Slashdot Mirror
EU Accepts Resolution Abolishing Planned Obsolescence, Making Devices Easier to Repair (retaildetail.eu)
Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo writes: The European Parliament accepted a resolution to lengthen consumer goods and software's longevity, a counter to the alleged planned obsolescence process built into a lot of products. The European Parliament now wants the European Commission to create a clear definition of the term "planned obsolescence" and to develop a system to track that aging process. It also wants longer warranty periods and criteria to measure a product's strength. Each and every device should also have a mention of its minimal life expectancy.
Devices should also be easier to repair: batteries and other components should be freely accessible for replacement, unless safety dictates otherwise. Manufacturers will also need to give other companies access to their components so that consumers can visit those companies for repairs.
Devices should also be easier to repair: batteries and other components should be freely accessible for replacement, unless safety dictates otherwise. Manufacturers will also need to give other companies access to their components so that consumers can visit those companies for repairs.
I say About Bloody Time.
Energy Star has been a massive success, at least in appliances. It lets people who care compare relative energy consumption. It's meaningless when it comes to monitors and such, but quite useful for air conditioning or refrigerators.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It has been a long time since I saw a false flag provocation troll that half-assed and pathetic.
Forcing companies to provide very long term support for long outdated technologies will decidedly tilt the playing field in favor large players at the expense of small innovative companies.
Thanks, but I don't want an innovative fridge, hair drier or cooker. I just want them to fucking work, and keep working.
Very few of them work well; for example, the energy-efficient dryer that requires you to run it twice, instead of once, or the energy-efficient refrigerator which specializes in spoiling food during its frequent "defrost" cycles.
Stop overloading your dryer. They work fine if you don't overload them. Of course, in this season, I hang up my clothes and don't dry them at all. A 50' line lets me hang an entire wash load. Before self-defrosting freezers, your food was spoiled by being frozen into place, and it took all damned day to defrost the freezer even during the summer.
Stuff worked better in the past. Toilets flushed. Refrigerators lasted for forty years. Washing machines actually produced clean clothes.
Fridges from then had non-encapsulated compressors and were loud AF. You could cheaply replace the compressor, but they didn't necessarily last a long time. You can still replace compressors, but nobody bothers any more. They just buy a new fridge. Toilets used more than twice as much water, so even if you have to flush twice sometimes you're still coming out ahead. Washers from then were not even slightly better than the ones we have now.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Truly, Beau, that's just nonsensical.
If we put the onus on manufacturers (and programmers) to maintain their products instead of abandoning them, it's absolutely no different than them giving us a new product with whatever imaginary, or actual, malware you have in mind. If they're black hats, they're black hats.
The important objective in that case is keeping an eye on them, and a more stable / less ephemeral product line can only work in our favor in such undertakings. If product maker X is found to have shipped flaw or problem Y, then they are obligated to fix it, instead of just leaving it in the dust and whipping out a new model (I'm thinking of OS vendors here as well as supporting devs and hardware manufacturers.)
Requiring manufacturers and software operations to maintain their products or lose IP rights to them could be a very strong component of bringing some of the more obnoxious operations into line with actually benefiting the public with their work. If I, as a developer, stop supporting it, or won't remedy a detected flaw, then the public owns the product and that's the end of my revenue stream and my rights to the ideas and inventions incorporated in the product are now gone.
Our software and hardware IP system is badly broken, and IMHO that's a fundamental underpinning of why our products are such throwaways. There's no reason for a manufacturer / developer to keep working on X. We need to give them good reason to stay with it.
These days, almost any product can be flashed with completely new code; at least, if the designers aren't idiots. Everything from a smart light bulb to a router, firewall, or car should be updatable and should have updates. Likewise, you write software like I do, then you should fix the problems it has, particularly so in the case of security issues, but anything else, too. There's no adequate excuse to not fix broken code. From the OS end, there are almost no good excuses to break existing applications, security being the one exception.
We should recognize our obligation to not just produce product, but to produce good product that doesn't shaft the end user, either initially or later.
The culture of disposable hardware and software we've fallen into is bad on just about very level one might consider. Ending it, or at least, ameliorating it, would be the very best thing for every consumer out there.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I am fucking jealous right now.
The EU has similar measures to let you compare the efficiency and running costs of various appliances. For example a vacuum cleaner has to have a sticker that shows how well it cleans on carpet and on hard floors, how much noise it makes, how well it cleans the air before expelling it (really important for people with allergies) and how much it costs to run.
https://ec.europa.eu/energy/si...
This new proposal is a great idea. The manufacturer will have to list the lowest MTBF of all components in the machine based on a standardized usage pattern. So if a washing machine has a belt with an MTBF of only 5 years then the label has to say "5 years" on it.
Video games should be interesting. "Servers guaranteed to run until 2019" could be pretty interesting on the next EA Sportsball game.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
If this means that manufacturers will be encouraged to use screws instead of glue then it's a win for the planet.
Apple and others - please stop gluing your fucking products together. I would rather buy displays i can fix, than thinner displays. I am keeping my computers for far longer than i used to, and need easy upgrade paths for internal components. why is this so hard to grasp for some?
FUD. Products don't suddenly become cheaper when planned obsolescence is introduced (quite the opposite, in fact), and don't suddenly become expensive when going back to normal practice.
Longer warranties is a different matter, but that should have minimal effect on expected costs because the entire point of a warrantee period is to cover the time in which defective items are likely to fail. Anything that makes it to the end of its regular warrantee period is extremely unlikely to suffer from a warrantee-covered fault if the warrantee period is extended, because if it was defective it would have failed already.
Hopefully they include stop the knuckleheads from adding chips in toner cartridges and inkjet cartridges which expire by time instead of quantity=empty