[ale] droid bricks if mod'ed

[Lightner, Jeff]

If you pry we fry reminds me of a support job I had years ago.  

Many of the software customers we had were ...um... forgetful about
paying their support bills on time.   The company had intentionally
embedded expiration dates in the code.  If your support was up to date
you'd continue operating but if it wasn't eventually you'd hit the
expiration and get a nasty error code.  Most of us in support knew what
the error meant.  However, one night I had a site call with the error
code that wasn't on our dunning list.   After digging into it I realized
that the site actually had a real error that generated the same code as
the expiration date - something I hadn't seen in a year of working
there.

p.s. Don't tell me it's illegal or unethical - at some point the company
dropped the expiration date practice and the company is long gone now
anyway.

-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of
Scott Castaline
Sent: Thursday, July 15, 2010 10:03 PM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts - Yes! We run Linux!
Subject: Re: [ale] droid bricks if mod'ed

On 07/15/2010 03:26 PM, Jim Kinney wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 2:56 PM, Jim Philips <briarpatch.jim at gmail.com
> <mailto:briarpatch.jim at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>
>
>     This article in Boy Genius Report is damping down some of the
initial
>     excitement over this:
>
>     http://bit.ly/9JKmZ7
>
>     Cyanogen is also a little bit skeptical that this will prevent
users
>     from modding their phones.
>
> Everyone is digging into this and the results look better than
> originally posted. It seems to be a euro-version only thing (looking
for
> a link to that info instead of other word-of-mouth stuff). "Jim: from
> what i understand it is in the milestone chipset, but only active on
the
> european versions... apparently it isn't function on the american
droids."
>
> still digging for definitive....
>
> but _in_ the milestone chips means _all_droid_hardware_ unless the
> milestone referred to is only one leading ot the X versoin and not the
> milestone related to the pre-launch of the droid I have.
>
> either way, a way for a manufacturer to effectively destroy the
product
> after they sell it to is flat wrong.
>
> --
> --
> James P. Kinney III
> I would rather stumble along in freedom than walk effortlessly in
chains.
>
>
>
>
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Just saw this, looks like its not just a European thing.
http://lwn.net/Articles/396222/
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