It's not that hard just to ignore them. Heck, I'd say that online it's only so much easier to ignore them than in face-to-face situations. Censorship is a slippery slope. He should know better.

I'm talking here only of stupid firmware/software. I didn't let myself suffer long enough for the hardware aging to come into play. After a few months I've had enough.

This, a thousand times this!! Google updates their systems constantly, constantly deploying both new hardware and new software. Somehow we can google things without seeing a "down for maintenance, we've got 5000 storage boxes to upgrade" page. And I'm pretty damn sure that whatever infrastructure google runs their search engine on would make even a large SAP deployment something to laugh at.

Nope, the learning curve is not steep! If it were steep, it'd mean you can learn very quickly. Learning curve is not a hill for crying out loud. Steep hills are hard, steep learning curves mean easy (fast) learning!

?! I think you'd be crazy to install anything as complex and under-documented as SAP BASIS without really knowing your OS!!

The screen-oriented workflow that is pretty much enshrined into the SAP Basis runtime's design is something that puts SAP firmly in the 20th century, usability-wise. There's no sane way to retrofit a SAP system into a modern, object-oriented UI. By object orientation I mean almost anything you use today: the file shell (explorer, finder, ...), any "editing" application where you manipulate objects (vector drawings in office suites or illustration packages, modern CAD, ...). In a usual deployment of a system like SAP, you can't, say drag the PO you're working on to a "desktop" to keep it there for easy reference, you can't tag things, there's no object-agnostic history of what you've been doing, etc. SAP is really just a green-screen-oriented design that keeps getting shoehorned into modern presentations, but the basic workflow is well understood to be nightmarish from the human efficiency standpoint.

This is very insightful. SAP's biggest advantage (integration) is its biggest disadvantage, too. In software engineering, tight coupling in such a big system has been repeatedly shown to lead to disasters. By any reasonable metric of software structure, SAP is a disaster.

I don't know about their internal architecture, but I do agree that the UI on my 2nd generation was absolutely horrendous.

You have the right gut feeling. The card is not flaky, it's a quite reliable and standardized piece of hardware. It's the crypto infrastructure that's built around it that sucks. One of the reasons it sucks is because, due to its proprietary and closed nature, it's hard to learn about it. So even people who work for the cable company simply don't understand what they're really doing, and there's much voodoo involved - voodoo that's a stand-in for knowledge that's inaccessible without you signing an NDA...

The EE in me finds the "multiple tuner" part to be perhaps the most ass-backwards one. I'd hope they do the tuning digitally and there's just one wideband IF signal chain that feeds into an ADC, with the tuning done inside of an all-digital ASIC. Demodulating QAM in an ASIC is really cheap.

I've had their 2nd generation box and it was a joke in terms of reliability and UI ergonomics. At home we have a couple of eyeTVs hooked up to an iMac and it works just fine.

There's a long way between the antenna and the microcontroller :)

But, arguably, those light bulbs, due to volume, will have the most vulnerability-scrutinized software stack ever :)

I've recently bought some 70W-equivalent LEDs and they weren't very heavy. Our desktop lamp didn't complain.

In a WiFi solution the wake-up packet filtering can be done in the radio hardware, the microcontroller can be asleep. A receive radio subsystem doesn't consume all that much power.