> What Is Intel On Demand?
> Align your infrastructure investment with your business demands with Intel’s API-enabled business offerings that deliver flexible consumption and configurations.
That answered all my questions.
> From now on, we will force you to buy subscriptions for hardware you already bought and is already sitting in your data center, because $$$
How "Acceptable" this is really depends on what features are going to be behind this paywall.
Is it really? If it's not retroactive, and you knew it going in and perhaps got a discount for it at purchase time is it really "you already brought". It's more like instead of destructively fusing off capabilities of functional products (ie irrecoverably ruining perfectly good hardware to enforce market segmentation), they make it easy to upgrade later. This isn't really that bad an idea.
As long as I can buy it fully unlocked from the get-go and am never forced into a subscription (as opposed to one-off) on my home workstation I really don't mind.
Only a few will call bullshit. Likely on niche sites on the internet. Probably not in such a dramatic way that the masses take note.
There might be a funny meme image gif.
The question is asked so that an answer may be provided, so that the question has been answered. That avoids anyone getting surprised by the question and giving the wrong answer. The right answer doesn’t have to mean… anything.
Delay, deny, distract. Until the avoidable is inevitable. Then we are all to blame, not just some poor corporation that meant well. After all, they told us what they were doing and we didn’t object!
We’re talking the difference between Chill Mode and Standard Acceleration, not seat warmers.
Its quite common to buy a lower end scope and unlock some extra sample size, seom extra bandwidth, some extra decoders by following a guide found on the net. (My personal theory as to why manufacturers don't lock these down more is because it gets home lab engineers more inclined to buy a brand they know they can hack and get the best bang for their buck in the hopes that will help drive sales when it comes to their companies requiring new lab gear).
If I were to give Intel the benefit of the doubt, They currently have a sizable SKU count in any generation of processor that are basically the same silicon under the hood just binned/hardware locked differently based on any manufacturing defeats and customer demand. If the locks already exist (be it hardware locks atm) why not move those locks to software and allow customers to unlock extra features as required?
As long as Intel don't a) convert to a "pay as you go"/subscription model or b) pump up the base price to gouge customers on common features I'm not going to loose any sleep over it, however but it wouldn't be the first time a company has fucked over customers.
There exist quite some makers who solve this "oscilloscope tiering" by installing a hacked or alternative open source firmware on the oscilloscope.
In a similar vein, I strongly suspect Windows would never have become the #1 OS had Microsoft locked it down further in its heyday.
> Although 3 million computers get sold each year in China, people don’t pay for our software. Someday they will, though, and as long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.
Though by the time XP came around MS was no longer happy with the casual copier although VL still made it pretty dam easy to pirate windows. I still enjoy listening to Dave Plummers talk about windows product activation - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpKNFCFABp0