While the pat experience may really no longer be relevant (though as you said, some companies consistently suck), still it would feel kinda wrong to buy from the same company that made the crappy product. I don't really want to step on the same rake a second time, especially when buying a brand new device (if I buy a device some time after its release the reviews will be more accurate (or at least it would show up if the device has a high failure rate), but when buying something just released I can only base my decision on my past experience because the "brand new" product reviews don't address issues like longevity of the device.
Even most programs are recorded such that events like explosions will rattle the pictures off your walls if the have base volume level high enough that the dialog is comfortably audible.
The same happens in a cinema. I like wide dynamic range - be it for action movies or listening to 1812 - 90WRMS speakers are nice to have.
Compressing dynamic range is easier than expanding it, so I like the fact that movies have full dynamic range and I have the option to compress it if I really want (contrary to most new music releases, where I have to use an expander).
Unless the item is really cheap I cannot afford to buy because "maybe they got better" or to have more data points (hmm, my hard drive failed too soon - better buy 20 more of the same brand/model to see if it was a fluke or not). Also, if another brand also had failures at about the same time it would mean that I would be looking for a third brand (because who knows, maybe both failed products were made in the same factory, just branded differently).
Also, depending on the item, I may skip several generations anyway, just because the old one that I have still works and is good enough.
An example - I was always an AMD/ATI fan and usually bought their video cards. Once I decided to buy a Geforce GTX280 (when it was new) to replace my relatively old HD2900 - decided to buy a nVidia card because of PhysX. The card had a really crappy VGA output - the image was blurry at higher resolutions/refresh rates. Tech support told me to return the card so I did. I then continued to use the HD2900 for some time. Idid not lose any money, but it took effort to troubleshoot and return the card - I had to install a fresh copy of Windows on a spare hard drive to be certain that it wasn't a driver conflict or something, then try various drivers and settings, then go to the store and return the card. Later I bough a HD6870 for trying to mine bitcoins and am now using it for my main PC. I recently bought a GT620 just for physx. It has good VGA quality, so I may buy another nVidia card to use as a main one, but won't do it for a few generations (because my 6870 is still good enough), but I will try to find out it that future card has good VGA video quality (or if the neither ATI nor nVidia cards have VGA outputs then it won't matter as I will have to use a converter and the signal quality will depend on the converter).
I do not buy devices of the same class very frequently, so my "grudge" can last a year or more because in the mean time I won't be looking for a new device and won't care at all whether the company started making good ones or is still making crap.
Well, unless you are buying an old device, there is no way to know whether it will be crap or not, so using past experience with the company is quite valid.
Let's say I bought a device and it failed very quickly (or was just crap), the company says that they fixed the problems and please buy our new model, this will work just fine. What if it doesn't? I'll wait a few years and if the company produces good quality products during that time I may buy from them again.
Losing trust is easy and fast, earning it back is not as easy or fast.
Some companies managed to consistently suck, but many of them the failures are rather line and generation specific.
A company's products of generations 1-5 were good quality, generation 6 sucked (but the suckage was not immediatly obvious, it showed up after a year or so of use, like the nvidia chips that desoldered themselves from hp (and some other) laptops). There is generation 7 announced, with supposedly all flaws from gen6 fixed. This could mean one of two things - gen6 was a genuine mistake and gen7 is good again or gen7 will suck just as much as gen6 did because the company is going downhill. How do I know which is it?
Except that some parts of this are because of human psychology. I remember one professor saying that you need to lecture no more than 15 minutes at a time, then tell a joke or something otherwise everyone will fall asleep (or just will not learn anything, even though they tried to pay attention to what is being said). Yes, sometimes, the topic is so interesting you can listen for the 1.5 hours, but most of the time you will forget 99% of what was said after the first 15-30 minutes.
As for
If you are going to a university but you can't be bothered enough to pay attention and actually engage yourself in your own education, even if the material is dull, then just save us all a lot of trouble and stay home.
this can be used to justify not having any lectures at all. Anyone sufficiently motivated should just read the relevant books and learn, the professors just needs to give the list of the books to read and then grade the exam/papers.
Why are you opposed to things that make life easier? I mean if gamifying education leads to better educated people, why not do it? If using a wheelbarrow makes it easier/faster to transport snow/dirt/etc short distances, why not use it?
I already did that. No need to use a text mode web browser, when I can just use Arachne - it works on DOS and is graphical (and really slow on a 286).
I also managed to get on IRC with it (I think the IRC client was part of the package with the telnet client). I even managed to access Windows shares (WinNT4 server has the required drivers for DOS), though it was a bit inconsistent - sometimes it would work, sometimes it wouldn't.
I used Arachne on my 286. It worked, but was rather slow. I did not want to set up a modem emulation so I just used ethernet. Still it's fun trying to figure out what you can do with such an old computer. I tried using a web browser on Windows (3.10) but with the Ethernet drivers there is too little RAM left for the browser. The computer has 1MB and I don't know if it is possible to upgrade (it uses DIP chips for RAM and I don't know if there are any compatible higher capacity ones).
Unfortunetly, the 286 is the oldest (working) computer I have.
What does it have to do to be considered "connected to the internet"? Just be physically connected and have working NIC drivers or does it have to run a server or some browser?
I did not blame the CD for the compression, I just stated a fact that a lot of CDs are compressed, so if I am into older music I might as well buy the record, since the re-release on CD is likely to be compressed. I have a great sounding recording of "1812" on CD with over 30dB of dynamic range (when the cannons fire you really feel it) that would be difficult to achieve on a record. So, in theory, CDs sound better than records. In practice, a lot of them don't trough no fault of the medium.
Add to that the fact that a lot of records (used) are cheaper than CDs, that the bigger sleeve of a record allows for bigger cover art and you have more reasons to buy a record.
Similar with my CRT monitor. The Sony GDM-FW900 may not be the best monitor today, but the better LCDs would be much more expensive than what I paid for this CRT.
Vinyl records sound great. So do properly mastered CDs. However, most vinyl records were produced without the excessive compression and most CDs are produced with it (even re-releases of old music - they put in extra effort to compress the dynamic range to make it sound bad).
There are also CRT HDTVs and monitors that have high resolution. I bought a CRT HDTV (and not a very good one, but this was pretty much the only option I found, if I find a better CRT TV I'll buy it) because even though it has lower resolution, it 1) displays interlaced SD content better (and I have a lot of that) and 2) it better displays dark colors, but is not as susceptible to screen burn as plasma (which is also good for dark colors).
So, let's jail the people who broke the law. The company cannot do anything - its the people that do things and can break laws.
So, in each of the companies that were found guilty there was somebody who decided that price fixing was a good idea and negotiated it with the other companies. Someone approved this policy (I can talk about price fixing with a sysadmin from another company all day, but nothing is going to happen unless the management of my and his company approve of the deal). That someone should go to jail. With great power comes great responsibility. Or at least it should.
But the alternative is to use what the others are using and getting no choice at all even faster. At least now I could still find my UMPC - I didn't have to buy a tablet or a touch phone. Maybe when my N5 breaks beyond repair I will either have to buy a tablet/touch phone or an old N5, but for now I had this choice.
Well, my UMPC fits in my pocket. A bigger tablet would not, so I would not be able to carry it everywhere (or would have to carry a bag just for the tablet) My UMPC has the capabilities of a normal sized x86 laptop (a bit older/slower one but I can still use the same software, except games of course). I can do almost everything that I can do with my desktop, though it is slower. Have you tried using ssh with the on screen keyboard? Or any task that requires a lot of typing?
Microsoft is jumping off a cliff because they are alienating their longtime customers (business desktop users) by making the UI less usable with keyboard+mouse. The iPad fans won't use a Microsoft tablet (because it is too much like a desktop) and I sure as hell would not use Windows on ARM (if it is going to be incompatible with my old software I might as well use Linux). So, Microsoft is in the middle - disliked by both sides.
Office will never be able to fully support touch - unless on screen keyboards became as good as normal keyboards for typing lots of text.
And yes, I know that I am in a niche market. I want my portable computing device to be a "mini-desktop", I use my phone with one hand and not always looking at it and I do not jump on new technology just because it is new (it has to be sufficiently better than what I have for me to upgrade - the requirements increase as the upgrade costs increase).
Yes, but I had no problem picking up Android, whether on phone or tablet. It's just intuitive.
I got an Android phone to try and was fuming most of the time I used it.
OK, so I have this new phone, I want to copy the call and SMS ringtones from my old phone (call ringtone is an mp3, SMS ringtone is a midi file). So, I transfer them over bluetooth and now they are sitting in the phones memory. OK. On a few Nokia phones I had you selected a custom ringtone just like the builtin ones, except you selected "custom" and then browsed to where the file was. So I try this here, no "custom". OK, maybe I can select the file in file manager and make it as ringtone - no, the file just starts playing. It turns out that I need to open the music playing app, open the file then I can finally set it as my ringtone. Great. Except there is no way to set the SMS ringtone. To do that I needed to download a new app from the app store and use it to set the SMS ringtone, except that app does not support midi files (even though the phone does) so I had to convert my file to mp3.
Yep, that was so intuitive, I had to google a few times.
At work I used unity for a few minutes at most - it was installed by default, so I used it to launch a terminal window and install KDE.
So what if everybody uses their devices differently than I do? If everyone was jumping off a cliff I still wouldn't jump.
Yes, those devices don't sell in volume and that means that the choice of these devices is limited. Still, to me it is better than no choice at all (i.e. having to use a "popular" device).
Typing a command in a CLI (over ssh or whatever) or writing a document is not very comfortable with my UMPC, but it would be horrible on the touchscreen "keyboard". Most people don't do that. I don't care. Using a tablet and a separate keyboard wold mean that I have to carry the tablet, the keyboard and a stand for the tablet and there would be no way of using it with the keyboard without putting it on a desk (I can thumb type on my Viliv faster and more accurately than on a touchscreen "keyboard"). Most people don't care about that. I don't care about their not caring.
Yes. I even bought a clamshell UMPC (Viliv N5) instead of a tablet so that I would not have to carry a separate keyboard. The builtin keyboard is not very good (because it is very small), but it still is better than using an on screen keyboard or having to carry around a separate keyboard.
Speaking of on screen keyboards - to me touchscreen-only phones suck. They are difficult to use with one hand because I cannot slide my thumb on the keypad and only press the button I want to press - no, I have to lift it up from the screen and there is no way to find the button without actually looking at the screen.
In my country SMS is very reliable, to the point that it may be more reliable than calls (if the reception is bad you won't be able to call or understand the other person, but the phone will keep retrying to send the message until is succeeds).
With Windows you have to go to the manufacturers website to download drivers for pretty much any device. With Linux a lot of the time it works out of the box, but when it doesn't then you have a real problem.
Same with software - when the package is in the repository installing new software is easier than with Windows, but when the package is not in the repository it is a PITA (and may actually fail) compared to Windows. Same with old closed source software - Windows runs it pretty much without problems, try running an old binary on Linux...
That is what frustrates me about things like cell phones - I can't pick the CPU/RAM/flash combo I want, but only what some marketer decided I should have.
Same with the UMPCs - when I was shopping for one the choice boiled down to 1GB RAM or 512MB RAM and VGA output - what if I want both the 1GB RAM and the VGA output? No can do, choose one.
And I cannot really find a new cellphone that suits me anymore, so I have to continue to use my old phone.
Do you want a motherboard with onboard SCSI/SAS or will SATA do? Do you want a motherboard with PCI and PCI-X slots or just PCI-E? Single or dual socket? Onboard graphics or not? SLI or Crossfire support? RAM slots parallel to the PCI slots (helps with the airflow in 1-2U cases) or not? ECC/REG RAM or unbuffered? Overclocking capabilities? Dual BIOS? IDE/Floppy connectors? Firewire? Single or dual gigabit NIC onboard? Integrated management?
See, there is a lot to consider when buying a motherboard. Of course ou are free to not care about any of that and see the motherboard as a "bridge between the power supply and cpu", that works too I guess.
Simple - when the capacitors in the motherboard fail, you can replace the motherboard with a spare one and then repair the old mb. Motherboards with soldered CPUs will be more expensive than motherboards without CPUs are now, so buying that spare will be more expensive.
Also, if I cannot afford two CPUs currently I can still buy the MB and a single CPU adding the second CPU when I have the money (or the need for it). I like the option of replacing the single core CPUs in my server (it's a relatively old server) with dual core ones to essentially double the performance without replacing the whole server.
I have replaced the motherboard while keeping the CPU a few times and I have replaced the CPU (with the same or a better one) while keeping the motherboard a few times too, so yea, I like that option.
It could be that new music is mostly crap - I rarely buy new releases, but I have a relatively big collection of older records and I still buy "new to me" records. I also do not buy "remastered" versions with the dynamic range squashed to almost zero.
It could also be that people are only buying one copy of a song, instead of buying the CD/record for their home and a cassette for their walkman/car they now buy the file and play it everywhere. Also, files can be backed up easier than records or tapes, so the need to buy them again in case of damage is reduced.
There is also the fact that iTunes and similar services sell single songs, not albums, which means that I can buy only the good songs for ~$1/each instead of buying the album (with one good and 10 mediocre songs) for $11 (to keep the song price the same) or more. Even a CD "single" usually contains remixes of the original song which I pay for when I buy that CD, but now I can just buy the original song.
There's also Youtube. With their content filters I would expect that if the video has survived for a year and got a low of view that the copyright owner approved of it (since otherwise it would be taken down). Yet, I can find a lot of music there for free.
Slashdot Mirror
While the pat experience may really no longer be relevant (though as you said, some companies consistently suck), still it would feel kinda wrong to buy from the same company that made the crappy product. I don't really want to step on the same rake a second time, especially when buying a brand new device (if I buy a device some time after its release the reviews will be more accurate (or at least it would show up if the device has a high failure rate), but when buying something just released I can only base my decision on my past experience because the "brand new" product reviews don't address issues like longevity of the device.
Even most programs are recorded such that events like explosions will rattle the pictures off your walls if the have base volume level high enough that the dialog is comfortably audible.
The same happens in a cinema. I like wide dynamic range - be it for action movies or listening to 1812 - 90WRMS speakers are nice to have.
Compressing dynamic range is easier than expanding it, so I like the fact that movies have full dynamic range and I have the option to compress it if I really want (contrary to most new music releases, where I have to use an expander).
Unless the item is really cheap I cannot afford to buy because "maybe they got better" or to have more data points (hmm, my hard drive failed too soon - better buy 20 more of the same brand/model to see if it was a fluke or not). Also, if another brand also had failures at about the same time it would mean that I would be looking for a third brand (because who knows, maybe both failed products were made in the same factory, just branded differently).
Also, depending on the item, I may skip several generations anyway, just because the old one that I have still works and is good enough.
An example - I was always an AMD/ATI fan and usually bought their video cards. Once I decided to buy a Geforce GTX280 (when it was new) to replace my relatively old HD2900 - decided to buy a nVidia card because of PhysX. The card had a really crappy VGA output - the image was blurry at higher resolutions/refresh rates. Tech support told me to return the card so I did. I then continued to use the HD2900 for some time. Idid not lose any money, but it took effort to troubleshoot and return the card - I had to install a fresh copy of Windows on a spare hard drive to be certain that it wasn't a driver conflict or something, then try various drivers and settings, then go to the store and return the card. Later I bough a HD6870 for trying to mine bitcoins and am now using it for my main PC. I recently bought a GT620 just for physx. It has good VGA quality, so I may buy another nVidia card to use as a main one, but won't do it for a few generations (because my 6870 is still good enough), but I will try to find out it that future card has good VGA video quality (or if the neither ATI nor nVidia cards have VGA outputs then it won't matter as I will have to use a converter and the signal quality will depend on the converter).
I do not buy devices of the same class very frequently, so my "grudge" can last a year or more because in the mean time I won't be looking for a new device and won't care at all whether the company started making good ones or is still making crap.
Yea, but the pixels there are too big. We have to wait for the proper monitor, only then will we have the ultimate widescreen.
Though to use it properly you might need to have a compatible tape deck so the seek time to your required pixel is shorter.
Well, unless you are buying an old device, there is no way to know whether it will be crap or not, so using past experience with the company is quite valid.
Let's say I bought a device and it failed very quickly (or was just crap), the company says that they fixed the problems and please buy our new model, this will work just fine. What if it doesn't? I'll wait a few years and if the company produces good quality products during that time I may buy from them again.
Losing trust is easy and fast, earning it back is not as easy or fast.
Some companies managed to consistently suck, but many of them the failures are rather line and generation specific.
A company's products of generations 1-5 were good quality, generation 6 sucked (but the suckage was not immediatly obvious, it showed up after a year or so of use, like the nvidia chips that desoldered themselves from hp (and some other) laptops). There is generation 7 announced, with supposedly all flaws from gen6 fixed. This could mean one of two things - gen6 was a genuine mistake and gen7 is good again or gen7 will suck just as much as gen6 did because the company is going downhill. How do I know which is it?
VLB is.
Wait until a flexible LCD is created - then you'll get tape monitors (6.3mm tall and 20m wide, wound on a reel).
Except that some parts of this are because of human psychology. I remember one professor saying that you need to lecture no more than 15 minutes at a time, then tell a joke or something otherwise everyone will fall asleep (or just will not learn anything, even though they tried to pay attention to what is being said). Yes, sometimes, the topic is so interesting you can listen for the 1.5 hours, but most of the time you will forget 99% of what was said after the first 15-30 minutes.
As for
If you are going to a university but you can't be bothered enough to pay attention and actually engage yourself in your own education, even if the material is dull, then just save us all a lot of trouble and stay home.
this can be used to justify not having any lectures at all. Anyone sufficiently motivated should just read the relevant books and learn, the professors just needs to give the list of the books to read and then grade the exam/papers.
Why are you opposed to things that make life easier? I mean if gamifying education leads to better educated people, why not do it? If using a wheelbarrow makes it easier/faster to transport snow/dirt/etc short distances, why not use it?
I already did that. No need to use a text mode web browser, when I can just use Arachne - it works on DOS and is graphical (and really slow on a 286).
I also managed to get on IRC with it (I think the IRC client was part of the package with the telnet client). I even managed to access Windows shares (WinNT4 server has the required drivers for DOS), though it was a bit inconsistent - sometimes it would work, sometimes it wouldn't.
I used Arachne on my 286. It worked, but was rather slow. I did not want to set up a modem emulation so I just used ethernet. Still it's fun trying to figure out what you can do with such an old computer. I tried using a web browser on Windows (3.10) but with the Ethernet drivers there is too little RAM left for the browser. The computer has 1MB and I don't know if it is possible to upgrade (it uses DIP chips for RAM and I don't know if there are any compatible higher capacity ones).
Unfortunetly, the 286 is the oldest (working) computer I have.
That's it, I'm connecting my 286.
What does it have to do to be considered "connected to the internet"? Just be physically connected and have working NIC drivers or does it have to run a server or some browser?
I did not blame the CD for the compression, I just stated a fact that a lot of CDs are compressed, so if I am into older music I might as well buy the record, since the re-release on CD is likely to be compressed. I have a great sounding recording of "1812" on CD with over 30dB of dynamic range (when the cannons fire you really feel it) that would be difficult to achieve on a record. So, in theory, CDs sound better than records. In practice, a lot of them don't trough no fault of the medium.
Add to that the fact that a lot of records (used) are cheaper than CDs, that the bigger sleeve of a record allows for bigger cover art and you have more reasons to buy a record.
Similar with my CRT monitor. The Sony GDM-FW900 may not be the best monitor today, but the better LCDs would be much more expensive than what I paid for this CRT.
Vinyl records sound great. So do properly mastered CDs. However, most vinyl records were produced without the excessive compression and most CDs are produced with it (even re-releases of old music - they put in extra effort to compress the dynamic range to make it sound bad).
There are also CRT HDTVs and monitors that have high resolution. I bought a CRT HDTV (and not a very good one, but this was pretty much the only option I found, if I find a better CRT TV I'll buy it) because even though it has lower resolution, it 1) displays interlaced SD content better (and I have a lot of that) and 2) it better displays dark colors, but is not as susceptible to screen burn as plasma (which is also good for dark colors).
So, let's jail the people who broke the law. The company cannot do anything - its the people that do things and can break laws.
So, in each of the companies that were found guilty there was somebody who decided that price fixing was a good idea and negotiated it with the other companies. Someone approved this policy (I can talk about price fixing with a sysadmin from another company all day, but nothing is going to happen unless the management of my and his company approve of the deal). That someone should go to jail. With great power comes great responsibility. Or at least it should.
But the alternative is to use what the others are using and getting no choice at all even faster. At least now I could still find my UMPC - I didn't have to buy a tablet or a touch phone. Maybe when my N5 breaks beyond repair I will either have to buy a tablet/touch phone or an old N5, but for now I had this choice.
Well, my UMPC fits in my pocket. A bigger tablet would not, so I would not be able to carry it everywhere (or would have to carry a bag just for the tablet)
My UMPC has the capabilities of a normal sized x86 laptop (a bit older/slower one but I can still use the same software, except games of course). I can do almost everything that I can do with my desktop, though it is slower.
Have you tried using ssh with the on screen keyboard? Or any task that requires a lot of typing?
Microsoft is jumping off a cliff because they are alienating their longtime customers (business desktop users) by making the UI less usable with keyboard+mouse. The iPad fans won't use a Microsoft tablet (because it is too much like a desktop) and I sure as hell would not use Windows on ARM (if it is going to be incompatible with my old software I might as well use Linux). So, Microsoft is in the middle - disliked by both sides.
Office will never be able to fully support touch - unless on screen keyboards became as good as normal keyboards for typing lots of text.
And yes, I know that I am in a niche market. I want my portable computing device to be a "mini-desktop", I use my phone with one hand and not always looking at it and I do not jump on new technology just because it is new (it has to be sufficiently better than what I have for me to upgrade - the requirements increase as the upgrade costs increase).
Yes, but I had no problem picking up Android, whether on phone or tablet. It's just intuitive.
I got an Android phone to try and was fuming most of the time I used it.
OK, so I have this new phone, I want to copy the call and SMS ringtones from my old phone (call ringtone is an mp3, SMS ringtone is a midi file). So, I transfer them over bluetooth and now they are sitting in the phones memory. OK.
On a few Nokia phones I had you selected a custom ringtone just like the builtin ones, except you selected "custom" and then browsed to where the file was. So I try this here, no "custom". OK, maybe I can select the file in file manager and make it as ringtone - no, the file just starts playing. It turns out that I need to open the music playing app, open the file then I can finally set it as my ringtone. Great. Except there is no way to set the SMS ringtone. To do that I needed to download a new app from the app store and use it to set the SMS ringtone, except that app does not support midi files (even though the phone does) so I had to
convert my file to mp3.
Yep, that was so intuitive, I had to google a few times.
At work I used unity for a few minutes at most - it was installed by default, so I used it to launch a terminal window and install KDE.
So what if everybody uses their devices differently than I do? If everyone was jumping off a cliff I still wouldn't jump.
Yes, those devices don't sell in volume and that means that the choice of these devices is limited. Still, to me it is better than no choice at all (i.e. having to use a "popular" device).
Typing a command in a CLI (over ssh or whatever) or writing a document is not very comfortable with my UMPC, but it would be horrible on the touchscreen "keyboard". Most people don't do that. I don't care. Using a tablet and a separate keyboard wold mean that I have to carry the tablet, the keyboard and a stand for the tablet and there would be no way of using it with the keyboard without putting it on a desk (I can thumb type on my Viliv faster and more accurately than on a touchscreen "keyboard"). Most people don't care about that. I don't care about their not caring.
Do you really want to take the keyboard with you?
Yes. I even bought a clamshell UMPC (Viliv N5) instead of a tablet so that I would not have to carry a separate keyboard. The builtin keyboard is not very good (because it is very small), but it still is better than using an on screen keyboard or having to carry around a separate keyboard.
Speaking of on screen keyboards - to me touchscreen-only phones suck. They are difficult to use with one hand because I cannot slide my thumb on the keypad and only press the button I want to press - no, I have to lift it up from the screen and there is no way to find the button without actually looking at the screen.
In my country SMS is very reliable, to the point that it may be more reliable than calls (if the reception is bad you won't be able to call or understand the other person, but the phone will keep retrying to send the message until is succeeds).
With Windows you have to go to the manufacturers website to download drivers for pretty much any device.
With Linux a lot of the time it works out of the box, but when it doesn't then you have a real problem.
Same with software - when the package is in the repository installing new software is easier than with Windows, but when the package is not in the repository it is a PITA (and may actually fail) compared to Windows. Same with old closed source software - Windows runs it pretty much without problems, try running an old binary on Linux...
That is what frustrates me about things like cell phones - I can't pick the CPU/RAM/flash combo I want, but only what some marketer decided I should have.
Same with the UMPCs - when I was shopping for one the choice boiled down to 1GB RAM or 512MB RAM and VGA output - what if I want both the 1GB RAM and the VGA output? No can do, choose one.
And I cannot really find a new cellphone that suits me anymore, so I have to continue to use my old phone.
Yes, there is.
Do you want a motherboard with onboard SCSI/SAS or will SATA do?
Do you want a motherboard with PCI and PCI-X slots or just PCI-E?
Single or dual socket?
Onboard graphics or not?
SLI or Crossfire support?
RAM slots parallel to the PCI slots (helps with the airflow in 1-2U cases) or not?
ECC/REG RAM or unbuffered?
Overclocking capabilities?
Dual BIOS?
IDE/Floppy connectors?
Firewire?
Single or dual gigabit NIC onboard?
Integrated management?
See, there is a lot to consider when buying a motherboard. Of course ou are free to not care about any of that and see the motherboard as a "bridge between the power supply and cpu", that works too I guess.
Simple - when the capacitors in the motherboard fail, you can replace the motherboard with a spare one and then repair the old mb. Motherboards with soldered CPUs will be more expensive than motherboards without CPUs are now, so buying that spare will be more expensive.
Also, if I cannot afford two CPUs currently I can still buy the MB and a single CPU adding the second CPU when I have the money (or the need for it). I like the option of replacing the single core CPUs in my server (it's a relatively old server) with dual core ones to essentially double the performance without replacing the whole server.
I have replaced the motherboard while keeping the CPU a few times and I have replaced the CPU (with the same or a better one) while keeping the motherboard a few times too, so yea, I like that option.
Alternative explanations:
It could be that new music is mostly crap - I rarely buy new releases, but I have a relatively big collection of older records and I still buy "new to me" records. I also do not buy "remastered" versions with the dynamic range squashed to almost zero.
It could also be that people are only buying one copy of a song, instead of buying the CD/record for their home and a cassette for their walkman/car they now buy the file and play it everywhere. Also, files can be backed up easier than records or tapes, so the need to buy them again in case of damage is reduced.
There is also the fact that iTunes and similar services sell single songs, not albums, which means that I can buy only the good songs for ~$1/each instead of buying the album (with one good and 10 mediocre songs) for $11 (to keep the song price the same) or more. Even a CD "single" usually contains remixes of the original song which I pay for when I buy that CD, but now I can just buy the original song.
There's also Youtube. With their content filters I would expect that if the video has survived for a year and got a low of view that the copyright owner approved of it (since otherwise it would be taken down). Yet, I can find a lot of music there for free.