On Wednesday 29 October 2003 02:32 pm, robin wrote:
Tom Brinkman wrote:
The patch in question wasn't 'Bleeding edge' or experimental (alpha). It simply enabled packet writing to CD drives. A feature now disabled in the 'fix' (kernel 2.4.22-21mdk) already available, and various floppy images soon coming. A shame from my point of view. M$ has long encouraged and supported sloppy non compliant hardware (and irresponsible users).
Now it seems even Linux users have to, or are willing to accept this, and demand that their favorite distro does the same. People with junk fake-Cdroms are now safe, the rest of us have to do without out of the box CD packet writing to accommodate the ones who don't want to be bothered with knowing their hardware. That think cheap junk non compliant hardware is just fine, an should be protected by others. IOW's back-asswards
I think you're being a little unfair to the people who bought LG - how were they to know it was junk hardware?
No clues?, price, the fact it's mostly an OEM ONLY Spec drive, mostly works only with M$. I know I offend some who have their hardware tied to their self worth, but if it says 'Dell' or some such anywhere on it, that's a good give away it's cheap non compliant M$ junk. I wish Civileme was still around, he'd say exactly the same thing, just more tackfully. It needs sayin tho if we're to avoid this type of fiasco in the future.
Just to prevent any further misunderstanding, I _do_ think LG are the guilty party here. I don't know how the law stands, but since the last time I looked, they were advertising Linux compatibility, there might be grounds for suing here. I'm also _not_ encouraging irresponsibility - I just don't think a user expecting hardware not to blow up is irresponsible. Hell, I use an LG drive at work (it's a writer, fortunately).
Sir Robin
Probly unfair to respond to your reply unless you saw my 'follow up' link I posted. Sorry, meant to add it the first time around. http://packet-cd.sourceforge.net/
I read it - informative.
Note that this early patch has been in existence, and the effort to bring writing data to CD in small increments, at least since the 2.4 kernel wasn't even released yet. IOW's a very long time, what about two years? Hardly alpha, experimental, untested.
AND it does provide a very usefull an attractive feature. Gone missing now ;( To the expense of many. Yes I can d/l the patch and run it against any kernel I wish to use, but why should I have to? An what about the users who can't or won't, even if their responsible enough to learn to avoid cheap win fake junk hardware like LG, Dell and other large ready mades. Much of OEM ONLY hardware (or non hardware, eg win-modems) is substandard non compliant junk by definition.
The hardware doesn't blow up, just it's non standard bios is corrupted. The drive can be fixed by replacing the firmware.
Now that I didn't know.
The fact of the matter is any OS, any software that sends a normal CACHE_FLUSH can kill these drives. The vendor knew it, Dell, HP, Compaq, et al knew it, and it's the responsibility of users to know it too. Know what? you say. Don't buy cheap ready made computers or any of the hardware they use ... for use with real OS's. There's been too much evidence for too long. Even many confirmed Win$ux users are responsible enough to avoid junk hardware.
I agree, but I think it'll be a long time before most people realise what is junk and what isn't. Most people still assume that if a computer has a known brandname and is sold at Walmart, it must be OK. I've noticed that a lot of the brandname computers here use fairly decent components for the things they think people will notice, like the CPU and the graphics card, then put in some dodgy no-name components for the things they can be pretty sure most people won't know about, like motherboards.
Many new and even some long time Linux users will be asking, some have already, "I can burn a partial sessions to a CD with Win$ux on the fly, just like writing to a floppy, and then still read the CD without closing it .... how come Linux can't do this?" Are you gonna be there to explain that ready made OEM hardware vendors collude with hardware manufacturers and M$ to (purposely) provide cheap hardware that only works properly with their systems? Many think LG's bios programmer is an idiot, I think they're all dumb like a fox.
OK, you've convinced me. Actually, I probably only pushed the argument as far as I did because I found the tone of a number of the posts objectionable. If I hear that "you're a big bad troll and I'm sending you to /dev/null" thing again, I'm going to scream. And it's not even Halloween yet!
Sir Robin
-- "I declare this sentence a performative!"
Robin Turner IDMYO Bilkent Univeritesi Ankara 06533 Turkey
www.bilkent.edu.tr/~robin
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