411–420 of 439 posts
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Librem phones can't come soon enough.
The issue there is that you're missing the app ecosystem. Without it, why not just use a "dumb" phone?
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Before computing divorced the idea of the file from the physicality of the storage medium, music was sold as live performance, printed paper, plastic discs, or magnetic tape. Those all have a non-trivial cost of reproduction. Now that music is just files, the marginal cost of sending a file down the network wire is proportional to its compressed file size, which is insignificant in relation to the cost of the human l…
Long before the invention of paper, plastic, magnetic tape, piano rolls, or metal drums with pins, songs and stories and other kinds of "intellectual property" could be conveyed from mind to mind verbally. Such ideas were expensive and difficult to create the original copy (ever write a song or derive Pythagoras' theorem from first principles?), but the marginal cost of each reproduction was minimal and close enough…
Before computers, it was nearly impossible to copy a musical song from one person to another faster than the time it took to perform it. And to go that fast, you needed someone trained to perform it well enough (cheap, but not free) and someone trained to memorize it by ear in one take (expensive). To do it more slowly, with more repetitions, you still needed someone that could perform what they had learned, which was cheap, but not free.
The cost of connecting the teacher with the learner was likewise not free. They had to be in the same place, physically. They might meet up, learn each other's repertoire, then split up again, so as to not compete with each other by working the same territory. The invention of written musical notation was a huge leap forward, in that it enabled the profession of composer/lyricist to be separated from that of the musical performer.
Millennia ago, great works were lost completely, because they were not copied enough to survive the deaths of everyone who knew how to reproduce them. That is not a thing that happens when copies are cheap. Even things that were written down have been lost, because copying written materials was not cheap enough until the printing press.
If making a copy takes a specialist four hours, and consumes paper and ink, that is nowhere near "close enough to zero".
Now, you can copy music in a millisecond, using a device that nearly everyone carries in their pocket, to anyone in the world who likewise carries a similar device. The cost is still not zero. It is just now too small to think about, unless you are making millions of copies per second.
What many people may not realize is just how long-lived a lot of farm equipment is. There will be tractors out there still working that are 75 years old and just keep getting repaired. Obviously the manufacturers would like to sell those farmers tractors more often than that or, in the very least, generate a revenue stream from existing hardware and honestly that's what I see a lot of computing in vehicles as being:…
I grew up on a citrus farm and I can tell you CAT equipment makes Apple look like an open hardware platform. Parts where unavailable to non dealers they used patents to stop aftermarket and where hostile to hardware hackers that fixed flaws in their design. This was all while they where mechanical. I cannot imagine what it is like owning a CAT machine now that they are computerized. I know my grandfather tended to st…
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13 years of support may very well be above and beyond the norm in the software industry, but that doesn't make it "basically forever".
Relative to software, it's basically forever. At some point you're still riding a horse and demanding that a highway be horse-accessible. It's unreasonable.
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I grew up on a citrus farm and I can tell you CAT equipment makes Apple look like an open hardware platform. Parts where unavailable to non dealers they used patents to stop aftermarket and where hostile to hardware hackers that fixed flaws in their design. This was all while they where mechanical. I cannot imagine what it is like owning a CAT machine now that they are computerized. I know my grandfather tended to st…
This is why GMOs are a bad idea. The science, in and of itself, is amazing stuff. Unfortunately the science doesn't exist in a vacuum and it's the business and legal structures (globally, not just in the US) surrounding it in which GMOs are problematic. Seeds are fundamental to almost all types of farms and the fact that there are "legal intricacies" surrounding the legality of growing food using seeds on your land i…
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Actually MacBooks get 6/7 years from when Apple stops selling them. In contrast, the timer starts as soon as the first Chromebook with that cpu is released. It was a nasty surprise when I found that out
That is terrible. So they'll never create a device that is good enough that they'll sell for for 6 years unless they sell something they don't support.
What many people may not realize is just how long-lived a lot of farm equipment is. There will be tractors out there still working that are 75 years old and just keep getting repaired. Obviously the manufacturers would like to sell those farmers tractors more often than that or, in the very least, generate a revenue stream from existing hardware and honestly that's what I see a lot of computing in vehicles as being:…
As you say computers in vehicle are nothing more than holding consumers captive for a guaranteed revenue stream for the lifetime of a product. The first incident that got me thinking about this is Tivoization. The problem is getting much worse and regular consumers are unaware it is happening.
As I said "right to repair" is a good right to fight for. We need a "right to own". I recognise and acknowledge there is significant overlap.
This is why I would never buy a Tesla.
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The issue there is that you're missing the app ecosystem. Without it, why not just use a "dumb" phone?
The original iPhone shipped without an app ecosystem. Was something like a year before they had an app store.
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Could you give some examples of such products?
High end mechanical watches like Rolex and Omega. They keep parts going back decades. If a part isn't in inventory, there are watchmakers that can create just about any part from scratch.
Not exactly "farm tractors that last forever".
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The problem is that not having a revenue stream is one of the most destructive forces to tech (or other) companies , and people like to keep their jobs.
Hardly. There are countless firms who built their reputation on and survived quite happily making durable products. You might find pages of their early products filling eBay and the like, still going strong. A few are still adhering to those built to last attributes, most have transitioned into "as cheap as we can get away with, but with our valuable brand and logo" as has most of the whole world, including those off…
I think you have a very strong set of rose-tinted glasses. Planned obsolescence was a strategy long before 1980.