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Handspring Hides Flash ROM in Handspring Treo
miradu writes: "TreoCentral has just posted an intriguing article about how the Handspring Treo has Flash ROM - something that Handspring claims it doesn't. They've worked with Brayder Technology to create applications to utilize this newly discovered feature. It brings up the question, Why do developers lie about features in a device - especially if they are features that are wanted? Does anyone know any other examples?" Strange -- hardware manufacturers don't often underestimate their products' capabilities, do they?
It allows them to remove the Flash at some point in the future and replace it with a cheaper ROM. If they don't tell you that they have a Flash, then you won't complain when it is removed. I would expect the next version to be missing the Flash.
The dogcow says "Moof!"
This isn't _standard_ on all of the Treo's and is only used in certain manufacturing runs, so some of the things tried here could fail, or screw up the system you have. So in the specs they don't mention it as the use of FlashROM was down to a costing decision on a paticular run (maybe they bought in bulk to support other products, or had left over elements that could be incorporated).
This is like assuming that just because one PC has a paticular motherboard with paticular tweeks that every PC has that.
The Treo is still butt ugly mind.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Users of the Samsung i300 for the longest time were told that there was no flash rom, and that the operating sytem was not upgradable.
Then FlashPro came out and proved that there was flash in the i300.
Upgrading the OS is still not an option, considering that there are lots of propreitary extensions to the OS.
However, the flash capabilities of the devices were hidden for quite a while.
Jake
I think at least in Handspring's case, they've had a philosophy of planned obsolescense by building their products with hard ROMs.
Obviously, they can't be upgraded that way, so in their all knowing marketing minds, they're hoping users will continue to upgrade to newer products from Handspring.
Originally, they claimed that the lack of a flash ROM was a price saving measure, but I tend to think that in some cases, a flash rom would actually be cheaper.
Now that the treo has a flash rom, and they're lying about it, what do they expect? Of course users are going to make use of that 'hidden feature' now!
Handspring, you ought to 'embrace and extend' now that the gig's up.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
PhysicsGenius is absolutely right. See this research paper for more information on why they don't want you to know the facts.
... ah fuck it.
Back on topic: obviously, they planned to release a newer model at a later date - "Now with flash rom!" - ye ol' upgrade path to hell.
So....you are saying the less technicaly inclined are going to know it can even happen? I'd bet money on the fact the majority of people in the world don't know what ROM is. Otherwise Gateway wouldn't sell so many, and people would realise Windows is not "all that it can be"
It has been my experience at least that companies regularly hide things I would consider features because they don't want to deal with customer support issues surrounding those features. This more often happens, so it seems, when the feature involved is either complicated or delicate (or both for that matter).
Sometimes Hardware (or Software) manufacturers include features that are either experimental or transient and they don't mention them because they don't want to provide support for those features. If it something that the system uses, but application software shouldn't, then they probably won't mention it in the specs.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Let's say they announce it's got Flash ROM, then people start hacking it, then "standard" apps no longer work on people's PDA's, 'cause their OS has been whacked up. What do you get? Returns! And what does that hurt? Profits! And who has to pay to support this stuff? Not the users!
If it was *designed* to be hacked with (*cough cough xbox cough*), then yes, Flash ROM would be a selling point. But it wasn't....
BTW, for a while, I thought the story was about a kerfuffle between Macromedia and the PDA people. =)
.f00Dave
There was a recent study by a German scientist Dr. Helmut Pottman proving that leaving your PDA in direct sunlight for just 10 minutes a day could erase your PDA's EPROM-chips in just a few weeks. The PDA could start acting erratically in a few days, but they usually lasted for at least two weeks. One way to protect the pda is to put a thin sheet of plastic over it. Helmut discovered this after accidentally placing a sandwich wrapper on top of his PDA.
overwrite rom or flash? Um you realize that digital cameras both have a flash bulb and flash/rom memory right?
And you got +2?
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
It isn't all that uncommon for automotible manufactures to underrate the performance of engines in cars, or cpu manufactures to underestime the chips that they market as x Ghz.
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
they aren't publicizing it possibly because their licenses for the palm os don't allow upgrades. I don't know the whole issue behind licensing and whatnot, but I think I remember something about it being cheaper for them to go the ROM route and not offer upgrades per device, but the buying in bulk issue is also a possible one, perhaps more likely.
cyn, free software and *nix operating systems enthusiast.
My guess is that they want to try and keep as much of the profit inside of the company as they can. If another company can utilize this, then they could be making the money instead.
My other sig is an import.
Objects in the blog are closer then they ap
Strange -- hardware manufacturers don't often underestimate their products' capabilities, do they?
Nvidia does this every year. They release a card that is purposely hindered, calling it "normal". Then 6 months later they release what they should have released 6 months ago, calling it "Ultra" or to the same extent. Except with the GF4 MX line. There they just "Ultra-Ultraed" a GF2. Hope they shoot themselves in the foot when all those mx cards run Doom III like poop.
On the original Rev.A iMac, Apple included what was known as a "mezzanine" slot. While Apple never used this slot for anything, some people did. I believe someone even rigged up a floppy drive into it. (This was before the HUGE boom in bondi blue USB peripherals)
Supernaut
Flash ROM is certainly more expensive than mask programmed ROM's, if only by a few pennies.. but those few pennies in volume production will cut into profits.
But, it would make sense, with an OS burned into a ROM, that you'd produce the 1st 5000 or 10000 units with a Flash ROM, and release them to employees and a few reviewers/testers under an NDA for testing.. if they find bugs, you can easily modify it, and later on (after the 1st few months of them being available) you switch to mask programmed ROM's to save the money in volume production.
Maby they discovered it was succeptable to those things. And it was too late in the product cycle to change it(the duh answer is to add a fysical jumper to protect from flashing). So they just shut up about it.
FRA: STFU GTFO
I've never used a treo, but I have had several Palms over the years. While all models had Flash Memory, the only way to use it directly with the stanard palm distribution tools was though a hot sync with a ROM Upgrade direct from palm. I have a samsung I300(other palm phone). This phone does not allow regular upgrades from palm because it has custom mods to the OS which are basicly extenions to allow the phone and Palm to talk to each other. In other words sence Samsung, will not update the OS there are no upgrades and no way to use the Flash ROM without aftermarket solutions. The Treo is likly the same. Handspring probly doesn't want to provude tools to use the flash memory, so it tries not to let people know its there.
Business News and Resources: www.usasource.net
According to the same article, Handspring had been putting Flash Roms in Platinum, Prism, and Edge, so it comes with not much suprise that Treo has flash rom as well.
They probably mananged to get themselves a better deal from the flash rom people so they sticked flash instead.
Another explanation would be that features such as 3G and email alert requires space off the ROM instead of your memory.
Don't get too exicted just yet since non of the PalmOS devices today are OS5 capble, the flash rom is for extra storage for now, before Handspring've decided to use them all for patches and additional features etc.
kawai
Ok you obviously didn't read the article and are a karma whore or the editors are dumb too. Quote from said article.
According to more than a month of strung-out research, TreoCentral has learned that Handspring has included 4 MB of Flash ROM for the OS; in addition to the 2 MB of Flash ROM for the radio, with every single Treo 180, Treo 180g, and Treo 270 on the market.
Since you didnt read the article you are the one assuming. And you made an ass out of you and ming. And if you've ever seen Ming when he's pissed off he's not a happy person. And as for The treo being butt ugly, i think you need your glasses checked. Go read the article and it has a really nice picture. Looks much better than what Palm offers, IMHO.
Wow. I'm impressed. For the record, a photo-flash doesn't actually erase flash-ROMs. That's not what flash-ROM means...
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Speaking from experience, I can tell you for a fact that "undocumented" features are far more common than you would expect... Virtually every piece of consumer electronics in production today has at least one feature turned off, typically a feature that had a potentially undesirable impact on the customer, or got in the way of Company X meeting their release date.
Unless you work at Apple, all products usually go through all sorts of functional tests before the final product is delivered into the hands of the consumer. Sometimes, a few of these features aren't reliable, or additional time would be needed to write in support for them. Keep in mind, any such change would mean revising the manual, revising the OS, all sorts of nastyness they don't want to get into until the next generation of the product comes along. Very rarely is it due to a particular part being broken, or unreliable.
The bottom line is, the business world hasn't quite caught up with the idea that Americans are resourceful tinkerers.. They like hidden features. Anyone who remembers notching their floppies with a whole punch can tell you the same.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
I'm seriously hoping that this post was meant to be funny. In which case it should be modded as such.
University - a box of academia nuts.
Take a look at the cars with the 1.8 Turbo engine.
By changing the ECU programming, they can add power by adjusting boost pressure, air/fuel/spark maps...
The car can magically gain 10-20hp between model years, all with the click of a mouse.
Aftermarket ECU tuners can get the same results out of the cars that are just a few years older.
But, "15 more HP than last year" is a great selling point for a car.
Since when do we mod up retards?
Every time I see something like this, modded up as if it were fact, I want to cry. Go ahead, mod me down as troll or flamebait, but it's the goddammed truth. PhysicsGenius is anything but.
I believe that, in some trollish way, he refers to the old UV erasable EPROMs that are hardly ever used today. Hello, Brainiac, not only do those always have a sticker over the window to prevent accidental erasure, but they would be inside the case. That's right, aside from the stray 1 in 1 trillionth photon that tunnels through a quarter inch of plastic, any EPROMs would be safe.
If only it were an EPROM, that is. Flashrom is electrically erasable, no light of any wavelength is involved. Nothing short of long-term high dose gamma rays is likely to have any effect whatsoever.
Please, please, if you see this in m2, kick the ass of the moderator that gave this "interesting".
He is thinking of EPROM which are erased by UV exposure, a completely different type of ROM.
A photoflash does contain a lot of UV though.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Personally though I've never seen the need to use the built-in flash RAM on my TRGpro, since I have a (*gloat*) 128MB CF card.
The way I see it, if you want to be able to sell devices that are supposed to work in service-fee based commercial networks (e.g. cell phone networks), it is very common that strict rules apply. If you can mod the BIOS of your cell phone, it might open security holes that allows you to mess with the network, change phone number, stuff like that. I am not saying that it _is_ possible, or exactly _what_ you can do. But it can be so that the FLASH cover-up is a last-minute thing thrown in by the legal department of a major network provider. They dont want people even to try.
Personally, I think that they said it is not FLASH is so that they can downgrade to mask ROM when their SW is stable.
FLASH might in many cases be cheaper, though.
Performance perhaps; FLASH typically has faster read cycles than ROM.
It might be that they didn't want to include all of the necessary control for flash programmin in their system. With flash (maybe its just the kind I work with) you cannot write to or read from a single address. You are restricted to sectors, and have to erase (make all 1s) a sector before writing to it again. This involved plenty of control, and if they gave the user's access to the flash they would have to make sure that certain sectors were protected and that they're internal apps didn't cross over any sector boundaries. Sure this is probably a good software engineering practice in general, but sometimes more trouble than its worth when you are simply conscerned with getting your product out as quickyl as possible.
Not computer related, but Porsche's posted performance specs on their cars (e.g. top speed, 0-60 acceleration) are more often than not *extremely* conservative. The vehicles (most often the turbocharged cars) typically perform a bit better in real world conditions than they are supposed to according to the papers.
I think this is much less prevelant in the computer industry where typical performance specs are almost always under ideal conditions.
Just my 2 cents.
My favorite quote from the article:
I ask all these rhetorical questions for a reason: I want to know what you think.
er... you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Be cynical, blame marketing instead. Next version was going to be "new, with added Flash ROM" and $100 more than this... ;)
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
When the Visor first came out Handspring made a point about how they didn't use Flash ROM in the device and how that was a cost saving to the consumer (ie made the device lower priced). They made a big deal about it in their marketing materials.
Now, what happens when they reverse their position?
Strange -- hardware manufacturers don't often underestimate their products' capabilities, do they?
ALWAYS. Ever hear of overclocking?
And not just computer hardware, but pretty much anything built is tested PAST the point that it's good for.
If your car's guages tell you it redlines at 6500 rpm, it probably really redlines at 7000. If an elevator says "20 People Max" it really means 30 or 40. etc.
-... ---
Move forward 6 months. Handspring now announce the 'quadro' PDA with the flash ROM feature and everyone rushes out to buy more PDAs to replace the one they have. This doesn't cost the manufacturer anything though since they already spent the moeny designing the flash stuff so they appear to have launced a new product with a feature people want with no net outlay -- and they've had 6 months of people unwittingly field testing the design for them...
Rich
Whats the chance they license Palm-OS on a reduced rate because it isn't 'upgradable'?
there was a program that went around for palmOS a while ago that claimed to be able to use a hidden feature in the dragonball processor in some earlier model palms. it was supposedly able to act as a cell phone, and came with a dialer to connect to an ISP. when you tried to call, it would make the sounds like a phone, but would always say it's busy or something. lol
It's common for the aspirations of engineers to be lobotomized a little by the larger marketting beast. I've read several articles on the web where a Celeron motherboard could be greatly sped up by placing celophane tape over a single pin of the Celeron's card edge connector. But then we stray into the area of overclockers...
THE EARLIEST EXAMPLE that springs to mind is on Radio Shack's TRS-80 Color Computers. There was some story about doubling the RAM by bending two pins on a socketted IC chip. The story was that the onboard capacity was crippled for the sake of easy in-store upgrades.
They do officialy say that Treo is upgradable to have GPRS. So, they did already said that Treo has flash ;)
Handspring have a flash rom on the treo because the current rom has bugs and they want the ability to update it. There's already been a flash update for early Treo 180 models. Once they iron out the bugs, they'll burn it in a masked rom for new models, and save money.
There is no space for user apps on the rom by default, the OS takes up all 4MB, but you can delete the foreign language apps to free up space
The rom is a toshiba type
There is 2MB (maybe 3MB, I forget) of flash on the mobile radio too.
Handspring have always admitted to having a flash rom, but do not support any utility which modifies it, the article is in one of their knowledge-base pages.
There probably won't be any major Palm OS upgrades in the foreseeable future, and almost certainly not for the Treo. Palm OS 5 won't run on it.
Just so ya know.
There are memory chips that are reset by exposing them to light.
Taken from here.
An EPROM (erasable-and-programmable ROM) is programmed in exactly the same manner as a PROM. However, EPROMs can be erased and reprogrammed repeatedly. To erase an EPROM, you simply expose the device to a strong source of ultraviolet light. (A window in the top of the device allows the light to reach the silicon.) By doing this, you essentially reset the entire chip to its initial-unprogrammed-state. Though more expensive than PROMs, their ability to be reprogrammed makes EPROMs an essential part of the software development and testing process.
-... ---
Rather than simply invent a new model, they could bargin out the old one, and give an extra boost, by claiming to have installed a Flash ROM for your convenience.
Same product, new label; and since they never promised that the old one has a Flash Rom you can't feel cheated when you open the box of your new handspring, only to find it eerily similar to the one you already had.
There was a recent study by a German scientist Dr. Helmut Pottman proving that leaving your PDA in direct sunlight for just 10 minutes a day could erase your PDA's EPROM-chips in just a few weeks. The PDA could start acting erratically in a few days, but they usually lasted for at least two weeks. One way to protect the pda is to put a thin sheet of plastic over it. Helmut discovered this after accidentally placing a sandwich wrapper on top of his PDA.
You could also keep it under your tinfoil hat - that should protect it.
"Thin sheet of plastic" protects it? More so than the thick sheet of plastic that the case is composed of?
"Dr. Helmut Pottman?" Surely he's published his "recent study" on the web somewhere? Show me the link - German's ok, I can read that...
C'mon... You can troll better than this! (Though you might want to send your post to ZDNet - they might fall for it...)
-- My Weblog.
So tell me IF they hadn't got flash ROM's in them how the heck would the software upgrade to enable GPRS work then?
:-)
Answers on post card
Yes the Visors don't have flash ROM's but the treos have. That;s one of the nice things about them.
Happens all the time. CPU's are one extreme example. Early Intel celerons had the hidden capacity to be used in a multi processor setup. This was only changed when Intel noted that a lot of users where opting to buy two dirt cheap celerons rather then the overpriced PII(I) they wanted you to buy. Same with overclockin. It is easy enough to accomplish with an AMD chip, don't have Intel myself anymore so couldn't say, but AMD sure as hell ain't telling users about it. I started my IT career on the PROGRESS platform, RDMS and 4GL in one. Their monitoring tool had a "secret" section I only learned about when a rep visitid for some testing.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The developers of the hardware usually aren't the ones who are lying. I work for a fairly large company and I can safely tell you that the engineers (that's me) don't sit around and plot to hide features. The way it usally goes down is that some guy in marketing gets a hold of technical documentation that is being developed along with the product. Once he gets it, he gives us a call and starts asking if feature so and so should really be documented. One thing is for certain though, marketing seems to get the final say as to what gets published and what doesn't.
The corperate benifit of some of this stuff is fairly easy to see. For instance, say we make a chip called the Wizbang 3900. Now, this chip is going to be released in the 3901, 3903 and 3909 flavors each with different features. Since a run through the fab can cost upwards of $500k, it is much easier to just make one version, then just label them differently. The same thing is true with the development boards. A lot of times the board is only populated with the parts to allow that feature set. By populating more/different parts of the board, different features can be achived with out requiring a different board spin. All of this saves money and development costs, but does lead to some documentation holes.
So in short, blame it not marketing not the engineers. We're the good guys.
It's because there's super secret spyware in the device that needs the flash memory to gather data on your useage habits for later reporting back to big brother.
I vaguely recall US Robotics doing something like this with their early Sportster modems a few years ago. IIRC, you could turn your $250 Sportster 14.4K into a $400 Courier Dual Standard (HST!) 16.8K by sending a command string that flipped a switch in the firmware and enabled the Courier code. I tried to find a page on it, but the best I was able to do was a few messages archived in Google groups.
Do hardware manufacturers understate the capabilties of their products? I guess the answer is "All the time, man. All the time."
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
First of all, it's not the developers who lie most likely, but that's just nitpicking. It's probably the marketing people.
But anyway, they probably lie for the same reasons that Microsoft disabled OS calls necessary for a bootloader to function.
***They don't want you to boot PalmOS, or WinCE, or whatever off the device and install something else.***
I'm not into MSoft bashing, but even I can't deny this one. They did it, plain and simple. And now it appears that Handspring may be using similar tactics.
I know it sucks for those of us who like to install alternative OS's on our PDAs, but on the other hand, I can also understand why it doesn't really fit into their business model.
Just think of it as Ford welding their cars' engines in place, so you couldn't easily swap the engine for a different one.
If you want to easily use an alternative OS on your PDA, here's the best options in no particular order, IMO:
Ipaq
Zaurus
Agenda VR-3
Old WinCE device and NetBSD
THere are probably others, but it's too early to think.
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
Well, maybe wrong is a little harsh. This is all opinion. I'd strongly say that the reason why though is that they don't want companies or people writing their own instructions on the ROM. After all, they strongly support PALM OS, and they wouldn't want to make it easier for people to migrate to other software.
haha
Ummm and the ones produced next week will be the same, and every run was checked. They didn't find any exceptions to their theory, but again this doesn't meant that there are none. Have Handspring confirmed that FlashROM is standard... nope.
t ml or http://www.symbian.com/news/2001/nokia7650-feat.ht ml ?
And in terms of butt ugly, sure it beats Palm but does it beat... http://www.symbian.com/news/2002/soneric-p800-2.h
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Flash rom is EEPROM or Electronicly Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory
This article on TreoCentral is even more interesting.. They did a review with pictures of the Treo 300.. That's the Sprint CDMA Model.. Wish they had some more info on when it will be available, since this is the one that I'm waiting for..
After the development of the VAX (1977-78 with large wire wrapped boards), VAXes on chips were developed (early to mid 80s), a small system was eventually developed: the microVAX. It had two bus board expansion slots (a proprietary DEC bus - was it Q-bus?) originally. The platform was wildly popular and sold well, yet they wanted to sell even more. They tried to do so by cheapening down the box and lowering the sale price. One thing they did with the cheaper version of the microVAX was to provide only one bus expansion slot, keeping the price point for the two bus slot system higher. The cost to re-tool the box fab plant would have been rather high, hence for the cheaper box the same mother boards were used and the second bus slot was filled in with epoxy rendering it unusable. Some enterprising customers, with access to chemical stockrooms filled with appropriate epoxy solvents, found that with a bit of dissolving, scraping, and cleaning; the cheaper microVAX could be made to have two bus slots just like its more expensive older brother. The VAX hardware hack went down in history as a legend.
It's an easter egg!
[o]_O
As can be seen.
--- What?
If it's a copy protection workaround of course they lie. That's why they're called "devices".
I'm still using the Palm III I bought originally for the simple fact that the only complaint I have about it is that it's difficult, sometimes impossible, the read under certain lighting conditions and nothing I've seen since, from either Palm or Handspring, has seemed to me to be all that much an improvement.
:(.
My Palm III gets used much less than it otherwise would because of this
I note that both my Casio wristwatch and my Kyocera cell phone, both with Indiglo back-lighting, are easy to read under *any* lighting conditions. With smaller fonts, no less. (I'm not sure the Kyocera is actually Indiglo, per se, just something that looks much like it.)
So what I'm wondering is: why haven't the PDA manufacturers caught on to this?
When a product is designed, especially when the product is part of an evolving line of similar products, the product may contain bits of technology that are there to test various design points or manufacturing methods. While these are part of the product, if the features these technology pieces provide are not advertised, then the manufacturer has no duty to provide support for them.
Support is one of the most costly items in a products lifecycle. I remember a statistic (I can't quote the source) that 50% of the cost of software is in the support and maintainance of it after release. I would venture that Handspring has looked at what it would take to support this feature and decided that there is not enough margin in the product to support it even if the capability is provided in the hardware.
A final thought, they may have discovered some sort of performance or reliability problem with the flash ROM and instead of correcting the problem (potentially quite costly), they removed the feature so they did not have to support it.
-tpg.
Late 70's/Early 80's Techtronics used to ship
the 4014 Storage Tube Terminal. To convert it
to a 4015 you paid some big bucks to Techtronics
and a technician came out and clipped a couple
of wires to enable the additional features.
TI's TI-58/59 calculators had undocumented
instructions that were useful in getting
programs smaller (Direct access to processor
stack). (1977?)
Undocumented/Denied features have been going
on for years. Why be surprised ?
The Voodoo2 card (not Voodoo Banshee) was made by MicroConversions and publicized as much as they could, so Apple "getting wind of it" is a somewhat misleading characterization - this was a product (the iMac GameWizard) sold openly and advertised, not some secretive hack like a blue box that was sold on the QT. Apple didn't kill the product (though they did remove the "mezzanine" slot from iMacs sold from January '99 on); MicroConversions went out of business for a number of reasons (customers sort of rebelled against the company for its high prices and unsatisfactory driver support). IIRC, another company bought up unsold iMac GameWizard inventory and continued to distribute them; I believe they even announced intentions to continue manufacturing them, although I'm not sure whether these plans ever went through. The market for them (gamers with early iMacs) is finite and fairly small, so I wouldn't expect the cards to continue to be manufactured forever anyway.
The TI-83+ Silver Edition (graphing calc) has approximately 96KB more memory than the standard TI-83+. However, Texas Instruments doesn't allow the user to access this extra memory through the OS, although there are a few programs that use it for certain features. (See VirtualCalc on ticalc.org if you're interested and/or disbelieve me.)
Hopefully, they'll make this memory usable in a future OS version, but I kinda doubt it.
Do you seriously thing that an automaker would advertise their engine as having only 140 hp if with a small software change they could get 160 hp? I mean come on.
No, they spec the engines out based on a number of factors relating to emissions, fuel economy and reliability. So by tweaking you adjust the compromise. Automakers do refine engines over time to gain more power, but they try do so in ways that don't effect it negatively. By that I mean, decreasing reliability or not allowing the car to meet US regulations regarding emissions and fuel economy.
This is exactly correct.
Take it from a developer for a multi billion dollar tech company. There are many features that marketing wants killed and get left in but hidden simply because it's too hard to test the version that has them removed. I have seen this in hardware and software both.
I'm posting Anonymously to avoid various repercussions, in this case i'm playing the prudent Coward
The original iMac had a so-called Mezzanine slot that allowed people to upgrade the iMac's paltry 2megs of ATi Rage (iirc) video. The revision B iMac no longer had the slot soldered in, but still had the place on the motherboard -- and some companies offered to solder in a slot so you could install video card upgrades (the Voodoo 2 was the only one I'm aware of, but that was a big upgrade, esp in 1998).
Apple didn't exactly deny the slot was there, but they weren't too excited to show it off (it's not in the iMac Rev. A's specs page) -- they made a pretty concerted effort to make sure people knew the slot wasn't supported. Wasn't long until the motherboard was changed and the slot was gone completely. Funny to think they were probably only saving a few cents to take the soldered slot off the mobo for Rev. B, but 2 times a million iMacs starts to add up!
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
Do you seriously thing that an automaker would advertise their engine as having only 140 hp if with a small software change they could get 160 hp? I mean come on.
Actually, yes, they do. They love to be able to use the exact same parts between models but charge different prices. So they tweak it one way for the "normal" model and tweak it another way (at no cost to them, really) for the "premium" model. Otherwise they couldn't sell premium models without investment on their part. Have you ever heard of marketing?
Of course, not all companies do that and it depends on who the car line is targeted at.
Rare it is these days that when you pay for a T1 from the local encumbant monopoly that you actually GET a T1 connection.
In reality, you are far more likely to get a DSL connection (usually HDSL) which mean they pocket the T1 installation fees and hand you a DSL modem instead of a router and have it run over a plain old copper pair.
The silliest part is that most of the DSL technologies will go much much faster than T1, so if the would pass along the improvements to the customer that might not be such a bad thing, but of course, they limit it to the exact T1 speed.
"You get what you pay for" only applies when it comes to customer savings, no company ones.
>Do you seriously thing that an automaker would
>advertise their engine as having only 140 hp if
>with a small software change they could get 160
>hp? I mean come on.
Single brand (Porsche, BMW) companies usually don't - but those who have luxury brands and ordinary brands (Toyota, Honda, VW, Nissan, Ford, GM...) do. They want to share parts to reduce cost, but have to intentionally downtune the cheaper brands to prevent it from competing with its own luxury brands.
It happens in the computer world too. Remember the Celeron 450...er...300? And the i486 "SX"?
If flash is inside my treo under cover, its obviously because ming the merciless is in there trying to take over the earth. Now that you've let the cat out of the bag ming will find out... oh well, time to switch allegiences. Hail Ming. Hail Ming. (you can marry my girlfriend if you like, as long as you give me a planet or something)
There is a difference. Erasing the data on a flash is done in blocks or over the entire chip.
If users install applications into this flash space, Handspring can't upgrade or patch the OS using this flash space. Now the number of support calls quintuple, because users flashed applications into this space (violating their warantee, I might add).
I see nothing at all wrong with what they've done, and it happens all the time in electronics.
Very poor quality troll. For one thing, PDA's don't use EPROMs, they use mask-programmed roms, which are faster and cheaper. Furthermore, sunlight doesn't erase EPROMS at all. I've tried it. Of course, it could be because there's not that much strong sunlight in these latitudes...
Yes, they turn down the turbo boost because you're putting more wear and tear on the engine running it at a higher boost value. Less waranty repairs and a longer engine life are both valuble qualities to have in car not aimed at car enthusiasts.
Don't support their disposable mentality!
-Kevin
> Does anyone know any other examples?"
I seem to remember that you could turn a copy of
Windows NT workstation into a copy of Windows NT
server just by flipping a couple of bits in the
registry.
The Wang OIS (late 1970's minicomputer) could be ordered with 2.5, 5 or 8 (?) meg hard disks. What they didn't tell you was that the difference between the 2.5 and the 5 meg versions was the DIP switch setting on the controller board... You would order the upgrade to the 5 meg, and the tech would come out, change the switch setting, reformat and reinstall. Then you would get the bill!
Another early example (early 90s) was the Intel 486 chip series. The 486SX was the cheap alternative to the 486DX because it supposedly contained no math coprocessor. Ah, but it *did* contain a coprocessor - not that you could use it.
486s were all built with a coprocessor, but the SX coprocessor was disabled.
Very poor quality troll
Is it now? Have you tried searching for the study? I have provided more than enough info for you to find it on the web.
Actually, the story I heard is that Intel made 486 chips. The ones that ended up with working coprocessors were sold as 486DX, and the ones with broken coprocessors had the links to this part of the circuit severed and were sold as 486SX.
I believe this is still going on with processor speed. They don't set out to make several different speeds of CPU, but rather make the CPU as best they can and sort them out by how fast they can be clocked after the fact.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
from the article:
"At the time of its release, Apple wouldn't say what -- if anything -- an unlabeled "Bondi blue" port cover on the right side of the Revision A and B machines might be for. As it turns out, the closed architecture design of the iMac hides a 160-pin connector clearly labeled "MEZZANINE" on the motherboard. This connector is basically a sort of PCI variant (PCI is known as a "mezzanine bus.") Although Apple says the connector says the connector is for internal development only and shouldn't be used, a few third-party companies supplied expansion connectors for Voodoo2 video cards and other expansion options. Some postulated that this bus could someday provide a connector for a video capture system, based on hardware designed to support the "Final Cut" video editing software that Apple bought from Macromedia, but Apple discontinued the mezzanine bus and infrared port on Rev. C and later iMac models."These were included in the iMac, but apple issued warnings to third party developers to *not* develop peripherals that used these ports, and a couple of revisions later they were dropped.
I'm guessing things like this happen when developers are still in the process of 'tweaking' their designs. Although the flash is more integral than a couple of ports maybe it will be dropped in later revisions of the treo?
Why?
- Race to market requires using a part that is available (with more capability) instead of the designed part which will appear in the next production run.
- Software support for hardware function was behind schedule.
- Cheaper to use just one part in a model series. Some users won't pay for extra function, but some will.
- Dangerous feature in the hands of the user.
You all know about overclocking. How about:- Single density floppies are just double density ones that failed paranoid testing.
- Many scanner radios with more memory than announced. Snip snip, more channels.
- Many amateur radios that transmit outside amateur bands. A dangerous feature in the hands of an idiot, but a hot selling point for those who need it.
- Autos with computer control, and reprogramming the chip improves performance. (The average program is for the average use -- high altitude use can benefit from a different program.)
- Caller-ID boxes that come with 25 memory slots, but contain a stock memory chip that can do 99. Snip snip. US West gave these away with Caller-ID service, and wanted people to buy larger capacity. Cheaper to have just one hardware.
So, yes, it happens all the time. The smart consumer can benefit.Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of THESE!!!
Maybe the flash ROMs in question "fell of the back of a truck", if you know what I mean.
slainfu
"I can't be a terrorist if you're sucking my bum."
I think there's a very specific reason why the flash is there, and why it hasn't been talked about and may not be in future versions - the GPRS update.
Certain new cell phones (which shall not be named, due to NDA) have Bluetooth, despite the manufacturer's claims to the contrary. The chips lie dormant in the phones until the company can work a business model around them...
Since it has a cell phone & a PDA, the cellphone probally has worse security then an Oki 900.
They might not want you to reprogram the cell phone.
PhysicsGenius is a pretty darned good troll, but my favorite troll by far is Sir Elton John. He has only gotten two score 0s out of 27 messages. Impressive. Not only that, he's gotten a score 5 early in his career. Pretty damn shweet if you ask me.
BMW claims their 2001-02 M-Roadster does 0-60 in 5.0 seconds. Mine does 0-60 in well under that (I don't have a good way to measure it precicely, but I've driven enough sports cars to have a good idea). The various auto mags that have run their own test place it between 4.5 and 4.75 secs. Why would BMW understate the performance so significantly? So that it doesn't cut into sales of the higher-priced M3 Convertable and the much higher-priced (and actually slower) Z-8....
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
i don't know if many of you guys are realizing this -- but anybody have a clue how hard it is to find non-flash memory these days?
i mean -- nobody uses those things? i bet you a dollar to a donut that meg-for-meg, flash comes in cheaper.
think about other memories too -- EDO 256M is $42; PC133 SDRAM is 256M; wait a sec -- isn't SDRAM "better" than EDO?
supply and demand, bud...
besides -- not telling you that the thing is flash-able avoids you even *asking* an upgrade. it makes two things easier: tech support and $$;
they make more money (you buy new system) AND they don't have to support wacked out Treo100 running Palm 4.2 configurations. hey i'd do it too.
except back to the first point: i *would* put non-flashable ROM in the thing except that
1) it will drive up the cost by 5 bux per unit
2) if i ever need to do a recall (OS bug, say), i trash crates of units instead of re-flash and sell them refurbed
3) any system that is really broke and returned and needs to be reflashed - i can't fix 'em
yeah... i bet if you were them you would make the exact same choices.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
I think at least in Handspring's case, they've had a philosophy of planned obsolescense by building their products with hard ROMs.
Obviously, they can't be upgraded that way, so in their all knowing marketing minds, they're hoping users will continue to upgrade to newer products from Handspring.
I disagree. Handspring has always had aggressive pricing: for what you get, the price has always been very good.
(And recently they have insane low prices on Visor products... probably because sales took such a big hit after Donna Dubinsky said Handspring would be exiting the organizer market. People don't want to buy an orphan product, so Handspring slashed prices to keep sales moving. Ironically, the Treo 90 makes it clear that Handspring has not, after all, decided to exit the organizer market! But Visor devices with Springboard slots are never going to see any new models.)
I used to work for a manufacturing company. They were obsessed with Cost Of Goods. If a flash chip really costs $5 extra, it would totally make sense for Handspring to want to get rid of it. $5 additional cost of goods is probably worth $15 on the retail price; they can abosorb that now but down the road that's a lot.
I paid $300 for my first Visor Deluxe. You can now get one new for $120.
And, all that said, how many Handspring customers really care? I've never bothered to install an OS update on my Visor Deluxe; I haven't had any problems with it, so who needs it? Once the OS is stable, having it in ROM won't bother very many people.
I, personally, would cheerfully pay $20 or more for a flash chip on my PDA. However, I'm a geek, and most people wouldn't choose to pay that much. And it would cost too much to produce two versions of each PDA (the flash version and the cheaper ROM version) and let customers choose.
I wish they could put the ROM in a socket or something so it would be easy to swap in a flash chip. Alas that isn't going to happen on a tiny PDA device, even if it didn't add to cost and make the device potentially less reliable.
I don't have a problem with what Handspring has done. But I might try to buy one of the "early" model Handsprings now that I know about this.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Proper adjusting of fuel/timing maps will not cause your engine to fail. In fact, if done properly, even increasing boost pressure will not lead to premature failure.
It is true, in most cases you will be sacrificing fuel economy, or emissional quality. However, its often possible to gain horsepower by siming advancing the timing a bit. All that is required is to increase the octace of the fuel. So if your car makes 115 hp at 87 octace, you can have 120+ hp, if you dont mind the cost of 93 (if its available in your area).
The problems come in when some moron buys a pre-burned chip, or doesn't know what they are doing when they alter the maps (ie. not on a dyno).
I really don't think this is that uncommon. Processor manufacturers do it all the time!
sig.
However, the demand for 68EC030 CPU's outstripped supply by quite a large amount, and consequently Motorola took to stamping '68EC030' on the top of perfectly good, functional, fully-fledged 68030's and selling them at a cheaper price. I had one such beastie on my GVP accellerator card on my A2000 rev B6. It's still around somewhere.
I worked at a Philips research site. During the days of the 2x and 4x writers they only produced 4x capable writers. The limits in speed/read/write were set by the firmware. (And ofcourse the frontpanel was a little different. )
After a while the story leaked. On the web you could download 3th party flash tools that bypassed the build-in protection against 'overspeeding' your writer.
I don't know if they are still doing this with their new writers.
They reason why they did it? Low production costs. When a writer went out to mass-production (mostly in a cheap labour country) they only had to change the frontpanel and the firmware chip.
Sonic Blue makes no mention of any firmware upgrade capability, and indeed, upgrade attempts fail at first. The Sp-90 is basically the same as the sp-100 though, so editing the the firmware image hex file and changing the model number on the first line to 'SP-90', followed by nulls, will allow you to upgrade the firmware on the SP-90 model to the latest of the SP-100. Also, rename the file to SP-90.hex. Use regular SP-100 firmware update files afterwards because your SP-90 will internally become a SP-100 after the first update.
A co-worker who used to be involved with palm had recently purchased a Sony clie (that spelled right?). Anyway, I asked if it was upgradable to Palm OS 4... He filled me in on a bit of details as to why the answer was no. Apparently licensees of Palm OS must agree to produce non-upgradable clones if they want to run the OS. This provides an incentive for consumers to buy true Palm devices, as it is the only software upgrade path.
*TheDarb
This sig intentionally left blank.
Obviously you haven't read Handspring's site close enough!
I already knew this from doing my own research into the Treo... I recently began working with Frontline Specialists as a Handspring Rep.
Organizer Featuers (sic)
Q. Is the OS upgradeable?
A. Yes. We use flash memory in order to be able to provide updates such as GPRS capability. Handspring does not intend to provide incremental versions of Palm OS but we will issue updaters for the Treo communicators from time to time such as the GPRS update later this year.
Get your glasses on!
This user account is inactive account replaced by the PDA
Not that these hidden features means anything in particular. While you're writing software you might well hide the options to your fresher code because it hasn't been tested yet. It may work most of the time but you don't want to support it, or document it when things might change too.
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
Basic4 computers sold a harddisk pack that had a 40 meg capacity. When you ordered more storage a technician visited the site, opened the Basic4 and flipped a bit, this expanded the capacity of the pack to 70 meg.
Seth
"Is that real poncho or a Sears poncho?" ~~FZ
I hack my caller ID box from 25 calls memory to 99 calls memory. The trick was to remove one jumper that told the chip not to use the extra memory. I think I read it in 2600. I believe that there was $50 dollar premium for the 99 call model dispite not coming with less hardware and less cost to make.
I've noticed from time to time a "feature" is burried and said to not exist becouse it's not supported in the typical way.
PalmOs provides some support for flash rom and no doupt the Handspring units lack that support.
There are some good reasons for not announcing this fact.
I've noticed on my Handspring Visor while I have 2 meg memory it's actually 2 meg total memory.. including the rom. This could be Handspring goofing around and giving less ram to cut costs. But I doupt they could easly do that.
More likely the rom was copied to ram. This is a trick to speed things up a tad done on some PCs.
If Handspring dose this will ALL the devices they sell then the flashrom would automaticly be cut off when it wasn't needed anymore.
It makes sense to me. Handspring provides software updates from defects in PalmOs on older visors. Yet they don't have flash. This suggests to me that the patch is being done in ram and not to the rom itself.
This also suggests that if you hard reset the unit your patch is vaperised. A good thing when you think about it... Viruses? Yeah you remember those. Palm isn't evil like Microsoft but they aren't totally benine. Just as evil as Kelloggs.. (Or do you believe coco puffs are actually a healthy breakfast? I don't.. Never did.. not even as a kid.. Good to expose kids to obveous marketting lies)
So basicly yeah it may be there but just not supported enough to tell the costummer.
The'd expect it to be supported in the usual ways and when it's not they'd be pritty angry.
I don't actually exist.
Me too! I used to work for a 'puter manufacturer. Frequently they outsourced the manufacture of the components or OEM'd from someone else and did not want to write drivers or support the feature, like USB on some early servers.
Maybe I'm looking at this all wrong, but couldn't Flash ROM be there to support GPRS?
l ?sub_nav_section=FAQs&prod_cat_name=Treo#general5)
from their website (http://www.handspring.com/products/treo/faq.jhtm
"Q. Will your product be upgradeable to GPRS?
A. Yes. In the second half of the year, Handspring plans to offer a software upgrade that enables Treo to work on GPRS networks. The upgrade will be available from Handspring's web site. The current hardware in Treo is GPRS-ready."
Just my $0.02 (Canadian, before taxes)
... but they still advertise it as an DVD-R...
Just another example...
GM also does this. The motor and tranny in the newer TransAms WS6 is the same as the corvette, BUT has like 15?? less HP because it is like 1/2 the price....supposedly it is just detuned. Can anyone dis/prove this statement, i'm not 100% sure about it.
LinuxWorx
Spelling errors are intentional as are gramatical error
Oddly, a lot of people seem to find this objectionable. I'm not sure why, though. If you have a CPU with a defective FPU, what's wrong with disabling the broken FPU and selling it at a discount? Or if it's more fragile and can't run as fast, why not lower its rating to whatever speed it can run at, and, again, sell it at a discount?
The only way the typical /.er can pick up a chick is with a forklift. -- AC