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This topic comprises 3 pages: 1 2 3
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Author
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Topic: CLASS ACTION SUIT... please
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Jack Ondracek
Film God
Posts: 2348
From: Port Orchard, WA, USA
Registered: Oct 2002
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posted 05-20-2017 12:37 PM
I can't say anything about Qube, but I do wonder how much care the manufacturers put into this insanely-expensive equipment some of us paid for out of our wallets.
In the past 5 years, I've lost 2 of those redundant power supply modules out of my 3 servers. I've had to pull one server out and re-seat a card that otherwise hadn't been disturbed. I've had a few issues that required an IMB be reseated, again, where the board was screwed in and hadn't been touched. Most recently, both my service company and Dolby suspect an update caused an issue where Dolby thinks the new software might have "damaged" 2 of my IMB's. What?!!
Of course, having just passed warranty, the "damage" to my hardware, supposedly caused by an update, sent out by the manufacturer, is not covered. So... I either buy new boards or go back to the software version I had in there to begin with... and possibly stay there.
Oh... and now I learn I shouldn't expect more than 5 years or so out of enterprise-grade hard drives?... at a drive-in that runs 1/3 to maybe 1/2 the hours an indoor does?
Frankly, I have $600 Dell desktops that have given me less trouble than these $XX,000 servers... and it's not that they're awful, just that for that kind of money, I would have expected them to be darn near bulletproof.
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 05-22-2017 02:39 AM
quote: Dave Bird
Speaking from experience, Scott is correct, the lawyers win and it is very, very hard to force anything but a modest settlement even when your case is a "slam dunk" like a clear-cut breach of contract. The mechanics and procedural actions available are enough to drag it for years, and only then, if for some reason they're tired of dealing with you, would a big enterprise ever consider settling with you. A "win" is tough. You'll pay hundreds of thousands to fight it, for the large corporations it's just a cost of business, they can fight you forever.
I think, in this particular case it would be just to force the manufacturer to come up with a solution. Nobody got injured for example. The only thing people want is to continue using their equipment, without buying new equipment. In order to facilitate this, a simple software update would be sufficient. This software update could be provided by the manufacturer at minimal costs and overhead. This way, they could extend the certificate another 10 years.
For Qube, it's already pretty late, within less than a month, people simply won't be able to use the affected servers anymore. So, people might already have bought new equipment or they will start losing shows. We're talking about potentially real, quantifiable damages here. Those kind of cases will get hairy and in a class action suit, you will most likely never recoup all your damages.
The only other option is to take it up against them individually, but if you're just a small, independent shop, chances are, you simply cannot afford to take those risks. All in all, the lawyers always win, but I think a class action suit would be the only alternative. Often, companies might want to give in, before the lawsuit actually started. It's not like they don't have anything to loose here and if they act fast, they can still fix it with minimum costs from their side.
quote: Jack Ondracek
Frankly, I have $600 Dell desktops that have given me less trouble than these $XX,000 servers... and it's not that they're awful, just that for that kind of money, I would have expected them to be darn near bulletproof.
The problem here is that the hardware that goes into your $XX,000 servers isn't necessarily much better than the hardware that goes into your $600 Dell desktop. Also, there are far more of those $600 Dell desktops being produced. So a production flaw in those will be far more costly than a production flaw in those servers.
You can buy most of the hardware going into those servers off-the-shelf for less than a tenth of the retail price, but you're paying for the package. You're paying for the stuff you cannot get off the shelf, which is essentially the IMB, the software and the research that went into it.
Unfortunately, most "enterprise" stuff works like this nowadays. What you're essentially getting is an "off-the-shelf" base with some task-specific magic tacked on. The age in where a piece of electronics was designed specifically for just the task at hand, are pretty much over. Even the latest iterations of sound processors are essentially just PC servers.
quote: Mark Gulbrandsen
I'm amazed that Dolby has never seen a class action suit just on power supply failures alone. Soooooo many failures starting with the CP-50 and moving up and on that I can't even begin to count them. The only very reliable one was the CP-100. I am thankful that Dolbly is out of my life for good.
I think it would be much harder to start any kind of class action suit based on those incidents. Your customers would need to join the class action suit and it would be far more difficult to get them in line about a failed PSU than for a failed server. Also, it would be far harder to prove a general design flaw, since the misfortune seems to span multiple models. You probably would need opinions of multiple engineers, who must come to roughly the same conclusion. Something like an expiring certificate at least isn't something that needs a lot of research. Any knowledgeable person can certify the expiry date works as an effective kill-switch.
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Frank Angel
Film God
Posts: 5305
From: Brooklyn NY USA
Registered: Dec 1999
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posted 05-22-2017 12:17 PM
Steve, that's exactly what the mechanical part (the bulk) of our machine does. Obviously those mechanical functions haven't needed to change in decades -- you still need to load a stack of envelopes into it, they are fed into the belly where they are stamped with the price of the stamp now set not my hand, but by the electronic head, and the envelopes sealed. Other than the electronic add-on, I bet the units probably even look about the same.
What is so frustrating is that massive machine is still totally capable of doing all that mechanical stuff which the new, $10,000 replacement unit will still have to do...there's not going to be any improvement in the mechanics of feeding, stamping and sealing envelopes or printing out a stick-on stamp for odd packages. So whatever the change in the electronics (perhaps more security protocols ala DCI compliance BS) you can't tell me they can't make their new protocols talk to that mechanical device.
Plus, I can't imagine what new safety protocols need to be in place since those are all strictly mandated by the USPS. The proof that nothing significant has change in USPS protocols is that anyone can sign up for stamps.com and print stamps on envelopes or print postage for packages on any consumer printer! All I am saying is that whatever nonsense P-B is trying to claim necessitates making their well-build mechanical "printer" obsolete (a unity, btw, which will probably keep working without a hiccup for another decade), is just so much corporate bullshit and greed.
I guarantee, if I had the time and the mind to do it, I would be able to hook a PC to that P-B machine and make it print postage via a stamps.com account. Stamps.com has no trouble printing to ANY printer and in reality, that's all the P-B unit is.
Sorry...didn't mean to hijack the thread, but it's the same principal -- purposefully killing a product without there being some factor that really necessitates it. Forcing the consumer to replace a perfectly functioning unit in order to increase corporate profit shouldn't be an acceptable (or legal) reason.
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 05-23-2017 03:44 AM
I don't think you can force any organization to support any product forever. Unfortunately, with any product directly tied to "on-line" services, those product essentially can become bricks for their owners, once the underlying services are discontinued.
It's probably a premature idea, but maybe a law requiring companies to open up their closed interfaces and designs, as soon as they decide to discontinue the services the products rely on, could help. In such a case, third parties could still jump into the void and offer services to continue the life of the product.
If, for example, PB would open up their discontinued postal meters, some third party supplier could possibly still provide equivalent services.
Obviously, such a requirement could become a problem for security related implementations like DCI equipment.
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 05-24-2017 01:20 PM
Having a specifically coded kill switch date programmed into a piece of high priced, computer-based hardware does seem very unethical.
On the other hand, I can understand the motivations behind this. Commercial cinema projection is a very small, niche market. The companies making software and hardware for this market are not charity organizations. They have to be able to earn a profit in order to survive. And they'll lose money providing support for ancient hardware and software several generations removed from what they're currently selling. Providing such support is a hit on human resources and it discourages customers from buying new products to replace the old. These companies are only going to make money off of continually selling new generations of equipment.
There is nothing computer-based that is guaranteed any form of long term life. 7 to 10 years is about the most anyone should expect for the life span of a modern digital product. So many kinds of chips, IC boards and other components are produced for only a short amount of time. The production lines change to something else very quickly. That leaves behind a limited supply of replacement parts. A company has only so much room to store that kind of stuff. After a digital device is several years old or more it shouldn't surprise anyone that when a part in that device breaks it often can't be replaced unless one can find a similar old device with a still working part.
The PC computing platform is a huge market, one where vendors like Microsoft, Apple and Adobe have incurred the anger of customers when they ended support for old versions of operating systems, software and hardware. Building backward compatibility too far in the past can create serious limits on new advancements. Even digital files you create with a given application can be rendered dead after so many years.
I'm not surprised by the appearance of kill switches in pro cinema gear. Deliberately short product life is something I complained about loudly before the movie theater industry began its widespread conversion from film projection to digital projection. Companies who make digital equipment have their own economic realities and limits. But so do movie theater operators. Theaters operators have been used to getting decades of life out of a film projector, something which costs a lot less than a digital projector. Theaters are not set up to absorb the costs of buying a new projector every several years, basically on the same replacement cycle as that of a good quality personal computer.
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