Today, of course, is 8-8-2008, and the day that the 2008 Summer Olympics Opening Ceremonies begin at, you guessed it, 8 PM.   I discovered another interesting conincidence on the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics website.  They have a count down till the 2014 Olympics begin, and guess how many days till that is? 2008 days.

A user on the ubuntu forums recently posted a thread with the title, Foxconn deliberately sabotaging their BIOS to destroy Linux ACPI which is quite provocative.  Foxconn is a major motherboard manufacturer who produces boards for game consoles such as the Wii, PS3, and Xbox360 as well as many PCs.  The user, whose name is Ryan, dissassembled the BIOS of the board, finding that there were different DSDT tables for the various operating systems.  Windows 95, 98, NT, XP, and Vista, as well as one for Linux.  The problem is that the memory location of the Linux section was a poorly coded table that doesn’t correspond to the ACPI specification of the motherboard.  In essence, whenever Linux was booted, it would randomly freeze or reboot.  Ryan says that this is deliberate since:

These are bogus mutes that are harmless to Windows (it ignores them), but crash Linux sporadically, soooo….

He even went as far to file a complaint with the FTC.  The funny thing is, one Foxconn heard that this was big news in the “blogosphere” they called Ryan personally and had him try out a revised BIOS.  Apparently it’s bad for business not to support Linux.  Many people were eager to point a finger at Microsoft as being the culprit for this fiasco, but I’m one to say that it’s just poor software on the part of Foxconn.  An offical response from Foxconn came a few days later:

Hello every enthusiasts on Linux,

My name is Heart Zhang from Foxconn China, these days I and another Foxconn guy in UK names Carl Brunning contacted Ryan Farmer with each other at all times by email and phone on the big issue happened on our Foxconn MB G33M-S.

Yesterday evening I sent one debug version BIOS about this issue to Ryan, ask him to help us verify again. This morning Ryan replied me his testing result. Almost bugs are fixed by this BIOS.

It’s good for Linux users that Foxconn were able to fix the bug so quickly, but it’s doubly good for PR.