This is why pirates are always better off.

This is why pirates are always better off.

Correction: this is why it's important to crack any DRM.

appiah4 wrote on 2021-05-18, 17:36:

This is why pirates are always better off.

Relevant:

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2021-05-18, 19:32:

Correction: this is why it's important to crack any DRM.

That too 😁

Some movie DVDs have nice extras, though. It's convenient to have them all in one place.

One thing that really irritates me are "special edition" DVD/Blu-ray sets that are priced at a premium (couple hundred dollars) and that are basically re-releases or have worse bonuses than much older collector's sets that cost no more than 50-70 bucks.

Similar to my situation. My 8 years old fridge needed new gaskets. Nobody made them anymore, not even the manufacturer. Without it the fridge was useless and had to be replaced. So I bought an universal set of gaskets instead and made it fit my fridge. It works now.
That's what you need to do with your broken software: find another way to make it work.
I'm pretty sure the EULA mentions customer support somewhere and the fact that they only need to provide it until X date.
The big question is: can the customer be condemned for using illegal means of method for activating his legally purchased product?

Beside the subject or which company, It might be obvious but this is not only related to softwares; I'd think it's a "new lifestyle" shared by most consumer products where "old things" and basically the "old concept of things how existed" was decided that have to end in a natural way or in some "forced" one like temporary licenses, sw/hw not updated anymore or not secure cause missing microcodes, patches, mitigations or whatever, not fast enough cause a usual generic homepage read by a browser should need octa-cores and gigabytes of DDR4 rams with 3D hw acceleration for no reasons.. at the end it's easy to see the old "retail logic" of a closed box product bought in a store to last theorically "forever" disappeared as a concept before reasoning about which product.
Basically when something is bought it can be felt it's already old when instead in the 80's most would have bought a single device and thought it should have lasted a lot! Let's take TV for example.. I already told this but we had a 70's CRT TV in the early 80's bought second hand and while repaired by ourself a couple of times, it lasted until 1998! Basically twenty years of lifetime and changed only cause a damn big store were built with some good prices and we bought another CRT (it still was a good one fortunately) but that was like beginning to buy things when they were not really needed. The old concept of "if it's not broken why change it" is gone. Not to mention the tv radio/codec format that change from the DVB one with a much shorter time compared to the past where basically the same analog signal might be improved at source but could be seen into a B/W CRT tv anyway. Not to mention talking about smartphone..

386SX wrote on 2021-05-21, 10:17:

Beside the subject or which company, It might be obvious but this is not only related to softwares; I'd think it's a "new lifestyle" shared by most consumer products where "old things" and basically the "old concept of things how existed" was decided that have to end in a natural way or in some "forced" one like temporary licenses, sw/hw not updated anymore or not secure cause missing microcodes, patches, mitigations or whatever, not fast enough cause a usual generic homepage read by a browser should need octa-cores and gigabytes of DDR4 rams with 3D hw acceleration for no reasons.. at the end it's easy to see the old "retail logic" of a closed box product bought in a store to last theorically "forever" disappeared as a concept before reasoning about which product.
Basically when something is bought it can be felt it's already old when instead in the 80's most would have bought a single device and thought it should have lasted a lot! Let's take TV for example.. I already told this but we had a 70's CRT TV in the early 80's bought second hand and while repaired by ourself a couple of times, it lasted until 1998! Basically twenty years of lifetime and changed only cause a damn big store were built with some good prices and we bought another CRT (it still was a good one fortunately) but that was like beginning to buy things when they were not really needed. The old concept of "if it's not broken why change it" is gone. Not to mention the tv radio/codec format that change from the DVB one with a much shorter time compared to the past where basically the same analog signal might be improved at source but could be seen into a B/W CRT tv anyway. Not to mention talking about smartphone..

It's called "planned obsolescence", and indeed a thing.

A thing that should be banned out under the threat of very hefty fines (50% of a company's yearly income or so) ASAP, because it is very bad for the environment and is a major factor in the creation of polluting e-waste. 🙁

Not only is planned obsolescence bad for the environment but it's bad for our collective bank accounts. Since we can't easily fix the item without just having to spend more money replacing it.

My parents have one of those DVD/VHS combo machines which they bought around 10 years ago. It only lasted about 5 years. It came to me with what appeared to be a burned microprocessor. The rear fan was dead. The machine still powers on with a broken fan. The people who designed this thing knew exactly what they were doing: The fan would run circa 5 years, then fail, overheat the PCB, and kill the chip. No simple repair possible.

By contrast I have a basic VHS machine made nearly 30 years ago which still works flawlessly.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-05-22, 19:43:

Not only is planned obsolescence bad for the environment but it's bad for our collective bank accounts. Since we can't easily fix the item without just having to spend more money replacing it.

I the item you are using was free you lose nothing. Just replace it with another free system.

Planned obsolescence exists because most people don't really want appliances that last. What's the point? They'll replace them after a few years anyway.
Why should a TV last 30 years when the next gen model will be out in 3 years?
It's not necessarily a bad thing. These appliances are fully recyclable and are made of recycled materials. Appliances that last decades would also cost much more. Most people would still throw them away when something better came along.
The times when we had to keep servicing old, crappy stuff because there wasn't anything else available are long gone. Thank god!
People who lived in the Comecon area know the feeling, my grandparents used the same washing machine for 30 years. It was crap when they bought it second hand and it was crap 30 years later.
Staying on topic, the battery life of a mainboard is ~7 years but people upgrade the PC every 4 years on average. That means that most buyers don't even replace the BIOS battery! So why would manufacturers build computers that last way beyond that? To accommodate the second-hand market? The average GPU lifetime is even shorter.
Yes, manufacturers started to cut corners to keep their prices down and stay ahead of the competition. But they also got the chance to develop new and improved models faster. Smaller companies got the chance to compete and that took the prices even lower. Some manufacturers have 2 lines of products: cheap ones for home use and expensive ones for professional use. Buyers can decide what they want.

Older appliances generally work a lot better than new ones, because older appliances are designed to do their job, while modern appliances use computers to figure how to avoid doing it in the name of "efficiency".

Dishwashing machines don't wash dishes, nor do they dry them.
Refrigerators don't keep the food as cold, but they compensate by lying about the temperature.
Any money they save on electricity is lost with their more frequent need for repair/replacement caused by their complexity.

Sometimes home appliances need to be replaced due to changing regulations. We had an old gas stove which worked fine but the guy who came to inspect it one day decided it was unsafe and insisted on disconnecting it, over our protests. Some emissions thing, IIRC. It was admittedly nearly 30 years old at the time.

Planned obsolescence is real, but a change of mind recently happend.
The EU introduced a "right for repair" or how it was called.
Edit: https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/europe-is-gu … right-to-repair

Also, the matter is quite oversimplified here.

In the 70s and 80s, computers lasted for a few years until they were considered obsolete.

In the 90s, however, technology was evolving so fast that a PC could be hopelessly outdated within a few months!

By the turn of the century, this process slowrx down again.
Currently, people can get away with a 10 years old PC no problem.

This was unthinkable in the 80s.

An Altair 8800 or IMSAI 8080 as a daily driver in 1989? Unthinkable.

What steadily degraded over the years, however, is build-quality.

Early appliances, no matter the type, were made of metal, wood or any other quality material (incl. good plastic).

Nowadays, it's all brittle plastic or cheap tin.
Chassis are either glued or use some sort of snap mechanism (plastic clamps).
No more screws.

Edit : My family's "Krups" handheld mixer from the 70s still works fine.
It's made of plastic, but the good type.
The electro motor is also still going strong.

The coffe machines, however.. They last two years, at best.

I think that while it's true that people tend to change tech even before they are usually designed to last (not much when considering integrated almost hidden batteries or with only few sw updates in a sort of never ending cycle between bugs/patches/releases and nowdays for everything even TVs), I'd agree that older tech were usually designed to last more or at least to do their single job and not integrating things they were not supposed to have. At least for its build quality as said above, maybe computer was quite early to last decades but their build quality was another world.
The point of people changing things that still works is somehow sad because buying "new" things seems to become some sort of "way to pass the free time". In a not far past, even if an old TV or an old device was consuming much more power or less eco-friendly they still worked just doing the job in the simplest and safe (for its time) logic. They still required repairing but there were much more local experts to do that when not repairable by ourself.
Nowdays a single capacitor on any device might stop the device to work or to work good. A coffe machine should not need a touchscreen based computer to make coffe as an example.
The durability point was more concerning the buyer back in the previous decades and usually if a thing stopped working after some years they'd still ask for answers about "why" that happened. Nowdays the logic is different, it stopped working let's trash it (with all the eco-friendly procedures but still filling up mountains of devices probably half of them working) and buy "finally" the new model.. the same coffe machine with an OLED display a quad-core cpu, wifi, remote updates..
And about power used by devices I think about how much does it cost for example.. even with low power light bulb, even not opening hot water or using a lot home devices at the end here the costs/bill is something like 1/4 of the cost of what's consumed and the other 3/4 like services, taxes, transportation of the gas/electricity or whatever.. so at the end you consume much less of the past (let's think to example much light bulbs with 100W each compared to the modern one that consume 10/15W each) but pay the same if not more. It's not that easy to understand myself where things got better for the consumer wallet.

Jo22 wrote on 2021-05-23, 07:15:

Planned obsolescence is real, but a change of mind recently happend. The EU introduced a "right for repair" or how it was called […]
Show full quote

Planned obsolescence is real, but a change of mind recently happend.
The EU introduced a "right for repair" or how it was called.
Edit: https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/europe-is-gu … right-to-repair

Also, the matter is quite oversimplified here.

In the 70s and 80s, computers lasted for a few years until they were considered obsolete.

In the 90s, however, technology was evolving so fast that a PC could be hopelessly outdated within a few months!

By the turn of the century, this process slowrx down again.
Currently, people can get away with a 10 years old PC no problem.

This was unthinkable in the 80s.

An Altair 8800 or IMSAI 8080 as a daily driver in 1989? Unthinkable.

What steadily degraded over the years, however, is build-quality.

Early appliances, no matter the type, were made of metal, wood or any other quality material (incl. good plastic).

Nowadays, it's all brittle plastic or cheap tin.
Chassis are either glued or use some sort of snap mechanism (plastic clamps).
No more screws.

Edit : My family's "Krups" handheld mixer from the 70s still works fine.
It's made of plastic, but the good type.
The electro motor is also still going strong.

The coffe machines, however.. They last two years, at best.

That's a good point and I agree but 80's computer were not capable to last a decade cause the evolution was really fast up the 2000's but as said they theorically "could" last decades. Metals, screws logics, well built heavy cases, well built mainboards (maybe not for the bios battery..); compared to modern ones they looked like "trains" and they were repairable also cause there was not the nowdays size problem where everything must be integrated and still everything must be faster without a real reason for it. Not to mention the smartphone sector where these logics surpassed themself but also sometimes in notebook I've seen some that had the ability to be upgraded but basically opening the whole notebook monitor included to access the sockets between flat cables and thin wires.
So I suppose the problem is not necessary even only the obsolescence but more about the consumer view of the products they buy and that lost logic of why a device is needed and if it's bought it must work and not waiting for a reason to replace it.
The point of a modern computer that works even if of a decade before, I suppose it will not last much long, many ones already doesn't have security mitigations, maybe might soon missing cpu instructions to even install o.s., ram/cpu usage even for an home office machine is higher than ever and browser jscripts are so heavy most web pages use half the cpu even without not doing anything like reading a newspaper article.

Miphee wrote on 2021-05-19, 15:16:

Similar to my situation. My 8 years old fridge needed new gaskets. Nobody made them anymore, not even the manufacturer. Without […]
Show full quote

Similar to my situation. My 8 years old fridge needed new gaskets. Nobody made them anymore, not even the manufacturer. Without it the fridge was useless and had to be replaced. So I bought an universal set of gaskets instead and made it fit my fridge. It works now.
That's what you need to do with your broken software: find another way to make it work.
I'm pretty sure the EULA mentions customer support somewhere and the fact that they only need to provide it until X date.
The big question is: can the customer be condemned for using illegal means of method for activating his legally purchased product?

If fridge manufacturers follows the "wisdom" of software industry, then you could go to prison for using universal gasket. Instead, you should buy subscription license for a new fridge. If you forget to pay your monthly subscription, the fridge will stop functioning and all your food will perish.

Oh, and there is more! All the food you store in the subscribed fridge is not yours. According to the EULA, the fridge manufacturer has the right to decide how and when should you consume those foods. You may find yourself buying new foods while discarding old foods that are still perfectly edible (or go to prison for breaking the EULA), because the fridge manufacturer decides the food has "security holes" that are bad for your health. Of course, the fridge manufacturer would never mention the fact that they receive commissions and kickbacks from food vendors.

Sounds sadistic? Well, that's what happens when psychopaths and sadists write the law, or at least use lobbyists to write the law.

Home appliances will all go on strike once they conspire with each other though the "Internet of things"

386SX wrote on 2021-05-23, 07:47:

And about power used by devices I think about how much does it cost for example.. even with low power light bulb, even not opening hot water or using a lot home devices at the end here the costs/bill is something like 1/4 of the cost of what's consumed and the other 3/4 like services, taxes, transportation of the gas/electricity or whatever.. so at the end you consume much less of the past (let's think to example much light bulbs with 100W each compared to the modern one that consume 10/15W each) but pay the same if not more. It's not that easy to understand myself where things got better for the consumer wallet.

That's also a good thing if you think about it. Consumerism means more job opportunities for people that decreases unemployment and increases economic growth. The more people have disposable income the more they spend. The more they spend the more the economy grows. It's a very basic presentation of a complicated process but the point stands. If I design an item that lasts 30 years then people won't need a new one for a very long time. So why would companies put money into R&D when people only buy an item every 30 years? Instead they started designing them to last 5-10 years and put the excess profit into developing new models every few years. Some of those models are bad but some are excellent and groundbreaking. New models require more parts, more suppliers, more workers. Everybody gets a slice and that puts food on the table.
Not to mention the advantages of a huge selection of items in every price range. You don't have to spend a fortune to get the latest tech anymore.