From owner-freebsd-hackers  Tue Jul 16 15:02:19 1996
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To: Jason Thorpe <thorpej@nas.nasa.gov>
cc: dennis@etinc.com (Dennis), hackers@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: mitsumi CD-ROM 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Tue, 16 Jul 1996 12:17:20 PDT."
             <199607161917.MAA03813@lestat.nas.nasa.gov> 
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 15:01:47 -0700
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From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
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> I fail to see value in "disposable" hardware.  That's just wasteful.  In 
> the long-run, you end up spending _more_ than you did on just one piece 
> of good hardware.

While I agree with your comments about spending an extra buck or two
on things like SCSI, generally recouping the cost in reduced hair loss
and psychiatric sessions, I can't say agree that there's no point at
all in deliberately producing disposable solutions.

Considering that 99.9% of all computer hardware is disposable *whether
you like it or not*, be it PC or Sparc (I wouldn't, for example,
accept a SPARCstation I as a gift) and won't be useful for much more
than 3-5 years, I can see some definite situations in which it would
make sense to throw a disposable 486 at some problem with full
knowledge that you'll be throwing the damn thing away (or giving it to
a local high school) in a short period of time.  Such is simply
realism in this industry.

						Jordan