Quote:
All aspects of life can be improved with the ever constant march of technology.
No doubt. I don't think he was suggesting that new stuff stop, only that the planned obsolescence do so. Does your Mom really need that 1.8GHz Pentium 4 with 768MB RAM and an 80 GB hard drive that uses a video chipset with enough power to put the computers that made Toy Story to shame? Nope. All she needs is to be able to send and receive email, browse the web, and write a few things to be printed out. She could easily do this on a Pentium 200 with 64MB of RAM and a simple frame buffer with no acceleration. Probably less. But instead, Microsoft has told her that she needs to get Office XP, which won't run on anything less than Windows 2000, which itself requires a quite modern processor and loads of RAM. The thing is, while there's certainly a place for all that new technology, there's nothing really wrong with the old stuff. Sure, many of us want to upgrade -- to have the latest stuff. But your Mom doesn't. But, in many cases, she's forced to.

Combine that with the fact that many people use a pre-installed computer until Windows rot makes it barely work anymore and then buy a new computer, thinking that the old one's worn out or something doesn't help matters.

And don't get me started on how Microsoft has bottomed out the populaces expectations of how well computers should work.
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Bitt Faulk