The corn farmers lobbyists are too influential in the US... They want to continue producing corn, and won't even consider changing their business model... So instead of looking to produce appropriate products to meet demand, they are looking for ways to force their existing products onto the market, even when they are not the best choice...
Case in point high fructose corn syrup, it is a terrible sweetener and requires considerably more processing than sugar, making it more expensive to produce... In the US, high taxes on sugar force the use of HFCS... In other countries without such manipulative taxes, market forces result in sugar being used because its a more suitable product.
The situation is so ridiculous, that people in the US actually go out of their way and often pay more to buy Coke that's been imported from Mexico because it uses real sugar instead of HFCS.
While that does make a lot of sense, it would just never work under the current economic system...
If they can't sell you new products or charge you for repairing the ones you have, how will the companies continue making a profit? It's in their interest to sell you an unreliable product, then charge you again for repairs and replacement parts before selling you a completely new product once the original one is judged beyond repair.
Also some markets are moving fast, for instance i have an old VAX built in the 80s that still works, but it is simply useless for modern day computing tasks.
On the other hand, selective reuse of certain components is possible.. I have an ATX case from the late 90s that i've upgraded the motherboard in several times, and I use an SGI keyboard from a similar vintage...
If you mandate lifetime warranties, then pretty soon the companies providing the warranties will simply go under as there would be too few new product sales to cover the ongoing warranty cost. The only thing that could practically work is a rental model, where you pay monthly for the product and the supplier has to repair it should it fail. Under this scenario not only would they have a continual source of income, but would also have an incentive to produce reliable products in order to reduce their repair costs.
If your talking computer cases, then stick with standard cases like the ATX standard... I have an ATX case which is over 10 years old now, and has been through several motherboards in its lifetime. Also, this case is mostly made of metal, and contains relatively little plastic.
Years ago when i bought a bottled drink, it came in a glass bottle and a portion of the price was refundable once you returned the bottle... That bottle was then thoroughly cleaned, refilled and ultimately put back on the shelf. The truck that brought the next delivery, also took back the used bottles. Now, glass or plastic bottles are smashed up and melted down, using enormous amounts of energy, if anyone bothers recycling them at all (which there is very little incentive to do without the refund you used to be given).
Many products these days also come with far too much packaging, everything comes in its own plastic tray which just ends up in landfill and is carried away from stores in plastic bags. I would rather the stores still let their customers take cardboard boxes, they are far more convenient for carrying in the car than plastic bags.
Things like meat and vegetables used to come in paper bags, now they come in plastic packaging...
The amount of packaging i go through just in a week is absolutely insane.
Well proprietary services are the problem... Actual broadcast TV adhered to the same standards for a long time, and there has been a long transition phase from the old analog standard to the new digital one. There are hundreds of different manufacturers, all making TV sets compatible with the standards. New standards only come out when there is an actual improvement to be made, you don't end up with multiple incompatible but otherwise equivalent services operating in the same place.
Standards are what we need, not a bunch of proprietary services coming and going which need their own proprietary set top boxes or restrictive software that only runs on certain devices.
Develop a standard for streaming and ensure all today's networkable sets support it, the standard will be around for years and only get superseded when something considerably superior comes along.
You seem to agree, at least in principle... By wanting a dumb monitor, you effectively want to separate out that part of the package because a dumb monitor does support standards (HDMI, DVI etc)... Why shouldn't that monitor also support a standard for network streaming too? Would severely reduce the clutter in people's homes...
A lot of these so called smart tv sets from the likes of samsung have an embedded arm based system running linux (google for samygo)... The only thing lacking is the default software, which tends to be pretty lousy and artificially restricted. If you were to reflash it with custom software you could do all manner of things.
Wasn't so long ago we were playing games using machines which didn't have soundcards (ie business desktops)... TV on the other hand is largely an evolution from radio.
I bought an old HP Document Sender (model 9100 i believe), it's the kind that business would have paid huge money for a few years ago, but now they're cheap on ebay, have a sheet feeder that hasn't jammed on me yet and can scan to email... It is massively more reliable than any of the home model sheet feed scanners i've ever tried.
IE releases *were* going to be tied to windows versions, the dedicated IE team was even disbanded at one point... It's only thanks to competition from firefox that they're bothering to update IE at all, otherwise IE8 would be "IE6 thats had minor tweaks to make it compatible with windows 7 and fit in graphically"...
And because it's very rarely used, most apps aren't written to expect it to be there and can cause all manner of compatibility problems. It's also a pretty crude hack, it minimises all your apps when you switch desktop and on a slow machine or under load you can see it doing so. Similarly, because its not installed by default chances are on a random machine your expected to use and on which your not allowed to install apps (eg the average corporate workstation) you cant use it.
And people have trouble with abbreviations since when? The amount of times i see "text" abbreviated as "txt", and all manner of others... Many of these random abbreviations come from the crude predecessor to windows, dos... which had an arbitrary limit on file name length and format.
As someone else already pointed out, you *can* use the gui to mount an iso if you want.
If i was explaining to someone how to mount an iso, i would probably explain the command line way because its easier... Someone could simply cut+paste the command that were posted here, whereas explaining a gui is much harder in a textual or vocal setting.
It's very important that both options be available, so that people can choose which method they want to use.
And therein lies the problem with society today... Businesses are selfish and short sighted. If every business works hard to improve efficiency, cut back on expensive staff and replace them with robots, outsource labour intensive activities to cheaper countries etc... The end result, is huge unemployment in the home country of that business, so then who buys your products? Those people in the country you outsource cheap labour to can't afford to either. Short term profit gains, leading to long term economic collapse.
Doesn't help for drives which are dead, but still under warranty... You can't erase the data without physically destroying the drive, which will invalidate the warranty and they wont replace it... You also can't erase the data because the drive is dead, and you likely don't have the equipment to recondition the drive like the manufacturer will when you send it back for replacement.
A lot of people would, obviously some wouldn't. Many would value the convenience, and so the availability of pirated material would decrease further increasing the relative convenience of the legitimate sources.
The pirate copy would now only offer a cheaper price, in exchange for the inconvenience of locating it, the risk/inconvenience of bogus downloads and the risk of getting caught making it a far less attractive proposition.
Those who still remain pirates...
Those who cannot afford to buy - no anti-piracy scheme will turn these people into paying customers, all it will do is deprive them, and deprived people are more likely to resort to other methods, eg stealing money which they can then use to buy the media.
Those who are hard core pirates and will always do so, again no anti piracy schemes will do anything as these people would rather go without. Similarly if any scheme is flawed, these people will sooner or later crack the system and get their fix anyway.
Sure Apple make an effort to maintain compatibility, but that effort is as you pointed out limited, typically to 3 release cycles... At which point, the older stuff is cut off completely. Solaris 11 can still run binaries from the first versions of Solaris (early 90s), it might even be able to run bins from sunos 4.x still tho i don't have any to try. Windows 7 can still run most win32 binaries from NT3, and some dos and win16 binaries. Linux can still run a.out binaries and older libc5 compiled bins (although most distros don't ship with the compatibility libs by default, compatibility is arguably less important for linux as the vast majority of apps can be recompiled by users).
OSX 10.5 removed the ability to run OS9 bins OSX 10.6 removed the ability to run on PPC hardware OSX 10.7 removed the ability to run PPC bins under emulation on x86 hardware
Running the latest OSX, i can't run any mac programs which are more than 7 years old without at least recompiling them if not making code changes, whereas for better or worse other systems will allow me to run programs which are 20+ years old.
The steering wheel is sold to you under the same terms as the rest of the car, you are not forced to agree to a separate user agreement in order to use the steering wheel. You can also sell your unwanted steering wheel and use your after market model instead. The steering wheel is more like a hard drive or processor in this respect, not like bundled software.
On the contrary, there are plenty of Nokia N9 handsets being imported into the US, and they work too... A closer analogy to DVD regions, would be if the N9 used its gps to work out its location and upon detecting it was in the US, bricked itself.
Pilot simply don't make that particular model available in the US. If i was to buy one in Japan, there is no built in region restriction on the device that would prevent me taking it to the US and using it there... There is no region restriction on US paper that would force me to also import Japanese paper in order to continue using the pen... I doubt they would even care if i purchased a bulk order of them in Japan, imported them to the US and then started selling them there.
The key difference is between "not bothering to sell a product in a given area" and "going out of your way to prevent people using a product in that area".
Solaris yes, backwards compatibility is very good... OSX is an especially poor example, Apple dropped compatibility completely with OS9 in the name of progress and thus we have OSX at all. They then moved to a completely different hardware architecture, again dropping compatibility... Apple have also deprecated a number of older APIs in the name of progress. Windows retains a fairly high level of backwards compatibility, but its not perfect and it comes at a huge cost in the form of some very crufty hacks, massive levels of bloat and plenty of security holes.
Your new analogy is also not good, commercial software is more like hiring space on someone else's cargo ship that's going to pre determined destinations whereas open source is more like having your own ship, whatever type of ship that may be, which you can dynamically resize according to the load and destination of your choice. Or a slightly better one... Commercial software is like a bus, if your lucky it will be going where you want to go, if not you might have to walk or adjust your plans, on the other hand someone else does the driving for you. Open source is like having your own car, it will go exactly where you want it to when you want it to, but you need to learn to drive or hire a driver yourself.
Outlook doesn't even quote previous text properly when replying to a message, nor does it set the in-reply-to header... Both of these actions are specified in various RFCs and virtually every other mail client seems to get it right. Makes it extremely hard to follow a conversation once you have outlook users replying to messages.
Try Zimbra, it has a local desktop client you can use, a very good web interface and it supports imap/caldav so you can use other clients and aren't locked in to the ones they provide.
Exchange becomes a huge pain in the ass as soon as you want to use anything other than their official client with it.
By making it more complex, you just serve to deter casual piracy (ie kids making copies for their friends), but you will encourage organised piracy (the kind that is big business in asian countries, and is often used to fund other criminal activity)... These groups make enough money that they can afford to buy the equipment required, and hire people who know how to use it. They can also bribe or coerce employees of the companies creating the media to get the keys out of them.
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The corn farmers lobbyists are too influential in the US...
They want to continue producing corn, and won't even consider changing their business model...
So instead of looking to produce appropriate products to meet demand, they are looking for ways to force their existing products onto the market, even when they are not the best choice...
Case in point high fructose corn syrup, it is a terrible sweetener and requires considerably more processing than sugar, making it more expensive to produce...
In the US, high taxes on sugar force the use of HFCS...
In other countries without such manipulative taxes, market forces result in sugar being used because its a more suitable product.
The situation is so ridiculous, that people in the US actually go out of their way and often pay more to buy Coke that's been imported from Mexico because it uses real sugar instead of HFCS.
While that does make a lot of sense, it would just never work under the current economic system...
If they can't sell you new products or charge you for repairing the ones you have, how will the companies continue making a profit? It's in their interest to sell you an unreliable product, then charge you again for repairs and replacement parts before selling you a completely new product once the original one is judged beyond repair.
Also some markets are moving fast, for instance i have an old VAX built in the 80s that still works, but it is simply useless for modern day computing tasks.
On the other hand, selective reuse of certain components is possible.. I have an ATX case from the late 90s that i've upgraded the motherboard in several times, and I use an SGI keyboard from a similar vintage...
If you mandate lifetime warranties, then pretty soon the companies providing the warranties will simply go under as there would be too few new product sales to cover the ongoing warranty cost. The only thing that could practically work is a rental model, where you pay monthly for the product and the supplier has to repair it should it fail. Under this scenario not only would they have a continual source of income, but would also have an incentive to produce reliable products in order to reduce their repair costs.
Or just use a lot less of it...
If your talking computer cases, then stick with standard cases like the ATX standard... I have an ATX case which is over 10 years old now, and has been through several motherboards in its lifetime. Also, this case is mostly made of metal, and contains relatively little plastic.
Years ago when i bought a bottled drink, it came in a glass bottle and a portion of the price was refundable once you returned the bottle... That bottle was then thoroughly cleaned, refilled and ultimately put back on the shelf. The truck that brought the next delivery, also took back the used bottles.
Now, glass or plastic bottles are smashed up and melted down, using enormous amounts of energy, if anyone bothers recycling them at all (which there is very little incentive to do without the refund you used to be given).
Many products these days also come with far too much packaging, everything comes in its own plastic tray which just ends up in landfill and is carried away from stores in plastic bags. I would rather the stores still let their customers take cardboard boxes, they are far more convenient for carrying in the car than plastic bags.
Things like meat and vegetables used to come in paper bags, now they come in plastic packaging...
The amount of packaging i go through just in a week is absolutely insane.
Well proprietary services are the problem...
Actual broadcast TV adhered to the same standards for a long time, and there has been a long transition phase from the old analog standard to the new digital one. There are hundreds of different manufacturers, all making TV sets compatible with the standards. New standards only come out when there is an actual improvement to be made, you don't end up with multiple incompatible but otherwise equivalent services operating in the same place.
Standards are what we need, not a bunch of proprietary services coming and going which need their own proprietary set top boxes or restrictive software that only runs on certain devices.
Develop a standard for streaming and ensure all today's networkable sets support it, the standard will be around for years and only get superseded when something considerably superior comes along.
You seem to agree, at least in principle... By wanting a dumb monitor, you effectively want to separate out that part of the package because a dumb monitor does support standards (HDMI, DVI etc)... Why shouldn't that monitor also support a standard for network streaming too? Would severely reduce the clutter in people's homes...
A lot of these so called smart tv sets from the likes of samsung have an embedded arm based system running linux (google for samygo)...
The only thing lacking is the default software, which tends to be pretty lousy and artificially restricted. If you were to reflash it with custom software you could do all manner of things.
Wasn't so long ago we were playing games using machines which didn't have soundcards (ie business desktops)...
TV on the other hand is largely an evolution from radio.
Not always, LCD screens are only just catching up to higher end CRT displays...
I bought an old HP Document Sender (model 9100 i believe), it's the kind that business would have paid huge money for a few years ago, but now they're cheap on ebay, have a sheet feeder that hasn't jammed on me yet and can scan to email...
It is massively more reliable than any of the home model sheet feed scanners i've ever tried.
IE releases *were* going to be tied to windows versions, the dedicated IE team was even disbanded at one point...
It's only thanks to competition from firefox that they're bothering to update IE at all, otherwise IE8 would be "IE6 thats had minor tweaks to make it compatible with windows 7 and fit in graphically"...
And because it's very rarely used, most apps aren't written to expect it to be there and can cause all manner of compatibility problems.
It's also a pretty crude hack, it minimises all your apps when you switch desktop and on a slow machine or under load you can see it doing so.
Similarly, because its not installed by default chances are on a random machine your expected to use and on which your not allowed to install apps (eg the average corporate workstation) you cant use it.
And people have trouble with abbreviations since when?
The amount of times i see "text" abbreviated as "txt", and all manner of others... Many of these random abbreviations come from the crude predecessor to windows, dos... which had an arbitrary limit on file name length and format.
As someone else already pointed out, you *can* use the gui to mount an iso if you want.
If i was explaining to someone how to mount an iso, i would probably explain the command line way because its easier... Someone could simply cut+paste the command that were posted here, whereas explaining a gui is much harder in a textual or vocal setting.
It's very important that both options be available, so that people can choose which method they want to use.
On most distros you click on an iso, it gets mounted... You also have the *option* of using the command line...
OSX works the same way.
And therein lies the problem with society today... Businesses are selfish and short sighted.
If every business works hard to improve efficiency, cut back on expensive staff and replace them with robots, outsource labour intensive activities to cheaper countries etc...
The end result, is huge unemployment in the home country of that business, so then who buys your products? Those people in the country you outsource cheap labour to can't afford to either.
Short term profit gains, leading to long term economic collapse.
Doesn't help for drives which are dead, but still under warranty...
You can't erase the data without physically destroying the drive, which will invalidate the warranty and they wont replace it...
You also can't erase the data because the drive is dead, and you likely don't have the equipment to recondition the drive like the manufacturer will when you send it back for replacement.
A lot of people would, obviously some wouldn't.
Many would value the convenience, and so the availability of pirated material would decrease further increasing the relative convenience of the legitimate sources.
The pirate copy would now only offer a cheaper price, in exchange for the inconvenience of locating it, the risk/inconvenience of bogus downloads and the risk of getting caught making it a far less attractive proposition.
Those who still remain pirates...
Those who cannot afford to buy - no anti-piracy scheme will turn these people into paying customers, all it will do is deprive them, and deprived people are more likely to resort to other methods, eg stealing money which they can then use to buy the media.
Those who are hard core pirates and will always do so, again no anti piracy schemes will do anything as these people would rather go without. Similarly if any scheme is flawed, these people will sooner or later crack the system and get their fix anyway.
Sure Apple make an effort to maintain compatibility, but that effort is as you pointed out limited, typically to 3 release cycles... At which point, the older stuff is cut off completely.
Solaris 11 can still run binaries from the first versions of Solaris (early 90s), it might even be able to run bins from sunos 4.x still tho i don't have any to try.
Windows 7 can still run most win32 binaries from NT3, and some dos and win16 binaries.
Linux can still run a.out binaries and older libc5 compiled bins (although most distros don't ship with the compatibility libs by default, compatibility is arguably less important for linux as the vast majority of apps can be recompiled by users).
OSX 10.5 removed the ability to run OS9 bins
OSX 10.6 removed the ability to run on PPC hardware
OSX 10.7 removed the ability to run PPC bins under emulation on x86 hardware
Running the latest OSX, i can't run any mac programs which are more than 7 years old without at least recompiling them if not making code changes, whereas for better or worse other systems will allow me to run programs which are 20+ years old.
The steering wheel is sold to you under the same terms as the rest of the car, you are not forced to agree to a separate user agreement in order to use the steering wheel.
You can also sell your unwanted steering wheel and use your after market model instead.
The steering wheel is more like a hard drive or processor in this respect, not like bundled software.
On the contrary, there are plenty of Nokia N9 handsets being imported into the US, and they work too...
A closer analogy to DVD regions, would be if the N9 used its gps to work out its location and upon detecting it was in the US, bricked itself.
Pilot simply don't make that particular model available in the US.
If i was to buy one in Japan, there is no built in region restriction on the device that would prevent me taking it to the US and using it there...
There is no region restriction on US paper that would force me to also import Japanese paper in order to continue using the pen...
I doubt they would even care if i purchased a bulk order of them in Japan, imported them to the US and then started selling them there.
The key difference is between "not bothering to sell a product in a given area" and "going out of your way to prevent people using a product in that area".
Solaris yes, backwards compatibility is very good...
OSX is an especially poor example, Apple dropped compatibility completely with OS9 in the name of progress and thus we have OSX at all. They then moved to a completely different hardware architecture, again dropping compatibility...
Apple have also deprecated a number of older APIs in the name of progress.
Windows retains a fairly high level of backwards compatibility, but its not perfect and it comes at a huge cost in the form of some very crufty hacks, massive levels of bloat and plenty of security holes.
Your new analogy is also not good, commercial software is more like hiring space on someone else's cargo ship that's going to pre determined destinations whereas open source is more like having your own ship, whatever type of ship that may be, which you can dynamically resize according to the load and destination of your choice.
Or a slightly better one...
Commercial software is like a bus, if your lucky it will be going where you want to go, if not you might have to walk or adjust your plans, on the other hand someone else does the driving for you.
Open source is like having your own car, it will go exactly where you want it to when you want it to, but you need to learn to drive or hire a driver yourself.
Outlook doesn't even quote previous text properly when replying to a message, nor does it set the in-reply-to header... Both of these actions are specified in various RFCs and virtually every other mail client seems to get it right. Makes it extremely hard to follow a conversation once you have outlook users replying to messages.
Forget MAPI, use IMAP for mail and CalDAV for calendaring...
There are plenty of packages which suit your requirements, Zimbra and Zarafa for starters but there are more.
Try Zimbra, it has a local desktop client you can use, a very good web interface and it supports imap/caldav so you can use other clients and aren't locked in to the ones they provide.
Exchange becomes a huge pain in the ass as soon as you want to use anything other than their official client with it.
By making it more complex, you just serve to deter casual piracy (ie kids making copies for their friends), but you will encourage organised piracy (the kind that is big business in asian countries, and is often used to fund other criminal activity)...
These groups make enough money that they can afford to buy the equipment required, and hire people who know how to use it. They can also bribe or coerce employees of the companies creating the media to get the keys out of them.