His software sang the words of God, then it went silent
inverse.com
inverse.com
Especially with all the passion and work Tom put into the program and his work with multiple Rabbi's to tweak in their slight changes and localized traditions. This feels more like much needed historical preservation that the community could have guided.
What a massive blunder of closed software.
Tarn Adams has a similar situation with DF. But hopefully they realize that at least having some sort of 'make available on death' could be valuable.
We have already lost untold countless relatively custom software packages for niche markets that you've never heard of - and people just continue or go back to doing things by hand.
What are the pretections against cheating the audit process?
Do you specify a frequency for validations?
What type of pricing model does the service use?
How long can you escrow something?
Please type things out in full so other people don't have to use a search engine just to follow along.
I think we take for granted the obviousness of open sourcing something and having a community potentially continue development when you're gone.
Coma, incarceration, etc.
But it puts the onus on the user to decide what they want to happen in those circumstances rather than leaving on Telegram to decide whether such and such person is living or dead.
There could be any secrets (API keys, etc) in a GitHub repo.
(And it should have very clear warnings before you turn it on so you don't accidentally make things public that shouldn't be. Plus, there should probably be some sort of way to tag which repose would still need to stay private even after your death.)
The moral of the story is accountants know the price of everything and the value of nothing, and if you really want to kill something of beauty, let an accountant be in charge. (Source: I’m married to an accountant - while a person I love, she can’t understand living for any other reason than counting money)
It's almost always because it's a labor of love and isn't worth the money.
Richard Douglass created Ballroom Dancing competition judging software because, as a competitor, he was wasting vast amounts of time with crappy judging and software (especially because a lot of software wouldn't deal well with garbage network connections). https://www.douglassassociates.com/
It has roughly 300 uses per year. It charges roughly $1000 per use. That's about $300K per year for taking the support calls, managing the credit card bridge, and updating any features due to the OS makers breaking shit.
They have a plan to release the code when he passes. However, that probably isn't enough. It's likely nobody has the programming AND ballroom dance competition experience necessary to keep it going.
Lots of ballroom dancers are computer science students who could build this as a class project, and any programmer who knows a ballroom dancer can look at the paper slips and write software to automate it.
"Garbage network connections" are trivial to deal with with modern web app practices.
Yes, the tools to build this product and make it function obviously exist. If you can do it cheaper, then do it and undercut him!
I don't think you want to handle billing, support (for VERY non-tech savvy groups) and build and customize the software fulltime for <300k revenue (not profit!). Especially not at the "$1k a client project" price. Anyone can crank out a webform, very few people can integrate software into a client and have the client continue to want to pay them!
Accusing someone, without merit, of skimming and corruption is bordering in the libel territory. Doing it in this case is also rude and shows a lack of experience.
Feel free to write it. People have been complaining that they want something better for quite a while (in both the US and EU). This project has been around since 1997(!) and someone could have replaced it over 25 years. And yet, no one has.
This isn't a technical problem and it absolutely stupefies me that people can't seem to wrap their heads around this.
You will field customer support calls. A lot of them. Ballroom competitions tend to have lots of non-tech people in them. You will field irate calls because something went wrong in the middle of a competition (even if none of it is your fault).
All for $1000 a competition. Not per competitor--per competition. Roughly speaking--the price of tickets from two competitors.
I look forward to seeing your replacement.
(Note: In fact there ARE other "more modern" solutions in the space. And they all say "Contact Us" when you start looking for pricing. Translation: we're going to charge way more than $1000).
> it's skimming money from dues payers by being friends with corrupt leadership
This is a really, really odd take.
Firstly, as pointed out above the cost of $1000 for a competition seems pretty reasonable.
Secondly, where do you get "being friends with corrupt leadership" from?
Most sports/recreation activities suffer from a huge lack of software. They are crying out for anything that helps them. If the leadership knows the author of the software, that isn't corruption that is a small community - and probably a good thing since it means the author probably listens to them.
[1] https://vitaminb.blog/cost-pro-am-dance-competition/
[2] https://danceparent101.com/the-real-costs-of-competitive-dan...
The full day cost around £6200, that included music, demonstration couple, compare, 6 judges, food, first aiders, venue hire, officials, trophies, medals, programmes, decorations. We then charged around £12.50 entry for ~500 students.
The national competition for universities happens in blackpool every year and I imagine the costs are around 3-4x that considering the venue and number of officials. And unless we got discounts for being universities, or the judges are paid less, i imagine it costs at least £28,000 to put on a big professional competition.
In a comparable venue to the winter gardens in blackpool
The West Coast Swing community has:
* steprightsolutions.com
* danceConvention.net
and probably others that I'm less familiar with.
From the article it seems like it attempts to connect to a non-existent web service on startup.
Could figure out what it's expecting and emulate that of course. Just wanted to point out that it may run but not work as expected without changes.
Or patch it to skip that check.
I don't even think this necessarily has to do with open sourcing necessarily. This is a wider software conundrum as well. From the article:
> The first warning Shepard got was when she went to update her Mac, and the system warned her that TropeTrainer wouldn’t run on the newest OS
Operating System updates frequently break software. Operating System transitions break software a lot. This is a thorny issue, imo, because on the one hand when people buy software I doubt they're thinking about how it'll be useless if the Operating System's company (or community) think they can do better with new APIs and behavior. On the other hand, updates are part of moving something as vast as an OS forward, and at least some amount of the time they're necessary.
Windows provides some ways of running older software in a VM. I'd be curious if they've tried such a thing with this software. MacOS I'm not so sure of, since even the ISOs are somewhat controlled.
Not so much MacOS after a few years, though they did release Rosetta and Rosetta 2 to handle the transitions to and away from Intel processors.
While the software itself was 32bit, many of the intallers of that era were Intallshield/InstallerWise that were still actually 16bit, so while if you could get the thing installed...you can't.
Ugh.
The expectation that once you've made something you can't expect it to keep working without endless catchup, attitudes like this one, are why I have completely given up making software for fun or to solve noncommercial problems for myself and others.
I'm not the only one.
I don't think there is a single type of item in the world for which you could expect it to keep existing indefinitely without maintenance. Machines rust, wood degrades, paintings need restoring every few centuries. And even when properly stored in controlled atmosphere etc, books from a few centuries ago are almost unreadable because the language has changed so much since then (see https://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/diagram_4english.html for example).
Everything in this world needs constant maintenance or it breaks down. Why would you expect software to be any different?
I have books up to 500 years old that are perfectly readable. I have programs I wrote single digit years ago that I'd need to give up a couple of days just to find out if I can get their build chain back and dig them out of dependency hell. Not worth it to buy, at best, a few years before I get to repeat the experience. Restoring and rebuilding old physical things is also far more rewarding because when I do it properly I never have to do it again.
I've owned physical objects that were worthless a few months (cheap throwaway), and have also worked on code that was over 5 decades old and still compiled just fine. If you construct the software with care it is entirely feasible to have something that you can run several decades from now, but that does mean that you shouldn't use dependencies which might disappear in that time. Curl or sqlite are probably fine, a dependency with a single maintainer is probably not fine. Network dependencies on DNS or NTP are probably fine, depending on the API of some 1-year old startup is almost certainly not fine.
Machines rusting and painting needing restoration is because they oxidize. Wood does not magically degrade, it decomposes. These are physical phenomena confined to the physical world.
Your example of the book being unreadable because people's language changed, that is a closer example but even that falls short because language is a human to human communication pathway. We have to spend literal years training people to understand it, it is inherently chaotic and messy.
Software is math, it is engineered. We don't wake up to find that suddenly the coefficient of friction is different and now our tires fail to grip the road. Or more to the point, that our speed and feed calculators are now trash and will crash the endmill into material ruining the machine and part.
Computers and their ability to run or not run software after and update is completely in the control of the people programing the updates. The reason so much software fails is because either A. It was not well designed to begin with or B. the people creating the update did not design it well.
Likewise hardware architectures change, and it’s absurd to assert machine code from the Eniac must run on every architecture, as well as every variation of every machine ever made on every future hardware in perpetuity. There are to this point many preservation efforts that create emulators that run on modern hardware or reference virtual machines that can be carried forward. But to expect this to be done in situ everywhere all the time for everything is on the surface absurd and unreasonable to an extreme.
Edit: the Eniac didn’t have machine code, but switches and wiring - even more to my point. While it’s still just math and logic, it’s not reasonable to carry forward all software configurations of the machine.
Provided there is anybody with very rare combination of being developer proficient in whatever language was used to write this software and who knows how Torah is read/sang
A little tongue in cheek, and I know off mainline maintenance exists, but it’s still the same ordeal - oft presented with a different tone of backdrop.
So, speaking from an ethical standpoint - and I mean purely philosophically, not in terms of legalities - what would be wrong with reverse engineering this program and finding a way to get it running again, for those who paid for it? If it's just a matter of spoofing a couple web requests and maybe bypassing some activation checks, I suspect it could be done.
People have been reversing stuff like DOS games recently [1], I don't really see any reason why this program couldn't be done the same. I think the legality is kind of just handled by not packing in the binaries along with the code. Personally I don't know a deep lot about reverse engineering, but it sounds like an interesting challenge to try to learn it.
edit 2: someone did this [2]
[1] https://github.com/jamesfmackenzie/chocolatekeen
[2] https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/1505006493417938946
Trope trainer has been reverse engineered and you can run old versions. Interesting series of events.
Maybe someone wants to try to get this to work in a VM (or Wine even), report back (and email the author of the article if successful)?
(disclaimer: not actually Jewish)
But listening to chanting from DECtalk? Here's "Happy Birthday" via DECtalk.[1]
There was apparently a 90s thing for religious DECtalk files. Here's an archive of them.[2] Here's "The Old Rugged Cross" in DECtalk input format.[3]
This mysterious program that represented so much work is probably mostly a DECtalk player and a big collection of playable religious DECtalk files. If someone were to extract the files, that would recover the content. There are players for DECtalk files; there's one at the links below. Converting them to a better text-to-speech system would help.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150310175636/http://theflameof...
[2] http://theflameofhope.co/SONGS%20FOR%20PC'.html
[3] http://theflameofhope.co/dectalk%20speak%20window/GOSPEL/OLD...
I got to play with DECtalk around 1999, when it was already old, and IIRC required us dusting off an old SGI workstation that could run it in software.
We had a school homework assignment to hand-tune DECtalk encodings of famous lines of speeches by US statesmen, for dramatic delivery. "Essential liberty", "shall not perish from the earth!" etc. Prosody, stress, etc.
The programmer who was doing the DECTalk work talked about this some:
> I ask Schnee if Buchler’s source code could be reconstructed from a copy of the software.
> Not exactly, she says. It might be possible to induce the machine code to dump out a database of every phoneme it had ever uttered — all the tiny pieces it had used to sing Armenian and Lithuanian and Egyptian trope — and then, if you were very patient and very skilled, you might be able to write code to piece them back together.
> It could be done, she says. But it wouldn’t be quick or easy. And it wouldn’t be the same program Buchler wrote.
There's also a sound file of their implementation at the bottom of the article.
And, as someone else pointed out in this thread, there exists an ISO and an activation code at archive.org, and it should be possible to get this running in Wine or in a VM. Someone clever could probably patch the binary to make it run on modern Windows. The distraught rabbis should community-source a developer.
All of that said, even if the source code were to be found, it seems likely that further development of the core functionality might be dead. This was a man's life's work in an esoteric domain; it might not exactly be accessible code.
I have several physical copies of the last edition of Trope Trainer, with serial numbers. They don’t work because they try to phone home for activation. I think they have all of the actual code they need to run, if would could bypass the initial steps. Realbasic binaries are harder to debug than Delphi, and I haven’t had time to really dig into it.
I have a book that makes an argument from Halakha that copyright is a binding norm under Jewish law, but I feel like it's kind of motivated reasoning because copyright as we know it is a 1700s British invention and there's no likelihood that any Jewish communities observed anything directly equivalent to it before that.
There's an additional principle of Jewish law that says that Jews should normally obey secular laws of the places where they live:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dina_d%27malkhuta_dina
Maybe the warning on the CD is indirectly alluding to that?
The same concept applies in Islam and has been used to justify copyright for Islamic works, even audio recordings of Qur'an recitation, one of the most common Islamic media outside of books themselves. So, the idea makes sense from an Islamic perspective, but there is plenty of room for interpretation and also for different accommodations and adjustments depending on the situation.
For example, it would be likely that a scholar would rule that strict copyright may be violated if the alternative, e.g., the complete loss of usefulness of an otherwise beneficial software, may be violated because the benefits outweigh the harm.
Given that the US law considers breaking copyright to be unlawful, Jewish law would too (in the US).
I have on my todo list to make a dead man's switch. If I don't flip the update after a couple of months, a maintenance message is put up, and if I still don't update it, then an end of life process is kicked off before all my domains expire. Maybe I'll get to it some day.
https://myaccount.google.com/inactive
You can set it to share all of your passwords and data to someone after you disappear
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveBot
The software is harder since I guess you aren't offering gratis downloads, but I think Software Heritage will eventually offer a source code escrow service.
You have to wonder where this is marching off too, this march away from complexity into easier and simpler abstractions, further from the magic and raising the ivory tower of the wizard who makes these tools higher above the masses who increasingly have no idea what is happening nor any mental model to think about this stuff as it actually works. Certainly some groups benefit from siloing the knowledge of fire of our modern world, but I can't help but imagine we are all losing in this race away from complexity.
> That was the part that led to the apocalypse.
Or heck, give me a precompiled binary and I'll give you a docker script that runs it in virtualization on any computer.
EDIT: Ok I finished the article. I guess the source code is gone. But surely there is a binary floating around somewhere? I could get it running under Wine, or worst-case decompile and fix the program.
I have physical CDROMs and serial numbers for one of the last versions ever published, but I haven’t been able to get them to run — they try to contact an activation server which no longer exists. I think this is just DRM, and in theory it can be bypassed, but no one has managed to do it yet. (I’ve gotten a couple people to look at it, but no one has had time to seriously dig in)
The data files for Trope Trainer are mostly human-readable, lots of XML. But then there’s an incredible amount of hand-coded stuff implemented in the software - very detailed pronunciation rules for Hebrew, just written as, apparently, lots of switch statements. In principle it could be mapped out, but I’d feel more confident about it if we had a running copy of the newer version.
I actually started reimplementing the old version as javascript- I managed to get the dectalk DLLs running in Wine, and then it’s just a matter of sending it the right phoneme codes… I had it accurately reciting the first few words of Genesis! but then someone mailed me the new, locked CDROMs, which derailed me
Gamers have dealt with this for years now, but it's going to affect more and more things. The era of emulators being able to preserve software is coming to an end.
>I ask Schnee if Buchler’s source code could be reconstructed from a copy of the software.
>It might be possible to induce the machine code to dump out a database of every phoneme it had ever uttered — all the tiny pieces it had used to sing Armenian and Lithuanian and Egyptian trope — and then, if you were very patient and very skilled, you might be able to write code to piece them back together.
free software is a good start, but as long as it's dependent on a centralized service, it's not a guarantee this won't happen to you
I thought this was a beautiful perspective.
As with faith, sin also comes in many forms, from a semiotics perspective. But, one is probably best of not getting into too much detail as it can interfere with living one's best life (of which high self-esteem is a crucial component).
As an individual, you should strive to always follow your moral code.
As a member of a group, you should accept that everyone is fallible — including and especially yourself and your ability to even define what constitutes fallibility.
There is much to lose and little to gain by ostracizing others for their immaterial human failings.
Just two obvious thoughts that may be relevant in this case.
1) the way he's enunciating every word and then pausing stops this from flowing nicely as a tune. Maybe its good for teaching but it doesn't sound as nice as flowing nicely would, and the tune ends up helping you memorize it better than the trop (since reading at the actual torah scroll doesn't have the trop).
2) while he has good overall sound and reading of the trop, the interface isn't highlighting the trop involved - you can memorize the reading but it isn't doing a good job teaching the tune of each trop to someone who needs the help enough to use it. It needs some re-work to make sure people associate the correct trop with the tune it creates.
still totally usable but a student needs to know to make an effort to connect the words smoothly and not pause as this person does.
edit: listening to some of this I also notice some inconsistencies in how he treats some of the trop. It might be a different style issue but I don't think so.
Does anyone have any insight into this?
There is one computer still running. Everything could be recorded.
Psalm 90 - Prayer of Moses [1]
>Note-for-note transcription of the Hebrew texts by Dennis McCorkle utilizing the DAVIDIC CIPHER.
I don't know whether the reasons are the same, but we used to often see situations like that in open source software, and in computing in general before that.
Also, even if something doesn't run on modern Windows, good chance it would run in Wine on Linux.
Actually the palette on the entire site is pretty nice. What a pleasing layout
Win32 is now, more or less, the Linux software development api via WINE. Nothing else is stable in the sense of not-constantly-changing.
I can't imagine it would not be more than a few minutes of downloading the image from archive.org and running it on any VM - I would be a bit surprised if this had any kind of sophisticated VM countermeasures in it.
Meanwhile, I can believe there is some 4 million line code of something (maybe it was written in assembly!) - in any case a horrible unmaintainable mess that nobody at this software company wants to deal with anymore. Rather just rewrite it in some web based shit like half of this site does for a living.
Also on actually reading TFA - it's rife with errors - at no point in history was the DECTalk the only game in town for speech synthesis - let alone 1999! - and the idea that it was the only one with controllable pitch is hogwash as anyone with a early 90s Mac can attest.
But the article's description of how Siri synthesizes speech is grossly inaccurate.
I had to chuckle about the genius of being able to program C and Lua as if typing English - I mean that's pretty much any reasonably proficient dev.
> It could be ran in a VM or even using windows compatibility layer.
The overwhelming majority of folks using this software seem to be extremely non-technical. Any of the options you listed would work for HN readers but not the general public. If it doesn't "just install" it's useless.
> The story calls the creator a genius, but really it's just a guy that had a passionate project.
Arguably, creating software that nobody else has managed to create that is beloved by its users is genius. He was clearly an exceptional engineer to have made the software and exceedingly business minded to get it into the hands of users and delight them. It's not hard to make mediocre software, but it's a terrific challenge to make it so good that your users are lost without it. You don't need to be in the running for the Turing award to be a genius.
The quote about 4 million lines of code and how could they it would be impossible for them to share it because it is too large for email...
I think the program's creator was a great guy, doesn't seem like he was really thinking about his death seriously. His friends loved him and miss him but do not look to continue his legacy by helping the community.
The worst thing is that all the little dialects that were preserved by this are now at larger risk of being lost.
I miss him so much. R.I.P.
...but not with anywhere near the devotion (pun intended) that Terry did.