- cross-posted to:
- science_memes
- cross-posted to:
- science_memes
keaxtu
abandonware should be public domain, force companies to actively support and provide products if they don’t want to lose the rights to them.
omikronsoul
Game companies hate emulation, but none of them seem to understand that a lot of us would just buy ROMs from them directly if we could. I don’t want a fifth remake of Final Fantasy IV, I want to pay five bucks for 3MB file you already made bank with thirty years ago.Nobody who wants to play something fo the purpose of retrogaming is going to consider a $40 remake as the alternative option, and we’re certainly not going to let the original disappear. They’re crying about opportunity cost for a product they are not even selling.
justlemeremember
op i know you’re probably talking about like, video games, etc. but this is also critical for research science - my lab has so much abandonware, either because the company’s out of business, or the company decided not to maintain it, and it’s a fucking nightmare, we have two Windows 95 computers that are CRITICAL for performing experiments/data analysis because the software needed is abandonware, one of the main roles for a guy in my lab is to maintain these little dinosaurs because if they go out, we lose access to ~20 years of raw data for research, part of why is that these companies also make their own file types, and make difficult-to-impossible to convert those files types without their specif software, by habit, i convert all research files to more generic versions (txt, pdf, tif, etc) so i minimize risk of losing my shit, but some stuff can’t be converted.
for example, we have a microscope that is perfectly functional, good microscope, but its software is abandonware because the company refuses to maintain it. the company is still in business, still makes essentially the exact same software, butt they made a lot of the old tech incompatible with new software to force people to buy the new microscope tech. it would cost a quarter million dollar to replace this microscope, this perfectly good microscope.
so like, i know a lot of people look at the original post and go ‘well, op just wants old video games to play’ (which is valid! games companies should not be able to push shit to abandonware and close it off) but also this is critical for like, biomedical research, if y’all had any idea how much basic infrastructure built on science relies on shit that is technically abandonware, you would probably be horrified.
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You don’t even want to know how much government stuff is held together with duct tape
The IRS still uses data tapes, which has caused some issues lately
I know that they were using a far older format, but data tapes for cold backups is absolutely still a viable technology in 2023. Fujifilm make 18TB LTO tapes. Yeah they only run at 400MB/s, but they’re designed to backup continuously so speed doesn’t really matter.
Yeah I briefly owned an older IBM server (2010-ish) that had a tape drive. It was pretty cool to mess around with, but I don’t need cold storage like that. I sold that server for a $150 profit lol.
Can’t argue with 45TB of storage, fair enough!
…Huh.
One boggles at how they must train workers to use the equipment.
At work we have 2 CNC machines that run from windows 7 computers and 1 that runs off of XP. If we lost a hard drive on any of those it would brick the machine
I hope you have backups
That about the labs is so true. You know those if only X than utopia memes? This feels like that, with the utopia being much better medical care.
I briefly worked for a company writing software for medical labs. You know, those labs that were completely swamped with work during Covid? Anyway, that company was 15 years old, in 2016. And only starting to implement source version control. They used Pascal. In Delphi 97. With some Chinese plugins to make it usable. The only machine that could actually compile the program was a virtual machine inside the machine of one engineer. And that dude who was supposed to train me fucked off with the passwords to the virtual machine after a week.
Needless to say, I ran away as fast as I could. I wonder how they fared, three years later.
But anyway yeah, it’s terrifying how much vital, important software runs on thoughts and prayers, essentially.
If the market stops buying rereleases of old games then maybe these companies would consider doing what this dude is suggesting.
Nah, this needs legal reform. Intellectual Property laws have been set up to benefit rights holders, not general citizens. They have been extended and reinforced again and again thanks to intense lobbying from rights holders to make bank under the current system.
The defense is always thrown out that it protects the livelihoods of smaller IP holders. However a system that enshrines IP rights for things for 70 years after someone has died for example is patently not there to protect the author; is is there to enrich those who buy or inherit rights yet had nothing to do with their creation.
IP laws need drastic reform. Abandonware is just one of many examples where citizens have to break the law to bypass the shitty status quo.
What are the first steps to make that happen? Do we need a petition or something? This also effects medical equipment that keeps people alive.
The first step is to organize. Find other people who also want reform. Get doctors and nurses who use those programs, get patients that depend on it. If they won’t join, at least get them to sign a petition.
Once you’ve got a bunch of like minded people, start lobbying the goverment. Show representatives and officials how many lives are being held up by old abandoned software that could go out at any moment. Show them your collection of incomprehensible doctor signatures saying that this is important.
Find or train a spokesman to talk to the press or goverment officials. Don’t repeat the AntiWork debacle with letting unprepared people represent your cause to hostile interviewers.
If you’re in the US, maybe start with California, the state isn’t deadlocked politically and has the power to affect both Silicon Valley and Hollywood.
If you’re in the EU, they seem to like passing consumer protection laws, so talk to your… representative? I don’t know how that goverment works.
Lastly: Stay on mission. We all hate climate change, we all want police reform, we all want to abolish capitalism (at least most of us). They’re all important goals to work to as well, but you’re trying to fix abandonware, right?
Thank you. I think I will. If not me, then who?
Yep, I have been saying this since 2008 when I wrote a paper for college on the DMCA, every single person I have ever talked to about this doesn’t care or thinks its boring.
Every concern I posited as a hypothetical has now happened, at a scale far beyond what I expected.
DMCA takedowns all over YouTube for bullshit reasons that presume guilt instead of innocence that massively hampers channel growth for those critiquing basically anyone, and has now just removed entire previously viable types of videos.
Entire economies rocked and largely shaped by companies forgoing actually benefitting consumers /and/ workers by throwing all their money at acquiring other companies for their IPs or Patents, depending on the industry.
Then there’s just the huge amount of technological progress /prevented and thwarted/ by useful software or sections of code being black boxed and not shared, having to be tediously revers engineered by FOSS advocates.
Oh well. Boring, no one cares, and now our political system is so beyond fucked it will probably never get addressed.
abolish intellectual property rights
See, this is why this is a complex issue.
You do /that/, just exactly that, and now no individual artist of any kind can expect to make any money other than donations.
Remove all IP also means no more brand rights, so it wouldnt take long for dangerous knock off copy cat products to start showing up in stores everywhere.
Its a very complex topic.
Reminds me of that time in university tech support where we had to reinstall Win3.11 on a PC with a bunch of floppy disks.
capitalism breeds innovation
You don’t even want to know how much government stuff is held together with duct tape
Yikes, that setup with Windows 95 machines sounds nerve wracking. They should really be running a modern computer with Windows 95 in a VM.
I actually posted that in science_memes a few days ago including other solutions as well as hardware passthru. People kept replying that it wasn’t a solution because alternatively the lab doesn’t have the expertise and somehow after 2 decades the only solution available is to continue to fight a losing battle of maintaining with no longer made hardware and also that source code availability would somehow just magically be maintained by magic software developers also interested in it after all of this time.
There’s more goal post moving and some stretching assumptions in the responses but that’s the ultimate gist.
It isn’t that I’m again code rights dying with a vendor or even source code availability but I was merely posting that these types of problems are too common and solvable already outside of severe edge cases.
Often it is not socketed to be able to do that (hardware is also an issue).
Back when I was a hardware engineer (embedded hardware, not really part of IT) for avionics, most of what I’d see where the interfaces weren’t standard inside ‘black boxes’ were really just PCs on a motherboard with a ‘bus controller’ (not really a bus controller) that could be slotted into a PCI. You just have to pass the PCI from the hypervisor to the VM where the drivers and OS that uses it sits.
An issue that hangs some people up is some hardware that required an RTOS and was being virtualized is the CPU scheduler (due to vCores/HT/SMT) but those didn’t run on Windows of course. My solution is just pinning the physical CPU and every odd core (if I can’t just turn HT/SMT off) to the VMs with an RTOS. Works great.
Most data connections are just serial types and the Data|TX -/+ or TX|RX are simply swapped in the pin-out with a ‘proprietary’ formfactor that’s easy to pigtail into whatever.
Maybe I should just go into business modernizing old lab and factory equipment’s compute.
