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Comment by johnklos | Hacker News Reader

I think the Voyager probes teach us lots about what's wrong with corporate America. Imagine devices that don't have built-in obsolescence, or licensing that expires, or that isn't built by committee where they just keep shipping requirements around from one department to another. Imagine if it weren't all proprietary and if it didn't have no public or even complete documentation.

Think of all the problems we have instead: Boeing airplanes that need to be rebooted if their computers are up for too long, an Ariane 5 blowing up because using the old thing should be "good enough", Microsoft Windows on ATMs and vending devices that literally can't not have pop-ups. It's like we've ceded control of our ability to do things to "methods" that corporations insist upon, even though they've been proven worse.

Heck - if businesses had their way, would the Internet be run on Novell, with millions of Novell admins all around the world constantly needing to fuss with things just to keep it running?

It's nice to see when science takes priority to everything else, and the hardware reflects that.

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> Imagine devices that don't have built-in obsolescence, or licensing that expires, [...]

You can buy long lasting stuff just fine, if you are willing to pay. You can get eternal licenses (or an outright sale of rights), if you are willing to pay.

It's all about trade-offs, and many people have priorities that are different from 'last as long as possible'. Eg many computers from the 1980s are still perfectly usable today, but who would want to use them? I'm sure you can probably also still use your old rugged Nokia phone today, especially since they had easily replaceable batteries. But who would want to use a 25 year old dumb phone?

There are some enthusiasts which do use these old devices. And it's great that they can do so! Never say corporations don't deliver!

But by and large people have different priorities than wanting their obsolete tech to live forever.

You can't use your 25 year old phone for more than a snake game. most 2g towers have been turned off to make room for 4g and 5g.

In the US, North America, you mean. 2G is still alive and kicking, especially in Africa and South Asia:

https://streetwave.co/mobile-networks/2g-switch-off-by-count...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2G#Phase-out

And Europe. Finalizing the shutdowns of 2G and 3G networks in Sweden during 2025.

Finland will still keep 2G for a long time.

Is there a particular reason? And how do you know so much about 2G in Finland, specifically!?

Portugal will keep it too.

Dumb phones are still being sold that are 2G only.

Not just that, but “landlines” are still being offered that are really a 2G phone restricted to work only in the vicinity of a home that's not (yet?) covered by actual landlines.

It's also used by emergency services.

It's considered a technology of last resort, and the service provider that wins the concession to provide it, with 100% coverage of a given area, probably finds it useful that it can meet the conditions with such tech.

3G has already shut down.

Denmark does the same. 3G has been shutdown, or mostly at least. 2G is kept running, with no plans to shut it down in the future.

Things that uses 2G:

  - Electricity meters
  - Alarm systems
  - Cooling and heating systems
  - Rat traps (?)
  - And an absolute crap-ton of early "IoT" devices.

And it's considered a backup network, with better coverage and range than 4G/5G. It also makes sense as the country is actively starting to remove the old landlines. The first cables are actively been removed from the ground.

Yeah, there was a lot of debates when they started relying on cell networks for alarms systems (mostly for the elderly) as a way to not have to maintain the copper.

A guess...

1G (NMT) and 2G networks have been used in forestry. Very often the machines are far from a mast and need the extra range to communicate.

And in general Finland is a sparsely populated country.

Yup and in the UK a lot of our card payment boxes for car parks will stop working when 3G is shut down, and will be replaced with an app. People without phones need not apply!

One can see how quickly people could drop through the bottom of society once you can't afford to pay your phone or car bills. None of that technology comes cheap, not at least if you hit hard times for a while, and you will become a second class citizen.

Luckily, technology has become cheaper and cheaper over time, and continues to do so.

Don't worry, software developers will keep upping the minimum requirements to compensate.

Really? Oh man ... I was in the UK this summer and had to install a different app to pay for parking (or car charging) in every city I went to, and some of them wouldn't accept a non-UK licence plate :( High demand for developers keeps my salary high, but it's all such a waste.

It is nice with the app though. Topping up, alerts, GPS for where your car is. It's annoying it's multiple apps, but the apps do add value.

Australia is shutting down 3G this year.

Didn't it shut down at the start of the month?

Yes, I agree, but I assume is not One Big Switch to disable all of 3G at once. Google tells me that is (at least) started on 28 Oct 2024.

Ref: https://www.infrastructure.gov.au/media-communications-arts/...

> what's wrong with corporate America

I don't know that it's necessarily that, simply that SMS became very heavily used _and still is_ for basic functionality, essential services, billing, notifications etc. in Europe, Africa, Asia - unlike the US. Compare to e.g. the US requirement for universal lifeline (landline) phone service.

That's not a good example of 'planned obsolescence'. 2G wasn't 'planned' to be obsolete, it was superseded by better technologies. Also because 2G is a *service* and not a product, it was a business decision to sunset the *service* since there is a maintenance cost to 2G *service*, as well as an opportunity cost in not being able to reserve 2G radio frequencies for 4G and 5G networks.

Yes, and this perfectly illustrates my point that putting in the extra effort to make your product ultra study is not a good engineering nor business decision, if that means the product outlasts the surrounding eco-system it needs to function.

2G is not just a service or a business but it is infrastructure.

You're being overly pedantic. But OK, 2G is a bunch of infrastructure that is then rented out creating a cell service. Everything else holds true in that there is a maintenance cost and an opportunity cost.

The point is that it has been around so long that so many things depend on it. That makes sunsetting it a public policy decision and not just a business decision.

You can get eternal licenses (or an outright sale of rights), if you are willing to pay

Not for everything. When I can do that I do, but it’s getting harder and harder to avoid subscription fees for everything these days.

Yeah. I mean, technically if you walk into Adobe’s office with $1M in cash, they might make an exception, but that isn’t exactly practical.

I mean effectively you could. Do something like the following:

Take a subscription product that costs $10/mo right now as an example.

Let's say you want a license that lasts your whole life.

Estimate the time you have remaining in your life. Let's call it 50 years.

Now you can use an interest calculator to see how much it would cost to effectively buy a license until the end of your life.

Plug in $10/mo contribution, plus 4% annual interest to cover inflation and price increases, for an investment length of 50 years.

So you can effectively buy an "eternal" license for $18,714.61

You are right about the financial calculations, but the terms of the license might change, or it might no longer be available at all.

But that's stuff from 25 years ago. Try it, get a windows phone with version 8.1 from ebay now and see how far you get.

I still have one, as a backup. It works.

What about the browser? Still loading modern websites? That was an issue the last time I tried to reuse some of my ancient tech stuff.

I guess technology lasting a long time for specific non-commercial purposes is one thing, keeping up with modern society in general another.

Yes, that's stuff from 25 years ago. It still works in the sense that the hardware was built to last.

It's not the fault of the phone's hardware that the world has moved on. But this underscores my point: if the hardware lasts longer than the eco-system around it, that's useless, and the company should have probably saved customers a few pennies by going with something less sturdy.

> You can get eternal licenses (or an outright sale of rights), if you are willing to pay.

Adobe Creative Cloud (among many others) doesn't have that option.

I have worked with some people in the defence industry who got just that from Adobe and a few similar vendors. They had to negotiate with adobe and sign NDAs both ways, and they payed through the nose for it. But you can do it.

Interesting. Can you point at something online with details of how that happens?

Many companies have separate license sales if you call them on behalf of a large company.

I worked at a large project management app where we charged per-seat.

We only offered per seat pricing, yet we had at least 3 companies that had flat pricing because they wanted >100k seats.

Deals outside of standard pricing gets cut all the time.

Thanks, that's informative. :)

"Be defence forces of (checks profile) one-of-the-five nation states" is not a standard of negotiation requirement I deem attainable for just about anyone that isn't one of the five or EU the union.

Fair enough, but how life-crucial can an old copy of Adobe be?... I'm assuming a project like the Voyager mission relies on something a bit more bespoke than a copy of Adobe Creative Whatever. I really hope the defence forces core mission doesn't depend on Adobe Creative Cloud.

I guess the main reason here isn't "keeping an old version", but having a version that doesn't require an internet connection to be activated and doesn't send any data to Adobe.

But having an older version can be useful too because some features from previous releases may be missing in current ones, so that's a way to ensure access to the old files. A couple of years ago all the Pantone colours used in Photoshop just became black after an update because Adobe stopped licensing Pantone stuff.

If it had, I would not trust that at all, because they can switch off some cloud thingy tomorrow, if they please, and I would not trust them not to.

Do they though, or are they just powerless consumers with no real choice, besides the colour of the wrapping?

Why would consumers be powerless?

There data is held hostage, they lack the knowledge and the skill to migrate services, the several companies they could buy from are owned by often one huge owner which prevents any meaningful competition. Consumers have a choice only in the placebo sense of which colour to choose in the company store with the company scrip.

> You can buy long lasting stuff just fine, if you are willing to pay. You can get eternal licenses (or an outright sale of rights), if you are willing to pay.

Where do you buy long lasting stuff? This is a serious question, I'm looking for new appliances and I am willing to pay more, within reason.

Let's say I'd pay double of what an appliance with similar technical characteristics would normally cost, which I want to go towards higher quality materials, craftsmanship, and quality assurance. I expect such an appliance to work and and be economically repairable for at least 20 years.

As far as I can tell, this is nearly impossible. Many brands that used to produce higher quality products have downgraded the quality of their materials and craftsmanship in order to juice quarterly profits for investors. Their reputation seems to lag the quality of their products by about 10 years.

> Where do you buy long lasting stuff? This is a serious question, I'm looking for new appliances and I am willing to pay more, within reason.

Miele is good for household appliances like washing machines and dishwashers. Kärcher is good for vacuum cleaners. There's lots of other German (and Swiss and Japanese etc) brands like that.

But in any case, I didn't (and can't) promise that you can get that kind of quality by merely paying double.

Btw, almost all cars these days last a lot longer than they used to, and with fewer repairs. Quality has gone up across the board. Planes also fall out of the sky less often. (And that includes Boeing, despite their recent troubles, their track record would be seen as unachievable good about 20 years ago.)

Miele was my first thought as well because they were historically regarded as an expensive, but high quality brand. Now they have a Trustpilot rating of 1.6.

https://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.miele.de

Our Miele appliances work just fine after using them for 7 years and after several house moves. I have never heard of this trustpilot before, interesting. Seems to be an American website?

> You can buy long lasting stuff just fine, if you are willing to pay. You can get eternal licenses (or an outright sale of rights), if you are willing to pay.

Would that 'twere so simple. Most previously reliable premium manufacturers have jumped on the enshittification bandwagon. You can get better design and a more exclusive branding if you are willing to pay more, but where exactly would you turn if you are looking, for example, for a dish washer that will just work for the next ten years? Preferably one that doesn't come with cloud integration. There are still a very small number of ultra-premium brands that really care about their customers, but apart from being way too expensive for most people, they are increasingly hard to find. One of the side-effects of so many companies trading their reputations for "shareholder value" is that trust is eroded for everyone, including those that still deserve it.

> [...] but where exactly would you turn if you are looking, for example, for a dish washer that will just work for the next ten years?

Miele works well for us.

I understand your complaint. I'm also sure it's really hard to get high quality buggy whips these days without paying through the nose, now that everyone has switched to these newfangled horseless carriages.

> Miele works well for us.

That's what I would have said as well, until recently. Last year we had to replace ours, and its been an absolute nightmare. Cost us endless hours of wrangling with technicians and customer service to have it installed and configured properly (and already repaired once). ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Interesting. Which country was that in?

We never had any issue with Miele in Singapore.

(The Australian customer service of Bosch was a joke, though. The one in Singapore seems competent, though.)

> You can buy long lasting stuff just fine, if you are willing to pay.

Where do you recommend I buy long-lasting refrigerators, washers, and dryers?

Right, "willing to pay" is not enough. You also need to know which products will actually last a long time and which products are just the regular crap sold at a high markup. Often this is impossible to tell if you are not an expert in the field.

That’s what stymies me

While I agree that "corporate America" is problematic, the lessons from Voyager are not really applicable. For starters, it was designed to take advantage of something that predictably happens every couple of hundred years. Very few corporations last that long. Then there is the element of predictability. The solar system pretty much works like clockwork. You can predict simple things, like the orbits of major bodies, centuries in advance with a great degree of accuracy.

Compare that to the tech industry. IBM itself can trace it's origins back to a data processing company about 140 years ago. They probably had the most natural evolution into a modern tech company because of those origins. Yet noone at the original mechanical tabulator company could have predicted what IBM would be producing 70 years later, nevermind a century later. Nintendo is roughly the same ago and is more-or-less doing the same sort of thing (gaming) but has gone from low-tech to high-tech so their path was not predictable. Yet those are abnormalities. Almost anything that old is an institution of some form (e.g. government or education). Perhaps the closest thing we had to predictable was Moore's Law, but that wasn't a pure law in the physics sense. It was reliable enough to build an industry upon for many decades, but it could have failed much earlier than it did due to hurdles in technological developments.

The other thing about Voyager is that its intrinsic value grew with time. While we could develop a mission that could go as far as it did faster, and have better instruments to conduct research, it would take decades to build the probe and get there. It also makes sense to support it to get what little data it can return to us because it would help us develop better missions when we do decide to go that route.

There are plenty of 100 year old companies doing basically what they did 100 years ago (Exxon, Coke, Hershey, Wells Fargo, etc.). They’re just not tech companies.

I was thinking about companies approaching 200 years old since I knew my point would be more difficult to make if I said 100 years (and because they had a launch window that comes up roughly once every 200 years, though I checked that out and it is 175 years). That said, you're right about my basically overlooking companies that weren't based in technology.

Exxon is a cute example though. At one point, they owned Zilog.

Fair enough. 100yr old companies are pretty easy to come up with, 200yr old companies are much harder.

You would pretty much have to turn to Japan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies

The other day, I saw a sign on a building for a painting supply manufacturer "since 1748": https://www.tollens.com/la-marque/histoire. I found that quite amazing.

I would say that IBM's business has changed less than Wells Fargo's. IBM still supplies number-crunching devices and services to large corporations and government agencies. The technicalities have changed, but the core business is the same. But running a bank under a gold standard is very different from running a bank under a fiat money and fractional reserve regime.

Wells Fargo is still doing financial services but banking has very different meaning today. Computer is no longer a job title after all.

So sure those brands are 100 years old, but the underlying companies have been restructured several times with major mergers and spin-offs etc. ExxonMobil even did the baby bell thing of splitting off from a single entity only to merge again and again in the coming decades.

Wow, your choices are interesting.

  * Exxon: Massive amounts of technology have been ingested by the oil majors in the last 50 years.  It is basically a high tech business at this point.  Also, if we only focus on the physical work, fracking didn't exist 50 years ago, and now it is a major part of the industry.  Again: Huge changes.

  * Coke/Hershey: Think about how much automation exists in their manuf.  Do any humans touch a "bottle" of Coca Cola before it is packaged?  I doubt it in highly developed countries.

  * Wells Fargo: the same as Exxon.  Commercial banking has a fraction the number of employees _in proportion to their assets under management (AUM)_ compared to 50 years ago.  How/Why?  Automation / computers!

Their point wasn’t that innovation doesn’t exist. Obviously things change. Still, both Exonn, Coke and Wells Fargo are still fundamentally in the same business as they were before. That’s not the case of other companies. IBM became big selling punch-card tabulating system. Have you seen a punch card recently?

Ibm was not in the punch card machine making business. It was in the data processing business, and still is.

> Ibm was not in the punch card machine making business. It was in the data processing business, and still is.

IBM absolutely was in the punch card machine making business in that they were absolutely selling punch card machines and not data processing consulting. And no, they are not in the data processing business today. They are clearly a consulting company first with some software development bolted.

They actually pivoted twice from a mostly hardware company to a mostly software one and once again to a mostly service based one.

    > it was designed to take advantage of something that predictably happens every couple of hundred years.

Can you explain this more? Does it mean something like a gravity assist based upon the location of planets when the launches were done?

Yes, but the program was cut down some from the original design:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program

I was thinking about how we can predict the location of planets with a high degree of accuracy. They are pretty close to an ideal physical system and is governed by a single physical law. The dynamics are so well understood that we have been able to predict the existence of, and find, other planets based on small deviations. We have even been able to refine our understanding of the structure of planets, even of gravity itself, based upon small deviations.

That said, it certainly includes our ability to use gravity assists when planning a mission.

Also numerous space probes did fail very early despite having design philosophy not very different from Voyagers.

It also helps to have $4.5B (in 2024 dollars) to spend on a project.

https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/voyager-spacec...

Not to mention that it has a chunk of highly radioactive plutonium that acts as a battery / power source. That whole thing is nuts that it got built, "shipped", and still works ~50 years later, approximately 1.21 jiga-kilometers away from Earth.

It's not apples to apples of course but that's well within the ballpark of what spacex spends mostly just shooting stuff into orbit in a year: https://spacenews.com/spacex-and-the-categorical-imperative-...

Especially for a first time in all of humanity type of mission, half a century ago, which yielded brand new data on faraway objects we'd never had, and considering it's still going and reporting data, it's arguably a bargain basement price for such a thing.

I 100% agree on the value of it.

My point was the comparisons that are often made, to things like consumer electronics, really aren't apt.

Everything is designed to last between a few years and a decade, with the expectation that there's no point engineering for longer than that because something better will replace it by then. This feels bad but it's generally correct. Practically every aspect of technology is improving so fast there's little point trying to engineer things that last, because a stronger, cheaper, lighter, thinner thing will be available long before the thing has expired.

Agile is a response to this, not the cause.

Planned obsolescence isn't only a thing with fast moving technology either. Engineers design bridges with a finite lifespan in mind as well, and it's not because they think there'll be a much better bridge in X years. It's just that the relationship between the expected lifespan of a thing and its cost to develop is exponential.

What's wrong with the Boeing case on needing to be rebooted.

It doesn't seem much worse then memory leaks in missle guidance tracking systems that exceed flight time. We have finite resources, if the effort to correct is minimal what's the harm?

>We have finite resources

So design systems that does not exceed those resources.

Why? You increase cost for what? The Boeing example I believe related to this defect which occurs after 51 days of operation: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theregister.com/AMP/2020/04...

This seems sane given that the planes don't operate for 51 days constantly (I'm not in aerospace so please correct me, it seems a reboot could occur with refueling without issue)

Usually planes are turned around too fast to be waiting for them to fully reboot every time they fuel. Typically they would prefer to keep them running for weeks at a time to minimize any issues or delays with extra steps when the clock is ticking and customers are waiting to board and fly

TIL. I had thought a computer reboot was snappy compared to filling those fuel tanks, that's so counterintuitive to me. That does make it more of an issue then.

But they don't reboot them every time they fuel.

Commercial aircraft need continual software updates to operate. They are, in a sense, living, breathing machines. Things like navigation and terrain databases are updated inside of 30 days.

Adding a scheduled reboot is one more item on a checklist that was already being run through.

It's counterintuitive, but performing a reboot as a scheduled maintenance item is far more risk averse than going in and touching code that has been otherwise thoroughly tested and signed off by regulatory authorities.

The chances of introducing a new bug when attempting to repair the former presents additional risk to what amounts to a convenience issue.

Yes.

Also in case of emergency, eg after a power loss or whatever, you might have to do a reboot anyway. So you might as well make sure that this code path is well exercised.

I'd rather deal with a ground hog day of the system being for the millionth time in its first day of operation, than dealing for the first time with the system being in its millionth day of operation.

Mainframes in the late 80s got so good nobody was rebooting them. Then in the 90s someone's mainframe had the powerbackup generators fail in a power outage and the system went down (a once in 500 year event, but with more than 500 mainframes around the world it was statistacally bound to happen). the system didn't boot correctly and it took months to figure out all how to start all the services it was running that the person who started them left without add them to the startup configs. Now everyone reboots a couple times a year so that when things don't restart correctly the person who knows about them still remembers something about it.

> it took months to figure out all how to start all the services it was running

Having had to migrate a 12 year old dying server this weekend, yeah, I was 24/7 strongly cursing the idiot who didn't document anything[0]. On the plus side I did get to update a bunch of stuff to more modern practices.

[0] You will not be surprised to learn that idiot was me.[1]

[1] My other servers are much better - anything that hasn't yet been properly service'd has its own `RUNME.sh` which runs whatever it is in the correct way.

Planes are certainly turned around quickly, so a reboot every time they refuel isn't desirable.

But equally, they dont do this 24x7 - if only because airport curfews and maintainence schedules won't let them.

Rebooting the computer when doing regular maintenance is no big deal.

    > Usually planes are turned around too fast to be waiting for them to fully reboot every time they fuel.

To be clear, this affected the Boeing 787, a plane usually focused on long-haul between medium sized cities. It is incredibly rare to see a long-haul flight turned-around immediately. Normally, they have max two flights per days, and for longer routes, just one route per day. There was plenty of time to reboot. I don't think anyone was ever in danger.

Also, I am starting to grow tired of "anything Boeing does is bad" on HN in the last 6-12 months. The Boeing 787 was a huge hit, both technically and commercially. (I would say the same for the Airbus A350.) I certainly never worked anything as important or cool in my career. The endless booing from the HN peanut gallery adds little new and/or useful information to the discussion. Yes, I expect to be downvoted for this last paragraph.

Why? Because it's indicative of shit engineering.

"Let's build something that we KNOW will catastrophically fail, because we deliberately ignore to take account limited resource availability of that system."

For a critical systems, that's just lazy and unacceptable.

Nothing, but I do find it amusing that we're comparing Boeing aircraft with guided missiles. How the mighty have fallen :)

> We have finite resources, if the effort to correct is minimal what's the harm?

That mentality at Boeing as, literally, costed many lives.

The harm is that nobody knows why there's a memory leak requiring a reboot (or if it's even a memory leak). What happens when that very same issue is combined with a rare case and causes the death of hundreds of people?

"Have you tried to turn it off and on again" may be fine for a $20 Internet-of-insecure-and-shitty-Thing bought on alibaba. Not so much when lives are at play.

The Boeing reboot is necessary because of an integer overflow that occurs once the aircraft is on for 248 days: https://www.i-programmer.info/news/149-security/8548-reboot-...

> This condition is caused by a software counter internal to the GCUs that will overflow after 248 days of continuous power. We are issuing this AD to prevent loss of all AC electrical power, which could result in loss of control of the airplane.

> A simple guess suggests the the problem is a signed 32-bit overflow as 231 is the number of seconds in 248 days multiplied by 100, i.e. a counter in hundredths of of a second.

> Microsoft Windows on ATMs and vending devices that literally can't not have pop-ups.

I know of several ATMs that still run OS/2 2.1 or OS/2 Warp. They're a slow dying breed that is being replaced by Unix (Linux or similar), but they still exist. Chances are, if you're in Europe, and the ATM you're using is one of the "slow screen refresh rate" ones, it's still running OS/2.

I have a hard time feeling complainy about stuff like this because if engineers are doing their jobs properly, they’re implementing the defined requirements. Requirements are guided by business decisions on what matters and what doesn’t matter for a project.

So ultimately this means that if the argument is that the business is making the wrong decisions, then that means there’s an opportunity for someone to profit by proving them wrong.

I love Voyager but it also cost something like a billion dollars. So it’s a bit unsurprising that it is such a resilient system.

The profit argument is not great for everything humans need, not everything can be driven by profit motives, look where that’s gotten us in medical care in America, social insurance, etc. Profit driven enterprise is efficient, but needs balance that doesn’t seem to be there today in order to limit the extremes.

I agree. Voyager happened because of what you say. But then we cannot compare apples to orangutans by pointing out how Voyager rocked but all these for-profit endeavours sucked.

> I have a hard time feeling complainy about stuff like this because if engineers are doing their jobs properly, they’re implementing the defined requirements. Requirements are guided by business decisions on what matters and what doesn’t matter for a project.

Well, it's a bit of back and forth between business and engineering.

> So ultimately this means that if the argument is that the business is making the wrong decisions, then that means there’s an opportunity for someone to profit by proving them wrong.

Generally yes, but sometimes it's hard because of double-sided network effects. The classic example being expensive but prestigious scientific journals:

All the scientists and funding agencies would benefit from moving to cheaper journals, but an individual scientist will try to publish their best work in the most prestigious journal they can get.

(And often the complainers mix in some good old paternalism, too: 'oh, those customers are ill-informed and the companies are exploiting them by tricking them into buying inferior products and getting trapped.' or some story like that.)

> I love Voyager but it also cost something like a billion dollars. So it’s a bit unsurprising that it is such a resilient system.

The money was necessary, but not sufficient. Compare the great performance of the Voyagers with the disaster that was the Space Shuttle program or the ongoing farce that is the International Space Station.

I'm 55 and still using my Onkyo receiver and Polk speakers from college.

> Imagine devices that don't have built-in obsolescence, or licensing that expires, [...]

We have that sort of- in open source by now. Basically the base implementation is free. But for more advanced extras you pay extra. Then the company providing the extras collapses and the extra becomes open source in one way or another.

I mean, the Voyager probes are completely proprietary. They’re completely custom, built for a unary purpose.

Building long lasting hardware makes a lot of sense when you expect to use that technology for a long time. I’m sure there was a time when people thought we’d be using steam power forever.

It makes less sense if the rate of technological innovations makes hardware or software obsolete every 5-10 years.

Principal agent problem. Look at the final outcomes. Business exists to make money even if it means the most malicious ways (ex planned obsolescence), science project are not there to make money.

> if businesses had their way, would the Internet be run on Novell, with millions of Novell admins all around the world constantly needing to fuss with things just to keep it running?

No, I doubt it. The businesses that make all the hardware and software that powers the internet are perfectly fine with it being an open protocol.

Expanding a tiny bit on your point, from where I am sitting, it all be summed up with greedy, plain and simple...and extends further to Capitalism as a whole, not just corporate America. I work for a US-based manufacturing company that has customers around the world as the guy who fixes the things the engineers build when they inevitably break. I have encountered so many design flaws that could have been done far, far better but we're not, largely due to cost, that I have come to just expect it. This is admittedly sad.

Some other commenter mentioned we can have all these great long-lasting things if we "are willing to pay." We, the consumer my might be, but the manufacturer and distributer who makes the the product not only want to sell you something once, but want to sell it to you repeatedly while maximizing their profit margins. This would not be so bad if a good chunk of those yearly record profits reached the folks who were on the work floor actually making the product (thus allowing them to buy more expensive things) but instead, the money gets sucked up and stays up, while costs get passed on to the consumer who likely is not making enough to afford the longer-lasting version. Which, I guess is the point of Capitalism, in a nutshell.

I'm not saying your wrong but it's also possible that technology whether created by public agencies or private companies is simply more complicated now and because of that .. more likely to fail over time.

I really think competition is good in one sense.

But of you think logically from first principles, it makes no sense to have both an a320 and 737.

All this competition and “corporate greed” where we literally have two airplanes that are functionally identical rebuilt from the ground up is an huge, massive waste of human capital and enabled by the government through monopoly of copyright and patents.

While I think creators should get paid, I wonder if there is a better way to manage copyright that what we do.

I think the government granting this extreme of a monopoly on copyright is one of the weirdest things we tolerate.

There has to be a way where we can statutorily authorize copying at x% fee or something.

That way we don’t build two copies of the same thing!

A320 and 737 are functionally similiar only in terms of "a flying machine moving you in the air at 900 kilometers per hour". Both Airbus and Boeing are exploring in a space of different design and engineering concepts, where there is no clear winner.

> Imagine devices that don't have built-in obsolescence

There is no such thing as "planned obsolescence". The trade-off is price vs quality. You can buy or source a hammer that will last you a lifetime, but will cost 10x the standard rate of hammer ... most people opt for the $20 option vs the $200 option, knowing full well, the $20 option may not last as long.

>Boeing airplanes that need to be rebooted if their computers are up for too long, an Ariane 5 blowing up because using the old thing should be "good enough", Microsoft Windows on ATMs and vending devices that literally can't not have pop-ups.

Couple things here:

1) None of those are examples of 'planned obsolescence'.

2) You really do not want to have every software application built the same way you build software for NASA. It would make software development incredibly expensive and slow.

3) I think everyone agrees that Boeing has major quality problems when compared with Airbus. But again, not an example of 'planned obsolescence', and it is not necessary for Boeing to build software like NASA builds software for the space shuttle, in order to produce quality airplanes (with quality software).

>if businesses had their way, would the Internet be run on Novell,

Huh? The software business is fully private. Most companies are not running on Novell because other businesses 'had their way' and competed.

Yes. As a left-libertarian, I criticize corporations and their profit motive all the time. I see the concentration of power being married to the inherent incentives of increasing share value for the shareholder class. The only way I see we can reform the system — and fix many of the problems — is to gradually replace shares with utility tokens, ie the accounting system inside an ecosystem that producers and consumers of a marketplace use, and gradully buy out the parasitic class of “investors” who just want to extract rents and enshittify everything. It is a bit like the efforts Europe undertook at peacefully buying out slaves from masters or serfs from feudal lords. Just get out gradually from an economic system that encouraged exploitation.

We have just been inculcated with this exploitation as a “natural” part of our capitalist system for so long, since childhood for most of us, that many have a knee-jerk reaction to shut down this line of criticism and not hear the simple solution. Many on HN have built a startup when they’re young, been part of the VC industry, akin to a music prodigy or young actor or model being “discovered” by “talent scout”, and sold a dream which only a few achieve. For every 1 person who makes it big, 1000 who do the same thing fail. But they keep licking the boots of the system hoping they’ll be among the lucky ones, so they better say nice things. If they see words like “utility tokens” they immediately think “grift”, when in fact the system they’re supporting has grift and exploitation built in. Having utility token holders buy out shareholders also may be an element in furthering SDG goals and “stakeholder capitalism”, and saving the planet. But hey, as soon as the words are uttered which may trigger pushback, the system starts to protect itself, in the form of downvotes or strawman attacks etc.

Yeah, planned obsolescence is one feature of corporate control and profit system. As is surveillance capitalism, or pollution, or pushing people to work long hours, or have a gig economy, neglect their kids, or having people in echo chambers be angry at each other online because anger and misunderstanding leads to more “engagement” etc. All the ways that represent gradual “enshittification” that Cory Doctorow coined, is not an accident. These are all negative externalities, which are all traced back to one main factor: the profit motive of shareholders as a core feature in the system, forever. The rents aren’t going to extract themselves.

I haven’t yet had a chance to work on aerospace (or beyond) equipment though I do work on medical grade things and some of the parts are aerospace certified, though they haven’t been put through the ringer. In particular, I work with high voltage/amperage, high liquid pressure and high temperature systems. Some of it has been running for close to 25-30 years with very few issues. Only recently have I had to open a power supply that degraded since it was first put into service (over 20 years ago). I’ve gotten into a habit of identifying parts that, through experience, I know will fail or can fail and replaced them with ones that are all but guaranteed to outlive me. I want the person, if anyone, who comes after to see the work that’s of higher standard than what came out of the factory. No machine can continue working forever, but one can get much closer to having fewer failure points. As an aside, to get to here however was a struggle of obtaining all sorts of things I shouldn’t have access to because the manufacturer started locking access down heavily. Story for another time.

This is a great post. This part stands out to me:

    > I’ve gotten into a habit of identifying parts that, through experience, I know will fail or can fail and replaced them with ones that are all but guaranteed to outlive me.

Depending upon your NDA/security level, can you share a specific example? Maybe you see a steel/aluminum chain between gears that you know will wear out in X years, but could be replaced with something that is tungsten/titanium that will last for 5X years.

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