5 ms·

It’s probably just cheaper to include the 8051 in every part and disable it for people who have bought the cheaper part. The way that some Teslas are range hand

by paggle 7y ago

It’s probably just cheaper to include the 8051 in every part and disable it for people who have bought the cheaper part. The way that some Teslas are range handicapped and can be upgraded over the air and given out for free during emergencies.

zxcvbn4038 7y ago
Back in the day my father was a service tech for NCR retail systems. For one of the lines they shipped out every system fully loaded with ram and disk - however how much their customers got to use depended on jumper configurations which the service techs would set and verify. I think IBM does the same thing with their mainframes - they ship out fully loaded but you can only use what you pay for, the rest is used as hot stand-by for hardware failures.
- mehhh 7y ago
  Was this during NCR's bad years where AT&T ran the business into the ground? I don't think NCR really recovered till the NCR 7878 came out, setting the bar for a robust scale/scanner
  - hobojones 7y ago
    Former NCR tech here. I can confirm the parent’s comment - we’d routinely have to validate/ensure jumpers based on entitlement. As for recovery, I worked for NCR once they regained their independence from ATT and they were still running themselves into the ground. By the time I left (around the era of the 7878) things improved slightly.
    - mehhh 7y ago
      NCR seems to be able to survive, but I wonder if the non-Windows point of sale systems will finish eating the low & midrange business. My old employer is prepping for the shift with their software vendor currently, should allow for a much longer period of support & remote debugging...
- hobojones 7y ago
  The company I now work for does something similar. We sell our product at what is essentially max capacity, capping memory/disk space/CPU per the contract. When the customer needs the extra capacity or wishes to upgrade, all that’s required is some settings changes and a restart.
- alfiedotwtf 7y ago
  I remember someone telling me that the printer in my primary school was only a black printer. When they wanted to upgrade to colour, a technician came down and flipped a dip switch
asveikau 7y ago
I may get flack for this, but that sounds ethically questionable. The sale has been made, why not just give the customer a better car for free?
- CaliforniaKarl 7y ago
  For chips, it’s possible for a chip to go through the production process, but have a defect in part of it. When that happens, the manufacturer disabled access to that part, and sells it as a lower-capability product. On the other hand, if everything came out good, then the manufacturer sells the part as the high-end product.
  - asveikau 7y ago
    Yeah, I thought of when I first followed overclocking in the late 90s, and Intel had a reputation for selling artificially slow chips in those circles. But in that case rating the appropriate clock is a subjective exercise, and they don't want the part to start failing if pushed to its limits. GP here made it sound like it was rather more harmless in this case, not sure if that is a mistaken impression of mine or what.
  - Osiris 7y ago
    Unless demand for the less expensive part exceeds the defect rate. AMD CPUs, especially the 3-core parts, were often unlockable by re-enabling the disabled cores in BIOS. Lucky buyers could get 4 cores for the price of 3.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- icegreentea2 7y ago
  It certainly feels ethically questionable from a certain perspective. But we can look at it in a specific way. We want pricing to be fair. A typical customer's perspective of a fair price is that is should approximate the unit cost of production plus the up front development cost of a product amortized over units. In this view fairness, if a family of widgets all have the same hardware, and use the same based software to enable or disable different features, they should all have the same price. However, there's another view of fairness (or maybe just a desirable feature of the markey). It should be possible for a customer to purchase only the features required to meet their requirements, and that they should be able to spend less money on less features. Those two views of fairness can be in contradiction with each other. The ability of a company to be able to provide a family of products at a variety of feature and price points cheaply is aided by their ability to do software based control of features. Use of a single physical platform reduces cost (which aids the final customer). If a company had to price everything at a single feature/price point, the average customer will see an increase in price to pay for features they do not want. Anyhow, that's the argument. Still feels icky though.

by paggle 7y ago

zxcvbn4038 7y ago

Back in the day my father was a service tech for NCR retail systems. For one of the lines they shipped out every system fully loaded with ram and disk - however how much their customers got to use depended on jumper configurations which the service techs would set and verify. I think IBM does the same thing with their mainframes - they ship out fully loaded but you can only use what you pay for, the rest is used as hot stand-by for hardware failures.

mehhh 7y ago
Was this during NCR's bad years where AT&T ran the business into the ground? I don't think NCR really recovered till the NCR 7878 came out, setting the bar for a robust scale/scanner
- hobojones 7y ago
  Former NCR tech here. I can confirm the parent’s comment - we’d routinely have to validate/ensure jumpers based on entitlement. As for recovery, I worked for NCR once they regained their independence from ATT and they were still running themselves into the ground. By the time I left (around the era of the 7878) things improved slightly.
  - mehhh 7y ago
    NCR seems to be able to survive, but I wonder if the non-Windows point of sale systems will finish eating the low & midrange business. My old employer is prepping for the shift with their software vendor currently, should allow for a much longer period of support & remote debugging...
hobojones 7y ago
The company I now work for does something similar. We sell our product at what is essentially max capacity, capping memory/disk space/CPU per the contract. When the customer needs the extra capacity or wishes to upgrade, all that’s required is some settings changes and a restart.
alfiedotwtf 7y ago
I remember someone telling me that the printer in my primary school was only a black printer. When they wanted to upgrade to colour, a technician came down and flipped a dip switch

asveikau 7y ago

I may get flack for this, but that sounds ethically questionable. The sale has been made, why not just give the customer a better car for free?

CaliforniaKarl 7y ago
For chips, it’s possible for a chip to go through the production process, but have a defect in part of it. When that happens, the manufacturer disabled access to that part, and sells it as a lower-capability product. On the other hand, if everything came out good, then the manufacturer sells the part as the high-end product.
- asveikau 7y ago
  Yeah, I thought of when I first followed overclocking in the late 90s, and Intel had a reputation for selling artificially slow chips in those circles. But in that case rating the appropriate clock is a subjective exercise, and they don't want the part to start failing if pushed to its limits. GP here made it sound like it was rather more harmless in this case, not sure if that is a mistaken impression of mine or what.
- Osiris 7y ago
  Unless demand for the less expensive part exceeds the defect rate. AMD CPUs, especially the 3-core parts, were often unlockable by re-enabling the disabled cores in BIOS. Lucky buyers could get 4 cores for the price of 3.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
icegreentea2 7y ago
It certainly feels ethically questionable from a certain perspective. But we can look at it in a specific way. We want pricing to be fair. A typical customer's perspective of a fair price is that is should approximate the unit cost of production plus the up front development cost of a product amortized over units. In this view fairness, if a family of widgets all have the same hardware, and use the same based software to enable or disable different features, they should all have the same price. However, there's another view of fairness (or maybe just a desirable feature of the markey). It should be possible for a customer to purchase only the features required to meet their requirements, and that they should be able to spend less money on less features. Those two views of fairness can be in contradiction with each other. The ability of a company to be able to provide a family of products at a variety of feature and price points cheaply is aided by their ability to do software based control of features. Use of a single physical platform reduces cost (which aids the final customer). If a company had to price everything at a single feature/price point, the average customer will see an increase in price to pay for features they do not want. Anyhow, that's the argument. Still feels icky though.