiliar with the subject matter.

Second, the analogy is stupid: "Would it be okay to make the car with a non-functioning radio..." If you had any lick of sense, you'd test drive the car and find out, oh shit! the radio doesn't work! I'm not going to buy this car!

Software bugs, and software in general, are unlike virtually all other product issues, which is why most analogies suck and have to be these convoluted situations that simply do not exist. Look at the full analogy again and tell me how that makes the issues any clearer to anyone:

What if the market place decided that cars will sell best at $10,000? But auto makers want to make $15,000. Would it be okay to make the car with a non-functioning radio, and then tell the consumers "We have an upgrade, it's better", but the new upgrade is a radio you can't turn off, filled with advertising. Or they tell you "we have an upgrade for your engine", but it is a GPS that collects data about where you go, so they can tell if you prefer Best Buy or Circuit City?

Huh?

Re:The problem with software companies

[Anonymous Coward]

stop being an egotistical pedantic fuck, thanks

Re:The problem with software companies

[Politburo]

I can buy pedantic.. but where do you get egotistical? Actually, I can't buy pedantic either. WTF are you talking about? Do you know what these words mean?

Re:The problem with software companies

[icydog]

windows 98 for example was a windows 95 bugfix.

Now I see why 98 SE was released. Windows 98 SE was a Windows ME bugfix!

Re:The problem with software companies

[Clinton]

Or Quicken 2006 Dlx. It won't do any updates (banking, stock quotes, etc.) until after you've registered the software.

And even then, the registration isn't intelligent. I had to re-enter all my personal information instead of just using my existing Intuit login ID. (personal annoyance)

Re:The problem with software companies

[justthinkit]

Problem is that most "upgrades" are not that but bug fixes the software company decided to charge for. windows 98 for example was a windows 95 bugfix.

I'm not even a Microsoft user or customer, and even I know that is not true. Win98 had real features beyond Win95. Ballmer himself stated that Win98 fixed 5,000 bugs in Win95.

Re:The problem with software companies

[Anonymous Coward]

This happened to me recently with the newest version of MATLAB (Service pack 1). I changed schools and had to get a new student version. There was an error in the programming which would not allow me to manipulate arrays once I got past a given size (~1000 cells). The KB stated that it was a known bug, that there was no workaround for my version, but the bug was fixed in the latest service pack (SP3). Problem was they would not let me download SP3 alone. Instead they made me pay $100 to get the latest version with SP3. I could not go back to the previous version because I was using it under the site license of my old university (for which I was no longer qualified). I spoke to someone at the help desk/sales department and got nowhere (if the disk is faulty due to a manufacturing defect send it back and we will replace it). Not like I had much of a choice, so I ponied up the money.

Re:The problem with software companies

[dorkygeek]

Well, then just leave these consumers alone. I mean, honestly, I use FL/OSS because it gives me want I want and need. But I simply do not care about people who don't. It is not my problem they are not using FL/OSS.

And it may be even better to keep the common consumer out of FL/OSS anyways, since I definitely do not want support requests on mailinglists from clueless Windows converts.

Sorry, sometimes I just have to rant.

Re:The problem with software companies

[SanityInAnarchy]

I have no problem with automatic updates, if they are done responsibly. For instance, Ubuntu's automatic updates. For that matter, almost never have I been burned by a kernel upgrade.

I would rather the software be properly tested before it's released. I'm as tired as everyone of the 20 meg service packs that we're forced to download only a few weeks after Windows had been "released". But I realize that there are going to be upgrades, and I'm going to accept them.

Forcing the user to agree to a new license, however -- that's a different matter.

I think it's time for someone to start a coalition for better and fewer licenses. I want licenses to be simple and readable, like the GPL, or better, like the UT2004 demo license. I want there to be only a few of them, like in open source, where it's generally GPL, BSD (or BSD-ish), LGPL, MIT... few enough that each is recognizable. I want them to be standard. And if they must be longer than one page, I want a Creative Commons style summary that accurately represents the legalese.

What would such a coalition do? Maybe refuse to use products which don't have such licenses. But at least be a standards group to certify the licenses, make a recognizable logo that companies could put on products which use compliant licenses.

Re:The problem with software companies

[mikeswi]

"What if the new version won't run until it phones home?"

That depends on how badly it irritates you.

Option A) If it's me...

1) Never EVER buy software from a retailer that won't let you return it for a refund or store credit. Amazon has a very liberal return policy on most things.
2) Uninstall it and return it as defective.
3) Go back and reread the product description, legal notices, system requirements, etc. If the fact that it won't work until it talks to an internet server is not disclosed, file a complaint with the FTC for unfair trade practices and false advertising.
4) Check my computer to make sure it didn't install DRM/rootkit/spyware/adware. If it did, add a computer trespass complaint to the FTC filing (or spyware violation, if an antispyware law ever passes).
5) Write to the company, read them the riot act, then explain how and why they just lost a sale and possibly a repeat customer.

But that's just me. Programs trying to connect to the internet without a good reason is a pet peeve of mine. When they do it without permission, it really pisses me off. When it won't work at all without making an unecessary connection, I label it as defective and remove it.

Option B) For everyone else...

1) Never EVER buy software from a retailer that won't let you return it for a refund or store credit. Amazon has a very liberal return policy on most things.
2) Decide whether you want the program more than you want control over your own property (the computer).
2a) If you can't do without the program, bend over and accept the fact that you just paid someone to violate your property rights.
2b) If you decide your property rights matter more, return the program as defective. The nasty letter and FTC complaint are optional.

Re:The problem with software companies

[1u3hr]

98 over 95 added things like USB (although it never worked right) and CD burning

Win98 certainly does not include CD burning (or support for anything except plain CDR or audio CDs). If you did have a burner, the drivers for that were bundled with it and will work just as well with Win95 (or even Win 3.1 in some cases). Win2k doesn't support CD burners out of the box either, not until XP I think.

I don't know why they had a single customer after the Office 95 to 97 fiasco

That's probably why since then the file format has remained compatible, Word 97 can open any later format, at least in my experience.

Re:The problem with software companies

[1u3hr]

Programs trying to connect to the internet without a good reason is a pet peeve of mine.

Even worse, programs that refuse to install unless you have IE installed -- several utilities, eg LitePC, allow you to uninstall, or not install, IE, but software often insists on having it, to for instance, render a splash page in HTML, and chokes if it can't find IE. Even though you may have another perfectly fine browser installed.

Re:The problem with software companies

[Anonymous Coward]

If you look on most boxes they now have that in the reqs, internet connection required. Makes me feel like an old crank that doesn't want to buy anything new lately.

Re:The problem with software companies

[Rhipf]

Second, the analogy is stupid: "Would it be okay to make the car with a non-functioning radio..." If you had any lick of sense, you'd test drive the car and find out, oh shit! the radio doesn't work! I'm not going to buy this car!

The analogy isn't the stupid part of the equation. The sad part is that you can take a car for a test drive to find out that the radio doesn't work but with software (for the most part) you are unable to take it for a test drive. Yes there are demos available for some programs but alot of these have limited feature sets so you can't be sure that there isn't a problem in the full retail package. It would be nice if it was possible to take the software for a "test drive" by purchasing the package and trying it out. Unfortunately, far too many stores won't accept the return of openned software packages.

Re:The problem with software companies

[Politburo]

Right. And look, you didn't need a convoluted analogy to get your point across!

What's Not To Like About Upgrades?

[ackthpt]

• Retraining
• Initial loss in productivity
• Data/Project Conversion
• New Bugs
• Cost (and Cost-to-Benefit of new features)
• Potential Hardware / OS upgrades necessary
• Bonus: The Murphy Factor - Is there something lurking in there which will make you very, very sorry at the worse possible time?

I seriously hate it when someone says, "Here's the new release, it's going in right away!" That's where the term "Bleeding Edge" comes in.

I typically upgrade when I feel I need to, i.e. there's some new feature which really is great or required for the work you do.

Lastly, this guy is 16? Props!

Re:What's Not To Like About Upgrades?

[just_another_sean]

I 100% agree. But yet recently I was forced to upgrade our accounting system through two versions in a weekend. Why? Well a new manager came along and said "We're using an unsupported version? We must upgrade now!".

We, like you, did not rush to upgrade because we didn't feel the need. Our users were happy and used to the system. We'd worked out some bugs over the years and everything was pretty stable, very routine. But our support contract (which we never used) stated that once a new version came out support for the old was very limited and eventually was per incedent, $mega/hour support only.

While I understand the nature of a support contract as insurance it is a bit frustrating that my company pays a huge annual amount for this, we hardly (actually never while I was here) use it and if we want to keep it we have to run our business on their schedule, not ours.

Re:What's Not To Like About Upgrades?

[HTL2001]

"Bonus: The Murphy Factor - Is there something lurking in there which will make you very, very sorry at the worse possible time?"

Don't forget to apply the Murphy factor to the actual upgrading and conversion...

Re:What's Not To Like About Upgrades?

[rizzo420]

Lastly, this guy is 16? Props!

i was shocked when i saw that. the site's been around for close to 2 years now. was he 14 when he started it?

it's a great site regardless...

Re:What's Not To Like About Upgrades?

[IEBEYEBALL]

Yep. oldversion.com rocks. I recently got Sygate Personal Firewall onto that website by working with the site owner. Sygate Personal Firewall is a really nice free personal firewall for Windows that Symantec pulled from the market when they scarfed up Sygate.

Re:What's Not To Like About Upgrades?

[ackthpt]

Don't forget to apply the Murphy factor to the actual upgrading and conversion...

Oh, that has happened.

One of the worst experiences I've ever been through was getting part of the way through an upgrade and realizing it wasn't going to work and having to go back to the prior version.

There are software vendors out that who Beta on their own users. I used to work in a shop that did US$1B payroll annually. The vendors, I kid you not, made a change to the code and installed it, just before a run. It broke. All manner of files, which WERE NOT BACKED UP because Data Entry for the run had finished AFTER LAST BACKUP and data was hosed.

Did we immediately terminate with these buffoons and sue for damages? No. We let them get away with it. The CIO who chose this company eventually would get a raise, retro in effect to the beginning of his hire. Dilbert stuff really happens.

We did find, at another place of employ, that an essential report was not there or a library it called wasn't there, right at the beginning of production. I called the vendor and asked what happened to this missing module and non-functional report. The apologised and said it would be fixed in the next point release, in about 4 months time. I went ballistic and my boss forbade me to talk to these people for a couple years. I ended up having to write the report as an overnighter. I didn't get any overtime or anything for it.

Re:What's Not To Like About Upgrades?

[Echnin]

16... I used that site years ago to download... what... I don't even remember what program. Stumbled over it a couple of times since that time too. Same guy running it then? In that case he was pretty young when he started it. Archive.org's oldest copy is from 2001. http://web.archive.org/web/20010709021341/http://w ww.oldversion.com/

Re:What's Not To Like About Upgrades?

[ackthpt]

While I understand the nature of a support contract as insurance it is a bit frustrating that my company pays a huge annual amount for this, we hardly (actually never while I was here) use it and if we want to keep it we have to run our business on their schedule, not ours.

It's like a security blanket, I expect. If your vendor has really bad software (not likely support is going to be any better, is it?) people far removed from the realities will feel some sense of comfort that it's there.

Re:What's Not To Like About Upgrades?

[hackstraw]

I 100% agree. But yet recently I was forced to upgrade our accounting system through two versions in a weekend. Why? Well a new manager came along and said "We're using an unsupported version? We must upgrade now!".

"Who is more foolish? The fool or the fool that follows him?"

-- Obi-Wan Kenobi

Why is it that these middle management fucks make half informed decisions and then the professionals that know better just go along and everybody, including the middle management fuck, suffers?

Re:What's Not To Like About Upgrades?

[SquadBoy]

Because most people, in particular techies, lack that self confindence and communication skills to argue the point.

The first time you tell a manager that he has left the path of wisdom is, to say the least, fucking scary. Asssuming that you are good at your job and can argue your point and have the sheer guts to stick to your guns it becomes easier and soon you get a rep as the guy who will tell it like it is. You don't win every battle but you do start to make a difference. But being human most folks will assume that they have no choice and go along.

I also *really* suggest that one picks their battles wisely. And it helps a lot if your manager knows that you are good at what you do and thus you can get that foot in the door.

Re:What's Not To Like About Upgrades?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Who is more foolish? The fool or the fool that follows him?"

-- Obi-Wan Kenobi

Why is it that these middle management fucks make half informed decisions and then the professionals that know better just go along and everybody, including the middle management fuck, suffers?

Why is it that Slashdot nimrods use Star Wars quotes to guide their "lives"?

Re:What's Not To Like About Upgrades?

[guitaristx]

Because the "professionals that know better" get fired for disagreeing.

Re:What's Not To Like About Upgrades?

[slackmaster2000]

Well, there are dangers in not keeping the software up to date, even if the software is working fine for you today. When you start getting two or more major versions behind, it becomes much trickier to upgrade the product. This is especially true of accounting systems, where major upgrades almost *always* seem to introduce data glitches that need to be hashed out. Doing this over time is easier than trying to do multiple upgrades all at once, and expecting the result to actually work.

Eventually, you *will* want to upgrade.

- A new featureset will be introduced that the company will want to implement.
- A bug will surface (probably in a less frequently used feature) and the vendor won't want to support you.
- Your hardware and operating system requirements will change and the software will not function on the new systems.
- The software will stop interoperating with some other software package that was upgraded for the reasons above, and so on.

The mentality of "it's fine just the way it is, this is all we need" would be great if that's the way the business world worked. Hell, sometimes it's tempting to just get out the paper and pencils and to hell with computers.

I do agree with most sentiments in this discussion though. Upgrades are a pain. Upgrades do often weaken the features that you liked so much about the software to start with. Etc.

The software package I hate the most when it comes to upgrades is a pretty minor piece of software: UPS Worldship. I swear they come out with a brand new major revision of this software twice a year, and it's always pretty close to being the exact same piece of software it's always been. So why upgrade? If you don't, UPS starts hawking at you to upgrade, and eventually the software just won't work. It seems to me that any service changes could be handled dynamically without having to actually *upgrade* the software itself. Anyhow, long story short, I let it go until it was three versions old and UPS forced me to upgrade, at which point it was extremely difficult to migrate the old data to the new system.

Re:What's Not To Like About Upgrades?

[Anonymous Coward]

Spoken like someone who's never had any kind of real job.

Re:What's Not To Like About Upgrades?

[joeljkp]

Yeah, he was. I remember I was thinking of doing the same thing until I noticed that oldversion.com just launched. I talked to the kid and tried to help out where I could, but he seemed to be able to handle it pretty well on his own.

Re:What's Not To Like About Upgrades?

[Anonymous Coward]

He started it when he was like 13. He really is just a dumb kid... you sound hear some of the phone message he's left me.

Re:What's Not To Like About Upgrades?

[complete loony]

From the other side, when a bug is found the requires a serious refactor are you going to develop a patch for all old versions of the software? I've been working on a large custom software system with about 15 clients. Yes an upgrade is messy, requires heaps of re-testing etc. But in the long run it makes everyones lives easier.

(Yes we should support a single stable release, but every client seems to feel that their missing feature is really a bug that we should fix ASAP, and they don't want to retest because some other client has an issue that doesn't effect them)

Re:What's Not To Like About Upgrades?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it that these middle management fucks make half informed decisions and then the professionals that know better just go along and everybody, including the middle management fuck, suffers?

From what I can tell, it is because these middle management types don't understand technology, but they do understand business. To them technology is risky and the great unknown. And as they cannot distinguish between good and bad technology, they have gotten burn in the past. But they do understand contracts and look at everything through that prism. It doesn't matter that it isn't the best solution technically, as long as they feel that they're still in control.

Re:What's Not To Like About Upgrades?

[Khelder]

* New Bugs

Don't forget the special bonus: you may know what some of the old bugs are, but you get to be surprised by these!

Re:What's Not To Like About Upgrades?

[iamacat]

Tell me again why should I waste my time and risk my job security or future bonus my alienating the PHB? The company pays me for the best use of my skills, therefore if I see something stupid I will send an e-mail to my manager, once. If he chooses to ignore it and the company (in the extreme case) goes under, I will feel as sorry about them as they would if my job is outsourced - NOT. Maybe some companies care about their employees or making high quality stuff, but I haven't worked for one yet.

Re:What's Not To Like About Upgrades?

[pthisis]

[quote]Because the "professionals that know better" get fired for disagreeing.[/quote]

That's odd, I've disagreed with everything from minor technical decisions to massive business plan purchasing ideas, and I've never been fired for it. If your management is so closed to ideas that they'd fire you for voicing a reasonable, informed opinion of what's better for the business, you probably ought to start job hunting on the sly.

Once you're saying "Yes, whatever you say" to things that you _know_ are terrible business decisions, it's time to move on.

I _suspect_ that most places will not, in fact, fire you for disagreeing. In my experience, if you can go make a solid business case then it's going to count as a point in your favor--even if they don't agree or act on it, showing some business saavy and taking an active interest in the company is hardly ever a bad thing.

Obviously if you phrase it as "no, that's stupid, you don't understand us techies, I HAVE PEOPLE SKILLS!" then it's not going to go over well. Make sure you know how you're going to approach the subject before you go to anyone to start talking about it.

Re:What's Not To Like About Upgrades?

[guitaristx]

This guy makes a good point. You apparently have a wonderful job. Not all of us are so fortunate. I'm certainly not a yes-man, but I don't work very hard at shooting down bad ideas unless they start venturing into the realm of the impossible. I've been bitten too many times by insecure managers who take it personally when I voice a concern.

Re:What's Not To Like About Upgrades?

[pthisis]

If you don't work to make the company better, you're contributing to when it fails and you _have_ to hunt for another job. You are _not_ doing the right thing to secure job security or a future bonus.

If you can't contribute because management is antagonistic, you're _not_ going to be getting meaningful promotions and it's very likely that your company is not healthy. In that case, sure, suck it up and do whatever they ask for--but have your resumes out there and move on quickly, because if you are interested in getting the "job security or future bonus" that guy mentioned, you're much better off at a place that manages its people well and doesn't make stupid business decisions.

I'm not saying to quibble with everything that's not, in your view, the absolute best way of doing things. But when you see something that is clearly bad, mention it and talk to people about solutions. Don't be antagonistic, and approach it with an open mind (maybe you're missing benefits to other areas of the company or something). But understanding your company's business strategy and plan, and being a contributor to achieving them (or altering them when they are clear losers), is one of the best ways to get real job security and bonuses.

I've been hired by a company (a large vendor who supplies mostly banks, the classic corporate bureaucracy) to go to a training course on a product line and then train their staff in its use and help them roll out a new offering. After the one-week course, I showed up and said "here's the product, here's how it works--but this other company has a competing product that is much cheaper, higher profit margin, lower cost of entry, and fits your customers needs better." They listened. I've worked at companies who had been Microsoft shops for years and shown them some cases where alternative platforms and tools could be major contributors to their productivity and tech management. I don't think I'm unusual or special.

Too many people say "well, I'm going to work in government, or for a huge faceless corporation, or at a startup that has a strong personality in charge--no hope of me influencing things".

In reality, that's almost never the case. Everything from business processes to purchasing strategies to technical decisions is malleable.

Hell, when you first show up for the job you can actually read the employment contract and suggest changes--even huge legal departments are open to that as long as you're reasonable about protecting the company's interests as well as your own.

Yes, there are some insane stupid red-tape companies out there. They suck (see my point about sending out resumes once more). But they're not nearly as prevalent as people seem to believe, as long as you have coherent reasons for making suggestions and proposing changes it's simply not that hard to get a lot more done than you would think if you just sit in your cubicle and implement orders without questioning them. And IMO you are far _more_ likely to get promotions, bonuses, and job security if you take initiative like that--companies do notice who is really helping their bottom line and work to reward them and keep them happy.

The Problem With Software Upgrades...

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with software upgrades is that an hour later you have to do it again. Not so much an upgrade, but more of a band-aid.

Pointless article, oldversion.com?

[Anonymous Coward]

First, the article is pointless. So yeah, so updates suck. Sometimes they remove features you liked/needed, sometimes the update is buggier than the older version. Welcome to computer software, this hasen't changed since the begining of time (relative to software that is). So what new insights did this have to offer, er, none.

Now, one to the more "interesting" aspect of this posting. I took a quick gander over at oldversion.com, I assume they have checked into the legality of carrying and distributing the commercial software that appears there?

Re:Pointless article, oldversion.com?

[RandoX]

According to the site, they only have Freeware and Shareware. Unless the software companies are using some weird definition of the two, he SHOULD be able to legally distribute. Can you retract a shareware license?

Re:Pointless article, oldversion.com?

[od05]

iTunes is now "unavailable" but the old versions are still on archive.org http://web.archive.org/web/20041012014729/http://w ww.oldversion.com/program.php?n=itunes

Re:Pointless article, oldversion.com?

[Rick.C]

I have noticed download license terms to the effect that "You are permitted to use this downloaded copy on only one PC. You are not permitted to redistribute it."

So, if I want to use one download for my five PCs, I can't. Nor can I give a copy (on CD-R) to a relative who has slow dial-up access.

It's stupid, IMHO, but if you click "I Accept" then you are supposed to honor your agreement.

Re:Pointless article, oldversion.com?

[Anonymous Coward]

I assume they have checked into the legality of carrying and distributing the commercial software that appears there?

Is that a question or a statement!

Re:Pointless article, oldversion.com?

[RandoX]

But they would have to prove that you downloaded it from them, and clicked "I agree" yourself, right? You aren't bound by another party's agreement if you downloaded it from a third party, who didn't offer the same download agreement.

Re:Pointless article, oldversion.com?

[Anonymous Coward]

if you click "I Accept" then you are supposed to honor your agreement

I would love for a court to test the legality of that kind of "agreement."

(By reading this post, you agree to send me $100...)

Re:Pointless article, oldversion.com?

[stupidfoo]

Wow. Apple's super lawyers at work.

Re:Pointless article, oldversion.com?

[FLEB]

Nope, you're bound by copyright law, which says that you still can't redistribute it.

Re:Pointless article, oldversion.com?

[theripper]

Sure thing, what's your address?

Re:Pointless article, oldversion.com?

[bostonrobot]

'According to the site' is the right way to start off that sentence. The site is wrong! Just as an example, the license for Adobe Acrobat Reader specifically prohibits distribution without written consent. The reasoning is simple: Adobe would prefer that you link to their site so your users get the latest version since the typical Joe WebAdmin doesn't update his site often. This of course defeats the purpose of oldversion.com, but that doesn't mean they can ignore the license agreement.

Re:Pointless article, oldversion.com?

[elrous0]

I assume they have checked into the legality of carrying and distributing the commercial software that appears there?

This kid is going to get shut down so fast he'll be lucky if we have time to even /. him.

-Eric

Re:Pointless article, oldversion.com?

[morcheeba]

Not exactly. Archive.org doesn't store large binary files. I found this out when downloading tools for an obscure processor - they had the smaller tools, but not the larger ones.

Try to download it from archive.org -- http://www.oldversion.com/downloadx/itunes41.exe"> http://web.archive.org/web/20060307125009/http://w ww.oldversion.com/downloadx/itunes41.exe -- it won't work. But, if you strip off the beginning of the URL, you can find out where oldversion.com used to store it -- in /dowloadx/itunes41.exe. It turns out oldversion.com still has it at this location and you can still download it from them.

Upgrade != Better

[ArcherB]

Upgragde does not mean better. WindowsME was supposed to be an upgrade to 98SE. Trust me, it wasn't.

The company I work for writes software. Trust me, I would not recommend anyone to buy the first release of any upgrade we offer. Wait until it gets about 30 or 40 builds and becomes stable.

I guess you could say that the reliability of software is like a wave: It goes up until a major release, then it drops down to the bottom and starts working it's way back up again. When the software becomes perfectly reliable and feature complete, it's time to release a new version, and down we go again.

Re:Upgrade != Better

[a_nonamiss]

30 or 40 builds, eh? What software company do you work for again? ;)

Re:Upgrade != Better

[ArcherB]

30 or 40 builds, eh? What software company do you work for again? ;)

Yeah, I'm gonna tell you that!
When I say builds, I don't necessarily mean releases. Our official 4.0 release was actually 4.0.1.10. We are currenlty on 4.0.3.45 and things are finally more or less stable. There are just some things that can not be tested in house and don't show up until they get beat on by a customer. As soon as we find what these bugs are, we fix them, but the same customer may find 3 or 4 different bugs over the course of a couple of months. Upgrading all their systems can be a pain for both them and us.

We'll release a build between every 1-4 days, so it's not a major thing. Every major bug fix warrants a different build (because someone needs it todayto fix their bug).

Re:Upgrade != Better

[John Whitley]

I guess you could say that the reliability of software is like a wave: It goes up until a major release, then it drops down to the bottom and starts working it's way back up again.

The software company *I* work for actually manages to release damn good software for every stable release, even in the presence of major feature additions or changes. We do patch releases, but very few and largely for minor issues. Nor do we have a very long development cycle time. That "wave", while present, is barely big enough to lap at your toes.

Perhaps it's time to take a long hard look at your software development process? Or look elsewhere for a smarter dev culture?

Re:Upgrade != Better

[Kevin DeGraaf]

CloneCD, perhaps?

Re:Upgrade != Better

[mikeswi]

"WindowsME was supposed to be an upgrade to 98SE. Trust me, it wasn't."

(Tin Hat Zone)
I believe WinME was a marketing tactic cooked up in Redmond to sell a future version of Windows (which turned out to be XP).

People (at the time) actually liked Win98SE. It worked well enough, despite the fact that it crashed often and needed to reboot every couple of days. MS probably predicted (accurately, most likely) that 98 worked so well that many PC owners would not upgrade beyond it. So someone decided to break 98.

They looked at what worked in 98, broke it, hid DOS-mode (the only thing I actually miss from 98), made it even buggier so that it - amazingly - crashed even more frequently, slapped a new name on it and got OEMs to bundle it.

Suddenly ME was everywhere, it sucked, people knew it sucked and they couldn't get away from it, because the OEMs weren't bundling 98 anymore. My first modern PC had ME and I HATED that thing. So when XP came out, marketed as being much more stable, people upgraded to it out of desperation.

It certainly worked in my case. An ME PC that had never stayed up longer than 3 days suddenly stayed on for weeks and months without a problem, after upgrading it to XP. It was the difference between a '77 Datsun and a modern stretch limo.
(/Tin Hat Zone)

Crazy theory, yes. But this IS Microsoft we're talking about.

Re:Upgrade != Better

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess you could say that the reliability of software is like a wave: It goes up until a major release, then it drops down to the bottom and starts working it's way back up again. When the software becomes perfectly reliable and feature complete, it's time to release a new version, and down we go again.

My impression is that this is rather common for product releases in many industries. Our company is constantly talking about how to manage new content to minimize an uptick in warranty after a new product release. This was a common problem even when there weren't electronics in the product.

They finally noticed?

[Black Parrot]

> When software makers urge upgrades, it isn't always in users' best interest, the Wall Street Journal reports.

They've got a bunch of geniuses over at the WSJ, haven't they.

Re:They finally noticed?

[PitaBred]

I think it's more that the people who read the WSJ quite possibly don't know this. My parents or my brother wouldn't. Most casual users wouldn't. Sometimes what's obvious to one person highly entrenched in a "culture" isn't at all obvious to someone outside of it.

Re:They finally noticed?

[DogDude]

They're a hell of a lot smarter than most Slashdotters. I got into a big flame-fest the other day when I said I was still using VB6 and will for the forseeable future because it works great for us. I got a ton of "BUT IT'S NOT SUPPORTED" responses, with no real explination.

Re:They finally noticed?

[jo42]

:%s/geniuses/geniasses/g

Re:They finally noticed?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

I got a ton of "BUT IT'S NOT SUPPORTED" responses, with no real explination.

That's kind of an explaination in itself.

Re:They finally noticed?

[DogDude]

NO IT ISN'T AAArgh! That's so damn frustrating. How does software not being supported SPECIFICALLY impact the use of it? You make it sound like somebody from Microsoft is going to drive to my office and rip the hard drive out. Software doesn't change on it's own. Theoretically, you can use the same piece of software forever. If it works, and the bugs are worked out, or you know how to work around them, why does it matter that it's "not supported"?

Re:They finally noticed?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

If it works, and the bugs are worked out, or you know how to work around them, why does it matter that it's "not supported"?

Because there is no guarantee it feature set, development tools or even compilers will be available on newer platforms. You code in VB in 2005, customer upgrades to Vista. You've got a problem. If the chipset is new as well, will you even be able to get a compiler for it? Will COM even work on Vista?

Realistically, is any of this going to be a problem in 2007/8? Probably not. Is it going to be a problem in 2015. You bet your ass!

Re:They finally noticed?

[DogDude]

OK, that makes sense. I was thinking of our own in-house apps. I guess that if you're writing for external customers, sure, that's a whole other ball of wax. I wasn't even thinking of that.

Re:They finally noticed?

[Arandir]

The grandparent will worry about that when the time comes. Duh!

If Vista won't allow VB6 programs to run, then at that time the grandparent poster can upgrade. Or switch to a different toolkit, language, platform, etc. Or throw up his hands in disgust and join a Mac commune. BUT UNTIL THEN, no one but socially repressed people like yourself will care.

Is it going to be a problem in 2015. You bet your ass!

OMG! That's only seven years away! Aaargh! You have to upgrade now to something that will be obsolete in eight years before it's too late! Think of the children! Aaargh!

Re:They finally noticed?

[abb3w]

They've got a bunch of geniuses over at the WSJ, haven't they.

Yep. They've realized their C-level audience doesn't understand this, and are enlightening them. This should make it easier for geeks to persuade the C-levels it's true, because they'll believe the WSJ.

CUSTOMER, not consumer

[Anonymous Coward]

n/t

New version with bigger, better ads!

[digitaldc]

Try the new version, its ads are bigger and the privacy intrusions are twice as invasive!

Just don't try to go retro, or we will disable your account and report you to the internet police.

(sarcasm off)

Re:New version with bigger, better ads!

[gEvil (beta)]

There are police on the internet?!? Oh shit!

Re:New version with bigger, better ads!

[digitaldc]

There are police on the internet?!? Oh sh...

Yes there are! You didn't know about Bill O'Lielly's secret police?

Re:New version with bigger, better ads!

[Mr Z]

Oh yeah!

Re:New version with bigger, better ads!

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget about the Google cache of pages.

I've found some nice things there after they were allegedly pulled.

Thanx Jon!!

Re:New version with bigger, better ads!

[operagost]

Ever hear of a 7-second delay? The guy was probably bleeped for saying something truly obscene after the Olbermann reference. In that case, you wouldn't hear what he was bleeped for in addition to the previous few seconds of audio. Why is it a guy actually involved in the media doesn't even realize this? Oh yeah, he do realizes it but thinks we're rubes; and we'll believe whatever idiocy these kind of guys spew out as long as it fulfills our own preconceived notions.

Sure it can!

[AKAImBatman]

Apple says iTunes can't be downgraded.

Yes it can! It's easy! Just move the new version to the trash, then put the old version in its place. Voila! You're now running an old version.

[...]

What's that? You say that they're talking about Windows? Pfff. Who uses Windows? I mean, do users have any clue how hard it is to uninstall... Oh.

(Yes, my tongue is again located in the cheek area.) :-P

Re:Sure it can!

[FyRE666]

What's that? You say that they're talking about Windows? Pfff. Who uses Windows? I mean, do users have any clue how hard it is to uninstall... Oh.

(Yes, my tongue is again located in the cheek area.) :-P

Yes, between Steve Jobs' cheeks it would seem...

Re:Sure it can!

[Anonymous Coward]

So where exactly do you find the old versions of itunes? I would like to go back at least 3 versions, as the recent ones have been unstable for me.

Re:Sure it can!

[spvo]

The issue isn't that it can't be uninstalled in windows. You can uninstall it fine, but apple does not distribute installers for old versions. This is the reason I stopped using itunes several years ago. I stupidly upgraded itunes only to find out the new version burned cds that were not compatible with my car mp3 player. And since Apple wouldn't distribute old versions of their software I had to start using a program.

Re:Sure it can!

[AKAImBatman]

Try here. The site has both Windows and OS X versions. Found with a quick google search.

Re:Sure it can!

[RandoX]

I don't use iTunes, but I had a problem with a new version of Nero doing the same. Try (if iTunes gives the chance) lowering the burn rate of the CDRW. If I burn at 8-12X it works when 16X+ doesn't (at least they don't in cars).

Re:Sure it can!

[vertinox]

Yes it can! It's easy! Just move the new version to the trash, then put the old version in its place. Voila! You're now running an old version.

Where does OS X keep the old version pray tell?

Or has it not been over writing my older version the entire time I've been going through upgrades.

Re:Sure it can!

[od05]

iTunes 4.2 for Windows

http://download.oldversion.com/itunes42.exe

and if that goes down

http://s65.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=3SD5GM2DZTLOU0G 897A0LFAY8X

Re:Sure it can!

[Firehed]

That's just messed up... an MP3 CD is an MP3 CD. I'd honestly blame the media, but you never know. I've had no problems burning either audio or MP3 CDs using iTunes.

While you *can* downgrade iTunes (provided you can find a copy, of course), you can't use the music store if you had made any purchases with the newer version. Once you've bought a song on iTMSv6, you can't use that same account on iTMSv5 (the fundamental issue of people with 5G iPods who want to use jHYMN, such as myself) Provided you can be bothered to keep two accounts, installations, computers, or whatever, you can download music off of the v5 account and jhymn-away the CRAP, then add that unprotected music into your v6 library which you use to sync with your 5G and/or purchase video content.

Re:Sure it can!

[AKAImBatman]

Where does OS X keep the old version pray tell?

1. Not my problem. TFA says that you can't downgrade iTunes. I'm (jokingly) pointing out that you can.

2. It's definitely not my problem that you are unable to look at the post above yours in this thread for a response that gives a location for older versions.

3. Even worse, it's not my problem that your humor sensor is busted. I might suggest getting that fixed.

Or has it not been over writing my older version the entire time I've been going through upgrades.

Oh, don't worry. You have been happily overwriting the iTunes versions. Next time, if it's important to you get a backup before you blow it away.

Have a nice day!

Re:Sure it can!

[mzwaterski]

Windows instructions: Select Add/Remove programs from the control panel. Select iTunes and click remove. Not exactly rocket science. But I know, windows sucks so it doesn't matter...

Re:Sure it can!

[Anonymous Coward]

The casual users this is targeted to know about doing backups? I mean, I keep the install files for most of the programs I download and install. Last check, this folder of mine is near 300MB. And I install pretty minimal stuff. Now, if I kept all the old versions for every one of those programs as I upgraded... that'd start getting near a gig. Whee!! No, my humor sensor isn't busted. But I don't think that you understand the depth of this proposal when it's applied to the casual user ;)

Re:Sure it can!

[AKAImBatman]

Windows instructions: Select Add/Remove programs from the control panel. Select iTunes and click remove.

Two reboots later, you HOPE that all the DLLs and Services that iTunes installed are gone. And don't forget to remove Quicktime. You might need the versions to match. Another two reboots later...

Re:Sure it can!

[spvo]

Actually it had to do with the way the mp3 files were burned to the cd. The older version burned every file into a single directory. After the upgrade Itunes put all the mp3's into a hierarchical folder structure. It stuck each mp3 into a folder with the artists name. There was no option to prevent it from doing it either, I even emailed apple support about it. And my car mp3 player would only read data cd's with up to like 64, or something like, that folders. Maybe that 'feature' was fixed in a later version, but I stopped using itunes completly after that.

Re:Sure it can!

[AKAImBatman]

But I don't think that you understand the depth of this proposal when it's applied to the casual user

I honestly don't expect the casual user to try this. I'm only responding to Mr. Killjoy up there who was whining that iTunes wasn't backed up when he explicitly overwrote it. I'm not sure what he expected to happen. :-)

For the rest of the world, I fully expect that if they realize they've made a mistake (and they consider it important enough to fix!), they'll harness the power of the Internet to find a site like, oh say, this one. (Hint: That's just about every version of iTunes you could possibly need.)

Re:Sure it can!

[Horatio_Hellpop]

Actually, since Apple likely created the uninstall app, it will probably remove everything, as it is supposed to.

In my experience, most "bad" uninstalls are due to crappy software development. Some remove all traces of an application, some do not. That can't be the fault of the OS.

Re:Sure it can!

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that a Mac mini in your pocket or are you just fantasizing about Steve Jobs again??

Re:Sure it can!

[arminw]

....Voila! You're now running an old version......

If you upgrade any of your computers to the latest version of iTunes, you have to upgrade the others also if you are using the music store. The first time after upgrading, when you connect to the ITMS, it makes a note in your account that you are using the newest version which has a different protocol that the previous versions. Then when you try to go back to using an older version you are told that all computers using that iTunes account must be upgraded. They are nice enough though to tell you this before you upgrade your older version, at least in OSX. I think the change has something to do with making the DRM harder to circumvent.

Re:Sure it can!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the media's fault. I had the same problem and found you can only use the (older) 650MB media disks, NOT the 700 or 800 MB CD-Rs. CD-RWs don't work either for some reason, only CD-Rs...

Since 650 MBs could be quite hard to find these days, might it be cheaper to replace your player in the long run?

2 Words: Windows Vista

[ToxikFetus]

'nuff said

oldversion.com Is A Great Resource for Pirates

[Cranky Weasel]

There. I said it.

As of one year ago, my system is composed entirely of purchased software. However I must admit that it took me 24 years to get there. I first pirated software for the Vic-20, and then the Commodore 64. I've been pirating ever since.

As the financial hole I dug for myself got deeper, the amount of software I pirated grew. Over the past three years, though, my income has been great. And over that time I slowly purchased many of the products I had illictly obtained, and deinstalled the ones I had installed but never used.

Oldversion.com was the place I went to in order to locate versions of software for which cracks were available. Often the latest version was all that could be downloaded from the official website, and the cracks were usually one or two versions behind.

Now at age 35 I'm done with pirated software. But I was a frequent visitor to oldversion.com.

Re:oldversion.com Is A Great Resource for Pirates

[Anonymous Coward]

And I'll say this:

Piracy is not always a bad thing. I used to pirate 3d software back in high school before I could afford it (or justify to my parents that I needed it) Now, some years later, I happily own Maya and Modo. If I had never pirated other 3d apps in the past, I probably never would have gotten into 3d and eventually shelled out the money to Alias and Luxology (and various book publishers, training DVD resources, texture collection CDs, etc) Does it make the fact that I originally did pirate software? No, but like I said, it worked out in the long run. (Keep in mind, this was before there were readily available personal learning editions, and when 3D was even more expensive than it is now)

Re:oldversion.com Is A Great Resource for Pirates

[Anonymous Coward]

oldversion.com only hosts shareware and freeware. Now, this may be technically illegal for some of those programs (depends on the license for the various programs, I guess), but it isn't "aiding piracy" from what I can tell... since all the programs listed there are either free or limited free-trials. Yes, you can download the program from oldversion.com and then go find a crack somewhere. But, then again, you could also download the program from the original site, and go find a crack somewhere.

oldversion.com has older versions, so yes this makes it easier to find a suitable crack. But again, most shareware allows redistribution (that's the point, right?). What oldversion.com is hosting is nothing more than outdated files that were publically available on the official sites in the past. I don't think this is a big deal.

People who seek out cracks for software are the ones "being unscrupulous" and/or violating the law. Not oldversions.com

Re:oldversion.com Is A Great Resource for Pirates

[freeweed]

I just switched to Linux. Not a single piece of pirated software on my systems anymore.

Similar effects can be obtained by strictly using freeware in the Windows world, although YMMV.

Re:oldversion.com Is A Great Resource for Pirates

[Peaker]

Are you saying software "piracy" is a bad thing?

Happily Running Photoshop 7

[Pope]

I'm happily running Photoshop 7 still, following my usual policy of ignoring even-numbered PS versions. Hell, there's nothing compelling me to get CS2, so I guess I'll run it until it stops working properly.

Adobe is the worst, though, since they CONSTANTLY change the goddamn key shortcuts to the tools. Gee, thanks, Adobe!

Re:Happily Running Photoshop 7

[jez9999]

Yeah? I'm still using Paint Shop Pro 6.00. :-) Does everything I need and is rock solid stable. But then I don't do complex graphics creation.

Re:Happily Running Photoshop 7

[shelterpaw]

I couldn't agree more about changing shortcuts or menu items. Every version of windows seems to move things around a bit. It's annoying. Photoshop changing around some of your tools is crazy. It took me forever to figure out where they put the damn air brush from 7 to CS 2.

However, one are I have consistently enjoyed updates or upgrades is in Music Software. Every time Ableton updates their software it gives me better performance and features. They also allow you to run your older version alongside the newer one. So you're nut screwed.

Re:Happily Running Photoshop 7

[Anonymous Coward]

6.0? Hell, I'm still running version 3.12

"You are on day 1497 of your 30 day trial period"

Re:Happily Running Photoshop 7

[Anonymous Coward]

Um... They are up to CS2 now. You're behind on your every-other plan.

Re:Happily Running Photoshop 7

[Reziac]

Bah, you early adopters, always volunteering to bleed for the rest of us... I'm still running Corel PhotoPaint v8.0, and loving every minute of it.

(I have v11.0 on another machine, but like the old one better.)

Double edged sword

[cpearson]

This problem is very much a double edged sword. As a developer, I want the users of my applications to have the newest features and latest bug fixes. It is also very helpful from a support (POV) to have every user on a current version. The dark side is frequent updates and a lack of previous versions can cause major headaches for the user.

map-based Montana

Upgradeitis

[ROOK*CA]

Unfortunately most non-technical users have "Upgradeitis", which means that all it takes to get them to upgrade a piece of software is to tell them in straight forward language "An upgrade to XYZ software is available" and make the upgrade process painless. The average user (in most cases I think) doesn't stop and ask themselves, do I really need this? Is the software I have now doing what I want it to do? What's in this upgrade that I really want/need? How will this upgrade affect my data and/or other applications?

Seems to me that they've become almost programmed to think of anything new as necessarily "better" and thus desirable without ever thinking of the old addage "If it ain't broke don't fix it", couple this with the propensity of many users to load up on drive by download software that they'll probably only ever use once and you end up with a pay per incident support providers wet dream.

Re:Upgradeitis

[Zerbs]

I think part of that comes from the constant news about how we need to update our software because of virus X or worm Y or some other vulnerability Z. People have been conditioned to believe for example that weekly updates to Microsoft Windows is a normal and good thing.
There are people who do fall too easily to the marketing hype of a "new and improved" version though. Part of the marketing strategy of using the year in the name of a product is to make it feel old to a user, even if it hasn't necessarily outlived its usefullness.

Re:Upgradeitis

[ROOK*CA]

I think part of that comes from the constant news about how we need to update our software because of virus X or worm Y or some other vulnerability Z. People have been conditioned to believe for example that weekly updates to Microsoft Windows is a normal and good thing.

I think you hit the nail right on the head here, Microsoft has do a great deal to condition the response from users. For any of us that provide informal "tech support" to our friends & family (or as a full time job) know that it can be somewhat of a difficult proposition to explain "Yeah you need to keep up to date with Microsoft updates, but as far as your applications, check with me before you upgrade any of them it'll save you some potential hassles", to which the standard reply generally goes something along the lines of "What do you mean by applications?". :)

Re:Upgradeitis

[tbo]

Seems to me that they've become almost programmed to think of anything new as necessarily "better" and thus desirable without ever thinking of the old addage "If it ain't broke don't fix it"

They are programmed to think that way because that's how we've programmed them. We (and I mean the collective slashdot "we", not the royal "we", or even necessarily you) are constantly lecturing users about installing all the latest security patches.

Do you really expect the average user to be able to distinguish a necessary security patch from an unnecessary minor functionality fix? Is there even a faint hope that they would be able to accurately assess the risks and benefits of a patch which combines security bug fixes with other changes (as so many patches do)?

Re:Upgradeitis

[juancnuno]

Who says it's just non-techies? My name is Juan Nuno. I am a technical user, and I suffer from Upgraditis.

I just switched over to Gentoo, just to try it out, because I was frustrated with the rate packages are backported to Ubuntu. (Yes, I know about Ubuntu Backports. I got the line in my sources.list.) I'm completely new at it, went ahead and applied the GCC 3.4.5 update, only to have my GNOME compile break.

And I ain't the only one. Steven Garrity has it too.

Can it be a deep-seated psychological need for what's new? Who knows? I guess the trick is to find the right balance. Don't blindly upgrade willy-nilly, do a bit of research. And at the same time if nobody upgraded their browsers, we'd still be using Netscape 4.

Re:Upgradeitis

[Ra Zen]

One major reason for upgradeitis is that many programs will flash "upgrade now" boxes so often that it interferes with program function and annoys the heck out of you. Sometimes you have to upgrade just to get the darn things to GO AWAY. Cases in point: Windows Media Player (newest version is the worst ever BTW) Adobe Acrobat

Re:Upgradeitis

[Koraq]

Unfortunately most technical users have "Upgradeitis" as well. OpenVMS is a good example of the Right Way(tm). When they ported it to Alpha from VAX they didn't recode all from scratch, but did a VAX simulator layer instead. Easier to verify that it was correct, and the code that had worked fine since 1977 could keep working fine. Apple and Microsoft et.c. are working very hard to eradicate lessons learnt long time ago in Computer Science and the practical field of computer hacking. I hate that.

Reminds me of Tomorrow Never Dies

[rehtonAesoohC]

There's a part of the movie when Elliot Carver is having a teleconference with his underlings, and one of the questions he asks is:

Elliot Carver: "How about our new software?"
Underling: "We are releasing on schedule. As requested, it is full of bugs, and users will be forced to keep upgrading for years."

I wonder how valid that statement actually is.

Re:Reminds me of Tomorrow Never Dies

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't Virtucon have the same policy?

Re:Reminds me of Tomorrow Never Dies

[Reziac]

It may not be so far off.

I know a guy who was part of the core devteam for MacOS7. He told me that they were actually FORBIDDEN to create a patch to fix a critical hardware bug, which rendered the system unusable for the very multimedia use for which it was being marketed. Why? Because the bug was fixed in the next incarnation of the hardware... and if you wanted your multimedia stuff to work, you had to upgrade the whole damn monkey!!

Re:Reminds me of Tomorrow Never Dies

[Quarters]

Your hyperbolic statement leaves a few unanswered questions:

* Would the patched code have worked on the new hardware?

* Was the "very multimedia use for which it was being marketed" item in OS7 considered to be supported on the older hardware?

Re:Reminds me of Tomorrow Never Dies

[Arandir]

I know a guy who knows a guy who says the guy you know is full of shit.

Re:Reminds me of Tomorrow Never Dies

[Reziac]

As to the next or previous generation of hardware, I don't know, but at the time both OS and hardware were very version-specific.

Long long time ago, and the details have largely fallen out of my head, but the point was... in response to the parent post, yes, programmers *have* been instructed NOT to fix bugs, solely to aid company profits.

Case in point:

[a_nonamiss]

Perfect case in point: I have a 4 year old laptop that I keep in my kitchen. It's running Windows XP (barely) but it's really low on memory. (192MB minus video memory) I like to listen to music on it, since it's in my kitchen and readily accessible. I recently installed the only downloadable version of WinAMP on it, and it uses almost 80-100MB of RAM while it's running. Now, when I used to run WinAMP on my old 233MHz Pentium with 32MB of memory, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't using 80MB of RAM while running. I don't need visual effects. I don't need an integrated web browser. I don't need a catalog of my 200GB music collection. I just want to listen to music... And it's not like iTunes or Windows Media Player are any better. They're hogs, too. I tried Foobar2000, but it hates my sound card and uses a lot of CPU. So I'm stuck. Whenever I start WinAMP, it takes 5 minutes to load, and when I quit, it takes 5 minutes to unload from memory.

I can't wait to get home and install WinAMP 2.0!

Re:Case in point:

[norkakn]

you could also try http://www.zinf.org/

Re:Case in point:

[a_nonamiss]

Oh, and side note, if you're from the RIAA, I meant 200MB music collection which I legally ripped from my CD collection.

Re:Case in point:

[Qapf]

Winamp 5 includes 2 modes, one for old computers with low ammounts of memory, and the other for people who want the nice stuff. During install choose the classic gui and it should be alot faster for you.

Re:Case in point:

[Anonymous Coward]

So download the non-enhanced version. Duh. It's available from the same site.

Re:Case in point:

[a_nonamiss]

Thanks! I was hoping for a couple suggestions. :)

Re:Case in point:

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, my mother-in-laws primary system sounds like your kitchen system. She's running just fine on Ubuntu. Though, she does have 256 MB of RAM. Of course she doesn't play a lot of music, there's only a 3 GB disk in her system.

But, even so, xmms is still using a whopping 35MB of RAM.

Re:Case in point:

[Anonymous Coward]

Use the classic skin if using Winamp 5. It is the new skinning engine that is the resource hog. When using the classic skin, I found Winamp 5 to be as lean as Winamp 2.

Re:Case in point:

[Apathetic1]

WinAmp 5 is just WinAmp 2 with a bunch of plugins and bugfixes.

Re:Case in point:

[Apathetic1]

WinAmp 5 is WinAmp 2 with bugfixes and additional plugins. It's the additional plugins that are giving you the trouble. The "Lite" version doesn't include most of the bloat, so WinAmp 5 should do everything you need it to do, especially on older hardware.

Re:Case in point:

[Wolvie MkM]

Using WinAmp Lite v5.11 w/Classic Skin. 25G music collection with a little over 4 200 songs. It took up 24 megs on my WinXP Pro box a few minutes ago, I minimized it to the taskbar and voi-la! 1.5 megs of ram. BUT the only catch is that when it swaps songs it jumps back up to 18 megs... Might be lazy coding, might just be by design (ie. Lazy Coding).

Try that, you'll find if you minimize a lot of your programs you'll save the GUI from wasting memory keeping it refreshed on your screen.

Cheers,

Re:Case in point:

[PitaBred]

If you don't need all that extra crap, turn it off. You can turn off the theme support in XP, as well as tons of other services you don't really need. I even do that on computers with "plenty" of RAM because I run a lot of programs at once, and it really helps the performance. Look here for some info on which ones are safe to turn off, depending on your setup.

Re:Case in point:

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out CoolPlayer. It's fast and very small. It doesn't have the functionality of WinAMP, but it plays all my MP3's and OGGs just fine. Get the CoolWAMP2 skin for it and you might even forget it's not WinAMP.

I'm running it now with 70 songs in my playlist, it' using 4 MB of RAM and 2 MB of swap file.

Re:Case in point:

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had good luck with musikCube on my older machines light on RAM. Its small and nice. http://www.musikcube.com/

Re:Case in point:

[gQuigs]

Give Coolplayer a try. http://coolplayer.sourceforge.net/

Re:Case in point:

[Anonymous Coward]

that's why I haven't upgraded from winamp 2.92 (or 2.93? I forget)

It's the last good one.

Hahaha -- appropriate: the confirm you're not a script word is "regret"

Re:Case in point:

[justthinkit]

I use Ultra Player, locked at version 2.112 for forever and just a 3MB download. I moved to it when I saw the CPU utilization spikes that early versions of Media Player caused. http://www.ultraplayer.com/

Re:Case in point:

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI: a lot are two words

Re:Case in point:

[Anonymous Coward]

you need Coolplayer!
http://coolplayer.sf.net/

Re:Case in point:

[NeoManyon]

My vote goes to CoolPlayer too, an excellent little player. You can get it from here: http://coolplayer.sourceforge.net/ It saved my bacon once, I needed a player on a NT 4 based dedicated audio logger, so no usb, no CD drive and no network. CoolPlayer was the only player I could find that would fit on a single floppy! Simple but effective, small and stable; if only more software was like that.

Re:Case in point:

[rynoski]

try Tuniac

Re:Case in point:

[calculadoru]

Dude, I'm sure many people have mentioned this to you by now, but here it goes again: try QCD Player, www.quinnware.com
The lightest player yet, and very easy to use if you are a WinAmp man.

Use it or I'll tell the RIAA about your 200 gig collection :)

D

Re:Case in point:

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently installed the only downloadable version of WinAMP on it...

Hmm.. By my count, I see 80 downloadable versions of winamp just on this one site:
http://www.oldversion.com/program.php?n=winamp

Oh, and I already knew about oldversion.com, but for people that don't already know, I tried looking for other versions of winamp to download by using this extremely complicated process:

I opened firefox, went to http://www.google.com/ typed "winamp" in the search box, and clicked on the 5th result.

...and it uses almost 80-100MB of RAM while it's running.

Well, seeing as there is only one version available for download, I'd assume that I must be running the same version as you, but just for shits I went ahead and looked at what I was running. Turned out to be version 5.2. Then I opened task manager and checked the memory usage. Imagine my complete surprise and utter shock when I found yet another error in your findings. 17.9MB of RAM was used on my system WITH all the pretty looking stuff enabled, custom skin, and visualizer running. Turn off the visualizer and it dropped to 13.1MB. This is without optimizing anything for small memory, or turning off any doo-dah extras that only serve to prettyfy things. Seems to me, if you really wanted just a barebones mp3 player, and insisted on running winamp (bit of an oxymoron there in itself if you ask me), you could get this memory thing easily knocked down to the single digits of MB of RAM used.

Anyhow,

Happy complaining!

Re:Case in point:

[Technician]

I like to listen to music on it, since it's in my kitchen and readily accessible.

What I'm looking for is an appliance to replace that type setup. Most media adaptors want special back end software running on an XP box to make it work. I'm looking for a player box that will do it's own browsing of a CIFS share on a PC or Net attached storage unit. I see no reason to leave an XP box left running just to play music. It should cut down power consumption from about 80 watts for a laptop + 350 watts for the XP box, to 10 watts for the media player and 20 watts for the NAS box.

Re:Case in point:

[Tim C]

XP should run ok in that much RAM, as long as the graphics system isn't stealing too much of it and you don't have a virus scanner, anit-spyware software, etc running.

WMP 10 is currently using 8.8MB of RAM on my system (15.7MB VM size), so it really shouldn't be a problem for you.

If you prefer WinAmp though (and I certainly used to myself), just grab the old version and enjoy :)

Re:Case in point:

[1110110001]

Let me say a bit more about what others already wrote. Winamp 5 is not only 2 + 3, it's really Winamp 2 + Winamp 3. If you have the new interface there's also an invisible window running, that's nothing more but Winamp 2 without the bitmaps for the interface loaded. Nullsoft just took the Wasabi and Maki part from Winamp 3 and made an frontend for the old player.

If you like the old version you can change in the preferences panel to classic mode (no need to reinstall - it's just a setting). And the trick with unloading the bitmaps for the interface is also used when minimizing Winamp.

So you can have the nice new features without taking too much resources and also stay with the IMHO best player (what a pity it's not avaible for OS X).

You often don't have a choice if you want support

[lohphat]

...when you call the outsourced, scripted tech-cupport center.

"Are you running the latest version?"

"No."

"Well, we need you to install it so we can diagnose your problem."

---

More often than not the upgrade is better, it's the 5% of times when it's a pain. Due to software development and support being a resource hog, vendors are quick to abandon older versions instead of developting patch trains for multiple releases.

wow

[kevin.fowler]

Considering how long I feel like I've been using Oldversions to stay with my favorite/most stable builds of programs... was this kid a fetus when he started it?

In all seriousness, that place saved my life when I was stuck with WinME for a year in college and the school mail program conflicted with everything. The no ad and non-resource hog (I'm looking at you, Winamp and iTunes) versions of programs are the way to go.

Want QuickTime without iTunes? That's hard.

[Animats]

Apple no longer offers their QuickTime without iTunes. Seriously annoying in a corporate environment, where you may need a video player but don't want a music shopping application that phones home on your machines.

Re:Want QuickTime without iTunes? That's hard.

[realmolo]

You are wrong:

http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/standalone .html

Right on the main Quicktime download page.

Re:Want QuickTime without iTunes? That's hard.

[gEvil (beta)]

Yup, you're right...

Re:Want QuickTime without iTunes? That's hard.

[clamum]

Do a search for Quicktime Alternative on Google. That way you can get the Quicktime codec and use whatever media player (it comes with Media Player Classic, which I recommend) you like to play Quicktime videos.

Re:Want QuickTime without iTunes? That's hard.

[Anonymous Coward]

He's not completely off base...while you can download Quicktime without having to get iTunes, there doesn't seem to be a way to get a nice little mp3 player/music organizer/legal way of buying digital music online without getting that bloated video player along with it.

Personal Rant: You'd think that a company like Apple that stresses UI guidelines for third-party developers would be able to give Windows users a product that was somewhat in line with what Windows users would expect from a UI. Thankfully, IrfanView can use the quicktime browser plug-in to play .mov files.

Re:Want QuickTime without iTunes? That's hard.

[Animats]

It's been crippled, though. You can't go full-screen with that version. Apple tries to sell you the pay version for that.

Didn't earlier versions of the QuickTime player go full-screen in the free version?

Re:Want QuickTime without iTunes? That's hard.

[Macdude]

Apple no longer offers their QuickTime without iTunes. Seriously annoying in a corporate environment, where you may need a video player but don't want a music shopping application that phones home on your machines.

Try going here...

http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/

In the fuure you may want to check your facts before you post...

Re:Want QuickTime without iTunes? That's hard.

[Animats]

Great concept, but user comments on that indicate that version 1.68 still crashes frequently.

Newer versions are mostly good for the seller

[Opportunist]

not necessarily good for the customer.

Why do companies make new version?

1. To fix bugs
2. To introduce new features
3. To fix hacks.

Now, a bugfix is usually a good thing. If the bug applies to you (like, when your certain combination of graphics card, CPU and mainboard doesn't enjoy having unmutex'ed multithreading that works allright on the test setup... don't laugh). If not, the bugfix is nice but unnecessary.

A feature add on is usually pointless. If you buy some software, you buy it for the features it has, not for the features it might have somewhere in the future. I stopped buying software on promises, I buy it on tests and reviews. If it has what I want, I buy. If it does not, I don't. Simple binary logic. So when a new version has a new feature, most of the time I don't need it.

So what remains is the big reason that has NO benefit for the customer and ONLY benefits for the seller. To close holes that allowed you to do with the thing what its manufacturer didn't want you to do. This can be anything from a "crack" (yeah, like the new version can't be cracked... but that's not the point) to actual firmware upgrades of certain well known companies that also distribute rootkits that should make sure that you use ONLY games that they deem appropriate for the area you're in. We're not even talking illegal copies here, we're talking region protection.

So much for the global market.

So who benefits from version updates? You? Or the manufacturer?

Re:Newer versions are mostly good for the seller

[HitchHik]

This reminds me of the following quote from a 1995 FOCUS interview with Bill G.:
Gates:
        No. I'm saying: We don't do a new version to fix bugs. We don't. Not enough people would buy it. You can take a hundred people using Microsoft Word. Call them up and say "Would you buy a new version because of bugs?" You won't get a single person to say they'd buy a new version because of bugs. We'd never be able to sell a release on that basis.

Re:Newer versions are mostly good for the seller

[Anonymous Coward]

It's too bad that the focus here is on ... WinAmp. Feature additions can be huge bonuses to following an upgrade path, particularly in beta's (I constantly update aMSN from CVS to get the increasing features I miss found in some other clients).

Community driven products typically introduce cababilities and featuresets that can expand your ability to do work (i.e., increase productivity) or make things less stressful/more interesting/fun/exciting. Examples: Autodesk AutoCAD is like night and day between R14 and 2002 for example (comparing on a windows platform). And WWIIOL, albeit slowly, has made considerable improvements (feedback directed) since it's shaky launch a half decade ago.

Itunes is a good example

[bogie]

Several releases of Itunes have taken away useful features from users while introducing features that users may not need.

Then again Apple isn't the only one doing this and its been SOP in the software industry for many years now. Kind of an odd article when you think about it, they might as well be reporting that spam is now a problem on the Internet. Well Duh.

Re:Itunes is a good example

[XxtraLarGe]

iTunes is highly problematic. Aside from my (now old) Powerbook G4, my family's computers are all older Macs, and they can't all run the latest and greatest version. For instance, my wife uses a 400 MHz iMac, running OS X 10.3.9., and my stepdaughter's 233 MHz iMac is running OS 9.2. We got her an iPod Shuffle for her birthday, and she still can only use it on her Mom's computer. We're going to boost the RAM on the old bondi iMac and upgrade to OS X 10.3.9, but the oldest version of iTunes that her machine will run is 4.7.1, which can't be downloaded from the internet anywhere as far as I can tell. Heck, it's not even available from OldVersion.com :-(

Re:Itunes is a good example

[Pope]

I don't have access to my home bookmarks at the moment, but I did see old iTunes versions over on planetmirror.com. Try there!

The main problem...

[joe 155]

...was that they changed the cat emoticon on msn messenger, back in the day typing in (@) would make a nice old school looking cat which had a good retro feel, now (@) looks all "new" and crap... I tried to use an older version but it said that it could no longer be used... d'oh, forced upgrades...

Re:Obvious first thought upon reading:

[Anonymous Coward]

"And rain is wet."

However at this time of the year it can freeze when it hits the ground, or other objects like cars and power lines. Then its not wet.

Winamp..

[xtal]

Winamp version 5.old users, unite!

I vowed never to upgrade after I found out that they took measures to discourage ripping of broadcasted mp3s.. ala streamripper. Nevermind I don't need ads, and the existing version works just great for my purposes. That was what, in 2000 or something.. I forget the exact details now.

Computers are about performing tasks, not running software. If it doesn't do new tasks, or old tasks (much better), why upgrade?

Re:Winamp..

[British]

Are you referring to that non-nullsoft made Winamp 3?(think that was the one) Oh wow did I love that user experience. You exit & go back in, and the last song you were on was deselected in favor of the first song. And the list went on and on. It was quite possibly the sorriest version of Winamp ever made.

Re:Winamp..

[Godwin O'Hitler]

Tell me about it. I've been cycling back through Winamp versions for the last few weeks now after installing the most recent version and having it crash every ten or so songs. The problem is I can't remember the number of the version I used to have that worked exactly the way it should.

All I can say is hats off to oldversion. Thanks to them I CAN cycle back.

Just to clarify a point, I need Winamp. I won't say why but you can take it from me it is indispensable.

iTunes & feature bloat

[teamhasnoi]

Anyone recall the removal of the abillity to stream your library over the net? Made it a real pain in the ass to listen to stuff from home on your work computer. (I'm the admin, so I yell at myself daily for doing it, thanks.)

Of course, 3rd party stuff that replaced the functionality quickly surfaced, but it all feels very hacky.

On the other side of the coin, there's the dreaded feature bloat. Take Adobe's Acrobat for instance - every new version has come with extra features, and exponentially longer start times. Ugh.

So many reasons not to upgrade. If you have a computer used for recording, you quickly learn to never fix what ain't broke. I am one of the few using SP2 successfully with my audio hardware, which is no longer being made. Of course, Windows doesn't make things any easier to back out of an upgrade.

Mac = rename old version, test new, toss new. Windows = huh? Some files could not be removed? Why doesn't this work anymore? I uninstalled it. Aw, hell. System restore...damnit! Time to nuke, and reinstall. Repeat. Oh, no...

It's even worse then the "upgrade" is a beta.

[windowpain]

AOL is guilty of this. I don't know if they're still doing it but the last time I went to install the latest version of AIM for a new machine the only thing they offered was the AIM Triton beta (which they did not identify as such on the download page). WTF? If want to be a beta tester I'll ask to be a beta tester. Oldversion.com to the rescue!

Re:It's even worse then the "upgrade" is a beta.

[alienfluid]

You said it dude, Triton sucks to say the least - it's bloated and it's unstable (well, it's beta - I guess I should expect that). But I couldn't believe that AOL would remove the old version till they stabilized and released the new one. What the heck.

Re:It's even worse then the "upgrade" is a beta.

[frankm_slashdot]

not to be rude but they never "removed" the old version. they just labeled it so that unadventurous types wouldnt try to download it. try the link that says "windows 98/ME" users. brings you right to the old version
http://www.aim.com/get_aim/win/other_win.adp?aolp=

Re:It's even worse then the "upgrade" is a beta.

[alienfluid]

Hah - thanks for the link! Deception serves them well I see.

Nice to find old versions...

[NFN_NLN]

Thsnks, I have a new site to add to my bookmarks now. It's getting harder and harder to find old versions of softare in my opinion. Most people just link to the vendor site or tell you to go to download.com, where once the new version comes out the old version is wiped from existance.

Anyone who has ever used Quickbooks Enterprise ...

[SyncNine]

Will agree with you wholeheartedly.

The company I work for uses QuickBooks Enterprise. We started on Version 5 (Quickbooks 2005). It worked pretty well. There were a few very small hiccups, but mostly it did what we needed it to do. We had purchased upgrade protection because we knew a new version would be coming out shortly. About the 5th of December or so we received the 2006 Update.

Now, being skeptical to begin with, I was NOT going to install this right out of the box. It's one thing to upgrade WinZip or WinAmp to the next version, another thing entirely to take the company's accounting server down for an upgrade that hasn't been proven in the wild for more than 5 days.

Skip forward to the beginning of February. Two months have passed and the support forums on the QB2006 site are relatively quiet. There is no patch released yet, and no notification that they are working on a patch.

We decide to do the install.

WORST DECISION EVER

The system is completely unstable. It crashes repeatedly. We lose transaction data. It's not possible to 'downgrade' without completely knocking the server offline for baseline rebuild from ghost. The amount of data on the server would take about 8 hours to rebuild, and the server is being accessed about 18-20 hours a day by different shifts. We finally orchestrate a weekend rebuild about 7 days later, and then spend about 30 hours taking the data out of the new version and putting it into the old version.

I might add, when we called Intuit to tell them about our issues, here was their response: "Well, there's nothing we can tell you. It's a known issue. You'll have to downgrade to v5. We know the uninstall funcationality is broken, you'll need to restore from a previous backup. No, there's no ETA for when the patch is coming out."

To make matters worse, the version 6 update was a crock anyways. We've since installed it with the latest patch and it 'works', but it's slow as molasses, buggy as hell, and still notoriously unstable. If the Accounting department didn't habitually use two of its new features, I'd push us back to QB2005 just to stop having the issues.

Two words: Windows XP

[Anonymous Coward]

If software wants to do something you don't want it to do, block it with your firewall. For me, that's the only necessary step.

What about when it does LESS than the previous version?

My box got infested with the Sony malware, thanks to my daughter. I'd stupidly lost the driver disks for my video card and audio chip, and there were no versions on the internet I could find that worked with 98; all were for XP.

I've found absolutely zero increased functionality with XP over 98. None whatever. (If one of you kind souls would point something out that XP will do that 98 wouldn't, please point it out... and not Microsoft's laughable firewall, I use Zone Alarm).

There are programs that ran just fine in 98 that XP won't run. And what's an OS for? Running your software.

However, I can no longer burn multisession CDs, which really pisses me off. I record friends' music, then put it on CD with MP3s in the extended portion.

Not any more. Thanks, Microsoft, for taking my hundred dollars and leaving me with LESS functionality!

Re:Two words: Windows XP

[RandoX]

The advantage of XP over 98, IMHO, is the stability. My XP machine almost never has any stability problems. In contrast, 98 had a lot of them. That alone is worth the upgrade for me.

I know, I know... try a BSD or Linux for stability. If the apps were equally available (games, especially) I'd be with you.

Re:Two words: Windows XP

[XMilkProject]

Thats just silly. XP is not even related to 98, it is an NT based O/S that is lightyears ahead of Windows 9x operating systems. Windows 98 is running on DOS for christs sake.

Re:Two words: Windows XP

[pete6677]

Not to mention, 98 has no support for multiple users or even a meaningful password lock system. And it is a complete nightmare in a networked environment. 98 might be fine for home users that don't do anything serious, but it will not (definitely should not) be found in a corporate environment.

Re:Two words: Windows XP

[DogDude]

Windows 98 to XP wasn't really an upgrade... Going from DOS to the NT kernel really was like getting a whole new product that happened to look the same and was compatible with the old stuff. That's opposed to say, Mac OS.whatever that really are just ARE upgrades (a few new features here and there, but the same basic product) that they sell every few months.

Re:Two words: Windows XP

[jx100]

Actually, the closest analogy would be the jump from Mac OS classic to OS X. You also get an entirely new, more stable, multi-user OS with that jump. The old kernel used cooperative multitasking (or actually, limited preemptive multitasking in windows 9x) to something specifically designed to be more secure.

Re:Two words: Windows XP

[DogDude]

You're right... that WAS a new product, not an upgrade.

Unfortunately for most Slashdotters, I gotta say that MS handles backwards compatibility about a million times better than Apple does. I remember when I had to do Apple tech support, and we had a giant chart of which OS worked on which piece of hardware. Uuugh. That was a nightmare. These days, for 80-90% of all Windows apps, you just have to be running some version of Windows that's at least as new as Windows 95. Personally, I was amazed when I went from Windows 3.1 to NT 3.51 (never used a DOS based OS again). That was a completely different product, but the transition was pretty damn smooth.

Re:Two words: Windows XP

[Anonymous Coward]

You tell 'em, DogDude! Don't worry about what the other Slashdotters say. Preach the truth!

I'd only offer this humble edit:

Unfortunately for most Slashdotters, I gotta say that MS is about a million times better than Apple.

Yeah! You my dawg, Dog!

Re:Two words: Windows XP

[Anonymous Coward]

For many people Windows XP is just another Windows. My parents have Windows ME, they see no reason whatsoever to buy an upgrade to Windows XP, no matter how more stable it is. "This is the version that came with the machine and it was made for it, why buy another product that wasn't made specifically for this machine," is what they say. You can argue all you want, I even installed XP once to show it was more stable. Two weeks later I found out my father had put ME right over it again.

Re:Two words: Windows XP

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a bit different from linux where you have to re-build everything for the latest crap each and every time. Yep: you can install drivers without boot. Yee-hay.

Re:Two words: Windows XP

[Anonymous Coward]

In a corporate environment I agree completely with you both. But I'm talking about the hundred bucks I paid for XP for the computer in my apartment. I have no need for multiple users; I live alone. Even if I still had the kids here, I'd not need "multiple users."

As to stability, I had no stability problems with 98. Maybe I build better computers than Dell? ;)

I'm still trying to find out what XP offers ME, the single guy living alone who "upgraded" to XP.

And I thank all of you who responded to the post.

Re:Two words: Windows XP

[Richard Steiner]

*Sigh*.

If only Win95 advocates would have been so honest about their beloved platform a decade ago... We knew it was crap, but they were more interested in desktop flash than having a real kernel or a real filesystem.

Re:Two words: Windows XP

[justthinkit]

As to stability, I had no stability problems with 98.

Sorry but I doubt this. I was a great 98SE fan and moved to XP for only one big reason -- system resources. I could not, for example, chat using Yahoo IM, browse and have Word open without running low on resources to the point of something croaking. Also, YIM would get flaky and force a reboot (couldn't get back into conferences otherwise). MS was very smart in how they kept 9x/ME crippled in this way (and MSN Messenger was even more of a resource/RAM hog than YIM). I'm still trying to find out what XP offers ME, the single guy living alone who "upgraded" to XP. And I thank all of you who responded to the post.

If you are a true one-app-at-a-time user then stick with 98, but I doubt that you are if you are on /.

Re:Two words: Windows XP

[Scarletdown]

Not to mention, 98 has no support for multiple users

Is it possible to have more than one user logged in on an XP box? Just a couple nights ago, I had a call from someone across the base here who was having troubles getting his computer's sound to work.

I fired up Remote Desktop and connected to his computer to install the drivers, since he didn't have admin rights. When I tried to log in, I was informed that there was another user already connected, and if I proceeded, he would be disconnected.

So if only one user can be logged in at a time, how can that be considered a multi-user system? Or am I misinterpreting your use of the phrase "multiple users"?

Re:Two words: Windows XP

[Torne]

I fired up Remote Desktop and connected to his computer to install the drivers, since he didn't have admin rights. When I tried to log in, I was informed that there was another user already connected, and if I proceeded, he would be disconnected.

So if only one user can be logged in at a time, how can that be considered a multi-user system?

Multiple users can be logged in at a time, just not through Remote Desktop. Remote Desktop is just Terminal Services, artificially crippled to stop you from using an XP machine as a terminal server (they want you to pay for a server edition of Windows for that).

You can have multiple users logged in graphically with Fast User Switching, though only one gets to use the console at a time; you can have processes running that belong to any number of users if they don't need a desktop (e.g. Task Scheduler, can run tasks as any user no matter who is logged in); you can run processes as a specific user if you know that user's password and they will be able to interact with your desktop; you can have many users logged in via the telnet server.. and any other app that feels like doing the same stuff (say, OpenSSH for Cygwin) can do it too.

So yes, it is a real multiuser system, though whether it's a good one I shall not comment on ;)

Re:Two words: Windows XP

[pete6677]

On that topic, has anyone actually gotten Fast User Switching to work, without system crashes or other major stability issues? XP supports multiple users just great, if its one at a time. As far as I'm concerned, Fast User Switching is a feature that was released before it was thoroughly tested and has some major bugs.

Re:Two words: Windows XP

[assassinator42]

Actually, with a hack, it is. It's using a version of the terminal services from a SP2 beta. Not sure if there are any security problems though.

Re:Two words: Windows XP

[ozmanjusri]

However, I can no longer burn multisession CDs, which really pisses me off.

I'm not sure why XP is causing you trouble with multisession, but there's a free burner here that'll do what you want - http://www.cdburnerxp.se/features.php.

Re:Two words: Windows XP

[rapidweather]

Windows XP is a hard drive installation, so if an upgrade of software goes bad, it can be complicated to downgrade, the point of this topic.
What I do with my livecd linux, is "back up" one build or so, if the current build, with all software included, turns out bad. So, I am only a few minutes away from getting my old stuff back, and up and running.
I am constantly looking ahead, however, so going back is not for long, I want to fix things, and build again. The details are in my Getting Started Guide, now getting quite long, but at least has a "What's New" section to "cut to the chase".
To bad we livecd linux folks don't have all the wonderful applications in Windows XP, but what we do have, is useful to say the least.

Re:Two words: Windows XP

[Technician]

My XP machine almost never has any stability problems. In contrast, 98 had a lot of them. That alone is worth the upgrade for me.


For me XP home is a downgrade. A pc running 98SE works fine for a SOHO fileserver. Shares can be set up with either Read Only or RW privilages based on password. This is gone in XP Home. Pro has it, but it's a downgrade on XP Home.

I moved my shares to a Linux appliance. They are now on a Simple Share NAS. The hardware and software is about the same price as a copy of XP Pro without the hardware. Sorry MS. Linux makes a better SOHO low cost high performance server.

Re:Two words: Windows XP

[tbone1]

On that topic, has anyone actually gotten Fast User Switching to work, without system crashes or other major stability issues?

I know that one place has. I've seen it for myself.

Re:Two words: Windows XP

[Mr. Shiny And New]

Windows XP has tons of new features that aren't in Windows 98.

It has many improvements that may technically qualify as bug fixes, such as improved stability.
It has support for more hardware out of the box.
It supports more memory. Windows 98 only supports 512 MB combined RAM + video ram.
It supports NTFS, logging into a Windows Domain with proper permissions, etc.
It has countless improvements in the user interface, and a few new annoyances.
It supports remote desktop, which has lots of drawbacks but is still very useful.
It has a built-in firewall. I don't care if you already have one from somewhere else, this is still an important feature that they added.
It has fairly-good integration with WindowsUpdate to keep your system updated.
It supports the latest version of DirectX, which I don't think is available for Windows 98.
It has improved accessibility features for users with disabilities.
It has support for wireless networking.

Not to mention countless other features that are available to software developers, who will use these features more and more once users stop using Windows 98. Many programs don't take advantage of the features in the OS until it has high market penetration, and that means waiting for people who use older OSes to upgrade.

Not that I'm saying you need to upgrade from 98 to XP, but I guarantee that XP is definitely the best MS os yet. And I'm a big Linux fan, I try to avoid Windows when I can, but let's be objective here. XP has many, many improvements.

Re:Two words: Windows XP

[jp10558]

I don't use fast user switching a lot - but it's never crashed on me. Of course, I only use it when updating something on my parent's machine with their limited user account, flipping between admin and the account to make sure everything gets set right.

Sure they do...

[Anubis350]

Ask and ye shall recieve, go here. Cheers!

Re:Sure they do...

[Anonymous Coward]

they don't exactly make it easy to find though, it took me half an hour, and if I hadn't known it was there somewhere I'd probably have given in.

Re:Sure they do...

[weg]

What does actually happen if I want to install the newest version of iTunes on a Windows computer, but you've paid for Quicktime Pro 6.0? Can Quickime Pro 6.0 and Quicktime 7.04 run in parallel on a Windows PC? (I think on my Mac it would work.. I'd never buy Quicktime Pro, though ;-))

Re:Sure they do...

[SmittyTheBold]

Installing the new iTunes upgrades the QuickTime files on either platform, and you can't have two versions of QT installed at once. Sorry.

Apple, iTunes and DRM

[babbling]

Apple are very unfair to their users when it comes to iTunes software updates. In some cases, the update is necessary for a particular feature to work, or for iTunes to support the latest iPod. The updates also change what users are allowed to do with the DRM songs that they have purchased from the iTunes Music Store, though.

So, when you buy a song from the iTunes Music Store, you might THINK you know what you're getting, but Apple seem to feel that they have the right to change the deal AFTER you have purchased the song. It applies to all of the songs you have purchased, not just the songs you purchase after Apple change their minds about what they want to let you do with your/their music.

I think this is what will become a classic case of a company abusing the power that DRM gives them. Consumer groups should be all over this, because Apple ITMS customers are not really receiving the products they paid for. I don't really believe a silly EULA means that Apple's customers have signed away all of their rights.

Swat 4

[Sporkinum]

I have never updated Swat4 to 1.1 due to their patch adding in game advertising.
http://www.massiveincorporated.com/
"SWAT4 fans have been on the offensive, following news that the new 1.1 patch contains a feature adding advertising to the game and collecting players' data, including IP address and how long they play for. The new patch implements Massive streaming ad support, which changes some of the in-game textures to adverts for real products. It also gathers information about players, detailed in their privacy policy."

Re:Swat 4

[u16084]

Them Bastards... I had NO IDEA

Thanks,.

Re:Swat 4

[fermion]

The sad thing is that most upgrades are about bussiness model change. The developer incorporate a few added features, a few security fixes, but most of it is about increasing the opportunity to make a profit. Which is totaly valid, but often significantly decreases value to the consumer.

My favorite two examples of this were my stalwart applications of the 90's. Quickbooks and Eudora. Both are wonderful applications. Both are very useful. But both began to have agressive upgrade schedules in which one basically had to upgrade every year. The result is that if I did not pay every year, I could lose access to the data. This was particularly true for Eudora. The risk was just not worth it, so I switch to inferior products that did not have the significant opportunity costs.

iTune is the same deal. Very good appplication. It if free. But it is becoming annoying. Every upgrade I have to turn off those arrows. Every coupel upgrades it seems the licenses changes slightly. However, since i use it as an interface to my music, which is all in standard MP3, there is little risk if one day it does becomes overall useless. I can just get a new interface for my tunes.

They key i think is not storing data in propreitary format. This is why the MS users are stuck, and why MS threatens anyone who wnats to build a filter with lawsuits. They know thier only hope is to keep users indentured.

Re:Swat 4

[rob_squared]

Speaking of games: What surprises me is the apparent lack of conversation about the PSP. People have been able to do things to the origonal firmware, and then Sony released a newer firmware that would break all those hacks. That's certainly no good for those using it.

Re:Swat 4

[JaxGator75]

There is a lot of conversation, but only in certain forums. They make new strides just about every day with PSPs. Mine is still an original ver. 1.5 and is more or less wide open. There are games that require 2.0 or higher to play, but that barrier is coming down (albeit slowly).

I love my PSP and recommend one to anyone who travels. 8 hour flight is nothing when you can play NES, SNES, and my personal favs: Cyberball and Klax.

I do not understand this...

[east coast]

I do not understand why users feel the need to upgrade if the software at hand is doing the job and not posing any threat to the system's functions. I understand there being the issue of support but it seems that all too often people jump for the latest version only to find out it just doesn't work as well or that some "features" have been locked down once the developer realizes that there is potential profit.

Read the release notes first on an upgrade, it's insane not to.

Re:I do not understand this...

[amrust]

Overall, I don't upgrade software, just because there happens to be a new version out. Unless there's a feature we need, we usually leave it alone if it isn't broke.

But I almost always install Windows OS upgrades. The critical one, anyway. I don't have the time to check to make sure our particular company falls under a certain OS vulnerability. Trusting Microsoft makes me nervous. But the prospect of getting a call in the middle of the afternoon because some building's PCs are ate up with something, and having some smartass co-worker point out to a boss that "there was a fix out for this, I saw it on Slashdot" scares me even more.

Re:I do not understand this...

[SharpFang]

I do not understand why users feel the need to upgrade if the software at hand

1) You never used Windows.
2) It's called "reinstall", not "upgrade".

OOOH apple fud!

[way2trivial]

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=quicktime+sta ndalone yer wrong buddy....

That site won't last long now

[BobTheWonderMonkey]

Way to go, Slashdot. Now that you've aimed a giant spotlight on this site, how long do you think it's going to be before all those companies' lawyers descend on this poor kid like a pack of rabid hyenas?

It was a nice site...

Re:That site won't last long now

[rehtonAesoohC]

I'm sure most companies don't care that he's providing old versions on his website. After all, those versions (in the mind of the companies) are all outdated and obfuscated, and if a user really wants to subject themselves to using such a "crappy" version, then they should feel free. Besides, TFA even says that he's only been asked to remove 2 programs from the site, and he complied both times.

Yes they do.

[Cranky Weasel]

Gee. If it had taken a bunch of digging to locate, I would understand your missing it. But here are my steps:

1 - Go to www.apple.com/quicktime
2 - Click "Download"
3 - Click "Quicktime Standalone Installer" (middle of the page)

Presto.

Re:Anyone who has ever used Quickbooks Enterprise

[ROOK*CA]

Ouch, that sux... BTW now might be a good time to hit management up for a testing environment. :)

The Internets Are A Great Resource for Pirates

[Phosphor3k]

OMG, the internets are a great resource for bomb-making, and finding whores, and pirating software and music and movies.

Whats your point? Oldversion.com is a tool with a very legitimate use. Just like anything else, it has the potential to be used in nefarious ways.

BTW, Congratulations on no longer being a criminal.

mod parent down

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because it's two paragraphs of drivel doesn't mean it's not two paragraphs of DRIVEL.

Criminal

[Cranky Weasel]

"BTW, Congratulations on no longer being a criminal."

Who said I was no longer a criminal? I never claimed that!

I just said I no longer pirate software. I'd like to think I'm a more than a one hit wonder on the supply side of crime.

Speaking of Windows ME...

[Pollux]

I'm busy applying for some free Windows product licenses for some donated computers to our school. We have the option of putting one of two operating systems on it:

• Windows 98 SE
  
• Windows 2000

I find it interesting that even Microsoft doesn't have faith in their own "next version" (Windows ME). Ouch.

Re:Speaking of Windows ME...

[Wolfrider]

Go for Win2K Pro unless the machines are truly low-end, or you need $functionality that 2K doesn't have. Win2k runs acceptably on my old P166 laptop with 128MB of RAM, with a bit of trimming and disabling services.

I used to like Win98se, but now consider anything before Win2k to be a toy OS.

Re:Speaking of Windows ME...

[GMFTatsujin]

I . . . now consider anything before Win2k to be a toy OS.

Funny: I say the same thing, except about Vista.

Re:Speaking of Windows ME...

[Ronin441]

Microsoft have never recommended Win ME for business use, though they did at one point recommend it for home use. So the options they are offering you are consistent with their historical position: the extra stuff that was in ME wasn't aimed at businesses; it was aimed at home users, mostly gamers. The fact that it sucked for gamers is a separate issue.

The trick is to know what you want

[guanxi]

Software is a tool; it's only value is in helping you achieve something.

Know what you want to achieve, and then you can evaluate upgrades: Does it help you acheive your business (or personal or whatever) objectives? If so, is it worth the money and time?

Just because the vendor is selling something, it doesn't mean it's worth anything to you.

Re:You often don't have a choice if you want suppo

[cdn2k1]

Why is this modded "funny"? This is one of the primary [legitimate] reasons many businesses are forced to upgrade - to retain access to tech support.

Ah, so upgrades are like Chinese food (n/t)

[Anonymous Coward]

n/t.

Re:Ah, so upgrades are like Chinese food (n/t)

[Anonymous Coward]

n/t 4.0? 3.5? ;)

sometimes

[dotpavan]

.. the newer versions arent compatible and might clash with other s/w installed.. good that sourceforge (and freshmeat) keep older versions too.

Why so hard to run old and new in parallel?

[dpbsmith]

I hate upgrades. They are never clearly described. In particularly, you can sometimes go from N to N+1 to N+2 with no problems whatsoever, only to discover whereas all of these ran fine in the system you have, N+3 may, without warning, suddenly up the ante on system requirements and may run glacially slow or require a RAM upgrade for decent performance.

What I hate worse--is that many vendors make it difficult or impossible to run old and new versions in parallel. It's not even unusual for a new software installation literally to search all of the mounted hard drives and remove all existing copies of the old version.

I tend to blame Microsoft for this, although it has spread to the point of becoming an industry custom (and has infected Apple). I believe it once had a technical origin of sorts in the inadequacies of MS-DOS, which led to the custom of software requiring patches and changes to the OS code itself, which in turn led to the rise of software distributions in which you couldn't simply copy an application... or an application and its directory tree... but had, instead, to run an "installer" program that went around merrily and selfishly making any changes to the OS that it thought it needed in order to give itself an environment in which it could run.

Re:Anyone who has ever used Quickbooks Enterprise

[lilrowdy18]

We are having the same issues here with Quickbooks 2006 Standard and Accountants Edition. THis past weekend Intuit released a patch for the "File must be opened on the server feature" and other "features" which have given us a headache. We just updated our test "Quickbooks server" this morning and are working on getting the testing done. For those of you unaware, any flavor of Quickbooks 2006 is ectremely problamitic becuase they have made major changes to the database. One of them being (I beleive) is that they use Sybase now instead of a proprietary database. Anyways we are urging our clients to hold off on upgrading to Quickbooks 2006 until Intuit cleans up 2006.

Re:1996 Called...

[Dster76]

In other news, I'm still using Winamp 2.0 because it's so much better than 5.0

Did you forget about the intervening versions of Winamp that prove that upgrades sometime suck?

16 yr olds excluded from computer-industry events

[tech-law-ny]

This 16 year old has one of the best insights into what customers
actually want. It's too bad that the computer industry arbitrarily
excludes under-18 persons from most important events. For example, for
the FOSE show today in DC, the literature at
http://www.fose.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Custom.Co ntent&MenuID=1007
says

      "No one under 18 is admitted, regardless of affiliation or
      circumstance."

Other events seem mostly the same, and yes it might be a venue
requirement, but really that's no excuse. We need to let them in and
talk with them (especially if it's a school vacation week!)

Security

[jrj102]

I think that with security being what it is today, it's critical to stay up to date. It's possible that companies will take (are taking?) advantage of this new reality to force updatest that aren't consumer friendly.

To wit: Acrobat Reader. Blech.

      --- JRJ

iTunes not available!

[fak3r]

Start the conspiracy theories!

http://www.oldversion.com/program.php?n=itunes
iTunes is currently unavailable.

I think I'm still running 6.0.1 at home on my iBook...

Heavenly Versions

[Doc Ruby]

A big problem with software versions is compatibility with other software. These days, most software has to interoperate with other software, whether operating systems, libraries, or other applications in a "toolchain" or "suite". But it's hard to know whether a program compatible with other software will remain compatible when any of the programs change version.

A big help lies in "object oriented" practices. Which boils down to "I don't care about how it works privately inside, as long as I can rely on what it tells me publicly". There are only a few public points of in/compatibility: UI, API and data format. Each of those interfaces should have a version number, in addition to the "function" version number.

We can learn (as usual) from hardware engineering, where there are already "model numbers" and "part numbers" for revised equipment. The model number need only be unique, and is used only to distinguish among different products appearing at the same time. Marketers and consumers like to use model numbers to express related products with similar model numbers, and better products with higher numbers. "Dot versions" have long been abused by marketers to signal small changes, even when those might break compatibility and cause big problems. While most vendors manipulate "major version" numbers to indicate progress even when there is no difference, or hide bait & switch tactics with incremented model numbers between unrelated versions.

Engineers use a part number. For software, the part number would best include UI/API/data versions. Each version number would be composed of a major number, incremented when incompatible with previous versions, a minor number, to reflect compatible releases, and an optional patch number, indicating compatible upgrades between releases. So a part# version would look like "U3.4.15/A6.4.0/D2.3.5". Parts with the same data version can exchange data interchangeably. Parts with the same API version can be called by each others method signatures interchangeably. And parts with the same UI version look the same to a user. That UI version will help consumers the most, because they don't have to learn anything new to use the new part version. Even different minor and patch numbers mean the parts are still compatible, at least in that layer.

Such version numbering helps identify what changed, now that we've learned that some changes matter to some people more than (to) others. With such precise numbering, we can much more easily upgrade, test, and roll back. Do I smell an RFC?

Re:Heavenly Versions

[Anonymous Coward]

yes. please write one. this would be extremely helpful.

Re:Heavenly Versions

[indyweb]

Good point. Nothing worse than upgrading and crashing another system. Adobe sticks out in my experiences with this, but I've noticed this with others including Microsoft. Yes, there will always be bugs and opportunities to enhance a release with service packs, but ensuring that an upgrade won't affect the enormous diversity of applications for all users is obviously an incredible challenge. I like the version numbering--helps us programmers troubleshoot a bit more.

Re:Heavenly Versions

[Reziac]

Is there any reason an application can't parse the path (which could mean the appropriate registry hive) and LOOK for a .DLL that's the correct version to work with itself? check .DLL version number, whoops, wrong one, but instead of throwing an error, let's look for the next one... aha, here's the right version, keep on running without the user ever knowing what happened.

Is that feasible in Win/*NIX apps?

I recall that the old Go32 DOS extender did something like that, albeit from the other end: put Go32v2 first in your path, and v1 after it in the path; then when a DOS app called Go32v1, Go32v2 would examine the request, and if it was for Go32v1, passed it along the path, so the app found the Go32v1 that it was expecting.

[note: IANAProgrammer. Use small words. :)

Re:Heavenly Versions

[Doc Ruby]

Apps should be able to search not only a local component DB (not just Windows, but any OS), but Internet databases and repositories for compatible components. The extra necessary ingredient is crypto-secure signatures, so the identity of the component and its version can be trusted. Also required is some authority for comparing new signatures against, either centrally authorative or in a "web of trust".

That entire app architecture is much more efficient than today's haphazard interop scene. And would benefit from a sound, clear, consistent foundation of accurately and precisely numbering versions for compatibility determination.

Re:Heavenly Versions

[Reziac]

Certainly would be nice if neither apps nor coders had to worry about interacting with older/newer versions of the "same" DLL, eh?

I'd think for stuff installed on your local system, there'd be no need to go searching the 'net for compatible components -- every app should come with its own, and under the database theory of avoiding DLL Hell, should bloody well know what's available on the local system.

Re:Heavenly Versions

[Doc Ruby]

Linux systems like Debian and Ubuntu use APT (A Package Tool) for automated install/update of dependent pacakges. APT keeps track of required versions, so upgrading any one part forces upgrades of all those depended upon. All automatic, across the Internet. Frequent security patches are easy. A client GUI notifies the admin that a new version is available, whenever (eg) a security patch is published. Clicking shows the details, including the changes in the new version and other packages that will get upgraded (but weren't warning because they weren't more urgent security upgrades). Clicking again performs the upgrades. There are many clients for the standard system, some of which completely automate everything, just emailing the admin when autoupdates were performed.

It's the main (daily) reason I use Linux, and certainly the main reason I prefer Debian-based distros. It's like Windows Update, but it works better, and it's open to anyone, without marketing considerations weighting its operational decisions.

Re:Heavenly Versions

[Reziac]

Yep, am aware of APT, strikes me as generally a good system for stuff that's often updated (provided the user has control over what gets patched, and over backing out bad ones) -- and certainly progress over the version hell that linux apps *can* be when nothing keeps track!

Not if you use the iTunes Music Store

[metamatic]

I was suckered into the iTunes upgrade, not knowing that Apple (a) screwed with QuickTime to disable jHymn, and (b) screwed with my iTunes Music Store account so I couldn't downgrade iTunes again without losing access to the store.

Still, it's been their loss. There were a couple of albums I was going to buy, but I'm not going to until jHymn is working again.

Re:Not if you use the iTunes Music Store

[Anonymous Coward]

buy? what is this buy you speak of?

PSP Firmware v2.01

[Anonymous Coward]

Worst. Upgrade. EVER! All it did was stop (well, temporarily inhibit) homebrew. Pisses me off. Security feature my ass.

Telejano 6.0 better than Telejano 7.0

[Tei]

I am a game developper. My proyect is Telejano, a Quake engine.

For some users its better to use old versions because can run smoothly on older software. While some high-end users want the latest build.
Often I look behind and test these old build and thinkk... "Humm.... I myself like this old version more than the new thing". But after that, I miss some key features.

So, I ask.. What you want?

I can enhance Telejano 6.0 forever. Or I can continue the roadmap with Telejano 7.0, ..8.0 etc,, that will need better and better hardware, with more ram, a better 3D card, etc.
As my computer is somewhat better than these of some users, I greedy choice to continue the roadmap to better and better Telejano engines. But the other option its still open for others engine-developpers... You can code to enhance, but you can code to optimize and bugfix. Because bugfixing and optimizing kill flexibility, is very anti-enhancement. Unenhanced code its often better than optimized code, because its readable, while optimized code its dificult to read. And bugfixes often make code harder to read, too. So its somewhat undesired. Its better to not have bugs, and not optimize code, but write good code and let the compiler do is magic, and the users buy enough horsepower :I

Three words: Software Lemon Law

[Nick Driver]

That's what we really need in the USA -- a software lemon law. For too many years, software customers have been getting cheated with faulty "products" and no legal remedy available to them. Yes it would make software more expensive, but so be it. In the long run, the quality of software and information technology in general would improve greatly. Right now the industry is analogous to that of the state where the pharmaceutical "industry" was back before the Food and Drug acts of 1906 and 1938 were passed and "patent medicines" that were sold everywhere and full of opiate poisons... or the state where the medical profession was before doctors had to have such intense training and be licensed before they could practice medicine.... or the state where the aviation industry was before the first Civil Aeronautics Act was passed which began to enforce law and order upon that industry.

Right now the software industry, as a whole, has in effect, a free "license to steal".

Donkey rollback

[spyrochaete]

Edonkey has actually saved my butt a few times when new software versions fuddled or broke a service. There's a great catalogue of retired legacy versions of popular (and unpopular) apps on the ED2k networks. It ain't stealing if you bought it, right?

Re:16 yr olds excluded from computer-industry even

[Junior J. Junior III]

I bet the reason for not letting in 18 year olds has to do with their status as minors and the amount of legal protections afforded minors. If a minor breaks an NDA, the recourse options available to the company is probably not so good.

Ugh... Case in Point...

[Greyfox]

If you really want this point driven home, try joining an MMORPG. You Star Wars guys know what I mean. I've never played SWG but it was really depressing watching EA systematically destroy everything that was fun about Ultima Online. I'm sure I know your pain.

At least you have SOME choice when you're updating software on your own computer. Not much you can do if the dev team of your favorite online app decides to royally screw it up.

Even worse...

[true_majik]

What about when a particular application has an update avaliable, requires you to upgrade no matter what, will not let you keep the version you have installed and if you do, the application will stop working. Not too long ago, I came across a Win98 PC that, while trying to view trailers at apple.com it required an upgrade for Quicktime. Unfortunately it did not provide a new version for Win9x, only Win2K and above. Without the latest version, the trailer wouldn't start playing because it *NEEDED* the new version of Quicktime....but somehow, a week prior, the very same trailer worked fine. Not being able to find a way around this, I had to *UPGRADE THE OS* to be able to upgrade Quicktime to be able to view a simple trailer!

Re:You often don't have a choice if you want suppo

[MrNougat]

On the other hand, how long should a vendor have to provide support for a piece of software? Should Broderbund still have to provide phone support for The Print Shop v2.0 (1994)?

If software companies can't end-of-life products, and have to support them indefinitely, the cost of vendor support becomes insanely high.

In the US auto industry, car manufacturers are required to produce replacement parts for a model for seven years.* Perhaps a regulation of that kind would be good for software/hardware vendors, too.

*Except Yugo, what with the giant war and everything.

Troll?

[Cranky Weasel]

So I've been moderated up to +3 Interessting, and back down to 0 - Troll.

I don't get it. I made a valid point about real behaviour - my own in particular. I didn't use inflammatory language, and I didn't accuse everybody of using it for the same purpose as I did.

I explained myself well, I think. How people arrived at the idea that I was trolling, I have no idea. But I guess that's what happens here when somebody says something unpopular.

Do your worst. My Karma is still fine.

Suitification

[RasendeRutje]

If invented (no patents) a word for this: Suitification.
It starts with a useful tool. Company creates some other, less useful tools. New tools don't sell. Company creates a Suite, which bundles all tools, and takes advantage of them working closely together (excusez marketing-droid language). And the original tool is an unusable monster.
Examples? Too many... ACDSee, Winamp, Norton utilities, MS-Office...

Re:Suitification

[ShadowBlasko]

ACDSee is an excellent example.

Good software, did what it was supposed to do, and did it well.

Clean, small footprint. It. Just. Worked.

Anything over 3.0 is shit. (Much like Winamp, go figure!)

The latest version was a total disaster.
I am starting to feel the same way about Nero as well.

CoolPlayer - GPL and Lightweight

[Anonymous Coward]

http://coolplayer.sourceforge.net/

Dump winamp..

[Radical Moderate]

...for Foobar. Teeny little footprint. www.foobar2000.org

Re:Dump winamp..

[Anonymous Coward]

The grandparent already said they tried foobar to no avail.

Non-techies fear of being "left behind"

[Reziac]

I see this all the time in my non-tech-savvy clients. The LESS they understand about software and hardware, the MORE fearful they are of being "left behind". So they glom onto every update and upgrade that comes down the pipe, despite having many problems with altogether too many of these upgrades.

My advice is always this: unless a particular update fixes a problem YOU are experiencing, or a particular upgrade supplies a new feature that YOU need, DON'T DO IT. The application update that fixes a problem on your neighbour's machine may break yours beyond repair. The upgrade that doesn't give you anything you need may also make it much harder to use the rest of the software.

Happily running Photoshop CS 2

[metamatic]

Yeah, I'm happily running PhotoShop Elements 2.0. Version 3.0 didn't offer any compelling reason to upgrade, and version 4.0 isn't Intel native--no way am I buying something now only to have to pay for another upgrade to get it to work on any Mac I upgrade to later this year. Get with the program, Adobe, Intel Macs were announced months ago, and have been shipping for a while.

Don't upgrade!

[zandermander]

I went from Girlfriend 1.0 to Girlfriend 2.0 which delivered on most of the promised features so I was pretty excited when offered an upgrade from GF 2.0 to Wife 1.0. The problem is that I found that Wife 1.0 offers slowly degrading performance and not all of the features of GF 2.0. Sadly I did not read the fineprint until after the upgrade to Wife 1.0 - this is an irreversible upgrade....

Re:Don't upgrade!

[Anonymous Coward]

not a problem if you dont use them at the same time its completely possible run girlfriend 3.0 whilst keeping wife 1.0

or a little hardware upgrade (some added silicon) and you could run wife 1.0.D, 1.0.DD, or 1.0.E for added gameing fun

Slashdot at its essence.

[Anonymous Coward]

16-year old innovates an excellent domain with a great name, and all these f**king monkeys know is how to masturbate by telling shit about the latest versions of software. I f**king love my illustrator cs2.

Site's owner is an idiot

[bluefoxlucid]

And the site's 16 year old owner is doing over 600 copyvios at $130,000 max each, so $78,000,000; but this doesn't count how many downloads were made. In reality, the copyvio suits could slap him with $130,000 per download, so we're talking likely several billion or possibly trillion dollars if oldversions.com is very old.

If he gets a C&D he better damn well listen; he doesn't, and his great great great great grandkids will still be paying. (note: I'm aware, when you die your debts die with you; debt is not inherited.)

Re:Site's owner is an idiot

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is there always some IP lawyer on here bitching about someone who is providing a legitimate service to the community.

If I got a C&D from the likes of you, I'd probably do what I do with all of them. Wipe my ass, flush, repeat.

Same thing creeps in to windows

[hurfy]

The issue i just ran into is that i can't upgrade our little psuedo server without spending half again as much to replace the tape drive and a bunch of tapes.

New versions of windows simply decided for me that those old tape drives (floppy drive port or parallel port, neither works, had em both)

I simply wanted to use the backup program we already had and the tape drives we already had to backup a folder at night. I see no reason to buy a new 40G tape drive to backup a 200M folder each night and pull the tape out!

MS decided for me that i dont want to do that anymore :(

How much code could it take to support that old device for God's sake. They took it out to avoid bloat in windows ?!? Aren't you glad they left out that extra couple kilobytes of program to keep windows lean and mean for you ;p

There is NO reason for it not to work, in fact it did eventually after installing every 3rd party driver that sounded remotely close to what i wanted and running the software a couple times under compatibilty mode. (ie, installing drivers for parallel cdrom to get tape to work, hehe)

----

even better, just thought of our previous accounting program.

One 'upgrade' added some new UI features, one of which was kinda nice. BUT it took out the ability to add custom icons on your custom toolbar buttons...thus the lookup for customer inquiry now gets the same icon as item inquiry instead of the easily identifiable ones i had made for previous versions :(

They made it easier to customize but harder to identify WHAT you had customized!

End of upgrade path for us. I knew they were just getting stupid now. When maintaince agreement stopped supporting it we stopped maint agreement. When company stopped support for it at all we stopped supporting the company.

Easy like this

[mayesa]

#apt-get update
#apt-get upgrade

what else?

Re:Easy like this

[SuiteSisterMary]

#apt-get update
#apt-get upgrade

What do you mean, ipop3d no longer accepts plain-text logins?

Use debian daily, love it to death, but even it has gotchas.

Next time: Upgrade isolated systems, and...

[BarnabyWilde]

..run in parallel until proven. Yes, it's a lot of work.

QuickTime Alternative

[antdude]

No no! QuickTime Alternative is even better.

Re:QuickTime Alternative

[Petrushka]

In some ways -- it doesn't keep bugging me, I can go full-screen, and I don't have to try to lock it down -- but I'd be glad if someone could enlighten me: other than being nagware, are there other ways in which QuickTime is inferior to QuickTime Alternative?

Re:QuickTime Alternative

[antdude]

Petrushka: You can download and watch high definition videos.

Re:QuickTime Alternative

[Petrushka]

Excellent, thanks.

To summarize the "doh" factor:

[Kjella]

Features and bugs = carrot and stick. Every version is to give you enough new buggy features to make you want to upgrade to the next version after that. If you haven't figured that out by now, you really shouldn't be in IT or sales in general.

Firefox and Gaim fight feature bloat

[chocolatetrumpet]

Unlike the commercial software world, I am so impressed that Firefox and Gaim seem to be refining and cleaning up their UI's, and actually even taking away unused features.

Combined with a strong plug-in architecture, this makes for very powerful programs.

Personally I am just so proud of these open source developers for taking away bloat and fighting feature creep. Our legal professionals should take a hint...

Why do you accept this? Examples...; ICQ99b

[PhYrE2k2]

Why do you accept that? That'd be my question!

If I got a car that failed to start 5 mornings of the year, I'd be pretty pissed off. If I got a TV that wasn't compatible with channel three or seven, I'd be rather annoyed. If my car's doors unlocked randomly on the third Tuesday of the month, I'd be frustrated. If I got a VCR that couldn't timer record at 58 minutes after the hour, I'd be pretty pissed off too!

So why do we let our computer programs have these problems? Why do programs need to be killed or the computer restarted at random (freezing during startup isn't as common since win2k). Why do we accept a computer program that doesn't seem to handle the formats established at the time with ease (think Windows XP destroying exif information on jpgs)? Why do we accept holes in our software that lets crooks in along with their bots, spyware, and adware? Why Why why?!?

I've always been a fan of a certain car maker (and still am), but when I got a 2004 sport sedan and a few weeks later had my dash light up brighter than a christmas tree, the dealer tells me that their software/flash upgrade to the car should fix the issue. Sure enough, it did, and by the forums, it wasn't an uncommon problem with early production of the model. But this is stemming into other areas. An audio system I got in 2000 couldn't read any CD-Rs- obviously it didn't spend enough time in testing, as this should have come up. My car had bugs! The EPROM on my new furnace needed to be replaced. This is getting silly!

Sure bugs are bound to get through, but it is the programmer's responsibility to properly test their program. I'd rather Windows 2000 be released today and have it stable as anything and a solid performer. This isn't how things work. Microsoft spends more time making Spider Solitaire for Vista then they do testing the OS itself.

Updates aren't always better. Sometimes they add functionality, like additional CD Recorder capability, updated roster information for a sports game, security fixes, etc. Other times they add bloat and problems.

Anyone remember ICQ 99b and the 98's? Memory footprint of about 1MB, fast as anything, fixed the data corruption issues of previous versions. Good upgrade. Then recall late 99 versions and 2000+, where the memory footprint was about 80MB, the thing took a good minute to start up. It was buggy, and an ad-city. Then they wonder why it died a horrible death to the favour of MSN? Pack hundreds of features in there and make it slow as anything and nobody will go back. Wait... That's a good description of Windows.

-M

Gentoo

[peterfa]

Yeah well, these people should not be feeling too upset over the upgrade issue. I run Gentoo and I'm trying to upgrade it. I am even having trouble switching to a new compiler version. If you think you have upgrade woes, try Gentoo.
Worse? Try RedHat or an RPM based distro. Now that's pain.
Of course, I wouldn't trade Linux in for Windows...ever. However, this hemmoraging is getting to me.

Re:Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds familiar... I also fell in love with Gentoo and started installing it on every unattended computer I could get my hands on. However, the compiler upgrade/downgrade brokenity got to me too with 2005.1.r1 while merely trying to emerge X.org ... Portage broke the C++ standard libs and started oscillating between the old and the new version of GCC and standard C and C++ libs. I find the bug somewhat annoying and am planning on resolving it before I touch Gentoo again! Until I've got time to do that I'm back to Slackware.

Re:1996 Called...

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you forget about the intervening versions of Winamp that prove that upgrades sometime suck?

Yeah, I tried that 4.0. What a waste of time.

New Versions sometimes Less Features

[JoeCommodore]

New version of Acrobat from 4 or 5 to 6 or later? Now it's standard stuff that was included are now a lot more extra.

Norton Utilities for Mac version3 included many features including a great backup utility. All gone in the later versions, and in some more problematic of what features remain.

PrintShop Deluxe for Mac 68000 included a graphics exporter which alowed you to export the PSD graphics into Adobe Illustrator, Quickdraw PICT or EPS. No longer included with the newer PrintShops.

Microsoft Office 98 for Mac included among other features an agenda Wizard, not in 2001 or 2004, though you can still use it in the newer versions if you copy it over.

Microsoft Office 2004 now only ofers Max (the Mac computer) as your assistant, no more clippit or professor (Max was the coolest anyway).

I'm sure there are many more. Partly I think it is beacuse the programmers that originally built some of the software were not there to do the upgrading, many times I have seen virtually new adaptations of the same program in an upgrade (PrintShop) as it seems evident they changed programming teams or development platforms.

Re:New Versions sometimes Less Features

[Jerry Rivers]

What you say is very true. Adobe for example, basically crippled text editing in Acrobat 7, and made it so you can't even use version 6 and 7 at the same time. If you were lucky enough to keep version 5 around you usually have to use that, which works just fine. The same applies to some configurations of printing in 6 and 7. Complaints just get a "I can't hear you" reaction.

The real reason for upgrades

[iminplaya]

besides the obvious money grab is the vain attempt to stay ahead of the warez sites.

OldVersion.com DOESN'T have iTunes...

[armyturtle]

It's funny this article should come up today. I just built a new computer this week & was looking to keep the same version iTunes I had on my old one. OldVersion.com immediately came to mind - however when I went to their site I found it awfully strange that there isn't ONE, not a single ONE version of iTunes there. Only thing on the itunes page is, "iTunes is currently unavailable." Pretty fishy if you ask me. See for yourself: http://oldversion.com/program.php?n=itunes iTunes-Page

Rolling back - what do YOU do?

[martyb]

(Background: I first put hand to a computer in 1972 via an ASR-33 Teletype over a 110 baud accoustical-coupler modem to a timesharing PDP/8 with, IIRC, 8KB(!) of memory.)

Over the years, I've been burned MANY TIMES by upgrades causing me more problems than they fixed.

What I do: I try to always download to a local directory, first, and ONLY THEN do I run the install. That way, if it goes bad, I can always try to uninstall and then re-install the prior version. (Exceptions: AVG updates, and Firefox extensions - only the original is downloaded first. Mostly because they make it way to easy to just install the updates directly, and also because I have not burned by doing this, yet.) I also regularly use Windows/XPs System Restore to make a backup - at least once a week. And, I have spare 200GB and 300GB USB drives which I use for system backups.

Question:

• How do you handle upgrades so you can roll back to prior versions?
• What tools/utilities have you used that have saved your bacon?
• How do you take control of the install/upgrade process on your system instead of relying on each vendor providing a mechanism for backing out?

I'd love to have a tool that I could fire up so that when I do an install/upgrade, it logged EVERY change to my system in plain text. (e.g.: Created file foo.txt; read file: baz.ini; replaced file: bar.doc; deleted registry key: ... added Registry key: ...)

that would permit me, immediately after the install, I could see what was potentially impacted. Further down the road, I'd have info I could refer to so I can find out what hosed needed functionality.

Case in point: I recently tried to write some data to a CD (hadn't done that for a few months) and cannot. I have no idea which of the past 4 months' downloads/installs caused the problem. But, with logs such as I just described, my task would be so much easier.

Re:Rolling back - what do YOU do?

[silas_moeckel]

One word ghost, at least for desktops. My laptop gets ghosted once it's fully installed and I roll back to that every few months possibly reinstalling a few apps and reghosting the laptop. I dont keep the sole coppies of much anything on there email is synced via imap, calendars via webdav (moving this stuff to http://www.funambol.com/opensource/ assuming it works as well as it talks) documents are in a offline folder that gets synced up to a fileserver whenever I'm using the laptop at home and all the bookmarks etc are networked. My address book synces with my Blackberry and will move over to the previous project when thats complete. So that gets all the data on the servers and the theyare all backed up via bacula and an old DLT7000 that have several TB's worth of tapes for. Full backups are on my schedual (it's a week of changing tapes need to get a robot)and months of diffs fit on a single tape. I can also backup via bacula to DVD's it's significatly faster than the DLT but requires more human intervention and I just trust tapes more.

Keep a downloads folder

[danimrich]

All software downloads on my computer go into a "downloads" folder and are sorted by type and/or name of software. This practice is from the days before broadband connections for home users became commonplace. Coincidentially this allows me to use older versions of software like ICQ where the ads are about half as large as in the newer one or older versions of winamp (for some plugins). But I mostly tend to keep my software up-to-date.

Re:Anyone who has ever used Quickbooks Enterprise

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I know lots of people with this problem. I have also heard that they migrated to a smaller company that sells a similar product that has true double entry accounting system called financial navigator based in California. I do not know their website but i think you can google it.

updates, when software changes

[Device666]

When you buy/use a specific software package for the first time, you probably investigated that it meets your needs. If it is exacly what you need, a update with added functionality is probably most often just a little annoyance. And all spyware and DRM pains are the toys for evil companies. In FOSS software you have also up en downgrades, but and there you won't have the troubles of spyware or DRM, nor the problem that you cannot find older versions, or that you have paid for something they can practice all their evil company stuff with. So for these people FOSS will become more and more a solution. After a cold turkey from all the closed source stuff, maybe they will find a nice addiction to open software. I feel relieved, I had the severe ilness called upgrad-ites myself, long ago. Then I moved over to OpenBSD and Linux. Since then I have decent support, better solutions for no cost, ultra flexibillity and all using free and open standards (and no virusses). I am now a complete stranger tot all the non-foss-fuss.

Re:Win98 had real features beyond Win95.

[Richard Steiner]

Like what?

Keep in mind that most "Win95" installations from the fall of 1996 onwards were actually Windows 95 OSR2, OSR2.1, or OSR2.5, meaning that things like FAT32 were already present, and USB support was either present or available via a patch.

what good is it?

[weg]

What does it help that an older version is still available if the software supplier forces me to upgrade (for compatibility reasons)?
(e.g., Final Cut Studio requires Quicktime version 7.0.4 or later, which means that I probably also have to upgrade Quicktime Pro if I bought an older version).

Re:Anyone who has ever used Quickbooks Enterprise

[Ex Machina]

testing enviornment = GAMES SERVER ;)

legislation

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope soon that decision is taken completely and totally out of your hands, because you are the posterboy for the problem.. We need to treat software like any other product if people want to profit from it like a product. Normal consumer warranties and a lemon law. If software companies want to keep playing the perpetual buggy betaware dance, then perhaps a little legislative inducement might get them to get rid of that "OMG not possible to code well" mindset.

If it means you have to move out of fancy and expensive california offices and drive less expensive cars-who cares? There's enough demand out there that even if 90% of the software companies went under, the other 10% who are willing to actually code well BEFORE they release will get the business. And if it is too high a price, look around, there are coders out there in the global market who can step in and keep doing it cheaper and better until we reach a consumer satisfaction level.

This ain't the 80s and 90s no more, you can't keep skating forever on past software glory, humongous checks for crapware, and mass consumer naievete. the revolt has started, you can see it, look at the article, people are resisting upgrades that do nothing beyond keeping a check rolling in to some company. You have to code value now, not just mass lines of code.

If you offer it for money, be prepared one day for consumer backlash, because it's already starting to crack open. You can't have it both ways with high costs and patents and not expect eventually to have your training wheels excuses for bugware ripped away and be forced into being treated like every other business out there.

F&#*$ing Intuit is a MAJOR problem this way.

[CFD339]

I used to love my Quickbooks. That was 10 years ago. Now, every new version adds more advertising built in then the last, puts more stuff in web browser style (or actual in some cases) interfaces, and starts costing more money.

Worse, they don't support common file interchanges and actually make it as hard as possible to use them, instead forcing me to pay THEM for the privilidge of connecting to my back. They also charge my bank, or charges me too! All this, for what should be free.

What stinks, is that MS Money small business is unusable (and talks to me -- which is even worse) and the other products out there are insanely expensive.

I've looked for one that runs in linux natively, but not found anything workable yet (I'd still love one that did).

Grrrrr. I've gone form loving to hating Intuit in just 3 years. What a shame.

Upgrading?

[linnerd40]

I often find upgrading quite a hassle. Some programs I use come up with updates every 2 days! That is insane. I just want software that works. Who really cares about a little upgrade that adds one tiny feature or fixes a non-problematic bug. If you want stability, go with Linux or BSD. Some might say that the applications are not the best but that is wrong. It may take a little effort, but you can get just as good programs for Linux as for Windows. I often perfer the Linux counter parts of Windows applications. Besides, Windows is so easy. I want a challenge. Ok, off topic now. Anywayz, I find updating software for major upgrades only is quite sufficiant and I have had no problems with compatibility or stability.

FileHippo

[RLKnight2004]

One site: filehippo.com I find this site to be better than oldversion.com

Re:Why do you accept this? Examples...; ICQ99b

[Anonymous Coward]

If I got a car that failed to start 5 mornings of the year, I'd be pretty pissed off.

you obviously don't live in Minnesota.

Re:F&#*$ing Intuit is a MAJOR problem this way

[theskipper]

Still using QB v5.0 purchased in 1996. Upon installation it asks if you want to install Netscape 2.0 to access its online services.

I'm totally blind to the three dialogs asking if I want to update the tax tables by calling an 800 number. Just reflexively click ok-ok-ok.

One of these days I'm going to call the phone number to see if it's still connected. At this point I'll probably get around to it in 2010 or so.

Great piece of software.

Re:F&#*$ing Intuit is a MAJOR problem this way

[CFD339]

Newer versions actually STOP WORKING in some respects if you don't upgrade (so I'm told, anyway). Bastards.

Old News

[mcocke]

Of couse upgrades aren't always a good idea for the end user! Programs changing EULA terms, adding DRM, adding adware, adding 'phone home' features, introducing 'features' simply to break compatability with other programs... The list of reasons NOT to upgrade is quite extensive. My personal guesstimate is that less than half of the time is an upgrade worth installing (depending on vendor - some is much worse!). I recommend to everyone that I know that they keep their old software on file and carefully evaluate upgrades before tossing the older stuff. Even 'real' new features sometimes aren't worth the learning curve, and they happen more rarely than most people think.

All I can think of is clippy

[CrazyJim1]

So many people paid money expecting a Word for Windows upgrade and were met with a smart assed paper clip.

Re:Anyone who has ever used Quickbooks Enterprise

[Anonymous Coward]

You can do a manual download of R5P (it's only available as a 'webpatch' at the moment at Intuit's website), which resoloves many [but not all] of the issues you guys are having.

R3 (available via automagic update) was problematic, and R4 was a 'private release' for big companies complaining about R3.

As always, test it on a non-production machine for a while before conducting the upgrade company-wide. Also, be sure that it actually upgrades all the way to R5 - sometimes the same patch will only bring it up to R4 (in which case you just re-apply it).

--SONET

Another argument against net apps

[istartedi]

You can't roll back network apps. I always remember when DejaNews was the best news archiver. One day I hit it, and they had changed the whole thing. The new version of the site just blew chunks compared to the old one; less easy to navigate, ugly colors, etc., no really great new functions, and prone to crash the browser. For a while, whenever some site did that I'd say "they Deja'd it". This has been part of the success of Google and to a lesser extent Yahoo! which has changed a bit, but rather conservatively. I continue to use them on a regular basis. When Slashdot caved in to all the doofuses that insisted it use CSS, what did I get? Pages that occasionally rendered text on top of eachother and had to be re-loaded. Nothing new that really mattered, and the new features that are added now could probably be done without CSS.

But I digress. If your apps are delivered over the 'net, you may be prevented from downgrading. Of course some things *have* to be delivered over the 'net so it's unavoidable. And of course if it's really bad, hopefully enough people will agree with you so that the free market will provide an alternative, which is what happened to DejaNews (or did they get bought?). It's just that switching is often a bigger hassle than downgrading.

Software upgrades and computer obsolescence

[riker1384]

What worries me about all these upgrades is that the might slow things down and eat up more memory. I use a G4 Emac 1Ghz and I hope to at least get 18-24 more months of good use if I add a little RAM, but I worry if all these updates will make my computer obsolete sooner. They sell the computers and the software, so it seems like they might have an interest in forcing me to upgrade.

Maybe you do have a choice

[BroncoInCalifornia]

I spoke to someone at the help desk/sales department and got nowhere (if the disk is faulty due to a manufacturing defect send it back and we will replace it). Not like I had much of a choice, so I ponied up the money.

Additions to python such as scipy are bring some Matlab like functionality. Defining class objects in Matlab is Ugly Ugly Ugly. In Python creating new classes is so much easier.

The extensions to Python are not as complete as the Matlab toolboxes but python is a far far better programming license. And Python is free.

Re:Why do you accept this? Examples...; ICQ99b

[Anonymous Coward]

I found a book explaining a lot of the issues involved.

The Software Consipiracy by Mark Minasi

Microsoft "upgrade"

[jridley]

I got bitten by a non-reversible upgrade from Microsoft. My XP laptop had Movie Maker, and when Windows Update brought it to 1.2, I started using the camcorder as a streaming capture device; analog video in, firewire out; no tape. Worked fine.

Then they released 2.0 on Windows Update.

Now, when I try to stream video through the camcorder, Movie Maker "helpfully" refuses to record; it pops up a dialog informing me of my "mistake" in trying to import from the camcorder with no tape in the deck.

There's no way to go back to 1.2. My XP has 1.0, I can install that, and from there I can update to 2.0. 1.2 isn't available anywhere.

Oh well, it just gave me incentive to go out and find a different (non-Microsoft) program to do the capture.

Three versions for workarounds

[dbIII]

I have three versions of one large ludicrously expensive geophysical package due to showstopping problems in each version.

Most recent version - has some features that are required. Some other features hang. Printing doesn't work and the clients don't pay unless they have their hard copy plots.

Previous version - the required new features all work, but tape access doesn't work and almost all data comes in on tape. Printing doesn't work either.

Two versions back - missing a lot of features but printing and tape input work on the Solaris version but not in any other version. Unable to run most scripts for the new version.

So the workaround is to have some machines for each version and the users log in to each as needed and waste a lot of time each time they get confused about what should be run where. To make things worse - the plot previewing program only runs in 8 bit colour and the upgrade for that (which didn't arrive, a labelled but blank CD arrived instead) would have disabled scripting support and required all users to spend up to five minutes of mucking about with a GUI (slow to load large files) each time they wanted to plot something - while currently only about one in twenty plots are previewed.

Re:Why do you accept this? Examples...; ICQ99b

[mellon]

How much did you pay for your car? Now, how much did you pay for all the software that you're currently using? Do you need me to go on?

My argument is somewhat weakened by the fact that paying more for software doesn't actually seem to achieve a higher level of quality - indeed it seems to me that in many cases the more you pay, the worse the software is. But at least when we're talking about the software we personally use, I think it's a meaningful measure. If you really paid $30k for your complete computer system, it bloody well ought to be reliable, secure and accurate. But if, like most people, you paid a lot less than that, then it doesn't make sense to talk about it on the same terms.

Another thing to consider is that unlike a car, software wants to be free. That is, in the sense that the marginal cost of each additional copy is zero. But the marginal cost isn't the entire cost - in fact, it's none of the cost - the cost of a software product is in the development, and it can be quite expensive, for a nice piece of software. But the marginal cost still dominates the way the software is sold - free software generally isn't, or it's sold on the basis of support, which generally doesn't pay for development. Non-free software is sold, but most of the extant copies are generally pirated (this is for the stuff we use - it's different for big corporate software).

My point isn't that pirates are 3v1l, that we should have to pay more for software, or anything like that. It's just that comparing the price and reliability of your car to the price and reliability of your spreadsheet is comparing apples and oranges. I don't see that changing in the future. So you're probably going to have to get used to paying for bug fixes, fixing the bugs yourself, or hoping that some open source developer fixes them without you having to do anything. From the perspective of personal responsibility, I recommend you go with choices one or two, although in practice I find that I benefit far more frequently from choice three. Which is pretty amazing, possibly even cause for celebration.

License review?

[jbn-o]

Has OldVersion.com reviewed the licenses for the proprietary software it distributes? Some proprietary software is not redistributable by anyone but the proprietor, some proprietary programs are only distributable if one observes onerous terms (like constantly monitoring a website for updates). When I skim this site, I get no impression that anyone there cares much for licensing and this is really just a place to find multiple ongoing copyright infringements.

Perfect example: Quicken

[ErichTheRed]

One example of this theme from the consumer world is Quicken. I've been using it for ages, ever since it was a simple checkbook register for DOS. It's got the perfect mix of features that make it a really good tool for maanging personal finances.

Lately however, I've been a little pissed at Intuit. Intuit has steadily cut back on product support over the last few years and has not been doing a very good job with testing. Last year, it ate a large portion of my transactions. It was my own stupid fault for not backing up the file regularly, but Quicken's proprietary data format makes it nearly impossible to recover from data corruption. Add to this the fact that Intuit is forcing financial institutions to adopt its proprietary extensions to the OFX standard. Finally, if you do want to downgrade, you can't unconvert your old file; you'll lose everything you entered on the new version.

Given all this, I've considered switching, but found that I can't. Microsoft Money, their only real competition, is awful compared to Quicken, and is even more ad-laden. Open-source tools just aren't mature enough and don't have enough "personal finance smarts" built in for common transactions. Accounting packages have no personal finance smarts built-in; they're just a chart of accounts that you have to analyze yourself.

I'm all for vendors wanting to make money periodically, but we should get something in return instead of just being forced to pay up. I'd even pay double for "Quicken Pro" that linked to a DBMS on the back-end and was better supported.

Re:Perfect example: Quicken

[swordgeek]

Something to look at:

Ace Money. A single account is a free download, more accounts are fairly cheap. It seems to be a pretty good little program.

You need..

[Anonymous Coward]

a wood stove and a ukulele son.

Re:Why do you accept this? Examples...; ICQ99b

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft spends more time making Spider Solitaire for Vista then they do testing the OS itself.

Congrats. This statement makes you a moron.

Happily Running GIMP 2.2.x

[tepples]

Adobe is the worst, though, since they CONSTANTLY change the goddamn key shortcuts to the tools.

I know GIMPshop is still not a serious contender in the print world, but at least GIMP lets the user customize all menu and toolbox key bindings. Adobe could learn a thing or two from the GIMP developers.

Media Player Classic

[tepples]

And it's not like iTunes or Windows Media Player are any better. They're hogs, too.

Tried Media Player Classic, a simplified media player for Windows with the Windows Media Player backend and a WMP 6.x style frontend?

QuickTime Alternative

[tepples]

You might want to try Media Player Classic and QuickTime Alternative.

Re:Why do you accept this? Examples...; ICQ99b

[PhYrE2k2]

How much did you pay for your car? Now, how much did you pay for all the software that you're currently using? Do you need me to go on?

How many units of my car are sold? How much R&D, testing, certification, and of course parts go into my car? Now, how many units of software are produced at next to no cost to the developer?

My argument is somewhat weakened by the fact that paying more for software doesn't actually seem to achieve a higher level of quality

You'd think higher price means fewer consumer customers and more corporate customers. Corporate customers leads to feature bloat. Corporate customers SHOULDN'T accept failure, but do as they seem to be able to afford it a lot more than say, a kid who just lost his university paper.

If you really paid $30k for your complete computer system, it bloody well ought to be reliable, secure and accurate.

Not really. MS Access better be robust if it's going to get my data. MySQL better be robust if it's going to get my data. Oracle better be robust if it's going to get my data. Data loss (as this example) is still data loss. Whether I (or a company) paid nothing, $700, or $70,000 for my database software, it needs to work reliably. I'd be just as annoyed if crackers broke into my linux servers than my windows servers. So why would it be any different? [note- multiple contributors creates a difficulty to blame in many open source projects- lets assume one developer or group of developers here].

... marginal cost ...

In one sense, I'd agree with you, because one can't deny that effect. On the other hand though, who cares what the marginal cost or marginal revenue are? All the company cares about is the TOTAL cost and TOTAL revenue (with the time value of money and cash flow in there). The software giant determines a good estimate of how many units they're going to sell and at what price, and has an idea of revenue (determine two and you have the third). They have a good idea of cost from experience as well.

So the question becomes, at what point have they invested enough and are ready to reap the benefits and let the gravy train roll in. At what point do they sit back and say that it's "good enough" despite not being done.

I commend what PS3 is doing compared to XBox360. They could have easily said, knowing the XBox360 date, that they are going to rush out development. They didn't. Microsoft's strategy was to get established. Get the games, get the early adopters to purchase despite a high price tag. But no- PS3 is holding it's ground with a vague timeframe as to when it might be ready (with no precise dates). It'll be ready when it is ready. No production flaws wiht power supplies and faulty drives. They're putting technical superiority above short term profit, and creating a better system as a result of it... rather than rehashing the XBox with a faster processor and better graphics board.

Non-free software is sold, but most of the extant copies are generally pirated (this is for the stuff we use - it's different for big corporate software).

Which came first- the chicken or the egg? Shareware was immensely popular for the longest time until developers got greedy. Microsoft Office used to be just over $100 and come on a series of 30-odd floppy discs for Windows 3.1. Why is it worth $750-$1000 for the near same set of features? Because they know people need it. Remember what I said before about picking two of the three. They set the revenue (probably based on the estimated cost), set the price, and that determines the number of units. If they want to sell more, the price is going to have to slip down.

I guess what I"m saying is that if, like an XBox game, if Office was worth $40, who wouldn't buy it? But these days Windows + Office > $1000 wh

Re:Why do you accept this? Examples...; ICQ99b

[PhYrE2k2]

Congrats. This statement makes you a moron.

Obvious exaggeration, but I'm glad you managed to get [or failed to get] the joke. Microsoft obviously tests their software considerably, but either doesn't catch countless bugs or fails to deem them as important. On something as important as an operating system, that should really be tested to the point of being next to bug free. Think of the countless bugs in the past- worms that can infect through obvious oversights in networking code, registry corruption, etc- all crucial to the system's operation.

I guess the point is- As opposed to improving the core operating system in Windows 98 and Windows ME for example, or 2000 through XP, they add new visual features that are shown to the user to make them think the world is a better place. I'd rather have them leave out the games section, media player, etc, and actually pay attention to what matters.

-M

A real upgrade.

[twitter]

Want WinAmp to work? OK, get Mepis or Debian Etch. XMMP still works the way Winamp was supposed to and won't eat your machine. You don't even have to install Mepis to start playing your music, just boot it and double click on the hard drive icon on your desk to start playing music.

Then try Amarok and wonder what giant waste of cycles is going on with the other programs. Amarok comes with Mepis and is an easy "apt-get install amarok" from working with Etch. Amarok is both network and culturally aware. It plays off networked boxes, so you can easily share your music with yourself without needing a 200GB hard drive in your laptop. sftp support seems a little sketchy for some reason, but I'm sure that will be fixed soon. Nice features are cover art and lyric management. It works without skipping while I work on a 1GHz laptop.

If Amarok is too heavy you can run Juk, which is also network aware and has most of what you want in a media player. Random playlists, tag sorting by artist, record year, etc, auto collection scanning and good sftp support make it a fine but light player.

Re:A real upgrade.

[Anonymous Coward]

Want WinAmp to work? OK, get Mepis or Debian Etch

ROFLMAO, yes, I'm off to switch operating systems for a better MP3 player experience. Thanks a lot.

Windows is fine. I don't suffer from spyware, malware, viruses or anything like that. All you have to do is use some common sense. You should try that sometime.

Win 98SE = Win 95 OSR4

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not even a Microsoft user or customer, and even I know that is not true. Win98 had real features beyond Win95. Win98 SE2 was a bugfix of previous Win98 releases. I don't know the details, but 98 over 95 added things like USB (although it never worked right) and CD burning and other new stuff that was not common in August of 1995 when Win95 was released.

Well, I am a Microsoft customer (both Windows 95 and 98) so I would tend to agree with the grandparent for the most part. Fundamentally, Windows 98SE uses the same version of DOS (7.1) that is used in Win 95 OSR2 and up. USB support worked (to some extent) in Win 95 OSR2. Heck, even Windows NT 4 can be patched to have USB support. As for CD burning, I have been doing that just fine in Windows 95 OSR2 without any problems for many years. Heck if you really wanted to, you could get an old copy of Nero and burn CDs under Windows 3.11!

Open source fanboy response

[driptray]

It should be pointed out that the phenomenom of "updates not in user's best interests" only occurs with closed-source software. In the open-source world the nasties in the new version would be stripped out by the user-community.

You just can't include anti-user features in open-source software.

Re:You often don't have a choice if you want suppo

[dodobh]

And exactly _what_ is a replacement part for software?

DON'T MESS WITH A STABLE SYSTEM

[speedlaw]

As a lawyer who unfortunately got known as the guy in the office who had a clue about computers, I learned the hard way that you don't upgrade without good cause. Indeed, we went back to word 97 from word 2003 as it was egregious bloatware, and they still hadn't fixed the "automatic paragraph numbering" bugs, which for guys who number many paragraphs is a huge issue. The best word processor I ever used was WriteNow 4.0, it used 400k of memory in my Apple, and was far and away better than any of the Microcrap that I've used since. RULE ONE...IF IT WORKS, DO NOT FIX IT.

robbing peter to pay paul

[v1]

One major software title I used to use a lot had this problem. I hopped on board at about version 2. This company had a very active beta program, and it was not uncommon to see a new version once a week. Unfortunately, they spent such an unbalanced amount of time on new development as opposed to bug fixing, that the new builds were very often worse than the old ones. You might argue that this was beta and so I cannot expect a polished product, and I agree. However, there was essentially no difference between the betas and the releases. It was widely believed that the week of the next planned release or paid upgrade, they'd take the best beta of the last few weeks and call it a release. (I don't think they ever did a "feature freeze")

It was very common among the developers that used the betas, to keep ALL previous betas. Many users were stuck several versions back because a critical feature they required had been broken several builds ago and had not been fixed yet. It was a very aggrivating tradeoff, to be dealing with a month-old build because you needed feature ABC to work, but then to see them fix (or add) three other things you really had been waiting for but that you can only drool at because you simply cannot upgrade until they fix your issue.

Sometimes you'd upgrade and then a week later get flooded with bug reports. Track down the problem and find it's the compiler itself that is causing the problem, and back you go, to last month's build. I was running several months behind on several occasions, using versions that were betas published prior to the most current release, which was already in a new beta cycle. In that case there simply was no release that ran acceptably.

All in all a very frustrating experience. I made my last paid upgrade at v4.5, it's now around version 7 I think, I've stopped keeping track of it since about 5.5. There are a lot of others in my same situation, agreeing that 4.52 is the best version that was ever released, from a stability standpoint.

What's really going to bite is when more companies go to a subscription model, and require a periodic payment to keep the program you already have running. When those companies go out of business or stop supporting an older version, you're just plain screwed. You'l be foreced to upgrade and suffer the consequences, or go through the torture that is changing products after you're already established with one.

Somewhat on topic... what's the current legal interpretation of software made by a company that is out of business? Is it considered public domain at that point? Or does the (defunct) author have to release it into the public domain? Or does it expire after a certain timespan or after termination of support?

Re:robbing peter to pay paul

[Anonymous Coward]

This has to be Lotus Notes, right?

I used to do tech support for this beast. I was on a team that had to support two products that ran on top of it, and every new release was a nightmare with what it would break.

Man, I felt so sorry for our customers.

Glad I got out of there.

Re:You often don't have a choice if you want suppo

[!equal]

dll files.

Cdr reading capability wasn't possible then

[KZigurs]

Eeehm... The issue with CD-Rs is not exactly a bug, but the fact that at the time disc transports for consumer electronics that could support CD-R (They are quite a different beasts from your off-the-shelf pressed CDs) wasn't available. This is why at ~2001-2002 you could see full shops with radios or boom-boxes that prominently displayed - CDR compatible,

Re:You often don't have a choice if you want suppo

[MrNougat]

I was thinking that replacement parts in the auto industry would be analogous to product support for software. Say that software vendors were required to make support available (not for free, just available) for n years, and after that they were free to discontinue support. This would ensure that vendors would continue to support a release for n years without requiring customers to upgrade, and give vendors a fairer playing field on which to compete.

If one vendor is cutting their support costs by only supporting the current version, that keeps their price low. Another vendor, wanting to do the right thing and provide more support for previous versions of a competing product has higher support costs, and thereby their price must be higher.

Re:Why do you accept this? Examples...; ICQ99b

[denne]

"If I got a car that failed to start 5 mornings of the year, I'd be pretty pissed off. If I got a TV that wasn't compatible with channel three or seven, I'd be rather annoyed. If my car's doors unlocked randomly on the third Tuesday of the month, I'd be frustrated. If I got a VCR that couldn't timer record at 58 minutes after the hour, I'd be pretty pissed off too!"

Well,i have heard about cars breaking down. and they do that alot to! And it costs a fortune to fix. And often, its because of automakers calculated risks of failure and choice between components that make them break down.

Re:Why do you accept this? Examples...; ICQ99b

[kibbylow]

It really bothers me when someone compares cars to software.

Why do we accept holes in our software that lets crooks in along with their bots, spyware, and adware?

Is your car immune to accidents, getting stolen, having its breaks tampered with, or getting keyed? Of course not. A car theif is like a hacker, if he wants to do something to your property, he won't be stopped by your anti-theft system or firewall.

When someone buys a car, they typically keep it maintained by regular inspections and oil changes. Software users are different because they have a mind set of if it ain't broke don't try to fix it. It's as simple as a few mouse clicks, or turning on auto update, but many users still refuse to do this.

Two words: File Permissions

[abb3w]

(If one of you kind souls would point something out that XP will do that 98 wouldn't, please point it out... and not Microsoft's laughable firewall, I use Zone Alarm).

XP supports NTFS style file permissions, which (EG) allow you to create empty folders which various spyware expect to be able to install themselves into (CashBack, Bullseye Network, SideFind, 180Solutions, etc), and remove ALL user permissions from them, thereby causing known spyware installers to crash. Of course, that was in Win2K as well.

Remote desktop is kind of nice, too, and was limited IIR to server versions of 2K. Of course, both of these things are limited to XP Pro, not Home. About the only new trick for both Home and Pro of any interest to users is the support for multiple DLL versions, which can make running software packages that expect different versions of a DLL to play nicer together.

Generally, I've preferred 2K-based systems; XP did nasty things to the peer-to-peer networking support, and I don't want remote desktop all that often.

Re:You often don't have a choice if you want suppo

[dodobh]

nope. Spare parts would be the equivalent of having binaries available (or source).
Having support available would be like having mechanics available all the time to help you replace the spare part.

It's my analogy; I'm going to eat it!

[MrNougat]

Yes, spare parts would be the literal equivalent of having binaries or source available, but that doesn't make sense when you consider the point I was trying to make.

For the purposes of my analogy, software support is analogous to spare parts.

Another vote for MusikCube

[Anonymous Coward]

Using it for my main mp3 player now and loving it.

Re:You often don't have a choice if you want suppo

[tcgroat]

In the US auto industry, car manufacturers are required to produce replacement parts for a model for seven years. Thank goodness the aftermarket parts industry comes out with lower priced, longer lasting replacements. $300 for a factory-replacement fuel pump that's identical to the one that failed in less than four years? No thank you, I'll fix my 20 year old rust bucket with parts from the NAPA store.

The problem with software and their attached EULAs is that there isn't a NAPA store. When it breaks you can't fix it, in fact the EULA claims it's illegal to diagnose the problem (reverse engineering). Only the supplier's mechanics are allowed to open the hood and take a look. All you can do is buy a new one when the dealer says they quit fixing your model.

Re:Anyone who has ever used Quickbooks Enterprise

[SyncNine]

On a side note, we did do a test in an isolated network -- the problem is that most of the bugs in R1-R3 of Quickbooks 2006 are not exacerbated in that style of install. It requires multiple users doing many different things in order to corrupt the database. Unfortunately, on a testing install, all functionality 'Just Worked (TM)'.

It wasn't until we actually did the true upgrade to it that the problems crawled out of the woodwork. Regardless, if I had a staff of 5 under me instead of just 1, I'm sure I could have duped the errors in a small network :).

I'll hit them up for more staff.

Re:Why do you accept this? Examples...; ICQ99b

[mellon]

Well, it's an admirable rant, and I agree with many of your sentiments, but the bottom line is that companies care about the marginal cost of software because competition and piracy drive the price of the software, amortized over its user base (including the people who didn't pay for it), down to the marginal cost. That's how the market works. If the total income for a product is less than the total cost, you're dead. You're right that Microsoft has been using lock-in and legal force to charge exhorbitant prices for Word. It would be nice if something changed so that that didn't happen anymore. But the economics of software really are chancy, and whether you like it or not, they probably don't support the level of reliability you yearn for. You know what software is that reliable? MVS. Why? Years of no new features, and years of bug fixes. You want a reliable version of Linux? Check back in 20 years - if the rate of innovation has flattened out by then, maybe you'll get your wish.