Its obsolete, throw it out!

Today is my monthly clean up day where I recycle or throw out anything obsolete. Everything is becoming obsolete faster and is less recyclable despite all the green labels.

Books

I found an Idiots Guide to Word for Windows 95. The book is obsolete in every way. Windows 95 is obsolete because windows 98 is the earliest 32 bit Windows and the earliest Windows for which you can get current software. Windows 95 was a big leap forward back then and many Windows 95 based computers lasted ten or more years. You can no longer repair the hardware. Linux replaced Windows 95 for the few remaining uses as file and print servers. The interesting comparison is the survival of Windows 95 for ten years compared to Windows Vista lasting only two years before everyone dumped Vista for Windows 7.

Windows 8 is about to replace Windows 7 and the user interface in Windows 8 is changed to the point that all books about Windows 7 will be immediately obsolete. Almost all proprietary software is following the same trend to generate extra revenue from upgrades.

Microsoft Word is obsolete in terms of buying an application. You buy Microsoft Office, most of the MS Office applications share features, and you buy a book covering covering the whole of MS Office to avoid all the duplication you would get in separate books. The Idiots series appears to have died. The publishers, Que, had better introductory and intermediate books making the Idiots guides effectively duplicate books. The paper will be recycled. The format of the book, thankfully, will not be recycled.

There was an excess of publishing in the past. When I wrote the first practical book on PHP 4, there were only a few reference books in English, no how to books, and they were mostly on PHP 3. My book zoomed to the top of the sales charts (for a book on programming) and encouraged other publishers. There was a market for five to ten books on PHP covering various niche areas. Twenty publishers flooded the market with fifty books. Instant obsolescence. After the market downturn, you would think the range of books would refine to a decent range of introductory and tutorial books focusing on the areas where books are really useful. Instead we have publishers still producing random gimics in an attempt to sell many copies before the public realise those books are not useful.

The younger generation are trained to watch videos instead of reading books. Videos are good for some things but not for extensive how-to sessions. Books still have a place. But, the big difference, is the short term nature of the books. The new colour Kindle looks like the future of book publishing. Subscribe to electronic books and get monthly updates.

Software

Outlook Express was never related to Microsoft Outlook, was never useful for anything, wasted millions of hours of technical support time, and should be purged from every computer in the world. Windows does not let me delete Outlook Express. Windows lets me uninstall Outlook Express but when I try to delete the files, Windows says Outlook Express is in use. Luckily I can delete Outlook Express from my backups. One day the Windows machine will be gone or I will load Windows in safe mode and delete the last Outlook Express files.

Outlook Express is an example of artificial manipulation of the software market wasting our time and creating things obsolete at the point of release. Microsoft made money from Outlook. Proprietary competitors and the open source software market produced competing products that looked like quickly becoming better at a lower cost or free. Microsoft released Outlook Express as a free alternative to suck customers away from the alternatives. Outlook Express dried up investment in proprietary alternatives and in open source alternatives. Competition slowed down. Outlook Express was forever doomed to being less that what is needed because Outlook Express was not allowed to suck customers away from Outlook. Outlook Express is one of those things that should never have been allowed to waste our time.

Fortunately the free open source alternatives survived and developed. Thunderbird makes Outlook Express obsolete and has almost made Outlook obsolete.

There is some action across the world to force the removal of some anti competitive software but, so far, none is successful. The European Union tried to force Microsoft to not include some software are standard. They only attacked a small number of specific applications and never developed guidelines for an overall approach. The first target was Internet Explorer. Microsoft developed ways to artificially lock Internet Explorer into the operating system by replacing some operating system code with Internet Explorer code. The result was massive failures of Windows and endless security holes but Microsoft carried on because Netscape was still a viable competitor.

Today the biggest reason for choosing open source software is the freedom to dump one product in favour of another product without cost or licensing limitations. As an example, this year you could replace Apache with Nginx because Nginx is sold as having distinct advantages over Apache then, next year, you could switch back because Nginx is not quite as flexible. you are not restricted by operating system because Apache runs on every useful operating system and some not so useful operating systems. The only cost is training staff and many of your staff will already use the products on their own projects.

Hardware standards

Out went an adapter cable to let you plug a PS/2 mouse and a PS/2 keyboard into a USB socket. The first use of USB had a weird error. If your mouse or keyboard was plugged into USB, both the keyboard and the mouse had to use USB. You often could not mix USB and PS/2. The typical situation I would hit is a wonderful old Honeywell keyboard still working and the mouse is dead. The tempting new mice are all USB while the Honeywell keyboard remains PS/2. One easy solution is to plug a USB mouse into one USB port then plug the Honeywell keyboard into another USB port using the adapter. Sadly the Honeywell keyboards are dead and I no longer need the adapter. There is no local recycling of anything in the adaptor, not even the copper in the wire.

PS/2 was an interface standard that lasted many years. Today's equivalents are short lived because hardware manufacturers ran out of customers. You used to replace your computer every three years because the hardware lasted that long. Then hardware started to last five years and manufacturers faced a downturn in sales. They had to generate artificial sales by adopting new standards without backward compatibility. It reached the point where you replace most of your computer system with each upgrade.

Then Apple moved out of the computer industry into the fashion industry. They copied the American car industry from the 1950s and 60s when everyone purchased a new car every year. Apple manufactured their fashion accessories with locked in batteries so you are forced to buy a new device when the battery fails. Apple changed the design enough each year to force fashion victims to upgrade every year.

So far, there is nothing in the Apple line up to make any Apple device better than the competition. The Macbook Air was a copy of the Toshiba thin notebook based on an Intel reference design released years earlier. The iPhone continued the development of the flat smartphone developed by HTC. The iPod was obsolete years before it was released. The main point is the Apple obsolescence. The other products were sold with all the important connections built in while Apple forced you to buy a boatload of adaptors then Apple released a new design that forced you to throw everything out and start again, every year.

Hardware interfaces

SATA has replaced the old PATA connection everywhere. The PATA cables, those big wide flat cables were obsolete long before they were replaced. PATA should have been replaced by a simple plastic optical cable similar to the TOSLINK cable used in audio equipment. That type of connector can easily operate at speeds in excess of the current SATA II and approaching the new SATA III speed. Yes we could have had SATA II speed ten years before SATA II.

The PATA cables were a pig to feed around a packed computer case and blocked air flow. A replacement was needed purely to help us build cooler quieter computers. You can buy a slightly smaller case when you use SATA cables instead of PATA cables and smaller cases mean less resource usage during manufacture.

I threw out a PATA cable and may find more in my various toolboxes. They all go out because I have no more PATA disks. There is no local recycling of the copper.

I threw out a PATA disk and thought about putting the metal parts in metal recycling bin. There are no recycling markings on the metals. The metals are weird alloys. The parts need labelling so each component can go in a bin for that exact alloy. Deconstruction of the disks is easy with a power drill and the right screw bits. You could program a computer to deconstruct a disk. If the parts were marked, they could be shipped to a metal recycling centre for reuse in high quality alloys. You could write the alloy mix on the part at very low cost using a laser. A robot could read the text. This should be the next step in technology recycling.

Why do we have hardware changes that introduce a small change instead of leaping up to current technology? Mostly it is patents. Patents protect designs for 15 years. Computer manufacturers wait those 15 years before using the design in their hardware. Computers are, for the most part, 15 years obsolete before the technology is used in mass produced equipment.

If two new designs compete, the owners of one design may share their patents at low cost to force the market their way. Blu-ray arrived faster than usual because there was a competing design. In a lot of areas, there is no competing design because all the major manufacturers joined the same design committee.

There are other influences limiting adoption of better designs. PATA cables were manufactured by companies working with wire. They did not work with optical fibre. They push for new standards based on wire. The industry thinks it is good because it will cut out the cost of replacing assembly lines with something modern.

Consider the position of a big company like Apple. They make $300 profit on each one of their major products. If they replaced a wired connection with an optical fibre connection, it might reduce their profit to $299. Their competitors are selling equivalent devices for less than Apple's $300 profit. When you sell an iPad replacement for $199, a technology change is expensive even if it costs only ten cents.

Apple's current approach is to make only one change each year so they can keep other changes for next year. Other manufacturers may adopt a more progressive approach. Many manufacturers adopted the Intel Ultrabook great-leap-forward even though it is only a slight rewrite of the Intel thin notebook reference design of many years ago, as adopted quickly by Toshiba then cloned by Apple a couple of years later. Those manufacturers did not see the original thin notebook from Toshiba as competition because Toshiba spent little money on advertising. The Apple clone of the Toshiba was heavily advertised, including endless paid placements in movies and television shows, to the point where all the other manufacturers had to react. Intel announced the Ultrabook and a big advertising budget. Everyone jumped onboard.

You can see the change. Hardware designs used to have an impact. Compaq became a big manufacturer because Compaq designs were genuinely different and were a real advantage. The first thin notebook was introduced about twenty years ago in Japan and was not a success because the hardware components where not good enough for the design. When Intel and Toshiba invented the modern thin notebook, the device should have been as revolutionary as the original Compaq products but nobody noticed because the media only publish articles written by the marketing people at companies who spend big dollars on advertising.

Better applications

Another bit of software bites the dust because an open source alternative is mature and a complete replacement. Paint Shop Pro was the program to use for quick and precise image edits on Windows. I used most of the features of early releases but not all the features of the later releases then stopped upgrading because there were several releases that had nothing new I would use. Gimp, on Linux and Windows, started replacing Paint Shop Pro. Today I use Gimp everywhere. Paint Shop Pro was wasting space on disk. I deleted Paint Shop Pro from my last remaining Windows machine and from all backups.

Better programs are not the only consideration. Today application packages are replacing individual programs. ACDSee started as a photo viewer on Windows then developed image editing functions. I used to use ACDSee with Paint Shop pro. Today ACDSee provides all the traditional features of ACDSee plus replaces Paint Shop Pro for most people. If you only use Windows and want the basic editing features of cropping and resizing, ACDSee is a great choice. Abiword is another example of a good application but OpenOffice and LibreOffice, despite being big and a bit difficult for Word processing, provide an excellent draw program plus a spreadsheet. You jahve to have Libreoffice along side Abiword for those other functions so why would you use Abiword for word processing?

Abiword is an example of something faster and more efficient. I can see the difference on my old netbook with a magnetic disk. My new ultrabook with SSD is so fast that there is no practical difference. The ultrabook style computer made small lightweight programs unneccessary, well almost.

Intel Ultrabook

The thin light weight notebook was invented in 1998 by Mitsubishi Electric but they withdrew their notebook because the available components, back then, were not good enough. Mitsubishi avoided making an instantly obsolete machine by recognising the hardware was inadequete.

2004. Toshiba invented the first thin lighweight useful notebook computer with their Portégé R100. If Toshiba had spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising and even more on product placements in movies and television, they would have sold hundreds of millions of R100s to travellers all over the world.

2005. Toshiba released the R200 as a step up. The R200 continued in stable production until 2008 when Toshiba introduced the R500 and R600. One interesting thing about the R200 was the three year lifetime. The original design was so good that it lasted three years at a time when major manufacturers were trying to cut lifecycles short.

The Intel Ultrabook design, and the earlier Intel thin notebook reference design, and the original Toshiba notebooks on which the Ultrabook and Macbook Air were based, have fast everything on top of thin and light. There is just one problem, the Intel specification for untrabooks does not specify the minimum speed of anythinthing other than the start up time.

The start up time is variously quoted as seven seconds and two seconds. Two seconds is the time from suspend and seven seconds is the time for the initial operating system load. After that they can do anything. Plus the Intel Ultrabook specification says there has to be a model under $1000, guaranteeing manufacturers will cheat on speed.

The Ultrabook startup requires a small amount of SSD to boot the operating system and to reload from suspend. 20 GB of SSD is more than enough for the operating system and reload of an 8 GB memory. Manufacturers can use a slow old magnetic disk after that.

The Toshiba Z830 is available as a Satellite Z830 and as a Portégé Z830. The Satellite is for home use and the Portégé for professional use. The Toshiba laptops are generally so reliable and well designed that the better Satellite models are better than the professional products from other brands. Despite the good design of Toshiba notebooks, both the Satellite and Portégé models are avaiable with magnetic disk instead of SSD. You get the choice but it is either/or with no option for a blend.

A blend would have a 128 GB SSD as the main disk and a slot for a second magnetic disk. You keep all your software on the SSD and your project files on the other disk. An alternative is two SDXC slots. You copy project files from one SD to your SSD, work on them then backup to the other SD card.

Whatever you need, you almost certainly do not need the Ultrabooks where everything is nomagnetic disk. They are so slow, you have to go back to applications such as Abiword to get resonable speed. Magnetic disks are unreliable when you work on the move and are the main source of data loss. The Ultrabook specification is already obsolete and will have to be replaced by an Ultrabook 2.0 with a minimum SSD size.

Given that 20 GB is lost to the operating system, the paging area, and the suspend area on an Ultrabook with only 4 GB of memory, and 30 GB is lost in an 8 GB Ultrabook, a 64 GB SSD is too small for most uses. The Ultrabook 2.0 standard should specify the SSD space to be available to the user after the OS and everyhing else is created. If 64 GB of available space is specified, a 4Gb computer would require an 80 GB SSD and an 8GB computer would require a 90 or 100 GB SSD.

The Ultrabook specification could further reduce obsolescense by specifying thedesign be compatible with Linux, which would encourage hardware designers to commission open source hardware drivers.

4G

4G wireless is everywhere. Apple are advertising their new iThing as 4G but it does not work as 4G. What is happening?

Wireless communication can happen on a lot of different frequency bands around the world. Well designed devices work on any of the four major bands around the worls and are labelled Quad band. Cheap devices work on only three bands, are called Tri band, and may not work at your favourite holiday destination. Cheap trash works on only one band, is usually useless outside the country is was designed for, and is obsolete before it is sold.

The Apple 4G device works on only one frequency band, a band used in America but not Australia. You will have to check your own country yourself. This type of rubbish problem, caused by extreme cheapscates choosing inferior hardware chips, is one reason the Samsung tablet is killing the iTrash in Australia.

Assuming you ignore the lies in the adverts, do your research, and buy a device that works on the bands available in your country, 4G is then divided into LTE and something else. LTE is the winner in the format war. If you buy anything else, your device is alredy obsolete.

LTE can have a number of features on or off. When you choose a 4G LTE network, you might choose a 4G LTE network with a lot of things missing. In theory the missing bits should be available if you switch to a different network. You might need a software upgrade to get some of the new LTE features. The hardware should not be obsolete.

Batteries

Companies are moving towards devices with batteries you cannot replace. That ensures you have to buy a new device at regular intervals. The old NiMH batteries survice about 500 recharges but declide steadily over their use. Given the common use for business devices of a full discharge and recharge for 5 or 6 days a week, NiMH will last two years only two years and may require recharging twice per day at the end.

Lithium ion batteries, Li-ion, last a thousand charges and could give you four years of use, enough for busineeses that replace their computers every three years but not enough to pass the used computer on to a family member for the next three years.

Given the expected ten year life of SSD and processor speeds sufficient for ten years, you want a device where the battery can be replaced at least once, for Li-ion, or several times for NiMH. The replacement code should be related to the true cost, not the inflated manufacturers price. Apple sold a replacement battery for the iPod at one dollar more then the total cost of the iPod. Nokia sold a replacement battery for one of my phones at $99 at a time when several other manufacturers were selling plug compatible replacements for less than half of that price. I purchased another brand for $40 and swapped the two from time totiem when travelling. The generic brand worked exactly the same and was often on sale at closer to $30. I asked one of the people in the trade about the lower price. He said he sells the battery at $35 and makes more than $10 profit.

In the long term we need more than replaceable batteries, we need open design batteries with multiple suppliers or batteries with a genuine life of ten years despite full recharges each day. That means a bettery to withstand 4000 full discharge/recharge cycles.

The future

If Apple wants to continue to grow, it will have to switch to making their products obsolete every six months instead of every year. The best way to fight that type of waste is to demand products complying to a standard with some sort of future. Demanding an Ultrabook with a minimum size SSD is one step. Demanding other current technology, such as USB 3 and 4G LTE, are all steps towards devices you can use for as long as they are useful to you and can then be handed to other people for use long into the future.