In a court of law, yes, but he was not being tried for anything.
doesn't microsoft have trust in there[sic] employees?
Yes. Bill Gates knows them all personally and goes to dinner with them and their families.
why would you hire someone you wouldn't trust with a camera?
Because you thought that they had enough sense not to photograph the inside of your facility and post it on the Internet.
Or do they give the PRINTING department access to all the hottests and latest technologies?
No. They have monks with quill pens write manuals and internal documentations for their developmental softare. Ever see a loading dock in a print shop? Doesn't look like he was in the print shop when he snapped that, does it.
my orig. post was a joke. your sense of humor astounds me.
Perhaps you don't have a very good sense of humor.
you r 0wz0red.
Speak English and quit with your 12-year-old-scrip-kiddie crap.
Really? So you are saying that the docks are on public property? Microsoft has no security on their campus and anyone can enter and wander around? I'm surprised to hear that.
If they were really concerned for security, they would have asked him to take the pictures down before firing him.
Yeah, so that he could file a wrongful termination lawsuit ("I did what they asked and they fired me anyway...").
I'm guessing that some humorless tin-pot middle-management dictator with anger issues made the decision to fire him on the spot because he thinks all employees are disposable.
Guys who work in the print shop at Microsoft are. As I said in another post, he's easily replaced. It's not like he's the lead developer for Excel.
And now the pictures are linked to on Slashdot..
And now security doesn't have to worry about his wandering around the campus taking other, perhaps more damaging, pictures.
and Microsoft's exceptionally nasty human resource management is once again in the spotlight.
Yeah. I bet that no one will apply to work there now.
I'm sorry, I just can't parse those few sentences.
Why? They were syntactically and grammatically correct, used no unusual words, and were not overly long.
One employee owned a digital camera, and happened to have it with him for work, stuffed in his bag.
How did he take a photo with the camera inside his "bag."? Why did he have his bag at the loading dock when he worked in the print shop?
Taking a single picture of a public area, the door, making every effort to conceal the nature of the building
What steaming, utter bullshit! It was not a public area. If it's a public area, drive your car onto the campus and then go to that supposed "public" area. My guess? You'll be arrested. And how do you know how many pictures he took and of what?
Eh, no? An employee owning a camera, and using it outside of work? Shock horror!
Did you even look at the picture? The picture was shot from INSIDE of the building. How can it be "outside of work" when he's inside of the building where he works?
In your world, employees have no rights what so ever and can be put on the unemployment line with a twitch of the corporate finger.
If by "[my] world", you mean the real world, then, sadly, yes. Employers can terminate employees without cause.
In my world, an employee can be fired for
1. Gross incompetence
2. Lack of work
3. There is no number three.
Great. Get me a job in your world. I'd like a job where I could steal computers, be insubordinate, show up in shorts and t-shirts every day, work whatever hours I chose, and spend my lunch hour banging some exhibitionist chick on the conference room table.
Who gives a f'k if some guy took some pictures of the delivery man dropping off some new Macs. It's no a big deal.
It's a big deal if you are part of Microsoft's corporate security and you don't know what else the guy has been taking pictures of.
Extrapolate. Consider the circumstances. He wasn't an incredibly valuable employee. He was a temp working in the print shop. If you have even an inkling of concern about the judgement or trustworthiness of someone in that position, you replace them. End of story.
lets summarize what youu just said. mac fan takes photo, get's fired. OOOHHH SNAP!!! better stop those crazy kids at apple, and all those silly linux distrubutions before they start desiging SIMILAR BUILDINGS
So you believe that he came onto the campus, took one photo with his digital camera, and that's it? You don't know what else he might have photographed, who he might have sent it to, or how it might have been used.
You apparently don't know how industrial espionage works. Industrial spies often collect information from many sources in order to determine what directions their competitors are taking. The delivery of a pallet or two of G5s might not be enough in and of itself to do much, but put that together with other information and it might reveal quite a lot.
So... your theories are great but ultimately not relevant.
They are great and they are relevent.
If they truly cared about future incidents they could've asked him to take the photo down, reprimanded him, and then sent email to the company asking that people don't do that.
If they don't trust him, what good does it do to tell him not to do it again?
But, instead they just fired the guy. Your theories don't mesh with the other facts.
Get a clue: He was a temp working in the print shop. He probably had access to all kinds of sensitive internal documents and he demonstrated a lack of judgement. He's easily replaced. He wasn't the lead developer for the.NET framework. He didn't head up the Outlook development team.
Nothing against the guy. He seems like a decent guy. He just made a mistake. He accepts that. Why can't you?
I disagree. I see no harm in what he did. You couldn't see anything except for G5's and a truck.
So what could be seen in the other pictures he took? You know -- the ones that he didn't post on the web site. Did he e-mail those to Microsoft competitors? Did they include new hardware being developed at Microsoft? Were there photos of company-proprietary documentation?
The fact is, that you don't know what (if any) other pictures the guy took. The guy presented an unreasonable security risk for the value he brought to the company. That's all.
Comparing it to him carrying an uzi around is outrageous.
I didn't compare it to that. I used that to illustrate the Slashdot bias: Microsoft lets someone go for good reason and the Slashdot headline implies it is because he used a competing OS/computer.
Microsoft allegedly fired him because he created a security risk. But if that were the real reason, then they should have happily accepted his offer to remove the posting.
The guy was wandering the campus with a digital camera taking pictures of non-public areas. Wouldn't that make you a bit suspicious if you were in corporate security? Wouldn't you wonder how many other pictures he had taken and who he had given them to? Why should Microsoft take a chance on some temp when there are hundreds of others lined up at their doors begging for jobs?
So it does make me wonder what the real reason is.
Right... It's Microsoft, so there must be some nefararious, hidden, evil plan at work. I forgot. Sorry.
So what? It's not a bank, a nuclear research facility, the changing rooms of Moulin Rouge; it's an office building.
Was he hired to take digital photos of company property? It's not his office building. It's theirs. If they don't want photos of it floating around the net, that's their call.
Think about the questions that go through the minds of the security people: Today it was the loading dock but what will it be tomorrow? The new X-Box, our development lab? Photos of company-proprietary memos? Why is the guy wandering around the campus taking pictures with a digital camera?
You also don't seem to understand how industrial espionage works. They might be just Macs to you. Someone else might have other information that they are able to put together with that in order to ascertain something that Microsoft wishes to keep secret.
And in all the places I've worked, no one has ever cared what snaps anyone took or what they did with them.
Where have you worked? JC Penney and Walmart? Most engineering firms are very guarded and don't want pictures of their facilities distributed over the Internet.
This guy's mistake was mixing up his personal life and his work life.
Let's look at this from an ethics standpoint. If the guy had posted a picture of himself dressed as Mary Poppins frolicking in his yard, then it's not an issue for his work. If he published pictures of his personally owned Windows PC blue-screening and bitched about it in his blog, that's not cause for Microsoft to take action against him, either.
It's when you cross that line between home and work that it gets ugly. The guy took digital photos of his employer's non-public building areas while there as an employee. He identified himself as a Microsoft employee, in what department he worked, and in what building. He used poor judgement and he knows it. Microsoft didn't commit some horrible atrocity against the Mac community by firing the guy. They did not quelch his free speech rights. They fired some loose cannon who was wandering around the campus taking digital photos and posting them on his own web page. The whole story is just sensationalistic: Microsoft Fires Mac Fan For Blog Photo. It had nothing to do with his being a "Mac Fan." What's next?
Your Rights Online: Microsoft Fires Linux User For Exercising Constitutional Rights
somegeek writes "Microsoft has fired a full-time temp employee after it discovered that the employee was carrying a loaded Uzi submachine gun around the campus in his backpack. Microsoft fired the Linux user, despite the person's offer to put the Uzi back in his car...
This could also be a great technology for improving the situation with the timing of lights as well as emergency vehicle situations.
Right now, only emergency vehicles have IR emitters to trigger traffic lights. If every vehicle had IR transmitters the ones in the emergency vehicles would only work when no one was around. Why? Because if every vehicle pointing at the light had an IR emitter, it would drown out the IR from the emergency vehicle and the sensor would be unable to detect the emergency vehicle.
But instead you have to insult others' intelligence
This coming from someone who started a post with "Don't be a chump." Amazing.
while you spout off on topics you clearly haven't taken the time to grasp.
See the above. I obviously have a much better grasp of this than you do.
Do you need someone to draw you a chart?
Yes, draw me a chart. Draw one with a four way intersection with 20 vehicles approaching from four directions with left turn lanes, right turn lanes, and through lanes, all controlled by traffic lights. Include the conical IR emission from each vehicle. Now add in an ambulance and its IR emitter and explain how the traffic lights would recognize the IR from the ambulance while being swamped with IR from 80 other vehicles.
You are the one who doesn't get it. The system in place now uses IR emitters to give emergency vehicles priority. What you are talking about is an attempt to improve general traffic flow while giving no priority to emergency vehicles. You don't have an explanation of how everyone could have IR emitters and not defeat the purpose of providing greens for emergency vehicles with IR emitters.
Quit with the playground insults and debate like an adult.
If people all day long approached the intersection and all had IR transmitters....
Then ambulances, fire engines, police, and other emergency vehicles could not get through the way that they can now that they are the only vehicles with IR transmitters.
This was an excellent comment that you failed to grasp and posted a ridiculous reply to.
No, it was a stupid comment that showed no understanding or concern for the needs of emergency vehicles to get priority green lights.
Maybe if everyone had these, it would lead to smarter intersections.
How "smart" would it be to have 28 vehicles and an ambulance all approaching a four-way, urban intersection with these devices fighting to get the green light? It would serve you right to be the heart attack victim in that ambulance as it sat there in gridlock.
If you want to think stupid things, go ahead, but don't encourage your fellow idiots to do something that could kill innocent people.
There are cheaper AVR MCUs (I used 8535 before), but nowadays it does not make any sense to even bother with smaller ones, unless you really count pennies.
Or pins. Sometimes it's really handy to be able to breadboard with 8-16 pin DIPs. I've used the 8535, 8515, 4414 (now defunct, I believe), the 2313, the 1200, and some of the really little guys. The flat-pack chips are neat for volume applications, but not fun for breadboarding.
The AVR is a great series, though. Love them and can't understand why PICs remain popular anymore.
And even if you do, being penny-wise is not always a smart move (as LG's example shows, and earlier Ford Pinto debacle).
Your age is showing.;-) Remember Firestone 500s? Some companies never learn.
I wholeheartedly agree with you on all of your points.
The roll-your-own flashing is a mess and should have been standardized years ago. Also, LG was apparently negligent in their engineering. Either that or it's an incredibly unlucky, and unlikely, series of accidents to blame. On the other hand, Mandrake wasn't any too thorough in their testing of the 9.2 release either.
Second you make the procedure to actually alter the stored firmware complex, so that it is hard to do accidentally, and such that if the procedure is not completed nothing is changed.
That assumes that the device has enough RAM to store the entire image prior to writing it. Many low-cost peripherals do not.
Maybe you don't need to make things quite as complex as for changing the firmware of spacecraft though, since you can at least get physical access to the thing.
When I worked on satellite firmware, it was actually not that dangerous. Unlike consumer electronics, there is hardware that lets you directly write to memory. You don't have to rely on the CPU and firmware in the bird being functional to start with.
CRC32 is a wonderful (and easily programmed) thing. How 'bout a simple challenge, response using CRC32 before hardware decides to start reflashing?
That assumes that the CD-ROM drive has enough RAM to store the entire flash image for the purposes of doing the comparison. When people want to spend no more than $19.99 for a CD-ROM drive, you can't rely on there being the RAM to do that.
I guess you never heard about pseudocode then. Because that's what the original poster wrote.
I'll give you the benefit of my 20+ years of experience: Pseudocode is not cryptic Linix commands strung together but is, instead, designed to be descriptive and easily understood by humans. Also, even if it was "pseudocode" (a claim that even the author did not have the gall to make), it demonstrates a real lack of understanding. You can't just copy new firmware to a peripheral once you flashed bad firmware to it. It often requires a factory-only programming interface be plugged into an internal connector -- or it requires that the flash part be physically removed, reprogrammed, and replaced.
This is not done by flashing the firmware. This is done by sending a perfectly ordinary ATAPI command.
What command? What are your sources to support that claim? I want real sources, not a quote from some unconfirmed posting you read on Slashdot. Mandrake's web site had only this to say:
Error scenario: Installing 9.2 and being told unable to install the base system and subsequent reboot reveals that CD-ROM drive is physically dead. Why: According to LG Electronics, their ODD (Optical Disc Drive) products do not support Linux nor do they test with Linux. Unfortunately, many Dell computers (possibly others) come with these CD-ROM drives. Solution: Currently there is no solution or work-around for this issue; it is still under investigation. Damage occurs even when doing a network install. At this point, please do not install Mandrake Linux 9.2 on any computer containing a LG-based CD-ROM drive or it will damage your CD-ROM drive! We are actively looking for a solution to this problem.
So you know something that they aren't revealing? What is it and where did you learn it?
Sorry, I can see that this argument has merit when it comes to complicated stuff like embedded routers,
Compared to CD-ROMs, routers are simple. Do you have any idea of the complexity of the firmware in the average CD-ROM drive?
but why the hell should a CD-ROM need to be firmware-upgradeable?
Because they are having read errors on copy-protected discs using Cactus Data Shield. Because the new CD-RW media introduced by Fictitious Corp. has a lower reflectivity than can be handled by the firmware currently in the drive. Because they discover that a small percentage of the drives are getting read errors at 52X on some CD-R 700MB media. Because the drives are exceeding FCC RF emission limits during motor start-up. Because the spindle motor manufacturer made a minor design change that requires a longer spin-down but didn't inform the drive manufacturer before shipping the drives. Because Promise's new IDE controller doesn't assert the cable select line soon enough after power-on. Because there is a problem when the CD-ROM drive is a slave to a Western Digital WD2000JB drive. Need some more examples?
Ship the drive with the jumper in the "write-enable" position. The clueful and paranoid can remove it at installation time. And we can resurrect the old idea of the keylock, except instead of locking the keyboard, we activate all the write protect jumpers.
I have used both the key-locks and spare "turbo" switches for motherboard write-protect jumpers. I've also used said switches for CMOS discharge back when I used to play the overclock-till-it-won't-boot game.
Another way to go about this which would really delight companies and which will scare the hell out of the anti-DRM types; implement DRM, and require that all firmware images be signed.
That scares the hell out of me since I have hacked firmware in my DVD-ROM that makes it regionless. I prefer the jumper method and your remove-if-you-are-smart-enough idea sounds pretty reasonable to me -- though I fear that most people would leave it in place.
A lot of people have said its from sending a command to flush the cache
I've seen that claim, but don't know if it's true or not and I'm not going to lend it any credence until I see some better evidence than "a lot of people" repeating something that they've heard. That's how urban legends are spread, not how one should approach engineering.
This is a long-shot, but I don't know the age of the LG drives in question, but the Flush Cache (E7h) command is relatively new to the ATA-ATAPI spec and may not have existed at the time that the LG drives were created. LG might have co-opted that then-unused command for some other purpose (e.g., some factory test or calibration mode).
Slashdot Mirror
aren't you innocent before proven guilty?
In a court of law, yes, but he was not being tried for anything.
doesn't microsoft have trust in there[sic] employees?
Yes. Bill Gates knows them all personally and goes to dinner with them and their families.
why would you hire someone you wouldn't trust with a camera?
Because you thought that they had enough sense not to photograph the inside of your facility and post it on the Internet.
Or do they give the PRINTING department access to all the hottests and latest technologies?
No. They have monks with quill pens write manuals and internal documentations for their developmental softare. Ever see a loading dock in a print shop? Doesn't look like he was in the print shop when he snapped that, does it.
my orig. post was a joke. your sense of humor astounds me.
Perhaps you don't have a very good sense of humor.
you r 0wz0red.
Speak English and quit with your 12-year-old-scrip-kiddie crap.
Considering anyone can walk up to those docs[sic]
Really? So you are saying that the docks are on public property? Microsoft has no security on their campus and anyone can enter and wander around? I'm surprised to hear that.
This is a bullshit argument.
My, you are a charmer...
If they were really concerned for security, they would have asked him to take the pictures down before firing him.
Yeah, so that he could file a wrongful termination lawsuit ("I did what they asked and they fired me anyway...").
I'm guessing that some humorless tin-pot middle-management dictator with anger issues made the decision to fire him on the spot because he thinks all employees are disposable.
Guys who work in the print shop at Microsoft are. As I said in another post, he's easily replaced. It's not like he's the lead developer for Excel.
And now the pictures are linked to on Slashdot..
And now security doesn't have to worry about his wandering around the campus taking other, perhaps more damaging, pictures.
and Microsoft's exceptionally nasty human resource management is once again in the spotlight.
Yeah. I bet that no one will apply to work there now.
I'm sorry, I just can't parse those few sentences.
Why? They were syntactically and grammatically correct, used no unusual words, and were not overly long.
One employee owned a digital camera, and happened to have it with him for work, stuffed in his bag.
How did he take a photo with the camera inside his "bag."? Why did he have his bag at the loading dock when he worked in the print shop?
Taking a single picture of a public area, the door, making every effort to conceal the nature of the building
What steaming, utter bullshit! It was not a public area. If it's a public area, drive your car onto the campus and then go to that supposed "public" area. My guess? You'll be arrested. And how do you know how many pictures he took and of what?
Eh, no? An employee owning a camera, and using it outside of work? Shock horror!
Did you even look at the picture? The picture was shot from INSIDE of the building. How can it be "outside of work" when he's inside of the building where he works?
In your world, employees have no rights what so ever and can be put on the unemployment line with a twitch of the corporate finger.
If by "[my] world", you mean the real world, then, sadly, yes. Employers can terminate employees without cause.
In my world, an employee can be fired for
1. Gross incompetence
2. Lack of work
3. There is no number three.
Great. Get me a job in your world. I'd like a job where I could steal computers, be insubordinate, show up in shorts and t-shirts every day, work whatever hours I chose, and spend my lunch hour banging some exhibitionist chick on the conference room table.
(just a whole lot of really insane corporate espionage and other BS not worth the electrons to repeat)
You're a fucking idiot. Either debate the points as if you were a man or go away.
Dude, where do you find the time to post, between sucking Bill Gates dick and kissing Ballmer's ass?
I don't even like Microsoft. I think that they are evil, scum-sucking, greedy bastards. But they were also perfectly reasonable in this case. Grow up.
Who gives a f'k if some guy took some pictures of the delivery man dropping off some new Macs. It's no a big deal.
It's a big deal if you are part of Microsoft's corporate security and you don't know what else the guy has been taking pictures of.
Extrapolate. Consider the circumstances. He wasn't an incredibly valuable employee. He was a temp working in the print shop. If you have even an inkling of concern about the judgement or trustworthiness of someone in that position, you replace them. End of story.
lets summarize what youu just said. mac fan takes photo, get's fired. OOOHHH SNAP!!! better stop those crazy kids at apple, and all those silly linux distrubutions before they start desiging SIMILAR BUILDINGS
So you believe that he came onto the campus, took one photo with his digital camera, and that's it? You don't know what else he might have photographed, who he might have sent it to, or how it might have been used.
You apparently don't know how industrial espionage works. Industrial spies often collect information from many sources in order to determine what directions their competitors are taking. The delivery of a pallet or two of G5s might not be enough in and of itself to do much, but put that together with other information and it might reveal quite a lot.
So... your theories are great but ultimately not relevant.
.NET framework. He didn't head up the Outlook development team.
They are great and they are relevent.
If they truly cared about future incidents they could've asked him to take the photo down, reprimanded him, and then sent email to the company asking that people don't do that.
If they don't trust him, what good does it do to tell him not to do it again?
But, instead they just fired the guy. Your theories don't mesh with the other facts.
Get a clue: He was a temp working in the print shop. He probably had access to all kinds of sensitive internal documents and he demonstrated a lack of judgement. He's easily replaced. He wasn't the lead developer for the
Nothing against the guy. He seems like a decent guy. He just made a mistake. He accepts that. Why can't you?
I disagree. I see no harm in what he did. You couldn't see anything except for G5's and a truck.
So what could be seen in the other pictures he took? You know -- the ones that he didn't post on the web site. Did he e-mail those to Microsoft competitors? Did they include new hardware being developed at Microsoft? Were there photos of company-proprietary documentation?
The fact is, that you don't know what (if any) other pictures the guy took. The guy presented an unreasonable security risk for the value he brought to the company. That's all.
Comparing it to him carrying an uzi around is outrageous.
I didn't compare it to that. I used that to illustrate the Slashdot bias: Microsoft lets someone go for good reason and the Slashdot headline implies it is because he used a competing OS/computer.
Microsoft allegedly fired him because he created a security risk. But if that were the real reason, then they should have happily accepted his offer to remove the posting.
The guy was wandering the campus with a digital camera taking pictures of non-public areas. Wouldn't that make you a bit suspicious if you were in corporate security? Wouldn't you wonder how many other pictures he had taken and who he had given them to? Why should Microsoft take a chance on some temp when there are hundreds of others lined up at their doors begging for jobs?
So it does make me wonder what the real reason is.
Right... It's Microsoft, so there must be some nefararious, hidden, evil plan at work. I forgot. Sorry.
So what? It's not a bank, a nuclear research facility, the changing rooms of Moulin Rouge; it's an office building.
Was he hired to take digital photos of company property? It's not his office building. It's theirs. If they don't want photos of it floating around the net, that's their call.
Think about the questions that go through the minds of the security people: Today it was the loading dock but what will it be tomorrow? The new X-Box, our development lab? Photos of company-proprietary memos? Why is the guy wandering around the campus taking pictures with a digital camera?
You also don't seem to understand how industrial espionage works. They might be just Macs to you. Someone else might have other information that they are able to put together with that in order to ascertain something that Microsoft wishes to keep secret.
And in all the places I've worked, no one has ever cared what snaps anyone took or what they did with them.
Where have you worked? JC Penney and Walmart? Most engineering firms are very guarded and don't want pictures of their facilities distributed over the Internet.
Let's look at this from an ethics standpoint. If the guy had posted a picture of himself dressed as Mary Poppins frolicking in his yard, then it's not an issue for his work. If he published pictures of his personally owned Windows PC blue-screening and bitched about it in his blog, that's not cause for Microsoft to take action against him, either.
It's when you cross that line between home and work that it gets ugly. The guy took digital photos of his employer's non-public building areas while there as an employee. He identified himself as a Microsoft employee, in what department he worked, and in what building. He used poor judgement and he knows it. Microsoft didn't commit some horrible atrocity against the Mac community by firing the guy. They did not quelch his free speech rights. They fired some loose cannon who was wandering around the campus taking digital photos and posting them on his own web page. The whole story is just sensationalistic: Microsoft Fires Mac Fan For Blog Photo. It had nothing to do with his being a "Mac Fan." What's next?
Come on folks.
This could also be a great technology for improving the situation with the timing of lights as well as emergency vehicle situations.
Right now, only emergency vehicles have IR emitters to trigger traffic lights. If every vehicle had IR transmitters the ones in the emergency vehicles would only work when no one was around. Why? Because if every vehicle pointing at the light had an IR emitter, it would drown out the IR from the emergency vehicle and the sensor would be unable to detect the emergency vehicle.
But instead you have to insult others' intelligence
This coming from someone who started a post with "Don't be a chump." Amazing.
while you spout off on topics you clearly haven't taken the time to grasp.
See the above. I obviously have a much better grasp of this than you do.
Do you need someone to draw you a chart?
Yes, draw me a chart. Draw one with a four way intersection with 20 vehicles approaching from four directions with left turn lanes, right turn lanes, and through lanes, all controlled by traffic lights. Include the conical IR emission from each vehicle. Now add in an ambulance and its IR emitter and explain how the traffic lights would recognize the IR from the ambulance while being swamped with IR from 80 other vehicles.
You are the one who doesn't get it. The system in place now uses IR emitters to give emergency vehicles priority. What you are talking about is an attempt to improve general traffic flow while giving no priority to emergency vehicles. You don't have an explanation of how everyone could have IR emitters and not defeat the purpose of providing greens for emergency vehicles with IR emitters.
Don't be a chump.
Quit with the playground insults and debate like an adult.
If people all day long approached the intersection and all had IR transmitters....
Then ambulances, fire engines, police, and other emergency vehicles could not get through the way that they can now that they are the only vehicles with IR transmitters.
This was an excellent comment that you failed to grasp and posted a ridiculous reply to.
No, it was a stupid comment that showed no understanding or concern for the needs of emergency vehicles to get priority green lights.
Maybe if everyone had these, it would lead to smarter intersections.
How "smart" would it be to have 28 vehicles and an ambulance all approaching a four-way, urban intersection with these devices fighting to get the green light? It would serve you right to be the heart attack victim in that ambulance as it sat there in gridlock.
If you want to think stupid things, go ahead, but don't encourage your fellow idiots to do something that could kill innocent people.
There are cheaper AVR MCUs (I used 8535 before), but nowadays it does not make any sense to even bother with smaller ones, unless you really count pennies.
;-) Remember Firestone 500s? Some companies never learn.
Or pins. Sometimes it's really handy to be able to breadboard with 8-16 pin DIPs. I've used the 8535, 8515, 4414 (now defunct, I believe), the 2313, the 1200, and some of the really little guys. The flat-pack chips are neat for volume applications, but not fun for breadboarding.
The AVR is a great series, though. Love them and can't understand why PICs remain popular anymore.
And even if you do, being penny-wise is not always a smart move (as LG's example shows, and earlier Ford Pinto debacle).
Your age is showing.
I wholeheartedly agree with you on all of your points.
The roll-your-own flashing is a mess and should have been standardized years ago. Also, LG was apparently negligent in their engineering. Either that or it's an incredibly unlucky, and unlikely, series of accidents to blame. On the other hand, Mandrake wasn't any too thorough in their testing of the 9.2 release either.
That is simply incorrect. Flash with r/o boot blocks exists for many years
But are much less often used than EEPROM w/o boot-block protection in inexpensive peripherals due to cost.
, and even many MCUs today come with this feature. My last project, based on some Atmel MCU, had it.
AVR series? I've got a development kit sitting right next to me.
First if there is a documented section of the command set for changing firmware you use that and only that to change it.
/ ide/.
There is no such standard in ATA/ATAPI. See http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/if
Second you make the procedure to actually alter the stored firmware complex, so that it is hard to do accidentally, and such that if the procedure is not completed nothing is changed.
That assumes that the device has enough RAM to store the entire image prior to writing it. Many low-cost peripherals do not.
Maybe you don't need to make things quite as complex as for changing the firmware of spacecraft though, since you can at least get physical access to the thing.
When I worked on satellite firmware, it was actually not that dangerous. Unlike consumer electronics, there is hardware that lets you directly write to memory. You don't have to rely on the CPU and firmware in the bird being functional to start with.
CRC32 is a wonderful (and easily programmed) thing. How 'bout a simple challenge, response using CRC32 before hardware decides to start reflashing?
That assumes that the CD-ROM drive has enough RAM to store the entire flash image for the purposes of doing the comparison. When people want to spend no more than $19.99 for a CD-ROM drive, you can't rely on there being the RAM to do that.
I guess you never heard about pseudocode then. Because that's what the original poster wrote.
I'll give you the benefit of my 20+ years of experience: Pseudocode is not cryptic Linix commands strung together but is, instead, designed to be descriptive and easily understood by humans. Also, even if it was "pseudocode" (a claim that even the author did not have the gall to make), it demonstrates a real lack of understanding. You can't just copy new firmware to a peripheral once you flashed bad firmware to it. It often requires a factory-only programming interface be plugged into an internal connector -- or it requires that the flash part be physically removed, reprogrammed, and replaced.
What command? What are your sources to support that claim? I want real sources, not a quote from some unconfirmed posting you read on Slashdot. Mandrake's web site had only this to say:So you know something that they aren't revealing? What is it and where did you learn it?
Sorry, I can see that this argument has merit when it comes to complicated stuff like embedded routers,
Compared to CD-ROMs, routers are simple. Do you have any idea of the complexity of the firmware in the average CD-ROM drive?
but why the hell should a CD-ROM need to be firmware-upgradeable?
Because they are having read errors on copy-protected discs using Cactus Data Shield. Because the new CD-RW media introduced by Fictitious Corp. has a lower reflectivity than can be handled by the firmware currently in the drive. Because they discover that a small percentage of the drives are getting read errors at 52X on some CD-R 700MB media. Because the drives are exceeding FCC RF emission limits during motor start-up. Because the spindle motor manufacturer made a minor design change that requires a longer spin-down but didn't inform the drive manufacturer before shipping the drives. Because Promise's new IDE controller doesn't assert the cable select line soon enough after power-on. Because there is a problem when the CD-ROM drive is a slave to a Western Digital WD2000JB drive. Need some more examples?
Ship the drive with the jumper in the "write-enable" position. The clueful and paranoid can remove it at installation time. And we can resurrect the old idea of the keylock, except instead of locking the keyboard, we activate all the write protect jumpers.
I have used both the key-locks and spare "turbo" switches for motherboard write-protect jumpers. I've also used said switches for CMOS discharge back when I used to play the overclock-till-it-won't-boot game.
Another way to go about this which would really delight companies and which will scare the hell out of the anti-DRM types; implement DRM, and require that all firmware images be signed.
That scares the hell out of me since I have hacked firmware in my DVD-ROM that makes it regionless. I prefer the jumper method and your remove-if-you-are-smart-enough idea sounds pretty reasonable to me -- though I fear that most people would leave it in place.
A lot of people have said its from sending a command to flush the cache
I've seen that claim, but don't know if it's true or not and I'm not going to lend it any credence until I see some better evidence than "a lot of people" repeating something that they've heard. That's how urban legends are spread, not how one should approach engineering.
This is a long-shot, but I don't know the age of the LG drives in question, but the Flush Cache (E7h) command is relatively new to the ATA-ATAPI spec and may not have existed at the time that the LG drives were created. LG might have co-opted that then-unused command for some other purpose (e.g., some factory test or calibration mode).