From what I read in the past three months,
Escient Media Servers or
Content Streaming Products over a few years old, tend to die from two types of causes. The first is power supply problems, as the caps age and fail; and hard drive problems, as hard drives die. Often a power supply problem will cause the hard drive to become corrupted, so these problems are inter-related. It seems there is some variation, early E-40 units for example had 60 Watt power supplies, while it appears that later E-40 units have 75 Watt Power Supplies, I know this since I have two E-40's with the later 75 Watt Power Supplies.
It also appears that each hard drive in an Escient E-40 or E2-40, E-80, E2-80, E-120, E2-120, E-160, E2-160, E-400, or E2-400
, or any other
Fireball Server,
DVD Manager, or any of the forty or so
Escient Media Server or
Content Streaming Products that use, other Servers, Computers, or Computer Networks, or an internal hard drive, is mated to a particular imbedded into the firmware Motherboard Number, or CPU Serial Number, and/or possibly a MAC Address Number, or both, or maybe all three. Therefore, a given
Escient Motherboard and CPU when booting up from a hard drive, will apparently only recognizes its' "
own numbers" when booting the hard drive. This lack of usability is tied to the keyed or proprietary operating system, which being of a proprietary nature, uses these secret "keys" something that was not revealed in
ANY of the owners manuals of any
Escient products. Apparently the owners of
Escient found this out and their lawyers forced then to suspend the production of these various forty models of
Escient boxes - that violate Federal Laws, but there are still tens of thousands of these
Escient Media Servers, DVD Boxes, and Fireball Content Streaming Boxes "
out there"...
Given the existence of many different "
Escient Golden CD's" which Escient won't give out to owners of various
Escient products, this makes these boxes expensive doorstops when either the power supply or the hard drive fails. If true, and it appears to be true, this prevents inserting an off-the-shelf hard drive into an
Escient Media Server or
Content Streaming Product from working. So, what this means is that when the original power supply or the hard drive fails (and sooner or later all non SSD hard drives with moving parts will fail!) the
Escient won't boot from a replacement hard drive, unless that hard drive was a
bit-for-bit clone of the original hard drive that came installed in that
Escient box, with the particular Motherboard Number, or CPU Number, and/or possibly a MAC Address Number imbedded into the operating system. Since
NO Escient Manual warns you of this, the nature of this protection scheme, is all but unknown to consumers! Since none of the manuals on the
Escient web site tells you any of that for your $2,000, or $3,000, or $20,000 investment in an
Escient System, that it becomes junk after a few years, this violates Federal Law - specifically the "
implied concept of usability" of the product.
This appears to violate Federal Law! It may surely violate the concept of "
implied usability" of products - as found in Federal law. Specifically,
The Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act (P.L. 93-637) a federal law, (15 U.S.C. § 2301 (
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/15/2301.html )
et seq.), enacted in 1975, which is the federal statute that governs warranties on consumer products. Federal Law over-rides any stated or implied warranty restrictions and this Act states what may and may not be done by companies. This form of a
secret key, and
proprietary obsolescence and
planned obsolescence by
Escient may violate Federal Law in several ways as we, as consumers may therefore be able to sue
Escient to obtain the proper "Golden CD" to make our machines run, as well as for damages, on a per incident, and with per-day damages.
Anyone who has a "dead"
Escient due to hard drive failure who doesn't wish to spend half a thousand dollars to get your "
inherent usability" back, should join me as I'm considering a Class Action Federal Lawsuit.
-Steven
