The Width of Men’s Ties and Waste in IT

"Those with enough patience and a large closet can rest easy knowing that everything they have ever purchased will be in style again, if they wait long enough (well maybe not that particular tie.) Of course, this is style obsolescence, a variant of planned obsolescence, and its a big driver of product sales in our culture."

I am humorously reminded of a passage in "How to Survive Without a Salary" where Charles Long talks about wearing the same wool winter coat for many years. Every few years, he would get complimented on his wonderful coat. On the years in between, he was plied with lots of sympathy and hot coffee. :)

Not exactly IT related. Though I guess I do know some IT types who are generally resistant to the "ooh, shiny" phenomenon and stick with stuff that works reliably, if that makes sense. I suppose both things require the type of personality that cares less about public opinion/trends than functionality.

Only if you buy into it.

We were on Windows 2000 until this year finally moving to XP for multi-media compatibilty (specifically Flash) reasons.

I've been around since dos3.3, looking forward to upgrades went out of the window a long time ago :)

The only interesting hardware innovation in recent times has been an interest in reduced power consumption / back to passive cooling.

Then again, I'm a guy with a 486 upgraded to P54C with 32Mb RAM as my email server.