I was on the Silent PC Review forums about a year ago, and someone was railing a motherboard because no drivers for its advanced features were available for Windows 98. A lot of people were trying to offer solutions (mostly motherboards with older chipsets or possible community generated driver projects), when I came in and addressed the 800 pound gorilla in the room.

Why? Why the fuck are you using Windows 98? It’s 2006 (at the time) and you are using an OS whose time has come and gone.

The response was simple “I have a lot of valuable software that only runs on Windows 98″.

Now, some people might believe this, but I for one call it total crap. If it will only run on an OS that requires coaxing (in truth, brutal hacking) to run on modern hardware, and you are unsatisfied with it’s speed on older hardware, then it’s really not that valuable is it? Matter of fact, one could (and this one does) call it worthless. Which is, last I checked, the opposite of valuable. It is a problem now, and you should searching for a solution to it, instead of bitching that your problem can’t be everyone elses problem too.

I see this a lot, a misconception of value. Like classified ads for items that appeal to an incredibly limited audience. For example, there is a cheap-when-new 70′s japanese bike on Craigslist right now that I have seen advertised daily for the past two months. The asking price is positively sane compared to other ads on there, but there is a fundamental problem with it. You see, it’s built for someone, say, six feet eight inches tall at a minimum. The standover is about eight centimeters higher than I could straddle, which is pretty frickin’ tall. But nobody who is kicking in near seven feet is out there right now dude. You need to adjust your sales pitch (perfect base for a tallbike, $25) or adjust your audience (nation wide. Read “eBay”) if you want to get $100 for that bike dude!

Or the brand new higher end bikes with this ad: “I paid X, selling for just (0.95*X), why buy new?”. I’ll tell you why jackoff jimmy, because if I buy it new, it’ll have a warranty. And at least the passing chance that some retard hasn’t stripped out an adjustment screw or otherwise dicked it up.

Don’t even get me started on classic cars.