You know what burns me?

Moxi. Yes, that's right, I'm talking about the Digeo Moxi. Processing wise, this is a great DVR and has great potential. But it's missing a lot of things, important things, which, overall, makes it a not so great DVR. So, here's my problems with this box:

1. Program listings on the guide or "what's on" are not listed in a grid. Instead, it is a vertical display of what's currently on at the present time. Upcoming shows on the schedule are only shown when a channel is highlighted (e.g., in the center of the view). This makes it very inconvenient to see what's coming on next for the next two hours or so: you have to select each channel, one at a time and look at the side bar of upcoming shows for that channel.
2. There is no reminder system. That is, once you find a show that airs in the future, you can't instruct the DVR to simply remind you about it. Instead, you have to tell the DVR to record it. Well, I don't always want to record it. Now, if this feature were made available, then, the following must occur: configurable reminder duration (e.g., how long the reminder stays on the screen); ability to find all reminders; delete reminders; change reminders.
3. The single TV model only has an 80GB hard drive, roughly 40 hours of recording capacity. There is a dual TV model with a 160GB hard drive. Well, where's the 160GB hard drive for the single TV model?
4. The unit has two USB ports, both completely unusable. Next problem is that they are USB 1.1 ports. What the heck was Digeo thinking? This is a modern device - who the heck puts USB 1.1 ports on a device that processes audio and video? This was a bad move.
   
5. I should be able to attach an external USB hard drive and record to that as well as the internal hard drive. I'm sure this goes against the stupid Digital Millenium Copyright Act. But, that act is, as I just said, stupid; it takes your rights away and gives them to Hollywood, production studios and artists. This is the same act that has essentially killed DVD for larger uses. Well, I'm waiting for someone to figure out how to hack the Moxi box... if I have time, I'll try it myself. One of the reasons I wanted a DVR was to be able to ditch VHS completely and burn the recorded programs to DVD for permament storage and use (if Digeo had a philosphy like Tivo, this wouldn't be a problem since Tivo uses Linux and Tivo encourages peope to hack their boxes just as long as not to subvert it for free service - c'mon, they can detect that anyway you fools!). Congress really screwed up on this one.
   
6. The Moxi assumes a default of 2 days for keeping a recording. Well, I should be able to override that default.
7. Moxi doesn't allow me to specify anything longer than a few days to keep a recording (except for "Keep until I delete it" and "'Til space is needed"). You should be able to specify time scales from days to weeks - especially since a lot of people record entire series where each episode only comes on once a week.
8. No storage space management functions. Believe it or not, but, a lot of people actually want to know how much space is available, how much is taken up on shows and total capacity.
9. While Moxi has a "Favorite Channels" option, you can't designate channels as your favorite. The box learns which channels you favor based on how frequently you watch or record them. I like this behavior, but, I would also like to be able to define my favorite channels from the start. A big thing that's missing is the ability to have multiple favorite channel lists. For example, there might be three people in the household. You might want to have three different channel lists - just like on Dish Network.
   
10. The box runs too hot. Better keep it well ventilated. The fan that's on there is too loud. Digeo - have you been paying any attention whatsoever to computer cooling solutions? Apparently not.
    
11. What kind of test group have cable companies used for this box? Apparently, regular end users whom never touched a DVR, are technically inept, and just don't get the DVR concept in the first place. They should have chosen people whom are integrators, testers and hardware and software engineers!
    

You know what burns me?

Oracle. The company that brought to us the RDBMS. They make a great RDBMS (in fact, one of the most popular across enterprises and IT infrastructures thoughout the world), but they have no clue about anything else in the software business.

First, their database. It's fast, it's powerful, it's scaleable. But their software is incredibly bloated, required far too much resources than is actually necessary. It took the stupid company almost a decade to even provide a GUI management system for the database. And when they finally got around to it - it sucked. It still sucks. It's poorly written, full of bugs, and worse yet, features it's own crappy installer.

Oracle was made by their RDBMS, and their stupid business development folks decided some time ago that they had to get into other markets. Markets such as application servers, grid computing, software development tools, data mining, data warehousing and more: domains that a RDBMS company knows nothing about.

Oracle has yet to get an application server right. It's full of bugs, even in 10g, and more bloated than necessary - it just barely meets J2EE standards compliance (unlike 9i which didn't even meet the bar - how the heck did it become certified?). I have run into issues with this application server that I otherwise would not have run into with WebLogic Server, JBoss and WebSphere.

Grid computing? You have got to be kidding me that an RDBMS company could even manage to properly do this one, let alone understand it. It is far from trivial processing, and decades worth of academic research have been put into it. Databases have very little to do with grid computing.

Let's not forget Oracle's software development tools. Sure, they claim that tools such as JDeveloper are the best integrated in the industry. I've seen some of this in the tool. But at an expense: reliability. Their development tools are extremely error prone, full of bugs. Not worth the headaches that they create. Apparently these tools are just slapped together and lack any sort of a real underlying framework and architecture.

The bottom line: Oracle has no clue how to write software.

You know what burns me?

You know what burns me?

People that think that it's annoying or too bothersome to read long write-ups of things, claim they don't get it or don't have the time, but wind up having the time and the patience to suggest "put it into chapters or sections".

And this is why there's more postings now than there was from the really^3 long post.

You know what burns me?