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The Media Technology

Hack This, Please 111

Posted by Hemos from the but-don't-crack-it dept.
Andy Kessler, the author of Wall Street Meat had a recent piece in the WSJ, and now reprinted on his own site. It's a piece about how companies are shifting much more to "hacker" friendly models. It's a particular area of interest for me, as it's something that I've talked about with the folks at BCG for a while.
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Hack This, Please More

Hack This, Please

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  • Not smart to sue your customers (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AubieTurtle ( 743744 ) on Saturday March 20, 2004 @09:25AM (#8620515)
    The hacker hostile business methods of cue:cat and iOpener sure helped those companies... helped them disappear!
    • Do you seriously think they disappeared because of hackers? Please. They disappeared because they had lousy ideas. Whether they sued hackers or not was totally irrelevant.
      • Not to mention the Cue Cat looked like a penis-on-a-string. Might be a market for that in certain portions of the population, but not really for us geeks.

      • Re:Not smart to sue your customers (Score:4, Interesting)

        by zurab ( 188064 ) on Saturday March 20, 2004 @12:02PM (#8621307)
        The parent didn't say they disappeared "because of" hackers. He said they helped them disappear. The way I see it, you are right - DigitalConvergence had a bad idea, bad business plan, and hackers helped air it out.

        Moreover, if you read the article, the author says:

        Companies should offer easy access to the code, inside their products or the workings of their Web site, and allow customers to hack away. The corporate types might learn a thing or two. ...
        Just open up your wares and your customers will not just show you what they want, but do it for you, too.

        I'm not sure what he's saying about the websites but, in effect, he's suggesting that having your wares closed, trying to have full control over them and trying to forcefully dictate exactly how your own customers use products they bought from you contributes to your products' lousiness. On the other hand, being hacker-friendly has a positive effect not only for gaining popularity and usefulness, but also contributing to valuable market research for your products and their future development.

        So, if you share Andy Kessler's point of view, then even in this way, hackers directly and indirectly contributed to serving DigitalConvergence their fate.
        • He's saying the code should be readily accessible.

          Either inside the product or on the company website.

        • I thought part of his point about websites is that they should allow customization by users and make it easy for third-party tools and websites to interact. Examples might be user-selected stylesheets, RDF feeds, XML-RPC interfaces, and even just simply making it easy for Joe Schmoo to create a deep link from his site into yours.

          Pretty common practice on Slashdot, Freshmeat, etc but sadly many mainstream sites aren't as flexible.
    • The cue cat just sucked and no one ever actually used it besides hackers (glances at modded one sitting next to case) i don't really know much about the iOpener, but that can probably be blamed on a combination of the hackers and a flawed business model. Really, who would buy an internet terminal. If you give a mouse a cookie and all that. People may think they just want the www, but then they'll want to download music, and then burn cds etc etc, which requires a real computer, which at $400 vs $99 is what

    • Umm (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ad0gg ( 594412 )
      I think it was bad business decissions that made them go broke. Had nothing to do whether or not they allowed people to hack their products. Giving away free hardware and trying to sell a subscription service is plain stupid. If they allowed people to hack their product, people wouldn't have bought service.

  • Still not that friendly (Score:5, Funny)

    by Avumede ( 111087 ) on Saturday March 20, 2004 @09:25AM (#8620517) Homepage
    I dunno where you are getting this. These models still don't give me the time of day! Even after I tell them I'm a hacker! They just stand there looking all aloof and beautiful. Maybe I just haven't run into the new kind yet.

    • Re:Still not that friendly (Score:5, Interesting)

      by smittyoneeach ( 243267 ) on Saturday March 20, 2004 @09:49AM (#8620617) Homepage Journal
      Loads of money is wasted on market research to define products that large numbers of people want. But consumers are not monolithic clones.

      I think this needs some elaboration.
      FNG consumers are monolithic clones. The fact that AOL and MS have been highly successful shows the wisdom of this.
      However, consumers do not stay monolithic clones. As they progress through the learning curve, the will try new stuff.
      The better user interfaces realize that the user has a learning curve, and offer copious hand-holding at the low end, and get they booty out of the way once you're a keyboard shortcutting, script writing, email [elsewhere.org] integrating tough guy.
      Like !me.

  • In summary.. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 20, 2004 @09:29AM (#8620533)
    he preliminary results of the BCG/OSDN survey reveal that:

    * Participants note extremely high levels of creativity in their projects.
    * Having fun, enhancing skills, access to source code and user needs drive contributions to the Open Source community. Defeating proprietary software companies is not a major motivator.
    * The Open Source community is truly global in composition with respondents coming from 35 countries.
    * Most participants dedicated at least 10 hours per week in their shared programming efforts
    * Contrary to popular belief about hackers, the open source community is mostly comprised of highly skilled IT professionals who have on average over 10 years of programming experience.

  • Why are not business (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Fisher99 ( 580290 )
    more like software dev models. You know, feasibility, plan, design, make, test, support etc.

  • Sheesh (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Reality Master 101 ( 179095 ) <.moc.liamg. .ta. .101retsaMytilaeR.> on Saturday March 20, 2004 @09:30AM (#8620541) Homepage Journal
    That piece is very foolish. The point he misses is that GEEKS DON'T MATTER. It doesn't matter that he likes hackable stuff; he's only one sale. It doesn't matter what books O'Reilly sells, because O'Reilly is barely a blip in the publishing world. What matters is what the masses want, and the masses typically want stuff that "just works" with a minimum of hassle. They don't care about extreme customization.

    I recall one of Steve Jobs' big failures. He created an "ultimate remote control" that did everything but get your beer for you. It was a massive failure. Why? Too complicated. People didn't want an infinitely programmable remote control.

    • Those sort of remotes seem to be doing better now, with crazy home theatre setups people have now a days standard universal remotes dont cover it. I have a 'standard' universal remote, and it cant turn on the reciever or set the clock on the vcr, or program or delete a channel from the tv. As usual Jobs was before his time. I remember looking around christmas time, basically you can get a truly universal remote for about $100, the top is a touchscreen lcd (only grayscale iirc) and you can download and load

    • Sheesh indeed! (Score:5, Informative)

      by despik ( 691728 ) on Saturday March 20, 2004 @09:51AM (#8620628) Homepage
      Jesus F. Christ, not Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, better known as Woz. In his own words [woz.org]:
      My company was CL9 and we built the CORE universal remote control. This was before the simple idea of preprogramming all the codes used by the common companies was done. My device looked at the IR signal and analyzed it and recreated it. It also had to determine if certain codes needed to be emitted more than once to work. My device had 16 user buttons and a few more control buttons. They were all large and finger sized. You could put the CORE into one of 16 keyboards, so you really had 256 total keys to use. Any key could have a sequence of any of the other keys and any IR codes that you read in. So a single key could turn on the TV, then turn on the VCR, then select channel 4, etc. More than that, the 'sequence' attached to a key could access all the control buttons. The lessor used control buttons were covered by a slider to keep things looking simpler. This remote control kept it's own time and could emit IR signals at certain times. You could hit "AT-5-PM-6" (4 buttons total) to execute button 6 at 5 PM. Even the buttons that programmed the main user buttons could be included in a program. Thus button 1 could reprogram button 2, etc. This allowed a simple level of programming without normal program loops. You could program the remote control to skip daylight savings time with a sequence like "AT-2-AM-Set-Hour up" (5 buttons). I was able to create a program that would keep daylight savings time going up and down on the right days forever, including leap years, but it was quite an effort and required a lot of keys to hold current states.

    • Re:Sheesh (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Peridyd ( 673109 ) on Saturday March 20, 2004 @10:27AM (#8620779) Homepage Journal
      With all due respect, it's you that missed the point. The piece is actually arguing that hacking should be incorporated into product lifecycle process. It's not arguing that products need to be so pliant that the "painted footprints on the floor" crowd can't use them, but rather that companies embrace the fact that some of their consumers will hack their products and that some of those hacks will be better than the original.

    • Re:Sheesh (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Felinoid ( 16872 )
      I recall one of Steve Jobs' big failures. He created an "ultimate remote control" that did everything but get your beer for you. It was a massive failure. Why? Too complicated. People didn't want an infinitely programmable remote control.

      Unless your talking about the Newton I never heard of it...
      And considering I knew about the Amiga, Atari ST and Zoomer all who died for stupid or non-existant marketting I'd say this 'Ultimate remote control' died for the fact that nobody knew it existed.

      The point he mi
      • Don't get me wrong the Macintosh is VERY geek friendly BUT Apple did create the impression it was not by mistake.

        Older versions of the mac hardware and software were not even close to hacker friendly.

    • Re:Sheesh (Score:4, Informative)

      by Tony-A ( 29931 ) on Saturday March 20, 2004 @10:44AM (#8620857)
      The point he misses is that GEEKS DON'T MATTER.

      WRONG!
      The effects are small and subtle, but persistent. There is a difference between something that is worth hacking (to the hackers) and something that is more trouble than it's worth (to the hackers). You don't make money (directly) from the hackers. You gain from reputation and sales to the masses. A lot of things "just working" comes from hackers messing with the stuff. The hackers function somewhat as R&D, but they are working at their own pace for their own interests. It costs very little to make stuff "hacker-friendly" and sometimes you gain a lot more than you spend.
      • WRONG!

        Yawn, didn't slashdot predict that ipod mini's weren't gonna sell. From what i head they are sold out. Geeks don't matter plain and simple. Why market to 0.001% of the population, when marketing to grandmother and mom is 30% of the population. My mom doesn't care that her cell phone can be hacked up neither does my dad, my aunt, my uncle, my sister.

        Not mention when you start allowing people to hack with things, they start breaking things. Which costs money to support. Prime example is chippin

    • Re:Sheesh (Score:3, Insightful)

      by zurab ( 188064 )
      It looks like you read the article, but still you are making points that the author already considered or didn't even make.

      The point he misses is that GEEKS DON'T MATTER.

      Except that he never said geeks mattered, but they only serve the purpose for "mass-customizable" products. Quote from the article:

      There is a new breed of users out there, computer-literate consumers who don't think twice about altering the look, feel and functionality of a product. Those billions of embedded computers have turned busi

    • ...did everything but get your beer for you.

      Now, see? That was the problem. It didn't get your beer and open it for you. :-)
    • You're right, and you're wrong.

      While the 'market share' hackers and geeks account for is small, the 'innovation share' is huge. The hackers are the ones who push technologies into new areas, who ask the ever important "what if" questions about the use of a new tool, or substance, or discovery.

      We are all descendants of the alpha hacker. The guy who decided to taste the meat that had been in the fire.

      Somebody has to figure out the best way to use this stuff, and too few companies pay engineers to play.

    • The piece makes some very interesting points, namely that indiviuals are beginning to be heard when it comes to contributing to development of commercial technological applications. The curve is slow, true. But it has started to become more and more prevalent in the public eye with Linux and the uproar for open source release for the Windows OS. Websites are becoming more interactive, various hack books are being published, and hell, even slashdot comments are taken seriously on occasion! The most effec

  • A little behind the times (Score:5, Funny)

    by signe ( 64498 ) on Saturday March 20, 2004 @09:32AM (#8620549) Homepage
    "Every business can and should hire a hack and set him loose on their stuff..."

    It seems to me, most companies already have one. The usual title is CEO.

    -Todd

  • They're wrong... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by robslimo ( 587196 ) on Saturday March 20, 2004 @09:32AM (#8620550) Homepage Journal
    in implying the the customers at large wish to hack products. We (yes, I'm including myself) are a minority, though numerous.

    Where the average customer can win is through the end products of hacking. Third party ring tones and games, etc for cell phones are passe now. So are "performance chips" for engine control modules. Third party hacks and add-ons for other embedded systems, like PVRs are here or on the way. In one way or another, all of these are the result of 'hacking' and have direct benefit for the non-hackers.

    • Re:They're wrong... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by enrico_suave ( 179651 ) on Saturday March 20, 2004 @09:48AM (#8620615) Homepage
      well... there is a certain truth to that (hackers aren't the majority) HOWEVER there is a benefit in the form of INNOVATION when a company "opens" up a bit/becomes hacker friendly/shares information with the user/developer commmunity.

      Maybe your mom doesn't want to mod her "whatever" but she may want to buy the next generation of "whatever 2.0" that was inspired by a hackers mod/idea...

      furthermore... a hack the first time is difficult, but eventually the "mod" can become simple and the "normal" to "normal but technically inclined" person can perform them e.g. x-box mod chips are "simple" now and don't require any intricate soldering or know how... (probably not the best example ---> but one the /. crowd probably gets)

      *shrug* bottom line it's about innovation... and finding new uses for products the stodgy business thinktanks didn't think of. by being open in stead of hording their info they can foster a whole team of "Free" innovators to r & d new applications.

      e.

    • Re:They're wrong... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Nakito ( 702386 ) on Saturday March 20, 2004 @10:28AM (#8620785)
      They are also wrong when they say that there are companies that truly want users to hack their mass-market electronic products. Here is the killer counter-argument:

      Name one manufacturer of a mass-market electronic product (including the Roomba described in the article) that will not instantly void your product warranty for doing the things described in this article.
      • And why wouldn't companies want you to void your warranty?

        Then they spend less supporting you.
      • Most of the time, voiding the warranty makes perfect sense when you're talking about hacking.

        Lets say I take apart my TiVo/Roomba whatever, put it back together, and it doesn't work right. If it was working before I took it apart, and it doesn't work when I put it back together, how can the company honor a warranty? They have absolutely no assurance that you didnt fsck something up while you were poking around. Do you really expect them to say, "You were hacking, so it's okay you broke it. we'll send you a
      • Removable faceplates on many products.. such as cell phones. This was done to allow easy hacking of the products look. Ring tones, downloadable games, etc were all done so normal customers could hack their cellphones without needing to be hacker gods. Get an N-Gage. They actively encourage writing of new programs for the unit and sharing them.

        That's exactly the kind of consumer friendly hacking the article was talking about.

        Or we could get to the all time favorite hackable consumer electronic device.. the
    • Also, don't rule out the influence factor. We drive more sales than most people realize.

      As geeks, we are usually the early adoptors for any new technology. If it's hackable, we are more likely to buy it, so it looks better to the bean counters in accounting. Early sales are a great indicator of product potential. Also, during the last couple of boom years, we had the $$ to spend on the toys as well.

      Secondly, who do our are friends and family ask advice from about what they should buy? Us!

      And neve

    • in implying the the customers at large wish to hack products.

      It's not that we (I'd count myself as more in the non-hacking community) want to hack it ourselves. We want you to hack it so we eventually get to see the benefits, without even going to any trouble!

      Something that is non-hackable is pretty much a dead end.
    • Third party ring tones and games, etc for cell phones are passe now. So are "performance chips" for engine control modules.

      Until a trojan leans the mixture out at 100% throttle and 2 minutes later you have a dead engine...A lot of these "performance chips" decrease engine life (substantially) already. Putting the fuel injector tables in the hands of customers will do a little to help the guys who know what they're doing...and a lot to help the automobile service industry.

      Cell phones maybe not as bad.

  • Hacking is bad (Score:2, Insightful)

    by pholower ( 739868 )
    This is how many companies see the word hacker. Ill things come to mind. They think of all the money they spend to prevent hackers from altering anything in the company. There are a few companies that put hacks in on purpose, but these companies are, as I said, few and far between. With all of the people now that use computers, it seems only an inevitablilty. Open Source programs are the ultimate hack. You can change anything on it you like, and the best part is, it is legal to do so under the GPL. We ne

  • My toaster (Score:5, Funny)

    by kir ( 583 ) on Saturday March 20, 2004 @09:33AM (#8620555)
    I hacked my toaster to only burn the toast. It's not *exactly* what I wanted, but I did it ALLLL by myself.

  • hackable (Score:3, Insightful)

    by elh_inny ( 557966 ) on Saturday March 20, 2004 @09:34AM (#8620560) Homepage Journal
    Instead of simply configuring your PC to suit your needs, you buy some exotic pieces of hardware to do the very same tasks but the hard way.

    While I don't mind versatility, things should not be sold to do something different from what they were designed for.
    • Then how about modifying a product to do what it should have been designed to do? Real simple example - why don't window mounted air conditioners have REAL thermostats that you can set to a temperature in degrees? Mine does - I built it. But if the original manufacturer had been just a little forward thinking I could have done it with 3 inexpensive components rather than 20 more expensive ones. And why don't the manufacturers do it right in the first place?
      • That's my point, after all why should the consumer be responsible for the product, it should be sold working with no need for hacing whatsoever.
        • In a perfect world, you'd be absolutely correct - but I certainly don't expect some poor underpaid taiwanese engineer to understand what I want. Let me be completely serious for a moment (although it's not going to sound like it). We all know that intelligent people are in the minority. Any doubts about that can be resolved by watching television. So, realistically, our best hope is for the manufacturers who have to appeal to the "morass market" to leave us an opening.

  • Archos MP3 Player (Score:4, Interesting)

    by elinenbe ( 25195 ) on Saturday March 20, 2004 @09:38AM (#8620573)
    The Rockbox software (http://rockbox.haxx.se)

    has incorporated some nifty things that the company, Archos seemed to have left out

    Currently, it can:
    -play movies on it's screen
    -alter the playing speed of MP3s
    -use bookmarks, different fonts, and more
    -and just recently there are "voice fonts" where the entire menu system is read back to you. There are a decent number of blind rockbox users, and this makes it the only mp3 player they can use. Ever see a blind person use an ipod? This customization alone is something that most blind people would pay upwards of 10-20x the cost of a device to be implemented!

    And with Amazon selling the 20GB USB2.0 recorders for $79 after a rebate I don't know where you can get a better deal!
    • The 20 gig usb2 archos shows a $210 price

  • this is nothing new (Score:5, Interesting)

    by newsdee ( 629448 ) on Saturday March 20, 2004 @09:40AM (#8620578) Homepage Journal
    The last line of the article summarizes it all with one line: "mass customization". It's the next step after mass consumption, with the added benefit that the buyer is in control of getting a truly unique product.

    The article explores a way to achieve this through software, but there are many more ways to pull it off. For example, a sport shoes company has a corporate website in which you order a customized pair of sneakers, allowing you to change a lot of details (there are more than 8 colors in 10 items, IIRC, plus other items with fewer choices).

    The old idea (mass consumption) was that you buy whatever fits your lifestyle, that you could really define yourself through buying a different mix of products from different brands. The new idea (customization) is that you keep the same brand but you adapt it to your lifestyle. The advantage (for the company) is that you don't need to look for another brand if you don't like such and such feature, and (for you) that you have a more unique product.

    Though as several companies start having it, customization won't guarantee success either. It will probably become necessary but clearly not sufficient. You will always see a real-life version of "attack of the clones" when teenage girls roam the mall in packs clothed exactly the same (who probably won't use customization as much). And you will always see "open-architecture" platforms fail miserably (e.g. 3DO).

    I would venture that this is a good thing after all, because it gives the control back to the buyer. If you really want to be different, you have to do a bit of thinking and research yourself, instead of relying on what the company tells you is new/hip/unique but sells in thousands.

  • Ownership vs. Usage (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dozek ( 525516 ) on Saturday March 20, 2004 @09:42AM (#8620587)
    I heard Dr. Ed Felton from Princeton lecture on this very idea...that we are used to purchasing a product and owning it. If that means we want to take a screwdriver, dismantle our toaster and find out how it works, then that is the right of ownership. However, he continued, with more technical products (ranging from commercial software to embedded components) we do not get ownership, rather a license agreement. Thus, we lose the "right to tinker" and subsequently improve products as we see fit.

    He referenced several lawsuits involving this idea...one in particular regarding aftermarket garage door openers.

    I've always asked the question "Why can't I change how long the snooze button silences the alarm?" My clock has a 9 minute snooze...but what if I just want 6 minutes? I'd have to keep buying clocks and find the right one through trial and error. I'd be totally willing to pay more for a clock with a variable snooze.

    • Re:Ownership vs. Usage (Score:2, Interesting)

      by bitflip ( 49188 )
      This [straightdope.com] might interest you: "Why does the alarm clock snooze button give you nine extra minutes, not ten," from The Straight Dope.
    • Variable snooze doesn't even need customisation, though! Alarms on the Psion Series 5, for example, can be snoozed for any length of time by pressing the 'Snooze' button several times -- it adds 5 minutes for each press, up to a maximum of 60.

      How hard would that be to implement? You could even make it multiples of 9 minutes, so that the traditional use wouldn't change, and people who weren't interested in variable snooze wouldn't even have to know about it...

    • we do not get ownership, rather a license agreement

      That's what the commercial software industry would like you to think, but it simply isn't true.

      If you go and buy a commercial program, you give money and get the software. For all intents and purposes you now own a copy of a copyrighted work. There were no contracts or agreements. They can try and spring one on you after the fact, but it doesn't matter... you already own a copy. You don't have to agree to anything to use something you already own.

  • Sounds good to me. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dealsites ( 746817 ) on Saturday March 20, 2004 @09:44AM (#8620592) Homepage
    I have the Linksys WRT54g. There are currently 3 groups creating custom firmware. The fixes and features are rolled out quite a lot faster than Linksys provides. I feel that I have one of the most powerful wireless routers on the market for around $80 now. The bandwidth management and remote VPN features are sweet. Linksys would have never implemented that.

    I always wondered why a few engineers don't create an open source hardware solution. I imaging a wireless router isn't more than a few chips laid down on a board. A group should get together and create an open-source hardware platform and then sell it at a slight margin to make up the manufacturing costs. Then let the software gurus continue to add features. Just make sure that the unit has enough ram and MIPS to process future functions. I'm not sure of the BOM cost for a wireless router, but I'm sure it's pretty cheap. An open source hardware router could probably sell for $20 when massed produced. There are 802.11b routers selling that cheap now.

    --
    Check out tons of hot deals updated in real time from many major deal sites.

  • Rabid Fan Base (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 20, 2004 @10:00AM (#8620656)
    I think that encouraging the "hacking" of your products, or not actively discouraging, helps to develop very dedicated fans (see Tivo). It also give people who have the desire and skills to modify the equipment a greater sense of ownership and/or control of THIER device. As a side benfit it allows a company to effectively outsource a portion of the R&D effort to actual customers. A nice cheap way to find out what people want. If they then incorperate these hacks into future models the the "I want it to just work crowd" can benfit too.

  • Consumer rights (Score:3, Interesting)

    by t_allardyce ( 48447 ) on Saturday March 20, 2004 @10:02AM (#8620667) Journal
    Shouldnt we have laws protecting people who want to modify something they own? Aslong as theres no danger to other people (eg screwing up your cars breaking system), you should be allowed to do what ever the hell you want with your property. Insead we get laws like the DMCA which companies now use on a daily basis to sue people for pretty much anything from making an adaptor cable to spray painting their PS2 silver. I think the mandate should be: "sell us what we want, or we will go and buy it from china"
    • Shouldnt we have laws protecting people who want to modify something they own?

      I'm a little concerned that we have come to the point where anyone has to consider a law to specifically allow me to do whatever I want to something I own.
      (as long as it's not directly harming anyone else - the old "your right to swing your arm stops at my nose" thing)

      • Its really a case of unionisation: there are two groups - the corporations and the consumers, which ever one bands together the most wins - if the consumers take a stance and all with one voice say "hey fuck you" then the corporations have to listen, otherwise they will loose their customers to someone who will. On the other hand, if the corporations band together and say "hey lets all sell our products under strict EULAs" then the consumer is screwed unless they can get the product somewhere else (like chi

  • What else are we missing? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SilentJ_PDX ( 559136 ) on Saturday March 20, 2004 @10:06AM (#8620682) Homepage
    I love my iPod, but the most frustrating thing about it is what it could do if Apple allowed people to hack them. For instance, thanks to all the mix CDs and compilations I own, I have over 1700 unique artists in my MP3 collection. Of those, only about 500 have more than one song and only 300 artists have more than 3-4 songs. On the iPod, that means I have to scroll through 4 one-track artists for each of the artists that I own an entire album of. It would be great to have a second "Popular Artist" list that would only show the artists that have more than 3-4 tracks. For a coder, something like that would be easy to write. But because Apple doesn't allow iPod hacking, I'll probably never see that feature. How many other great features are our mp3 players, DVD players, microwaves, automobiles, etc missing becuase people can't hack them? I think one could apply the same argument to Microsoft: what nifty OS features aren't we seeing becuase the only vision of OS we see is the MS vision?

  • I Definitely Agree (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Futaris ( 16554 )
    I'd have to agree with this guy. There are a lot of people out there that want to hack things to worth the way they want them too. And with education levels of everyone rising, it will only be a matter of time before the younger generations want to modify things. Take for example, the mobile phone, which five or ten years ago was just a phone. Most of the younger generation likes to modify and change their mobile.

  • Bad Idea (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CreatureComfort ( 741652 ) on Saturday March 20, 2004 @10:16AM (#8620733)

    The biggest problem with this idea is that allowing your product to be easily changed by the end user is a recipe for technical support disaster. That's why every branded PC you buy these days doesn't just come with a disk to reinstall the OS, it comes with a "System Restore" CD. So that when you call Dell, HP, Gateway, eMachine, etc. with a problem, they walk you through the few simple things to determine if it is a hardware or software problem. As soon as they feel they can eliminate a hardware failure, the next suggestion is use the restore CD, simply because they can't afford to spend the time trying to figure out what you did to your PC to mess it up.

    If your toaster becomes deliberately (by the manufacturer) "hackable" then they can no longer have those big warnings that tinkering with the device voids the warranty, and they will also have to hire a massive support group to get all those messed up toasters working again.

    • Re:Bad Idea (Score:3, Insightful)

      by JayBlalock ( 635935 )
      If your toaster becomes deliberately (by the manufacturer) "hackable" then they can no longer have those big warnings that tinkering with the device voids the warranty,

      Um... no. It's not like this article was literally talking about slapping a "hack me please!" sticker on the box. It's talking about things like not going out of your way to sue\harass people who DO hack the product and talk about it. Or, from an engineering standpoint, not attempting to lock every component behind locks and doors to ke


      • But beyond support, is the problem of liability. Unfortunately there is ample history of people in the U.S. using products in ways they were not intended and then sueing the manufacturer for "letting them" hurt themselves. When we have product warnings [dumbwarnings.com]already about not sticking your head inside a Gamecube console, about not eating the silicon drying agent, etc., etc., etc.... I can't see companies making it any easier to "modify" thier products.

        Just ask Wonko the Sane....

  • To the contrary (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Nakito ( 702386 ) on Saturday March 20, 2004 @10:16AM (#8620735)
    Companies have a much stronger interest in preventing, not encouraging, end-user modification of their products. This is because they want to charge you for extra features and upgrades. Consider one of the most obvious and prevalent examples of computer hardware hacking (which the authors failed to mention although I am sure it was in their minds): CPU overclocking. Intel has no interest in making it easy for you to buy one of their inexpensive CPUs and making it run like one of their premium CPUs with no benefit to them. To the contrary, their entire pricing model is based on charging you extra for those capabilities.

    Yes, there is the occasional product that gains geek cult status because the manufacturer encourages end-user hacking (e.g., Lego Mindstorms). But those products are already aimed at that particular segment of the market. Makers of mass-market electronics, on the other hand, have no interest in letting you upgrade their products when they would much rather sell you the upgrade.
    • Actually, the Mindstorms was conceived and marketed for kids. Lego was quite surprised that they ended up selling so many of them, and that so many of the buyers ended up being men in their 20s buying for themselves. (No, I don't have a cite.)
    • To the contrary, their entire pricing model is based on charging you extra for those capabilities.

      Companies work better when everything follows the same normal flow. It's a "Special orders do upset us" kind of thing. You can make a few bucks (very few) at a large cost to the company's sense of direction and identity. Hackers are a very useful market, particularly if you are willing to run it at a slight loss. There is no way you will make a lot of money from hackers. They don't have all that much to spend

  • Making money from it (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nenya ( 557317 ) on Saturday March 20, 2004 @10:23AM (#8620768) Homepage
    There are two primary reasons that are holding back major corporations from opening their goods to hackign. The first is liability, the second is money.

    Concerning liability, companies are rightly paralyzed with fear that they could be held responsible for making a product that can be modified to do illegal and/or unpleasant things. Take, for example, the TiVo situation. Just because they took out the ad-skipping feature by default, doesn't mean that they cannot theoretically be held responsible for allowing their product to be hacked in such a way to put the feature back in. And hacking cars is even more legally dangerous. In short: while corporations ensure that their goods meet the requirements of current legal code, there is no way to ensure that a hacked product will still be in compliance. It is highly likely that corporations can be held liable for this.

    Second: corporations exist to make money. The reason that most companies don't want their product to be hacked is that they don't want you to find that feature for yourself, they want to find it first and sell it to you. If you add a feature they didn't sell you, they lose. There is a way around this, fortunately, and Apple has already taken it. Simply reserve the right to include and market any hacks that consumers come up with. But finding the hacks that would have market value is hard enough: finding the hacks with market value that are legal is even harder.
    • Concerning liability, companies are rightly paralyzed with fear that they could be held responsible for making a product that can be modified to do illegal and/or unpleasant things.

      Pah. Without modification, I can use knives intended to carve food to kill others instead.

  • I hacked my underwear (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    For some reason there was no hole at the front, so a cut a hole... just now I relized that they must be girls underwear!

  • Although I think racing is a waste of resources... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bigattichouse ( 527527 ) on Saturday March 20, 2004 @10:31AM (#8620798) Homepage
    Racing *was*, and occasionally *is still* a major source for automotive innvations to control a car at high speed. Hacks like this are the modern equivalent for non-racing items. Play with it break it, see if you can make it better.
    • Exactly. I don't see why people (companies, consumers, Senators, etc) don't understand that hacking\modding an X-Box is effectively NO different than modding a car. It baffles me when, on one hand, Congress keeps passing laws to protect small garages and prevent auto manufacturers from locking down hoods, and simultaneously on the other, they pass restrictive laws to prevent any consumer from ever so much as thinking about modifying a piece of electronics.

      Well, not ENTIRELY baffled. It's about stupidit

      • I don't see why people (companies, consumers, Senators, etc) don't understand that hacking\modding an X-Box is effectively NO different than modding a car.

        Okay, heres one reason it is different, you can go from there.

        A modded X-Box isn't a whole lot more likely to go beserk and crash into people at 50 MPH with a ton of inertia behind it than a non-modded X-Box.
  • that seems an awful lot like open source software. So I guess one could say that opensource is the 'next big thing' because one can modify it as much as they want.

  • Hack your TiVo! (Score:2, Informative)

    by jkeegan ( 35099 )
    Seems like a good place for a plug. :)

    Hacking TiVo: The Expansion, Enhancement, and Development Starter Kit [amazon.com], available for $20.99 at amazon.com.

  • Citroen C2 in europe has this philosophy (Score:3, Informative)

    by rapiddescent ( 572442 ) on Saturday March 20, 2004 @01:07PM (#8621641)
    Citroen (a french car manufacturer) recently updated its small hatchback range, the Saxo. The Saxo was designed to be a small affordable car for teenagers and mums - however, quite unexpectantly, the fast and furious cruise crowd who modify cars really liked the cars adaptable engine and so it became, especially the VTR model - very popular.

    So much so, the new replacement for the Saxo, the Citroen C2 GT [citroen.co.uk] has been designed so that enthusiasts can modify the car (and keep the warranty). there has even been talk of owners being able to share ECU maps and so on to have different performance characteristics. It is not a WRX fast car - but has been designed for the high-risk-insurance youngsters who want to modify their vehicle. It looks like some big consumer goods companies are beginning to look this way and let the end user tinker with the original format to make something unique and match the end users requirements.

    rapiddescent (who owns a modified WRX turbo)

  • I'm all for companies making their products more "hackable" and all that this additional empowerment of the consumer that it implies. But as usual, with empowerment, there is a downside as well as an upside. The article just touches upon it when it refers to the issue of liabilities.

    I remember a Law and Order episode where a gun manufacturer purposely designed their product, a legal, single-fire gun to be hackable. A minor hack, which they did not sell or acknowledge, but which was described on a third-p

  • Just think about it: A personal computer is not a box that exists to DO something. It's a box that exists purely to be customized to do whatever the user wants.

    Look how THAT caught on.
  • They might allow a little hacking but I'm sure they'll draw a line quickly. Auto manufacturers seem to love the closed-source model, owners are forced to bring their problems back to the dealer $$$ [slashdot.org]

    My Dad is one of an earlier breed of hackers: an amatuer auto mechanic. He's better at hacking cars than I'll ever be at hacking electronics.
    He converted his jeep to manual trans then back to auto when it failed too. His 55' Thunderbird has a Chevy engine in it. He gave up trying to find the "proper" ford

  • Make the next XBOX open. Let people add to it, program it, modify it, etc. Want to kill your competition? Open it up you b00bs!

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