Posted on 03/28/2007 6:51:38 AM PDT by Halfmanhalfamazing
FIRMS WOULD LOVE to have you dump your computer every year, and your accesories, and your MP3 player, and your DVD, and your entire movie collection, and replace it with new ones. The software world is getting closer.
I think that "Planned Obsolescence" is sadly here to stay; but there's hope, only one: open source. Microsoft has lately perfected the planned obsolescence game with its decision to make flagship products like Internet Explorer 7 not available for previous OS versions like Windows 2000. Cutting updates and no longer releasing patches for insecure products is not enough.
(Excerpt) Read more at volesoft.com ...
That is harder to do when new technology growth rates double the capabilities of something every two years.
The open-source (religious) fanatics overlook that fact in their quest to make everything free for everyone. They are so like liberals in their communist software beliefs.
I am all for open source software for anyone who wants to make something and give it away free. go ahead! Just don't expect everyone to agree or try to FORCE them to agree.
So do I. The limiting factor for most people has nothing to do with your hardware, it's the network speed that governs your work. Having a faster anything does zip for increasing the network bandwidth. The sole exceptions might be a video composer or a processor intensive scientific application.
Eventually, everyone will figure out, the network really is the computer.
^^^^^^^^^^^They are so like liberals in their communist software beliefs.^^^^^^^^^^^^
It's not that they're *like* liberals..............
They *are* all liberals And leftists. Well, the vast majority of them.
But what're you gonna do? If your sole reason for not using open source software is to avoid leftist leadership, then you're stuck up a creek without a paddle. Both Gates and Jobs are also liberals.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^I am all for open source software for anyone who wants to make something and give it away free. go ahead! Just don't expect everyone to agree or try to FORCE them to agree.^^^^^^^^^^^^^
My sentiments exactly. But the original post of mine gives you a good idea of *why* these people think the way they do. I don't take it to the religious level that these people do, but it's a problem that I to have no choice but to deal with. We all do. Perhaps you can afford to buy new software and hardware within the planned cycles. I can't.
I think that by referring to "Open Source" they mean making the source code available to the marketplace so that other companies can contribute improvements and in so doing extend the life-cycle of the product.
I think what you are thinking of is "Freeware" or "Shareware". Those days are largely behind us.
I'll admit that my take could be wrong, but that's the way I interpreted the article.
^^^^^^^^^^Eventually, everyone will figure out, the network really is the computer.^^^^^^^^^^^
That's largely accurate.
Where I work is a great example of just the opposite. We have excellent bandwidth, a huge internet pipe; I've seen our networking back end. It rocks.
Our workstations stink to high hell. They all need ram upgrades, they all have horribly slow hard drives in them, and some brainiac IT person thinks it's cool to use the cheapest power supplies known to man. They're hotter than a stove and break often.
I submit to you that having the greatest network on earth doesn't mean a hill of beans if you can't even access it, or if your portal to the network, your workstation, is so god-awfully slow that the *network* is waiting for you to catch up.
It's all a balance.
I agree that planned obsolscence is bad but I can hardly fault apple for it, I will be upgrading the 10.5 as soon as its out on my 4 y/o powerbook..
Request for Clarification: What doe you think of the GPL license?
Have you seen Killer NIC? For $279 it can seriously reduce latency and lag. It basically takes almost all of the networking load off of the CPU and handles the network buffers in its own memory, then uses optimized algorithms for common tasks. For example, instead of your OS having to traverse the whole networking stack to see if there's data on a port and then pull it, this thing does it in two quick instructions. That's helpful if you're polling a port all the time. Games have seen between 1 and 38 ms lower ping times, and performance gains up to 10% (slightly due to processor offload, but mainly due to not waiting so long checking and pulling data from a port).
It's mainly for gamers since latency is the killer for them, not raw bandwidth. But something like this should speed up a high-traffic business network -- VPN and remoting should love it. Is it cheaper to upgrade your whole network because your remoting UI is jerky, or to put these NICs in those systems that do remoting?
I'm not sure I agree with it. Without it, then we'd never advance, always have to support the first versions of any software, and never get anywhere. Society, companies, and people all require planned obsolescence in order to progress.
"The Banana Jr. 6000, now with Tint Control."
Shadow,
Planned means pushed. Dos will still work on modern hardware its not used because its ancient not because people were locked out of it.
Yep, but you still can't get rid of the network latency which overruns all else. Try a program like pingplotter and see for yourself.
Ahh. OK. I misunderstood your position, then. In light of that new definition, then, I will have to agree with you.
To a certain degree planned obsolescence is necessary. Downward compatibility is a major resource drag on development, every OS you have to support is another round of regression testing and OS dependent bug fixes. Eventually you have to draw a line in the sand and say "we're not even going to try to work on that". As for keeping your devices until the smoke comes out, go ahead, there's nothing about planned obsolescence that's actually stopping you. If you're happy with IE6 or other browsers that work on Win2K then keep Win2K, there's nothing that says you have to stay with the curve. Of course if you choose to stay with the curve, then there's plenty of upgrades you have to do.
There's network latency, and then there's total latency -- the time the user has to wait for network latency plus the time his computer spends on dealing with the network. This card cuts the total latency. I'll bet PingPlotter shows shorter pings with a card like this, especially if you tell it to rapid-fire the requests for a stress test.
Just showing how PC hardware can make the network faster. However, the "network" really does include every computer, at least every computer's NIC, so you really upgrade the network with one of these cards.
For the average consumer sitting at the end of a cable connection, somewhat the best available ... mine is 8 MBit down, 512 KBit up, it doesn't matter one wit. Just throw up a monitoring program and watch. Business use, yeah it could make a difference, especially what I do, software development, where compile time is an issue. I just offload it to a local server -- A 4 GByte AMD x2 5000.
I wish my network was so capable and had so much bandwidth it has to wait for me ...
You just told the story of Vista vs. OS X, and why OS X is still ahead.
No I told the story of developing applications. How far back is software made for OSX compatible? Does Safari work on System 7? Eventually everybody has to draw that line in the sand, downward compatibility is a lot of additional labor for steadily decreasing return, this is a platform independent problem. The only real advatage open source has on this is that while the guys "in charge" of a product can set a cut off point if there are enough people in the extended community that want the new rev to support some antique OS then they can do it themselves. But even that isn't a real solution, that's a community based work around that assumes there are going to be enough skilled people that care to extend the product's functionality beyond the line originally intended.
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