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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.
would it have hurt the submitter to have informed readers that this is basically a cross between a tablet, alarm clock and digital photo frame? We aren't all familiair with every old, niche, discontinued product from every major electronics company you know!
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.
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.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I had one of these back in 2010-2011 or so. First device I actually ran Netflix on. Chumby was a brand of "Smart" internet ready smart alarm clocks. They had basic functions, and 3rd party apps you could install such as Netflix, or different clock faces, etc. Very long end devices. Sony used the Chumby OS and made their own branded versions of these clocks, Sony Dash. I ditched mine back in 2013-2014 or so once I saw a post somewhere showing Sony was discontinueing the platform. I knew it was a matter of time until they killed the services and I was not risking this. Instead I set up a old Android tablet to use as a alarm clock. Works well.
Chumby was one of Bunnie Huang's projects(of xbox hacking fame back in the day); and it was notably OSS-y and user accessible by the standards of consumer electronics. Best Buy briefly had their own chumby-based product("Insignia Infocast 8") and I picked one up a while back when they were on sale. The features weren't on by default; but you could poke a couple of menu items to start up SSH right out of the box; and the device used a microSD card for firmware, making experimentation with custom builds low-risk and fairly painless.
[i]However[/i] Sony's version, unlike all the other chumby variants, was markedly more closed because Sony included some video playback features that they didn't want people getting their filthy hands on. I think that, for that reason, their hardware was among the nicest/fastest of any of the chumby devices; but also the most hostile to user tinkering. That makes Sony terminating their support likely to sting even harder.
That said, I'm a bit surprised that the hammer didn't fall sooner: the chumby was a neat device; but it came out not too long before Android started showing up all over the place and at increasingly low price points, at which point the similar-role-but-vastly-tinier-ecosystem chumby really had no hope of survival or niche to occupy. I still use mine, it has served me well; but if I were buying today the combination of ubiquitous and cheap Android-things and the post-rPi crazy cheap dev boards would certainly rule it out. Dick move on Sony's part(non-Sony chumby units are still working fine); but not a total surprise.
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.
In the end, the Dash was killed by the decision to support DRM that required a server side component. This would always wind up costing Sony more to support than the device would ever make. That and the rise of landfill android, and suddenly there was no reason to buy a Dash.
--WooooHoooo--
I also have a Chumby one.
I believe my wife is personally responsible for a Dash update. My Dash actually got a Firmware update a little over a month ago - which surprised the shit out of me considering I pretty much knew it was running on life support. In fact I kept an eye on my Abe Vigoda status - it declared him alive even while in dead state and unlike to achieve alive again.
As for the update - I don't really believe in streaming music. Yes, I'm one of those weirdo's who has a huge CD collection, I buy CD's, rip and compress them to OGG and rarely stream music, and that being said I have a huge video library also.
My wife does not have this particular way of looking at the world, around November or so she saw the Pandora app on while I was messing with my Dash and got all excited. "I didn't know that was on there!" She's been streaming for many hours each day while I'm at work, somewhere between four and ten hours a day I'm guessing. She loved the Dash because it didn't have the "We don't like playing to an empty room" thing going on. Guess what was the only change I could find after the recent firmware update?
As for my Chumby One - when Chumby quit working some recent years back I found Chumby offline firmware, downloaded the apps I liked from the Sony Dash site, FTPed them over to my Chumby and that was working until the power supply quit. I still need to get a new supply.
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Reminds me of Niven's _The Magic Goes Away_ - where at one point the protagonists are using a magically-stiffened-and-driven cloud for cross-country transport and are concerned about what happens to them if they hit a place in the sky where the "mana" is used up...
"Where are you on a cloud when the magic goes away?"
Where are you on a cloud SERVICE when the magic goes away?
Perhaps a few incidents like this will start people wondering why you would ever use a cloud service for something mission-critical - or for anything -in the first place?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way