Thursday, June 17, 2010

Planned Obsolescence

Anyone with a computer three or more years old has probably experienced it -- the computer's version of tired blood. It doesn't boot up as fast as it used to, applications seem to take an age to initialize, even shutting down takes forever -- it just seems to have lost the sharp edge it came with the day you opened the box.

You have followed the suggestions in those endless computer magazine articles: defragment your hard drive, get rid of applications you don't use, clean out the cookie jar once in a while. You even download FREE software which will tell you what your problems are. It does. And then it invites you to BUY the software you need to fix them.

You talk to the guys at your local computer repair shop, and what do they tell you? Get more memory! Get a bigger hard drive! Your operating system is out-of-date! For only $150 we'll take care of it! They will even try to convince you that the electrons your system came with are too slow, so you need new drivers -- the information highway is no place for slow drivers.

I have a conspiracy theory about all this. I am convinced that all computer software is written with embedded delay loop counters that are initialized with the square root of the number of minutes elapsed sinced you purchased your computer, each time the software is executed. During any operation, startup, shutdown, application initialization, these delay loops are executed so as to make it appear your computer is slowing down, when in fact it's the software that is slowing down -- deliberately! How about that for a theory?





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