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The problem is that this can be arbitrary if the market doesn't supply enough competitors. I don't think Intel is in a position to enforce this, but the competi

The problem is that this can be arbitrary if the market doesn't supply enough competitors. I don't think Intel is in a position to enforce this, but the competitors that would prohibit them from implementing such restrictions are fairly weak in numbers. AMD alone isn't enough regardless of whether they ship superior products or not. It also tells me about the focus of Intel and who is in charge of the company. They have many flawed products lately and they seem to not want to compete on a technological level anymore. That said, proprietary DSP aren't unusual. It would still a shame if they find their way into general computing too a larger degree. Can make sense for the line of XEON CPU perhaps. I just wouldn't buy them really.

qeternity 5y ago
> The problem is that this can be arbitrary if the market doesn't supply enough competitors. What is this referring to? What is the problem? And why is this problem arbitrary? > It also tells me about the focus of Intel and who is in charge of the company. They have many flawed products lately and they seem to not want to compete on a technological level anymore. Ok, that's one take and you're certainly entitled to it. As someone who personally had to replace some hardware so I could use ecc ram in a zfs nas for my media server, I would have loved to just pay a few bucks to get a microcode update instead of a full hardware upgrade. Now, you can complain that ecc should be standard, etc but that's a different discussion. But it's classic economic theory: if Intel can charge some people more for ecc, and charge other people less who don't want it, that is an optimal pricing strategy.
- b112 5y ago
  It is where it will end up, and that's phoning home, online verification, and more. And intel already has parallel software running on intel systems, including access to the nic, which is impossible to shut off at the OS layer, so yeah.. they can do that. (but outrageous, you say! and people will complain. naw. IME has been around forever, no one cares, it has had zero days, you cannot deactivate it, so a little phoning home and license authorization won't matter. This also means your cpu can expire because intel says so.... )
  - qeternity 5y ago
    Fine, I would agree with you on much of this. But those are different issues. And I don’t think a slippery slope argument applies as you note Intel has been pushing this stuff for a while. So from a purely price discrimination perspective, I think this is a good thing, even if Intel are doing a lot of other shady things in parallel.
    - southerntofu 5y ago
      > So from a purely price discrimination perspective, I think this is a good thing This kind of setup never benefits users. It only allows corporations producing a product for <100$ to sell variations of it up to thousands of dollars. See also Canon cameras or nvidia graphics cards doing precisely that: locking/reducing features via software cuffs (and of course you can find cracked firmware to go around those, just makes it harder). Greed is a bad way to organize society: it has failed us as a species and threatens to destroy millions of other species along with it. We need to build a needs-based economy that is not dictated by private corporations.
      - qeternity 5y ago
        > This kind of setup never benefits users. You’ll be hard pressed to find an economist that agrees with you. If Canon sold one camera, they would have to find the profit maximizing price and quantity. By definition this means that single product will have too many features and too expensive for some people, and have too few features for other people who would be willing to pay more. So instead they make multiple products with different functionality so that people can decide. I’m surprised to have to be defending greater consumer choice in HN?!?
        throwaway2048 5y ago
        this sort of "choice" is essentially entirely meaningless, if camera features were software unlock based they could sell all cameras with all features for the lowest price and still make money, the only one benefiting here is canon extracting maximum value.
- microtonal 5y ago
  Now, you can complain that ecc should be standard, etc but that's a different discussion. But it's classic economic theory: if Intel can charge some people more for ecc, and charge other people less who don't want it, that is an optimal pricing strategy. I think people object to this because it's a step towards moving hardware to a licensing/subscription model. Because, why let someone pay for ECC once and not monthly? Unfortunately, once that is normalized, everyone will want to have a piece of the pie. Talking about ECC specifically: ZFS does not need ECC more than any other filesystem [1]. Secondly, many Ryzen CPUs do have ECC support. [1] From the horse's mouth (one of the founders of ZFS at Sun): https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1235679&p=26303271#p26303271 https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1235679&p=...
  - qeternity 5y ago
    > Talking about ECC specifically: ZFS does not need ECC more than any other filesystem [1]. Secondly, many Ryzen CPUs do have ECC support. Thanks for this. Yeah I know ecc is not required any more or less and ultimately I switched to AMD for this very reason (despite my comments in this thread, I am not a fan of Intel and own no Intel hardware - only Apple silicon and AMD).
- simion314 5y ago
  >But it's classic economic theory: if Intel can charge some people more for ecc, and charge other people less who don't want it, that is an optimal pricing strategy. I did not learn enough economy in school, so is there no limit for this? Example, I invent a medicine for a rare illness that kills 1000 people/year. It costs me 1$ for treatment but when I want to sell this the money dudes make this calculations: 1 if we sell it with 1$ we earn 1000$/year and we have 0 deaths because all 1000 people afford it 2 if we sell it with 10$ , only 900 people aford it and we earn 9000$ and we kill 100 people with our greed 3 if we sell it with 100$ then only 100 people afford it but we earn 10000$ then the guys make a plot and find that we make more profit when we let most of our possible customer to die , but since we have shareholders and everyone wants money we doom 900 people to death so we can earn 10x more money. There should be some limits/incentives where such immoral shit won't happen, but so far the only thing I noticed was when asshole was shamed on Twitter for some medicine price increases (I forgot the name). This idea of a price to be the maximum number that maximizes our profit and not consider any morality is IMO evil. It also has the side effect where you get giants like Google,Facebook,MS, Apple that have too much profit that they use to do evil things, things that free market people consider wrong.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    > This idea of a price to be the maximum number that maximizes our profit and not consider any morality is IMO evil. Yes, it's called capitalism and private property, the two most insane human inventions across history.
    - adwn 5y ago
      > Yes, it's called capitalism and private property, the two most insane human inventions across history. That's also the system that has produced more wealth and prosperity than any other system in human history. Yes, unchecked capitalism leads to great problems, but there's no such thing as unchecked capitalism anywhere in the Western world today, not even in the US.
  - wongarsu 5y ago
    The medical company would say they aren't killing people, they just choose not to save them. Whether that's a difference depends on your ethical framework. But of course most Western countries resolve this kind of conundrum in healthcare with collective bargaining, whether that's at the government level or at the insurance level (which only really works if you ensure absolutely everyone has insurance). If the offer is "we will buy 1000 doses/year for no more than $15 each" the dynamic changes a lot.

qeternity 5y ago

> The problem is that this can be arbitrary if the market doesn't supply enough competitors. What is this referring to? What is the problem? And why is this problem arbitrary? > It also tells me about the focus of Intel and who is in charge of the company. They have many flawed products lately and they seem to not want to compete on a technological level anymore. Ok, that's one take and you're certainly entitled to it. As someone who personally had to replace some hardware so I could use ecc ram in a zfs nas for my media server, I would have loved to just pay a few bucks to get a microcode update instead of a full hardware upgrade. Now, you can complain that ecc should be standard, etc but that's a different discussion. But it's classic economic theory: if Intel can charge some people more for ecc, and charge other people less who don't want it, that is an optimal pricing strategy.

b112 5y ago
It is where it will end up, and that's phoning home, online verification, and more. And intel already has parallel software running on intel systems, including access to the nic, which is impossible to shut off at the OS layer, so yeah.. they can do that. (but outrageous, you say! and people will complain. naw. IME has been around forever, no one cares, it has had zero days, you cannot deactivate it, so a little phoning home and license authorization won't matter. This also means your cpu can expire because intel says so.... )
- qeternity 5y ago
  Fine, I would agree with you on much of this. But those are different issues. And I don’t think a slippery slope argument applies as you note Intel has been pushing this stuff for a while. So from a purely price discrimination perspective, I think this is a good thing, even if Intel are doing a lot of other shady things in parallel.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    > So from a purely price discrimination perspective, I think this is a good thing This kind of setup never benefits users. It only allows corporations producing a product for <100$ to sell variations of it up to thousands of dollars. See also Canon cameras or nvidia graphics cards doing precisely that: locking/reducing features via software cuffs (and of course you can find cracked firmware to go around those, just makes it harder). Greed is a bad way to organize society: it has failed us as a species and threatens to destroy millions of other species along with it. We need to build a needs-based economy that is not dictated by private corporations.
    - qeternity 5y ago
      > This kind of setup never benefits users. You’ll be hard pressed to find an economist that agrees with you. If Canon sold one camera, they would have to find the profit maximizing price and quantity. By definition this means that single product will have too many features and too expensive for some people, and have too few features for other people who would be willing to pay more. So instead they make multiple products with different functionality so that people can decide. I’m surprised to have to be defending greater consumer choice in HN?!?
      - throwaway2048 5y ago
        this sort of "choice" is essentially entirely meaningless, if camera features were software unlock based they could sell all cameras with all features for the lowest price and still make money, the only one benefiting here is canon extracting maximum value.
microtonal 5y ago
Now, you can complain that ecc should be standard, etc but that's a different discussion. But it's classic economic theory: if Intel can charge some people more for ecc, and charge other people less who don't want it, that is an optimal pricing strategy. I think people object to this because it's a step towards moving hardware to a licensing/subscription model. Because, why let someone pay for ECC once and not monthly? Unfortunately, once that is normalized, everyone will want to have a piece of the pie. Talking about ECC specifically: ZFS does not need ECC more than any other filesystem [1]. Secondly, many Ryzen CPUs do have ECC support. [1] From the horse's mouth (one of the founders of ZFS at Sun): https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1235679&p=26303271#p26303271 https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1235679&p=...
- qeternity 5y ago
  > Talking about ECC specifically: ZFS does not need ECC more than any other filesystem [1]. Secondly, many Ryzen CPUs do have ECC support. Thanks for this. Yeah I know ecc is not required any more or less and ultimately I switched to AMD for this very reason (despite my comments in this thread, I am not a fan of Intel and own no Intel hardware - only Apple silicon and AMD).
simion314 5y ago
>But it's classic economic theory: if Intel can charge some people more for ecc, and charge other people less who don't want it, that is an optimal pricing strategy. I did not learn enough economy in school, so is there no limit for this? Example, I invent a medicine for a rare illness that kills 1000 people/year. It costs me 1$ for treatment but when I want to sell this the money dudes make this calculations: 1 if we sell it with 1$ we earn 1000$/year and we have 0 deaths because all 1000 people afford it 2 if we sell it with 10$ , only 900 people aford it and we earn 9000$ and we kill 100 people with our greed 3 if we sell it with 100$ then only 100 people afford it but we earn 10000$ then the guys make a plot and find that we make more profit when we let most of our possible customer to die , but since we have shareholders and everyone wants money we doom 900 people to death so we can earn 10x more money. There should be some limits/incentives where such immoral shit won't happen, but so far the only thing I noticed was when asshole was shamed on Twitter for some medicine price increases (I forgot the name). This idea of a price to be the maximum number that maximizes our profit and not consider any morality is IMO evil. It also has the side effect where you get giants like Google,Facebook,MS, Apple that have too much profit that they use to do evil things, things that free market people consider wrong.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  > This idea of a price to be the maximum number that maximizes our profit and not consider any morality is IMO evil. Yes, it's called capitalism and private property, the two most insane human inventions across history.
  - adwn 5y ago
    > Yes, it's called capitalism and private property, the two most insane human inventions across history. That's also the system that has produced more wealth and prosperity than any other system in human history. Yes, unchecked capitalism leads to great problems, but there's no such thing as unchecked capitalism anywhere in the Western world today, not even in the US.
- wongarsu 5y ago
  The medical company would say they aren't killing people, they just choose not to save them. Whether that's a difference depends on your ethical framework. But of course most Western countries resolve this kind of conundrum in healthcare with collective bargaining, whether that's at the government level or at the insurance level (which only really works if you ensure absolutely everyone has insurance). If the offer is "we will buy 1000 doses/year for no more than $15 each" the dynamic changes a lot.