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[Alexandre Souza]

> Printers are a case in point too - a parallel port does that job just
fine,
> yet it's hard to find a machine that doesn't have more complicated USB
> interfaces on it, and a printer's now expected to use that.

    The problem is the legacy - in order of building smaller PCs, people
should get rid of the (big and clunky) parallel port. Imagine a pc where
everything - printer, keyboard, mouse, pen-drive - is USB. You'll have to
have a power supply, a video and a USB connector, all peripherals can be
connected thru USB, and many of them (as a keyboard - dunno why it doesn't
happens today) becoming a USB hub.

> e.g. take PCs (please! ;)  - Back in the early 90's you could choose
whether
> to have an accelerated graphics card or not, a caching disk controller or
not,
> a CDROM drive, a large or small hard disk etc. - at least the customer had
the
> choice. These days they don't get given that, and everyone has to have the
> complexity whether they actually want/need it or not...

    You **can** choose, but why? In the early 90's I paid $650 for a CD-ROM
(Nec intersect). Now you pay what? $20? For a CD Recorder? :oþ