6 ms·

I also got downvoted for stating that I feel I have enough HW and can live a few years off what is there. I guess people have been trained to get the newest th

I also got downvoted for stating that I feel I have enough HW and can live a few years off what is there. I guess people have been trained to get the newest thing every year, that it now hurts them bad to not be able to do so for a few months. And yes, I agree, this could be a wonderful time to actually strengthen our knowhow regarding keeping things alive, instead of just throwing them away. Sounds like a great chance for the climate change people. How is the market for used equipment doing btw?

Jetrel 5y ago
To speak to a "long perspective" on the issue, that was one of the things that scared people when electronics moved to integrated circuits. There's no "knowhow to keeping them alive". Once the magic smoke gets let out, they're just dead. There was a time when every part of a computer - including, literally, an individual "bit" of ram, could be hand-repaired, craftsman-style (and even visually assessed for failure), but we've been on a long, long trajectory towards none of this stuff being user-serviceable. We're now watching the rise of SoC, wherein my graphics card and my ram crawl into my CPU and disappear as discrete components. Strange times.
- mlang23 5y ago
  Well, I get your somewhat nostalgic attitude. But back then, computing equipment was also way large, louder, and energy consuming. Heck, one of the "museum" disk drives we have at work used to make the light flicker in the lower floor if you powered it on. So yeah, we're past a certain point of repairability. Thats sad, but more a function of progress, not really something we can do about. But that doesnt mean all our existing tech will emit the magic smoke in the next few months. The endless need for more computing power is mostly driven by software bloat. We could extend the current smartphone and gadget usefulness by a significant amount of time if we stopped to fall for constant featurism and did lets say, a year or two of cleanup. Sure, "the future" like AR and such will have to wait, but heck, this "we will sell you 3d" thing is around since the 80s and didnt take of in the mainstream yet, so what?
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    If floppy drives were common today I think many of the issues you highlighted like increase power usuage would be solved and applied to this domain. We don't have to be past that power.
  - stadium 5y ago
    Are there any standards bodies or informal organizations that try to quantify software bloat and featurism? Seems like an opportunity for groups that are motivated to keep software lean and consumer friendly to pool some resources ala open source. Anything like that out there already?
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    If we kept our tech level at around the 80s but only increased the power efficiency, we wouldn't be in such a bad position.
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      Aren’t most of the power efficiency gains from integration and miniaturization? If you’re charging/discharging a larger amount per bit, it’s going to take more power than a smaller (physically and electrically) equivalent would. That tends to work against practical field repairs (other than replacing at the IC or subassembly level).
      - GravitasFailure 5y ago
        The shorter the distance between two components the less energy you're going to lose to resistance, electromechanical components have physical friction, conversion inefficiencies going from electrical to mechanical energy, and the energy needed to accelerate a mass. Really, what nukes the repairability of a lot of products these days (ignoring the repair-hostile practices of many companies) is the cost of the item vs the time needed to disassemble the unit, track down where something went wrong, repair it, reassemble, and hope that component didn't blow because something else upstream is faulty that you didn't find. Cuba and Africa the time is cheap while replacement units are somewhere between expensive and unobtainium, USA/Japan/Europe not so much.
- Applejinx 5y ago
  This can still require a certain amount of DIY. I've just replaced a Blackmagic Atem Mini: sadly, I tinkered with my previous one trying to keep it alive and couldn't return it. I burned it up trying to do too much with it: ran the internal processing at super HD from a Pocket Cinema 4K, with two separate other inputs coming in and having to be rescaled, color corrections, and then the output downscaled after chromakeying to HD. The unit basically melted itself until all it could do was flash bright colorful lines. Total loss. So the replacement (dropping right into the previous workflow, though I'm making a point to not run as many rescaled inputs by default) will sit on a homebrewed heatsink with thermal pads and fan. That way it probably won't burn up, but if it did I won't have taken it apart, and I can most likely return it for a replacement. The inability to repair is a concern, but on the other hand building the larger environment into the cooling support the unit should have already had, is the DIY aspect. Should work.
tdeck 5y ago
There's definitely a sort of "keeping up with the Joneses" that goes on in technical fields with regard to hardware. I do all my personal projects on a 2013 model Ultrabook. Sure it's underpowered, but not for editing text, compiling small codebases, or building CRUD WebApps. If I need to do some derp learning, I can just spin up a cloud instance. There are certainly productive tasks that benefit greatly from newer hardware (video editing, compiling the Linux kernel, launching a single instance of the Android Studio emulator), but most of this hardware capacity is probably for gaming and, like many people, I'm not much of a gamer.
- mlang23 5y ago
  Since I am still mostly on a plain terminal, I used to have a time when I used a rpi0w as a laptop, since I really dont need much more then an instance of Emacs and a few ssh sessions in a tmux. I switched to a real laptop by now, and its nice to have a bit of local power. But I could actually do all my dayjob on a rpi0w. https://blind.guru//blog/2016-06-12-brlpi.html https://blind.guru//blog/2016-06-12-brlpi.html https://hackaday.com/2019/03/26/not-all-raspberry-pi-laptops-have-qwerty-keyboards-and-screens/ https://hackaday.com/2019/03/26/not-all-raspberry-pi-laptops...
bluedino 5y ago
>> How is the market for used equipment doing btw? I sold my stockpile of laptops (anything i5 or newer) for triple it's value last year. People would buy anything at that point.
- mlang23 5y ago
  Crazy. And also good, since that hardware is likely getting used more now.
duckmysick 5y ago
What's HW in this context? I can only think of homework and hot water, but neither makes sense.
- hattar 5y ago
  Hardware
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
axiolite 5y ago
> I have enough HW and can live a few years off what is there. I guess people have been trained to get the newest thing every year I imagine the downvotes were for implying that everyone else is in a similar situation as you. What about people who were being efficient before the shortage, and now can't keep their aged equipment running any longer? What about businesses who suddenly need much more equipment than they did previously, due to pandemic restrictions? > How is the market for used equipment doing btw? I've found it much harder to find available supplies at any given time, but I haven't actually seen prices going up as a result.
Zanni 5y ago
Have you never had a laptop stolen or a phone destroyed by water damage or a car totaled in an accident? Sometimes you actually need a replacement, and when you do, you need it now because you depend on it for your livelihood. Buying new is not always the mindless plodding on the capitalist treadmill you make it out to be. There are plenty of people who can and should delay purchases right now, but there will always be those who just can't wait.

Jetrel 5y ago

To speak to a "long perspective" on the issue, that was one of the things that scared people when electronics moved to integrated circuits. There's no "knowhow to keeping them alive". Once the magic smoke gets let out, they're just dead. There was a time when every part of a computer - including, literally, an individual "bit" of ram, could be hand-repaired, craftsman-style (and even visually assessed for failure), but we've been on a long, long trajectory towards none of this stuff being user-serviceable. We're now watching the rise of SoC, wherein my graphics card and my ram crawl into my CPU and disappear as discrete components. Strange times.

mlang23 5y ago
Well, I get your somewhat nostalgic attitude. But back then, computing equipment was also way large, louder, and energy consuming. Heck, one of the "museum" disk drives we have at work used to make the light flicker in the lower floor if you powered it on. So yeah, we're past a certain point of repairability. Thats sad, but more a function of progress, not really something we can do about. But that doesnt mean all our existing tech will emit the magic smoke in the next few months. The endless need for more computing power is mostly driven by software bloat. We could extend the current smartphone and gadget usefulness by a significant amount of time if we stopped to fall for constant featurism and did lets say, a year or two of cleanup. Sure, "the future" like AR and such will have to wait, but heck, this "we will sell you 3d" thing is around since the 80s and didnt take of in the mainstream yet, so what?
- ipaddr 5y ago
  If floppy drives were common today I think many of the issues you highlighted like increase power usuage would be solved and applied to this domain. We don't have to be past that power.
- stadium 5y ago
  Are there any standards bodies or informal organizations that try to quantify software bloat and featurism? Seems like an opportunity for groups that are motivated to keep software lean and consumer friendly to pool some resources ala open source. Anything like that out there already?
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  If we kept our tech level at around the 80s but only increased the power efficiency, we wouldn't be in such a bad position.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    Aren’t most of the power efficiency gains from integration and miniaturization? If you’re charging/discharging a larger amount per bit, it’s going to take more power than a smaller (physically and electrically) equivalent would. That tends to work against practical field repairs (other than replacing at the IC or subassembly level).
    - GravitasFailure 5y ago
      The shorter the distance between two components the less energy you're going to lose to resistance, electromechanical components have physical friction, conversion inefficiencies going from electrical to mechanical energy, and the energy needed to accelerate a mass. Really, what nukes the repairability of a lot of products these days (ignoring the repair-hostile practices of many companies) is the cost of the item vs the time needed to disassemble the unit, track down where something went wrong, repair it, reassemble, and hope that component didn't blow because something else upstream is faulty that you didn't find. Cuba and Africa the time is cheap while replacement units are somewhere between expensive and unobtainium, USA/Japan/Europe not so much.
Applejinx 5y ago
This can still require a certain amount of DIY. I've just replaced a Blackmagic Atem Mini: sadly, I tinkered with my previous one trying to keep it alive and couldn't return it. I burned it up trying to do too much with it: ran the internal processing at super HD from a Pocket Cinema 4K, with two separate other inputs coming in and having to be rescaled, color corrections, and then the output downscaled after chromakeying to HD. The unit basically melted itself until all it could do was flash bright colorful lines. Total loss. So the replacement (dropping right into the previous workflow, though I'm making a point to not run as many rescaled inputs by default) will sit on a homebrewed heatsink with thermal pads and fan. That way it probably won't burn up, but if it did I won't have taken it apart, and I can most likely return it for a replacement. The inability to repair is a concern, but on the other hand building the larger environment into the cooling support the unit should have already had, is the DIY aspect. Should work.

tdeck 5y ago

There's definitely a sort of "keeping up with the Joneses" that goes on in technical fields with regard to hardware. I do all my personal projects on a 2013 model Ultrabook. Sure it's underpowered, but not for editing text, compiling small codebases, or building CRUD WebApps. If I need to do some derp learning, I can just spin up a cloud instance. There are certainly productive tasks that benefit greatly from newer hardware (video editing, compiling the Linux kernel, launching a single instance of the Android Studio emulator), but most of this hardware capacity is probably for gaming and, like many people, I'm not much of a gamer.

mlang23 5y ago
Since I am still mostly on a plain terminal, I used to have a time when I used a rpi0w as a laptop, since I really dont need much more then an instance of Emacs and a few ssh sessions in a tmux. I switched to a real laptop by now, and its nice to have a bit of local power. But I could actually do all my dayjob on a rpi0w. https://blind.guru//blog/2016-06-12-brlpi.html https://blind.guru//blog/2016-06-12-brlpi.html https://hackaday.com/2019/03/26/not-all-raspberry-pi-laptops-have-qwerty-keyboards-and-screens/ https://hackaday.com/2019/03/26/not-all-raspberry-pi-laptops...

bluedino 5y ago

>> How is the market for used equipment doing btw? I sold my stockpile of laptops (anything i5 or newer) for triple it's value last year. People would buy anything at that point.

mlang23 5y ago
Crazy. And also good, since that hardware is likely getting used more now.

duckmysick 5y ago

What's HW in this context? I can only think of homework and hot water, but neither makes sense.

hattar 5y ago
Hardware
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

axiolite 5y ago

> I have enough HW and can live a few years off what is there. I guess people have been trained to get the newest thing every year I imagine the downvotes were for implying that everyone else is in a similar situation as you. What about people who were being efficient before the shortage, and now can't keep their aged equipment running any longer? What about businesses who suddenly need much more equipment than they did previously, due to pandemic restrictions? > How is the market for used equipment doing btw? I've found it much harder to find available supplies at any given time, but I haven't actually seen prices going up as a result.

Zanni 5y ago

Have you never had a laptop stolen or a phone destroyed by water damage or a car totaled in an accident? Sometimes you actually need a replacement, and when you do, you need it now because you depend on it for your livelihood. Buying new is not always the mindless plodding on the capitalist treadmill you make it out to be. There are plenty of people who can and should delay purchases right now, but there will always be those who just can't wait.