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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Intel is removing drivers and BIOS for its old desktop boards so anyone running an old Pentium-based PC has four days to get hold of anything they might need.
The warning on Intel's download center page says:
End Of Life - This download, BIOS Update [RL86510A.86A] P21, will no longer be available after November 22, 2019 and will not be supported with any additional functional, security, or other updates. All versions are provided as is. Intel recommends that users of BIOS Update [RL86510A.86A] P21 uninstall and/or discontinue use as soon as possible.
Opinion on message boards is mixed, with some accepting that a 20-year support cycle is not terrible. But others pointed out that some industries like manufacturing will still be relying on old hardware to run parts of their infrastructure.
Posters on Vogon, a forum dedicated to ancient hardware and emulators that allow you to run old games on newer machines, questioned the move and how much space and storage Intel would really save by the housekeeping measure.
Various people are setting up their own mirrors and using archive.org, but the maker community noted that file names are not always obvious and downloading from mirror sites can be risky.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 3, Interesting) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday November 19 2019, @11:06PM (11 children)
The question is liability and culpability for backdoors and no longer allocating personnel dollars (both in institutional knowledge, ongoing design/revisions, and responsibility to maintenance those pages). But harder on the closure of a liability door. If a project is officially EOL'd then the company is no longer responsible for putting out patches for it. And while they could EOL the product but still leave the last good copies up that still leaves a question which might be litigated. ("See, they left the downloads up for it... so they were still 'maintining' it." Lousy argument but it might be litigable.) Shut the whole thing down and say, "it's gone," and one can't argue in any way that they were still offering maintenance for them.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Hartree on Tuesday November 19 2019, @11:17PM (7 children)
I doubt this is that forward thinking. I'm betting a PHB heard they still had ancient drivers around and cried out: "But we want them to upgrade! Take that down. Now!" regardless that it has no bearing at all on current computer users.
Never attribute to well thought out malice what can reasonably be explained by sloth, stupidity, or Pointy Haired Bosses. (But I repeat myself.)
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 20 2019, @01:21AM (4 children)
No, GP is right, Intel policy doesn't allow the use of anything that is considered "outdated" for fear of security flaws causing lawsuits. Even sysvinit is banned from use due to it being "old" and "unmaintained", so, pretty much anything that hasn't gotten any new release in the last 6 months.
And yes, older releases do get retroactively declared insecure and removed because a component didn't get any new updates after the release.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday November 20 2019, @02:07PM (3 children)
So if you have old and essentially bug-free software (no known bugs for extended time), you have to keep making pointless updates just to keep it alive?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Wednesday November 20 2019, @07:52PM
Have to justify your job somehow, I guess. ;)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 20 2019, @08:28PM
Why do you think all bug fixes introduce 1-3 new ones? It's not that software developers are bad, or software is hard, they just like job security.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday November 20 2019, @11:02PM
No.
If you have old and essentially bug-free software and still are claiming it is as maintained then one must still be alert to the possibility that it could be compromised. If an entity lists their products as CVE compatible (sometimes a prerequisite for enterprise-level acceptance of packages) one has to have somebody prepared to respond to CVE notices for that piece of software. One has to be prepared to migrate the web support pages when the company buys into a new CMS. One has to nominally assure that the program isn't suffering bit rot from the introduction of unexpected new technologies into an otherwise static environment.
TL/DR: If you claim to be maintaining software... you have to maintain it. (Even if that maintenance consists of no codebase changes).
Corollary: If you keep shit online, you may be establishing prima facie an intent that it is being maintained. Although hopefully your "THIS IS NOW END OF LIFE AND ARCHIVED ONLY" notice will win you the lawsuit, it doesn't stop someone from filing one against you. Especially if you have deep pockets. The deeper the pockets, the more PHB's you must have, sadly. Success breeds bureaucracy.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday November 20 2019, @11:05PM
Yes, also possible. Actually, probably both reasons are correct making it a "win-win" for them (and "lose-lose" for the user whose twenty year old system still faithfully chugs along).
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday November 20 2019, @11:18PM
A quick R/L non-software issue.
We have an electrical switching box manufactured over 20 years ago by G.E. as part of a larger system that was, at that time, maintained by G.E. Changes happened, and G.E. was no longer being paid money to maintain the system which needed the switchbox. Other equipment was put in after that box.
Someone came in and did some electrical maintenance for us and it fried a very expensive part inside that box. We managed to get ahold of a genuine G.E. replacement part for the fried component. We tested all other components in that system and determined they were all good - just the one part fried. The company who fried the part (by shorting together two wires that should never have been connected but they thought they knew what those leads did) raised an extreme objection that we were endangering the system by replacing the part.
Sooo..... we tackled the hierarchy at G.E. And managed to speak with the engineering office that still had maintenance authority for the plans for that box. They hadn't been asked a question about these schematics for those plans in five years because that model of box was retired soon after we purchased our installation.... but they still had installations using that box under maintenance. The engineer with oversight responsibility for that box was responsible for periodically re-certifying that the plans were accurate and suitable for applications fitting the required specs. That engineer certified to us, given all the conditions we gave him about our testing and our best suspicions about what happened that installing the replacement part would create no additional hazards. All of that consultation happened to us at no charge, and while G.E. owed us nothing they still took responsibility for the basic workmanship of the twenty year old switchbox and its circuitry. (Although we billed the person who shorted the wires for the replacement part cost).
That was about ten years ago, and that box is still in place doing its job today. I'm sure, if it hasn't already happened, that G.E. will make a cost decision eventually that all remaining installations of that box will need to upgrade or lose their maintenance, those plans will be jettisoned, and the engineering office I spoke with will no longer have responsibility to answer silly questions like ours.
So the point of this is.... point... point? No, I guess I just liked that story. :)
Oh, and sometimes there are internal cost charges to keeping stuff around beyond just a scant amount of power and hard drive space. And PHB's too, granted.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 20 2019, @03:41AM
UUuuuUUUuuu they save 100 MEGAbytes of disk space!
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday November 20 2019, @10:23PM (1 child)
>The question is liability and culpability for backdoors
then they would have not shipped the IME, and the BIOS would be updatable only after setting a physical switch, and no EFI, and no integrated radio circuitry, and the BIOS would be 100% mathematically verified, and would be openfirmware because it is already there, working, and free.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday November 20 2019, @10:48PM
You confuse liability with perfection. But I can see where to a Bot that things must either be perfect or offline.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by RandomFactor on Tuesday November 19 2019, @11:19PM (7 children)
Seriously, what's the harm in keeping them up? You could probably manage the load on that website with a 486sx
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 4, Insightful) by anubi on Tuesday November 19 2019, @11:46PM (1 child)
Why aren't these softwares now considered public domain?
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Wednesday November 20 2019, @02:28AM
That's precisely what should happen when support is dropped. Then the archiving websites can post them. Copyright/patent and support should be inseparable.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 5, Interesting) by TheGratefulNet on Wednesday November 20 2019, @03:42AM (3 children)
intel loves to remove things from their site.
even whole programs! case in point, I was involved in a TV show of theirs (americas greatest makers). go try to find info on that, its even purged from archive.org. a whole TV season on TBS, a few years ago, IoT focused using an intel curie chip (ok, go try to find info on THAT, as well!) - all gone. their website interviews, the time and effort people put into that - and it was on national tv for a whole season.
try to find any mention of it on intel's website. nope! wiped clean.
now, sure, they were embarassed about it; it was kind of a failure, in many ways. but still, it was a thing and it happened; yet there's no ref to it and they had to go to extra effort to get archive.org to not mirror it, or purge it.
after experiencing that, nothing that intel does would surprise me. otoh, the left hand really does not know what the right hand does, over there.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 2) by Barenflimski on Wednesday November 20 2019, @07:37AM (2 children)
While I believe that you believe you know what you're talking about, I'm not sure what you're talking about.
There are plenty of references to that show. Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
Here is a link to a PDF about the Curie chip on Intel's site -> Cure Chip [intel.com]
I was 100% for your story though!
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday November 20 2019, @08:11AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quark [wikipedia.org]
Another one bites the dust... :(
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Wednesday November 20 2019, @04:26PM
there are not 'plenty of references' ON INTELs SITE. that's my point. external refs, but intel did its best to purge all refs to it, internally.
when I searched using intel's own main page, I found only 2 refs and those were either dead links or incorrect links (one goes to a dot com domain that is not even owned BY intel!
they did start a season 2 but it never completed and never aired. it was not too much longer after that that big brian was fired and left intel.
to be honest, that whole show was an ego boost for brian.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Wednesday November 20 2019, @06:23PM
You're not kidding. Those are typically less that 500K each. I mean ffs.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Snotnose on Wednesday November 20 2019, @01:08AM (3 children)
Last year my laptop died and I had to buy a new one. I couldn't find the CD with my printer driver (10-15 year old printer). Went to the website, and just about every link I clicked on older than maybe 10 years took me back to the top level drivers page (in other words, instead of 404 they had me start over). Finally found a Windows XP driver for my printer, which worked under Win10.
I neither write nor maintain web pages, but link rot is a real thing and I suspect it, instead of bandwidth/storage, is the real cost driver for not supporting older devices.
The sad thing. About a month later my printer had a paper jam. With no paper in it. So I ended up getting a new printer anyway.
That said, I don't know why companies can't just make a "really old shit" link, and under that they never update their web pages nor the underlying tech, but the links still take you to the ancient drivers.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2) by dry on Wednesday November 20 2019, @04:45AM (2 children)
Even just an ftp site. Oh yea, ftp is now depreciated. Still I can find all kinds of OS/2 software and other equally old stuff on IBM's boulder ftp server.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Wednesday November 20 2019, @06:30AM (1 child)
I had to search for WSFTP6.EXE . Old FTP client on both my WIN7 and WIN95 machines. I use those to get stuff in and out of my phones, which I have an FTP server running.
There is a 25 year gap between those two programs - what's running in the computer, and what's running in the phone. Both still work perfectly
Wish I could make the same claim for most of my paid stuff.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by dry on Wednesday November 20 2019, @06:55AM
Yes, ftp just works. Unluckily it is being removed from Firefox and may have already been removed from Chrome, in the name of security.
Ftp does seem to be the way that a lot of Android file managers share files and it works fine.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday November 20 2019, @01:39AM (11 children)
If a machine that old is still in use, it has likely been updated already, just as far as the owners think necessary, or wise. I think most of us have learned (the hard way, in some cases) that you don't just update your bios because there is a new one available. If your machine works, why risk bricking it with a new bios? If you have a problem which the updated bios claims to address, then, sure, you update.
No one is actually SELLING these old machines anymore. There aren't warehouses full of them, being auctioned off, are there? It really is a safe bet that these old machines are in place, and doing whatever jobs they will do, until their individual ends of life.
Those businesses still using these machines need to get a clue. It's time, and past time, to upgrade. Think about it. That poor little 100mhz machine that struggles to maintain an inventory ledger? You can, today, upgrade to a machine costing mere hundreds of dollars that can do the same job using far less than 1% of it's resources. The other 99+% can be harnessed for something important, like, playing solitaire.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by hemocyanin on Wednesday November 20 2019, @02:27AM (2 children)
I was over at a friend's shop recently and while he was firing up a CNC he has that's about the size of a full-size van. CRT touch screen running Windows 95. It's not connected to any network -- just that machine.
I recently had to buy a new video card for my main desktop -- this thing is pretty old, not EUFI but because I'm not a gamer, it does everything I need it to do without a hiccup. It's certainly more than 7 years old at this point and maybe more (I have one of the 3 core AMD processors marketed as 6 core for reference). The case is probably twice as old as the guts inside it.
Anyway -- upgrading is overrated. There was a point some years ago where aside from gaming or hardcore science, processors got to be good enough -- so long as my motherboard holds out, popping in a new drive from time to time like you change the oil in a car will keep these things going just fine. I'm running the newest version of Linux Mint off an SSD and after I type in my decryption password pre-boot, it feels like somewhere between 5 and 10 seconds later I'm ready to type in my login password. If that dropped down to 3 seconds, it wouldn't make my life any better really, but I'd spend $1000 (give or take) to get there. So I'm just going to swap cards or memory or HDs so long as this thing keeps ticking along. Oh yeah, and since I had NIB power supply sitting on my shelf since buying it years ago because it was on closeout for almost nothing in a store that wouldn't be selling that stuff anymore, I went ahead and refreshed the power suplly when I did the video card. Kind of like getting a new set of spark plugs.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Freeman on Wednesday November 20 2019, @05:02PM (1 child)
Seems like by the time you need to replace it you'll be able to get a Raspberry Pi that will do everything you need for $35. Depending on what you're doing, you might be good to go now with a Pi4 4GB. I'd recommend giving it a go some time, if for no other reason than those old PCs pull a whole lot more juice than a Raspberry Pi.
If you're in the USA, there's a sale on a few different models at Micro Center.
https://www.microcenter.com/search/search_results.aspx?Ntt=Raspberry+Pi&searchButton=search [microcenter.com]
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 21 2019, @12:40PM
When people return them, they get put up as Open Box for 20% off.
So a $55 Pi4 4GB with $5 discount can suddenly become $40. I got mine before the discount but managed to get 3 of them as Open Box. Mix of 4GB and 2GB.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Hartree on Wednesday November 20 2019, @05:09AM (6 children)
You wanna cough up the quarter to half a million to buy a new version of the x ray crystallography machine I keep running just because "get a clue and upgrade"? The control software is specific to that era of machine and thus dos.
It still does its job fine. Ditto the large number of CNC machine tools that are still out there running fine on old embedded systems. Again, software specific to the computer they came with. I keep a half million dollar to replace (we did the costing last year) laser milling system going that is heavily used not just by our university but also groups at other Midwest universities. It runs on closed source software specific to the hardware on Win2K. It was bought with a grant that was for a professor who is no longer there and if it goes down, we don't have the money to replace it, we just stop doing laser milling. Yeah, the researchers can go with commercial facilities at massively higher cost and much longer turn around time. It's your tax dollars that are going out the window there.
The computers in and of themselves aren't worth didly. I've got lots of old hardware (both at the school and of my own)
The problems is they are running systems that are very expensive to replace. And before you mention DOSBox, I've yet to see it simulate an ISA slot for the custom data acquisition cards many instruments used.
Grants for instrumentation are very competitive, so we have to make the machinery we have last.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Wednesday November 20 2019, @06:47AM (3 children)
Remember when you could burn a a pair of 27256 and transfer the BIOS of your liking onto the motherboard? Award? Phoenix? AMI?
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Wednesday November 20 2019, @04:28PM
for a short time, there was this thing called MR BIOS (no no 'mister bios', lol, but MR stood for something else).
you could load that bios onto asus or tyan or supermicro boards. back when running software raid was a 'thing', mr bios had that before most others, built into the bios. (I think it was 1995 or so).
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Wednesday November 20 2019, @08:09PM (1 child)
I remember poking around in the results from using the bios dump utility that came with the Sourcer disassembler.
I knew there were some alternate bios-es around, but never messed with them myself.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Friday November 22 2019, @01:21AM
Those were the days!
I could code up something for a factory using garden variety parts, have it work perfectly from then on.
Now, Micrium OS on specialized hardware, or maybe propeller chips, are my last resort to counter the morning surprise when it's discovered the system updated last night, or some hacker has taken an interest in our system.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday November 20 2019, @03:04PM (1 child)
Yesss, I understand all of that. It makes perfect sense. But, isn't that kinda tangential to the point I was making? Your machines are already updated just as far as you need them to be updated, correct? If you have a stash of thirty machines sitting in the warehouse for the day your active machine(s) crap out, you need to be sure their BIOS's are all updated quickly! I'll repeat the bit about "no one sells these things any more" here.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Wednesday November 20 2019, @08:02PM
In a perfect world they'd already be updated. And for the systems I mentioned, we have preconfigured spare hard drives in storage that we test from time to time (or at least the IT guys say they do. So far it's been truthful. :) )
In reality, I don't necessarily have any contact with the machine until $panicked-user calls me talking about a hard drive crash on a machine they utterly depend on. The answer to asking about backups is often a dumb look and, if I'm lucky, saying they think they can still find the original floppies/cd that came with it.
Academic users, even ones with PhDs are often just as without clue as any others. I'm thinking that by now with all the digging I've had to do, I should have an honorary appointment in the archeology department.
(Score: 2) by dry on Wednesday November 20 2019, @05:14AM
I bought my old machine for $20 about a year ago, Q8800 based, it is plenty fast enough for my needs. Just the other day I was at Intel checking out a BIOS update (already has the latest). So they're still being sold on the second hand market and are plenty good enough for casual use.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 20 2019, @01:54AM (3 children)
Apple II, Commodore 64, and Pentium 100 - One Fucking Hundred Megahurts (with 16 MB RAM) with pluggable cache memory modules.
We thought ANSI C was the language of Allah's revelation, and we were right.
Pointers math and out-of-order execution turned it into a black magic nightmare, though - i.e., programmers can't tell how shits will turn out.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Wednesday November 20 2019, @06:54AM (2 children)
I can't tell you how many microcontroller things I made for my first employer, based on 65C02, and developed on a C64 Assembler .
I thought the 65C02 was the only processor worth messing with, until the MC68000 showed up .
Then I finally learned C.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 20 2019, @08:47AM (1 child)
not much difference between 68k asm and C, though.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Friday November 22 2019, @12:50AM
Compared to the 80286, I considered the 68000 instruction set and architecture to be heaven.
I absolutely hated segmentation with a purple passion.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]