Franki wrote: [snip]
The fault is LG's, they used a command that is sposed to clear the drives buffer on burners to instead be interpreted by
their CD rom as "upload firmware", thereby wiping the drives firmware.....
Their drives are NOT ATAPI drives as they do not support he ATAPI standard, therefore LG are liable for misrepesentation., no doubt about it.. and I will bet the designers of the ATAPI standard would agree...
Now if we write an application that is totally ATAPI compliant as the mandrake kernel apparently is/was. and it clags the CDROM
because it was sold as an ATAPI drive when it clearly ISN'T.. who are you to blame???
LG are clearly to blame, but the kernel developers deserve a slap on the wrist as well. Sure, the bug is in the CDROM, not the kernel, but LG CDROMs are everywhere! An analogy is website design. I write, or at least try to write, standards-compliant HTML/CSS. If it comes out fine in Mozilla, I can be pretty damn sure it'll look OK in Opera or Konqueror. I also know that there is a risk that Internet Explorer will mangle my code, so from time to time I test my pages in IE. I can't be bothered to spend a lot of time on workarounds to makesure my pages look exactly right on IE, but I at least want them to be legible (same applies to things like Netscape 4.*). I can't afford to take the view that any problem is Microsoft's fault and not my problem, because 90% of people viewing my pages will be using IE.
The same applies to LG CDROMs. I don't know how common they are where the developers live, but here in Turkey, they are the most common drives, because they're cheap, and actually more reliable than their main rival, Sony. Whateverthe problems, the kernel should have been tested on them.
[snip]
Be careful what you wish for.. if Mandrake were to adopt a position of responsibility for LG's error, you would unlikly see anything "cutting edge" in mandrake till long after someone else has done it first...
As I said, the fault at the Linux end is really with the kernel developers more than with Mandrake.
To be honest, CDROM's being as cheap as they are now days.. throw the dud one out .(or send it back to LG) and go and get yourself a
nice new burner or DVD player (or both) and get on with life....
That's fine if we're talking about a home user with a decent salary. If we're talking about a school in a developing country with a load of CDROMs to replace, I imagine the techie who suggested switching over to Linux isproabbly looking for a job now.
Sir Robin
You have some valid points Robin,
BUT, the LG cdroms WERE tested.. it was only a firmware revision that had the problem..
so not all firmware was tested apparently. Is it the kernels responsibility to get every single piece of hardware
and then get every piece of hardware with every revision of firmware to test it with???
If that is how it was run, we'd still be using variants of kernel 1.x
And your analogy of the school, if the IT guy didn't test it on a few systems before rollout, the he SHOULD be looking for a new job.
rgds
Franki
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