It never ceases to amaze me how poor quality has gotten in the past few years. It's the Walmart mentality I call it. We want cheaper, faster and more…but at what cost. Everything has become disposable.
Quality is lacking in just about everything now it seems. Home phone system, power supply failure. It's 9 months old. Easy fix for me but for some, it would be intimidating. Business wise, I have a disk failure on inhouse systems once a month. It's become normal now to expect it and dealing with it…part of the reason a lot of what I used to run inhouse, I've outsourced. Like this web hosting for instance. It's just too time consuming to keep fixing it myself.
There's the point…when I first started on the web in the early 90's..yes, it was via companies like Compuserve..find them today…and AOL…yep…still around…it was 9600 baud rate…yes for those who remember baud rates…aka modem speeds on high speeds systems today in equivilent numbers are 3145728 bits per second…aka baud rate or roughly 300 times faster …can't even remember what baud stood for…that's another sign of getting older…and it was measured in dollars per minute…with bulk rates about $10 an hour…a good incentive for offline processing if ever there was…
Disk sizes in that era were measured in megabytes (MB), forget hundreds of gigabytes. We have more RAM on most systems today than we had disk space in that era. .On the upside, system failures were virtually non-existant. The system weighted 50 lbs (or should I say 22kg since we've been metric here for 30 years now)…Monitors were another 50 lbs for a 14" monochromatic..
So why the rant down memory lane today…simply it's Thanksgiving and in light of this consumer society we've become, we need to remember what's important. Sheryl Crow summed it up well in her song "Soak Up the Sun" with the line "It's not having what you want It's wanting what you've got".
The world only has so many resources, and it's time we focus on restoring that rather than exploiting it more to use up even more. On that sombre note, have a Happy Thanksgiving.
Dave
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