Linus Torvalds sees “zero real reason for anybody to waste one second” on them.

I didn’t know whether to mark this NSFW or not but it’s time to buy a new computer if you haven’t upgraded in multiple decades.

    • mriswith@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      9 hours ago

      Yeah, the amount of industrial machinery being controlled by ancient hardware would baffle a lot of people.

      For a comparison people might relate to: There are ATMs running twenty year old versions of Windows XP.

    • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
      31·
      17 hours ago

      Yup. Airplanes, for example, take a lot of validation. It’s extremely expensive to retest a new configuration, so they make one computer, get it validated, and use it unmodified for the next thirty years.

      This is why the Boeing Max 8 thing was a big deal. They made approved modifications, but found in rare conditions it could cause unexpected and dangerous flight conditions. But, a times b times c was estimated to be less than the cost of doing it properly, so they didn’t.

      • dan@upvote.au
        14·
        8 hours ago

        Same with industrial automation. There’s some robotic arms, assembly lines, etc in use today that still use PCs with ISA slots - the predecessor to PCI, which was the predecessor to PCIe. Old 16-bit bus with a max speed of around 5Mbps. That’s why you’ll occasionally see newish “industrial” motherboards that have ISA slots and parallel ports.

        They also often have a lot of the hardware in stock and ready to deploy, to handle replacements.

        A project I worked on at university (way back in 2010) was for one of the largest providers of air traffic control systems. Our project was interesting - overlaying eye tracking data from Tobii eye trackers they provided (thousands of dollars each at the time) on top of screen recordings taken via VNC, to aid in training of air traffic controllers.

        It was even more interesting to learn about some of their processes, though. Whenever they built an ATC computer system for a client, they’d build one or two spares at the same time, with exactly identical hardware. They did this for two reasons:

        1. If the hardware breaks down, they can supply a new system that exactly matches the hardware that was verified.
        2. If a client has an issue with their system, they can try and replicate the issue on a clone of that client’s system.

        We got to see a storage room with a large number of these systems. Lots of different PCs anywhere from a month to maybe 15 years old. :)

      • LandedGentry@lemmy.zipEnglish
        18·
        17 hours ago

        Dude when those emails came out and we saw the engineer talking about how he wouldn’t let his own family fly on one to another engineer when asked…truly slackjawed moment.

          • LandedGentry@lemmy.zipEnglish
            3·
            5 hours ago

            It’s real bad

            “This airplane is designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys.”

            “I still haven’t been forgiven by God for the covering up I did last year,” one employee says in 2018, referring to an exchange of information with the FAA.

            “Would you put your family on a Max simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn’t,” says one employee to another, who responds, “No.”