[TUHS] Re: The death of general purpose computers, was - AIX moved into maintainance mode

[segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org>]

Planned obsolescence is, in my opinion, one of the most disgusting concepts in the whole of engineering.  The idea that anyone would, in good faith (HAH!), purposefully subvert reliability and dependability engineering solely to ensure frequent turnover of their product is mindboggling.  At the very least it's my opinion that all these cell manufacturers (and lets face it, IoT manufacturers) designing their devices to be thrown away and replaced every couple of years should be 100% responsible for the environmental implications of shipping nominally temporary/destined for the scrap heap piles of heavy metals, plastics, etc, all over the globe.

Instead these companies are shoveling tons and tons of resources into the market knowing they're going to be landfill material only a few years after release.  Yeah there are recycling programs, but even then, it just feels like the general public being made to run on a treadmill of buy this, now donate it back for recycling, now buy the same resources again repackaged in a shiny new box.  I'm willing to wager, security and protocol issues aside, most consumers would do just fine with computing technology circa the late 90's/early 00's still, but dangit that new iPhone has a couple more megapixels.

- Matt G.

------- Original Message -------
On Thursday, January 19th, 2023 at 12:59 PM, Rich Morin <rdm@cfcl.com> wrote:


> Several projects are attempting to target cell phones with (mostly) Linux variants (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_for_mobile_devices). Most of these are focused on particular (or even custom) hardware, but at least one has the explicit goal of supporting "old" hardware:
> 
> > We are sick of not receiving updates shortly after buying new phones. Sick of the walled gardens deeply integrated into Android and iOS. That's why we are developing a sustainable, privacy and security focused free software mobile OS that is modeled after traditional Linux distributions. With privilege separation in mind. Let's keep our devices useful and safe until they physically break!
> 
> 
> https://postmarketos.org
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostmarketOS
> 
> I'm particularly interested in this project, because it might let a few billion (!) retired cell phones be used as portable computing and communication devices. Here is a current snapshot of their porting progress:
> 
> https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices
> 
> -r
> 
> > On Jan 19, 2023, at 12:09, segaloco via TUHS tuhs@tuhs.org wrote:
> > ... I want to be excited about the idea of potentially having a powerful computer with me just about anywhere, but at the same time, if that power is significantly throttled (see Game "Optimizing" Service...), and full root access to the device is not granted easily, then it's not any more useful to me than a kiosk at Walmart. ...