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What is happening in here? I suggest you take this outside, and discuss it sensibly in the street, like men.

As for everyone else, the parts are in the skies right now coming to the UK!

I believe they will be landing in Sedgefield and will then have to go though a customs clearance (no doubt it will take them a day to do this) because it's a huge 1 ton shipment.

Then it's all coming here, probably on a huge commercial UPS vehicle.

It will then take us a day or so to get it all indoors and organised and checked and I'll take some video and photos while this goes on.

This is going to be back breaking but sensational work. I think we will all get a high from unloading this lorry.

This is it chaps!
 
I am sad to see Ed take a break, and also that people are losing their temper. It looks to me that people really care about the project and the only real "Wildcard" is the case factory.

It must be so hard for the team, and also one must question the reasons behind the paint job:

- Is it because the factory need more time, and are using the paint job as a way to justify an eventual new delay? i.e The painting took longer than we expected on mass production, so we are now using a new paint machine, but need extra time to run this is, but we are hopeful for a shipping date medio May.

- Is it because the factory are perfectionists and feel duty bound to improve case quality? i.e Open pandora is such an important customer that we will increase our costs, reducing our bottom line, in order to stun them with our quality, ensuring that high volume orders are taken in the future.

It's a very tempting carrot for the team, but scope creep kills projects and I maintain that once a decision is made to ship, a brave leader will stick to their guns and deliver the project "Warts and all" assuming the aims have been achieved.

The reason scope creep is so dangerous is because of unexpected side effects, just off the top of my head they could be:

- Reduction in control of size tolerances. Some cases have a good PCB fit, others need filing down.
- Increased production time, and unknown potential delays related to a new manufacturing process that hadn't been considered.
- Fixing an issue that doesn't exist. The cases are fit for purpose without paint, what does the project gain by painting?
- Potential problems with paint that weren't expected. The paint wears off, the paint is poisonous, the paint reacts with certain other chemicals etc.

So the risks are clear. What are the benefits?

- The units "Might" look better.
- Extra colour choices are available
- Unusual colours can be Ebay'ed to claw back costs

What I find staggering is just how service minded the OP team are. Everything they do it seems they have the customer at heart and as they love consoles as much as we do I fear that this might cloud judgment. I'm in no rush for my Pandora, I only ordered early 2010. That said, I believe that the team needs to have a "Development freeze" on the hardware now, and just get the product out of the door. By all means take a limited number of "Test Painted" cases, and Ebay them, but I don't think it would be so smart to risk the project further with a last minute change.

Thanks again to the OP team for trying to bring to market a unique and interesting console. If you get the units out to us without paint or silkscreen you will have achieved a great result. Sometimes you just have to say "Enough" we ship now. Ed, please don't let the vocal minority force you away from a community that you contribute so much too. Make it a short break! (Like until Monday,) just enough to clear you head, but not so long as to loose touch.

Good luck to the team, and fingers crossed us late adopters will get something before the summer holiday season.
 
craigix said:
What is happening in here? I suggest you take this outside, and discuss it sensibly in the street, like men.

As for everyone else, the parts are in the skies right now coming to the UK!

I believe they will be landing in Sedgefield and will then have to go though a customs clearance (no doubt it will take them a day to do this) because it's a huge 1 ton shipment.

Then it's all coming here, probably on a huge commercial UPS vehicle.

It will then take us a day or so to get it all indoors and organised and checked and I'll take some video and photos while this goes on.

This is going to be back breaking but sensational work. I think we will all get a high from unloading this lorry.

This is it chaps!
That's all great news Craig, but without a firm status update on the cases(what's going on, and when they are shipping), all those parts are useless! No offense! <_<

I'll get happy, when the cases are in the air, and getting ready to land, whenever that may be?

Chris
 
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Tor said:
Monk said:
Full speed on anything is rarely possibly in real life. It just seems to me that 500KB/s is a long way down from the impossible 5MB/s. It seems quite a long way down from your suggested 22Mb/s.
Well, yes, but don't forget the part that you didn't quote! :) The N900 (very similar type of device: Basically same chipsets, including wi-fi) is in the same range throughput-wise.

Not forgotten, just - as I don't know anything much about the N900, I have pretty little to say about it except perhaps that I don't find "everyone ELSE is doing it!" to be an especially valid approach to life. I'd rather see artificial (local wirless LAN stuff) benchmarks than "real life almost anything could have caused that speed" type stuff.

Someone asked if MWeston had done tests at different speeds - I believe ED mentioned that they had tested, and as CPU clock rises so does throughput.

craigix said:
What is happening in here? I suggest you take this outside, and discuss it sensibly in the street, like men.

Hah! Probably your best post in... I dunno. ages.

craigix said:
This is it chaps!

You really need a photo of you standing on your roof wearing a leather flying cap to accompany that phrase. IMHO.
 
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Gruso said:
Chairman_Now said:
Most of all, please don't get all revisionist about who the intended audience is or was. I can't find anything about the unit being "mainly for fans of homebrew and opensource... who don't care if the software doesn't run 100% from the beginning" in any of your press, or anywhere on the promotional website (the English language one, at any rate). It wasn't sold to me that way ...
It's not revisionist. It was aimed at users of this forum, plain and simple. It took off from there without any advertising or PR. We (forum users) spent the following year explaining to newcomers that it was a homebrew device, not polished like an iPhone, etc. In fact the standard answer to the endless "is this device for me?" posts in 2009 was that the first batch OS would pretty much be in beta.

Over time the OS has come in leaps and bounds, and perhaps we haven't been as compelled to push that advice. But that's how it was sold here on the forums, by OPT and GP32X members, as I remember it. How it was sold by Engadget or other sites might be was a different story. ;)

Sorry Gruso, but I have to disagree with you on this point. You're normally the voice of reason mixed with some boosterism, but your response is not grounded in reality.

Sites like Engadget don't just make up stories out of thin air; they actually interview the principals. And I'd be willing to bet that many (original?) pre-orderers do not hang about these forums; I know two ther pre-orders that have no idea of what goes on here. How many people pre-ordered without ever coming here? Only the OP team knows that.

If you accept that premise, I can't imagine that you can find anything resembling an official communication (i.e., Craig interviews or website PR) that mentions the device being "mainly for fans of homebrew and opensource".

I mean, this is posted on the Pandora site:

You don't need to be a developer to use the Pandora. You don't even need to know anything about Linux. Using the Pandora is very easy.

This wouldn't lead me to believe that the device was rough, hackerish, home-brewish. And nothing else that the OP team has communicated outside this forum would bring me to that conclusion.

Given all the verbiage on the site, my expectation is that the device should be as easy to use, and as polished as a more consumer-oriented Linux distro - Ubuntu, Fedora, etc. And I'm only saying that because I know what the "code word" of Open Source tends to be. Other pre-orderers may not get that punch line.

Thanks for your thoughtful reply.
 
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Vorporeal said:
  1. Do you guys really think that the delays aren't hurting the team as much as they are hurting us?
I'm not convinced of this. I believe that they're considering possible future orders more than worrying about delays for us. They've already got our money, and unless the whole thing explodes they know that cancellations will only come in at a manageable trickle. Now they're taking their sweet time so that everything looks good and happy for the batch 2 crowd.

Essentially, I feel that we're being taken for granted while they plan for their long term success.


  1. and to me, things don't look _that_ bad (no worse than they've been, I suppose).
They never do, and yet ... here we are, a year and a half later.

They manage their updates so that every single one gives us the impression that there's only a couple things left to do, and that we'll be holding our Pandoras in two months or less. Every once and a while (Early December, Early this April, last July are a few of examples) we get a brief glimpse of hope that they're getting off the merry-go-round and will actually begin shipping in under a month. Then ... they add a couple more things to the TODO list, and around we go again! Of course that makes people angry. How could it not? Frankly I'm getting more and more surprised that OpenPandora doesn't realize that they're practically engineering these bouts of anger.


The rest of it is looking good though
It always does though!
Logically, I understand that they must be getting closer to the real actual ending. But the way they describe it to us, there's always only about two or three major things to go.


If you bothered to read all of that, thank you.
You're welcome.
 
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craigix said:
I think we will all get a high from unloading this lorry.

This is it chaps!

I did'nt think the dodgy painted cases were arriving at the same time ? :D
 
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ging said:
craigix said:
I think we will all get a high from unloading this lorry.

This is it chaps!

I did'nt think the dodgy painted cases were arriving at the same time ? :D

Dodgy painted cases like... um... this laptop I'm using right now, my Samsung phone, my mouse, the kettle in my kitchen...

Trolls must be running low on things to criticise now...
 
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Chairman_Now said:
Sites like Engadget don't just make up stories out of thin air; they actually interview the principals.
Really? I was of the impression that those sites mostly just regurgitated stuff that they got elsewhere... :blink:

Team, when have Engadget interviewed you? :p I mean, have they?
 
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Prometheus said:
Chairman_Now said:
Sites like Engadget don't just make up stories out of thin air; they actually interview the principals.
Really? I was of the impression that those sites mostly just regurgitated stuff that they got elsewhere... :blink:

Team, when have Engadget interviewed you? :p I mean, have they?

Well I for one am tired of seeing quotes from me or the team which were just made up.

Magazines and websites do just make up facts and stories. There are a few sites who *really* know and follow the Pandora project and I know who they are because they email me to check facts.

90% of websites don't.
 
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craigix said:
ging said:
craigix said:
I think we will all get a high from unloading this lorry.

This is it chaps!

I did'nt think the dodgy painted cases were arriving at the same time ? :D

Dodgy painted cases like... um... this laptop I'm using right now, my Samsung phone, my mouse, the kettle in my kitchen...

Trolls must be running low on things to criticise now...
See the smiley ?
 
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ging said:
craigix said:
ging said:
craigix said:
I think we will all get a high from unloading this lorry.

This is it chaps!

I did'nt think the dodgy painted cases were arriving at the same time ? :D

Dodgy painted cases like... um... this laptop I'm using right now, my Samsung phone, my mouse, the kettle in my kitchen...

Trolls must be running low on things to criticise now...
See the smiley ?

It was more just a general reply to people saying the cases are dodgy, I didn't mean to be addressing you personally.
 
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craigix said:
ging said:
craigix said:
ging said:
craigix said:
I think we will all get a high from unloading this lorry.

This is it chaps!

I did'nt think the dodgy painted cases were arriving at the same time ? :D

Dodgy painted cases like... um... this laptop I'm using right now, my Samsung phone, my mouse, the kettle in my kitchen...

Trolls must be running low on things to criticise now...
See the smiley ?

It was more just a general reply to people saying the cases are dodgy, I didn't mean to be addressing you personally.

No prob.Thanks for the reply :).
 
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Welp, I for one am fairly pleased with how things are going. I'm really happy that the WiFi issue has been taken care of, and that it only took a couple of weeks, instead of months. And that the WiFi was fixed before the first units have even been assembled! I'm not at all surprised at how long it's taken the Case Factory to ship, and I will be surprised if they ship anything by the 20th. But, I am very hopeful that they will. In one week we should know that the production is happening and that the cases have shipped. I think that regardless of everything else that has happened, this is good news.

Keep up the good work guys!

Also, I hope ED doesn't have to take too long of a break, as I always enjoy reading his posts!
 
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