Computers Becoming 'Smart' and 'Modern' (and Car Analogies)
Money down the drain...
THE latest article from Ryan Farmer speaks about cars, General Motors (GM), and various other things. Buying a so-called "modern" or "smart" car is not cheap (we checked prices earlier this week) and they don't last long, never mind high costs associated with maintenance or the price of repair. It's one of those classic examples where it becomes ever so evident newer does not necessarily mean better, it just means increased complexity (at least under the hood) and thus more difficulties in diagnostics, reliance on third parties for "support" (e.g. car mechanics and large new parts, far bigger than the defective component), and higher car insurance fees (more so if you refuse to carry a tracking and listening device inside the car all the time).
The cost of "modern" is also high in computing, both hardware and software. Nowadays chips are manufactured in bulk which later turn out to be fundamentally defective (microcode updates are risky and devastating to performance). The same is true in software. Some days ago Nico Cartron wrote "No, fixing a Debian OS update shouldn't require a reinstall!"
Debian is all systemd and it allegedly wants to impose Wayland on users some time soon. How does that benefit the users?
To quote Mr. Cartron: "I have a draft article named "Fed up with Linux/Debian, moving all the things to FreeBSD!" which will contain a lot more details once published, but I wanted to have this one out as I just "fixed" one of my issues..."
The OpenBSD founder has 'strong' views on what lies beneath the Wayland push. "The writing has been on the wall a very long time," he said this month, "that some people believe their role in the ecosystem is to reduce software choice and push everyone into vertical software monocultures."
Complex cars with like a thousand (or several hundreds) computers in them don't make a better car. They make or add up to a very complicated thing that probably won't last a decade, not without an investment that exceeds in cost the purchasing price.
We're now dealing with software stacks (e.g. in WordPress) that are so bloated that one can guarantee a lot of undetected bugs and many moving parts that can go wrong. Let's move away from that.
Companies that promote this trend are shoving us around; they sell "support" and "managed services" or "hosting". It's in their interest to reduce the customer to a mere "tenant" (like RHEL "licences"), subscribing rather than owning. Even subscribing to use heated seats, which are already integrated into the car anyway. Why tolerate this? Why pay companies that do this to us? █