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It doesn't come as a surprise to anyone that it's hard to get parts for your Model T Ford these days, the thing came out in 1908 and nobody would really expect a car to last for over a century. Nobody is really blaming Ford for no longer producing replacement parts.
The Model T was produced for the best part of 20 years and presumably parts were freely available for a good while after the last one rolled off the production line in 1927, so it isn't hard to imagine early adopters running their cars from 1908 through to the 1930's and beyond.
A few decades on, cars just don't last that long. Not necessarily because they're less well made but because new features (whether they be for safety, comfort, performance, emissions or whatever else) come along with increasing rapidity and often become expected and/or legally required. Yesterday's bonus features become today's "must-haves".
Now if someone tried to fit 40 years worth of motoring innovations into an old Ford Cortina, they'd pretty soon realise that it would be a bit of a struggle to integrate anything more advanced than a seat-belt because the framework simply wasn't built to anticipate the "mod cons" of the future.
Is that Ford's fault? No. You can't really blame people for a lack of precognition.
So what have Ford done about it? Well, they'll take your old car and recycle it in exchange for a discount on a contemporary model. They've been doing it for years. Does anyone complain about this? Does anybody say "You should be giving me a 100% discount as I bought this thing in perfectly good faith in 1972?" It seems a pretty reasonable thing to do and no-one has been making a fuss about it.
Then someone in the electronics business does something similar - "keep using the old one of you like or chop it in for a discount on the new state-of-the-art model if you'd prefer that" - and they're public enemy number 1. Go figure ...
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. - Mark Twain
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Exactly the sort of thing I was thinking. Same goes for cassette tapes, 8-track tapes, VCRs and DVDs.
Plus the title is absolutely false and the author must have known it.
#SupportHeForShe
Government can give you nothing but what it takes from somebody else. A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you've got, including your freedom.-Ezra Taft Benson
You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
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Not to speak of video from the moon landing...
Brief summary for those who don't know the story: When the last-of-a-kind video tape player capable of playing the video tapes from the Apollo 11 moon landing was to be ditched, someone in NASA came to think of those original tapes: We never digitized them properly. Maybe we should do that. But where did we put them? ... As far as I know, the tapes were never found. And the last tape player for that format was ditched.
When you today see the "high quality" Apollo 11 videos on YouTube, they are much better quality than what we could see in 1969, but that's because we today have quite fancy restoration techniques for sharpening up the blur that was received over the radio link. Everyone knows that the video tapes recorded onboard the space ship, and physically brought down to earth, would have been razor sharp, compared to the restored images.
I am afraid that lots of users of the first and second (and maybe third) generation of digital cameras will discover that they have lost piles of images, the day they bring down that box from the attic to show their grandchildren. I, too, have got a handful of 2" Sony floppy disks, but without the camera (which I borrowed for a single weekend) I have no way to view or print the images. I have transferred all the photos I once stored on 5.25" floppies to my harddisk - but kept that Win98 machine, in case others need help. Same with photo archives on 3.5" floppies. Some people were going "professional", using tape for archival storage: You may have to search far and wide to find someone who can read those tapes. Some units used the LPT interface, but you shouldn't be too certain that the drivers will work in a Win10 DOS window! Others had dedicated interface cards - but when did you last see a PC with an ISA bus? Lots of my friends can't even read their CD-ROM photo archives any more.
The only "comforting" side of it is that noone cares anyway... Once you have shown the photos from the past weekend to your friends, once you have posted your vacation photos on Facebook and received a dozen likes, noone cares about those pictures anymore. Maybe they still exist, but who cares to look at pictures from yesteryear? Or even from last month? It really doesn't matter to us that our personal history is lost.
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Good points...
However...Member 7989122 wrote: It really doesn't matter to us that our personal history is lost.
There's a lot of people that care about that. It's up to them to take the steps to preserve and make accessible those images.
#SupportHeForShe
Government can give you nothing but what it takes from somebody else. A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you've got, including your freedom.-Ezra Taft Benson
You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
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Well the title is completely incorrect. What Sonos did is to make obsolete the things you buy from them if you turn it in for recycling. For that effort you get a 30% discount on new stuff. OOOH big evil here. 
But nothing is stopping you from selling your old Sonos stuff *as-is* to someone else for a 50% discount from the original price and then using that to get new Sonos stuff. Sheesh. This article is so much false alarm signaling.
Also, it's an unfortunate side-effect of technology. Just like VCRs and even DVDs are "obsolete" because we've moved on to other things. This is no different.
#SupportHeForShe
Government can give you nothing but what it takes from somebody else. A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you've got, including your freedom.-Ezra Taft Benson
You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
modified 23-Jan-20 15:02pm.
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When the general public are screaming, they often are the culprit themselves...
Norway went from analog to digital radio broadcasting 2-3 years ago. The change was finally decided in 2011, and completed, region by region, from January to December 2017. Everbody knew that it would be coming, everybody complained about the mountain of FM radios that were rendered useless when the FM transmitters were turned off.
But between the 2011 decision to close down FM and the actual turnoff, five million pure FM radios were bought by the public (counting about 5 mill people). The question of switching to DAB had been hot in media since at least 2005; noone could claim that "I didn't know!" Everone knew very well. I was into discussions with people insisting that they couldn't get a DAB radio for their new car - but when I dug up the brochures from the importer, showing them that DAB-radio had been standard-equipment for two years, an FM-only radio had to be explicitly selected, they admitted that they were so much against the switching to DAB that they had deliberately made that selection... (Believe it or not: I met several people doing that!) Note that till this day, I have not yet seen a single DAB radio that does not handle FM as well; you wouldn't loose anything by buying a DAB radio. (There are DAB adapters intended for plugging into an FM radio Line In; they do not need an FM tuner, but they are adapters, not complete radio receivers.)
And by the way: The mountain of discarded FM radios failed to materialize. Maybe it made a bare noticable hump on top of the mountain of mobile phones that people throw away after two years of use. (Actually, it is close to three years nowadays, but that is because people are holding their breath waiting for 5G.)
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#SupportHeForShe
Government can give you nothing but what it takes from somebody else. A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you've got, including your freedom.-Ezra Taft Benson
You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
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We are happy to announce the availability of the preview SDK for Microsoft Surface Duo, and availability in the coming weeks for the preview SDK for Windows 10. Try it before they give up on it
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Kent Sharkey wrote: Try it before they give up on it
I thought that sentece was only reserved for google 
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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True - Google would have given up on it already.
TTFN - Kent
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I have a feeling that folding phones won't be as popular as tech companies have decided that they will be.
They're assuming that being able to put stuff in your pocket is a big thing, but one of the main allures of mobile phones is that they're small enough to hold comfortably in the hand.
Having a phone that's more difficult to hold kinda breaks that, and why would someone want an unwieldy double tablet, when it would be a relatively trivial matter to network two tablets together to extend their screens? (if you then wanted to keep the unwieldy option of sticking them together, you could always use duct tape.)
As for tablet-sized devices that fold down, who would want to carry something that bulky (and heavy) in their pocket? If you carry it in a bag, the folding thing isn't such a great advantage, and could even be more of a disadvantage. Flatter and thinner trumps smaller but fatter, in many cases.
So the only working use case is for devices that fold out to somewhere between phone and tablet size, but which are still awkward to hold.
They won't sell none, but I hardly think it's going to take the market by storm.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Yeah - I kind of like the smaller one. Almost like a day-timer, but you're right - hardly a one-handed tool. The big one just reminds of kids books for some reason.
It's niche, but I guess a differentiator?
TTFN - Kent
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You underestimate the strength of "I have the newest gadget" of many morons that will buy it just for the sick of showing it when going out.
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Nelek wrote: You underestimate the strength of "I have the newest gadget" of many morons
I'm more the "I've got a new gadget that's been out for three years -- they've got it working properly, now" type.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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I was using my iPhone 4S (my own work phone that I bought really cheap when I left previous company) until mid 2019.
I still have it, but not as main device because I can't trust the battery anymore and I want to be reachable for the family / kindergarden.
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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With 2/3g networks being shut down even with a new battery it'd be on borrowed time.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Yeah... that's one of the reasons why I didn't try to repair it.
That and that the cost proposal from Apple was more expensive than my current new device. 
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Nelek wrote: I can't trust the battery anymore
That really sucks, and is as much of a scam as printer ink.
apple phones cost more than a mid-range laptop; if people had to throw laptops away, rather than just get new batteries, there'd be riots in the streets.
And that's not to mention that it's an incredible waste of incredibly high tech. A smartphone ain't potato peelings, that should just be discarded as garbage.
I'll be very happy when the European court rules that non-replaceable phone batteries are not acceptable.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Mark_Wallace wrote: And that's not to mention that it's an incredible waste of incredibly high tech. A smartphone ain't potato peelings, that should just be discarded as garbage.
That's why I still use it as alarm clock, surfing and so on, but I leave it at home.
I am starting to think on to prepare it a bit for kids multimedia content, with the hope if they have something "own", they will try less to play with ours.
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Old? Windows-only? Community struggles with '40-year-old male' problem Stodgy.NET? Boomer#?
Only partly a duplicate. While it discusses the ".NET on DOS/Windows 3.11" example, it veers off into discussions of "them what uses .NET". And I thought more discussion here might be...interesting.
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The closing comment: The issue is real, though, and the company has a challenge in marketing C# .NET to a younger and more diverse range of developers.
Just fork it and call the fork Latte Macchiato Pokemon Go, and they won't be able to get enough of it.
... Or do anything useful with it, probably, but one step at a time...
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Quote: In its current form .NET is for 40-year-old white men.
Exactly. Because it's a mature professional programming language, like a 40 year old (ok, we could drop the "men" part) that should be a mature professional programmer at that point.
The issue is not men/women, it's the cultural-craze that starts probably pre-teen now where all your male friends geek out on some goofy programming language. We have a graveyard of them. Ada, Perl, and Ruby come to mind.
And why "male friends"? Quite simply because geeking out pretty much doesn't attract women the way it does men. Of course there are exceptions, but the exception is not the point, reality is.
Given that *almost* everyone under 30 is not a mature professional programmer (man or woman), of course C# / .NET has an image problem. Frankly though, I strongly believe that if we had more women as developers, we would also have saner decision making on all these newfangled here today, gone tomorrow languages and frameworks.
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Marc Clifton wrote: The issue is not men/women, it's the cultural-craze that starts probably pre-teen now where all your male friends geek out on some goofy programming language. We have a graveyard of them. Ada, Perl, and Ruby come to mind.
I agree - this is not a men/women thing, but a long-standing impression of Microsoft and Microsoft tools as being locked-in and "enterprise-only". Not for Kool Kids(tm). Yet somehow a 30 year-old language (Python) suddenly is. And as you mention, Ruby before then. .NET Core could easily play in those spaces, it just needs some interest (and likely a framework like Rails. I almost said, "good framework" but my fingers wouldn't accept those two terms in one sentence)
It would be good (IMO) to get the 20-somethings using .NET though, and I think moving it to Linux/Mac will help this happen. They might see that the days of Windo$e are over, and that it is a company that you can actually somewhat trust (at least some parts of the company - Windows and Office marketeers continue to amaze me).
TTFN - Kent
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Kent Sharkey wrote: Boomer#
I exemplify that remark. Get out of my yard, you puling brat!
Software Zen: delete this;
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Scientists at Google and the Janelia Research Campus in Virginia just published an incredibly-detailed 3D connectome — a map of neural connections — for a fruit fly, including a mind-boggling 20 million synapses connecting 25,000 neurons. "Take a ride to the land inside of your mind"
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