Originally Posted by
Saracen999
I love it when people say "the fact is" when it self-evidently ISN'T the fact.
First, where did I say I expect it to be supported forever?
If you bothered to read what I said before criticising, I said tbe exact opposite. I neither want nor need MS support for my systems. That's why they are isolated behind an air-gap, have no internet connectivity, and have been running, 100% stably, for a decade or more, and so on.
My comments were to illustrate why the "you should upgrade" cobblers is just that in some circumstances. It might well apply to most users, especially home users, but people that say that ought to realiise there are circumstances where it is simply wrong.
Also, while future-proofing is indeed always a major consideration, so is the cost both in time, money and inconvenience of doing so.
I have hardware that is currently doing a perfectly adequate job, so please explain your engineering rationale for why I should spend thousands of pounds, or more, and loads of time, upgrading it to gain .... well, what exactly? The ability to run the "latest OS" that doesn't do anything I want, or need.
Then there's software solutions, There's a whole load of stuff written in Delphi, Paradox, dBase III/IV, CA Clipper, FoxPro, DataEase, etc. Again, they are doing what's needed. They sit there, day after day, doing what they need to, costing .... zip, zilch, nothing.
So again, why exactly should I upgrade, and to gain .... again .... what, exactly?
You then go on to claim "The fact is I haven't conxidered this".
Utter tripe.
It's a simple cost-benefit analysis.
Cost of upgrading = prohibitive. Benefit = naff all.
To do so, I either have to replace perfectly functioning hardware ( and you don't what or even if it exists) or go find suitable modern development environments, buy them, learn them, then build systems to replicate what is currently being done perfectly happily for no cost.
If these were systems which needed to grow constantly, evolve now and into go long-term, then I might agree with you and would have been porting years ago. But they aren't.
Where on earth are you getting this rubbish.
No, I'm not being "forced" into changing, mainly because I'm not changing.
Yes, I considered it. If you read what I said, I have a whole cupboard of "spares" that will allow me to replace everything, most of it several times over and if absolutely necessary, can double up one machine to two or three uses.
No succession plan? Left it too late? What the hell?
You know little or nothing about me or my circumstances yet you jump to unsupported conculsions and preach at me. My experience in this business goes back to IBM mainframes in the 1960s, and DEC machines in the 70s, where a punch card machine with a whole 80-character buffer was the height of luxury and my early backups of development stuff was on ASCII punch tape input through a teletype. Take a wild guess, from that, about how much longer I might need these system before both they and I are decommissioned permanently. When I did my computer science programming at Uni, it was in Algol and Cobol.
Do you have any idea how ridiculous "no succession plan" or "left it too late" actually are?
That post is a perfect example of why someone with an eye on the big picture always holds the purse strings over "engineers" in the real world - to stop engineers over-engineering a solution to a problem, especially a non-existent problem.
Finally, you say I expect something to be supported for ever (not what I said, by the way) and "for free as well" when I said on the record here that while I applaud MS for extending limited support, and I'd cheerfully pay for it, if I needed it (which I don't). I certainly do not expect it to be free.
Your problem, MaddogPepper, is that while I was trying to illustrate, using my situation, why the generic advice about keeping up to date is not always appropriate and why it is perfectly valid for those users to have the hump with MS foisting stuff on them that being largely (but not entirely) why I DID pick an alternate OS for suitable systems) you are trying to apply generic procedures to my specific circumstances when you don't understand those circumstances.
So, with your engineering expertise, go on, give me an idea of just how expensive its going to be or would have been even 10 or 15 years ago, to take customised systems, including some running under OS2, and port them to something in a different environment and maybe even a different OS?
Then, consider that I developed those systems, some over several years, updated as my needs evolved, and NONE of them requiring external comms connections. So, a system, one of a number, that may have taken me several months of work, much of it evenings and weekends, and that has been running solidly since, well, since Paradox (for DOS) was state of the art ....
So, I'm semi-retired now, have systems doing what I need, am I supposed to spend probably a year or two redeveloping so I can upgrade? Or is it just possible that you don't know what you're talking about and that carefully considered options, selected in some cases 20 years ago, are working perfectly to plan?
How often have you "engineed" and developed a succession route and had it still working perfectly 10, 15 or 20 years later, with almost zero ongoing costs over those many years.
Then, go on, tell me about all the benefits I'm missing out on by not "upgrading", and ..... what was it again .... God give me strength.