> Five guys moving a server to a new datacenter without shutting it down. Without cutting it off from the internet. And as using a car would have been too easy, they used public transport.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQ5MA685ApE (DE audio, EN subs)
See also perhaps:
> The HotPlug allows hot seizure and removal of computers from the field to anywhere else. The HotPlug's patented technology keeps power flowing to the computer while transferring the computer's power input from one A/C source (such as a wall outlet or power strip) to another (a portable UPS) and back again.
* https://shop.digistor.com/products/hotplug-field-kit
* 2007 potato-quality demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erq4TO_a3z8&
I wouldn't say that I miss those days, but there's some good nostalgia there having done some things that feel pretty similar (early 2000s). Not quite to that extreme though.
Highspeed Highway Halo
If anything, thats an indication to me to make a HA setup so you can power down 1 member.
Im not going to watch a video, honestly, but HA with a front-facing Zookeeper and sharded Postgres isnt super hard. Can be if you didnt initially plan for it.
Ideally, you need an odd amount of quorum machines to properly handle split brain decisions... But if its a money issue, you can technically get by with just 2, and accepting a possibility of split brain.
> We created this product for our Government/Forensic customers
My oven has a proofing feature. It wasn't really advertised, it's just there. I like that feature and I use that feature when baking.
If one day my oven manufacturer pushed an update which removed my proofing feature, I'd be upset.
The same could be said for encrypted memory. If you as a computer owner discovered and turned on encrypted memory because you wanted to feel a bit more secure about your hardware getting stolen. You'd probably be upset that on a normal firmware update that feature suddenly went away. Not because the hardware doesn't supported it or didn't support it. Not because AMD's firmware didn't or couldn't support it. But because someone in an AMD product management team said "Woopsie, that's an enterprise feature, we better disable that".
Completely different story if these CPUs never supported that feature. Completely different story if future CPUs didn't have that feature or had it disabled in firmware. Heck, even a different story if with the disable AMD also said "We disabled this because there's an unrecoverable fault in the memory controller which causes memory corruption."
I have to assume the reason wasn't because of a bug in the feature, but rather because management decided the feature wasn't supposed to be there.
Because I think ethics goes further than "bad thing happened to me", I've formed an opinion that this is a pretty shitty move.
As far as AMD is concerned, this was never supported, nor documented. Now pulling the rug with a firmware update isn't a very nice thing to do, but maybe they've had some actual reason for that beyond "this shouldn't be enabled". Nobody should expect undocumented and unsupported features to just continue to work in perpetuity, simply because they did work at some point in the past.
Maybe this is the only thing that concerned them but not the only thing they knew very well. AMD knew that this was widely used by consumers and that every motherboard manufacturer exposed the option to the user. They pulled the rug legally, knowing that all those many people standing on the rug will fall on their ass.
I don't know what current case law is but I think that ought to be explicitly illegal. A physical product should be required to maintain the features that it had when it was purchased. Anything else is clearly cheating the consumer.
Even if you have the ability to remotely enable new features:
1. You shouldn’t use the same ability to disable existing features.
2. You shouldn’t enable them, either! It should be opt-in. Any kind of change has the potential to break something. Just don’t be changing my hardware without me initiating the change.
> Just don’t be changing my hardware without me initiating the change
In this case it seems to have been disabled in future firmware, so "you" did initiate the change, as you did an firmware upgrade that included the change. Still, shitty to sneak it in, I agree, but the feature wouldn't literally be there one day then not the next, requires human initiation at least.
> particularly for gaming servers
Not "particularly" but that's one example.
Also, it probably wasn't the selling point, but it was the baseline of quality, and probably documented online or in manuals.
Furthermore, accepting this as normal opens the door to further post-sale enshittification of ALL things. Next thing you know, upgrades here and there are going to degrade the quality of products and services just because it wasn't explicitly written (think post-upgrade slowdowns of mobile phones to pressure people to buy newer ones).
This is THE slipperiest slope; and it's just taking place because the deregulation mafia is turning a blind eye to these tech cartels.
Given it was never marketed, it's possible perhaps despite the feature being exposed it never worked correctly and AMD saw fit to just disable it rather than people get a false sense of security through it.
"no one uses it and there is a bug" may invite more questions or panic, but "that's all we're going to say" implies that Mythos found something scary, or that the NSA demanded they all get turned off.