On Mon, July 1, 2013 14:03, John R Pierce wrote: > On 7/1/2013 10:57 AM, Nathan Duehr wrote: >> DRM'ed server hardware. Pure evil. > > why is that evil? why should you pay for features you're not using? >
Actually, firmware control of system features has been part of HPQ's business practice for as long as I can remember. The HP3000 series of MPE/iX mini computers ran on exactly the same hardware as the HP9000 HP-UX systems, but were priced considerably higher than their HP9000 equivalents. However, one could not simply run MPE/iX on the HP9000 hardware. One had to pay HPQ to come in and run a system utility that reset a flag on the processor to enable that. On the other hand, one could run HP-UX on the HP3000 hardware without requiring any changes. A similar thing applied to processor speeds. HPQ would typically release a family of HP3000/HP9000 processors that differed only in speed. The trick was all the processors in the family were identical other than the firmware settings. The processing speed was throttled by firmware switches that one could pay HPQ to turn off in order to increase usable processor cycles. As far as I could ever discover the clock speed was constant so one paid the same for the electricity and a/c whether one had the lowest or the highest processor speed. Mind you, we no longer deal with HPQ or employ any of their hardware because of these and similar experiences. In fact, HPQ's business practices are what turned our firm over to FOSS and commodity hardware in the first instance (after using HPQ exclusively for 20+ years). Poisoning the well so to speak for any other name brand vendor. Nice gear; company, not so much. -- *** E-Mail is NOT a SECURE channel *** James B. Byrne mailto:byrn...@harte-lyne.ca Harte & Lyne Limited http://www.harte-lyne.ca 9 Brockley Drive vox: +1 905 561 1241 Hamilton, Ontario fax: +1 905 561 0757 Canada L8E 3C3 _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
