Why the Best Days of Open Hardware are Yet to Come
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Why the Best Days of Open Hardware are Yet to Come
1–10 of 25 posts
Re: Why the Best Days of Open Hardware are Yet to Come
#2Its a great insight. What happens when your laptop is 'fast enough' for the forseeable future?
Re: Why the Best Days of Open Hardware are Yet to Come
#3I'm not sure if all of these assumptions follow. Marketers are in the business of finding reasons to compel you to buy new stuff, and marketers are the ones making products.
In the past, people held on to things longer, not because they lasted longer or were viable longer, but because they didn't have the resources to buy new stuff. In order for "repair culture" to set-in in any significant way, consumption culture would need to be displaced. The factors that would drive that are largely unrelated to technology. For example, a global economic depression would result in people keeping their possessions longer simply because they don't have the money to buy new.
Look at the many other products in our lives that people regularly replace before their usefulness has expired. Cars are probably the best example. When the economy is booming, people replace their cars rapidly. As it slows down, they hold on to them longer. I can't find any long term data, but the graph and caption on this page imply that the two are correlated: "The Changing U.S. Auto Industry Series: Consumer Sentiment During Challenging Times."
http://www1.eere.energy.gov/vehiclesandfuels/facts/2010_fotw...
I don't see any reason computers will be different. "Hackers" will remain a niche community, but I still think the many other reasons cited by the author will result in better tools for us to play with. For example, development of reasonably priced and performant FPGAs would be huge. Look at the Arduino line of products.
The future is still a bright one. I just don't see "heirloom laptops" in our future.
Re: Why the Best Days of Open Hardware are Yet to Come
#4I'm not sure if all of these assumptions follow. Marketers are in the business of finding reasons to compel you to buy new stuff, and marketers are the ones making products. In the past, people held on to things longer, not because they lasted longer or were viable longer, but because they didn't have the resources to buy new stuff. In order for "repair culture" to set-in in any significant way, consumption culture w…
> people keeping their possessions longer simply because they don't have the money to buy new
This is already the case for most of the developing world. However, with increasing automation and outsourcing, it looks as if that is a future that might not be too far away here too. There might simply not be enough jobs to go around and a new class of lifestyle may arise where you need to purchase durable and repairable goods and a market would rise around that need.
Re: Why the Best Days of Open Hardware are Yet to Come
#5I'm not sure if all of these assumptions follow. Marketers are in the business of finding reasons to compel you to buy new stuff, and marketers are the ones making products. In the past, people held on to things longer, not because they lasted longer or were viable longer, but because they didn't have the resources to buy new stuff. In order for "repair culture" to set-in in any significant way, consumption culture w…
> For example, a global economic depression would result in people keeping their possessions longer simply because they don't have the money to buy new.
That would seriously suck then because the stuff that we've got today for the most part was built with a very definite life-cycle in mind. So when you are dumped in that global recession you need the quality stuff that wasn't produced when the recession wasn't on yet and you can no longer afford its creation.
Re: Why the Best Days of Open Hardware are Yet to Come
#6Although I do agree that Open Hardware has a bright future, I'd just like to point out that people have been calling the end of transistor size scaling for a few decades, and technology keeps finding ways to get around the limitations (strained silicon, high-k metal gates, finFETs, etc.).
Re: Why the Best Days of Open Hardware are Yet to Come
#7Its a great insight. What happens when your laptop is 'fast enough' for the forseeable future?
Then you start running into failure. Modern electronics isn't really built to last, so having a laptop that will last you more than 10 years is extremely unlikely.
Until market demand changes to quality, long-lived electronics, you will still be rolling over your computing device every couple of years. And then there's always the trends and cycles of fashion...
Re: Why the Best Days of Open Hardware are Yet to Come
#8Its a great insight. What happens when your laptop is 'fast enough' for the forseeable future?
My desktop has already hit this point. Granted I'm not much of a PC gamer or anything, but prior to my current desktop I would upgrade and/or totally replace my main desktop system at least once per year. Now I've got a 4 year old desktop running on a Q6600 and Nvidia GeForce 9-somethingOrOther that I'm still insanely happy with. The only upgrade made to it in the past 4 years was replacing the system drive with an SSD.
Laptops are pretty much "done" for me too if you don't consider size/battery issues -- a Core i5 laptop is more than enough for pretty much everything I do and likely will be for the next 4+ years, but now I just need a smaller, lighter, more battery efficient one.
Re: Why the Best Days of Open Hardware are Yet to Come
#9Its a great insight. What happens when your laptop is 'fast enough' for the forseeable future?
Then you start running into failure. Modern electronics isn't really built to last, so having a laptop that will last you more than 10 years is extremely unlikely. Until market demand changes to quality, long-lived electronics, you will still be rolling over your computing device every couple of years. And then there's always the trends and cycles of fashion...
Yeah, but 10 years is still a lot longer than the 3-year upgrade cycle many people are on today.
Re: Why the Best Days of Open Hardware are Yet to Come
#10I like where this is going, ie. Hardware becomes just another software component.
The key item thats left is some sort of standard interface to port programs to a FPGA style processor, i.e. a way of interfacing between a language compiler and HDL.
I like the look of the Reduceron (http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/fp/reduceron/) which looks to be funded by Xilinx and Lava( by Satnam Singh, who works for Microsoft Research), purely because I think its easier to visualise a functional language translating into circuitry.
Although I do wonder whether it will take a start-up to be able to successfully merge both the software and the hardware components into a workable model.