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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.'"
Yes, it's clear a lack of regulations works just fine, there's never been a consequence from snake oil, investment hoaxes, or free building.
Heck, safety belts, fire codes, and handwashing signs probably kill more people. After all, somebody probably died from soap allergies.
I remember that pretty much anything electronic from Radio Shack had a schematic at the back of the user manual. Nice to have if you want to fix it years later (and still have the manual.)
I have a Radio Shack clock radio with a huge LED time display. Have had it for maybe twenty years, and it recently decided to show random LED segments instead of the time. Yesterday, I opened it up to look for any obvious smoked transistors or leaky capacitors. No, looks fine. Playing the odds, I replaced the largest (power supply) capacitor, and now it works again. I saved the cost of a new one and saved the landfill from one more piece of e-garbage.
A dingo ate my sig...
It has been a long time since I saw a false flag provocation troll that half-assed and pathetic.
Appliances are all junk now that require you to buy insurance from the store just to ensure that they make it to five years of operation.
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.
Stuff worked better in the past. Toilets flushed. Refrigerators lasted for forty years. Washing machines actually produced clean clothes.
I am all for ecology, but the way we go about it is silly, mainly because it is an excuse to avoid seeing the real problems.
Alternative Right.
Literally, the headline. European Parliament has no actual legislative power. It just has a power of veto. All legislation must come from European Commission, which European Parliament gets to vote on. It's a "yes/no" vote with no right to modify the package and vote on the modified legislation. This is a power comparable to a veto power, and by definition is not a legislative power as the name "Parliament" and its supposedly being a "legislative branch" would imply. In most states, this is a power comparable to one of the powers held by the executive, who gets to veto legislative packages or approve them by signing.
It's also the only actual power European Parliament has, and of the key issues with EU's legislative system and why EU is routinely criticised for being undemocratic. It's something closer to an early Roman Senate, where unelected aristocrats selected by other members of aristocracy similar to the current state of European Commission gets to decide on what legislation to run through, and the plebeian Tribune of the latter days of Roman Republic (the European Parliament) can either block the legislative package or accept it, but has no legal ability to change the contents of the legislation.
As a result, unless it's a Commission's legislative initiative, it's not worth the paper it's printed on.
That is absolutely true regarding EnergyStar. However, regulations requiring EnergyStar compliance at worst might slightly increase the cost of the appliance or device. A regulation "abolishing" planned obsolescence is likely to have unintended consequences.
I get that 50 or 100 years ago planned obsolescence would have been almost unquestionably wrong. However, technology moves much faster today. 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.
I find it interesting, since the EU tends to favor the little guy over the big guy in business/commerce. This regulation favors the big guy in order to "help" the consumer. (I put "help" in quotes since I do not think it will actually be as helpful to consumers as the regulators think it will be.)
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.
You don't need to download spyware on to peoples' devices if it already comes preinstalled at the factory (points finger at forehead)
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.
Subscriptions are, in a nutshell, planned obsolescence via threats. The only way you can keep such tempware working is a continual drain on your resources - it's designed to fail you otherwise.
I wouldn't buy subscription software under any circumstances, nor will I ever offer it (I'm a developer.)
You invest in my stuff, it'll keep working - it's yours now. I don't "license" it to you, I don't tell you what you can or cannot do with it, and I won't break it. If I offer a paid upgrade, then you get new stuff. It won't break your previous stuff, and it also won't turn into dead bytes on your computer.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I am fucking jealous right now.
These days obsolescence, (even among the highest-tech goods), is as much a matter of fashion as it is of product failure, unrepairability, etc. People expect and demand the latest 'innovation', even if it's only a small change in size, the lack of a bezel, or some other frivolity. The population at large is addicted to having the latest and greatest, with no thought for future generations. It's kind of a 'chicken and egg' situation: planned obsolescence and flashy advertising make unnecessary purchases more compelling, while the resultant increased demand further encourages manufacturers to make products that inherently don't last and can't easily be repaired. So along with legislation against planned obsolescence, we need mass education to help turn the tide of rampant consumerism.
Of course, taking these actions will have negative consequences for 'The Economy'. Personally, I don't think that's a bad thing - hence my sig. As a species, we need to start living within our means, and to abandon the notion that uncurtailed economic growth is anything other than a social cancer. Instead, we keep "borrowing", (or, more accurately, stealing), the resources that fuel our (largely) hollow and soul-suckingly luxurious lifestyle from future generations. The early investors live the high life, while the later ones, (many of whom either have no choice or haven't even been born yet), get screwed. Population growth makes even mere survival of mankind an iffy proposition in the long term, so we really need to stop treating the Earth as though it's a broken freezer that needs to have all of its contents consumed before they go bad. Our current habits are making us fat and lazy, and they they may eventually bring about the end of mankind.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
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.
As long as this resolution also includes software and not only hardware it should be good.
These days you're nothing with an android phone from 4 years ago that you can still repair but is running android 4.0 filled with security holes.
And let's not start with all the IoT devices.
Software obsolescence is just as big a problem.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
This proposal is quite clever. They will have to put a sticker on the box that says "average time before something fails is X years", which instantly does two things:
1. Consumers know how long something will likely last, rather than just guessing based on brand reputation or anecdotes.
2. Longevity will become a selling point. Before they had stickers on vacuum cleaners showing how well they actually cleaned people just tended to buy the most powerful one, but now they make a more intelligent and informed decision.
Selling price isn't based cost of manufacture, it's based on what the market will stand. So for example goods often cost about the same in Europe as they do in the US (factoring in tax), but in Europe you get a much longer statutory warranty.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Of course not.
https://slashdot.org/~BeauHD the editor is a very different account from
https://slashdot.org/~BeauHD+(... which is a troll account.
Hopefully they include stop the knuckleheads from adding chips in toner cartridges and inkjet cartridges which expire by time instead of quantity=empty
iPhones aren't really the problem, it's stuff like household appliances. The cheap ones barely last 3 years a lot of the time.
Also stuff like software that is reliant on some server somewhere. What is the minimum lifetime of that service? A few years ago some smart TVs stopped playing YouTube because they dropped support for old devices. Imagine phones having a sticker that told you the earliest date that they would stop supplying updates.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I would like to suggest the problem is actually the consumer. Consumers want neatly little packaged integrated things as products mature. They want their own knowledge requirements for the devices operation to decrease as products mature.
Consider cars. There was a period of pre-war auto manufacturing where it was non-longer bespoke but at the same time people expected to buy a car and own it for a long time - maybe indefinitely. They anticipated maintaining and repairing it. If you look at engine designs right up thru the early post war periods you see things like lined cylinders and valve guides. Basically all wearing parts were built to be replaceable. Granted it still might have major work in terms of labor but compare that to most modern mass market automobile engines - you'd have machine the block today once things like valve guides or cylinder walls wear or crack etc. Essentially they are now disposable devices. On the other hand you can now own and operate a car with virtually zero knowledge of how it works - they even have built in monitors to tell you when to get the oil changed now.
Think about how home stereo equipment evolved from 1960 - 2018. Discrete often home assembled components to integrated systems to one giant reciever with everything built in driven by your smart phone to "IoT Speaker"
We have seen the same thing with computers. Even if you bought something like a Northgate back in the early 90s it was in a standard box. You could replace the motherboard and CPU and retain the chassis and power supply. You might even keep the main board and slap and "overdrive" process on it. Granted you can still get "project box" style cases today and certainly there is a plenty big market for motherboards and stuff in standard sizes - but if you buy a brand name PC odds are pretty good its now some custom miniature case like a Mac min - or similar offering from HP or Dell.
So lets look at mobile. You use to manually sync your iPaq, Cassiopeia, or Palm with your laptop. You either manually cabled it up or careful started some IR sync tool and line up all the devices. Every application was side loaded; or you had a RIM that just did e-mail. Now yes its all integrated in your phone. You don't need to know how anything works. You don't need to really even learn any software tools - but you have way way less choice about how you are going to manage things. Want to backup your iPhone? - its iTunes or nothing (okay iCloud now). I used to be able to eject the CF card from my Cassiopeia and back it up however I wanted! Which is not say I'd go back!
What do we do now - we integrated the PDA / portable gaming devices into our phone - its all online - its mostly automagical. The consequence is people don't really know anything about them. I would suggest consumers don't really want replaceable batteries because they don't really want to be at the battery store flipping thru "phone books" of part numbers looking for a suitable replacement on Saturday afternoon - they rather just get a new phone!
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html