NVIDIA Calls A Feature A 'Bug,' Strips Away Overclocking Option On Its Mobile Device Cards

from the you-can-buy-it-but-you-can't-have-it dept

In theory, the marketplace for goods works like this: a purchaser hands over $$$ and in return receives a product that they own and can use as they see fit. In reality, purchasers often hand over $$$ and find that the product they purchased is still in the grips of the company that took their money but seems loathe to honor its end of the deal.

Case in point #38,909: guess what NVIDIA thinks is a "bug," not a "feature."

Starting with the Fermi drivers, though, a software overclock was possible in the drivers, which allowed you to adjust your laptop GPU's clockspeeds at will. Tools like AfterBurner from Micro-Star International Comp., Ltd. and Turbomaster by ASUSTek Computer Inc. allowed users to more easily and safely tweak their GPU's clockspeeds on select gaming laptops with cooling solutions designed to cope with the higher thermal load. Companies like the Clevo Comp., Sager, ASUS, MSI, and Dell's Alienware regularly sold models billing overclockability as a sales feature.

What OEMs apparently didn't expect was that NVIDIA would rob customers of that feature. But that appears to be precisely what happened.

NVIDIA pushed out new drivers last December that took away customers' ability to overclock their cards. These were targeted at cards for mobile and hybrid devices, where the chance of overheating (and causing serious damage) was more pronounced. Those who had overclocked their cards but now were unable to do so demanded answers from the manufacturer. And wouldn't you know it, the explanation for NVIDIA's removal of this option cites "safety" as the primary motivator.

Unfortunately GeForce notebooks were not designed to support overclocking. Overclocking is by no means a trivial feature, and depends on thoughtful design of thermal, electrical, and other considerations. By overclocking a notebook, a user risks serious damage to the system that could result in non-functional systems, reduced notebook life, or many other effects.

There was a bug introduced into our drivers which enabled some systems to overclock. This was fixed in a recent update. Our intent was not to remove features from GeForce notebooks, but rather to safeguard systems from operating outside design limits.

"Safeguard systems from operating outside design limits" sounds an awful lot like "your purchased items are only as flexible as we allow them to be." Sure, warranty departments handling burnt up/out devices may have been making some noise about dealing with the aftereffects of careless overclocking, but if so, they're no less blameless than NVIDIA. Overclocking is generally one of those warranty-voiding activities, and if companies didn't want to be replacing torched devices, they should have handled it better at their end. (And, as Daily Tech points out, they should probably stop advertising overclocking as a "feature" if it's truly that much trouble in the warranty department.)

But NVIDIA's action takes the purchased product out of paying customers' hands. Most people who dabble in overclocking are technically adept and know the limits of their hardware (and the terms of their warranties). There will always be those who push too far or get in over their heads, and a few overclockers who disingenuously expect the device's manufacturer to bail them out when things go wrong, but these customers are in the minority.

When a company takes away a feature (especially one that has been advertised by the devices' manufacturers) and calls it a "bug," it's basically telling customers that they won't ever own what they purchased. In this case, NVIDIA is hurting some of its most loyal customers -- people who know their devices inside and out and will pay good money to stay ahead of the tech curve.

And NVIDIA's being a bit disingenuous itself. It calls overclocking a "bug" when explaining why it took this feature away. But if it truly was a bug, why didn't it issue a patch rather than eliminating the option? The obvious answer is that overclocking is no bug and NVIDIA knows it. But it has apparently chosen to placate its OEMs at the expense of some of its most reliable customers.

NVIDIA hasn't issued any further statements on its "bug fix," so it's safe to assume it doesn't really care whether it's angered a number of its customers. Its position in the graphics accelerator market is virtually unassailable, especially in the area (mobile/hybrid) where it has just guaranteed its customers will get less product than they paid for.

Filed Under: bug, feature, overclocking, ownership, video chips
Companies: nvidia

Multitasking Is Our Main Activity

from the learn-to-love-it dept

Earlier this year, I wrote a post questioning whether the "inefficiency" found in multitasking was a bug or a feature. It was in response to studies pointing out that people who multitask tend to be less efficient at specific tasks. Folks like Nick Carr like to hold up things like that as examples of how modern technology makes us dumber, but more and more people are questioning that concept. While this is from a few months ago, Kevin Donovan points us an excellent piece by economist Tyler Cowen that challenges the concept that internet multitasking is a problem. In it, he makes a key point:

Multitasking is not a distraction from our main activity, it is our main activity.

That's a nicer way of saying what we said a few months ago. The "inefficiencies" from multitasking aren't a bug. They're a feature. Cowen goes on to explain it using the analogy of a long distance relationship compared to a stable marriage:

A long-distance relationship is, in emotional terms, a bit like culture in the time of Cervantes or Mozart. The costs of travel and access were high, at least compared to modern times. When you did arrive, the performance was often very exciting and indeed monumental. Sadly, the rest of the time you didn't have that much culture at all. Even books were expensive and hard to get. Compared to what is possible in modern life, you couldn't be as happy overall but your peak experiences could be extremely memorable, just as in the long-distance relationship.

Now let's consider how living together and marriage differ from a long-distance relationship. When you share a home, the costs of seeing each other are very low. Your partner is usually right there. Most days include no grand events, but you have lots of regular and predictable interactions, along with a kind of grittiness or even ugliness rarely seen in a long-distance relationship. There are dirty dishes in the sink, hedges to be trimmed, maybe diapers to be changed.

If you are happily married, or even somewhat happily married, your internal life will be very rich. You will take all those small events and, in your mind and in the mind of your spouse, weave them together in the form of a deeply satisfying narrative, dirty diapers and all. It won't always look glorious on the outside, but the internal experience of such a marriage is better than what's normally possible in a long-distance relationship.

The same logic applies to culture. The Internet and other technologies mean that our favorite creators, or at least their creations, are literally part of our daily lives. It is no longer a long-distance relationship. It is no longer hard to get books and other written material. Pictures, music, and video appear on command. Culture is there all the time, and you can receive more of it, pretty much whenever you want.

In short, our relationship to culture has become more like marriage in the sense that it now enters our lives in an established flow, creating a better and more regular daily state of mind. True, culture has in some ways become uglier, or at least it would appear so to the outside observer. But when it comes to how we actually live and feel, contemporary culture is more satisfying and contributes to the happiness of far more people. That is why the public devours new technologies that offer extreme and immediate access to information.

Many critics of contemporary life want our culture to remain like a long-distance relationship at a time when most of us are growing into something more mature. We assemble culture for ourselves, creating and committing ourselves to a fascinating brocade. Very often the paper-and-ink book is less central to this new endeavor; it's just another cultural bit we consume along with many others. But we are better off for this change, a change that is filling our daily lives with beauty, suspense, and learning.

The full piece is much longer, but beautifully written and quite convincing.

Filed Under: bug, efficiency, feature, multitasking, tyler cowen

Is The Inefficiency Of Multitasking A Bug Or A Feature?

from the questions-to-ponder... dept

There have been a bunch of studies recently claiming that multi-tasking and our constant use of technology harms our ability to concentrate or accomplish certain tasks. A recent example is a study claiming that so much tech usage is harming our ability to learn because kids can't focus as much on long form work. Of course, I'm a bit skeptical of any such claims (almost all anecdotal) considering that actual studies have shown that kids read more books today than in the past. And, it's not just kids. More people are reading books than in the past in the general population as well.

Still, there's another argument to be made also, which reader JJ recently pointed out. Stowe Boyd notes that all of these types of studies miss the point, in that personal efficiency may be less important than being more interactive:

Perhaps what we are doing has nothing to do with efficiency. I don't operate the way I do with the principal goal of speeding things up. My motivations are much more complex and diffused.

I don't perceive what I am doing as multitasking, really. I am not trying to speed up how quickly I shift from one thing to another. Instead, I am involved in a stream of activities, in which other people figure prominently, either synchronously through direct discussion (a la Twitter or IM) or indirectly, through their writings and my responses.

In many cases, I leave activities dangling because I don't know exactly how I feel about them. In some cases, I could resolve my feelings and take some action if I simply stopped other activities and focused solely on that activity, but in most cases that is not the case. And simply forcing myself to focus on the next thing in the activity would not lead to an acceptable or beneficial result, necessarily.

It's like a painter with a number of works in process. My primary motivation is not getting a particular painting 'done', but adding dabs of paint that I feel are the right ones.

I honestly had never thought of it this way, and I'll admit I'm not sure how I feel on this. But it is an interesting way of looking at such things. Obviously, in a work setting, personal productivity may matter. But, in general -- just doing stuff online -- is it a problem that we multitask? Or is that a feature?

Filed Under: bug, efficiency, feature, multitasking

Security-As-A-Feature And The Economics of Abundance

from the a-feature-not-a-product dept

The always insightful Bruce Schneier has a new piece out arguing that the stand-alone security industry is doomed, as security increasingly becomes a feature of other products, rather than a product in its own right. He points out that hardly anybody wants to buy a "security product." They want to buy useful products -- operating systems, databases, web servers, whatever -- and take for granted that the developers of those products have designed it to be secure out of the box. Schneier points out that consolidation in the security industry has not taken the form of large security firms buying small security firms, but of non-security-focused software firms buying security firms to help bolster the security and reputation of their products. This may indicate that developers of other software products are recognizing that better security is one of the key features customers are demanding in their products.

If you'll excuse me for jumping on a Techdirt hobby-horse here, this is another example of the economics of abundance at work. Security products are increasingly becoming commodities. Obviously the software ones -- anti-virus tools, software firewalls, intrusion detection systems -- have a marginal cost of zero, and even many of the hardware devices are built on commodity parts that get cheaper every month. What hasn't gotten cheaper is the expertise required to put the bewildering array of security tools together into a coherent system that's customized for a firm's particular business. Indeed, as security products have gotten more numerous and more complex, it has actually gotten harder to keep track of them all and know which security tools are the best ones to use in any given situation.

And crucially, this isn't something you can outsource to a third party. I've written before (in the context of e-voting) that encryption isn't magic pixie dust that automatically makes a system more secure. The same point applies to security more generally. Having the best firewall in the world won't do you any good if it's not configured properly, or if your network hasn't been designed with security in mind. And because every large organization has different security needs, every organization needs a slightly different security setup.

This creates a huge opening for companies who understand that customers are not looking to buy a security software product, but a suite of software that they can count on to be secure without worrying about the details. We've pointed out that this is essentially the business Red Hat is in: not selling software but selling the expertise of its employees with respect to the software. Security is a big part of that. "Security software" is an infinite good, and the market for it will get increasingly crowded in the future. On the other hand, the expertise needed to build complex software systems securely is as scarce as ever, and such expertise is one of the key ways that software companies can distinguish themselves from the competition.

Filed Under: abundance, bruce schneier, feature, product, security, service