from the how-much-are-you-willing-to-pay-for-those-repairs? dept.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/we-need-software-updates-forever
I recently did some Marie Kondo–inspired housecleaning: Anything that didn't bring me joy got binned. In the process, I unearthed some old gadgets that made me smile. One was my venerable Nokia N95, a proto-smartphone, the first to sport GPS. Another was a craptastic Android tablet—a relic of an era when each year I would purchase the best tablet I could for less than $100 (Australian!), just to see how much you could get for that little. And there was my beloved Sony PlayStation Portable. While I rarely used it, I loved what the PSP represented: a high-powered handheld device, another forerunner of today's smartphone, though one designed for gaming rather than talking.
These nifty antiques shared a common problem: Although each booted up successfully, none of them really work anymore. In 2014, Nokia sold off its smartphone division to Microsoft in a fire sale; then Microsoft spiked the whole effort. These moves make my N95 an orphan product from a defunct division of a massive company. Without new firmware, it's essentially useless. My craptastic tablet and PSP similarly need a software refresh. Yet neither of them can log into or even locate the appropriate update servers.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 24 2021, @09:07AM (4 children)
Not because I liked Gameboy, but because I was a helluva lot younger then. And, it's so easy to sneak up on a kid who is distracted by the game he's playing.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 24 2021, @09:24AM
Sounds like you need a rehabilitative update.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday September 24 2021, @01:53PM (2 children)
That is creepy as all get out, just FYI.
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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 24 2021, @06:09PM
Probably the same creep accusing liberal users of being pedos. Projection, it is always projection.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 24 2021, @07:27PM
dude i intepreted it as a means to smack the kid before it was able to realize there was more out there than just its insolent hedonistic demands for constant entertainment--and some of that stuff might not be mom and dad buying more stuff in an effort to get the kid's whining to stop.
if there is anything creepy, it is the insinuation that someone actually isn't trying to smack obdience into the child and had actual nefarious intent--like teaching the kid the konami code or something and furthering the cycle of paper certs and cheaters that claim to be good with computers later in life because they got 100% achievements in their game profile rankings... even when they used an achievement server to do it.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 24 2021, @09:33AM (3 children)
At some point even all remaining devices are broken physically. Do you still want the software to be maintained until forever?
I'd rather see the code being opened at a central space (think of an archive), including user documentation, provided binaries that were offered at the time AND instructions on how to build that code, basically the whole mumbo-jumbo. I often dig up old devices, but looking at the support section of the company that build it, I increasingly find that they don't have any record of the devices, that they once produced.
I've also had devices that I looked at the available code for some time, but didn't bother to start reverse engineering the build process.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Immerman on Friday September 24 2021, @02:44PM (2 children)
Here's an idea - how about we just standardize the hardware interfaces like we did with PCs, so that you can easily install an updated version of a stock OS instead of needing all sorts of vendor-specific customizations?
Windows and Linux will run just fine on most 20-year old PCs. Imagine where the PC world would be if instead you needed to rely on Dell, HP, etc. to release their specific versions of the OS for your specific PC?
The worst part is that they (mostly) have done so already - they just make no effort to remove the last troublesome differences, and even go out of their way to make it more difficult to install compatible non-vendor OS versions.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 24 2021, @05:06PM
PC is the aberration, is poor business to provide a product you can reuse or even still use 20 years later. Go on buy the latest gee whiz.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 26 2021, @02:24AM
I take it that you haven't seen the Windows 11 hardware requirements and enforcement policies or ever tried to install retail Windows on an HP branded PC. HP does in fact issue customized, hardware specific versions of Windows for their computers, and if you are lucky you might get one major version upgrade before they drop support. This is enforced by using non-standard hardware that requires HP's custom version-locked drivers to work. You can still use Microsoft's security patches, but that's it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 24 2021, @09:36AM (2 children)
Once you accept that, you can plan rationally.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Immerman on Friday September 24 2021, @02:49PM (1 child)
Point is, there's no good reason for them to be. It generates a huge amount of needless waste, and substantial negative user value.
The PC market has demonstrated that interoperable hardware running vendor-agnostic operating systems is a completely viable and robust market. Apple has just shown that vendor-locked software with intentional hardware churn is more profitable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 24 2021, @03:22PM
> Point is, there's no good reason for them to be.
Error. The continual purchasing of new computers drives the development. Moore's Law demands that we keep supplying cash to create ever faster computers. Once we are happy, we'll stop buying shit we don't need. You see? Don't be happy, friend, keep chasing.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Friday September 24 2021, @09:42AM (7 children)
It's not really that we need updates forever. However, we need "right to repair". Which means: if the original company drops support, we need the possibility to maintain something ourselves, or to pay some third party to do so.
This means: A decision to drop support must include open-sourcing all hardware specifications and all software source code. This must include any required licenses, for example, if the company has patents on any of the technology. For IoT devices, this would also include code for the server, so that IoT functionality can be re-created.
Since companies may well not want to comply with this things, or may even be unable to (in the case of bankruptcy), all of these things should be placed in escrow at the time the product hits the market. For those not familiar, this is not an unsual thing. Back when I was part of a 2-person shop, we took on a big customer. This customer saw a risk: what happens, if the two of us were run over by the same bus? So we placed our source code in escrow, with regular updates (it just became part of the regular backup process). Customer representatives must be allowed to audit the escrow, to ensure that everything is there - part of consumer protection. No escrow? Product not allowed on the market.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by c0lo on Friday September 24 2021, @09:47AM (1 child)
I fail to see the need for the IoT server. Very likely because I fail to see the need of IoT.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Informative) by Immerman on Friday September 24 2021, @02:51PM
Luddite. Without IoT how are you going to invite random strangers from the internet to spy on you and get a foothold in your nominally secure network?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 24 2021, @06:01PM
I think you mean the API interface or even the ABI if it's binary. Then you can re-create the functionality. If you have the code, you are not re-creating anything, merely assembling it.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 24 2021, @09:19PM (3 children)
Your suggestion is brilliant. But I'd like to see things go a step further, though I have no idea how: if you look at the JS13k contest, or projects like KolibriOS, you'll see software with a lot of useful features that requires several orders of magnitude less disk space, memory, and computing resources than what's available today.
Planned obsolescence drives the investment case that powers Moore's Law, and that's cool. But the environment and our budgets take a beating when productivity software, games, and websites could be written to work adequately fast on laptops from 2004 and lightning fast on laptops from 2010 but instead you need more than 2GB of RAM on your device just to keep a few browser tabs open. Plus, of course, the effect on user satisfaction when your latest and greatest application hangs for a few seconds on hardware any tech industry CEO from 2000 would have sold his soul to get.
Sometimes I think our entire industry lost its way shortly after the Commodore 64.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday September 25 2021, @04:20AM (2 children)
Yes. And, no. On a server with mountains of memory, Firefox running with more tabs open than I care to count. It has requested 33 gig of memory. It is actually using 277 meg. That is a huge discrepancy, isn't it? Applications want, and request, a lot more memory than they actually use, in this case, by two orders of magnitude.
It isn't just Firefox, either, it's the entire operating system. Playing around with virtual machines, you might think that even a server can run out of memory quickly. Oddly, I've not come close to filling up my memory with a dozen virtual machines running. Assign 16 gig of memory to each Windows machine, start up half a dozen of those machines, open applications inside of each of them, then come back to the host machine to check memory. I'm only actually using ~20 gig of memory, total, for the host and all of those virtual machines. And, no, there is almost no disk swapping going on, inside or outside of those VMs - all are tuned to use RAM, and avoid disk swapping.
I actually did see memory usage reach 80 gig at one point, then I did some tuning with shmem in the host OS, then more tuning in VMWare shared memory, and cut that actual memory usage drastically.
So, no, you don't "need" 2 gig of memory for a browser, even today. It only seems that way, because your applications request that much, and your operating system allocates memory in mysterious ways. If you purchase a new computer today, provisioned with 32 gig of memory, you're probably not going to run out of memory for the next decade, even with the ever increasing bloatware added onto most software.
My single biggest memory usage is Folding at Home. It has requested 24.3 gig of memory, but it is actively using only 3174 meg. (I could satisfactorily run an instance of Windows on that 3174 meg!) Each application attempts to over provision it's own memory pool. So, much of your memory is marked by the system as 'used', but in reality, most of that memory can be reclaimed and used for other purposes.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 25 2021, @01:09PM (1 child)
How do you measure the difference between requested memory and used memory? Is it 'virt' vs 'res' in top?
But my broader point is that I'm all but certain that if companies and projects made performance a top priority people could still be using smartphones from 10 years ago and other hardware from 20 years ago. But time-to-market and minimum-viable-product and rapid iteration outweigh those concerns, so you end up with heavyweight products and services.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday September 25 2021, @04:46PM
Yep!
Yes, I agree with your broader point. And a large part of the reason for the ever-increasing demand for more resources is to keep consumers on that upgrade treadmill. It's amazing how many people believe that they need a new machine every two years. But, they've been indoctrinated by the industry, and neither you nor I are going to change any minds.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 5, Insightful) by shrewdsheep on Friday September 24 2021, @09:43AM (10 children)
I despise guys like the author of TFA. Bring your devices into a state that keeps them useful before mothballing. This is what I do with my tablets (the two I owned thus far). I make sure they can play video formats that I can support, I have enough useful apps (eReader, drawing, notetaking) so they can serve a purpose until they die. They cannot be updated anymore but are still useful. Stop consuming for the sake of it and make conscious choices if you want to get some life out of your devices.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Friday September 24 2021, @10:21AM (3 children)
For some devices, what you say makes sense. For others, not so much. Consider two examples:
My very first smartphone ran, iirc, Android 4. It ran forever. At the end of its life, I just wanted it to manage a couple of household devices. But those devices required Apps that kept getting updated. In order to install the updates, I had to update the phone OS. Android grew. I uninstalled everything possible, but a lot of Google stuff cannot be uninstalled - and those apps grew as well. Eventually, despite all the games I played with memory, the phone simply could not carry out any useful functions anymore. It was theoretically a working device, but it was useless.
Second, more general example: Take you pick of any of a zillion IoT devices that depend on the manufacturer's server. You can also add lots of software to this category, for example, games that contacts a DRM server. If the manufacturer decides that the server is a cost sink, they'll turn it off. Your product is immediately, without recourse, useless. And, no, hacking doesn't count: Even if you can hack the device in some way, that's not a common skill, and it's illegal in many places.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 24 2021, @12:46PM (1 child)
But did those household devices need the updated apps? Also, there are 'Apksave' type apps whose function is to create new apk installer files out of installed apps on android systems. I used one to make an installer for Quickoffice, which Google purchased and then extinguished to force people onto Google Docs. Quickoffice works to this day on my current android gadgets.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 26 2021, @02:33AM
IoT apps typically work by connecting to a central server, such as Google Home. If that server requires an app update that you can't install then you are screwed.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday September 24 2021, @03:13PM
It would be *really* nice if app stores would keep an archive of the last versions before any change in OS requirements.
It would also be really nice if device manufacturers would incorporate upgradeable storage. It's the one aspect of modern hardware that's still seeing big improvements every year, and the relevant hardware interfaces existed before the first smartphone, and even better alternatives have emerged since.
For IoT devices, I would love to see server-based shutdowns legally considered failure due to manufacturing defects, with the recourse that allows. Beyond that - the whole field is a terribly bad idea made worse in practice, so I have limited sympathy. I would love to see more vendor-agnostic network devices, such as were common in industry long before anyone had heard of IoT, with at least basic server software included - in fact most would probably benefit significantly from simply being designed to work with a bog-standard file server with an HTML-based interface.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday September 24 2021, @11:50AM (3 children)
That's not possible in a world where devices connect to the net and new vulnerabilities are found nor in a world where security certificates expire (and they expire fast these days). Mothball it and find out even just one year later that the certs are expired and that everything (including your old device) that used the toejam 3.12.654.1234.23.4b library is vulnerable to the now ubiquitous poochscrew attack.
Or you find that even for local use it would occasionally phone home because the manufacturer was a Peeping Tom and it'll stop working if it can't find the (now shut down) server.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by helel on Friday September 24 2021, @01:14PM (2 children)
If you've mothballed a device why would you ever let it touch the net again? Seems like "turn off the wifi and block it at the router" would be a standard part of this process, and if you turn it back on far enough in the future that you no longer have the old router with the ban the problem is probably moot as the mothball probably won't talk to new equipment anyway.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday September 24 2021, @04:58PM
Eventually you want to take it out of mothballs, yes?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 26 2021, @02:36AM
Many devices stop working if they can't phone home, especially devices that had no business connecting to the net in the first place.
(Score: 2) by stormreaver on Saturday September 25 2021, @01:46AM
So, Wisconsin?
(Score: 1) by anubi on Sunday September 26 2021, @03:10AM
Did similar.
My old WalMart cheapie tablet works great as a Miracast player, as it had Miracast enabled from the get go.
It also works as a crude audio oscilloscope, signal generator, spectrum analyzer, network analyzer, port knocker, all sorts of specialty calculators.
Its TCP/802.11 wifi still works great on my local network, where I do any file transfer via old school FTP protocol.
VLC player works fine.
I am getting a miracast projector for it should I need a really big display ( only for special occasions... Its bright, uses lasers, and the TI micromirror imager, and draws 400 friggen watts!) or send it to a standard monitor via a miracast dongle. Miracast does not need an internet connection to work. But it does use the wifi hardware to implement the tcp like link to the monitor dongle, meaning that you have to be originatinating the video content from somthing like VLC on the tablet.
I have found it amazing how many useful things I could do with this ultracheap WalMart tablet!
A lot of my old stuff isn't nearly as restricted/locked down as the new stuff I see out there. And a helluva lot less expensive. And does not require me to allow third parties to be invited into my private affairs.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2, Disagree) by c0lo on Friday September 24 2021, @09:44AM (5 children)
And we need those buggy whips just because Mark Pesce has a sudden attack of andropause and recalls the good old times a Gameboy gave him a hard on.
So? Upcycle them, give them another purpose. Or recycle them. Not like there's a single solution for deprecated technology polluting the planet.
What next? You want the updates for ENIAC too?
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday September 24 2021, @11:00AM (2 children)
I agree, and disagree at the same time.
Yeah, there has to be some point at which the company can offload responsibility for all those devices that have survived the decades. But, there are many use cases in which good hardware has survived for decades beyond all support. Maybe we don't need support forever, but the current chaotic non-structure of support needs to be changed. The way things are today, you can bring some doo-dad to market in the first quarter of the year, and end all support in the fourth quarter, and the millions of people who bought your product have no recourse. In fact, we see this with feature phones and phones sold through Telcos that never see an update. I have little idea if any IoT things ever get updated, I presume that few if any do.
What we have today is simply exploitation. A better term might be 'ripping consumers off'. That needs to be rectified.
The suggestion above, about putting source code into escrow isn't a bad idea at all. It allows for some kind of recourse, if a community exists willing and able to maintain it. Github and similar would fit right into such a scheme.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Friday September 24 2021, @01:43PM (1 child)
Github!?! You mean... like trusting Microsoft with an escrow on the source code for, say, a Nokia phone?
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday September 24 2021, @01:49PM
I didn't propose that Github hold the escrow. I proposed that they might host open-sourced work after the escrow had been released. Aren't escrows held in secure places, like Fort Knox or some such? Or a bank vault? Or buried beneath a hickory tree on the south side of the barn?
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 5, Touché) by sjames on Friday September 24 2021, @12:02PM (1 child)
Notably, the design for buggy whips is freely available as are tools and materials needed to make one. If you decide to restore great grandpa's buggy, you can. Horses are still available and if all else fails, you can make a buggy whip that works the same as the one great grandpa used to use. Though, as it turns out, it won't come to that because Amazon has several available for under $30 :-)
OTOH, a new battery for a 10 year old phone might be a problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 24 2021, @10:55PM
Biden needs a shipment of buggy whips to the Texas border ASAP... some uppity Haitians need a good whipping.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 24 2021, @10:26AM
The abstract used here actually contains about 75% of the total information content of the complete article.
It's just a very brief "right to repair" article that's practically SEO keyword stuffing.
There is nothing new in this. Stop submitting stuff you haven't read completely; this is plain headline clickbait. If you want Reddit, it's over there ---------------------------------------------------------->
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 24 2021, @04:14PM (2 children)
Twentieth century folks are sad that you cannot seem to send faxes and telegrams anymore. What is this world coming to?
(Score: 3, Informative) by ElizabethGreene on Friday September 24 2021, @04:36PM (1 child)
You can still both fax and telegram, don't be silly. Yes, an honest to god person walks up to your door and hands you a piece of paper telegram. To send myself "Test Message" would be $33, but it's a telegram.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 24 2021, @05:15PM
There is even an app for that, well website.
https://www.itelegram.com/ [itelegram.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 24 2021, @07:09PM (1 child)
Who's going to a agree to update your software FOREVER? That's just insane.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 24 2021, @10:57PM
》Who's going to a agree to update your software FOREVER?
Microsoft... with Windows 10.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Friday September 24 2021, @07:31PM (2 children)
Atari 2600 games don't ever need to be updated.
And sometime after that, back before I yelled at kids running on my lawn (and while old geezers yelled at me for running on their lawn), we setup local networks that didn't need the internet. Instead, we had LAN parties.
The point being that software updates are not needed. Software makers decided to make them that way.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 24 2021, @09:56PM (1 child)
Yeah, well, Atari games were written in FORTH! Even stupid people can use that, you don't need talent in maths or linguistics! How are we supposed to feel superior about programming knowledge if everyone can do it?
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday September 30 2021, @12:15AM
"Atari games were written in FORTH"
I never knew that!
FORTH was an elegant hack.
It doesn't make a lot of sense on a 64-bit machine. It really matters whether the equivalent of an opcode is 16 bits or 64 bits.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 25 2021, @06:56AM
Then Microsoft may have more motivation to actually make Windows 8, 10, 11 etc significantly better than Windows 7.
[1] It's funny in an era where distribution gets wider, faster and cheaper but copyright terms get longer and longer.