5 Jun
2004
5 Jun
'04
2:59 p.m.
There will always be devices to listen to your old
recordings, you can still
find record players and vcrs all over the place along with tape decks.
Only because those devices were repairable and because there are people
around who can repair them!. I would be very suprised if DVD players last
in the same way (for one thing they're a darn sight worse made than, say,
tape recorders, and for another they use a lot more custom parts, and for
yet another there are no service manuals available).
All the new computers are made with custom parts many of which are
proprietary and very hard to replace because of surface mounting. The reason
Surface mounting (apart from BGAs!) is only hard to replace if you're a
salesdroid!.
electronics are so cheap today is because of the
massive integration of
components. The whole throw away commodity industry has also caused the
massive recycling movement. Instead of landfilling all the old items they
get recycled now and reused. Very few people can troubleshoot problems to
It is clearly better to reuse than recylce! And a lot of stuff, at least
over here, does _not_ get recycled.
component levels (and most don't even want to if
they could) and with the
Well, some of us actually enjoy fixing things...
prices for new items being so low most of the repair
shops in the industry
have closed. How many people go to tech school to be an electronics
That is a separate rant. Yes things are too cheap (If they were made
correctly, and priced sensibly, then they would be worth repairing, and
they would be able to be repaired...)
repairman? I can look in my basement and find
100's of devices that still
work just fine but are obsolete to anyone except a collector, so even if we
Well, to me something is not obsolete if it still does the job....
repaired everything it would still end up in the trash
sooner or later.
I would say quite a few of the people here grew up at the same time as the
computer industry and know how to fix and troubleshoot computers, but the
next generations will only know specialized areas of it.
If at all. It worries me -- a lot -- that almost nobody these days has
any sort of clue at all about computer hardware. I really wonder who will
be designing better computers in the future (or will we be stuck with
incremental modifications on the PC for ever :-()
-tony