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https://www.iafrikan.com/2020/06/30/do-we-really-own-our-digital-possessions/
During 2019, Microsoft announced that it will close the books category of its digital store. While other software and apps will still be available via the virtual shop front, and on purchasers' consoles and devices, the closure of the eBook store takes with it customers' eBook libraries. Any digital books bought through the service – even those bought many years ago – will no longer be readable after July 2019. While the company has promised to provide a full refund for all eBook purchases, this decision raises important questions of ownership.
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We Don't Really Own the Digital Possessions That We Buy Online
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Fascinating is a word I use for the unexpected.
-- Spock, "The Squire of Gothos", stardate 2124.5
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday July 02 2020, @04:48AM (13 children)
Try to get parts for an Apple some time (yes, a computer SHOULD be a durable good). Newer appliances now need a particular board to make them run. Not like the old days when you could swap out a timer or even repair the old one. A digital control board SHOULD last a lot longer than a mechanical sequencer, but they don't.
I am quite familiar with appliance and automotive repair.
Agreed about the cost of having someone else repair and about rent and mortgage. The outrageous cost of just treading water is a gigantic weight dragging our standard of living slowly down.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Thursday July 02 2020, @05:09AM (6 children)
The first time I ran into Expensive-Unrepairable was in fact an Apple desktop computer (Mac System 8 era). Fan died in the power supply and it was overheating. So I arrive, tools and replacement fan in hand, and discover that the whole assembly was RIVETED together such that there was no way to get it apart, short of a chainsaw. Owner settled for leaving the case open and a desk fan aimed at the innards.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by sjames on Thursday July 02 2020, @07:04AM (3 children)
I ran into a not quite so expensive but more egregious example. A VCR with some probably minor mechanical failure so that it didn't correctly load/unload a tape. I took the cover off and tried to put it through it's motions to see what looked wrong, and damned if it didn't have a hidden light sensor to detect the cover off condition and perform a PLANNED malfunction so I couldn't see how it was supposed to work!
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday July 02 2020, @08:08AM (2 children)
Holy crap! the Mac was just poor design -- didn't look so much nyah-nyah-try-and-fix-this as what's the fastest and cheapest way to fasten it? (whole thing was made cheap as could be) but that VCR... yeah, that's just evil!!
Oh, speaking of evil... a tale I was told from back when software ran off floppy disks: if dBase (then thousands of dollars) thought you were making a move to pirate it, it would erase itself. And doing something like accidentally removing the wrong disk or in the wrong order would trigger it (I forget the details but it was way too easy to do by accident). Someone at a friend's former work managed to set it off... ouch.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sjames on Thursday July 02 2020, @09:26PM (1 child)
Yeah, that dBase copy prevention was way over the line. Active and possibly irreversible retribution triggered by a hyper sensitive tilt switch.
DRM and other copy prevention is necessarily against any principle of robust software. Rather than trying to find a way to go on and just dealing with probably harmless quirks, DRM and copy prevention actively look for a reason to hard fail. Imagine if going to a 404 page caused the browser to just exit without saving state.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday July 02 2020, @10:31PM
Good analogy!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Thursday July 02 2020, @07:15PM (1 child)
You couldn't drill the rivets? That's the normal way to remove them.
I bought an expensive aluminum tower chassis many, many years ago, and it got damaged in shipping. I got a refund I think from the shipping company, so I had a free but dented case; it was made of aluminum panels riveted together, so I drilled out the rivets, took it apart, bent/flattened the aluminum back into shape, then riveted it back together, and it was pretty much good as new.
Rivets are certainly not as easy to remove as screws, but it's not impossible.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday July 02 2020, @08:33PM
I thought about it, but there were about a dozen (and the thing was layered together so you couldn't even reach some of 'em) and sadly I lack a drill capable of going around corners into very small cracks. Wasn't worth the pretty good chance of hitting something vital; owner said never mind, I'll just use a desk fan, and so it went until the thing died entirely a couple years later.
If it were mine, yeah, I'd probably have completely dysmangled it and made it so it came apart gracefully whether it liked it or not. Or, why I don't like creatively tight packing when stuff might need to come out. (Of course, Apple and repairs...)
Good story about your case -- well worth the effort!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday July 02 2020, @07:20PM (5 children)
Try to get parts for an Apple some time (yes, a computer SHOULD be a durable good).
Apples aren't durable goods, they're luxury items. Are you going to complain about getting spare parts for a Bugatti car or a Coach handbag? When you buy an Apple, any repairs need to be done by Apple themselves, not by you or third-party companies. Honestly, complaining about this is silly. I've have no trouble getting spare parts for my Dell laptops.
Newer appliances now need a particular board to make them run. Not like the old days when you could swap out a timer or even repair the old one. A digital control board SHOULD last a lot longer than a mechanical sequencer, but they don't.
You can repair circuit boards too. This complaint just comes from people who don't understand electronics and whine that it isn't as easy as something mechanical. Circuit boards rarely fail, and when they do, the problem is usually cheap electrolytic capacitors. The other problem is usually cold solder joints.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday July 02 2020, @08:35PM
"Apples aren't durable goods, they're luxury items."
Exactly!!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday July 02 2020, @08:39PM (3 children)
Apple is not a luxury good. I said computers SHOULD be durable goods. The comparison with Bugatti is a bit extreme. How many Bugattis do you see in the parking lots compared to how many iPhones and MacBooks you see around?
I understand electronics just fine. I have designed circuit boards and I have repaired them. There's no excuse for them not outliving a clockwork sequencer by a factor of 10. I note that the tools needed to repair a board do go a bit outside of the set of basic tools every household should have and be familiar with.
When you can get a replacement board, they charge outrageous prices for them. You could almost get a CM to make you a one-off for that price, but you'd still need to get the firmware from somewhere.
You can see the transition happening in some areas. Some gas water heaters have a safety sensor that detects when the burner fails to shut down and trips to shut it down. Once repaired, you press a reset button. Others have a one time "TRD" that breaks when overheated (or it gets old) and it blocks the air inlets smothering the burner out (leaving unburned gas spewing from the burner).
The most typical approach today is to use "value engineering" to get the marginal cost of production down followed by "value pricing" to make sure the savings stay in the manufacturer's pocket.
Dell has gotten better about repairability lately, but there was that era where if you swapped in a non-Dell power supply, it would blow the mainboard because they swapped 3 or 4 pins in the otherwise standard ATX connector.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday July 02 2020, @10:39PM (2 children)
Yeah, I remember the horror stories about Dell vs normal PSUs. It's a good deal of why my ...uh, computer museum... has but one older Dell, and it was amenable to normal parts. Tho I still recall the argument I had with a fan-of-Dell... someone sent me a top-of-the-line Dell because he was tired of fighting with its constant overheating just from admiring its navel. I took one look inside, dumped the shroud and the teeny tiny fanless heatsink, gave it a normal heatsink with a normal fan, and its operating temperature dropped *40F* degrees. Anyway the fan-of-Dell was horrified because surely they design 'em for best airflow and you'll ruin it! Um, which part of no-longer-overheating did you not understand??
The newer ones, tho... pretty much interchangeable everything, at least for the normal form factors. Which is probably nowadays the cheaper way to build 'em.
Um... how is that behavior by gas water heaters not an explosion hazard??!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by sjames on Friday July 03 2020, @02:14AM (1 child)
That's a damned good question! The theory is that once the flame is out, the thermopile will cool and shut down the gas valve. My preference is the resettable overheat switches that directly disconnect the thermopile from the valve. At least with that, if the valve itself is stuck, the gas will be burned off rather than building up.
The saga of fixing my water heater under warranty is a sad one. It did eventually get fixed, but only because I did the diagnosis myself and did a little social hacking.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday July 03 2020, @02:19AM
Good thinking... why are you not a designer of gas appliances? :)
We just put a new gas water heater in the rental house... I hope it does not have any of these weird newfangled ideas....
And yeah, *resettable* not one time and dead!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.