Intel On Demand Driver Ready To Activate Your Licensed CPU Features With Linux 6.2

[schmidtbag]

So what *should* be illegal, and why?

If a fast food restaurant decided not to serve black people, couldn’t everyone “vote with their wallet” to stop that behaviour?

Uh... what? Why must there be something illegal?
There's really no comparison to a company ripping off customers simply because they can, vs being prejudiced. However, let's go with your hypothetical situation anyway: if enough people are outraged and boycott the restaurant, then yes, that will probably stop the behavior. It's honestly not that hard to avoid such restaurants, or at least divert your patronage to an alternative. Fast food restaurants have lower profit margins than many would think. They're not about to needlessly piss off customers over ideological or racist differences.
But let's continue to give your example the benefit of the doubt, where that restaurant is the only one around and a lot of people depend on it: simply by cutting out a large percentage of their customer base, the company might not survive.

What if a company sold essential products that had a 1% chance of killing you every time you used it? Assuming for the sake of argument that alternatives existed, you could just not buy it, right?

Well a good real-world example of that is a motorcycle. Many people's lives depend on a motor vehicle. There are safer alternatives, of which people do tend to buy specifically because of the high chance of death.

Unfortunately not. Many IT consumers just want more, more, more, like little fat greedy kids.

Well right, which is why this is a bit counter-intuitive because you're getting less, less, less. Again: it all comes down to the pricing model.

They couldn't possibly understand that something "ancient" like a core2duo could still be usable. This kind of broken culture is also ruining the Raspberry Pi where they simply fail to even use a Pi3 because it is "too slow!" and are playing a part to drive up prices and causing the company to price themselves out of the market.

Basically, these are the twits that cheer when the upstream kernel drops hardware older than their Steam DRM platform gaming PC.

I understand and agree to an extent. I'm constantly whining about poor development practices, where the most mundane tasks take up hundreds of MB of RAM which used to be done in KB, or where people keep throwing more GHz or cores at problems rather than optimize for what we've got. There is no good reason we should need more than 2 cores and 2GB of RAM to do basic everyday tasks, yet, software trends are requiring that. It's one of the reasons I use Linux, because much of the software is kept clean and efficient.
However, there are some things people desire/need that are just inherently taxing, where a RPi3 would never keep up no matter how much you optimize. For example, 4K video playback without the need of super lossy compression. Or trying to manage large spreadsheets. Or running virtual machines. Or compiling software in a timely manner. Or computer vision. While I think many of us would do well practicing more patience, there is an extent where that becomes unnecessary. After all, why should only developers optimize code? Why shouldn't the hardware be optimized too? Perhaps a Core2 Duo could be manufactured using today's lithography where hundreds of cores could fit on a single wafer and would consume a tiny fraction of the power it used to, but it also wouldn't make economic sense to do so - you're still getting a chip that can't perform well in tasks that businesses require to be done faster, and there's a limit to where the chip can only be made so cheap.
I guess what I'm getting at is even in a world where most software developers weren't so lazy with optimization, there would still be a demand for better hardware, and your old Core2Duo would have to be obsoleted in order for the more developers to focus on more efficient CPU designs.

[ssokolow]

However, there are some things people desire/need that are just inherently taxing, where a RPi3 would never keep up no matter how much you optimize. For example, 4K video playback without the need of super lossy compression. Or trying to manage large spreadsheets. Or running virtual machines. Or compiling software in a timely manner. Or computer vision.

Or emulating the Nintendo 64 properly. My single-core OpenPandora palmtop, overclocked to 800MHz, can emulate a larger slice of the Nintendo 64 library than a Pi3 and it's still a pretty small slice of it.

[Danny3]

I hope the EU makes this illegal!
Fuck greedy companies ruining the environment!

[kpedersen]

Well right, which is why this is a bit counter-intuitive because you're getting less, less, less. Again: it all comes down to the pricing model..

and RPi3 is definitely too slow for actual desktop/workstation use.

I'm tend to disagree a little with these views. The Pi3 is probably equivalent to a 2005 era PC. People were using these as fairly competent workstations and arguably achieving more in terms of innovation than we are today.

What exactly is too slow? Can these slow elements not be replaced by better alternatives? There is zero reason why a file manager and a desktop environment should take up more than even 10 MB. The strings, the images can all probably fit in Bill Gate's supposed 640k.

Yes, heavy GPU usage is beyond a 2005 PC but these aren't necessarily important for workstations or desktops.

[Luke]

From my perspective the BMW seat heater case is an outlier, as BMW is relying on the unwillingness of rich customers to work on their own cars. If someone gave me that car, I would immediately do two things:
1: remove the fuse to the 4G radio or cut and cap the wires to it, to stop the car from phoning home
2: Cut and cap the original wires to the seat heaters, and wire them to a new switched connection directly to the battery. Seat heaters work, no subscription! Impossible for BMW to block this, as a resistance heater is an analog device so this is an analog hole exploit.

Much more difficult is a battery unlock mod to a Tesla. Unless some hacker has cracked the computer, this requires building your own charger that hooks directly to the battery terminals, possibly just a small "topping charger." Presumably Tesla will keep the cost of a paid battery unlock just below what a mechanic/hacker would charge to do this for you.

Still more difficult but NOT impossible is a BMW motor performance unlock/subscription defeat. Again I will assume no crack for the computer is available. The job now requires building a new motor controller, hopefully the big MOSFETS from the original can be salvaged. The original computer probably goes in the trash at this level, and you may need to build a hot rod instrument panel too. Again, this can be done, and some hacker or radio amateur somewhere has surely done it all. Enough of this and aftermarket computers will become available that would be "generic" for hot rodded electric cars. You lose all self-driving and similar bullshit but get all your battery and all your performance the motor and battery can physically deliver.

Probably BMW figures their market is not to folks who do this, so one BMW with a custom motor controller and a seat heater control bypass does not affect their market. If Chevy had tried to do any of this in say, 1975, garage mechanics would have undercut their prices and car magazines would have published DIY instructions.

Note that with an electric car, replacing the computer does not violate any emissions laws. If I decide to get an electric car, I will start from scratch with a battery and motor retrofit to an old car. That way I can have a non-networked car, and can even re-use the transmission to boost motor performance and battery range. Same priniciple there as on a mid-motor E-bike, not now available on any electric car to my knowledge. Note that the very old "Project X" 1957 Chevy owned by Popular Hot Rodding recently got an electric conversion, with a single motor installed directly replacing the previous engine. No tracking, no subscriptions except by magazine readers!