Lawsuit Alleges That Palms Damage Motherboards 437
schussat writes: "This brief AP article describes a lawsuit that alleges that syncing a Palm Pilot "damages or destroys the motherboards on certain PC brands." Does anyone know more or have experience with this? Is it even possible to cause damage? The article is not very detailed."
Why sue Palm? (Score:5, Insightful)
That raises an interesting question. You have a problem when two pieces of equipment interact. One of them blows up. Who to sue? The one that survives, assuming it "broke" the other one? (That seems to be the option taken) The one that breaks, assuming it was a piece of junk to start with? Both?
And the answer is.............THE RICHEST COMPANY, STUPID!!!
--
Re:Why sue Palm? (Score:3, Funny)
Fried Mice (Score:2)
It was enough electricity to give me quite a zing, as well.
This is probably what happened with the Palms.
In my case, I don't blame the mouse. I don't blame the motherboard. I blame myself for not grounding myself before I touched the computer. I know better.
If this is indeed the problem, this lawsuit is bogus.
AP mirror (Score:2, Informative)
Try this AP link [ap.org]
broken, sorry, Yahoo one works (Score:3, Informative)
Have at you! (Score:5, Interesting)
1) The cradle was ALREADY plugged into the port, and had been for several months. In case you don't understand what that means, it means I was NOT plugging the cradle into the port when this happened, alright?
2) serial ports, as I understand them, are NOT designed to be hot-swapped safely. This is why any device that connects to a serial port (or anything other than USB for that matter) tells you specifically to turn OFF the computer before plugging it in. Sure, serial ports can take certain amounts of current, but obviously not as much as the ESD (electro-static discharge, yes?)
3) the Palm IS designed to be hot-swapped into and out of its cradle on a regular and ongoing basis. Again, I'm NOT talking about the cradle and the port, I'm talking about the Palm and the cradle! The Palm, and in this case a PalmV, is designed to be connected and disconnected repetitively and daily.
4) I'm not an idiot or a moron. I would NEVER touch exposed electronics, or even plug devices into my computer while it's on. I know all about static and how it can damage computers. What I didn't know (and I do now, so you can all STFU about it!) was that the cradle and/or mobo is NOT protected against the ESD that happens when I put the palm into the cradle.
5) As I stated in my article, I walked across the room, dropped the palm into the cradle, and my computer died with a pop and a smell of burnt electronics.
6) I'll concede that the damaged UART might have been from something OTHER than just the ESD, but the sequence of events is so apparent that anyone in the room when it happened would almost certainly agree that the ESD is what caused, or at least was the catalys for, the damage pictured in my article. You might call me a damnass for not grounding myself, but you would agree with me about what actually happened.
7) I was, and still am a little, pissed about the whole thing, but I am NOT looking for a lawsuit, and certainly have nothing to do with the one being filed in Cali. Will I sign on if it goes class action? Yes. But not because I want a chunk of money. I would join because I want Palm to fix a design that they KNOW facilitates damage to computers.
8) I wrote my article to spread the word about how the PalmV (and others, possibly) connected to a serial port can damage the computer through normal usage. I didn't write it to be called a moron by all the holier-than-thou geeks on the internet, but that's sure as heck what I got, and I'm getting it all over again because of this lawsuit. Again, you can all STFU about it, ok?
I fully expect even more repetitive flames from people, telling me I'm a moron, that it's the mobo maker that's to blame, that it's my house's wiring, or anything else other than the probability that Palm decided that the risks of their cradle killing a certain percentage of people's computers didn't outweigh the cost of redesigning the cradle with it's own optical coupler to prevent ESD to the serial port. I'll certainly also get supportive e-mail as I did before, because guess what? THIS IS NOT AN UNCOMMON OR ISOLATED INCIDENT! It's just that most people take the punches Palm throws and never complain, because they're made to believe it was their fault even though it wasn't. With every new report of this problem, all you flamers will jump on it all over again. But, sooner or later, it will be reported enough for enough people to believe it that the problem will be fixed.
For now, PalmV users have three choices:
1) get the USB adapter and plug the cradle into that.
2) get a serial port surge protector (link at the end of my follow-up article)
3) ground yourself before ever going anywhere near your Palm's cradle.
I guess I'm a glutton for punishment, because I'll probably come back to read what drivel you people post in reply to this message. Heck, just posting this was like painting a target on my ass for you people.
Re:Have at you! (Score:5, Informative)
That said, there is a lot of poorly-designed crap out there, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to meet a motherboard that blows itself up under perfectly acceptable conditions.
For consumer equipment, all externally-accessible connectors should be able to take some vicious ESD zaps on every single pin. In fact, the 'CE' requirements in Europe make this a legal requirement. As an example of how much ESD protection is in engineer's minds, take a look at this datasheet [maxim-ic.com] for the Maxim MAX3232E RS-232 transciever chip, which has built in +/-15kV ESD protection. (Again, there's a lot of crap being manufactured that can't take ESD like it should.) If the Palm cradle connects to a 'wall wart' transformer to recharge the battery, there is another failure mode: the output of many wall warts is capacitively coupled to the AC power line. The ones I've seen make an approx. 60 VAC sine wave on the output, as measured relative to earth ground. There isn't much current available, and a proper RS-232 design should be able to take it all day long, but I *have* seen equipment that is damaged by it. (At work we're very paranoid about explicitly grounding laptop computers in the electronic labs to keep from frying our prototypes.) Oh, bullshit. It's the engineer's responsibility to design things that will actually work in the real world. Walking up to a piece of office equipment and touching it should *never* cause smoke and/or explosions. It's almost impossible to accidentally blow up a properly designed serial port. Either Palm deliberately and maliciously designed in a destruction circuit, or your motherboard was badly designed. Knowing how crappy commodity motherboards are, I'd bet on the latter. Given that RS-232 is intended to hook up randomly-grounded pieces of equipment with 50meter cables -- and is required by law to include ESD protection in Europe -- there's no point in handling it with kid gloves. Adding optocouplers would cost about US $1.50 per unit. Adding them would mean that the tens of millions of Palm owners with correctly designed computers would be paying a $25,000,000 tax to protect the few people with defective computers. You're forgetting the fourth choice: buy a computer that actually complies with the RS-232 standards, and actually has the run-of-the-mill standard level of ESD protection. Serial ports should be able to take almost anything short of being directly connected to the AC power line. It costs only pennies more to manufacture, and it provides a much better customer experience. (The only catch is that the computer manufacturers have to actually care about doing a good job, as opposed to cranking out an extra few hundred thousand motherboards per month.) I think you under-appreciate how hard it is to design good ESD protection. It's not enough to zap your circuit, and say it has good protection if it keeps working, because ESD damage often just weakens the transistors. Doing it right takes a good theoretical understanding of the circuit, great technician-type skill at performing the tests, and a well-developed sense of paranoia. Designing good ESD protection is a lot like designing cryptographic systems: it's easy to make something that *seems* to work, but very difficult to design something that will be rock solid under years of hard use.All motherboard manufacturers are under *tremendous* schedule pressures. The engineers are being pushed and pushed and pushed to get the design shipping as fast as possible. A two week delay (an ESD fix would probably take 3-4 weeks) costs the company more than a senior engineer's yearly salary, so the tendency is to say 'We zapped it, it works, what the hell let's ship it!' Keerist, with the Rambus and MTH fiascos earlier this year, Intel was shipping motherboards where *the engineers knew the digital functions didn't work*. Their priority for ESD protection was probably two notches higher than picking lint out of their belly buttons.
Hint: the trolls want attention, and you're giving it to them. Act as if a forum is good, and it becomes better. Act as if it sucks, and it will suck worse.Re:Have at you! (Score:2)
Re:AP mirror (Score:4, Funny)
You mean people on ./actually read the article first and post after?
My god, this should be in the headlines...
Re:AP mirror (Score:2, Informative)
I've got a dell and a palm, both for years (Score:2)
If someone can find any doc on this I'd appreciate it.
Re:AP mirror (Score:2)
Actually, alimentation sounds about right for (probably) French or Spanish -- I once saw a poster somewhere (don't remember if it was
/Brian
Re:Seems jike another frivolous lawsuit (Score:2)
Serial Port keeps getting killed on my Laptop (Score:2, Interesting)
I've always put this down to the build quality of Dell laptops, I've also had the screen, keyboard, CD writer and battery replaced over the last year and a number of other people have had the same serial port problem in my office.
In the end I gave up and got a USB serial adapter to fix the problem, as I came to the conclusion that the port on my laptop wasn't properly earthed.
Their may be something in this, but I think they should be sueing their motherboard supplier. I ran the Palm V on my old Gateway laptop without problem for over a year.
Dave.
An Ex-Dell Tech Post (Score:5, Informative)
-A Quiet Reader
"No matter where you go... There you are..." --Buckaroo Bonzai
This is a general serial port "problem" (Score:2, Interesting)
For palmpilots you plug/unplug them all the time by design, which actually is kind of strange and not compatible with the design of the serial port. From this POV it is not so strange to hold Palm liable for bringing such a product on the market (at least without clearly warning for the risk or telling people to only plug/unplug while the computer is shut off).
Of course with the newer USB palms, this is no longer an issue.
Laptops aren't grounded (Score:2)
I've had my share of Dell Latitude's with broken serial ports because of the Palm V Cradle, and these MB's were replaced by Dell Technicians multiple times without any problems. But it's a pain, especially if you are trying to emergency-flash a cisco router over the serial console, with some very impatient client watching your every move. Bad timing to figure out that your laptop's serial port has been blown to smithereens just hours before :).
Palm's Cradle has zapped many-a-MB, but filing a class-action suit is probably a bit overreacted. That's what you get for living in the land of the free.
Ungrounded Motherboard? (Score:2)
Re:An Ex-Dell Tech Post (Score:5, Informative)
Re:An Ex-Dell Tech Post (Score:2, Interesting)
Keep in mind, people will tell a tech person anything to get their computer fixed under warranty. I've been there, on both sides. I've had people look me in the eye with a straight face and tell me their modem line was NOT hooked up during the lightning storm, as I point out the nasty black burn mark near the input jack. I've had them swear that there's no way they would ever go mucking around in
Re:An Ex-Dell Tech Post (Score:2, Interesting)
I can't help but wonder, though, whether it's the cradles themselves zapping MOBO's, or whether it's customer misuse
Misuse is probably too strong a word.
I remember buying a cheap mechanical keyboard/monitor switch for some ALR 386 server boxes (this was some time ago, obviously). I found out the hard way that the switchbox was able to generate a sufficient static charge to blow out the keyboard port.
This didn't cost me a motherboard; the ALR motherboards incorporated a fusible link in the keyboard circuit, which absorbed the static charge and blew. It took a soldering iron to fix it, but once this fuse was replaced, the mobo worked fine once again.
As I recall, ALR fixed it under warranty.
Was I at fault for using the cheapo switchbox? Probably (I bought a better one thereafter). Was it "abuse"? Probably not. Had ALR denied me warranty coverage on these grounds, I would have been pretty pissed.
Should other mobo manufacturers be blamed for not similarly insulating their serial ports? Probably. Should the switchbox manufacturer have been expected to fix their design? At the price I paid, probably not. Should I have sued either ALR or the switch manufacturer. Good God, no.
Re:An Ex-Dell Tech Post (Score:2)
I thought RS-232 connectors were meant to be hot-pluggable? In which case this isn't misuse.
One question... (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally, I don't know if the voltages in the serial port are enough to do damage (I think the parallel and video ports are the hot ones) but still, if she's tooling around with a metal-ringed connector with her fat greasy fingers in the back of her computer who knows what she could short out?
Honestly, I look at this claim with as much skepticism as the people who find live maggots in a McDonalds hamburger that just went through frying in a microwave for three minutes.
Besides, even if one Palm cradle was faulty and shorted out something on the motherboard at best Palm is liable to have that single motherboard repaired. Class action status means a bunch of people need to have problems with this and this is the first I've heard of it. Devices have been using the serial/parallel ports since time began, what's so special about Palms?
- JoeShmoe
Re:One question... (Score:2)
Static didn't melt the chip, but ... (Score:4, Informative)
A static discharge could fry a sensitive control chip, which might fail short, and cause another chip, "downstream" of it, to overheat and bubble its plastic casing. I have seem similar problems on the old Epson dot-matrix printers, where a $45 control chip would periodically fail, causing the printhead to fail, and usually taking some of the power transistors which drove it along. Fortunately, the $60 (?it's been a long time) printhead and the $3 transistors would fail so quickly that they would save the $0.25 fuses.
The point? Yes, static could have caused the failure. How to prevent that? Ground things properly. Make sure that the case of each machine is grounded ("earthed" if you are in Britain), but that the cables connecting peripherals to computer have the ground wire connected at one end only (that's case ground, not signal ground). This prevents ground loops, which can also melt chips in houses with wiring problems.
Reading further down that page, we can see how Palm turned an upset customer into an extremely upset customer. He tells us that he got the run-around, that the story kept changing, and that Palm made it quite clear that they didn't care about keeping a customer happy; it wasn't their fault, and he couldn't prove it. On this [seapug.com] page, he concludes his story. He's bitter but resigned. I have to wonder, now, whether I want to spend hundreds of dollars to buy something from a company whose service and products leave one bitter and resigned, and hundreds of dollars poorer. HP, on the other hand, has promised him a check for $100, to help defray the cost of a new motherboard. I wonder which company will get better word-of-mouth out of this epsiode?
Did you know.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Did you know.... (Score:2)
Since the Palm V is charged on the stand there is a slight possibility that putting the Palm V into the cradle wrong, or misaligned could cause larger current (from the wall adapter) onto a pin it shouldn't be. Personally I subscribe to the idea that it is mostly caused by static.
COurse, if someone was to send me a Palm Vx I'd be glad to test it for a couple of years.
Hardware vs Software (Score:2, Flamebait)
*13 million units sold
*2 people with problems
*Class-action lawsuit
Windows:
*1 unit sold per home PC (on average)
*approx. 1 crash per week on average purely caused by Windows
*No comeback
WTF is going on here? It really is about time someone saw sense on these kind of issues, software companies can release whatever they like and we have no call on them - if only a tiny percentage of users have problems with hardware, they start a class-action lawsuit!
1 crash per week?! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Hardware vs Software (Score:2)
The contrast in treatment is glaring. A few people get blown chips from a piece of hardware and a class action lawsuits and FUD make mainstream news. Hell, my mom heard about this before I did. Yet every year poorly written software dooms millions of PCs to the junk heap. Poor little PC gets unstable under some MS trash and its poor little user thinks the machine is just obsolete and chucks it.
The orignial post makes all the sense in the world to me. Making excuses for MS does not.
The evils of coincidence (Score:3, Insightful)
Earlier this year, thousand of foolish parents refused to give their children MMR vaccines because shortly after it was given to a tiny percentage of children, they developed autism. Never mind that autism is detected at around teh same age as vaccinatin' time. Result? Lots of unvaccinated kids. Probably a few lawsuits.
What've got here? A couple of people whose motherboards blew while their pilots were plugged in. Result? Lawsuit. I bet Genius are delighted; they'd probably have been blamed if the first thing our litigious chums saw after the crash was a mouse.
Re:The evils of flawed products (Score:2)
having hardware fry due to NORMAL EXPECTED USE of a product is NOT ACCEPTABLE.
P.S. MMR vaccine does indeed appear to cause autism. Children should get individual doses for measles, mumps, and rubella, not at the same time. This may reduce the risk.
That's nothing... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:That's nothing... (Score:2, Funny)
FUD (Score:2, Offtopic)
Palm crashes hotmail! (Score:3, Funny)
Can i have the names of the lawyers? I smell money!!!
What's so special about that? (Score:2, Informative)
Not a very good article (Score:5, Informative)
The article implies that this is somehow software-based, and most people probably thought 'Bullshit', and rightly so.
A google [google.com] search for Palm damage motherboard [google.com] turns up some better articles: This one [palmblvd.com], and a follow-up here [palmblvd.com] are both pretty good.
The guy making the claim has a page here [seapug.com]. The guy (called Greg Gaub) details his story in which his Hewlett packard desktop computer's motherboard was ruined; Greg's claim is that the motherboard was damaged because of a faulty or badly designed Palm V cradle which doesn't dissapate static charges.
Quoth I: As you may be aware, The PalmV and Vx devices have an aluminum casing. They also have a cradle with, in my opinion, a design flaw that does not dissipate static electric charges that travel from a person (holding or reaching for their PalmV) into the cradle, and on into the desktop computer's motherboard via the serial connector.
It does seem a somewhat unlikely problem, but I suppose it could be possible, in theory at least.
Michael
Re:Not a very good article (Score:2)
We managed to save the data on the hard-drive using Linux fdisk. Though why the partition table was nuked by a static discharge, I don't know.
Rich
Re:Not a very good article (Score:2)
If the head happened to be over the partition sector and/or the static charge caused what looked like a spurious write request to the heads, you could scramble all or part of a sector. I wouldn't expect it to be common, but anything could happen in the death throes of a shocked machine.
Hmm... More likely, actually, that the static mangled a couple of bits on an access request to the hard disk. That would seem a MUCH more likely cause of a bad write (offhand... I'm not an EE).
Re:Not a very good article (Score:2)
Spooky. Wonder if that was what the recent MS FUD about opensource was about. Not only viral software licences, but viral install and boot process, facilitated by lightning. No wonder they're scared.
UART chip would get the static (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:UART chip would get the static (Score:2)
Re:Not a very good article (Score:5, Interesting)
- Take a soldering iron and heat it up.
- touch soldering iron to tip of index finger and hold
- does the skin bubble up? yes.
- take soldering iron and touch to chip and hold.
- does the chip bubble up? no. chips can take a lot more energy than your finger.
- repeat experiment with static electricity and your remaining good finger.
- does your skin bubble up? no. neither will the chip.
- conclusion: JCZ is right, and you are wrong.
Now, it is quite possible that your palm and/or the static did hurt your machine, but that chip has nothing to do with it. How did it happen? if some small percentage of all people have bubbled chips in their boxes anyway, but the only people who look are the ones who've just zapped them, that same percentage of the people who've just zapped them are probably going to attribute the bubbling to the static zapping... but that doesn't make it so.furthermore, even if your motherboard was properly designed to ... oh nevermind, this is a waste of my time.
Try to be more smart and less stupid, please.
Re:Not a very good article (Score:2)
(thermal runaway) which melts/burns the chip.
This shouldn't be news to you, "as a Quality & Reliability engineer for computer systems at a major manufacturer".
(one major manufacturer known for unreliability does come to mind though)
Even small surges or dips in power can melt/burn chips. I had a $12 FPGA-type chip fry in an electronics class when a lab partner connected a logic probe's power inputs in parallel with the chips power inputs (which is correct), but while the chip was on, which was not proper.
I gather the voltage instability on the power inputs could have either directly started a damaging effect or could have caused a state which both sink and source transistors in CMOS were on at the same time (halfway logic levels could do this).
The chip smoked. Afterwards it had a bump in it.
Re:Not a very good article (Score:2, Insightful)
I haven't seen a Palm cradle, but if it was designed poorly - say as a huge capacitor on a cord that conveniently plugs into your motherboard's USB slot - they could conceivably be at fault. The palm cradle is supposed to be designed as a conduit for charge to flow, but only within certain specifications. I can't hook an arc welder up to my USB port and blame the motherboard manufacturer when the board is reduced to a charred mass of plastic and silicon. I can blame Palm if the design of their device is such that in as prescribed usage it exceeds design specifications.
Things don't accidently brush against ports usually, especially USB (or Firewire) ports, the electrical contacts are recessed from the exposed surface and have a rather small clearance around them.
Only sweaty palms (Score:4, Funny)
A true story of multiple motherboard death (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, for all of those who believe that this sort of thing couldn't _possibly_ happen, this happened 5 times to my dad. He's a good guy, but not terribly adventerous when it comes to computers. The only device he has ever plugged into a serial port since obtaining that system was (gasp) the Palm V cradle. After having the same problem with a replacement cradle (suggested by 3Com) and after 3 motherboards, another call to 3Com put him in touch with a 3Com/Palm engineer who was kind enough to inform my father that there is a design flaw in the electrical interface to the cradle.
For those that haven't seen the design, it involves a wall wart connected directly to the 9-pin RS232 connector--used for recharging the Palm V's battery.
At any rate, the problem is very real. I'm forwarding the URL for the article to my father. Who knows? Perhaps motherboard manufacturers that have replaced large numbers of units should join the class...
Happened to me too (Score:3, Informative)
Okay - here's the REAL scoop. (Score:5, Interesting)
Dell Manufacture Motherboards? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Dell Manufacture Motherboards? (Score:3, Informative)
I've experienced something similar (Score:3, Informative)
When the first serial port stopped working, I thought it was coincidence, but then I switched the cradle to the other one, and it eventally went out, too.
-Karl
Hmmm, so not user error at all. Right? (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, really; "damages or destroys the motherboards on certain PC brands" - just a little too vague there for me to take it seriously. Especially with a company that's shifted as many units ("more than 13 million") as Palm.
Re:Hmmm, so not user error at all. Right? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is an example of the kind of attitude that keeps corporate users unhappy with their technical support. It's not right to assume that just because you can't imagine the causal connection between (your example) Office 97 and a printing problem that there isn't one. Haven't you personally had many experiences in which changing one variable (say, plugging a printer into a different USB port) immediately precedes something else, seemingly unrelated, "breaking"? No matter how fastidious you are, no matter what operating system you're using, an OS + thousands of programs + all the variability in hardware configurations in the world is far too complex a system for you to intuitively know whether the report of a problem's apparent cause is right.
If you're in a service profession, your job is to serve -- to assume that your customers are reporting, to the best of their ability, what they understand about the situation, and to use the information they give you, however flawed, to find the source of the problem. Up with "stupid users", I say.
The argument that this company shipped more than 13 million units is hardly support for the premise that they can't screw up. And it's a cop-out to lay the blame at the feet of pejoratively-labaled "users". Both the computer hardware and software industries get away with far too little responsibility to ensure quality in their products.
Re:Hmmm, so not user error at all. Right? (Score:2)
I'm no longer in tech support, but when I was I experienced people attributing a fault to something that experience told me wasn't the culprit. Each time I checked (yes, I provided the best support I could regardless of my opinion of the user), my initial suspicion that it was actually user error turned out to be correct.
My original point was not that this is definitely down to the users. It was simply that at the moment experience tells me that the fault probably lies with the user, not the hardware.
And, for the record, my corporate users all seemed perfectly happy with my performance : )
Re:Hmmm, so not user error at all. Right? (Score:2)
But seriously, I agree that the customer should be able to use your product as it was intended without having any problems. But if someone drove their Ford into a tree they wouldn't have any claim against Ford, would they? Question is, what were these people doing that caused their Palms to break their mobos?
Now, I accept that this could be a fault with the Palms. Or it could be a fault with the motherboards (I wonder why they've not gone after the motherboard manufacturers).
All I did was speculate that the problem could have been caused by something other than the Palm. This was based on my experience of people similarly mis-diagnosing problems (and often causing the fault themselves either through understandable software problems or through genuine stupidity [yes, it does exist and sometimes there's a limit on what you can do to overcome it]). And the fact that there's just two of them filing this suit makes me even more suspicious. OK, so it's a negative attitude, but it's only that way because of what I've seen previously.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Come and get your $900 handheld? (Score:2)
of course you also let there lawyer know that if they don't find any problems then palm will expect to be reimbursed for the money thay spent for the engineers.
or you get an arbitrator to chose the engineers and whom ever "looses" foots the bill.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Come and get your $900 handheld? (Score:2)
besides If Palm is found out not to be the cause, they just say 'you know what, we'll wave that fee if we can use the evidence found as proof agains other lawsuits'.
I thought that spin was obvious, sorry
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Hmmm, so not user error at all. Right? (Score:2, Insightful)
You are absolutely right. I'm the only network admin for a company with about 200 users. We do have a couple of desktop support guys that work with the end-users. My job is mostly servers, and only end-user support when needed. We've had a HARD time finding good desktop people..people that HELP the user and don't call them "lusers" as soon as they walk away. We've finally gotten good people in but we're still dealing with all the damage the last group did.
A lot of computer admins and support people forget that their customer is the end-user...not the company they work for. If it weren't for them we wouldn't have jobs. So the top priority is to make them happy. My servers could be barely getting by, but if the users are happy I'd still have a job. Flip that around, if my servers were flying along with full backup and great performance but the users weren't happy and had problems I'd be fired.
Re:Hmmm, so not user error at all. Right? (Score:4, Funny)
Rather than saying 'up with stupid users', how about we continue to call them stupid until they can prove themselves otherwise?
More than once before I have suggested to those calling me for tech support that they might like to read 'The Demon Haunted World' by Carl Sagan as an excellent primer for how to apply basic logic and scientific thinking ftoeveryday life. One of them actually took this advice, and since they've not called for tech support again I can only assume this worked.
Warning: I only do tech support as a summer job whilst at University; if your life depends on your tech support job (and $deity help you if this is the case) then recommending books on basic logic skills to those requesting tech support may not be an advisable course of action. You do so at your own risk, and I will accept no responsibility.
I have experience with this. (Score:2, Informative)
Going out on a limb (Score:2, Interesting)
1 - RS232 ports can handle a lot more than 5 volts, and ordinarily have circuitry just behind the connector to make things all nice-like.
2 - USB ports are made for hot-swaps, and the connector is unlike any other, so they're probably also not the cause of this complaint.
3 - Some Palm docks (like the one for my V) have to be connected inline between the keyboard and the computer.
4 - Some keyboards lock up when the keyboard is plugged and unplugged, and I've seen some CPUs conk out when this happens under power.
Unfounded conclusion: This is related to someone not knowing what can be plugged/unplugged when the box is powered up, that being the keyboard.
Unfounded conclusion 2: or just some idiot attorney who will believe anything he's told if there's a fee attached to it.
Re:Going out on a limb (Score:2)
perhaps electrostatic discharge damaged it (Score:3, Informative)
So, I wonder whether they really mean that the cradle causes the PC to be vulnerable to electrostatic discharge.
port voltages... (Score:2)
Serial ports are built to the EIA-RS232 spec, which requires it to handle at least -10V to 10V to barely come within spec. Recommended tolerance for EIA-RS232 is an even larger swing.
About the only thing I can see is that there was a short, and it toasted the UART. Since many systems are integrating the UART onto the southbridge, this could be a possibility. However, I doubt this will ever make it to class action status. Palm will pay for the mobos and fix the cradle's design, and that will be that.
Surfing /. damages the monitor (Score:3, Funny)
I don't buy it. (Score:5, Insightful)
I called them with a stupid problem and they mailed me a new one. I'm guessing that the first Palm heard of this mess was when the reporter asked them about the suit. If they got an off the wall complaint like that, they would probably have gievn the customer a new box so they could tear apart the old one and see if it had actually happened. From a curiosity standpoint, it'd be worth the money. "I wonder if our product can do that?" Trying to duplicate the results wouldn't work. Getting your hands on a box that (allegedly) it's already happened to is much better.
Sounds like a couple of morons and a law firm willing to spend a couple of associates' time on a crap shoot. Business as usual.
Reboots (Score:3, Informative)
Serial ports (Score:2)
Some motherboards don't have a problem with it because the UARTs are designed better. Standard UARTs like those in Intel reference design motherboards will have a problem with the ESD output by the Palm V.
Computer OEMs like Compaq, Dell, and HP no doubt know about this problem but haven't sued 3com because at this point it would likely put them out of business with all the follow-on suits by just about everybody else.
So it's definitely palm's fault, right? (Score:2, Interesting)
Heh. So they're suing Palm? Why aren't they suing the motherboard makers for making such crappy motherboards? It seems to be a much higher likelihood, since it only happens to *some* motherboards. My guess would be that palm has deeper pockets.
Either that, or the users in question here don't know jack about what really went wrong... like if they put a cup of coffee in their "cup holder" and when they hit the hot-sync button, it closed.
here's the downlow (Score:4, Informative)
I did blow a processor before (Score:4, Informative)
I plugged in a speaker into the computer while it was on, and the processor blew. It was probably to do with the voltage differences, causing a spike in the PSU.
I can imagine that the Palm may do the same thing, but I'd hope that there would be warnings to tell people to ensure that if they're plugging different things in which are connected to the mains that they'd better make sure everything's off.
Of course, with connectors that earth levels properly, and with spike protection, this shouldn't be an issue.
Re:I did blow a processor before (Score:5, Informative)
P.S. I wouldn't necessarily blame Palm for this, but it seems like better design on the serial port, or on the cradle, could reduce this problem...
Re: I did blow a processor before (Score:2)
Tribbles, something must have happened between the time you plugged in the speaker, and the time the processor went bad, because there is no direct connection between the audio line output and the processor.
Probably a surge destroyed the power supply, and that destroyed the processor.
Snap, crackle, pop, hardware crispies (Score:2, Informative)
A friend of mine had a lightning-induced surge hit the phone line of a BBS we were running a few years back... weird effects. It pretty much torched the external modem, came up the serial cable, lightly browned the UART (yes, the chip casing turned brown!), hopped down the bus, and grounded out through the power supply (blowing the lids off a few electrolytic capacitors in it in the process)... everything else in the box was fine.
Re:I did blow a processor before (Score:2)
I have an unearthed, regulated switch-mode power pack: 240V AC input, switchable 3 to 12V DC output in 1.5V increments (except 10.5V) output. After feeling a tingle when touching a device powered by the plug pack, I checked the output with a digital multimeter. Since there is no earth connection, the negative output is floating at around 114V AC; the current is around 120uA. This is probably not an issue if the device is earthed, but would probably kill sensitive electronics. A floating voltage like this may explain why the Palm V powered cradle allegedly fries motherboards.
Re:I did blow a processor before (Score:5, Informative)
The USB spec explicitly says that the data lines must be able to withstand this sort of thing. In practice, they have bloody great clamp diodes (you've seen them on circuit diagrams, they're the ones connected "backwards", cathode to signal, anode to ground), which absorb the voltage spikes.
You'd have to be hot-plugging a MIG welder into your USB ports to spike them that badly.
Re:I did blow a processor before (Score:2)
Re:Palm is a higher-quality & lower-power device (Score:2)
Anyway, technically the coil becomes a magnet when it's got a current flowing through it, but I'm just splitting hairs now and blatantly trying to cover up my mistake.
Ahh, everyone point at the dumbass [me].
Info from an electronics engineer (Score:3, Informative)
The problem occurs if there's any static charge on you. You pick up the serial cable and touch one of the pins, the cable may also end up with a charge on it. Plug it into the PC, and the serial port gets a static shock. This could (although you'd need quite some charge!) damage the serial port. Or you could do a similar thing by touching the serial port pins during the process of plugging the cable in. A really severe static charge could break through the serial port chip to the power supply and cause a spike on that which would damage other devices, although that's highly unlikely - you'd really have to be trying to build up that kind of a charge on yourself.
Of course, if the serial port connector is mounted on the mobo, then the force of plugging and unplugging it could bend the mobo slightly, which in the case of a badly-made and badly-mounted board could be enough to break a track. Or the connector could simply have failed through overuse.
More details on this are required. To win this, the plaintiffs are going to have to prove (a) that their mobos are damaged, (b) that the damage could have been caused by the Hotsync, and (c) that it was Palm's fault rather than the mobo manufacturers releasing a dodgy product. Frankly, (c) sounds a much more logical option.
Grab.
They've got to be kidding (Score:4, Insightful)
Their computers probably just broke down and they're hoping Palm will settle out of court and give them new ones just to get them to shut up.
What They're Doing... (Score:3, Insightful)
If you assume they're not hucksters, they are doing this to get people who may not have known about the problem to come out and join their effort to right the wrong.
If you're a realist, they are doing this because they are trying to get greedy and/or stupid people like themselves to jump on the bandwagon and get enough mass to force a settlement. Unintended Acceleration Syndrome, anyone?
Re:They've got to be kidding (Score:2)
And I though it was supposed to be a chicken head in a box of Chicken Mc Nuggets [seanbaby.com]...
Seen it (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:RS232 is a difficult standard to use (Score:2, Informative)
If the Palm's case is metallic and is connected to the Palm's ground, then I think it might be possible to avoid static discharge through the motherboard if a simple ground wire is soldered to the 0V pin of the cradle. I've never seen a Palm cradle, but they surely use a simple AC-DC converter for power which hasn't any ground wire.
Re:RS232 is a difficult standard to use (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Optical isolation. (Score:2)
My TI-99/4A, on the otherhand, did not survive a cup of milk when I was 6 years old. :)
Re:News: broken mother boards get broken more easi (Score:5, Interesting)
there is now way this could happen. (I have seen computers sit there with close to 55 volts AC on the serial pins being inducted from a long serial run in a factory. with no damage to the PC or the serial hardware.
Short of a direct static shock to the port, which will only take out that serial port, you cant damage the mobo with a serial device (unless your serial device is a lamp cord and plug wired to a 9 pin plug.... I could see 110V ac could create a bit of trouble in the pc
Motherboard murder (Score:2)
I had two PCs sitting next to each other. I had a shortage of UK power cables but I did have a US 2-pin power cable so I plugged that into an adapter and that powered computer #2. Computer #2 was headless but had a PSU with an oultet socket. I needed to power my digital camera so I used a hot-connector and plugged it into the outlet on computer #2 and the serial of computer #1.
OK, turns out that because it didn't have a proper ground, case of computer #2 was floating at around 90V. Therefore ground in camera floating at ~90V, therefore ground on serial cable floating at around 90V to computer #1 ground. When I plugged the serial into computer #1, I must have brushed the 90V shield against some pins. Dead serial port. When I noticed the serial port wasn't working properly, tried plugging it into the second one...
Ended up claiming on the house insurance (hardly worth it) and buying another.
Rich
Re:News: broken mother boards get broken more easi (Score:2)
Oh, it can happen, believe me! I've seen something similar once debugging an embedded system. We were using a ROM emulator attached to the PC via the parallel port. The PC and the target machine happened to be plugged into different AC circuits. The PC went *poof* suddenly. Turns out the cause was a 300 mV (yes, 300 millivolt) differential between the grounds on the two circuits.
The moral of the story is, some PCs will put up with a lot of electrical abuse, while others are pieces of junk with no isolation whatsoever. It can happen. However, in a case like this I'd say it's the PC at fault, not the external device.
Oh, and always use a common ground!
Re:News: broken mother boards get broken more easi (Score:3, Insightful)
With people it's the "volts that jolt, but the mills (milliamps) that kill".
With electronics, even a low current, high voltage static shock is deadly.
If a static shock is enough to stimulate your nerve directly to cause sensation (after passing through a relatively high resistance of your skin), it is MORE than enough to punch a hole through the oxide layer of a CMOS chip, creating a new electrical connection (short) where one does not belong. This is permanent.
In addition, such a short can cause increased heat production which can cause thermal runaway (more heat and more current in a vicious cycle).
This can easily melt/burn a chip.
Re:HotSync? (Score:2, Funny)
A technician, upon opening a box to work out modem problems a customer was having, found no modem card, but a phone cable spliced directly onto the main power cord. Upon asking the customer why on earth that was, the customer replied "Well, whoever made the computer forgot to install the the modem card, so knowing a bit about Electrical stuff I spliced in a cable myself.
It never fails to amaze me just how dumb some people are. ;-).
Re:Frying motherboards via the Serial Port (Score:2)
- Firstly, lightning packs a much much bigger kick than anything a Palm could muster. Way bigger than mains voltage too.
- Cook the modem, and you'll have trouble sending any data to the mobo. I guess you might just about manage to do this, but only if the kit wasn't designed too well. I'd expect that Palm would be producing fairly high-quality kit.
- Your point about suing doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I'm sure a lot of people would sue God if they could : ). But seriously, if a garage put new tires on my car, and that somehow caused my engine to explode (I know, stupid example, but I'm trying to do my job at the same time as post) then you can bet I'd be going after the garage for compensation. Assuming I could prove something so improbable....
Not trying to flame, just trying to help.Re:Frying motherboards via the Serial Port (Score:2)
woof.
Re:No way possible (Score:2)
In 99.9% of the time there is no problem, but the palm is typically a device that gets plugged/unplugged very often, thus the chance for damage may indeed get quite high.