6 ms·

This reminds me of a story told to me by a work colleague who began his career on Mainframes in the late 70s. One work place he was at paid several million for

This reminds me of a story told to me by a work colleague who began his career on Mainframes in the late 70s. One work place he was at paid several million for a major upgrade to their IBM mainframe. A guy in a white lab coat showed up, took the side panel off the mainframe, removed a circuit board and gave them a piece of paper to sign saying the job was complete.

ethbr0 5y ago
Isn't this the same as SaaS thinking, albeit in the hardware era? For the more common story of IBM enabling present but disabled memory, they couldn't magically teleport a new memory board into your mainframe. But they could ship your mainframe with extra, verified but disabled memory. Customer UX for memory upgrades then changes from "Wait for it to ship, etc" to "We'll have it done tonight."
- seanhunter 5y ago
  Yes indeed. These kind of things afflict enterprise IT all the time. I used to run b2c teams which dealt with big banks. One bank's IT department used to bill internally for data center costs using RAM as a proxy for energy usage. A big spark cluster was purchased for the project I worked on and the minimum RAM for the spec of machine that was "standard" was 128MB, so to "save costs" they had the data center guy take out half the memory in every machine before racking it up. :-(
PeterisP 5y ago
It's not an ancient practice, I recall a case in the early 2000s where we got an expensive CPU upgrade to a mainframe which was not implemented by "a guy in a white lab coat" but as a one-line script (with a cryptographic key) to unlock more CPUs which were already installed on the system when it was first shipped.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  There are Cisco Nexus switches today that require licensing to enable all the ports.
acchow 5y ago
What did that circuit board do?
- outworlder 5y ago
  Hardware-based sleep()? :)
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  Might have added some capacitance or something to the system clock, so that it didn't cycle as quickly.
ts4z 5y ago
Tesla sold 75kWh cars to people who bought 60kWh cars. Then, during the wildfires here in California, they remotely unlocked the extra 15 for people trying to get out of town. If you wanted to get access to what you had legal title to, well, that's an upcharge.
- amelius 5y ago
  Business practices should have their own book of law, which says what is and what isn't acceptable.
  - OldManAndTheCpp 5y ago
    Isn't that just contract law?
    - amelius 5y ago
      The problem is that the law is too abstract and not sufficiently exhaustive to address all the disingenuous schemes used by businesses.
  - GuB-42 5y ago
    Why shouldn't it be acceptable? You bought a 60 kWh car. If it performs as advertised, you not entitled for more, no matter what hardware is inside. And if you find a way to exploit the full capacity of the battery, you can, it's yours, but don't count on Tesla to support it. I have no problem with market segmentation. It allows more people to have access to a product while protecting the margins of the manufacturer. Because, without margins, there is no product. And in fact, I am happy when I am traveling and the student next to me paid half of what I paid, I could afford the higher price ticket in exchange for more convenience, so no problem for me, but if the student had to pay the same price as I did, he wouldn't have been able to travel at all. I was like him years ago, and our children will probably be too.
    - amelius 5y ago
      The problem in this case is that you're dragging along 15kWh worth of battery weight, which is a waste of energy.
squarefoot 5y ago
It's a very common practice, not just in computers. Many digital oscilloscopes (and probably other instruments too) can be hacked by just editing a file or flashing a new firmware. The purpose in scopes is making them behave as more expensive models with much higher bandwidth, which means that faster ADCs and circuitry is already there, but not used to its full potential so that the device can be placed in a lower market segment and sold cheaply. https://nyctomachia.wordpress.com/2018/09/02/riglol-unlock-extra-features-on-rigol-oscilloscopes/ https://nyctomachia.wordpress.com/2018/09/02/riglol-unlock-e... https://www.makermatrix.com/blog/hacking-the-siglent-1104x-e-oscilloscope/ https://www.makermatrix.com/blog/hacking-the-siglent-1104x-e... ..etc.
- analog31 5y ago
  And if anything goes wrong, it will just halt during boot and that's a $4000 repair.
  - squarefoot 5y ago
    Make it at least an order of magnitude less; most of those models are in the $250-$500 range.
    - analog31 5y ago
      Probably true. I was thinking of a particular "major" brand. I do own a couple scopes of those lower priced brands.
Taniwha 5y ago
We had a Burroughs 6700, at some point (late 70s) we agreed to pay for what was called the "$50,000 screwdriver" which upped the clock speed - we wrote a contract where we would run a benchmark before and after and if it wasn't X% faster we wouldn't have to pay. We ran the before benchmark, the field engineer went into the cabinets to up the speed, came back looking sheepish, seems he'd regularly been turning the clock speed up during preventative maintenance sessions to make sure the machine was performing OK and at some point had forgotten to turn it back .... we didn't have to pay
- cyberpunk 5y ago
  Hahaha, that's great :}
- Taniwha 5y ago
  Also I designed a Mac graphics accelerator gate array back in the late 80s, we were worried that the promised VRAM performance would not be fast enough so I designed in the ability to add extra clocks to RAS and CAS timings - it ran at full speed which was great, but marketing wanted a lower price-point version of the graphics card so we sold one with a ROM that turned on those extra RAS/CAS clocks
a45a33s 5y ago
IBM field engineers had a special dongle key that could unlock hardware features that were already present on the hardware, for a price
Corrado 5y ago
I have a similar story. A company I worked for in the 90's had a voice mail system that ran out of storage space for messages. When we upgraded our contract a technician came on-site to expand our storage. I was curious how it worked so I watched over his shoulder; he physically removed a bolt from the hard drive. I asked about it a bit and he said that the bolt had prevent the drive from accessing the entire drive. My mind was blown.

ethbr0 5y ago

Isn't this the same as SaaS thinking, albeit in the hardware era? For the more common story of IBM enabling present but disabled memory, they couldn't magically teleport a new memory board into your mainframe. But they could ship your mainframe with extra, verified but disabled memory. Customer UX for memory upgrades then changes from "Wait for it to ship, etc" to "We'll have it done tonight."

seanhunter 5y ago
Yes indeed. These kind of things afflict enterprise IT all the time. I used to run b2c teams which dealt with big banks. One bank's IT department used to bill internally for data center costs using RAM as a proxy for energy usage. A big spark cluster was purchased for the project I worked on and the minimum RAM for the spec of machine that was "standard" was 128MB, so to "save costs" they had the data center guy take out half the memory in every machine before racking it up. :-(

PeterisP 5y ago

It's not an ancient practice, I recall a case in the early 2000s where we got an expensive CPU upgrade to a mainframe which was not implemented by "a guy in a white lab coat" but as a one-line script (with a cryptographic key) to unlock more CPUs which were already installed on the system when it was first shipped.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
There are Cisco Nexus switches today that require licensing to enable all the ports.

acchow 5y ago

What did that circuit board do?

outworlder 5y ago
Hardware-based sleep()? :)
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
Might have added some capacitance or something to the system clock, so that it didn't cycle as quickly.

ts4z 5y ago

Tesla sold 75kWh cars to people who bought 60kWh cars. Then, during the wildfires here in California, they remotely unlocked the extra 15 for people trying to get out of town. If you wanted to get access to what you had legal title to, well, that's an upcharge.

amelius 5y ago
Business practices should have their own book of law, which says what is and what isn't acceptable.
- OldManAndTheCpp 5y ago
  Isn't that just contract law?
  - amelius 5y ago
    The problem is that the law is too abstract and not sufficiently exhaustive to address all the disingenuous schemes used by businesses.
- GuB-42 5y ago
  Why shouldn't it be acceptable? You bought a 60 kWh car. If it performs as advertised, you not entitled for more, no matter what hardware is inside. And if you find a way to exploit the full capacity of the battery, you can, it's yours, but don't count on Tesla to support it. I have no problem with market segmentation. It allows more people to have access to a product while protecting the margins of the manufacturer. Because, without margins, there is no product. And in fact, I am happy when I am traveling and the student next to me paid half of what I paid, I could afford the higher price ticket in exchange for more convenience, so no problem for me, but if the student had to pay the same price as I did, he wouldn't have been able to travel at all. I was like him years ago, and our children will probably be too.
  - amelius 5y ago
    The problem in this case is that you're dragging along 15kWh worth of battery weight, which is a waste of energy.

squarefoot 5y ago

It's a very common practice, not just in computers. Many digital oscilloscopes (and probably other instruments too) can be hacked by just editing a file or flashing a new firmware. The purpose in scopes is making them behave as more expensive models with much higher bandwidth, which means that faster ADCs and circuitry is already there, but not used to its full potential so that the device can be placed in a lower market segment and sold cheaply. https://nyctomachia.wordpress.com/2018/09/02/riglol-unlock-extra-features-on-rigol-oscilloscopes/ https://nyctomachia.wordpress.com/2018/09/02/riglol-unlock-e... https://www.makermatrix.com/blog/hacking-the-siglent-1104x-e-oscilloscope/ https://www.makermatrix.com/blog/hacking-the-siglent-1104x-e... ..etc.

analog31 5y ago
And if anything goes wrong, it will just halt during boot and that's a $4000 repair.
- squarefoot 5y ago
  Make it at least an order of magnitude less; most of those models are in the $250-$500 range.
  - analog31 5y ago
    Probably true. I was thinking of a particular "major" brand. I do own a couple scopes of those lower priced brands.

Taniwha 5y ago

We had a Burroughs 6700, at some point (late 70s) we agreed to pay for what was called the "$50,000 screwdriver" which upped the clock speed - we wrote a contract where we would run a benchmark before and after and if it wasn't X% faster we wouldn't have to pay. We ran the before benchmark, the field engineer went into the cabinets to up the speed, came back looking sheepish, seems he'd regularly been turning the clock speed up during preventative maintenance sessions to make sure the machine was performing OK and at some point had forgotten to turn it back .... we didn't have to pay

cyberpunk 5y ago
Hahaha, that's great :}
Taniwha 5y ago
Also I designed a Mac graphics accelerator gate array back in the late 80s, we were worried that the promised VRAM performance would not be fast enough so I designed in the ability to add extra clocks to RAS and CAS timings - it ran at full speed which was great, but marketing wanted a lower price-point version of the graphics card so we sold one with a ROM that turned on those extra RAS/CAS clocks

a45a33s 5y ago

IBM field engineers had a special dongle key that could unlock hardware features that were already present on the hardware, for a price

Corrado 5y ago

I have a similar story. A company I worked for in the 90's had a voice mail system that ran out of storage space for messages. When we upgraded our contract a technician came on-site to expand our storage. I was curious how it worked so I watched over his shoulder; he physically removed a bolt from the hard drive. I asked about it a bit and he said that the bolt had prevent the drive from accessing the entire drive. My mind was blown.