I am setting up a new TV-set, a Philips 32pfl3807h .
I had never seen a commercial product programmed in such a moronic way. The programmer must have been outright illiterate.
Can you imagine the only way to set the timezone of the clock is upon installation by specifying the country - and no way to change that afterwards. Including a half an hour+ channel scan. Then once you specify "Bulgaria" - where I am - it will not find the digital channels of the cable TV. If you specify "Germany" it will but the clock is wrong. If you specify "Finland" the clock is correct but it will not find the analog channels (you can search and store them afterwards _only_ one by one and you have to specify for each explicitly under which number it has to be stored....).
I am not going to go into how it has to be repowered every once in a while if you play some video etc., how it won't do even primitive multi-task stuff like showing the program guide without stopping the current channel reception etc....
What I find amazing is that such a product, very nice display, hardware working OK etc., had to be made nearly useless just because they (Philips) did not have a programmer to do a simple job.
If I deliver a device which is 1/10th that not working I am sure I'll never get away with it. How do they manage that is beyond me.
I am sure there are enough people even only in this newsgroup who could do this OK and would be affordable to any company having a mass product like this. Why are they not contracting someone if they don't want to hire one? Because they wanted to pay $200 to someone over freelance.com and be done with it? The software looks that appaling, I must say that.
Or are we a dying species here? Just folks capable of drag and drop "programming" nowadays on the market?
Dimiter
------------------------------------------------------ Dimiter Popoff Transgalactic Instruments
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