Replies

agoldhammer wrote:

What does gall me is the planned obsolescence by manufacturers.

That is the core of the problem.

The majority of the device replacements are occurring because the manufacturer WANTS to break your current device so you have to buy an new device.

In the past they relied on Moore’s law (computer power doubling every 18 months) to ensure hardware rapidly becomes unsuitable to run software most users want to run. But for the last 10 or more years computes have had enough power, removing the user requirement to replace older hardware.

The

• software manufactures response: stop hardware linked software licences & replace it with a subscription model or make the user the product and sell the ability to modify user behaviour to software companies real paying customers.
• hardware manufactures response: remove upgrade options (processor, ram, hard disk) and if that’s not enough add something to the device which will break when the manufacture would like to sell you new hardware (glue in a battery, rubber grip which perishes on a keyboard, weak plastic shelve attachment in a fridge, non stick coating in a saucepan, artificially inflate the cost / limit repair options of a camera, fashion marketing in clothing).

It is a weakness of a poorly functioning capitalist system, by which I mean one which lacks real competition / user choice. If you actually want to fix it we need a financial dis-incentive proportional to the loss of competition (such as a sales tax progressively increasing with market dominance).

So MS-Defcon 3 and the Master Patch list showing almost all recommending “Defer” is not a mistake.

I take it the Master patch recommendation is likely to change to “Install” some time soon for those without IPv6 internet access?