Dava's Hitchhiker's Guide to 'End of Life' ..so long and thanks for all the chips!

[Here is a lighthearted look at 'End Of Life' known also as EOL, when a product moves from the support phase to a coffin somewhere in the ethernets of a Skyrim graveyard.. or no longer supported by the manufacturing company, while this is not always the worst thing ever to have happened in existence.. try paying £4000-12000 for a MacPro and tell me in 6-10 years if you feel like a little cry :'(

Now please listen to the hitchhiker's guide music, and have a reasonably astute voice in you head, for the duration of the proceedings. ~ahthankyou]


Once upon a time in the 1970's of 'earth' The Planetial Conglomeration Interstellarfractuation, also known to the locals as IBM, realized once consumers worked out that the original company that sold them their 'Till device', was then responsible to help them use it for a unlimited number of years, they became aware & alarmed this was going to be all too costly.. negating the disastrous PR problems that occurred with a Till that tallied the wrong outcome this would come second and third place.. oh my!

By the 1980's every major company had just assumed the humans were stupid and would accept; 'when a new model comes out we stop supporting the old one' and many stupid humans did, even though they paid the same price for a system as you would for a kidney on the black market, they just said 'okay' and bought the new model.

Two companies did not think they should be so mean to the stupid humans.. IBM and Apple, in the early 80's it was IBM offering extended support, and in the mid-80s to 1990's it was Apple giving up to 6 years EOL support, today Apple offers 6 years half-life support, with a full life of 10.

One may note another.. Clive Sinclair, whose systems he made sure were backward compatible.. possibly the first human to do this on a whole range of computers, and so risk losing money.

By 1995 the idea you had support what-ever-on-earth you were selling had caught on, and people would get quite cross ..if you sold them junk and disappeared to china they would report you to Interpol because they would have nerd-rage if something didn't work *exactly* as stated!

By 2000's graphic chip vendors, became proud of their place within the community, offering much laxed policies on RMA and EOL, even cards from those eras still receive support today.

*

Don't let the talking whale delude you, all of this was hard fought, with many angry letters about amps and millivolts .. usb ports with strange colors that no one knew what they meant.

In history there has been many strange occurrences of faulty goods, like the hypnotic vacuum cleaner incident of 2070, where as you know, many people where convinced that cleaner was working but in-fact it had no motor and only a MP3 player and a speaker... or the woeful tale in 2102 of the faulty electric massage underwear, .. so many lives lost, they will be missed.

People enjoy knowing who to trust.. now if you just pop in the scales and I'll warm up the probe..
.. ohw you *have* lost weight, must be all the seaweed we feed you. .. its vibrating .. oh! i think that means its ready..

notes----
*Shixxor of Reddit's Flying Whale. great artist!

PC Satellite Devices.. or Homer Simpsons asks 'Can.. my Monkey.. Have a Pet??'

Hi Guys!

These days we all have smartphones.. like a satellite device for our PC's.. a mini part of our computing life 'on the go'.. there is talk of smartwatches that satellite our phones, while this *has* happened it's yet to catch on.. I think this a great idea!

It would give us a second smaller screen for our phones, linked via bluetooth, we can check our notifications just by turning our wrist, naturally, and we can have traditional wired headphone headsets running up our sleeve, to saving us from the often strange looking mono electricity using bluetooth headsets, we can store & sync more data and have a place to exchange data on our person, when we run out on the move. We wouldn't have to reach to our pocket to take our phone out, which is handy for both security reasons and a more elegant solution.

This would facilitate phablets a bit more, for mobile movie watching too, as most other small tasks would/will be shown on the smartwatch, answering & ending calls, viewing text and fb messages.. although replying requires the phone, we can be patient until we are seated, or have hot-presets like 'ok' 'yes' 'no' 'thanks' 'yes please' 'no thanks' and user defined ones via the our phones. A camera on the side of the watch for easy skype, making it easier to play cameraman.

tbh I really don't like Tablets, I know its a matter of taste, but I don't see the point in them other than for the lady in your life. large and cumbersome, without the nice little luxuries of a laptop, i'd rather keep that to the foray of the phone.. but i could be wrong, as many seem to be making the move to combine laptop and tablet as one device..but i'm still not convinced.

But there seems to be a major fault in the pricing, afterall this is a *watch* we are talking about.. many many if not all, seem wildly overpriced even prohibiting the market into being a grown market and a established technology. Many charge from £300 to £5/600 which is ridiculous! again, you do realize this is a WATCH .. many pay around £30 to £150 for their watches.. so starting at £75 for a basic Android Samsung/HTC/Sony then having a top wall of £150 makes this an *actual* possibility of buying one and becoming a market. I think they got greedy or had starry eyed expectations as far as pricing, but its new tech and no one knows what price it should be at first, but I think we can all see now it's been out for two years.


So... in five years.. 'SmartRing' anyone? :)


Dava