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LG CD-ROMs Destroyed by Mandrake 9.2
An anonymous reader writes "The latest offering of Mandrake's distribution, 9.2, has been found to not only be incompatible with some LG CD-ROM drives, but to destroy them during the installation process. Mandrake have posted information on their errata page and further information can be found on this thread [google]. Along with over 350Mb of updates within a week of release, it's not been a good start for this latest release."
...and software is capable of destroying your products, you're fucking fired.
As for Mandrake, I'm sure that the updates are a good thing, unless they're stupid bugs that should have been fixed before release.
If you're a hardware manufacturer...and software is capable of destroying your products, you're fucking fired.
So how do you propose putting firmware updates into CD-ROM drives, DVD drives, modems, etc.? Just about any peripheral which has flashable firmware can be rendered unusable by software.
Dude, software should never be able to damage hardware. Not in 2003. Part of this is just common sense -- how could anyone design hardware that bad? But beyond that, it is only a matter of time before someone writes a virus that includes this cute little effect. It is no longer possible to blow up a CRT by giving it an out-of-range signal, or to call halt-and-catch-fire, or to blow up your car's engine by overreving it (assume you haven't screwed with the rev limiter). It is not okay for normal usage to damage hardware, and in the computer world 'normal usage' means any data at all, even malicious or (in the case of Mandrake, it seems) really bad data.
I've had this sig for three days.
If I try to tell my monitor to use a refresh rate that will damage it, it will tell me to screw off. My P4 will start to slow down, automatically, if it starts getting too hot, in order to keep it from burning out. Hardware suicide is more or less a thing of the past for a large portion of things.
I would consider it poor design on the part of the hardware manufacturer is something silly could burn it out. Are you telling me the next SoBig virus is going to make everyone's monitors explode?
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
I wonder how many folks here would be bitching out LG if it was XP that was trashing the hardware?
1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
Software != Firmware.
The mandrake problem doesn't have anything to do with firmware as far as I can tell, you just send a flush command to the drive, and it fails.
A simple software command should never, EVER be able to fry hardware. Screwing with the firmware is another problem entirely.