Slashdot Mirror
The Demise of Hackable Computers
chipwich writes: "Extremetech has an article describing the impending demise of hackable computer systems. What if disposable computers brought a brand-new system within your budget for yearly purchase... Would you be willing to pay a premium just so you could install Linux on last years' model?"
*hehehe*
The article has a positively Jon Katzian glibness and is basically nothing more than a troll, for driving up page hits and sparking debate among slashdotters. This is fine for Jon Katz articles themselves (and part of Slashdot's charm), but look again! Isn't this the same site that was recently reported on as ZDNet's lame attempt to muscle sites like Anandtech out of their own market? Isn't it the very same site that was firmly identified as fake corporate grassroots? Why, goodness me, it is! And isn't this a site that would benefit from a slashdotting (build 'traffic' for PR purposes) and to become a recognizable name among techie geeks? I say it's at least 50/50 this article is a plant.
Now, they can't very well plant references in sites like Anand, because those people are too aware of the situation. But it looks like even without producing any sort of serious content, they can throw together some glib rabblerousing, get someone to plant it in Slashdot (again, 50/50 it was a plant vs. a real user) and move towards achieving their aims by building, or more accurately manufacturing, 'street cred'.
It's only a suggestion, but Slashdot story editors may wish to keep an eye out for Slash being used in this manner, and be slower to accept 'stories' that come from 'ExtremeTech'. That's just a suggestion. Personally, I would rather read Jon Katz: at least he's one of our own.
Donate them to schools. The Linux Terminal Server Project for schools, as mentioned in a previous article's comments, seems like it could benefit immensely from this.
What to do when the schools have all the computers they need (unlikely, but let's be optimistic for a second)? Donate them to schools/people in developing countries where people can't afford even the $400 PCs floating around today (this would be most people in the world). I can't think of a better way to sow the seeds for the development of a massive army of Linux hackers destined to propel Linux to total world domination than to grab this massive market that Microsoft doesn't care about and where the people have a much stronger work ethic (and would therefore be willing to hack) than most in the US.
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Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
The PC industry is all about commodity hardware. There have been very few cases where a closed hardware specification has done well economically. In fact, IBM's effort to open their hardware was what guaranteed that the Macintosh didn't become the dominant PC computer architecture. Early Macs were a lot nicer machines than their IBM compatible counterparts, but the IBM compatible machines were cheaper (due to commodity hardware) and so they won out in the end.
Since then IBM tried unsuccessfully to corner the PC market with their MCA bus, and Rambus is currently learning that consumers (and more importantly memory manufacturers) aren't interested in their proprietary memory.
Hardware manufacturers that make it hard for their customers to actually use their hardware are only shooting themselves in the foot. They gain absolutely nothing by creating hardware that can't be hacked, and they lose potential sales from people that want to tweak their hardware.
The only folks that are concerned about the open nature of hardware are the folks who make their money from so-called "intellectual property." The RIAA and the MPAA don't want you to mess with your hardware because it might make it easier for you to copy their songs and movies. Microsoft doesn't want you to open up your computer because it makes it harder for them to keep you from copying their OS. Also open hardware specifications make it possible for alternative OSes to write drivers for the hardware. Microsoft would rather have Windows only hardware.
The hardware folks, however, don't really care if you are stealing songs, movies, or software. In fact, they would love for you to steal your software (that would give you more money to spend on hardware). They have something tangible to sell, and they know that their margins are tight enough that they had better not tick of their customers. They know that if they are quick to jump on the "closed hardware" bandwagon they will find that their customers are simply buying from their competitors, and that they have limited their own marketability simply to help someone else's business.
The Media industry wants it, they want the OS only to talk to authorised decoder hardware and output devices. They want Soundcards to integrate DRM functionality, they want video cards to send the output to monitors via an encrypted protocol. They Want hard disks with copy control information.
And the last thing they want is for you to be able to look at the OS and reverse engineer their protection. And *insert favourite Free OS* will not run on these systems - it'll be windows only, well unless you want to forego graphics, sound and hard disk access.
Ironically, he mentions the Toyota Prius and says that people are modifying it, and even gives a link to some yahoo group on it or something. You would do well to _finish_ the article before flaming it...
I suspect you're joking, but seriously, I recently moved and threw away a dumpsterload of hardware because it wasn't worth moving and gave everything else to a friend of mine who builds systems for non-computer-people for fun.
And the other day, I ran across four 486-class machines stacked in front of the dumpster at the apartment I'm staying at temporarily.
486es don't have enough processor power to justify the electrical cost of powering them on anymore. I didn't even think it was worth the five minutes it would have taken to filch out the floppy drives just in case they worked. And a mere gig of disk also isn't worth the power it takes to spin it up-- and a gig was huge in these machines.
The chassis are obsolete, the memory's probably 30 pin (remember that!)
...and at present, I own no walls to hang 'em on. Sadly, these beasts were in the right place; at the dumpster.
On the other hand, had they been P2 class or Athlon machines of any flavor, I'd've snatched 'em up, four years old or no. Some machines, on the other hand, are just disposable...
-JDF
Apparently he hasn't tried to mod a car recently. It's really not that hard. They are far from being black boxes. How do new technologies affect my ability to drop in some new KYB/AGX struts and springs? They don't. Or to flare the fenders and put bigger wheels on? Or to drop on some Alcon big brakes? Or to replace the sway bars, the bushing, the shifter, the mounts, the drop links. To say nothing of body kits.
And we haven't even gotten under the hood yet. Lightened fly wheels, underdrive pulleys, new cams, new heads, new pistons, close the deck, add forced induction, drop in a programmable ECU to get whatever fuel map you want, add new fuel rails, a high flow fuel pump, a stroker kit, high flow cats.
Sure it may take a "fair amount" of knowledge to mod your car. But it also requires a "fair amount" of knowledge to mod your computer. After all, it's not like you can just buy SDRAM SIMMs and try to fit them in your EDO DIMM slots.
The people who built hotroads in the 60s have been replaced by people who don't whine when technology changes.
But he somehow pretends that you could mod computers a lot more in the past. What exactly can I do with my old P120 motherboard? Can I put in that new spiffy memory? No. Can I use the new Ultra ATA hard drives at the true limits? No. Can I put in an AGP 4x video card? No. Can I drop in a Thunderbird? No.
If you want bleeding edge performance (which is his main complaint) then you have to basically buy a new computer from the ground up anyway. I don't see how this is any different from the future world he posits.
What do you have against diapers? You can encase your baby's first solid BM in Lucite, and put it on your desk at work. What a conversation piece!
Nail one to the wall so you can look at it and remember what your baby was like before he/she became a hell-bound, rebellious teenage terror.
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I don't agree with his comment about not being able, as an automotive enthusiast, to modify your car. Besides all the rice-boy type modifications, people have been hacking their newer cars in ingenious ways. There was an article (which may require free registration) in the Chicago Tribune about people modifying their Toyota Prius for more efficiency, customizing it's dashboard and integral LCD (to be able to display any ol' video signal), etc. Look, people find a way to hack everything.
It's even less of an issue with PCs. There are enough electrical/computer engineers in the world to tell us how to hack just about anything. People said that the Intel Celeron (R) wasn't SMP capable, but look at all the people that were out there drilling pins out and rewiring their CPUs to take advantage of the PII core! Don't tell me that you won't be able to hack hardware; it just becomes more challenging and FUN!
---------The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
Its a good article about DIY projects. The author touches lightly on the one thing that may effectively kill the DIY market, new laws. But then he swerves back into his nostalgia for overclocking and other simply build-it-yourself systems.
/. and other places, many of the market leaders of commodity PC components have realised that there is no profit in a commodity market as long as every little taiwanese/korean factory is allowed to create cheap knock-offs that are functionally equivalent. Consumers love the fact that PC components are cheap, but what if that isn't always the case?
.NET to store everyones data in data centres, so if your box fries, you just go buy a new one, and keep working where you left off.
As noted on
If projects such as CPRM move ahead, it will create a new, protected technology for PCs. All of the mainstream market companies will band together to offer only new machines with CPRM, locking out all the non-licensed competition. When federal/euro laws come into effect outlawing the sale or possession of non-compliant disk drives, the market for cheap far-east drives will disappear over night. The laws will be based on protection of intellectual property, and the battle will become much tougher to fight once those laws are passed. This is why so many intelligent people are fighting the creeping crud of bad IP laws, they can see the economic damage if more laws like the DMCA/UCITA are passed.
Further down the road, more laws protecting IP will eliminate competition in the video card market, sound cards, or any IP storage, transmission or playback mechanisms. When that happens, only large computer manufacturers will have systems on the market, and even though they will only cost about US$500-US$1000, they will become sealed units. If you want a system with more storage, buy a bigger computer. Faster video for games, get the next expensive system. Upgrading will no longer be an option, and all those internal upgrade slots/cables/connectors/sockets will disappear.
Getting rid of unused DIMM sockets, IDE sockets, plugs, cables, AGP adapters, PCI buses will make a computer system much cheaper than today. Systems will become sealed, and changing components will be left to only the most technically gifted. Those cheap systems will use technologies like
This also has a knock-on effect for Free Operating Systems, if the law extends to cover drivers for IP protected components. No longer will linux be allowed to have a free version of a driver for CPRM drives, or a DeCSS decoder for DVD players, or De4HGFu for the latest 4D-Hyper-GeoForce-Ultra video chipset. Possessing, creating, or distributing un-licensed drivers will be completely outlawed, possibly with criminal charges as opposed to the current civil laws. Universities will be required to monitor students work, and forbid any student working on any project that might infringe on IP protected software. When the boxes close up, free software will be marginalised to very small groups dedicated to keeping the counter-culture spirit alive.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
From the: I-prefer-to-cuddle-my-own-hard-drive,-thanks dept.
This is not a big surprise, really. Palmtops, laptops, eMachineish types of computers are coming out all over. Cheap, working, closed-case machines for the masses. And the trend will continue, I think....but I think there are other issues at work here.
First, raise your hand if you like to upgrade your machines. Lots? Good. Next, raise your hand if you enjoy upgrading your mother's aunt's sister's machine. No? "But it's soooo slow!" Imagine. She's had it since 1996 and thinks it's slow. I'm flabbergasted.
The point is this: These compact, $300ish, throwaway machines are practical for the masses of lusers in the world looking for a quick, working desktop/Internet PC. They don't care about upgrades, and if it's only $300, so what? Trash it, get another. And there are a lot of us geeks out there who would rather NOT worry about having to try to upgrade it.
Now, I don't know about you, but there's nothing more satisfying than having a good night of tinkering with my hardware. (computer, you sick mind) I'll gladly pay the little extra to get cards that aren't integrated, to get 45 case fans all at the same time, to see the lights dim when my new 540,000RPM hard drive spins up. It's a disease, and I'm infected. And you know what? The machines run great. They just do. Maybe it's the love, maybe it's the time, maybe it's because I know every inch of it. I need my hardware fix. Or repair. Or upgrade. And as long as there's a demand for such systems that allow this, they'll be there.
I think we'll see these disposables before long. But there will be a chasm: disposables for lusers, tweakables for the elite.
Blog,Twitter
... I can get multi-gigahertz performance in something the size of a wallet that costs less than $50. In other words, when computers are truly ubiquitous. When they are so cheap and numerous that I truly don't care.
Until then the mainstream will be (easily) modifiable computers. People still need customized solutions for at least a few more years and it's still cheaper to do so rather than have one prepackaged system. Remember that $500 isn't chump change. PC gaming in particular, which is a huge factor in popular computing, doesn't invite closed systems since we haven't plateaued. You can't equate PC and consoles for at least the next couple generations.
It's going to happen, yes, but not for several years at the minimum.
Fsck cluebie moderators. I'll say what I want, offtopic or not. And fsck having to qualify every bloody statement just
... they're called "laptops". OK, so they're not completely untouchable, but they're not nearly as easy to mess with as a desktop system. What limited mods can be done require a good deal more skill too. Maybe if similar desktop systems become the standard, more people who want to play around with hardware will be forced to improve their technical skills. But I can see that it'd just make computers even less understandable to "Joe Sixpack", who can currently swap in new cards/processor/RAM/HD on his desktop machine without being a l33t haXor or having a CS degree.
Freedom: "I won't!"
Hardware manufacturers likely do'nt have enoguh clout for that. More likely is that the hardware will be closed, and an extension of the DMCA will make it illegal to hack on any hardware which as been "closed for the benefit of content holders". You wouldn't even have to circumvent or develop a circumvention tool, just do anything that might make circumvention easier down the line.
E.g. opening a case which is designed to destroy the computer when opened, but done it such a way that the computer isn't destroyed. Now it would be easier for people to add "non-secure" (i.e. doesn't restrict fair use) hardware and possibly violate the DMCA.
That is more likely, and even scarier. The MPAA owns way more of Congressional mindshare that the hardware companies. And the hardware companies have been on the side of good quite a bit (often not for noble reasons, but for economics. In a way, that's better because they aren't likely to change their mind unless the economics of the situation changes a lot).
Congress has members who actually believe that if the MPAA makes less money (but still a huge amount) due to priacy, that they'll just stop making movies (and make zero money), and that they won't be able to go to the theater on Saturday night.
Hopefully by the time things get too bad, Linux will be mainstream enough that crushing us will be politically incorrect.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
[Political Party X] will introduce legislation preventing techies from building their own machines at feasible prices within the next 5 years.
You failed to state a rationale for this. You seem to imply it's because corps. will lobby Congress so they can force you to buy whole systems, but the same end-results can be achieved by convincing MS to tighten the screws on its WPA (and Apple can solder its machines shut if it wants).
A better argument would be to point out that as processor speed goes up, so does RF interference. Once it gets to a certain level, the FCC will feel compelled to step in. Of course, that doesn't require Congress to act, either, so I'm still not sure why you said what you did.
Anyone who thinks 'all-in-one' computers are 'unhackable' needs to remember the I-Opener phenom. Have a look at Linux-Hacker.Net to see that the same people who soldered their IOpeners are doing it with everything imaginable - specifically interesting is the GateWay Connected Touchpad (which originally runs Linux on a Transmita CPU), it has 802.11b and a touchscreen....
I don't know why its scary - the point about this "sealed" box is that it is cheap. Think more along the lines that you have a several ball point pens (maybe each with a different colour inks) than a quill pen and lots of bottles of ink.
He seems to think that we won't be doing it much longer since companies have been catering to our needs? I ask, in what fashion?
I still can't find an AMD Athlon T-bird 750mhz with a gig of RAM and all the fixings without building it myself for under 500. Pricewatch will be around for a long time hopefully, and as long as it is, I'll be ordering my stuff on there. Sepearately.
I've yet to see company offer a great price for prebuilding a system to my specifications.
I do have to say he hit the nail on the head with this one:
Two events conspired to effectively destroy the market for modifying cars. The first was the Federal Clean Air Act Amendments of 1970, which started the ball rolling for mandatory air pollution controls on cars.
While the second one was about oil shortages, I'd have to say the first was the biggest problem. My dad and uncle *still* talk about how great life was way back when they could modify cars as they see fit.
So, here's my prediction: The Greens/Democrats (not chosen cause I disagree with them political, but rather because it is most likely based on philosophy that such a social policy would come from either of those two) will introduce legislation preventing techies from building their own machines at feasible prices within the next 5 years. The Republicans (not chosen because I disagree with them politically, but because they are in a "compassion" phase right now, which ultimately mean "comprimise" phase, where they vote however they deem necessary to get majority votes on *their* bills) will of course support the bill once the Democrats get enough convincing and possibly support from Apple (the biggest company to gain from the bill), Dell, HP, Compaq, and other big PC builders, which could easily meet the regulations, while us small-time PC builders cannot.
Don't think it'll happen, you just wait. Remember I made this post.
With this idea of sealed boxes the scariest thing for me is that maybe they'll sell one box for video editing and one for gaming but not one that does both well. So instead of paying for one card I have to buy a whole system to get the same functionality. The beauty of PCs is how customizable they are, it would be a great loss to loose that.
What the hell is up with everyone wanting to dispose of perfectly good items? Stuff like diapers should obviously be disposable, but computers? Thats just plain ridiculous. Even if a piece of hardware is totally shot, its got other uses, like hanging on the wall of the server room to remind the working hardware what it will end up being once it breaks. :)
"Why do you consent to live in ignorance and fear?" - Bad Religion
As long as there are systems, they will be hacked. They may not look like current systems, and the hacking might be harder, but so much the better.
These are the same people who tricked me into thinking that by the year 2000 I'd be watching holographic porn while riding in my flying car.
Most of the time these people can barely grasp how things work now - let alone in the future.
Aren't we already starting to hear about massive amounts of old computers stacking up at junk yards and so forth?
What the hell are we going to do if we throw away a computer every year instead of every three years?
Just a question. Well... maybe two.
People love to be able to point to something and say "I did that." It's just human nature.
The example from the story, modding cars, is not a good analogy. Federal standards caused cars to become more complex, and thus harder (impossible?) to modify. I can't think of any reason the same would be true of computers.
Besides, as long as there is a reasonable market, companies will still individual parts. Black boxes may become commonplace, but think about the server realm. It would be very expensive to replace a black-box server compared to the cost of swapping out bad components. So as long as the server market is alive (forever?), there will be a market.
I don't think customizable computers are dead.
My first reaction was, "didn't this happen years ago?"
I mean, when was the last time you got out a soldering iron and had at your PC? That used to be the norm, back when messing with micros meant S-100 and IEEE stuff. But with multi-layer boards (gack, I can't remember the last time I saw a single or layer two-sided board made by someone I didn't know) it's a lot harder, and likewise with the decreasing size and increasing complexity of ICs. But the main reason I stopped is that I no longer needed to work at that level to get the job done. The optimal level for configuration moved up, and I followed it.
This (if it happens, about which I have some reservations) will just trigger another migration: rather than hacking inside the box we'll just be hanging odd homebrew things on various I/O ports and treating the PC as a blackbox.
(set-mode Old-fart nil)
-- MarkusQ
P.S. A real old fart would tell us hardware hacking died when they went to these here new-fangled "chip" things. You can't pry them things open, or least wise 'tan't worth it.