Very strange. Neither of my cats have ever paid the slightest bit of attention to the contents of any screen on any device I own. Yet I know people whose cats like to watch television, so there's some thing going on where some cats see screen images as significant and others don't. I should go looking for info on that!
In any case, I don't see how this is XFCE's problem. Just change the wallpaper.
> I don't see how this is XFCE's problem. Just change the wallpaper.
While any user who notices they're affected by the issue can fix it on their own, this is only likely to happen after damage has already been inflicted. XFCE can help people preemptively by changing the default to something less likely to attract cats.
Cat eyes have a different refresh rate than human eyes. Some cats can see monitors just clearly enough to make out what's on the screen. Others see flicker. The color gamut is different too.
Dang, TIL, I guess... but I don't see how that relates to the OPs hypothetis about cat vision. A phrase I never thought I'd be uttering here, or... anywhere, really.
Back in the day, if my cat was near my monitor (rare), I would move the mouse cursor around in front of him. He would see it, and maybe gently paw it, and move on within 20 seconds.
I remember my early days of computers (not as old as some folks here, I know) when there was an intense debate on whether a software could cause damage to some hardware.
I remember programing a small .asm that would move the head of a floppy to a farther point and it stoped working. Probably not all models would fail, but one particular brand did.
Then a intense debate followed that I was wrong. Never talked about it again.
Fast-forward, now we have news that nuclear programs had malfunctions caused by cyber-attacks. Ok, not exactly the same "software doesn't damage hardware" we talked back then, but...
I'm willing to consider that using software to make some catware cause damages to the hardware should be acceptable too :D
Of course we can design hardware (+ firmware) that allows software to damage or irrevocably destroy it.
So even if we're not willing to accept that alone, it surely follows that some hardware (+ firmware) will (accidentally) be physically vulnerable to malicious software?
I think so. The point was that you couldn't make a hardware go beyond its limits (video cards, monitors, HDD, keyboards, CD-ROMs)... then I lost my patience and stopped arguing. Funny that at those times, "hardware guide" books were a thing, and one of my opponents was one big writer in my country. Never heard of him anymore, by the way.
I also recall that on early IBM PCs with a monochrome monitor and a Hercules graphics card, it was possible to set the refresh rate to zero and toast the monitor.
As the person who wrote the accepted answer to that question, I'm flattered to see it linked here. (I'm also a bit embarrassed at reading some of my older rambling-style writing, but nothing beats experience :)
While my forray into malicious floppy disks didn't end with physical damage, I did manage to make one similar to DBAN. If you booted the computer with the floppy inserted, all drives would be formatted instantly, without any user input.
Fortunately, even in highschool I realized they probably imaged the school machines anyways. Probably...
This actually happened to me, but I was on i3 and using pactl to set audio volume. I'd given my laptop to someone and they increased the volume to 300% or so and my right speaker blew.
Haha. Site's back up. Maybe all tech sites need a DDoS protection service not to protect against malicious attacks but rather hitting the 1st page of Hacker News and Reddit.
