[Arm-netbook] "Good enough" computing and the upgrade treadmill

[Matt Campbell]

Hello:

I read the white paper referenced on the Crowd Supply campaign page [1], 
and I was particularly interested in the section on "good enough" 
computing. The following paragraphs describe some problems that, as far 
as I recall, aren't addressed in the rest of the paper:

 > Now, in 2015, "good enough computing" has been cross-examined, and 
found wanting - perhaps not for the right reasons though. The key 
problem of having a three to five year old computer is not so much that 
it can't do the job it was designed to do: if the computer was not 
connected to the Internet it could continue to be used for its 
designated tasks until it suffered major component failure (possibly in 
8 to even 15 years time).

 > The problem is that the kinds of web sites that most people visit and 
want to use are being designed with modern computers in mind. Even some 
recent smartphones are more powerful than high-end desktop computers of 
a decade ago. The latest version of Google Maps, for example, when using 
the "Street View", overwhelms a recent version of Firefox running on a 
computer with 8 Gigabytes of memory and a Dual-Core Dual-Hyper-threaded 
2.4 Ghz processor, causing it to reach 100% CPU and lock up the entire 
machine.

 > But that's not so much the real problem: the real problem is the 
inter-dependent nature of Software Development. Upgrading even just one 
application often brings in a set of dependencies that can result in the 
entire operating system needing an upgrade. And the longer the duration 
since a software upgrade, the less likely it is that one single 
application may be upgraded without huge impact and inconvenience. With 
no knowledge (or convenience) on how to upgrade software or hardware, 
most people pick the simplest solution...

This "upgrade treadmill" has bothered me for a while. Yes, with modular 
hardware like the EOMA68 cards and housings, the environmental impact is 
lessened because we only have to discard computer cards, not whole 
laptops. But unless we can stop the upgrade treadmill, we'll still have 
to discard our old computer cards when they would otherwise still be 
functional.

I remember the laptop I used throughout my university education, from 
1999 to 2003. It had a 366 MHz mobile Pentium processor and 64 MB of RAM 
(later upgraded to 192 MB when I had to work on a fairly memory-hungry 
Java application under Windows). In its original configuration in 1999, 
that laptop was perfectly comfortable for everything I wanted to do, at 
least under Linux: Web browsing, email, word processing (including 
StarOffice), software development, and listening to music. Now I don't 
know if X would run at all in 64 MB of RAM.

As another illustration of how much waste the upgrade treadmill causes, 
here's a paraphrased bit of dialogue from the 2012 novel _Off to Be the 
Wizard_ by Scott Meyer. One character, a time traveler from 1984 whose 
last computer was a Commodore 64, asks, "What on earth can a person do 
with 4 gigabytes of RAM?". The other character, from 2012, replies, 
"Upgrade it immediately." Maybe that was supposed to be funny; the whole 
book is pretty light-hearted. But to me it's just sad.

So what can we do about this? The only idea I've got is that I and other 
software developers should do all of our work on the most underpowered 
computer that will let us get buy, rather than the nicest one we can 
afford. Then maybe, out of necessity, we won't be so wasteful. But then 
maybe we won't be as productive either, particularly if not being 
wasteful means we have to write everything in C or C++. And of course, 
it won't do any good if I'm the only one who chooses to make those 
sacrifices.

At least with free software, there's always the possibility to fork 
projects that succumb to the upgrade treadmill. For example, the MATE 
desktop environment is a fork of GNOME 2, and one of its explicit goals 
is to run well on non-compositing graphics hardware. I imagine MATE will 
run quite well on something like the A20 card. But still, we can't live 
in a forked, time-warped world. We have to interact with mainstream 
websites, which means using a mainstream browser or at least one of the 
major rendering engines. In this regard in particular, I wonder if the 
upgrade treadmill has already left the A20 behind, particularly since we 
can't use full GPU acceleration. I can certainly understand why the 
JZ4775 wasn't chosen, though it checks all the other boxes for ethical 
computing.

Anyone else have any thoughts on this? Sorry if this is too much of a 
rant or off-topic here. FWIW, I just backed the campaign by ordering an 
A20 card.

Matt

[1]: http://rhombus-tech.net/whitepapers/ecocomputing_07sep2015/