I wonder how the DVR design group feels?

[Bob Haller]

After the complete airing of the bug situation. Imagine doing this for a living and see your efforts torn apart.

Wonder if they are thinking if we had me resources things would be different?

I kinda wonder about the human side of things like this.

[gcutler]

After the complete airing of the bug situation. Imagine doing this for a living and see your efforts torn apart.

Wonder if they are thinking if we had me resources things would be different?

I kinda wonder about the human side of things like this.

I've been involved in development projects where due to managment stupidity it was obvious it was a total waste of time, and things end up crashing in flames...

I'm willing to bet that if they are relatively new to the job they may feel bad, but if they are veteran developers, they just follow their instructions, and collect their paychecks and do whatever it takes not to get fired.

[Inaba]

I'm willing to bet that if they are relatively new to the job they may feel bad, but if they are veteran developers, they just follow their instructions, and collect their paychecks and do whatever it takes not to get fired.

Judging by what I've heard the environment there is like, this is probably pretty accurate. Being a software developer myself (among other hats), it can be pretty crappy to have your work torn apart... but the flipside of that is that either a) the developers are less than spectacular or b) they are hamstrung by management.

I'm a big fan and propenent of "release early and release often" school of software development. Release lots of little patches OFTEN. Each little bit you fix, release a patch, that way you can tell if something works and doesn't on a component by component level, instead of trying to figure out where you went wrong in that MONSTER update. If something breaks immediately after you update one small section, chances are, it's that ONE SMALL SECTION of the code... You're customers, in the meantime, always feel like they are getting attention and "stuff" for free when you send multiple updates.

I won't claim to know exactly how the whole Sat business works in terms of updates, but I can't imagine that it would be terribly hard to send down a software update once a month. However, maybe there's issues with writing the EEPROMs or something, as my experience comes from the non-solid state storage world... so I'm sure there's concernes in that department.

[Mark Holtz]

I hate to say this, but some of the problems may be due to marketing promising various features and the DVR design group is going "You want us to do WHAT by WHEN?"

I have a nagging feeling that the 5xx is now at the end of the development cycle, and that any code changes will be just to implement new equipment, such as SuperDish capability.

[gcutler]

If they are 'Less the spectacular developers" they may be better off with less updates as each one may be one step foward and two steps back (as it seems many DP updates were)

[gcutler]

I have a nagging feeling that the 5xx is now at the end of the development cycle, and that any code changes will be just to implement new equipment, such as SuperDish capability.


Except for the consistant bugs, I can live with the 50x as it is now with features (since I have 1 TiVo in the house). Many houses would be happy with 1 721 and 50xs everywhere else (let the kids fill up their own 50x with whatever they like) But I never expected the 50x to come very close to the 721 or TiVo.

[Mike D-CO5]

It would be nice if the 721 had some of the features of the Tivo. I've got 3 /508s and a 721 , so each member of the house has a dvr to watch what they want. Can't imagine watching tv with out one now.