[clug] Monitors that swivel

[Hal Ashburner]

Mike Carden wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 8:13 PM, Lana Brindley <lanabrindley at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> once I ditch RHEL5 I should be able to just
>> install $DISTRO_OF_CHOICE
>>     
>
> As any sane person (ahem) might. :-)
>
> Debian? Arch? Gentoo? LFS?
>
>
> Hal wrote:
>   
>> Maybe it did back in the days of CRTs and scan lines but I don't know what I'm talking about there even more
>> than normal.
>>     
>
> Back in my Panasonic days, a factory engineer visited Australia to
> show us gaijin how to service a lovely new model of $3500 21" CRT
> monitor. He duly downloaded the latest firmware from the factory and
> showed us how to flash it. Then he powered up the monitor and with a
> big bang, the blue smoke escaped. Seems the file he copied was all
> zeros and when that controls the horizontal output stage, nastiness
> ensues.
>
> No spares in the country at that time so the monitor was toast and we
> had to take him out to introduce him to Australian beer.
>
>   
Kieth Packard tells stories of $monitor_vendor demanding they remove the 
default stipple background from XFree86 as it had similar effects on 
their lovely monitors. The way he tells it he replied "Noe. And verily 
shalt thou fix thy old and busted junk."
Pendants may take issue with my use of quotation marks there...