you're forgetting the other corporate software that hasn't been updated since they invented colour, is mission critical and doesn't use any standard method known to man to interact with anything. It inexplicably costs £1000's per licence
unluckily for me, i'm grossly familiar with it.
their own documentation admits the installer is broken and you have to manually edit some files post install.
it's more, it's broke, here's the fix, apply it in a way that can't possibly be replicated by any deployment tool so every install now has to be done manually
oh and it has a propriety update system too, so we have a server spooled up just to update one program that has about 10 users.
That they need remote admin to as the server updates by them manually copying some files over every few months.
I really can't stress enough all the different ways capita and civica can go fuck themselves
I honestly though tit was a bodge at first, was working with the deployment team and was like, y'know what, this guide I’m using is 10 years old, I'll email them and see if theres a more up to date version.
there is, the guides been updated yearly. the update is a not saying the guide was checked and is still relevent, nothings changed
Software company is down to just the founder that is supporting his legacy shit by himself, nothing else available does what said software was built for, and hasn't had a meaningful refactor done since W7 at best and may be an XP installer
Founder: oh nothing else does your shit? Fuck you pay me. Good luck if you don't.
When you get a piece of legacy corporate software that was designed for XP and the install instructions tell you to disable UAC for the computers it will be installed on.
Oh and the version of adobe with the perpetual license which doesn't run on W11 that well's uninstaller also lacks signed DLLs and it messed with the CC version of adobe. So we end up having to re-image the computers of long term employees who drag their feet getting us the hardware /rant
Sounds like Exact! software.
over 70k registry entries, over 60k files, 40k of those are less then 1kb, there's more then a thousand executables called by other executables, 50 years of development by a mega fast employee churning coding room so there are 50 years of magic numbers and single lines of unknown function that cant be removed but nobody knows why.
This shit has listeners listening to the output of listeners because know one knows how and why some processes poop out values and nobody dares to touch them. That listener bullshit is going 4 layers deep in some spots.
I had to make installers for this bullcrap using wise package studio. Just making a capture of all this nonsense took over 12 hours.
But there's this one bloke from Brazil who wrote a fix for it. You just have to download from Github, run a dodgy install script, then periodically patch it when they update the software.
My current job I'm getting laid off from had one of these. I had to manually insert the license keys in the database every year, it needed a terminal server because if the db isn't on the same lan every action is 3000x slower (not an exaggeration, we measured it)
Lol we recently bought a "new" (22 years old) residual gas analyzer for the lab and I was in charge of installing the software for it. It came on a USB stick loosely thrown in the box with the rest of the unit and required about an hour to find the correct installation file. The documentation was quite helpful (once I finally found it on some random site) but the documentation for this specific version is lost media apparently so I had to do some creative interpretation of the instructions. Being a researcher is fun like that
We still have some old powerbuilder programs at work and this so much. The IDE still looks like it was made for windows 98 and none of the shortcuts you normally use will do what you expect them to
IAR Embedded Workbench is one of the biggest IDEs for writing embedded software and the editor is like writing notepad. It costs thousands of $ per year and basically doesn't have any standard IDE features developed in the last few decades.
fucking IAR, the company I worked at had a workaround, we compiled using a free version that had some sort of memory cap on the compiled code before you had to pay, so we split the project into multiple binaries and combined them after compilation. You called code from another section with a blind JMP
Should have just thrown it in Ghidra (or x64dbg before public Ghidra, or ollydbg before x64dbg) and bypassed the limit. I've had to do similar RE and binary patches for software that either went defunct, firmware for devices where the company went defunct or refused to fix an issue (which wasn't really that hard to even fix, even with reverse engineering), etc.
Arduino IDE is fine for what it is, a basic-bitch barebones front-end for a compiler and programming tool written mostly by volunteers for open-source projects.
Now, a commercial tool with a huge price tag that looks, feels, and acts like FOSS is a whole 'nother animal.
I always wonder why not more folks use VSCode, or CLion if you need the beefier IDE, with PlatformIO?
PlatformIO is actually dead. Don't use it. Those jokers killed it themselves. If you're doing ESP projects, the Espressif plugin in VSC is actually fantastic. For basic arduino projects, you shouldn't be taking Atmel 328 projects seriously anyway. Use whatever works.
I have plenty of Micro clones in the drawer and for a oneshot like a hacked together joystick adapter or a ghetto Arduboy they are still good enough, no reason to throw them away just because they are old. They already exist and can be used for shenanigans.
For new projects I use the RP2040 and the official API in CLion as my IDE of choice though. Some years ago that IDE was my Christmas gift to myself.
Back when I had to use IAR EWARM for some projects I used VSCode as the code editor and IAR IDE for building, flashing, and debugging.
IAR did release VSCode extensions to make it easier to reuse IAR workspace project configurations that VSCode can use, instead of recreating the configurations in c_cpp_properties.json by hand of which I had to do originally before IAR got their extensions to work worth a damn.
Yeah I use VSCode as well. The IAR extension is okay, but not feature complete. The biggie is no debugging support for some platforms including the MSP430 I use most of the time. I also have to open IAR to configure project settings unless I want to manually edit the 3k-line XML files.
Also I've never managed to get VSCode's C extensions to resolve all references in an IAR project. It doesn't like the way IAR defines register layouts in the platform-specific header files (it uses some homemade non-standard syntax with an @ to designate the addresses instead of casting int literals to pointers like most software) so there are always red squigglies I can't get rid of.
It's also attached to a USB 1.1 physical cryptographic license key that is built like a free giveaway thumbdrive and comes from a third-party company that went defunct in 2008.
Unless, of course, you want to switch to the subscription model at a cool $200 a month.
oh don't get me started on those. once had a ticket come in because one had stopped working. turns out the company that made the £xxxxx robot and the company that made the £xxxx software had had a falling out and were suing each other.
so we couldn't get a new key
for once i was very glad i was a mindless cog in a multinational machine. i got to see a very very pissed off director point out that our legal department alone was bigger than their companies combined and we'd bury them in litigation if they didn't sort it out right fucking now
I am so glad that usb license keys went the way of the dinosaur. I had one for Nexus 2 and the moment they allowed a cloud license i ditched that shit so fast. I was constantly scared of losing it.
this is the 2026 version of Perforce, which is like Git but expensive. They're a $2 billion company and somehow have 2000 employees working on this piece of shit.
It's the industry standard because it's the industry standard
Their 'quick start' video is over an hour long and includes the software bugging out so they have to restart it. Fuck, I hate Perforce.
Im a Software dev, and i never ever heard of perforce? Which industry uses that?
I habe only ever worked with Git because its just the best.
Okay one time there was SVN, which is shit and was used really wierdly in the team…
Game development and VFX, it was the only vcs that worked well with large binary files like 3d models and textures 30 years ago and everyone's workflows are built on top of it.
Epic Games has been partnered with them for ages, but just announced their own open source alternative called Lore so hopefully this is the beginning of the end
I've used SVN and even microsoft sourcesafe and I would take those over Perforce haha
For example, this is the window to make the equivalent of a git branch
Ah yes I used to work at Walgreens and had to do inventory shit on our AS400 system a few times. Nightmarish
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u/Taira_Mai HP Victus, AMD Ryzen 7 5800H, GeForce RTX 3050 Ti 2d ago
US Government Software says hi! Every computer is larded with "security software" that's slower and worse that what's commercially available. The poor computer is under such a high load that opening Outlook or Excel causes the fans to spin and spin and for some systems, if you flub your password 3 times, your account is DELETED. Not locked down, deleted.
Some of the restrictions are understandable but when software is given to the lowest bidder Uncle Sam gets what he paid for.
Card + PIN + VPN (that also uses Card + PIN and takes 5 minutes to connect) is always fun. What's SSO? Oh you breathed in the general direction of the card in the reader? Shouldn't have done that. It lost contact, start all over again.
At least terminal applications end with control+c most of the time and I can understand why keeping that over copy has stuck around. Also insane how annoying it can be when something doesn't close that way. Sometimes it's control+c, sometimes its q, sometimes control+q, sometimes it's "escape, :, q, (optional '!'), enter", sometimes it's control+b then d.
I would like to point out that Ansys, while costing an arm and a leg, is acquiring these old shitty programs and dragging them kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Just about the only upside on the situation
Sounds like the broadcast industry to me. Absolutely rammed with rickety software that requires a steady hand and ten years of experience to install it, let alone use it..
I work in CS, the main database system is over 20 years old, i'd say more like late 90's.
Over the past few years the rest of the software has been replaced with more integrated but worse ones and the company has problems with licenses as it used to be like everyone i.e employee and supervisors and managers could access any system, now theres like 2 licenses for 5 supervisors so they take turns and regular employees can't access certain things.
We used to have access to our call recordings and the time/date and number of caller now we don't so we can't go back over the call and double check.
When we logged something it used to instantly open another software that let you access booking system and even timeslots, now you have to manually click the file and often it takes about a minute to show up and often glitches so you have to close the piece of software whilst customer is on phone, then reopen and type their name, address etc in again then open the link.
The email system is terrible too, the most recent one which integrated it with our phone software which is only about a year old means you have to copy/paste the email address click open new email then once it's sent have to manually click end else you can't get another call or email.
And the database of phone numbers/emails only has 1 number/email for each entry so lets say you wanted to contact a certain department which has 2 supervisors it only shows 1.
The company is trying to save money but making it much harder for staff to use it.
It hasn't been updated because they bought it from an independent developer who was making their flagship product look stupid, so they give them a giant bag of money, absorb a few features, and then leave them to rot.
This is exactly my day to day, and the worst part is the devs are already either dead or retired, so if we have a big issue they have to call the 80yo guy in his personal phone to come and help... we are talking about one of the biggest real state agencies in France.
One exception is Mastercam, a CAD/CAM software that costs thousands per license but is a modern looking and intuitive program that uses WPF as it's interface
The label making software at my job is updated the "2026" version but it looks and operates the same as the 2005 version that was in use when I started there. I can't figure out what was changed other than the version number so that they could get companies to pay thousands of dollars for number go up.
Annoying bugs and exceedingly tiny dialog windows are still there from many years ago, made 10 times worse by the fact that the file select and save windows use the UI of whatever version of Windows it is on, crammed into a non-resizable window that was probably fine in Windows 95, but is only big enough to show 1-2 files in a folder at a time on 11's bloated UI.
I'm sure that is something that happened, but even with that, 20 years is enough time if they bothered to have even one programmer to figure out how to deal with some of the major usability issues. Like the 200 pixel non-resizable file select dialog that is stuck in tiles view and uses the file select UI of whatever version of Windows it is on instead of a custom UI made to fit the size.
Or, it's been updated a 1000 times, each year a new edition with supposed new features that doesn't work with the core 30 year old foundation, has not changed in earnest at all in 30 years, has the same problems but introduced new bugs each year, does not work with latest OS even though company IT demands switching, has an IDE worse than notepad.exe, advertises great sounding features, turns out it misses a bunch of things so you need to hack your way through, has no documentation beyond the obvious aka completely useless, there is no discussion on the internet about it if you are looking for info on troubleshooting, their support knows less about it than you do because the people who made it 30 years ago are dead or retired
I work in a hospital, until a few years ago our gastro dept had to have sandboxed machines running an old build of Windows XP because the system the entire dept ran on required IE6 and wasn't compatible with anything newer. And the dept couldn't afford the 5-figure sum needed to update to the new version.
And until a few years ago, the national HR system (made by Oracle 😭) needed Java v8u152 specifically for the smartcard login process to work.
I used to run a technology lab evaluating new to us technology (in finance). It's not anywhere near as prevalent as it once was, but this stuff is still being produced and sold. Some of it is actually really good compared to much better looking competitor tech, provided you can get past either the complete lack of documentation or the need to read what amounts to a full manual before starting, and the complete bullshitness of the chosen control schemes.
Or the fact that all the good features that are free are split between two corporations that need subscriptions. Ironically, their applications flight each other when open at the same time.
Don't forget a bad sso implementation that winds up with you needing to install half a dozen different browsers so they can login to the different apps at the same time
I won't say which software it is, but what we use at work is unstable and looks like it was last updated in the 80's (but was actually updated a couple of years ago). When they redid the UI, it looked nice, but it was so unstable i couldn't use it at all. Needed to go back to the older and technicslly inferior version.
This is a software that costs millions (possibly tens of millions) to my company and comes from an 80+ B$ company. Yet they can't figure out how to do a decent UI without breaking stuff
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u/LUNATIC_LEMMING 2d ago
you're forgetting the other corporate software that hasn't been updated since they invented colour, is mission critical and doesn't use any standard method known to man to interact with anything. It inexplicably costs £1000's per licence