On 10 Mar 2005 at 21:55, Robert Patterson wrote: > From: David W. Fenton [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > > THIS WILL NEVER HAPPEN. > > I wish I had a nickel for every time this turned out to be wrong in > the computer business.
You cut out the first half of my sentence, which read: Well, if history is any guide, THIS WILL NEVER HAPPEN. IF, IF, IF. History may *not* turn out to repeat itself. Microsoft may suddenly stop trying to insure backward compatibility. But there is no basis whatsoever to state, as you did, that: For Windows users the day is coming. Meaning, the day when Finale won't run on the current version of Windows. So far as we know, that day has not yet arrived, and: if history is any guide, THIS WILL NEVER HAPPEN. Speculation in the other direction is contrary to all the indications that we have available to us in regard to how Microsoft designs its operating systems. > > Your comments here just motivated me to try, but I just realized > > that before I moved in 2000, I trashed the old Finale 2.01 > > disks/manuals. > > Hence, in fact, you personally *cannot* install it on a new computer, Well, no, but my lack of installation disks has nothing to do with whether not Finale 2.01 would or would not install on Win2K. > although perhaps you could copy an existing install. If you had > WinFin2.01 files you would essentially be SOL, at least without > re-editing in a later Finale version. I don't have an installation of 2.01, as it would be completely useless to me, as I have converted all my files to each successive version of Finale that I've used (3.52, 97, 2K3). I didn't discard the disks until I no longer had any files in that format (when I did discard them, in 2000, it had been quite a long time since I'd had any 2.01 files, having converted everything first to 3.52, and then to 97). > > I strongly doubt this. Microsoft has *never* introduced a version of > > Windows that causes large numbers of software applications to fail > > to work. > > Past performance is not indicative of future returns. . . . But it's a strong counter to your assertion of certainty. It's *possible*, but there is absolutely no evidence available to suggest that it is likely, let alone certain, as you assert. > . . . Some day MS will > introduce exactly what you described. Or else they will go out of > business or morph into something else. . .. I did not say that MS will *never* introduce a version of Windows that breaks large numbers of apps, only that they had never done so thus far. That's all the evidence we have to go on. > . . . Forever is a very long time, > and 10-15 years in the computer business is nearly as long as forever. I wonder which side of this are you arguing, since this is a point that is in *my* favor. Applications compiled in 1983 can still run on versions of Windows released in late 2001. That's *18 years*, which your own formulation would cast as "nearly as long as forever." > In fact, both the original feature-set of Longhorn and 64-bit Itanium > Windows (now both apparently dead or on hiatus) contained the first > rumbling threats of large-scale software obsolescence. That is, if you > believe the trade rags. We've heard it before. But in most cases, what ended up happening was that some functionality was reduced in any packages that were "broken" by the new Windows versions, not completely crippled or unable to run. Given that Coda switched to using Microsoft development tools around the time of WinFin97, I'm pretty certain that their apps are pretty conformant to Microsoft standards, which makes it very unlikely that future versions of Windows will break older Win32 versions. > > WordPerfect 6.0's > > problems on Win95 were all due to WP's non-standard programming > > practices. > > Were Finale's early Windows practices "best practices"? I have no > idea. If they weren't then you would be screwed. There is no going > back an fixing a 15-yr-old software version. I don't know. The UI was certainly not "best practices" but I can't say about their programming practices. And if they weren't, that doesn't necessarily mean that the software would fail, or even have problems that were anything other than annoyances (as was the case with WP6, where the problems outside the printing subsystem were strictly cosmetic). -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
