Planned obsolescence
I was at the local Staples picking up some paper for the kids’ school. When I got there I always like to snoop around because sometimes they have the great priced technology related computer equipment.
At one of the end caps in the back of the store they had a 160 GB hard drive from Maxtor for $96 (USD) call the BlackArmor. Not that great of a price but it has onboard 128-bit AES hardware encryption. Wow, now this is something I could really like. No need to have my computer worry about the overhead of encrypting before reading and writing to the disk and if I lose the disk no one can read my data. Then I read the description and it had the dreaded ** next to the operating system requirements. Under the ** it said “Drive will not work with any other operating systems”. For the operating systems there were various XP and Vista system listed. While this usually isn’t a bad thing, what is does mean, is any Windows operating system going forward may (or may not) support this particular drive.
So when Windows 7 comes out I may be out of luck. I can’t believe some drive manufacturers can be so short sighted and just plain incompetent. You are building in obsolescence into your business plan. Pure madness.
Now you know why the drives are on closeout.
sigh
Some links that will probably only interest me.
Life photographs now archived on Google.
PC Magazine after 26 years goes digital only.
If you have a bunch of Social site stuff and Outlook, this plug-in is not bad.
Hosting your own stuff for a small business is coming to an end.
If we had been allowed to continue building our own, this would never happen.
