291–300 of 773 posts
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That can't be legal? Not in the EU, anyway.
Are you saying dash cams are illegal broadly there?
https://europe.autonews.com/automakers/tesla-warns-its-camer...
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Yeah these discussions always give me a bit of cognitive dissonance. On one hand, I like owning my software or content I purchased (talking about DRM) On the other, people expect most things to be a "live service" in terms of updates, which isn't sustainable if you only ever get paid a small onetime fee for your software. If you make the fee large, like Modo/Photoshop did, then it acts as a financial gatekeeper to yo…
> On the other, people expect most things to be a "live service" in terms of updates Do they? Most people I know don't want anything to update as long as it's working. They don't want new features. They don't want new UI changes. They'll dismiss/ignore prompts to update for as long as they possibly can. In very very rare cases people want "live service". They want their GPS to give them traffic information for exampl…
> Software-locked features that need to be activated by the owner paying or subscribing to a service are becoming increasingly popular in the auto industry. Popular is the wrong word. Common, maybe. But popular?
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Is it rent seeking/overreach? I make a video game and charge $50 for it. Later I make a DLC and charge $25 for it. Is your claim that if I keep them as separate purchasable downloads, I'm not rent seeking? But if instead combine the game and dlc into a single executable (to simplify build and distribution) and put the dlc behind a software lock, somehow that is now rent seeking/overreach and I deserve to have hackers…
Even though that is not exactly the issue I refer to, I still say yes, that is my claim, from a moral perspective. If the content is on the disc or shipped as part of the files of the base game, then it should be accessible without additional purchase. Otherwise, you're undercharging for the original deliverable, and overcharging for the actual "downloadable content". Imagine this taken to the logical extreme. I sell…
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Even though that is not exactly the issue I refer to, I still say yes, that is my claim, from a moral perspective. If the content is on the disc or shipped as part of the files of the base game, then it should be accessible without additional purchase. Otherwise, you're undercharging for the original deliverable, and overcharging for the actual "downloadable content". Imagine this taken to the logical extreme. I sell…
Seems morally dubious. When you purchase software, it doesn't mean you automatically own the bytes and can do whatever you want with them. There are things call licenses that dictate what you are allowed to do, and you agree to the license when you decide to use the software. If you agree not to use the software for commercial purposes when you purchase it, you can't morally decide "my bytes my choice" and just to us…
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I'm somewhat torn too. IBM and I'm sure others have shipped enterprise hardware for years that was partially locked. You might get a machine with 16 cpus but you only paid for 8, for example, but you could license the rest as you grew. It seems a little similar and it was in no way underhanded, everyone knew what the deal was. However I'll echo what another poster said. I say Tesla should be free to sell whatever the…
AMD shipped CPUs for quite some time where if you were lucky you could unlock additional cores that had been disabled for various reasons
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I kinda get it. Rather than maintaining a supply of multiple parts which complicates your supply chain and install/repair procedures, Tesla is making cars nearly 100% identical physically and differentiating in software.
The supply and install problem clearly isn't that hard, auto makers have been doing it for many decades at this point. Plus, it seems backwards from a business standpoint. You always have the cost of installing the hardware, but now you only get a % of users who agree to pay for the additional cost? The only way to "fix" that is to artificially raise the price of the product so effectively everyone is paying, which m…
Are you referring to the legacy auto manufacturers that still can't make EVs profitably in 2023? Perhaps Ford with its negative 58.9% EBIT margin on their EV division [1]?
Of course you can "solve" a more complex supply-chain and multiple vehicle configurations. It just costs more money. And therefore reduces your profit margin. If you do too much problem-solving of this type, your margin might end up negative. Not every EV manufacturer can subsidize their EV business with a high-margin ICE business.
[1] https://media.ford.com/content/fordmedia/fna/us/en/news/2023...
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Producing the extra weight of the seat heater requires extra fuel to burn. Now multiply that by the number of cars on the road. Will cost the customer a (small) amount extra in fuel costs for a part that is not being used. So there is an economic argument that ya, we can subsidize manufactures by taxing people more. Seems like a bad deal to me. Now lets talk about CO2 output of driving around extra dead weight. Makes…
I think the usual "heated seats" example is a poor one, since it's so obviously an optional feature that not everyone would want to hack around. Let's say instead that BMW decided all their car models would be physically 4 seaters, but in order to be allowed to use the back two seats, you had to pay a large monthly "sedan fee". And if they caught you using the back seats without paying, they'd sue you. Would anyone a…
Either way if I truly think I am right, then BMW, etc should just go ahead with this plan. It should be a money loser for them in the long run. But on second thought why burn all this CO2 just to prove a point. We should probably collectively put a stop to it sooner rather than later.
I wonder if Tesla will start using physical one-shot fuse bits buried deep in hard-to-access components (eg. hardwire a heater control relay open in the final programming step at the factory) to make these type of attacks more difficult. Of course that would preclude up-selling the feature later.