7 ms·

I don't entirely know how I feel about this hack. I feel like this is really similar to unlocking the "Professional" version of a piece of software with a seria

• fosk 14y ago
  I think that if I own a piece of hardware, I am the sole owner of every single chip and screw on it, including every hardware hack that it may have. On the other side, usually you don't own the software but only a license that grants you permission to use it.
  • latimer 14y ago
    This is a good point. When you buy hardware, you are now the owner of it so they shouldn't be able to stop you from doing it, just like once you buy a phone you should be able to unlock it or install whatever software you want on it.
    • chii 14y ago
      > just like once you buy a phone you should be able to unlock it or install whatever software you want on it. unless, of course you signed an agreement to not do that, in exchange for a cheaper price on the phone and some period of contract with a particular carrier...
      • cma 14y ago
        Which is handled by contract law; it isn't clear why companies that want to do that should get a subsidy via criminal law DMCA penalties. Just like it isn't clear why white-only diners should have received free services from government thugs to throw out African American "trespassers".
    • zem 14y ago
      yes, precisely.
  • throwaway0000 14y ago
    On the contrary, most individuals purchase a tangible copy of software in a retail store without any licensing terms attached at the time of purchase. (Granted: App Stores are changing this) Shrink-wrap licenses attempt to end-run this by making the product unusable unless the user agrees to forfeit his existing property rights. The legality of these sorts of after-the-fact licenses on a traditional retail purchase is very unclear. It's for this reason that many do not object to cracking or modifying software which they have purchased. Indeed, there's no definitive argument that one shouldn't.
    • wildgift 14y ago
      I upvoted, but hope people understand that software shrinkwrap/clickwrap licenses are still a legal gray area. Yes, it's been this way for 25+ years, but it's still an exception to regular property rights.
  • sliverstorm 14y ago
    Binning is good for everyone, so it seems kind of short-sighted to try to tear it down.
    • mistercow 14y ago
      If people hacking their hardware were a significant threat to the practice of binning, hardware manufacturers could simply make it more difficult and dangerous to hack.
  • sneak 14y ago
    What about my laptop? Do I own the RAM? Can I put any bytes I want into it? How about the ones that cause software to skip a license check?
    • chii 14y ago
      > Can I put any bytes I want into it? How about the ones that cause software to skip a license check? yes you can - as long as you didn't have a prior agreement to not do it. For example, you downloaded a piece of software off a torrent site. you didn't have any prior agreement with anyone about anything. The agreement between the uploader who originally first distributed the software and the copyright holder is the only place that is valid in my view.
• parad0x1 14y ago
  You're already paying an over-inflated price, and they want you to pay an even greater inflated price. It's the manufacturer's and software developers decision to bundle another product within each other. They are already charging too much for this GPU, and they try to squeeze the most profit they can from every chip.
• seany 14y ago
  That hardware is hardware. if I buy hardware from you can can do what ever I want with it.
• drucken 14y ago
  Well, the original reason given by the modder is to unluck the same functionality available under one OS as in another - that is all.
• kyrra 14y ago
  This kind if stuff has been going on for a long time. I remember one of the Nvidia cards from 8 years ago could unlock extra lanes in the GPU just With a firmware flash. Intel had been using the same dye for multiple CPU SKUs for a long time now. Though people have figured out how to move between the various skus with ease. The one thing to keep in mind with hardware like this is that the different price points and SKUs are more than just making money. A lot of the time the SKU a card or chip is set at has to do with the yield quality of the pieces as they are manufactured. It's amazing to realize that when a new line of some cutting-edge tech comes around, they are going to have a 50% or less yield rate on their products. Sometimes they can use lower priced SKUs and take features away as the components will operate better without those features.
  • skyebook 14y ago
    There were unlocked lanes as well as the ability to use Quadro firmware with 8800GTS cards (which offered improved IQ in apps like Autodesk 3ds). As you allude to though, I'm pretty sure that the professional workstation cards are of a better binning.
• chao- 14y ago
  It feels similar to unlocking software because despite the different legal structure (ownership vs. license), the source of the difference similar, as you point out: You have been given a purposefully broken (i.e. effort was expended to reduce its usefulness) product. One would be tempted to make the argument of costing the company sale of an otherwise higher priced product, the method of fixing this would involve having entirely separate design and/or fabrication for the two tiers of components. This is far costlier than the price gap afforded to a handful of technical and risk-taking customers. Unless the ease of the transition is reduced to "Flip the big red switch from 'Fast' to 'Faster'!" then this sort of missed sale amounts to a rounding error for Nvidia, and certainly does not even match the cost that would be necessary to protect against it.
• eupharis 14y ago
  Sargun, your point was, I think, why is it that we treat software modding differently than we treat hardware modding? The chorus of "The hardware is hardware, and we can do whatever we want!" misses the point. It is a good point sargun. One I wish I had an answer for. Perhaps one explanation lies in the fact that some level of risk and skill and ingenuity and research is required to actually mod hardware. So we feel like the hardware modders deserve the fruits. But at we feel like the software "modders" don't, because most of them are thoughtlessly running some riskless script devised by someone else. I am not saying this should be our attitude. I am just saying I too have the knee-jerk reaction "the hardware is the hardware" but am far less certain when it comes to software. And I don't really understand why.
  • ISL 14y ago
    One possible future: Bits exist physically on my hardware. I get to twiddle them however I want. Furthermore, I can speak freely about having done so. This reality is at least partly responsible for the emergence of software as a service. Can't crack what you don't have.
    • cookiecaper 14y ago
      Rosetta Stone is a great example of this. After years of heavy piracy and failed client-side protections, their solution was to make the program web and subscription based. While rips of services like this are still possible, they're much more effort than cracking a client-side application.
  • cookiecaper 14y ago
    It's about the volatility and potential danger to copyright holders. If something requires a hardware hack, it's always going to take that much effort to apply. There's no easy way to instantaneously apply that hack to millions of peoples' hardware with minimal human effort. With a software hack, it's much more fearful because once it gets packaged as a crack, it's four clicks to a perceived infringement on the copyright holder's rights. A barrier to entry this low makes software mods much more frightful to rightsholders. Though the grandparent is right that these are similar practices in principle, people react differently because one is perceived as a widespread threat to the traditional mechanism of creative livelihood and the other is perceived as an advanced hack that will be done only be a couple of tinkerers. Most people are happy to provide encouragement and information to the latter group, but are more worried about the first group, as most software companies depend heavily on copyright law for their business model.
• danilocampos 14y ago
  It's not about principles, it's about economics. This is a matter of price discrimination. Nvidia wants to be sure they have a chance to sell their gear to every single person who has money to spend on graphics cards at a range of price points. Consumers have smaller wallets than professionals, but both have similar needs. So the company performs a "hack" that allows them to extract maximum revenues from each segment. Let's take this to an absurd extreme. Sennheiser did this by crippling their low-end headphones with a piece of foam to limit audio quality. Savvy audiophiles simply popped open the cans and removed the foam. No quibble with that, right? For me, companies have every right to practice price discrimination by fiddling with their hardware. And I think consumers have every right to mod that hardware. A few tinkerers are unlikely to break a meticulous price discrimination model like Nvidia's, and I think it's probably a net win for the company to have a chunk of their userbase who love them so much all they want to do is tinker in this way.
  • GhotiFish 14y ago
    Yes. That's a wonderful rhetoric, but really what it's saying is that the only people who don't deserve being screwed are the people that make it a hobby to tinker. There's many other areas of life to specialize in, not just technology/engineering side of things. I think general fair play trumps an incentive to learn and hack.
    • danilocampos 14y ago
      What makes price discrimination unfair? Nvidia needs to recover costs and earn a profit. They do so by segmenting the market. That they are able to do so in this way suggests that no one else is able to perform the R&D necessary to sell these tools at a lower cost. Who's getting screwed? The gamers who lose out on pro features many don't even need?
      • GhotiFish 14y ago
        or the pros getting massively overcharged because culture accepts the notion of sinking tens of thousands of dollars on the equipment of ones profession. The answer is both.
• TeMPOraL 14y ago
  I see it this way: were they giving the cards for free, they wouldn't ever disable features to create different models. In this magic world everyone would get to use the 100% of what the most current technology can do. The only reason they limit their cards is to extract more money out of the economic system. It feels wrong to us because brains don't reason via market economics. You can feel the waste in this solution, but it's the inefficiency inherent in the market economy. With SaaS it sometimes feels kind of different probably because we really do see it as a service (as it states in the name, btw.). and feel that the company offering us the service deserves more compensation for more things they do for us.
  • chii 14y ago
    > it's the inefficiency inherent in the market economy. i think this inefficiency exists because there is no perfect competition (i.e., anyone can start a semi-conductors company and compete in the market). We should push for a future where there _is_ perfect competition, and this problem will resolve itself. For example, 3D printing is a viable method of reaching such a future, if the printing tech keeps increasing in fidelity and durability etc.