I am aware of no laws against overclocking. Intel most likely bins production parts for speed, so if you overclock a CPU you degrade timing margins at your own risk. The Freescale 3.3 volt version of the MC68332 is guaranteed for 16 MHz. I've verified that they work to 45, and run them at 20. I don't think that I've broken any laws, and I doubt that Freescale minds, and I assume the risk.
Intel may well sell 1.3 GHz parts as 1 GHz parts, especially as their manufacturing yields improve over time. It's their choice as to what they promise and what they charge for it.
Quite often, the things are getting tossed into the different bins not because of a difference in quality, but for marketing, legal, inventory reduction or whatever non-technical reasons. There are many examples of that. But the question is not about moral/legal implications.
The idea of using varicap in the scope analog front end doesn't make much sense to me. What do you think?
Vladimir Vassilevsky DSP and Mixed Signal Design Consultant
It has very clean transient response as shipped, at the 50 (or 70) MHz bandwidth. The hacked version is ratty looking. I wouldn't do the hack even if it was morally and legally fine.
This is a very nice little scope, superb for the price. It has loads of more features than a comparable Tek at around 1/3 the price.
Why Jones would choose to hurt Rigel is a mystery to me.
It's too hypothetical. Each extra room costs real money to build and has real value on the market. IP costs real money to develop, has market value, but costs nothing to reproduce. That's why an EDA vendor can charge you $60K for each copy of a DVD, and why the law protects their right to do so.
There's a clear legal distinction between physical property and intellectual property.
Under US law, I belive it's criminal conspiracy to use a computer to hack software for profit. Which I think is illegal.
Well, I do. Especially telling the world how to do it, which will cost Rigel serious revenue.
There are many small details which indicate that the software was written by indiots.
BTW, one of the things that I design are the analog front ends for scopes and like. Some with BW to 1 GHz. The idea of using varicap just doesn't make any sense to me.
"Good - Better - Best" marketing principle is old as a World.
Vladimir Vassilevsky DSP and Mixed Signal Design Consultant
What makes you think he hurt Rigol? They've have probably just sold dozens of scope to people who wouldn't have otherwise bought a scope from a Chinese maker.
Most companies will continue to buy what's guaranteed.
I'm sure that some people who would have bought the 100M version will buy the 50 and hack it. Not many, I expect, mostly amateurs. But he chose to make this option available to the public where Rigol did not.
I've only had mine a couple of weeks, but I haven't seen any problems. What are they?
The menus take a minute to figure out (and of cource I haven't cracked the manual) but generally make sense. The cursor logic is a little annoying.
I like the selectable filtering, specifically the lowpass. The digital filters aren't perfect, but the slower lowpass settings are the most useful to me and behave well.
For around $550, with memory stick slot and RS232 and USB, it's stunning. I'm going to get one for our cabin in Truckee. You never know when you'll need a scope.
Quite orthogonal to all of the commentary so far... when viewing the YouTube video of the hack, I accidentally turned on the "closed-caption decoder" feature in the playback (up-arrow at the lower right corner of the window).
The result was... well, interesting. The closest analogy I can come up with at the moment is "beatnik free verse". I think the auto-transcription feature being used has a problem with David's accent :-)
--
Dave Platt AE6EO
Friends of Jade Warrior home page: http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
I do _not_ wish to receive unsolicited commercial email, and I will
boycott any company which has the gall to send me such ads!
If the hardware wasn't capable of 100MHz, then the software wouldn't make it so. Therefore, flipping a software switch is just like cutting a lock. If it needs a completely different load of software to do
100MHz, then the manufacturer is playing games with the law.
Define "hack". And yes, it is probably illegal, and if he's really hacking it by my definition of hack, then wrongly so.
If he's taking a software load from another Rigol scope, and that load is under copyright, then that's going beyond hacking. If he's finding a way to reach in there and flip a switch to turn on the 100MHz capability, then that should be legal.
Arresting a career criminal will cost him serious revenue -- should we refrain from that?
Preventing Kennith Lay from raping Enron would have cost him serious revenue, had someone done it -- had it been legally possible, should we have refrained?
Making food manufacturers print lists of ingredients on their products, and insisting that what they produce is safe no doubt costs them serious revenue -- should we stop?
The digital copyright protection act gives IP providers extreme and egregious tools to extort money from consumers, and repealing it would cost them serious revenue when they use it to do things that are just plain wrong. Should we refrain from repealing it?
--
Tim Wescott
Control system and signal processing consulting
www.wescottdesign.com
How does DCMA extort money from customers? If you don't like a product and its price/terms, don't buy it. DCMA prevents you from using a computer to violate the contract you made with the seller, and from spreading around copies of his IP.
If you want to repeal DCMA, write to your Congressman or whatever. Get rid of the patent office while you're at it.
Not at all. IP costs money to develop and has to be paid for. And there are economies of scale from building one hardware platform and marketing competitive products that have different firmware. Rigol's error was to make the hack too easy.
It's like stealing stuff out of cars. People will steal thongs if you don't roll up the windows and lock the doors, so everybody has to roll up the windows and lock the doors. Ditto big steel vaults in banks. It's inefficient because a minority of people will game the rules any way they can, sometimes just because they can.
Rigol did the engineering and selected a business model, and you chose to break it based on some moral judgement of your own. They will have to react somehow, which will cost them money one way or another.
Why did you do this? Did you feel that Rigol was cheating the public and deserved to be exposed and, additionally, deprived of revenue?
Oh I don't plan on hacking it. I just figured that there might be a tick up in sales of the 50MHz version and I should get mine before they sell out. And yeah the pulse response looked nice. (I also like that it's a bit faster than the spec.) I'm not sure about the rattiness of the 100MHz response.. after all the 100MHz TEK pulse looked ratty too and it might have been that Dave was hitting it with a raggy pulse to begin with. (Sorry Dave, I don't mean to dis your bench test skills.)
I think Dave likes Rigol and I'm not sure his hack will hurt sales. I would guess it's only a small fraction of users that would want the hack anyway. I would bet.. though I don't know how to prove it.. that Dave has been good for Rigol sales. (He is certainly responsible for my purchase of one.)
One (or maybe more than one) contact lens maker got into serious trouble in the US for selling identical lens as different products with different prices. The FTC went after them with a vengence, and hit them with a major fine for doing what (it appears) Rigol is doing with their scopes.
I'm not saying that hacking it is right, or selling it as two models is right, just saying that at least in the USA, there are federal regulations that govern this type of situation, and it is likely that Rigol didn't fully investigate their liabiliities in doing what they have been doing.
If it's, say, 100 scopes hacked at a loss of $400 each, until Rigol makes the firmware more secure (which will also cost money to do) that's $40K. I don't know if $40K is "serious" money that matters to Rigol, or to you. $40K is fairly serious to me.
How would you feel if Jones hacked one of your products and cost you $40K? But I think you don't do firmware, so the question is probably moot.
The scopes are not identical because they have different specs and firmware. Just like versions of Windows, or GPS units, or all sorts of things have different specs and functions differentiated by firmware.
Rigol made it too easy to hack their scope, and Jones took advantage of it. I still don't know why.
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