In our service desk, where a device is reported as being slow, broken, malfunctioning, or for any other reason the user wishes to have it replaced, we first determine the age of the device. If the device is outside of the standard hardware lifecycle, it will be replaced, because the maintenance and TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of devices older than the standard lifecycle is more costly than the replacement costs. If it’s within the life cycle, it will either be repaired, or we’ll evaluate if the user actually needs a more capable machine to carry out their role.
In very general, cumulative terms, the TCO of a device increases over time. When the annual TCO exceeds the cost of a new device, it is overdue to be replaced.
Loss of productivity of the employee using the device.
Added complexity from maintaining an older (less uniform) fleet.
Security concerns due to older devices.
This is standard across the IT industry, although many science/tech firms may have dramatically shorter lifecycles due to the higher workloads that devices are expected to handle.
The above lifecycle means that we will maintain a life cycle of replacing 33% of our laptops each year, 25% of our desktops, 20% of our monitors, and so on. This is the staggered approach; some firms employ the forklift approach which means replacing (e.g) the entire laptop fleet once every three years. This impacts cash flow harder, and can be more disruptive during the change, but has the advantage of delivering a perfectly uniform fleet of hardware each time. Many contact centre-style businesses employ this approach.
Get rid of tuition fees. All university education should be free.
All university-level education should be free. Those people crying out for the good old days when fewer people went to university have got completely the wrong end of the stick.
100 years ago, the same could be said for high/secondary school – why do we need our working classes to be able to read and write, do reasonably complex maths, understand any scientific principles at all?
We live in an age where (almost) everything we do, everything we work with, play with, consume and produce are linked inextricably to very complex scientific products and concepts. Some of the people arguing here went to school before DNA was discovered, for heaven’s sake.
School children now learn about the structure and principles of DNA, particle physics, climate modelling, computing science, software development, and other stuff that didn’t exist 30 years ago.
It’s simply not the case that there’s an “ideal” percentage of the population that should have a university education. As society and technology progresses, there is simply more to know and more to understand. This has been the case since the dawn of human civilisation and will continue to be the case until civilisation ceases to be.
As a society, we owe it to ourselves to aim to provide a university (and higher, if possible) education to every person that desires it and is able to do so. The progress and survival of the human race to some degree relies upon us getting this right, not penny-pinching and making people pay for the “privilege” of developing their (and as a result, society’s) skillset and knowledge.
Just as we reap the benefits of all children going to school up to the age of sixteen, the benefits of nearly everyone in society having a higher level education wouldn’t take long to be realised, through the development of life-enhancing and preserving technologies, to more rapidly developing alternative energy sources and mitigating climate change.
There is also such a thing as knowledge for knowledge’s sake. A more educated society is a fairer, more equal, and (hopefully) happier society.
Put simply, higher education benefits all of us, not just the person being educated.