Why is it that when Sun or IBM (or even Apple) give large donations to schools, its viewed as great and benevolent, but when MS does the same thing, its seen as a slick marketting ploy?
Because with Microsoft that has always been the primary motivation
Because Microsoft is a monopoly (the other co's are just wannabee monopolies)
Because Microsoft often gets most or all of the money back in sales anyway (and sometimes makes a direct profit on the donation!) which kind of erases the donation-ness of it all
Because Sam and Scott have personalities, but Bill doesn't (as any well-aimed custard tart will demonstrate)
A local school recently tried to teach the embryonic recapitulation theory ("it's not a little baby person, its just a [pick one of fish/crocodile/bunch'o'cells/dog/dinosaur] so far") to a child I know, and that's been known to be a fraud for about 140 years (tongue firmly in cheek? of we go, then) so far.
I'm fairly sure that this rocket doesn't have scales, though... (g/d/r).
You live and you learn. Maybe Granny Brooks was secretly a member of the Stunt Smocking Team or something, she always did seem unnaturally peaceful at home. (-:
BTW, nice to see PJ make it into the Jargon file with that article. (-:
The FLUSH_CACHE command is given to all CD drives, readers and writers both, in order to put them all in the correct frame of mind for dealing with packet writing on any of them.
Note that recent versions of LG's firmware don't break, which is a reasonably clear message that earlier versions did in fact do The Wrong Thing(tm).
Apparently, some flavours of SuSE also kill LG drives, and the patch in question originated with SuSE (unconfirmed).
...complain to Kollar-Kotelly, and/or Massachusetts. Both are actively rattling Microsoft's cage and this looks like a fairly straightforward antitrustworthy action.
The LG CDROMs die because they see FLUSH_CACHE and do UPLOAD_FIRMWARE.
I do have a Microsoft keyboard to hand on which the function keys (and some special keys like Insert) don't send the standard codes. You have to invent a keymap for yourself if you're not running on MS-Windows. But noi, we'r enot abusing our monopoly power at all. Beward of keyboards with a "FN Lock" key near the top right.
I had problems w/supermount in 8.0 (later fixed in an update), but not since.
I've never had problems with slow-loading apps and I use Mandrake for a lot of things.
I have several score customer machines running various versions of Mandrake, no worries, including several complete noobs using it as a workstation. My SIL does all kinds of esoteric (for a user) stuff on it, odd USB devices, all manner of fiddling with images and audio, ripping and burning, again no worries.
I've not tried to do a no-docs installation.
Mandrake are not perfect, not everything runs well, but the things that do run well run so well that the imperfect apps don't make much difference. Having a choice of everything helps a lot, too. If you have a problem with one app, use another.
A flush command which happens while deciding whether they're a writer or not has been redefined (<thwack!>) by LG to mean "upload firmware" (with predictable results). To quote Juan Quintela from the Cooker list, "Yep, whoeved decided at LG that reusing for UPLOAD_FIRMWARE command FLUSH_CACHE comand should be shoot. Twice."
This is not done by flashing the firmware. This is done by sending a perfectly ordinary ATAPI command. With certain firmware revisions on certain drive models. It was only a matter of time before something tripped over it.
Perhaps the Powers That Be should rename the command HCF (Halt and Catch Fire) in honour of LG and after the best hardware traditions. The HCF instruction meant "Halt for/on Carry Flag" on some ancient transistor-era architecture - kind of like a wait-for-interrupt on a modern architecture that actually has interrupts - and the effect was to spinlock the machine until another piece of hardware knocked the carry flag on the head. Certain race conditions would result in the carry flag failing to be pushed over if the HCF was executed in the same cycle that the carry-clear happened, at which point the machine would spinlock for seconds instead of milliseconds, hardware not designed for this would heat up and let out the smoke, and the machine would die. The Jargon File mentions the same thing happening with an MC6800 micro system, although I can't personally see that. I guess the modern equivalent would be "Halt and Corrupt Firmware".
A standard ATAPI command with standard parameters etc etc does the damage to certain revisions of firmware on certain models of LG drive. The technical term for this kind of behaviour is "suicide". Take your drive in and warranty it.
R. I. P.
L.G. Drive
Killed by
Firmware
- 2003 -
Do we know for certain that Mandrake is just setting ordinary, to-ATAPI-spec, commands to the drives
Yes.
Mandrake are not the only people to use this code, merely the first to unleash it in large numbers.
When the drive is set up for packet writing, part of the procedure is to completely flush the drive's command queues and such. The command to do this guts certain models of LG ("Lame Goldstar?") drives with certain revisions of their firmware.
I don't know whether the drive can be flashed and recovered or not.
Flash your LG drive to the latest version of their firmware and it won't die, even if it is on the blacklist.
I don't like and don't use the LG drives. You may have a good one, but I've seen all sorts of marginal behaviour in them with customers. For example, many of them won't work without hdX=nodma. When the time came to choose a CD burner for myself, I shelled out the extra 15% and bought a Sony, and have had no complaints. It actually does burn reliably at the rated speed, even without packet writing.
My Pioneer DVD burner hasn't caused a problem yet either, but OTOH the shine has hardly worn off. It's in an external USB2.0 case so I can use it with my lappy, desktop or elsewhere so I'd expect it to be damaged more rapidly than one in a fixed installation.
Rather, it apears to be lazy programmers at Mandrake.
Mandrake actually tested on several broken models of LG drive, including one I own. It didn't kill any of them. Why not? Well, it turns out that none of the drives tested had the broken firmware revision(s).
Using your reasoning, Mandrake should have tested every single firmware release of every single model of every single piece of hardware that their OS interacts with - in all possible combinations - with every single subrelease of their own kernel. Got a spare aeon or two?
...but they should have advised the users of certain models of their drives to check and possibly update the drive firmware.
The thing which kills the drives is - wait for it - setting them up for packet writing. The hackers who made the patch to do this (included starting with Mandrake 9.2rc1) may be able to figure out a way to do it without triggering LG's bug, or may not, in which case any Linux kernel which features this packet writing code will kill a broken LG drive.
Note that this happens when the drive is init'ed, not when you write a CD with one, so you'll kill a drive just as effectively even if you install over the network or whatever.
As to responsibility, well... the drive software is broken, end of story. If your LG drive dies, take it back and make a warranty claim.
For those who assert that Mandrake should have tested 9.2 on every known drive before releasing it, the answer is that Mandrake did indeed test 9.2 on these models of LG drives, but none of their testers happened to have the broken firmware revision(s). <shrug>
For those speculating about what would happen if it had been MS-Windows-XP's problem instead, the only differences would have been that more than 80% of all broken LG drives would have been killed by now due to semi-forced upgrades, Penguinistas would have been gleefully rejoicing that their software didn't kill drives, and Microsoft would still be ignoring the problem and we'd expect them to for at least another two weeks.
I don't know whether it's possible to flash a killed drive's firmware and resurrect it, or whether the broken firmware actually destroys hardware.
IPTables (hi, Rusty!), PostFix, OpenOffice.org, OpenLDAP, OpenSSL, Mozilla, the KDE suite... all of these make Linux useful as well. SaMBa is "just" one more "pluggable" component on the most popular server application framework in existence. It happens to be a very good one (as in, robust, extensive, flexible, secure).
Lest you think I'm only a one-eyed Penguinista, I've used and benefited from SaMBa running on Solaris, BSDi, *BSD, Irix, HP-UX and AIX too.
One piece of MS-Windows software which always amuses me is PuTTY. Why "PuTTY"? Well... it makes Windows useful. (-:
I'd tend to use slightly more objective words like patient, careful, wise, diplomatic, thoughtful, intelligent, hard-working and so on. In short, most of the useful characteristics I lack. (-:
Like most of the FOSS superstars, if you met him on the street you probably wouldn't recognise him. With a handful of exceptions, FOSS people are recognised primarily for their utility and productivity rather than for dashing good looks or social dexterity.
From what little I know of Tridge, he'd be hastening to point out countless other FOSS developers more deserving of such an award. While that's a very valid point, it doesn't make him any less deserving himself.
Richard Stallman please note: this is a genuinely GNU project, so I'm calling it "GNU a2ps" with pleasure and satisfaction, but the Linux I use is either "Mandrake Linux 9.2" after the distributors who do some much work to get it all packaged and integrated right, or "GNU/SGI/BSD/KDE/Apache/Sun/IBM/{blah,blah,cows come home}/OSF/Linux", or just plain "Linux".
...which is all I need. It amuses people to see me running the Windows and native Linux versions of PuTTY side by side.
However, my wife would like to to run stuff like Dorling Kindersley entertainment software, and on most of them it doesn't even come close. Mind you, the, er, geniuses who wrote a lot of this stuff only tested it in a very limited range of situations, and used all kinds of bizarre special features, so a lot of them run poorly (crash, misdisplay, lose features) on Windows 2000 and XP (haven't tried on 2003).
I guess I'll have to set aside some time to become a WINE developer for a few weeks if that's ever to come to pass, and if I'm going to that much trouble, why not just write something de novo instead?
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A local school recently tried to teach the embryonic recapitulation theory ("it's not a little baby person, its just a [pick one of fish/crocodile/bunch'o'cells/dog/dinosaur] so far") to a child I know, and that's been known to be a fraud for about 140 years (tongue firmly in cheek? of we go, then) so far.
I'm fairly sure that this rocket doesn't have scales, though... (g/d/r).
...so it seems fitting that the evidence should be too.
You live and you learn. Maybe Granny Brooks was secretly a member of the Stunt Smocking Team or something, she always did seem unnaturally peaceful at home. (-:
BTW, nice to see PJ make it into the Jargon file with that article. (-:
Natural selection, anyway. (-:
Yeah, right.
The FLUSH_CACHE command is given to all CD drives, readers and writers both, in order to put them all in the correct frame of mind for dealing with packet writing on any of them.
Note that recent versions of LG's firmware don't break, which is a reasonably clear message that earlier versions did in fact do The Wrong Thing(tm).
Apparently, some flavours of SuSE also kill LG drives, and the patch in question originated with SuSE (unconfirmed).
Juan Quintela, Mandrake developer. Now crawl back under your rock.
OK, so it wasn't that funny...
...complain to Kollar-Kotelly, and/or Massachusetts. Both are actively rattling Microsoft's cage and this looks like a fairly straightforward antitrustworthy action.
Who would you say is to blame?
The LG CDROMs die because they see FLUSH_CACHE and do UPLOAD_FIRMWARE.
I do have a Microsoft keyboard to hand on which the function keys (and some special keys like Insert) don't send the standard codes. You have to invent a keymap for yourself if you're not running on MS-Windows. But noi, we'r enot abusing our monopoly power at all. Beward of keyboards with a "FN Lock" key near the top right.
I had problems w/supermount in 8.0 (later fixed in an update), but not since.
I've never had problems with slow-loading apps and I use Mandrake for a lot of things.
I have several score customer machines running various versions of Mandrake, no worries, including several complete noobs using it as a workstation. My SIL does all kinds of esoteric (for a user) stuff on it, odd USB devices, all manner of fiddling with images and audio, ripping and burning, again no worries.
I've not tried to do a no-docs installation.
Mandrake are not perfect, not everything runs well, but the things that do run well run so well that the imperfect apps don't make much difference. Having a choice of everything helps a lot, too. If you have a problem with one app, use another.
A flush command which happens while deciding whether they're a writer or not has been redefined (<thwack!>) by LG to mean "upload firmware" (with predictable results). To quote Juan Quintela from the Cooker list, "Yep, whoeved decided at LG that reusing for UPLOAD_FIRMWARE command FLUSH_CACHE comand should be shoot. Twice."
And I agree. They should. (-: Just a s-l-i-g-h-t incompatibility there :-)
This is not done by flashing the firmware. This is done by sending a perfectly ordinary ATAPI command. With certain firmware revisions on certain drive models. It was only a matter of time before something tripped over it.
Perhaps the Powers That Be should rename the command HCF (Halt and Catch Fire) in honour of LG and after the best hardware traditions. The HCF instruction meant "Halt for/on Carry Flag" on some ancient transistor-era architecture - kind of like a wait-for-interrupt on a modern architecture that actually has interrupts - and the effect was to spinlock the machine until another piece of hardware knocked the carry flag on the head. Certain race conditions would result in the carry flag failing to be pushed over if the HCF was executed in the same cycle that the carry-clear happened, at which point the machine would spinlock for seconds instead of milliseconds, hardware not designed for this would heat up and let out the smoke, and the machine would die. The Jargon File mentions the same thing happening with an MC6800 micro system, although I can't personally see that. I guess the modern equivalent would be "Halt and Corrupt Firmware".
A standard ATAPI command with standard parameters etc etc does the damage to certain revisions of firmware on certain models of LG drive. The technical term for this kind of behaviour is "suicide". Take your drive in and warranty it.
R. I. P.
L.G. Drive
Killed by
Firmware
- 2003 -
Yes.
Mandrake are not the only people to use this code, merely the first to unleash it in large numbers.
When the drive is set up for packet writing, part of the procedure is to completely flush the drive's command queues and such. The command to do this guts certain models of LG ("Lame Goldstar?") drives with certain revisions of their firmware.
I don't know whether the drive can be flashed and recovered or not.
Flash your LG drive to the latest version of their firmware and it won't die, even if it is on the blacklist.
I don't like and don't use the LG drives. You may have a good one, but I've seen all sorts of marginal behaviour in them with customers. For example, many of them won't work without hdX=nodma. When the time came to choose a CD burner for myself, I shelled out the extra 15% and bought a Sony, and have had no complaints. It actually does burn reliably at the rated speed, even without packet writing.
My Pioneer DVD burner hasn't caused a problem yet either, but OTOH the shine has hardly worn off. It's in an external USB2.0 case so I can use it with my lappy, desktop or elsewhere so I'd expect it to be damaged more rapidly than one in a fixed installation.
Mandrake actually tested on several broken models of LG drive, including one I own. It didn't kill any of them. Why not? Well, it turns out that none of the drives tested had the broken firmware revision(s).
Using your reasoning, Mandrake should have tested every single firmware release of every single model of every single piece of hardware that their OS interacts with - in all possible combinations - with every single subrelease of their own kernel. Got a spare aeon or two?
...but they should have advised the users of certain models of their drives to check and possibly update the drive firmware.
The thing which kills the drives is - wait for it - setting them up for packet writing. The hackers who made the patch to do this (included starting with Mandrake 9.2rc1) may be able to figure out a way to do it without triggering LG's bug, or may not, in which case any Linux kernel which features this packet writing code will kill a broken LG drive.
Note that this happens when the drive is init'ed, not when you write a CD with one, so you'll kill a drive just as effectively even if you install over the network or whatever.
As to responsibility, well... the drive software is broken, end of story. If your LG drive dies, take it back and make a warranty claim.
For those who assert that Mandrake should have tested 9.2 on every known drive before releasing it, the answer is that Mandrake did indeed test 9.2 on these models of LG drives, but none of their testers happened to have the broken firmware revision(s). <shrug>
For those speculating about what would happen if it had been MS-Windows-XP's problem instead, the only differences would have been that more than 80% of all broken LG drives would have been killed by now due to semi-forced upgrades, Penguinistas would have been gleefully rejoicing that their software didn't kill drives, and Microsoft would still be ignoring the problem and we'd expect them to for at least another two weeks.
I don't know whether it's possible to flash a killed drive's firmware and resurrect it, or whether the broken firmware actually destroys hardware.
IPTables (hi, Rusty!), PostFix, OpenOffice.org, OpenLDAP, OpenSSL, Mozilla, the KDE suite... all of these make Linux useful as well. SaMBa is "just" one more "pluggable" component on the most popular server application framework in existence. It happens to be a very good one (as in, robust, extensive, flexible, secure).
Lest you think I'm only a one-eyed Penguinista, I've used and benefited from SaMBa running on Solaris, BSDi, *BSD, Irix, HP-UX and AIX too.
One piece of MS-Windows software which always amuses me is PuTTY. Why "PuTTY"? Well... it makes Windows useful. (-:
I'd tend to use slightly more objective words like patient, careful, wise, diplomatic, thoughtful, intelligent, hard-working and so on. In short, most of the useful characteristics I lack. (-:
Like most of the FOSS superstars, if you met him on the street you probably wouldn't recognise him. With a handful of exceptions, FOSS people are recognised primarily for their utility and productivity rather than for dashing good looks or social dexterity.
From what little I know of Tridge, he'd be hastening to point out countless other FOSS developers more deserving of such an award. While that's a very valid point, it doesn't make him any less deserving himself.
Richard Stallman please note: this is a genuinely GNU project, so I'm calling it "GNU a2ps" with pleasure and satisfaction, but the Linux I use is either "Mandrake Linux 9.2" after the distributors who do some much work to get it all packaged and integrated right, or "GNU/SGI/BSD/KDE/Apache/Sun/IBM/{blah,blah,cows come home}/OSF/Linux", or just plain "Linux".
...which is all I need. It amuses people to see me running the Windows and native Linux versions of PuTTY side by side.
However, my wife would like to to run stuff like Dorling Kindersley entertainment software, and on most of them it doesn't even come close. Mind you, the, er, geniuses who wrote a lot of this stuff only tested it in a very limited range of situations, and used all kinds of bizarre special features, so a lot of them run poorly (crash, misdisplay, lose features) on Windows 2000 and XP (haven't tried on 2003).
I guess I'll have to set aside some time to become a WINE developer for a few weeks if that's ever to come to pass, and if I'm going to that much trouble, why not just write something de novo instead?