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Replying To:
So what is the standard? (none / 0) (#8)
by Anonymous User on Fri Mar 04, 2005 at 04:20:39 PM PDT

Surely the whole point of a standard as that there is some kind of future-proofing in it? When IBM came out with the concept of an open-architecture "Personal Computer", their prime objective, of course, was to make money - but the thinking behind it was to put a PC on everyone's desk, and to encourage OTHER companies to develop hardware that fitted the architecture. Let's be honest, where would Microsoft be if they hadn't made it "open architecture"? So why am I sitting here with a Bluetooth Belkin F8T003 V1 adaptor which simply won't work with my "standard" bluetooth barcode scanner? Well, so far as I understand it (and it cost me money to even find this knowledge, because it sure doesn't mention it on the box!) it turns out that it's because someone wanted to get rich quick, that's why. My little adaptor simply isn't hard-coded with the right hardware key to accept this week's flavour of Widcomm Bluetooth, so that means that I've simply got to toss it into the ever increasing landfill and buy a new one, simply because Widcomm (or perhaps now their new owners?) thinks that's how it should be. As I understand it, there is absolutely no reason why my little F8T003_V1 can't utilise the latest Widcomm stack, other than the fact that someone deliberately made sure that it wasn't ever going to be allowed. That, to me, seems like worldwide fraud - market something under the banner of being "new standard", only to keep changing it the following week/month/year. I wonder, in the long term, who is going to pay for this greed? Maybe we should count ourselves lucky that the guys at IBM who first dreamed of a "world standard PC" weren't quite so greedy, or else we should need to dig one hell of a bigger hole for the landfill. Come on, guys, where the hell are we going with this? It won't work if it's just about lining your own pockets with the here-and-now. Ever heard of evolution? I've heard it used to work really well, until just recently.



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