Avoiding Obsolescence

Enhancement and Obsolescence: Avoiding an "Enhanced Rat Race".

A claim about continuing technological progress plays an essential, if unacknowledged, role in the philosophical literature on "human enhancement." I argue that-should it eventuate-continuous improvement in enhancement technologies may prove more bane than benefit. A rapid increase in the power of available enhancements would mean that each cohort of enhanced individuals will find itself in dan...

Optimal obsolescence

Product Obsolete / Under Obsolescence

This application note describes a high-speed, reconfigurable, full-precision Transposed Form FIR filter design implemented in the VirtexTM and Virtex-II series and SpartanTM-II family of FPGAs. The VHDL reference design provided with this application note is easily modified to change filter parameters including coefficients and the number of taps. By illustrating a design methodology for digita...

Computers, Obsolescence, and Productivity

What effect have computers had on U.S. productivity growth? This paper shows that increased productivity in the computer-producing sector and the effect of investment in computers on the productivity of those who use them together account for the recent acceleration in U.S. labor productivity. In calculating the computer-usage effect, standard NIPA measures of the computer capital stock are ina...

Competitive planned obsolescence

The incentives that durability offers to a monopolist to price discriminate over time and the related difficulties that secondhand markets create in these situations have been well recognized in the economics literature. The conventional problem for the monopolist is that, having sold a durable good, there is an incentive to reduce price later to bring into the market those consumers who would ...