Turn your Rigol DS1052E Oscilloscope into a 100MHz DS1102E

Is it worth that much?

Destroying a market isn't usually a good way to make money in the long run.

And it's easily possible that Rigol saves a boatload of money by having only one assembly number to design, code, build, and test. Remember that (as Dave discovered earlier) they're actually overclocking the ADCs on the 100 MHz model--so one can argue it's really a 50 MHz scope that Rigol themselves hacked into a 100 MHz one.

Companies have been selling crippleware forever--the earliest example I know of was the 6 MHz IBM PC-AT. You changed the crystal and one other thing that I forget, and suddenly you had a blistering fast 8 MHz AT! (Cooler than the coolest thing ever, no?) There were similar howls of outrage over that one.

The moral question is actually an interesting one, I think, and the different views seem to hinge on what people think they're buying, and whether a hardware/software combination is more like hardware (which you can hack up as you like) or software (which has a license agreement you're bound by).

I don't think it's tenable to say that Rigol is dishonest when they sell two models that differ only in firmware, and the difference in the front ends. For instance, nobody thinks it's morally repugnant for Intel to sell different speed grades of microprocessor which actually come from the same wafer, right? That's because we fantasize that the slow-spec ones all failed at speed sort--which is far from true, because otherwise the available supply of the slow version would evaporate as the process improved. Still, no big outrage there--overclockers can have fun, the rest of us ignore the issue.

We also don't mind Microsoft selling a 60 cent DVD full of software, because that's what we expect. (Some of us grumble, but nearly everyone is willing to pay.)

It's where these hardware/software chimaeras come in that we don't have an agreed model for what is fair and what isn't.

I'm not meaning to be a Dutch uncle here--I don't think I know the full answer myself--but it's an interesting question.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal
ElectroOptical Innovations
55 Orchard Rd
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058
hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net

I was going to type out a lengthy reply but you're obviously not open to reasoned debate.

Would you accuse AMD of 'outright theft' for selling 4 core processors as

3 core processors?

Nial

People buy the standard and Pro versions of Windows knowing the only difference is a few flags. Windows consumer versions are brain-damaged to allow only a small number of network connections at a time, and cost almost nothing bundled with a PC. Windows Server removes the limit and costs about $2K.

I'm sure that all sorts of expensive automotive options are just firmware these days. All sorts of products differ only in theor firmware.

It's Rigol's choice how to price their products and amortize their engineering. Buying their 50 MHz scope and hacking it, and gleefully telling the world how to do it, it is essentially vandalism. Legally, it may be criminal conspiracy to use a computer to commit a crime.

Jones is perfectly capable of estimating the considerable economic damage he is doing to Rigol. I suppose he hates Rigol enough that he's happy about it.

If you spent years writing a book or some software, would you be happy if people copied it and distributed it for free, cutting off your rotalties? After all, copies cost almost nothing. Now can you justify charging $20 for a book or $500 for a program when it costs pennies to manufacture copies?

John

Rigol may well be culling assembled scopes, picking the best ones to sell as the 100 MHz versions.

The IBM 1401 has about a dozen cards that slowed it down, things like homing disk heads on every seek. A 1410 cost more and didn't have this stuff.

Yes. What's a fair price for IP that costs nothing to manufacture?

John

On a sunny day (Wed, 31 Mar 2010 11:29:12 +1100) it happened "David L. Jones" wrote in :

Nice work. Now to upgrade it to 1Ghz BW :-)

=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D

log.com

Excellent, I just ordered a Rigol DS1052E! The best news is that even without the mod the 50 MHz is closer to 70 MHz as is.... (just scaling your measured 5ns rise/fall time.)

George H.

On a sunny day (Wed, 31 Mar 2010 07:01:39 -0700) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

Yes MS is a bunch or criminals who ask hundreds of dollars for crappy software. They and Hollywood buy the system to impose laws so people who work around it are branded as criminals. In MS case Linux is the way out.

Well, a Ferrari looks different.

Yes.

No it is not, it is exposing the market mechanism. You bought the hardware, it has everything IN it, INCLUDING a varicap SO EXTRA COMPONENTS to make it inferior. Disabling something that purposely reduces performance of something YOU OWN is GOOD.

Dave is taking a risk (these days with millennium copyright act and such), but is helping all those OWNERS of that hardware to a better scope.

What this society no longer seems to recognise is OWNERSHIP, that goes from your property being taxed to your say over your life.

He owns that scope, and the serial interface came with it.

Fixing your car may be a crime too in the future. maybe designing electronics is a crime too? F*ck off.

Kudos for Dave, and f*ck that Millennium act and its puppets, May else the nukes rain.

Have a nice rainy day.

I've just realised it's early morning there, have you been drinking (alot)?

Well done!

Nope, still not a 'Pom'.

Nial.

Like the Intel MPU case, sure. And in that situation, one can argue that slowing down the front end to match the capabilities of the slower ADCs is a good thing for customers--you don't pay the 3 dB noise penalty for bandwidth you can't use. All for an extra 20 cents worth of parts.

Same as the fair price for anything else--i.e. what a willing buyer will pay in a free market. (There are occasions when it's morally wrong to charge the 'fair' price so defined, e.g. cornering the market in food during a famine or other nasty monopoly behaviour--but it's a real stretch to put Rigol in _that_ category.)

It's certainly a good lesson in customer relations, though--what was that about no good deed going unpunished?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal
ElectroOptical Innovations
55 Orchard Rd
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058
hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net

:))))))

According to your logic, CPU overclocking is a crime. Although that 20 vs 50 MHz nonsense doesn't really make any difference and probably not worth hassle.

But, why varicap and that lousy circuit? Looks like Rigol analog designers don't have a clue... They are probably as unexperienced as their programmers...

Vladimir Vassilevsky DSP and Mixed Signal Design Consultant

You don't favor copyrights or legal protection for intellectual property? If you spent years writing a book or a symphony or developing a product that was mostly firmware, you wouldn't mind if people copied it and sold cheap knockoffs?

There is an argument against copyrights and patents, but it would change a lot of things.

Yes. Their mistake was making it too easy.

It looks as if hardware-hacking the varicap bandwidth limiter is legal, but doing it through the serial port may be a crime in the US.

Agreed. Hackers are amazingly inventive.

I don't intend to hack any of them and I never steal IP. I hope that people won't hack my products and steal my engineering investment.

And 50 MHz is a good place for a bench scope, clear of a lot of FM and TV crud. The Rigol looks great at 50 MHz, but noisy and ringy at 100.

John

No. But that costs the seller nothing, and is perfectly legal. Jones has cost Rigel a lot, now and in the future. And the way he did it is probably criminal conspiracy to commit a computer crime, by US law at least.

So, why did he do it, specifically why did he post a video showing the whole world how to do it? He had to know it would cost Rigel real revenue, and must have decided that they didn't deserve that revenue.

Jones? Why?

John

Just out of curiosity John, would you think the same thing applies to the kids who overclock their processors? After all, Intel makes less money on the lower clocked CPU chips - is this depriving Intel from deserved revenue? Note that I'm not making any judgment on whether this is right or wrong...

The difference there is that you don't have access to AMD's verification/test suite which shows some of the functionality on one of the cores as broken so it would be marked as bad and disabled. It is certainly the same die as the 4 core processor but it may not have passed all the tests.

If you're upset at paying more for the same die, you don't even have to go as far as different number of cores. Any CPU you buy today (from AMD, Intel or IBM etc.) has different speed versions with different pricing while it's exactly the same die. The only difference is how they're binned (and testing may or may not have shown an issue with lower binned/priced parts.)

--
Muzaffer Kal

DSPIA INC.
ASIC/FPGA Design Services

http://www.dspia.com

If the 100 MHz scope flunks the speed test and is going to be restricted to 50 MHz (with appropriate sampling rate), why make the customer pay the 3 dB penalty for the wider bandwidth?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal
ElectroOptical Innovations
55 Orchard Rd
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058
hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net

Well, not really. You don't buy the software, you only license it. You have to agree to the EULA for it to install. If you figure out how to use regedit to enable certain features, it isn't illegal to tell people how to do so (of course they may be violating the EULA if they do)

Hang on a second. It's only Rigol's scope until I buy it. When I buy it, it's mine. Not theirs. You don't have to sign an agreement that says you won't modify it.

What crime is possibly being committed? To the best of my knowledge, there is no charge of "taking advantage of a companies stupid business decision".

Apples and Oranges.

The customer only ever owns the physical copy of the book, or the CD the software came from. The customer does not own the IP itself. The customer CAN modify their property (Eg scribble over pages or smash the CD in half). When you buy a Rigol scope, Rigol may still own the IP to the design, but you own and can modify the scope itself.

It's illegal to make copies of the book or software without permission because otherwise there is no real way for programmers or authors to make an income.

Rigol were foolish by making their scope so easy to upgrade. Some software mods could have made the job much harder. You can hardly say that without a law to prevent modification to "their" product (which is now owned by the customer) it's impossible for scope manufacturers to make a living. If they HAVE to make a product and cripple it to make a low-end model, they are free to use every trick in the book to prevent it being modified. Rigol didn't bother.

I own a car - I do not own the IP associated with that car (an untold number of patents, copyright on the microcontroller firmware etc). I service it myself - you seem to be saying that's unethical. After all, I'm taking business away from my local mechanic. Suppose I find a very easy way to boost the engine output by cutting a certain wire, which fools the ECU into thinking I paid for a better motor. Is it unethical for me to tell people? I don't think so.

Al

In fact it's not. According to my logic, something is a crime if a country has laws that declare it to be a crime.

Do you think that it doesn't work? And that their firmware was coded by inexperienced programmers? How many oscilloscopes have you designed and manufactured and marketed?

Looking at the transient response at 100 MHz, which kinda sucks, I wonder if the 50 and 100 MHz scopes are indeed identical except for firmware.

John

Suppose (bear with me) the builder's business model was to mass- produce 4 bedroom houses, but offer a cheaper '3 bedroom' one with the

4th bedromm locked behind a $2 padlock. Suppose Mike figures this out, and tells the world 'Hey, if you need a 4 bedroom house, just buy the 3 bedroom one from Jones Brothers, move the supplied wardrobe out of the way, cut the lock and you have an extra bedroom'. Families needing 4 bedroom houses read this advice and do so, meaning they spend less money on the house then they would otherwise. This deprives Jones Brothers of income they'd otherwise recieve. Jones Brothers has to cut costs, and their children go hungry.

Who, if anyone, do you think is in the wrong in the above story?

I'm not denying it might cost Rigol some cash, but I fail to see what the crime was.

Personally I don't see it as morally wrong in the least. And I'm sorry to inform you John, but if I owned one of your devices and figured out how to enable an extra feature I needed for free (as long as it wasn't by downloading some hacked firmware, which would be a copyright violation) I'd do so and still sleep at night. Because when I did so, I'd be modifying _my_ box of tricks. You stopped owning the physical item when you sold it to me. If it's a real concern, ask the customer to sign an agreement not to modify the product.

Cheers,

Al