Nvidia Adds Telemetry To Latest Drivers

[tetris42]

If just me alone? Never. But that is the problem people with bitch and cry and moan about something but then keep buying it. Yes it does require the majority to change. I don't disagree with you in the slightest. The issue is that 99.9% of the people won't vote with their wallets however. They don't want to change, they just want to bitch and expect that to be enough. Fuck you Nvidia. I don't like what you are doing. I will still give you $1000 every year for a new video card but you better know that I am not happily giving you my money so fuck you and just take my money. What does that change? They are still making money so they won't care. Now, if you get 25% of the people to stop buying their cards, that they will notice. But you will never get that because most people just want to bitch and not actually do anything about it. So even if it is just one person to start with that decides you know what, fuck everyone that pisses me off with their practices, I am gong to start only buying from people that I actually agree with or I am happy with the service of, that 1 person can convince other to do the same and slowly it spreads. If every person upset by this change in policy never bought another Nvidia card again and next year bought AMD cards, Nvidia would take notice. People in a group have the power to make good change with something as simple as their purchasing habits but they refuse to change them. As for having vote with your wallet work. I have seen it work a few times. A guy opened a restaurant in the town that I work. After 5 years of great service he sold it to 4 of the employees and left. Since they were paying him monthly out of the profits they decided that they wanted to make more money so that they could actually have larger profits to split 4 ways. So they raised prices 1.5x time what they were, but at the same time cut back on what you got. So for example a chicken tender and fry meal was something like 4.75 and gave you 4 tenders. They made it something like $6.95 and gave you 3 smaller sized tenders. They had a car show there ever tuesday where people would bring classic cars, they put a stop to that saying they didn't want all these people in their parking lot. People started to complain and they did nothing. So everyone stopped going there over time, till it got to the point that they were having a good week to have 6 people stop by the entire week. Within 5 months of them taking over they couldn't afford to pay the original owner and were getting ready to close the place down. The original owner took the place back from them (which was part of the original contract), put the prices back to how they were and put the food sizes back to what they were to start with. He also brought back the car show and started giving them a small discount for being there. Within a week of the reopening the place was back to being packed at lunch time. Now I understand that I am talking about a small place with much tighter margins than a large company, but just giving an example of at least one time that I have actually seen it work.

However you aren't wrong in anything that you are saying. It isn't something that normally has a large impact, but only because as you said Joe Average and even most everyone else doesn't care so the company still makes money hand over first.

Well what you're describing is a different situation. People make decisions based on PRICE and QUALITY of the product every day. So if Nvidia decided to double the price on all their cards, you bet that would affect how many they sold. Likewise, if a design mistake made all their cards half as slow, that would also change how many were sold. Joe Average DOES care about that. But I can't think of any instance where voting with your wallet ever changed shitty business practices so long as the product worked okay and the price was acceptable. So loss of privacy is fine. Loss of warranty is fine. Signing away the ability to take legal action against a company is fine. Worker exploitation is fine. Environmental disasters are fine. Products that kill people are fine as long as it's not easily provable or easily associated. Now of course Nvidia isn't guilty of all that, but my point is, I've always found the "vote with your wallet" completely meaningless when it comes to stuff like this. Stuff like this never changes from voting with your wallet. Or rather, like you said, it affects the 1% of sales for people who do give a shit. That's not voting, that's statistical noise.

 

[Exavior]

Well what you're describing is a different situation. People make decisions based on PRICE and QUALITY of the product every day. So if Nvidia decided to double the price on all their cards, you bet that would affect how many they sold. Likewise, if a design mistake made all their cards half as slow, that would also change how many were sold. Joe Average DOES care about that. But I can't think of any instance where voting with your wallet ever changed shitty business practices so long as the product worked okay and the price was acceptable. So loss of privacy is fine. Loss of warranty is fine. Signing away the ability to take legal action against a company is fine. Worker exploitation is fine. Environmental disasters are fine. Products that kill people are fine as long as it's not easily provable or easily associated. Now of course Nvidia isn't guilty of all that, but my point is, I've always found the "vote with your wallet" completely meaningless when it comes to stuff like this. Stuff like this never changes from voting with your wallet. Or rather, like you said, it affects the 1% of sales for people who do give a shit. That's not voting, that's statistical noise.

I think we are trying to argue semantics right now. There is a difference to "can voting with your wallet work if everyone actually did it" and "does voting with your wallets work with the current mindset of the general population". One requires people to make intelligent decision when buying stuff and one deals with the fact that most of the world is populated with people who are board line mentally retarded and we should be surprised are actually able to have anything close to a thought spark inside their head. I fully agree with everything you said. But only because people just don't care enough to think about anything other than themselves or some narrow minded thought processes. Same reason why companies use pretty women to sell you things. "Your product causes cancer in 3% of the users? Well they were probably already sick, so how many do you want me to buy pretty lady? "