About 2.5 years ago, I was pulled onto a cable television platform for some companies we purchased so that I could work some magic and get things manageable. Over the years, I've seen many different interfaces for managing devices. CLI, web applications, custom applications, and Java applications of varying degrees. I have a wide range of experience for comparison.
I've found some of the most egregious user interfaces for cable platform devices. Some things are just horrendous.
Specific example: There's a guide server that we use for about 9 different markets. If a change is made and you need to push out the modified files to each market. (The GUI is simply ftp'ing files to a different device.) When you click the button in the GUI, it blocks and prevents you from sending anything to another market for 20 minutes. It is insane! Granted it is a Windoze "server", but blocking for 20 minutes because a ftp transfer is in progress is just crazy. I thought I'd prod their support and ask if there was any mechanism where one could tell the GUI to push files to all markets instead of waiting 20 minutes, then moving to the next market. Seems like it'd be a desirable feature instead of making a user wait 180 minutes for 9 markets to complete updates. I was not surprised with the response. Their support indicated there was no such thing within the GUI or externally of the GUI.
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