On 4/6/07, Chris Devers <cdev...@pobox.com> wrote:
But anyway, to go back to the original problem that set this rant off, keep in mind that the instigator here was the display resolution spontaneously & without provocation reducing itself. As far as I can recall, nobody even had their hands on the keyboard or trackpad when it happened. Maybe that's a hardware hate, or maybe it's software, I don't know, but spending 10 or 15 minutes trying to get that back to the way it had been didn't make it any easier to solve the problem we were really supposed to be working on...
Ive been reading about Vista recently and its evil "tilt bit" logic and defenses against hardware hacking to bypass DRM controls, and what you have described sounds very much like that. Laptops always have been made up of weird hardware to keep the size / heat / power / performance balance within a tolerable envelope. The logic that Vista uses to detect bus sniffing hardware or various tricks like that could quite conceivably get "confused" by laptop type hardware, which would then trigger the hacking defense behaviour which as far as I understand involves a reboot of the display subsytem into a "safe" mode with reduced capabilities. Theres a great article about this (that im too lazy to track down) that makes the point that traditionally hardware and software have been designed to be hardware error tolerant. Vista turns this on its head and treats hardware error as being a symptom of hardware hacking and disables parts of the system when it occurs. So if something goes "wrong" on Vista then it makes it worse, instead of what it should do and work around the problem. So for all you know some transistor switched state slightly too late and Vista decided to punish you for it. The hatefulness of such behaviour (and the costs of doing it) is incredible. Yves -- perl -Mre=debug -e "/just|another|perl|hacker/"
