On Fri, 22 Jun 2007 17:04:14 -0500, Peter Flass <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Not can't, *won't*. By breaking stuff every release they force people >to upgrade all their software without having to make any improvements >that would make people want to upgrade. It's a money fountain, they >don't want to turn it off, and most lusers are too uninformed to realize >there's any other choice. Third-party vendors benefit from this too, as >do hardware menufacturers. It's like the bad old days of Detroit >"planned obsolescence." Detroit was finally forced to change by the >competition. I'm not sure Detroit (or Silicon Valley) had this widely touted "planned obsolescence". Nothing is forever, designing a part to last 5 years isn't designing it to fail after 5 years whether it is a car, a printer, or a pair of shoes. Sure, I can buy shoes that last longer than normal - does it mean that those sturdier shoes just have a different "planned obsolescence" date? (A race car is designed to barely survive a race before needing lots of repair - is that "planned obsolescence"?) Back to programming - we are moving from easy-to-maintain programs to easy-to-replace programs. There are good reasons for this with how our cost/benefit analysis of our needs have changed. We think of how quickly we produce a product, and how efficiencies change - but another advantage is we can adapt to technologies easier when it is easy to start over. If IBM changes their architecture of their database machine - should programmers care? When Apple changed their chips twice, and moved their core OS to Unix, the average user didn't have much adapting to do. And when the tools figure out how to do their own parallel processing, they will go ahead without most users and even most programmers really having to have a good understanding of what's happening. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
