@Paul_Gadd
I understand what you are saying but imagine this HD killer code kicked in when you had a crash/virus attack or something and your harddrive was useless untill you repaired it, would you want to give them a second chance?
Don't get me wrong... What Elbox did was collasally STUPID, but I don't think it was malicious. I've been thinking about this a lot, as I was only inches away from buying a Mediator before learning of this.... So hear me out...
Yes, this code could be accidently triggered. The possibility of this event is non-zero. However, the possibility of MANY things happening is non-zero... If I asked you what the probability of a coin toss (of a properly symmetrically balanced and shaped coin) was, you'd probably answer 50/50. But that's not quite right, as there's the ever-tiny chance that it MIGHT land on it's edge.
The FACT of it is, that this code is very UNLIKELY to be accidently triggered. You'd have to have a program go off in the weeds and jump the program counter on the processor straight onto the proper byte in memory in order for it to execute. Counting how it's not that often that the processor jumps to a totally random location on a crash (usually it blows out the end of a previous block of code or branches into data), I think we can safely say that if you have 4 megs of fast ram, (and I can't imagine that a PCI system could have less!) your chances of this happening are less than 1 in 4 million. Yes, Matilda, you have a better chance of hitting the lottery.
Now, this code could be triggered by another program that would know where to jump the program counter to, but if you're writing a malicious code, would it really make sense to do that? You'd probably waste as many bytes to find the offset of destruct code as it'd take to write your own destruct code.
I still haven't bought the Mediator, but that's because I came to the conclusion that I'm waiting for the Shark PPC G4 add-on ship. (I don't trust anything not being vapor until I see it with my own eyes, anymore!)
Elbox screwed up. They got caught and called on it. They took a big hit on reputation. But I think they deserve to be looked at in the larger picture. For the most part, they ship quality hardware. That's rare in the cottage-industry that is the Amiga scene. I'm willing to overlook a blunder, but they really should start a campaign to improve their image. I'd like to argue that they should open-source the drivers as a show of good faith, and stick to making hardware, but I doubt that's practical to their business... But they do need to do something to show that they've really repented their sins.
