Firmware Upgrades For Everything 285
eggoeater writes "Forbes Magazine has an article discussing how more portable electronics are not only suggesting firmware upgrades, but requiring them in order to get all the features! Apparently the new Lyra A/V Jukebox will sometimes display a message stating that 'this feature will be available in future upgrades.' In addition, the article states that some patches are difficult and dangerous depending on the component. Some cell phone patches require a proprietary cable ($25) that will then wipe out your phone book. This raises concerns over alienating users that aren't tech-savvy and how this could affect perceptions of portable electronics as a whole."
Dude, where's my shares? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, I am cynical.
Let's start the discussion by raising the concern that if the majority of users aren't tech savvy and society is dominated by technology, doesn't this sound like a new dark age? History has shown that when the peasant mass is uneducated, the church and monarchy rule. Are we not heading in this direction again? Technology being the new "power"? How long until the masses catch up and stop being screwed?
They're just thinking ahead (Score:5, Insightful)
I see a business emerging! (Score:5, Insightful)
Or let the luddites live without the 'features'. Face it, that's why we became techies in the first place, to profit from everyone else's technophobia.
Slow down (Score:5, Insightful)
and maybe you would get it right without needing to "update/mess about with" every 3months
the consumer is not your beta tester
Bah .. (Score:5, Insightful)
Frankly, if I'm being forced to pay $25 for a cable to do necessary upgrades, you're going to alienate me whether I'm tech savvy or not. Especially if the 'unavailable' features were advertised as part of the item in question.
Crap (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Haven't had a problem with firmware updates yet. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know why anybody would seek a non-upgradable piece of hardware over an upgradable piece of hardware. New features through firmware updates should be quite welcome to everybody who can follow the simple precautions necessary to update.
Trust and the missing feature. (Score:5, Insightful)
Likewise with firmware in consumer goods. I don't trust them - if it's not there when I buy, I suspect they'll ship it in a "deluxe" version before they let me upgrade my DVD player/blender/mp3 player to get the same feature.
Simple Solution (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Dude, where's my shares? (Score:5, Insightful)
When corporations are held criminally liable for this sort of deceit. Don't hold your breath.(I too am cynical;)
the average (Score:5, Insightful)
many of us on
When a feature in your blender won't work becasue of a bug, people will stop buying your blender. It should just work without the user knowing anything about the inner workings.
Re:Dude, where's my shares? (Score:5, Insightful)
corporate planners are intentionally breaking their own products just to mess with you, but the fact is that right now consumers want whiz-bang products that come with every feature known to mankind, and they want them last Tuesday. There is no magic formula to get everything they want so the features come out but often with a bunch of bugs.
So how do you as an individual get around this? Easy, instead of rushing in to buy something and then whining about it later, read some objective reviews of the products you buy, talk to people (either in the real world or online) about them, and lastly take all the advertising you see with a grain of salt.
Yes I am realistic.
Yes I do eat meat.
Re:Haven't had a problem with firmware updates yet (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that the customer has in most cases already paid for these features. At that point, who is to say these "features" won't turn into vaporware.
This trend started with wireless NICs (Score:5, Insightful)
For example: I spent a day and a half trying to upgrade the firmware on an otherwise useless SMC "PCI" NIC, the SMC EZ Connect 802.11b 2602W v.1 [smc.com], not to be confused with the v.2 or v.3 models with completely different chipsets. I say "PCI" because the NIC is actually the 2632W v.1 PCMCIA NIC in a PLX "riser."
Thanks only to Jun Sun's mini-HOWTO [junsun.net] and "unofficial" firmware caches on the Web, I was able to upgrade the station firmware. Unfortunately, this did not result in the features I needed.
If vendors begin requiring consumers to flash firmware regularly, it needs to come out of the "underground" and be explained by the vendors. I'd also like to see DOS boot-disk-based firmware upgrade tools, like Dell's BIOS flash disks. I didn't like turning to Windows to run SMC's update program. (Linux and DOS attempts failed with this particular NIC.)
Thanks to the openap-ct [collegeterrace.net] project's Linux floppy I was able to use prism2_srec to flash a different NIC, though.
Helevius
Re:Bah .. (Score:5, Insightful)
This brings me to another point. Do not ever purchase contracts for a cell phone or anything from those in mall third parties. That is trouble waiting to happen. Go to a retail store and make sure the contract you are signing is with Cingular/Verizon, etc, not "JoesCellphones for Verizon".
Download implies upload (Score:5, Insightful)
Overlooked in this is that when you connect your product to the 'net to download new firmware, the product could have the ability to be able to upload as well. Who knows what the firmware in your stereo, or TV may report back about your use?
Re:Sounds like extortion to me.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Another way to control the consumer (Score:5, Insightful)
Although firmware upgrades could be a very positive thing for users, providing ways to customise and improve a device, they're also open to abuse. Apart from being a means to ship an inferior product earlier, this opens up an opportunity to control the consumer by messing with the normal product purchasing process. By doing this, the traditional rules of competition can be blurred enough for a company to succeed where it otherwise would not have.
The software industry has featured this idea for a while in a few forms: you buy the software, but then you don't really own it because you are just licenced to use it. Or you buy the software, but have to apply a critical update that comes with a licence change that changes it into something you wouldn't have purchased in the first place. Now, the hardware manufacturers can get in on the act, throwing the old rule book out the window. Companies will do anything to get ahead if they think they can get away with it. They're not people and have no sense of wrong or right - just a sense of profit or loss.
Firmware upgrades (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:They're just thinking ahead (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe they will get the idea and make a basic device with add on (firmware?) products which can't break the core device by updating.
The alternative is security/safety updates for phones, microwaves etc, requiring more and more processing power and getting locked into an upgrade cycle, like people have been in with their PC's for decades.
Re:Research it. (Score:2, Insightful)
This is when people have an onus to go out and buy some crap to give you, and you have the onus to do the same for them, before you can even visit for tea.
And, of course, the "present" is usually presented personally, and its kinda in bad taste to not open it up and fawn over it for a while. I mean, you don't really wanna hurt their feelings after they went through all that mad rush to get it for you do you? Its not like you personally have had to experience the same frustration yourself trying to hold up your end of the bargain. So, you open it and drool over it awhile so their feelings won't get hurt. Presto! Opened product!
Now, to add injury to it, if your donor finds out you returned the thing they so "carefully selected" for you, their feelings might be hurt. You wouldn't want that, would you?
Yep, a marketer's dream market.
Damm, I feel like Ebenezer Scrooge!
But before you bah-humbug me as such, I will say I think the holidays are for sharing as much time as you can with others, as our busy worklives, accounted for by the minute, doesn't leave much time for social interaction with loved ones. Its just the horning in of others with the fiduciary interest of milking this occasion for all its worth that irritates me so.
Re:Slow down (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why is this a problem? (Score:2, Insightful)
Although the article has a negative spin on the art of upgrading, I can see lots of positive aspects as well: new formats emerge could well be addressed with upgrades, security holes could be filled, etc. However, the device *must* do it well!
Re:Crap (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe because it would be the last time anyone, anywhere, ever bought a product from such a company.
A better idea is to provide enough real features to add credibility to the vapor in order to string the consumer along an endless line of upgrades and replacements. For a great example of this tactic, check out any company at all.
Re:I see a business emerging! (Score:2, Insightful)
Simple Concept: Be a *Late* Adopter (Score:5, Insightful)
- I bought a 4x DVD burner less than a year ago and had to firmware flash it. I can get an 8x now for less.
- Firmware flashing an 802.11g laptop wireless card went wrong and broke wireless networking on my laptop. As I hadn't set a system restore point, I had to re-install windows.
- I rushed out and bought SuSE Linux 9.0 for AMD64 as soon as it came out. Had to wait months for drivers to support my SATA drives and the onboard ALN on my MoBo.
I'm done.Video jukeboxes... I'll wait until trailer-park mamas are trampling each other at Walmart to get the $35 Christmas special model made by Kwok-tek or some other manufacturer you never heard of before.
- Greg
Re:As an engineer in the electronics industry... (Score:3, Insightful)
You bring out the greatest product in the world in a bad time period, say right after christmas rather than before, then your target group has already spent their money and won't really be interested in any sort of mass spending for a while to come, by which point your product will be old and considered(whether it is or not) obsolete so you'll have to at the very least drop the price substantially to sell it.
On a slightly unrelated note, anyone notice this doesn't happen to computer software anymore. I'm not even talking about things like Diablo I which use a game of the year award to hang onto full price for something like 5 years, I'm talking about regular software, the discount stuff from earlier seasons I used to buy and enjoy when I was in high school has seemingly disappeared. Wonder what happened, do old games still sell well at that price?
Re:Dude, where's my shares? (Score:3, Insightful)
What's your point? Where is it written that this compromise must be made if you're to have upgradeable firmware? It just makes updates possible after a product has shipped. There's nothing inherently bad about that.
Products that support and responsibly apply upgradeable firmware capabilities are better in every way. Products that ship early with buggy firmware "because they can" will still suck, just like there are sucky products that don't support firmware upgrades.
Not a path i like to see. (Score:5, Insightful)
Software has been sold with insane conditions that people take the responsibility off of the manufacturer but that is because software has been treated as art and not as real products. Hardware on the other hand do not have those conditions so when you buy something and it doesnt work, return it. The only way to remedy this problem is if enough people stay away from companies following the path of almost ready hardware. If its broke, they should fix it, not us.
The R&D dept's are loosing their senses (Score:1, Insightful)
Beauty in design.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The true beauty of technology should be judged in its apparent simplicity.
Re:As an engineer in the electronics industry... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is, not everyone can be great; most people are just average. Same goes for organizations; most are just going to be average (read: crappy), so they don't really have a hope of putting out a 10x better product. So instead they go for time-to-market and try to make more money that way.
The second part of the problem is with consumers: rather than wait around for the 10x better product, they line up to buy the first product out the gate, no matter how crappy it is. The companies with crappy products have figured this out, and now they're exploiting it.
What can we do about this? Almost nothing. Unless you can invent a mind-control device that telepathically reprograms everyone in society to be careful consumers who demand the highest in quality, we're pretty much stuck with our fellow citizens being shortsighted idiots. Individually, all we can do is learn from their mistakes, and be very careful about our purchases. Exercise caution and patience; don't buy anything on a whim, or without careful research for anything over $50 or $100. And don't become an "early adopter" of anything. By doing this, you'll end up saving yourself a lot of time and money in the long run.
Definition of evil (Score:5, Insightful)
If by evil you mean allow others to die so they can profit, then a slightly smaller number are evil.
The point is, there is some definition of "evil" for which a lot (if not most) corporations are evil.
My definition is simple: if a corporation is willing to harm others in its pursuit of profit, it is evil. By this definition, quite a few are evil. Since this is condoned (and encouraged!) by our government, it seems to get worse.
Now, you can argue that corporations don't make these decisions, individuals do, but that is simply prevarication. Groups of people will do things indivduals will not; this makes the group culpable. (Now, defining the individuals within the group may be difficult.)
So how do you as an individual get around this? Easy, instead of rushing in to buy something and then whining about it later, read some objective reviews of the products you buy, talk to people (either in the real world or online) about them, and lastly take all the advertising you see with a grain of salt.
This is excellent advice, and I certainly agree with it; but that doesn't change the economic reality that sometimes, there is only Hobson's Choice, at best. In some areas, if you want phone service, you must use the single provider in your area. This is just one example among many.
Further, consider how people have been reduced to "consumers." Between that and, "worker," that is our role in society-- to work, and to consume. Who profits most from this? I'll bet you dollars to donuts (Mmmmm.... Krispie Kreme....) it isn't the individual.
I don't take exception to your arguments. I take exception to the reference to the "uninformed opinions" so popluar here on
Just because you are right about unthinking consumerism driving shoddy workmanship in the electronic gadgets sector does not negate the evil nature of many corporations. Enron did not happen in a void.
Re:Drooling Morons (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem with most people is that, as the previous poster said, they're mentally lazy. They just learn enough to do their job (and usually only adequately then), and outside of that they don't want to learn anything at all. So when something goes wrong, they're completely helpless. The toilet breaks, and they have to call the plumber and pay $100. The car breaks, and they have to go to a mechanic and pay $1500 because he tells them they need all kinds of things replaced which don't really need to be, but they don't know any better. They don't know anything about finances, so they buy all kinds of crap with credit cards and pay huge interest fees, never save any cash, then lose their job and they're suddenly out on the street.
What people should try to do is become knowledgable, and hopefully competent, in most areas of life that they have to deal with (house repair, auto repair if you own a car, law, finances, etc.), so that they can take care of themselves instead of being helpless and easily duped.
Re:Dude, where's my shares? (Score:2, Insightful)
This is BS (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact, it's the textbook study of why society needs laws, and why they have to be applied. Because otherwise what happens is that the crooks create a pressure on everyone else to be a crook too.
E.g., if you let some merchants sell contraband or counterfeit goods, it will create a pressure on the other merchants to start selling contraband or counterfeit too. Otherwise their prices won't be competitive. So everyone starts trying to outdo the others in how much of their merchandise is from dubious sources.
The same happens here. Once a company is allowed to cut costs by shipping non-functional products, it just puts a pressure on everyone else to do the same thing. Because otherwise someone who actually spends the time to finish and thoroughly debug a product, can't compete with the snake oil peddlers on either price or time to market. So everyone starts trying to outdo the others on cutting down quality.
That kind of thing doesn't go away by itself. Never did, never will. You need a legal system to stop it.
And saying that everyone needs to waste countless hours of their life trying to avoid getting screwed is, if you'll pardon my saying so, completely idiotic. It's as idiotic as saying that your only recourse to spam should be sorting your mails yourself by hand.
There are laws and courts of law for this kind of thing. If I sell you a house which isn't even built yet, you'd sue the pants off me. If I sell you a car, except what I can give you is just two wheels and a spoiler, you'd sue the pants of me. No "EULA" will let me say it's OK to shaft you, in any other industry.
It's time the same applied to software too. (Yes, including firmware.)
Because this kind of generalized thievery and snake oil peddling is already too high a cost for society as a whole. Not only hundred billions of dollars per year are lost to basically legalized scamming in this industry. We're also talking billions of hours total shaved off people's lives, where they have to work around bugs or to read reviews to make sure their new product will even work at all.
Those hours by themselves are too high a cost.
A murderer can be put to death for... what? Shortening someone's life by, say, 20 years? That's approximately 20 * 365 * 24 = 175,200 hours.
Well, these scammers cost society as a whole a thousand times more hours off everyone's lives. Each year.
Now I'm not asking to actually give those marketroids a death by firing squad. But throwing some of them in state jails would be a damn good start.
Either way, again: history has shown again and again that this kind of thing needs laws. And it needs them actually applied.
Re:the average (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps that fact people who are not technologically literate are willing to accept this is because they are afraid of revealing their illiteracy by complaining about something. Maybe all those flashing 12:00s are because someone doesn't want to ask their neighbour to fix it and therby show their own ignorance.
Re:Dude, where's my shares? (Score:4, Insightful)
False advertising.
There's also the issue of how to send a corporation to prison.
Pressing charges against the board members and advertising agents would be a start.
Yes, the ignorant masses are being duped by the marketing dollars of large corporations. This has happened throughout history (ask any woman if Victoria's Secret underwear is actually comfortable), and it's not likely to stop.
Doh! I've been trolled!
Exponential growing pains and convergence (Score:2, Insightful)
seems ok to me (Score:1, Insightful)
it takes time to get to the store from its manufacture location, they go stale on the shelf.
Re:Definition of evil (Score:1, Insightful)
Agreed that some people contribute nothing, though "moron assholes" is a bit juvenile. But how are you to determine what they contribute unless you evaluate their opinion?
Having an open mind isn't the same thing as skipping through the new age post-modernist field, valuing everything in sight as a "rich source of intellectual diversity". Some of us who are professional scientists still realize this.
Re:Dude, where's my shares? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, start giving advertising the legal weight of a contract. If I buy a product which says "Supports Feature X" only to find out that it doesn't support feature X out of the box, I can go to small-claims court and attempt to recover whatever portion of the purchase price I feel feature X was worth.
There's also the issue of how to send a corporation to prison.
That's a very tough issue. Assigning guilt is going to be very hard to to in many cases. If you fine the company into oblivion, you are going to hurt many of the companies employees, customers, and suppliers who had nothing to due with the problem. Here's my thought: Doctors, Lawyers, Professional Engineers, and may others can be sued for malpractice if they perform their job in an incompetant or illegal manner. I think we need the concept of a Professional Manager. If you fail to keep your employees within the law, you can be held responsible. Extend the liability all the way to the board of directors. To extend the previous example, if a company has a habit of listing "Supports Feature X" on the box without actually supporting feature X, let the FTC (or their equivalants) go after the company. Determine who approved the working "Supports Feature X", and divide the fines equally among the approvers manager, the manager's manager,
Consumer dependance or features you don't want?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, three months later, the download that enables that feature comes out, but lo and behold - the download also includes a bunch of "features" you don't want - such as DRM or embedded advertising.
It's happened before... my sound card (A SB Audigy) has a digital 5.1 output
Or, take the case of ReplayTV - most people don't know or realize this, but the OS in the ReplayTV can be set up to display advertising on the pause screen - it was only used once IIRC, but there's nothing saying that the owners of ReplayTV can't do it again. The ReplayTV is particularly nasty in this since the files that run the ReplayOS are in fact digitally signed so you can't "tinker" with the operating system.
What am I afraid of? The general public is getting used to paying monthly fees to have things that were previously "free" - Cable TV, for example. Radio will probably end up going the same route - check out XM and Sirius Radio. Now, imagine if you bought a hardware device - for example a PDA. Right now, I can go to Best Buy and drop a few dollars on a Palm Tungsten something-or-other... and it's _mine._ I don't have to pay Palm one red cent over that initial purchase I made if I don't want to.
Now imagine 10 years from now - you go to Best Buy to pick up that PDA. But now, instead of paying a few hundred dollars once for a Palm Pilot, you now have to pay to purchase the unit, PLUS subscribe to some sort of subscription service if you want your PDA to, for example, connect to your PC.
Already the world of personal gadgetry is heading this way. Check out the "Get it now!" service from everyone's favorite cellphone carrier. You have to pay to download a game, PLUS you have to pay a monthly fee (if the author of the game wants you to) - and many cell phones now have the ability for the carrier to "turn off" certain features on various cell phones.
The same thing goes for my ReplayTV - two exact same models hardware-wise - the exact same software inside! Yet, on the newer "5500" series units, two features (commecial skip and Internet Video Sharing) are disabled. One option bit in the internal "registry" turns these features off. Now, this was in response to a settlement with Hollywood, but what is to prevent hardware manufacturers from doing the same thing for profit? Or, charging you a monthly fee to enable certain features - if you don't pay, the features are disabled! It's not like a service is being provided, since all you are paying for is a little "command" to be echoed to your device to enable whatever it is you're doing - similar to cable boxes of old that could have their IR receivers disabled by the cable company if you weren't renting a remote from them - so you couldn't use any universal remotes for free.
The long and the short of it
Just my pissing-and-moaning-about-companies-trying-to-mak
-RickTheWizKid
Re:This is BS (Score:3, Insightful)
You mention inner city blacks. Well, how much better would they be _without_ government intervention? Would everyone spontaneously donate some of their money so that the less fortunate can get wellfare? Would everyone spontaneously donate some of their money for public schools? (However badly funded those schools may be, it's still better than nothing.) That's BS. Unless there was a government making you give up that money, noone would.
Without a government doing something about it, chances are those blacks would have been still held at gunpoint to work on plantations until after World War 1. (When eventually agriculture started to have too much manpower, instead of too little.)
No, the government isn't perfect. No, the politicians aren't up to date on all technical issues. No, they're not always honest either.
But history shows that it still works better than just waiting for the problems to go away on their own. Here are some random ideas for you:
- If today you don't get toxic waste dumped wholesale into rivers any more, it's precisely because the government has passed some laws about it. Otherwise the pressure effect I've described would have made everyone dump their toxic waste in rivers. Those trying to use filters couldn't have competed on price and profits with those who dump indiscriminately.
- Ditto about factories spewing crap into the _air_. If you waited for it to go away on its own, you'd still have cement factories without filters, spewing tens of tons of dust in the air. In the _city_. There's some government rules that made that stop.
- Dunno about where you are, but here we have some very strict laws on how much pollution can a car spew. And you know what? I very much enjoy being able to take a walk along a major street in rush hour and not start choking and coughing.
I also happen to know that it was the government that dragged the automobile industry, kicking and screaming, into having seatbelts, airbags, and do at least _some_ effort so you might survive an accident.
In both cases, without government intervention it wouldn't have happened. See the pressure mechanism I've described. Anyone trying to make a safe car couldn't have competed on price with those who sold a death trap on wheels. So you'd still be buying death traps on wheels, if there weren't some laws that changed the playing field.
Etc.
So let's drop the lemming attitude that "governments are inherently evil" and start thinking about how we can use them for our good.
Re:Dude, where's my shares? (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree, however my point was that they were selling features that did not currently (and may never) exist. This is not a performance issue, this is snake oil.
Which advertising agents? I freelance to a marketing firm who works with the salespeople for a particular gadget. Who's liable?
Another poster had what I consider to be a great idea. Professional engineers, architects, doctors, lawyers etc... are held directly responsible for their actions. What about the concept of the professional manager? If that person gives the final OK on fraudulent marketing techniques, that person is held liable.
Marketing is a fact of life. Without it, companies have to wait for consumers to come to them. No one has that much time or money. And without that, no gadgets.
Agreed. But they can bring products to market and they can market them without being fraudulent.