Sony Outage Disables DASH Devices, No ETA On a Fix

New submitter Jack Greenbaum writes: In 2012 Sony closed the developer site for the DASH, their version of the Chumby platform. Sony never officially killed off the product, and they kept the back end servers on line, until recently at least. About two weeks ago DASH owners started seeing their devices fail with a cryptic error message "Unable to download the Control Panel (No download information available). Please restart your dash to try again." Sony acknowledges that the issue is at their end, but no ETA for a fix has been provided. The passionate DASH community is not pleased that Sony is being so quiet about a fix. One user even overslept for work because they depended on the alarm clock feature. Now every DASH is dead until Sony decides to not abandon its walled garden.

Comments

Explanations needed

[arth1]

WTF is DASH? Or Chumby?
Following the link leads me to believe it's like a Palm Audrey 2.0?

A short description in the headline of what you're talking about is never amiss. But then again, this is Timothy, the indiscriminate copy/paster who shan't be bothered to actually read through the submission to see whether it makes sense.

Outage on Slashdot commenters

[Overzeetop]

It seems like we're looking at the end of the platform, I guess. I suppose Dice and Beta officially made the site unreadable, or just superfluous for most users. Scrolling down the front page I see stories with nearly all the comment totals in double digits. The "active" story is about the hot-button US Supreme Court nomination fight with 279 comments. Three years ago, it would have been 1500.

I suppose 18 years (17 for me; I started reading in '98) is a good run in the internet age, but it's kind of sad to see it go.

Re:Outage on Slashdot commenters

[phishybongwaters]

The slide started long before the acquisition. But you know what's worse? No, not the apps apper apps mooo moo douche. No. What's worse is people moaning and whining about the good old days. This is the logical extension of trying to host essentially a forum for discussion, and make money from it. This is what it becomes. Be thankful people still actually mod this at all.

stopping devs stops the product too!? heresy!

[ThePhish]

I'm sure that one bloke who missed work that day because of his niche product not working, due to some large multinational company decided to cut losses is going to be very happy Timothy made him front-page famous on the Slashdots.

"...we must avoid clinging to the edifice of a decadent past" doesn't seem to apply to a knockoff product of something that was popular between tuesday night and a wednesday morning, half a dozen years ago.

Re:Former Owner

[AmiMoJo]

About a decade ago Sony sold my friend a DVR. The advantage of their model was that it got the programme guide (EPG) over the internet, which gave you much longer range and could cope with things being rescheduled etc. After three years they discontinued the EPG service due to some kind of fall out with the EPG provider, and the device was basically a brick. You could program it manually, but it was painful. My friend got a 25% refund from the shop and bought a different manufacturer's model.

Lesson learned, no more Sony products in his household.

Re:Former Owner

[Megane]

That was due to Rovi (formerly known as Macrovisiion, so no stranger to annoying consumers) decided to shut down the OTA version of the TVGOS service. And not just shut it down, but yank it from the world. They demanded the hardware back from stations, who might otherwise have left it running just for the clock. So while it wasn't technically bricked, the usefulness of a DVR without a working clock is very near zero.

The problem was that Sony, in their infinite arro...wisdom decided that TVGOS would be the only way to set the clock for their DVR. There was no manual clock setting option. Nobody discontinues products like Sony, and their DVR was already discontinued when this happened, so no updates were provided.

I personally had a ChannelMaster CM7000PAL DVR at this time. I can say that the TVGOS service with its 14 days of guide info was awesome, but that particular DVR also supported using the ATSC guide data, and the clock could be set manually. It was flaky (show descriptions would go to the wrong show, which also happens on my MythTV, but I insist on using the OTA guide data and someday I'll figure out the problems) and most stations only put up 12 hours of data because apparently some TV sets had crappy guide implementations that would freak out with too much data. But it still worked, unlike the Sony.