Almost my first heart attack - or how my monitor failed me
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Almost my first heart attack - or how my monitor failed me
The whole story started so simple: I had been watching Running Man using my TV card (nice movie though with a serious logic error even after several beer) and after that I wanted to check my mailbox. I started Thunderbird and all of a sudden the monitor powered off for a split of a second. After that it did display everything with a nice touch of yellow.
I jumped out of my chair, thinking "holy crab (censored word), what's that?".
I turned the monitor on and off and rebooted my machine, didn't help. I pulled at the cable, as I already suspected that didn't help as well. I plugged the monitor into my notebook (or laptop, depends how you would define it) and I did immediately knew that I could still rely on my fellow graphics card (powered by ATI).
Now I was desperate: Monitor repairs are almost as expensive as a new monitor nowadays. Also I didn't want to buy a new CRT monitor, those give me headaches even with 100Hz. An TFT display would be a suitable replacement, however you can't imagine how expensive a TFT is with a decent resolution. Decent in my case is anything equal or above 1600x1200 (God [if it exists, can't really be proved nor disproved yet] bless my Dell Inspiron 8200 Notebook with it's godlike display). I'm not a millionaire, so I can't afford a stand-alone TFT with 1600x1200 resolution.
I really wonder why such displays are so cheap it bundled with a notebook
Out of the void I had an inspiration: Maybe the hardware isn't broken, it could just be the software! After all software controlling the monitor settings is not open-source, so there's no way any reasonable person would ever consider to trust it.
So I opend the OSD and went to the page controlling the color temperature. Guess what: The blue color channel was set to zero! Now I was baffled. How could something that simple as the monitor software could contain such a serious bug? Even if the monitor would run with Windows CE (in that case every color channel despite blue would be zero) I would not expect such a bug.
This problem shows only one thing: There's absolutely no quality testing for commercial software. Even unpatchable, hard-coded software contains serious bugs.
So if possible, please try to avoid to use commercial software at all costs. Buy monitors with analog controls, use routers which us free software and sue Bill Gats for being totally evil.
I've drawn a conclusion from this: I won't stop writing free software until commecial software has been declared illegal
PS: I've already emptied several bottles of my favourite beer, so please excuse by poor English.
I jumped out of my chair, thinking "holy crab (censored word), what's that?".
I turned the monitor on and off and rebooted my machine, didn't help. I pulled at the cable, as I already suspected that didn't help as well. I plugged the monitor into my notebook (or laptop, depends how you would define it) and I did immediately knew that I could still rely on my fellow graphics card (powered by ATI).
Now I was desperate: Monitor repairs are almost as expensive as a new monitor nowadays. Also I didn't want to buy a new CRT monitor, those give me headaches even with 100Hz. An TFT display would be a suitable replacement, however you can't imagine how expensive a TFT is with a decent resolution. Decent in my case is anything equal or above 1600x1200 (God [if it exists, can't really be proved nor disproved yet] bless my Dell Inspiron 8200 Notebook with it's godlike display). I'm not a millionaire, so I can't afford a stand-alone TFT with 1600x1200 resolution.
I really wonder why such displays are so cheap it bundled with a notebook
Out of the void I had an inspiration: Maybe the hardware isn't broken, it could just be the software! After all software controlling the monitor settings is not open-source, so there's no way any reasonable person would ever consider to trust it.
So I opend the OSD and went to the page controlling the color temperature. Guess what: The blue color channel was set to zero! Now I was baffled. How could something that simple as the monitor software could contain such a serious bug? Even if the monitor would run with Windows CE (in that case every color channel despite blue would be zero) I would not expect such a bug.
This problem shows only one thing: There's absolutely no quality testing for commercial software. Even unpatchable, hard-coded software contains serious bugs.
So if possible, please try to avoid to use commercial software at all costs. Buy monitors with analog controls, use routers which us free software and sue Bill Gats for being totally evil.
I've drawn a conclusion from this: I won't stop writing free software until commecial software has been declared illegal
PS: I've already emptied several bottles of my favourite beer, so please excuse by poor English.
Re: Almost my first heart attack - or how my monitor failed
liarbotg wrote:[...]
PS: I've already emptied several bottles of my favourite beer, so please excuse by poor English.
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Re: Almost my first heart attack - or how my monitor failed
Mozilla Thunderbird Rules!botg wrote:...after that I wanted to check my mailbox. I started Thunderbird and...
and lets not forget Mozilla , Firefox.
What monitor is it by the way that caused you this .... uh grief.
It wouldn't harm you much, unless I miss something (I am not german) this is a non-alcoholic beer...Golyc wrote:In brazil we don´t have this bear.... in any case i don´t like or drink bear (only 14 years old ^^ ) soh good apetite ! bunk don´t code FZ3 when uou are dunk or it will crash several times before the release !botg wrote:Have you ever considers that my favourite beer could be Clausthaler?