Put Us Out Of Our Misery!

[mali]

^This. Better yet remove it completely. The Two Months God is always watching

 

[sold]

This thread is teh suxxorz. It is also why we can't have nice things. And I am fairly certain that it would make baby Jesus cry. Why is this thread still open precisely exactly? AND why am I still posting in it? All the answers to these questions and more will be revealed in the next thrilling episode of... who gives a shit anyway?

Want Pandora? Buy Pandora. Want a pat on the back for your supposed altruism and righteousness? Not gonna happen. Most of the people here want to get their Pandora and use it in as many kick-ass ways as they can. So to those of you who feel the need to vent their cynicism and frustration here, I ask you this...

If you don't like a place, say a restaurant or a pub, do you go back there frequently to tell the proprietor and patrons who don't seem to mind the joint that it sucks balls and you wouldn't even expel urine upon it to douse the flame if it was on fire? I think not. That would make you a jackass if you did, right? And a forceful blow to the jaw would be a likely consequence if one was to do that in real life. So why are you doing that here?

 

[mali]

Sometimes it helps to look at things from a different angle. Anybody who doesn't care about something shouldn't post anyway.

edit:
My post looks a bit meaningless, so I'll expand.
You can mark this thread as a "Gerald"-thread. It might be annoying to some but if you look closer those people who are annoyed by it are exactly the people who should want it to stay open. I don't want to diss people, so I say I'm a Gerald, too.

 

[juniorm33]

Personally, just read last couple pages and was pleasantly surprised how well it recovered.
Apart from one post in my eyes.
And I would rather it being discussed in this thread than spreading to others.

 

[Asmo]

Want a pat on the back for your supposed altruism and righteousness? Not gonna happen.

I wonder who here has put up their whole house as collateral just so they can sell an underdog games machine to a bunch of teenagers/aging geeks? Craig

Confirmed: No Pat on the back from Sold.

If you don't like a place, say a restaurant or a pub, do you go back there frequently to tell the proprietor and patrons who don't seem to mind the joint that it sucks balls and you wouldn't even expel urine upon it to douse the flame if it was on fire? I think not. That would make you a jackass if you did, right? And a forceful blow to the jaw would be a likely consequence if one was to do that in real life. So why are you doing that here?

We haven't eaten yet?

 

[sold]

I didn't mean to sound as if people don't have a right to point out what they feel is a shortcoming of the project, but for people to actively post on these boards and repeatedly criticize the project while openly stating that they will under no circumstances ever buy the product, even if it is the best thing since sliced bread, seems like a waste of time and effort to me. I just don't understand why people would be prepared to come back time and time again and get shitty about stuff.

There are some very good-natured people on these boards and then there are some not so good-natured folk here also (yeah, I know I may have set myself up for some jokes here :lol: ) And even though it takes all kinds to make the world, I don't see any reason for *VERY* personal attacks against a particular member of the OP team. And I must say, Craig conducts himself very respectfully most of the time imho, because if I was in Craigs shoes, after responding to some of the comments that have been made I would need to have surgery to get my foot removed from either my own mouth or the arse of some of the people that think they can say whatever they like because this is the internet and anonymity is king. Most likely both. Somehow. I suppose it isn't physically possible. But you know what I mean.

It is no easy task to put something like the Pandora together. Just try and even get something the equivalent of say, ONE of the tools required to mould part of the case done and come back and tell us about how you lost some hair and a couple of years off your life because you set yourself an unrealistic deadline due to lack of experience and the freaking thing is still in China :lol: Forget making an entire device that would require at least some background in engineering, software development, computer science and industrial design, as well as the desire to create something different.

My humble opinion is that in life there are two options. Take it, or leave it. And I know the world is not as black and white as that sounds, but in the end, one of those choices will come into play in everything people may encounter. Sure you got a right to talk about things, good or bad. But after a while, talking about the same grievance over and over becomes nothing more than getting up on a soap box and have a whinge to any passer by who may listen.

EDIT: @ Asmo Confirmed: that meme never gets old :lol: And torpor was just stating a fact. BTW Craig isn't the only one
in the team taking a risk.

EDIT 2: I better get off my soap box now

 

[Dunny]

If you don't like a place, say a restaurant or a pub, do you go back there frequently to tell the proprietor and patrons who don't seem to mind the joint that it sucks balls and you wouldn't even expel urine upon it to douse the flame if it was on fire? I think not. That would make you a jackass if you did, right? And a forceful blow to the jaw would be a likely consequence if one was to do that in real life. So why are you doing that here?

I took Mrs. Dunny out for a weekend this one past (no, not Valentines - our anniversary is the 13th of Feb, which was a friday. Unlucky for her most certainly). We went to a restaurant - it was in the middle of the Yorkshire nowhere, it had snowed, and it was cold. The restaurant was cold, the clientèle loud, the food was late. I considered complaining loudly, but 1) the waitress was fit and 2) we knew the food would be excellent. And it was. It reminded me of these forums - the food being on time would have been good, but I didn't mind as the quality was amazing.

I thought "what would the forum do?"

So I complained. Loudly. When they argued I bloody well told them that I had a forum avatar in the shape of a toilet, and they just backed down, they obviously realised what a force to be reckoned with I really am.

 

[torpor]

I've got a Porsche. Its *NOT* an automatic!

 

[andyB911]

I took Mrs. Dunny out for a weekend this one past (no, not Valentines - our anniversary is the 13th of Feb, which was a friday. Unlucky for her most certainly). We went to a restaurant - it was in the middle of the Yorkshire nowhere, it had snowed, and it was cold. The restaurant was cold, the clientèle loud, the food was late. I considered complaining loudly, but 1) the waitress was fit and 2) we knew the food would be excellent. And it was. It reminded me of these forums - the food being on time would have been good, but I didn't mind as the quality was amazing.

I thought "what would the forum do?"

So I complained. Loudly. When they argued I bloody well told them that I had a forum avatar in the shape of a toilet, and they just backed down, they obviously realised what a force to be reckoned with I really am.

Who in your great analogy is the fit waitress? Is this a subtle way of publically declaring your emotions for Craig?

 

[rmm2131]

Want a pat on the back for your supposed altruism and righteousness? Not gonna happen.

Altruism is unselfish concern for the welfare of others.

I wonder who here has put up their whole house as collateral just so they can sell an underdog games machine to a bunch of teenagers/aging geeks? Craig

Yes, they said they put up their houses. They also have full-time jobs with income outside of the project. I don't believe they would become destitute if the project tanked. I want them to do well financially, but that banner your waving is a nonissue.

If you don't like a place, say a restaurant or a pub, do you go back there frequently to tell the proprietor and patrons who don't seem to mind the joint that it sucks balls and you wouldn't even expel urine upon it to douse the flame if it was on fire? I think not. That would make you a jackass if you did, right? And a forceful blow to the jaw would be a likely consequence if one was to do that in real life. So why are you doing that here?

Why are you still allowed to post in this forum?

I didn't mean to sound as if people don't have a right to point out what they feel is a shortcoming of the project, but for people to actively post on these boards and repeatedly criticize the project while openly stating that they will under no circumstances ever buy the product, even if it is the best thing since sliced bread, seems like a waste of time and effort to me. I just don't understand why people would be prepared to come back time and time again and get shitty about stuff.

It's the product we want that keeps us here not necessarily the people behind it, and there was only one person who said they wouldn't ever buy it. Everyone else is enamored with the Pandora.

I've made mistakes over the course of my life and i've always been accountable for the choices that didn't turn out proper. You can distill what you want from that, but I just wanted to say it and I hope the next few weeks bring some really good news for ALL of us.

 

[renegadechic]

i think accountability is something where you actually do something wrong yourself and hold yourself accountable for what happened and the aftermath.

in this situation i think the difficulty has been that we cannot blame the companies that let the project down and only the middleman. can we hold the team accountable for the banks flipping out? for the chinese company taking way longer than expected? for all the first nubs company going bust and leaving debts behind that we had to pay over again? no, all that happens is that we beg for news on all those things and plead for estimates and we get them and then when a company lets us down, they then pass the information down and the estimate has to move. we are always working with best estimates relative to the knowledge at the time.

so basically... are you suggesting people be accountable for what? passing on information? inaccurate guesses? simple hope?

c'mon...

 

[MonkeyChops]

you wouldn't even expel urine upon it to douse the flame if it was on fire?

I just pictured someone pissing on a raging building fire and being thanked by the crowd.

 

[Monk]

so basically... are you suggesting people be accountable for what? passing on information? inaccurate guesses? simple hope?

c'mon...

Well, I wasn't suggesting but I've seen people suggest that customers were wrong to pick the Pandora if they didn't know there would be "some delays" in such a project (running a year and a half over on a two month estimate is pushing that argument somewhat into the absurd though), but... I think OpenPandora should be held to at least as high a level of accountancy as the end users, don't you? If customers are responsible for the choices they make, OpenPandora should be responsible for their choices too. Or are we all just irresponsible?

 

[renegadechic]

...I think OpenPandora should be held to at least as high a level of accountancy as the end users, don't you? If customers are responsible for the choices they make, OpenPandora should be responsible for their choices too. Or are we all just irresponsible?

i'll agree there but im not entirely certain what level of accountability we have... i mean its down to us if we buy from them sure but its far easier for us to back out at any point or change our orders. they cant really back out of their investments (i.e. china). i guess if they are going to be held to be accountable for their patience with us and their holding of a civil tongue then sure but comparitive volumes of negative noise and lashing out is far lower from them team and the times they have have been in direct response to being ground down by whatever person they are lashing out at. noones perfect i guess, but then if there was an apple product development board and steve jobs frequented it, i can guarantee he would snap now and then too.

tbh if we are only talking about accountability of words, then this is all really quite silly. all that could be achieved is a salving of some hurt butts and really thats just not going to happen

 

[fiori_musicali]

Without myself getting into calling people fools or ignoramuses, I must admit that on the whole a web site like http://www.open-pandora.org/ looks pretty much like an invitation to Joe Public to buy Pandoras. Quotes like "It might be October, it might be December." sound like the product should be forthcoming very soon (well, they would have last September).

I'm not sure that customers don't have a reasonable right to have their expectations in such regards be met, or the right to be unhappy (and express that) when such expectations aren't met. I'm not sure that investors in any company tend to sit back silently either - from what I know of investors (including Craig's comments on the topic) they are generally very demanding too.

None of which excuses anyone for being a jackass, of course.

Everything seems to be painted so HARSHLY too often, when in actuality we all share more in common than the fairly small differences that divide us.

Regardless what advocates of political correctness would suggest, sometimes the best word for stupid is stupid. How one relates to that is a personal thing. I've done many stupid things in my life that I'm not proud of, but the most important thing is that I was able to retrospectively understand why they were stupid, hence I didn't need to make stupid my identity. It's probable that many people who jumped in as fools later became more involved and understanding of the details and so of the project.

It's true that investors also have the right to demand results, but shouldn't that be proportional to the made investment? A price of a single Pandora in this project is rather small and simplistically enough to buy you a voice worth a single unit. The difference to a normal situation is that this is a community project. Even that is not completely true, as that ~350€ isn't enough to produce a single unit as for that you need mass production which is dependent on thousands of additional small investments similar to yours. If I understood right, even EvilDragon himself was spotted from the forums and became part of the core team. The same laws of accountability just don't hold under these special circumstances. It is a fact that these people didn't know all that well what they were getting into themselves, and such projects require the effort of a large, mostly very unorganized group of people.

The customers' role in this is different to the usual setting as we funded this project, and that requires a certain degree of commitment. What if everyone starts pulling out their money halfway the process and the OP team is left alone with massive pre-paid orders and components with the money already scattered around the world and transformed into half-complete parts. We're not left with, say, 10% of 4000 completed units, but instead 4000 of 10% completed units, and an enormous debt to be paid by the core team who was working the hardest on making this happen while the rest of us sat on our asses wondering why our cash still hasn't turned into a device. The longer you've had your money invested in such a project, the more difficult it becomes to pull it out because (aside from maybe the PayPal issue and the nub factory going bankrupt) the closer the project has come to completion. I would say the system itself is excellent, just the fact that investors couldn't be hand-picked and the deal between them wasn't more carefully negotiated brought problems in form of community dissonance. Of course we can express our dissatisfaction, I'm not trying to take that away from people, but at the same time we must understand how the system works.

I admit it IS a difficult system to deal in as a customer, but what we can do to ease that pain (the wait, frustration) is, basically; Either take a refund and let someone who is more willing to make that long-term commitment to take over, offer advice and counseling, or offer concrete help - i.e. contribute to the project. We've seen all of this happen, sometimes it surprises me just how many different kinds of expertise you can find solely by attending this forum. After the project has gained enough inertia to keep progressing, facing small obstacles along the way and without a catastrophic show-stopper ending the game, it's the best we finish the thing we started. Even if you would take a refund at this point, earlier you were there helping this get off the ground, for which you get good karma but unfortunately not a Pandora. The completion of the project is at this point more certain than ever before, so I wouldn't consider canceling as big a sin as, say, before setting the case order, because the investment (which is getting closer and closer to earning to be called a purchase) would be quickly replaced given the positive publicity from the finished cases. It's not something to throw a parade for either, and the personal frustration definitely doesn't justify attacking the foundations of the project (which have been somewhat fragile at times).

I was one of the fools, then again I joined in very late (late June/early July '09). It was around the time when Craig said it would be complete in about a month or two, and of course I thought that must be a reasonable guess. I educated myself a little on the history of the project to learn where it was presently, and learned a bit more about the structure of the community (specifically the most core parts of it). I would normally feel this a reckless thing to advertise, but at that point I considered my purchase a risk investment. These people want to make this happen, I want them to make it happen, we depend on each other, so if the ship sinks it would sink with their time and money and my money on it. I think that's just one instance where the "community" part of the project manifests. I do get some satisfaction from the thought that I'm funding such a great project that started with just a couple of guys talking "There should be something like this", taking input from a large community to help in defining "this", and then started building it.

No, I don't want a tap on the back, I'm in with a couple hundred euros that I was able to afford getting rid of at the time of purchase. It's peanuts compared to the total cost of mass production. I want people to also consider this difficult journey from the developers' perspective, as that often gets neglected in the heat of personal frustration accumulating after each disappointment that we always deal with from our rather narrow perspective of "You got my money, so are we there yet?".

 

[rmm2131]

i think accountability is something where you actually do something wrong yourself and hold yourself accountable for what happened and the aftermath.

in this situation i think the difficulty has been that we cannot blame the companies that let the project down and only the middleman. can we hold the team accountable for the banks flipping out? for the chinese company taking way longer than expected? for all the first nubs company going bust and leaving debts behind that we had to pay over again? no, all that happens is that we beg for news on all those things and plead for estimates and we get them and then when a company lets us down, they then pass the information down and the estimate has to move. we are always working with best estimates relative to the knowledge at the time.

so basically... are you suggesting people be accountable for what? passing on information? inaccurate guesses? simple hope?

c'mon...

Again, no one is disputing that outside parties were responsible for those delays.

Accountability is the quality or state of being accountable; especially : an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or to account for one's actions. Yes, the interaction between buyers and sellers are actions even if they are verbal estimates of merchandise delivery times.

Well, I wasn't suggesting but I've seen people suggest that customers were wrong to pick the Pandora if they didn't know there would be "some delays" in such a project (running a year and a half over on a two month estimate is pushing that argument somewhat into the absurd though), but... I think OpenPandora should be held to at least as high a level of accountancy as the end users, don't you? If customers are responsible for the choices they make, OpenPandora should be responsible for their choices too. Or are we all just irresponsible?

I agree entirely with that. The reality is presently as of TODAY, for many previously answered reasons, only one party received something of value. That of course will be remedied in a matter of weeks. I hope it will anyways.

I want people to also consider this difficult journey from the developers' perspective, as that often gets neglected in the heat of personal frustration accumulating after each disappointment that we always deal with from our rather narrow perspective of "You got my money, so are we there yet?".

Most companies would be ecstatic to have a customer that gives them money and will wait the indefinable "as long as it takes" amount of time for it. The top executives of those companies would rename their first borns after you for being so loyal.


Anyways, back on topic: the Pandora is the greatest handheld we've never used.

 

[craigix]

I've got a Porsche. Its *NOT* an automatic!

It's!

(sorry)

 

[rmm2131]

I've got a Porsche. Its *NOT* an automatic!

It's!

(sorry)

Lucky!

 

[Monk]

Err, "accountancy"? I'm pretty sure I MEANT "accountability" there. So, that would be a stupid mistake of mine, then

Not entirely unlike getting involved in these conversations! :lol

 

[Monk]

Mostly, I refer the honorable gentleman to the answers given previously, to the point of making those who read my notes nausiated. However,

The customers' role in this is different to the usual setting as we funded this project, and that requires a certain degree of commitment.

Why does it REQUIRE any more commitment from the customer than is put in black and white? An offer of goods is made, a tentative delivery estiamte of within the next two months at most is given, and money changes hands. I'm not a 2009 joinee (or a 2010 one), and I paid up with every intention of sticking the course AND of having my Pandora Christmas 08 (or probably more likely January/February - you know how these things go). I don't know what my join date here is (and won't until this post has been psoted and I can see my info on-screen), but my preferred role is "lurker", and one I managed for some time before joining in to post back, as it were. However, I don't feel there is any "requirement" for me or any other customer to be anything like as committed as I have been - that's a personal choice, there's not a hint of it in the sales order or anything like that.

What if everyone starts pulling out their money halfway the process and the OP team is left alone with massive pre-paid orders and components with the money already scattered around the world and transformed into half-complete parts.

Then the OP team are up shit creek without a paddle. They're taking a big risk. I believe their insurance supposedly covers the customers, and if that's true then only the OP team are taking the risk. I don't envy it them, but to be blunter than I ever intended in one of MY missives, it IS their risk - and if the damn things sells gangbusters like the device we're promised OUGHT to, then it's they that will reap the financial rewards. That's how it works - the people who take the risks get the rewards if it works out, and the penalties if it doesn't. It OUGHT to work out. If they lose their customers for whatever reason then, well, they lost their customers and their gamble. That would be bad, but there it is. No-one wins. That happens, sometimes.

That's distinctly clearer-cut than I'd generally hoped to phrase things, but I feel the need for knife-sharp accuracy in the face of this rather wooly "we owe it to them" type of attitude. We don't owe them anything - they owe us. Literally. Having the INTENTION of wanting to help them, or of wanting the project to succeed, or (and so on) is a different matter, and I think it's important from OPs POV that we're "on side" and I feel everyone should want them to succeed. But it's not our business to keep them afloat regardless of much much they get wrong, or to leave our money with them until they don't need it any more. That would be ludicrous.

The completion of the project is at this point more certain than ever before, so I wouldn't consider canceling as big a sin as, say, before setting the case order, because the investment (which is getting closer and closer to earning to be called a purchase) would be quickly replaced given the positive publicity from the finished cases.

OpenPandora have never called it an investment, nor us investors, that I am aware of. They have called it a purchase, from day one. It's already a purchase. I agree there are ways to use the term "investment" accurately, but as an alternative to a purchase isn't one of those ways for this project. That's using the term in a way which winds up one of our member no end, last time I saw him post on the topic, because it's simply not accurate.

To even suggest calling getting a refund at ANY stage a sin has me floored. My mouth has hit the floor. It's not a pretty picture, but you have completely stunned me. That is just so outrageous I don't even have a comeback for it

It was around the time when Craig said it would be complete in about a month or two

That doesn't actually narrow the field down very much, if at all