U.S. Farmers Are Being Bled by the Tractor Monopoly

Re:U.S. Farmers Are Being Bled by the Tractor Monopoly by cellularmitosis on Monday May 13, 2019 @07:14PM (#19905008)

> Years ago, farmers found a hack where they could put a resister in-line between the diesel temperature sensor and the ECU and increase their horsepower. The hack spread like wildfire.

And no wonder. Inducing artificial market segmentation by selling software-crippled devices is hugely unpopular with consumers.

I find it ironic that the unlock ended up being a resistor, just like with the Promise IDE controller / RAID controller from long ago -- another example of a company trying to save costs by designing one product and shipping it as two products (with one of them software-crippled). That instance was also hugely unpopular with consumers, and that resistor hack also spread like wildfire.

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Re:U.S. Farmers Are Being Bled by the Tractor Monopoly by war1025 on Monday May 13, 2019 @08:00PM (#19905343)

Based on the way the comment was worded, it wasn't a power upgrade that was turned on/off based on a resistor being present or not. Adding the resistor changed how the engine thought it was running, which caused it to run in a way that produced more power, but not in a configuration that had been tested or approved for production use.

There are lots of things that you can run outside of spec, but they introduce premature wear, which is why they don't run that way by default.

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