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

Sony's version of what?

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:Sony's version of what?

[mwvdlee]

So basically an expensive, vendor-locked version of a $40 Android tablet?

Re:Sony's version of what?

[Jhon]

Sort of. But this was out when a current $40 tablet would run $300+.

I have a dash and I paid $50 new towards their end of life a few years ago. Its a nice device. Yes, you can do more with a tablet but except for this lame requirement that it find the server to fully boot *IF* it's on a network, it's a great -- the right size, balance, snooze button locations etc. it's a CLOCK, not a tablet. It's shaped like a clock.

Heres the annoying thing: If I shut off my wifi at home and boot the device it will start to JUST the alarm clock (nothing else will work). If it can connect to my wifi but can't 'phone home', it's as described in the article. There would be less anger from the dash users if the damn thing would just default to the "clock mode" as if no network was available.

If you do a factory reset and dont bother setting up a network you can use it as a 'dumb alarm clock'.

Re:Sony's version of what?

[arth1]

Maybe if you clicked on the link they provided that leads to the "Chumby platform" you would have been able to read all about them.

Maybe you should have clicked that link yourself before posting, because it leads to a page for buying new and used chumby devices, without describing what they actually are. Not even on any page reachable from that page.

A few words of description in the submission would not have hurt anyone.

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.

Re:Explanations needed

[ausekilis]

I'm sure the 10 people that have these devices know already... Why do the other thousands care?

Re:Explanations needed

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it's yet another warning to "consumers" that if you buy anything "cloud connected", its useful lifetime is limited entirely by the service provider's whims.

Re:Explanations needed

[MachineShedFred]

Side story: I'm actually shopping for a new fridge right now. I saw one where they integrated a Keurig machine into the fridge, next to the ice maker and water dispenser thing.

At first blush, I thought that was clever. Then, I realized that it will break, and instead of just buying a $100 coffee maker to replace it, I'm paying $450+ for a guy to come out and fix that stupid thing, or have a permanently broken thing on my refrigerator.

No thanks, I'll continue using the coffee maker I already have.

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

[gweihir]

I would comment on that, but somehow I do not find the motivation for it.

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.

Re:Outage on Slashdot commenters

[thegarbz]

It seems to have noticeably dropped this week, despite the positive comments on the "state of Slashdot" thread.

Given that half of the comments are bitching and moaning about Slashdot itself, now that the problems are getting fixed there a good portion of commenters being disenfranchised.

Former Owner

[WoodburyMan]

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.

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.

If memory serves...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

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.

On a cloud (service) when the magic runs out...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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?