[rescue] Sun / Linux LX50 -Rebuttal

[Steve Pacenka]

On Thu, 2002-09-19 at 18:13, Greg A. Woods wrote:

> But the waste doesn't come primarily from the family computers -- it
> comes from the orders of magnitude more computers on the desktops of
> corporate America.
> 
> It's as if every company gave every work an SUV to drive and they
> upgraded them to the latest model every year or two and instead of
> selling the off-lease models they crushed them!

Now this I can relate to directly.  In our computer rehab/recycling
operation we receive mostly business and higher education fleet
machines.  We're currently getting 133-200 MHz PCs and 100+ MHz
PowerMacs by the pickup load.  17-19" color monitors.  What on earth are
those donors thinking?  These do just fine with Windows 95/98 or MacOS
9.  The business and home apps of a couple of years ago still work fine
on them as long as new incompatible file formats are avoided.

I blame Microsoft for the worst of this.  Their apps and OSes are
designed around ever-increasing demands on memory, CPU speed, and hard
drive space.  Try to find current software that will run on a 486 or a
68040.  You can aquire discontinued versions sometimes but your friends
or colleagues all use file formats that yours can't understand.  Pah.


> Now admittedly the newer computers are ever more energy efficient than
> even newer SUVs might ever be, but still....

The energy and materials costs of discarding old systems offset against
the energy efficiency of the new ones.

I just rehabbed a couple of Mac Quadra 605s yesterday; cute little
things with SCSI hard drives.  These do an adequate job as X terminals. 
They have a 30 watt power supply.  The CPUs do not even have heat
sinks.  Quite energy efficient these.


> You'd think we in the computer business would have learned something
> from the mistakes of the automobile business.  After all we have managed
> to "improve" the raw computing power and energy efficiency of our tools
> by many orders of magnitude more than has happened with personal
> transportation technology.  However at the same time the computer
> industry has "improved" on the auto maker's idea of planned obsolescence
> by similar orders of magnitude!

It took some heavy duty pressure to get the US automobile industry to
get its act together.  A big one was the shock of oil embargoes that
caused fuel efficiency standards to be established.  Another big hit was
the mass embarrassment of "unsafe at any speed", the exploding Pintoes
and rolling SUVs that prompt the pace of national safety regulations and
provide fodder to the consumer watchdogs.  The biggest of all was that
non-US competitors decided to sell things that were durable, efficient,
and reasonably priced.  Fifteen years ago, if you wanted something
cost-effective and safe you looked at Toyota or Volvo earlier than Chevy
or Dodge.

So what external events are going to shock the computer industry into
socially efficient behavior?  There are currently no market rewards to a
company that sells computers that would definitely last ten years.  Or
to a company that would guarantee that their software will be supported
that long.  (Microsoft will not let such a software company survive that
long, and they'll certainly not do that themselves since they are
greedily addicted to a short-interval upgrade cycle.)

I have some hopes for government fees that try to build in disposal
costs into the up-front sale cost.  Something that is designed to be
discarded or fall apart into toxic junk after three years deserves a
$500 fee up front as a deterrent.  Unfortunately this does nothing about
Microsoft in the driving seat.  Maybe as part of the monopoly penalty
their applications source code ought to be dumped into the public domain
after three years, so others can keep it alive and make it interoperate
better with the free world if M$ will not.

===
Not your usual Rescue chat day today.

-- SP