3 Aug
2006
3 Aug
'06
5:03 p.m.
Printers are a case in point too - a parallel port
does that job just
fine,
yet it's hard to find a machine that doesn't
have more complicated USB
interfaces on it, and a printer's now expected to use that.
The problem is the legacy - in order of building smaller PCs, people
should get rid of the (big and clunky) parallel port. Imagine a pc where
everything - printer, keyboard, mouse, pen-drive - is USB. You'll have to
have a power supply, a video and a USB connector, all peripherals can be
connected thru USB, and many of them (as a keyboard - dunno why it doesn't
happens today) becoming a USB hub.
e.g. take PCs (please! ;) - Back in the early
90's you could choose
whether
to have an accelerated graphics card or not, a caching
disk controller or
not,
a CDROM drive, a large or small hard disk etc. - at
least the customer had
the
choice. These days they don't get given that, and
everyone has to have the
complexity whether they actually want/need it or not...
You **can** choose, but why? In the early 90's I paid $650 for a CD-ROM
(Nec intersect). Now you pay what? $20? For a CD Recorder? :o?