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The Incredible Magical Pantech UML290The Incredible Magical Pantech UML290Posted Jun 23, 2011 19:19 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)In reply to: The Incredible Magical Pantech UML290 by pflugstad Parent article: Quotes of the week
My suspicion is that the reason embedded companies don't want to publish specs on their proprietary protocols is that they don't actually know what those protocols are. They stick some stuff they have together, and then they tweak it until it the parts talk to each other and don't get confused, and then they leave it. If they were going to release actual specs, they'd have to reverse-engineer their own device to figure out what the total effect of the layers of workarounds is, and they just don't want to do the work. Dan Williams probably understands this device at this point better than any individual at the company.
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The Incredible Magical Pantech UML290 Posted Jun 24, 2011 16:16 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
Having worked in companies which sell linux-based appliances, the above has been my experience. Some developers try to be more conscientious but don't have the time resource given by management to do a better job and a number of developers just hack and hack and hack at the thing until they get something to work. I could tell some horror stories about temperamental internal software that had idiotic interfaces and failure modes that couldn't be replaced because "well, it worked..sort of and it's already a sunk cost".
Heck, thedailytwf.com is full of stories like that.
The Incredible Magical Pantech UML290 Posted Jun 25, 2011 9:13 UTC (Sat) by linusw (subscriber, #40300) [Link]
When I reverse-engineered the protocol used in the Creative NOMAD and Zen Jukeboxen (prior to the MTP protocol) I had a similar experience. Yes I think I know these protocols better than Creative by now. :-/
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