Monolithic Software

boomzilla

https://itnext.io/the-rise-of-monolithic-software-9e538cfec6e4

I am not really offering a solution. I wrote this article primarily to clarify why I don’t like modern software very much.

He definitely calls out legitimate downsides to the way software has gone but he also doesn't go into some of the advantages. Remember how you used to need multiple browsers to be able to use all the sites you needed? IE for this, Firefox for that, etc. Ugh.

To an extent, I think the walled gardens have lowered the barriers for people to participate at the expense of power user types who want to run their obscure clients, which, yeah, kind of sucks for the power users, but look at the confusion and angst over Mastodon right now.

izzion

@boomzilla said in Monolithic Software:

https://itnext.io/the-rise-of-monolithic-software-9e538cfec6e4

I am not really offering a solution. I wrote this article primarily to clarify why I don’t like modern software very much.

He definitely calls out legitimate downsides to the way software has gone but he also doesn't go into some of the advantages. Remember how you used to need multiple browsers to be able to use all the sites you needed? IE for this, Firefox for that, etc. Ugh.

To an extent, I think the walled gardens have lowered the barriers for people to participate at the expense of power user types who want to run their obscure clients, which, yeah, kind of sucks for the power users, but look at the confusion and angst over Mastodon right now.

How dare you put usability over freedom and hoity toityness?!?

dcon

@boomzilla said in Monolithic Software:

IE for this, Firefox for that, etc. Ugh.

I still do. (I can't login to our corp website from my home machine on FF).

Applied Mediocrity

Another freedom hippie gets a reality check. There used to be Wild West Webs alright. But that's just not good business. No innovation, only competition. So big companies bought up all the land and walled all the gardens. They now relentlessly innovate against each other, and farm and sell your data there. They bloody well couldn't do that if gardens were on public land and all was out in the open, could they?

loopback0

In an ideal world, you would have a standard protocol for interacting with your online bank, and you could pick from a variety of clients offering different types of user interfaces and functionality.

What about HTTP? Imagine there was an HTTP client that worked with all online banks, and it was the same HTTP client that worked with online forums and Teams and Zoom and Gmail etc

DogsB

@loopback0 said in Monolithic Software:

In an ideal world, you would have a standard protocol for interacting with your online bank, and you could pick from a variety of clients offering different types of user interfaces and functionality.

What about HTTP? Imagine there was an HTTP client that worked with all online banks, and it was the same HTTP client that worked with online forums and Teams and Zoom and Gmail etc

dcon

@loopback0 said in Monolithic Software:

What about HTTP?

Apple will say: You MUST use HTTPS!

(Accidentally found that out. Also discovered how to use the NSExceptionDomains element in my plist file)

loopback0

@dcon said in Monolithic Software:

@loopback0 said in Monolithic Software:

What about HTTP?

Apple will say: You MUST use HTTPS!

Imagine if there was an HTTP client that also worked with HTTPS...etc

Madness indeed.

topspin

@Applied-Mediocrity said in Monolithic Software:

No innovation, only competition. So big companies bought up all the land and walled all the gardens. They now relentlessly innovate against each other, and farm and sell your data there.

How does that create innovation if you only have 2-3 major players that have locked in their users so they can't migrate off, compared to everyone freely choosing their own clients?

Applied Mediocrity

@topspin Exactly! There are no alternatives, therefore it's the best product available. And it's only getting better with more updates. It's kind of like the warmest day of the year (), see?

Unperverted Vixen

@dcon said in Monolithic Software:

I still do. (I can't login to our corp website from my home machine on FF).

Is it using Windows Authentication? Firefox at least used to not support it by default, you had to explicitly allow it on relevant domains in about:config.

topspin

@Applied-Mediocrity said in Monolithic Software:

@topspin Exactly! There are no alternatives, therefore it's the best product available. And it's only getting better with more updates. It's kind of like the warmest day of the year (), see?

Just that this post highlights how ridiculous this is and the other post reads serious to me.

dcon

@Unperverted-Vixen said in Monolithic Software:

@dcon said in Monolithic Software:

I still do. (I can't login to our corp website from my home machine on FF).

Is it using Windows Authentication? Firefox at least used to not support it by default, you had to explicitly allow it on relevant domains in about:config.

No, we use PingID. What happens is the login works (including PingID) and it drops us at another login page. An F5 clears that (on IE) and I'm in. On FF, it never gets past that page - F5 just lands back on that 2ndary login page. And entering any data on that page never does a thing.

Applied Mediocrity

@topspin YMBNH

Applied Mediocrity

@topspin No, but I am quite serious actually. I mean, I don't exactly like it and therefore I laugh about it, but the other way hasn't exactly worked. In fact if it had, it would have been the first time ever in human history. These days especially I see no difference. It's all shit.

Well, anyway, I went on that rant back in some open sores topic or another, and it earned me only scorn, so I'm not going to do that again. Short version: you can believe in the freedom of the interwebs all you like. Interoperability and freedom is not compatible with profit. And someone will always look to profit from it. Invariably.

topspin

@Applied-Mediocrity interoperability and freedom are certainly compatible with profit. The point you should be making is that lock-in, user hostility, etc. can create more profit, for some, when done right.

But all of that is orthogonal to whether it’s the right thing or not. False advertising creates more profit and it’s wrong. Ripping off your customers creates more profit, if they don’t have a different choice. So, apparently, does spying on your customers.
The question is where you draw the line at what you think is acceptable, since “creates more profit” isn’t a distinguishing factor.

Gribnit

@Applied-Mediocrity said in Monolithic Software:

Interoperability and freedom is not compatible with profit.

This is why nobody ever owned a PC-AT compatible system back in the desktop days.

Applied Mediocrity

@topspin said in Monolithic Software:

more profit

Yes, that.

whether it’s the right thing or not

I don't believe that enters into the equation too often.

where you draw the line

Nobody gives a damn where I draw the line or if I draw one altogether.

I work in the internet of shit business. I'm pretty well acquainted with taking the low road. Numbers in the bank are fairly good at quelling the conscience. Or what's left of it.

Walk your talk. One thing I'm not doing is pretending to be a freedom warrior just because I have AdBlock.

jinpa

@boomzilla said in Monolithic Software:

Remember how you used to need multiple browsers to be able to use all the sites you needed? IE for this, Firefox for that, etc. Ugh.

I still have to do that.

dkf

@dcon said in Monolithic Software:

What happens is the login works (including PingID) and it drops us at another login page.

An F5 clears that (on IE) and I'm in. On FF, it never gets past that page - F5 just lands back on that 2ndary login page. And entering any data on that page never does a thing.

Must be doing something horrible with cross site cookies or something like that, and the two browsers have different rules for when two domains are similar enough to share cookies. Or something else at that level of nauseating. I don't want to probe further; what I know of web security is dispiriting enough as it is.

boomzilla

@dcon said in Monolithic Software:

@loopback0 said in Monolithic Software:

What about HTTP?

Apple will say: You MUST use HTTPS!

LOL, our customer recently added something like that, except they forgot to except their cert revocation URL, which you need to access in order to make sure a cert is still valid, and therefore it's HTTP by design.

EDIT: But that was only if you were on their network (including VPN'd in). If you came in via the interwebs everything was fine, of course, because your browser could get to the revocation list no problem.

boomzilla

@Applied-Mediocrity said in Monolithic Software:

@topspin No, but I am quite serious actually. I mean, I don't exactly like it and therefore I laugh about it, but the other way hasn't exactly worked. In fact if it had, it would have been the first time ever in human history. These days especially I see no difference. It's all shit.

As it turns out, everything has a trade off!

Steve_The_Cynic

Oh, isn't he so cute?

I used to use messenger applications such as Trillian and Adium which understood instant messenger protocols such as AIM, IRC, XMPP, Yahoo! Messenger, Bonjour and many more. Software used to be built a lot more in this style. There were a number of clearly defined standards and a wide variety of software to plug into those standards.

He thinks that AIM and Yahoo! and (MSN) Messenger had "clearly defined standards"...

That's so cute.

No, dude, those are not clearly defined, and they aren't standards either. Back in 2010 or 2011, had the unenviable task (I certainly didn't envy it) of adding something that, on the face of it, sounded simple and straightforward: add support for blocking file transfers for these three (...) (...) (...) so-called "protocols" in my company's firewalls. So I dug into them. And I dug. And I dug. And I continued digging. Yahoo's was the least awful, to the extent that compared to the other two, it didn't leave any mental scars.

But AIM's protocol, more correctly called "OSCAR", was ... special. It was elaborately layered, with lots of "let's have a laugh with the people who try to analyse it" features, like a layer called SNAC (no "k" at the end) that spoke extensively of "food groups", and a prize feature where they would use it in clear-text format over SSL/TLS ports like 443, whence the special code in the SSL/TLS handler to detect that the connection was using OSCAR instead of SSL/TLS and switch to its handler. (Yes, our firewalls have a full deep-packet-inspection mode, and therefore do not tolerate people trying to slip illicit traffic over well-known ports without being in the relevant actual protocol.)

Microsoft's alleged protocol might even have been worse, being a weird composite of text and binary formats, with the text parts usually in a format similar to HTTP headers (token-colon-space-value-newline), except that...

For inexplicable reasons, some of the lines were lightly obfuscated. Instead of:

IPv4AddressAndPort: 192.168.1.42:443

it would say:

troPdnAsserddA4vPI: 344:24.1.861.291

That project caused me a <<<===================>>> teeny tiny bit of stress.

Parody

@Steve_The_Cynic Exactly! I didn't use Trillian because of a bunch of open protocols made it easy to write a client for all chat programs. I used it because each one was its own walled garden and I'd otherwise have to run half a dozen to communicate with various friends. That was a drain on systems of the era.

Not mentioned: the services changed the protocols regularly to break programs like Trillian.

Luckily, I got to avoid most of the "this site only works on IE/(Netscape/Firefox)" except at various jobs where things only worked in IE for years past its prime.

Bulb

@boomzilla linked an article in Monolithic Software that said:

An application written for the Google App Engine platform will not run on Microsoft Azure. What is next? Somebody invents yet another cross-platform layer, so your web software can run only any cloud provider?

It already exists: Open Containers¹ and Kubernetes

Yet more layers of abstraction to make sure we kill any advances in hardware made in the last 20 years?

Containers themselves use very little resources, since it's just a bunch of extra kernel structures and then some libraries may be unnecessarily duplicated, but that's about it, and Kubernetes isn't too heavy.

Yes, each cloud provider offers a lot of managed services that are slightly different for each, but when you want to run your own code, containers and VM images work the same way in all the clouds.

And there is terraform for unified management and configuration.

@boomzilla said in Monolithic Software:

He definitely calls out legitimate downsides to the way software has gone but he also doesn't go into some of the advantages. Remember how you used to need multiple browsers to be able to use all the sites you needed? IE for this, Firefox for that, etc. Ugh.

The browsers became the common API and overcame the split, but it is what killed the other apps. Because most features can't be added just on the client, or just on the server. And any feature that requires changes in the client and the server and possibly protocol extension means you need to use that client with that server … or with that content like in case of IE and active-x-or-y-or-whatever-security-barn-door Microsoft came up with.

To an extent, I think the walled gardens have lowered the barriers for people to participate at the expense of power user types who want to run their obscure clients, which, yeah, kind of sucks for the power users, but look at the confusion and angst over Mastodon right now.

Indeed. With thick clients users need to install and configure and update a bunch of stuff, but web apps mostly just work (or don't, but thick clients can have bugs just the same). In fact I'd prefer if most companies just forgot Electron and Cordova exist and just created installable progressive web apps² and called it a fortnight. With the benefit of not having to deal with those pesky app s(t)ores³.

HardwareGeek

@Bulb said in Monolithic Software:

work the same way in all the clouds.

Not all clouds are the same. These are fine:

But I recommend avoiding these if at all possible; things tend to work not so well in them:

dkf

@HardwareGeek Things often "work" well there, if that includes going flying despite being nailed down.

BernieTheBernie

@HardwareGeek The "real" clouds: they suck everything up, and then distribute it weirdly all over the country (or the sea)...
That's why "cloud" is a good description of that "computing infrastucture".