Doesn’t the operating system provide a safe environment to work with hardware? What happens if you start messing with “raw pieces of memory” in the wrong way? Will you damage the hardware? Permanently?
Short of CRT monitors exploding because you tried to send them too high of a signal, I think it’s very difficult to damage hardware from software and even more difficult to do permanent damage.
In 2000 one of the work machines 17 inch CRT caught fire when it ended up with the wrong sync settings - I’m glad that doesn’t happen with LED displays.
A video of the presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYQ_lq5dcvM
Doesn’t the operating system provide a safe environment to work with hardware? What happens if you start messing with “raw pieces of memory” in the wrong way? Will you damage the hardware? Permanently?
Short of CRT monitors exploding because you tried to send them too high of a signal, I think it’s very difficult to damage hardware from software and even more difficult to do permanent damage.
In 2000 one of the work machines 17 inch CRT caught fire when it ended up with the wrong sync settings - I’m glad that doesn’t happen with LED displays.
Which reminds me of this bug from years back:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/10/29/mandrake_linux_ate_my_cd/