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Comment by sargun | Hacker News Reader

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 serial key generator.

Although, I understand hardware is dramatically different than software, it's using the same principal -- the same reusable bits to assemble many different products, and then just using tools to mask features unless a user pays for them.

Then again, why should software be any different? Why shouldn't we be able to unlock the hidden features of our software with hex editors, and serial key generators?

What do you guys think?

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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.

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.

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?

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.

You seem really excited about being angry about this, and I'd hate to deprive of your rage-joy. So, sure.

I appreciate hacker news preventing anyone under 500 from downvoting comments. It makes sense really. People use downvotes as an analog for disagreement, but those kinds of actions obfuscate proper discussion.

Really what they should be used for is dissuading bad thinking, trolling, or poor rhetoric.

What do you think?

I think whatever you're getting at has sailed right over my head. But I'm glad you're having fun! That's really what it's all about.

I can also see this in the obligatory car example: your car has the same engine as a nicer model but is just de-tuned with software. Is buying a Mercedes C63 AMG and flashing the ECU to unlock more horsepower effectively "stealing" the SL63 that has the full horsepower unlocked? Of course not, because you still have a C63 and not the SL. In the case of the GPU, you not only get no "professional level" support; you void your warranty (this second part probably also applies to the car).

Is a professional going to risk it to save a few bucks? I'd bet not.

It's not "being screwed". If they didn't do this, they would have to either physically make different cards which would increase the price of both (or lower margins and reinvestment in r&d) OR keep the same hardware and sell it at only one price point somewhere in the middle (which would be more expensive for the consumer, who typically wants the cheaper gaming card). This is a win-win for pretty much the entire market..

We see this behaviour in lots of industries. Car manufacturers will nerf the lower end vehicles so that there is more 'value' in purchasing a higher end car for enthusiasts.

And to hit a little more close to home - think of all the web companies doing exactly the same thing. There are usually 3 or 4 price points, each segment operating within the same code, but features enabled for the higher price points.

I see the same thing happening here. The 'performance' of the cards are the same after this hack, but the driver software 'lights up' exposing extra features. You could say the price differences pay for the driver features.

In the case of software as a service, different pricing tiers are at least semi-justifiable because you can argue that additional featuresets require more system resources to be added to the hardware infrastructure undergirding the site. If you want the more demanding features, you must compensate the provider for the extra infrastructure hit they'll be taking. Therefore, it doesn't feel as lame as intentionally performing a simple downgrade with the hope that you'll be able to trick others into paying more money for something that's already there if you know how to remove the foam/hack the resistor/whatever.

As far as more demanding resources go, that's not always the case but in a lot of them it would be. Think then about the various versions of Visual Studio or even Windows (Pro/Home) etc. The argument is still the same.

And with this nvidia case, the hardware hack only lights up new features in the drivers. It's exactly the same principle, and one others have shown is acceptable market practice.

Visual Studio and Windows aren't software as a service, and I suppose the argument in traditional client apps is that "the advanced features cost a lot more money to develop, so we need to recoup that cost". Neither case is as egregious as starting everything at a high-level baseline and then intentionally decreasing/damaging some parts to make them into "lower-end" models. Software is usually developed the opposite way -- you start at the baseline, get something together, and then say, "Oh, what about feature X? That'll take a while to develop..." and some guy says "Well, we can make it a premium feature". It just doesn't have the same feel as nvidia's hardware hack.

Sennheiser may have very well manufactured that whole incident in order to sell more of their overpriced-at-any-level headphones. Marketing people love to make people think they are getting a steal.

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.

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.

> 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...

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".

yes, precisely.

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.

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.

Binning is good for everyone, so it seems kind of short-sighted to try to tear it down.

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.

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?

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Well, the original reason given by the modder is to unluck the same functionality available under one OS as in another - that is all.

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.

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.

That hardware is hardware. if I buy hardware from you can can do what ever I want with it.

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