I am duty bound to start a thrad about planned obsolescence

[JoeP]

Pah. I replaced my last car after 14 years.

[Qingdai]

Fourteen years, oh la la!



Seriously, I have a hard time remembering ever having a car that wasn't about 20 years old, at the time of purchase. I currently drive a 1993 model. I also hate automatic seatbelts, do they still make those? I hope they stopped.
It does have a good cassette player though.

[Ymir's blood]

I only got 9.5 years out my last vehicle, but it was rusting out from the road salt.

[JoeP]

No road salt here. Lots of rain in summer, but not generally v humid so not much rust. It's the potholes that destroy cars.

[JoeP]

... and the potholes are there because the roads agency have the same approach to maintaining roads as I do to replacing cars ....

[lisarea]

I had a Volvo once that had almost 500K miles on it when I finally had to put a DNR order on it. It died one day as I was driving to work to attend a workplace safety committee meeting.

Good old Pee Wee, thinking of my welfare even with his dying breath.

[lisarea]

This is a really sort of hyperliteral example of planned obsolescence, and a hyperliteral rebuttal to the manufacturer's arguments:

How a HarperCollins library book looks after 26 checkouts (pretty good!) - Boing Boing

(Harper Collins recently announced that they'll be using DRM to expire library copies of ebooks after 26 checkouts, claiming that that's the maximum life of their physical books.)

[Demimonde]

That just pisses me off beyond belief.

[BrotherMan]

26? In a row?

That's fucking ridiculous.

[Janet]

Agreed. As a librarian, I am duty bound to be incandescent with rage at the very thought. Damn you to hell, Harper Collins. You are going on my list of people I wish hell existed for alongside Erzabet Bathory and Gilles de Rais.

[Qingdai]

Well that cinches it for me, fuck e-books. Fuck you in hell.

I'm going to go listen to my Dead Kennedy's cassettes now.

[Deadlokd]

4shared.com - free file sharing and storage for most of your e-book needs, DRM free.

[lisarea]

This is kind of interesting. (The site design is crazy and unreadable, so I recommend installing Readability first if you don't have it already.)

It is Bruce Sterling announcing the end of his viridian design, um, thing, which is in a nutshell like a green thing based on creating explicitly nondurable objects. It is Bruce Sterling, so it's got a lot of pontificating and woolgathering and neologising and stuff, but still: Interesting.

Also, the whole decay aspect re-reminds me of a thing I was reminded of re: the expiring ebooks, but I could not find it so I didn't mention it.

But now I am going to on the very off chance maybe someone else remembers or can figure out how to find it. Way back when, there was some conceptual design for some kind of markup that would 'decay' web pages as they were read. That is, with each pageview, the background would yellow, it'd get crinkly around the edges, stuff like that. I thought it was one of those 3M or Xerox ambient technology designs, because those guys did a lot of wacky conceptual stuff, but hells if I could find it.

So yeah, anyways, that was a thing. I didn't mention it the first time I vaguely remembered but could not find it, but TWO TIMES is my tipping point!

[Ymir's blood]

Originally Posted by lisarea

Also, the whole decay aspect re-reminds me of a thing I was reminded of re: the expiring ebooks, but I could not find it so I didn't mention it.

[lisarea]

No, I know I was talking about the expiring ones, but I meant that that reminded me of that gradually decaying webpage concept.

So like, it would be funneh if Harper Collins, rather than just auto-expiring books after some arbitrary limit, did that instead, so that with each checkout or view or whatever, it'd look just a little bit crummier, like it does with a paper book.

GOD MR. BLOOD! It's like you think I am even dumber than I actually even am! That's pretty bad!

[Ymir's blood]

Hah! You've fallen for one of my favorite tricks. Acting as if I've misunderstood what someone said in order to make them all angry and post in all caps!

[lisarea]

This is a little bit relevant to this.

In praise of "crap" technology - Boing Boing

I like some of the resulting discussions more than the original article, but the best part is how the Boing Boing comments exploded with umbrage at them illustrating the crap technology story with a Sansa player. (I'm not funning on them for that. I was a little umbish about that too.)

[Ymir's blood]

My next MP3 player won't be an iPod. The first one I had was buggy as crap. I went to a new model after a number of years for more hard drive space. It's less buggy but the menus are sluggish. I blame all unnecessary "features" that can't be disabled.

[Watser?]

Sansa clip doesn't have a big memory, but it's pretty much indestructable. I have had at least 2 other players die on me and that one is still going. Had to reset my Creative Zen player with a paperclip the other day too.

[erimir]

Actually, I've thought about getting another mp3 player to replace my iPod that broke a year and a half ago, and for some reason I hadn't even really considered my other options in the mp3 player market. I mean, right now I'm not going to because I don't have money to waste on that, but yeah.

Cuz I have a smartphone and other gadgets, so all I really want the mp3 player to do is basically what that old iPod could do - have a lot of memory, a decent menu system, and have organizational tools for the music (sort by artist, album, create playlists, etc.). I don't need a touchscreen or to show the album art or have the ability to put apps and games on it, so an iPod Touch or something like that would be a waste of money.

[lisarea]

The Sansa Clip is probably the best choice right now. They don't come with tons of memory, but they have a microSD slot so you can add memory if you want it. And they're like $30-40.

(I have a different model Sansa because of other reasons, but the Clip is the most popular one.)

[Watser?]

My Sansa Clip has no microSD slot. I have another Sansa I bought secondhand, a lot bigger than the clip, that does have that, but that one is practically useless outdoors because it has a maximum volume that is way below a crowded train.

I have seriously considered buying a couple of other sansa clips if another mp3 player breaks down though, they are so small you can keep a couple of them in your coat pockets. And micro sd cards are almost as expensive.

[lisarea]

Oh, sorry! I thought all the clips had the expansion slots.

I have a 2 gig C250 ($25) with an 8 gig memory card ($10), and I don't know from you young people and your infernal rackets and all, but I can't take it much over 50% volume without getting scared.

I have the Rockbox on it, but that shouldn't affect the actual volume. (Let me say though: All around better and it starts up like 10x faster, so you should try it if there's a port for yours, which I think there is.)

[Watser?]

Oh, ok, my Sansa Clip is 8 gb so that's a lot more.

Yeah, I don't usually play any player at max volume, but this other player is weird like that.

It's a sansa fuze, I checked. Which is supported by this Rockbox thing, so Imma try that, thankee

[Watser?]

Well, that was a lot of fun...

And I still don't have it installed.

ETA: Yayz! I have triumphed!

And the volume gets waaaaaaay louder now!!

Also the sound quality is so much better!!