Milton Friedman's doctrine was a failed turning point in business thinking [0] and unfortunately pervasive in people's perspective today. Prominent shareholders often have different motives than that of delighting the customer. Motives that are very short term profit driven. Such a toxic way to purport value.
We could use a revival of these ideas (which were the foundation of the enlightenment) in our era of blasé cynicism.
Then, if I understood, your point goes back to “might makes right”, as in, we have the power, we might as well take the money, and to hell with long term prospects or society. It is unfortunate that these people have so much influence over the rest of us. It is also a demonstration that optimising private interests does not result in public good, that is, the invisible hand of the market is utter bollocks.
Back at PS2/PS3 they were used for computing, Sony actually released a kit and had paid staff helping people who wanted to build PS2 supercomputers -- a good friend from college worked on the project at Sony. They had amazing vector processing units in them.
* https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/3/20984028/playstation-supe...
Article from 2003 on PS2 setups https://www.ign.com/articles/2003/05/28/ps2-supercomputer
Maybe nvidia should be held responsible for thier products. Anyone else up to support a law imposing disposal obligations on single-use products designed to kill secondary markets? When the boom slows, the miners can give these cards back to nvidia for environmentally friendly recycling.
This line of thinking scares me. It’s basically saying “they aren’t doing what I want so let’s use the government to make them do what I want!” How is this freedom? Forcing people to bend to your will though government is the opposite of freedom, and should be used very sparingly
Whatever helps you sleep at night I guess.
The fact is that corporations are made up of many people, so at a basic level you’re still compelling people who want to do what _they_, to do what _you_ want, through government.
But it’s pretty clear that you and I are never going to agree on this. So probably not worth discussing too much further.
Regulation of a market by government doesn't mean abandoning free markets. Regulation is an essential part of sustaining a free market. Totally non-regulated markets quickly devolve into monopoly and other anti-consumer evils such as devices, like this, designed to kill secondary markets.
"Regulation" in the old sense of "making regular", perhaps. Establishing fair weights and measures, preventing fraud, etc. Ensuring that individuals are free to trade and that all transactions are in fact voluntary (including, most importantly, transactions with the government itself). But when your "regulation" consists of applying force to micromanage how people—shareholders in this case—employ their capital for the benefit of some other group, you've moved well outside the realm of the free market.
"Lobby the government" that's what bigger corps do to the point of buying some. So it is only fair game.
It's not really the same because playstations are sold at break-even or at a loss with the expectation that follow-up revenue would make up for it. On the other hand no such dynamic exists for nvidia. For them, sale to a miner is the same as a sale to gamer.
It's simply not possible.
There's Nvidia's longstanding allergy to open source, but that only affects the tiny fraction of gamers who use Linux.
There's this hash rate thing, but from a gamer's perspective that's pro-consumer.
I suppose you can count their price increases for recent GPU generations. But I don't know if that rises to the level of "anti-consumer". Especially when they've been delivering performance to match.
The best example I can think of is their policy of requiring servers to use their more-expensive 'professional' line of GPUs. This does hurt gamers, since it forces game streaming services using Nvidia cards to charge higher prices. That said, among the major streaming services, Stadia, xCloud, and PlayStation Now all use AMD GPUs, while GeForce Now can skirt the policy since it belongs to Nvidia itself. The remaining services are relatively obscure – though perhaps they'd be less obscure if Nvidia didn't have that policy.
Not ever having the functionality in the PS4 and later doesn't imply they didn't remove it in prior cases.
I would have had Sony and friends not create a closed ecosystem in the first place.
You're replying in a thread about (compared to consoles) general purpose computers, which developers depend on gamers actually playing their games on, being effectively DRMed.
I don't particularly care about shareholder obligations in this case. I'm glad this incentive structure exists, and it doesn't necessarily inform my ethos.
This is being received well by people who are practically triggered by the notion of cryptocurrency operations.