[ale] Defective MoBo?

[Tom Freeman]

Mike

I will respond at the top to the question at the bottom.

Many (most?) companies are in business to earn money (you already knew 
that!). Selling stuff gets money. Supporting stuff costs money. As an 
oversimplification, if they keep the money they win. If what they do 
encourages you to go away, they keep the money.

Support is a cost center, but not a profit center.

But again, you already knew all of that.

With everybody already lawyered up, about the only offense the consumer 
has left would be, as pointed out already, the Better Business people and 
publicity of the slashdot and TV type.

IMHO, of course

On Fri, 21 Jan 2011, Michael B. Trausch wrote:

> On Fri, 2011-01-21 at 22:17 -0500, Scott Castaline wrote:
>> Sorry for using bandwidth on this, but I again asked Gigabyte if I
>> could
>> just RMA the board and here is their response:
>>
>> "Since Linux is open source we are unable to verify it, we suggest
>> testing with Windows based OS. It does not need to be Windows 7"
>>
>> I've already informed them that I don't have Windows and really can't
>> afford to buy it just to prove or disprove that this board is bad.
>>
>> Any comments?
>
> Right, because it is ever so much easier to "verify" an opaque binary
> blob.
>
> I seriously question the knowledge of the people behind some of these
> companies.  They are making hardware, which is by definition neutral of
> an operating system in particular.  Being that they are creating
> hardware (or at least, creating boards that use hardware that they
> supposedly have the specs for), it should be relatively easy for them to
> create a driver for any operating system; particularly one that is "open
> source" because there are so many people who are able to work on the
> bloody thing *and* the whole API is actually available in (somewhat
> readable) source code form.
>
> For fuck's sake, it would not be *all* that hard to build a minimalistic
> framework built around the Linux kernel (or for that matter, any member
> of the BSD family, if they're worried about being forced to commit
> indecent exposure) and provide a disk that boots up the kernel and loads
> a minimalistic program that can validate that all the hardware is up and
> running correctly and operating within specified parameters.  They used
> to do similar things with DOS-based boot floppies and CDs, and that was
> a much more difficult task.
>
> Is there such a thing as a hardware manufacturer that knows what
> supporting their product *actually* means?  I mean, seriously.  You'd
> think that motherboard manufacturers were in the business of selling
> illicit drugs, not selling and supporting their own hardware.
>
> 	--- Mike
>