My Netgear EVA2000 went into strange mode 1 day after being hooked to Internet

Update:  I was finally successful in replacing my old disabled by the corporation media box... Raspberry Pi using the Raspbmc distribution:  http://mystry-geek.blogspot.com/2013/05/finally-got-raspberry-pi-to-try-out.html

Let me know if you owned a netgear product that might have also been deactivated in this way.

So, I finally hooked my Netgear EVA2000 multimedia internet device up to the internet after having owned it for a couple of years and the day after I hooked it up, it crapped itself.  Evidently they phone home when they are connected to the Internet, and it got some sort of message from home to crap itself.

 I searched on the Internet and a lot of people have had this same problem with no  resolution from Netgear.  So I decided to give Netgear support a shot.  Wish me luck.


Online technical submission: view case
Case #:      [redacted]
Problem:      Functionality
Cause:      ReadyNAS - Streaming Media
Status:      Open
Notes:     
10/31/2012 3:08:00 PM
I have had [ my netgear eva2000 ] hooked to my tv for about 2 years now and it has worked flawlessly to play movies off a hard drive and to play movies from a media server through the internet without any issues.

I finally got an internet connection and hooked the device to the internet so I could get access to the other functions. The day after it had access to the internet it updated the firmware without asking me and all the functions on the device no longer works. The main menu comes up as: My Collection Movies on Demand Internet video Settings And only settings works, clicking on the others just moves the cursor down to settings. There used to be a youtube option and it is now gone. Settings works fine, but having a little box hooked to my TV that _only_ allows me to change its settings is sort of useless.

A soft reset and a hard reset does nothing to resolve the issue.  [evidently they call it a soft restore and a full restore]

The only way I can get to my local media server now is to goto Settings->Eject USB disk, wait a few seconds, plug the drive back in, wait a minute or two, hit OK to browse the disk when that finally comes up. This window goes away quickly, so I am forced to stand there like an idiot for a couple of minutes waiting for this screen, or I have to start the process all over again. I am finally sitting at the screen where I can select my hard drive, if I press back at this point I can get access to the menu that my collections should take me to.

To sum it all up, it appears that connecting to the internet allowed my box to phone home looking for an update and it was ordered into this mode by your company. Needless to say, I am upset that you deliberately broke a perfectly functional unit, with what I can only assume is a desire to sell me a newer product. If you cannot fix my eva2000 back to a working state, or provide me with a working replacement unit, I will never purchase any product from your company again. I will instruct all my friends and family to not buy your products. On every internet forum that discusses your products I will tell my story about how it appears that you deliberately crippled my device at end of life in order to force me to purchase a newer product. Good day.

10/31/2012 8:23:00 PM
From Expert ID: [redacted]

Case ID: [redacted]

Dear Mr.Rogers,

Thank you for choosing NETGEAR. My name is Rajesh, and I will be your support expert today.

I understand that you are experiencing a problem with EVA2000. We apologize for this inconvenience. Because we are doing this online, it might require a few email exchanges to resolve the issue. Rest assured that we will do our best to resolve your case quickly.

Use this option to restore factory defaults.

1. Select Restore Factory Defaults on the Settings screen.
2. You can select one of the following:

a. Soft Restore – Resets the factory defaults, removes your user account, but preserves all
downloaded movies (both purchased and rented).
b. Full Restore – Resets the factory defaults, removes your user account, and all
downloaded movies (both purchased and rented).

Warning: Because the Full Restore removes your user account and BOTH rented and purchased movies, NETGEAR recommends that you use the Soft Restore option for most purposes.

3. Click the Select ok button to confirm your selection.
DE Live returns you to the Settings screen.

Followed by the following procedure please hard reset by holding the power button for 8 seconds

Please contact us again if you require further assistance.

Please do visit http://support.netgear.com for any technical queries regarding NETGEAR products.

A notice will automatically be sent to your email address when we have responded to your inquiry. Please DO NOT REPLY to that email. Instead, to add additional information to your case, click No to the question "Was your problem resolved with the information provided by the NETGEAR representative above?"

If you click YES, your case will be closed and a separate email containing a survey link will be sent so you can share with us your customer support experience.

Thanks again for choosing NETGEAR. Have a great day!

Sincerely,
Rajesh.

Technical Support
NETGEAR, Inc.
http://my.netgear.com

***NOTE: Your case will autoclose after 7 days of inactivity.***

Did you know that NETGEAR provides support for all your home networking devices and PCs? We can provide a one-stop solution - no need to call multiple vendors* for support. If you would like to learn more about the NETGEAR GearHead services, go to http://kbserver.netgear.com/kb_web_files/gearhead/home.html.

31 Oct 2012 06:51pm

I replied that I tried the above and it did not fix my problem, asked about a firmware update, and was given this response:

Your request has now been sent to a support representative


So there is still hope.   Just in case I am looking at making a little xbmc box to hook to my TV, With just a handful of  plugins it would be far more capable than the little netgear device.  I really liked how convenient and low powered that little device was though, so it it still disappointing that

--

Got a reply back after a few hours, they admit it is a defective product.

My name is Rajesh, and I am following up on your Support case.

After reviewing the information you provided, I have a better understanding of your issue and believe I can resolve this for you. Please follow the steps below:

Regarding your concern since this product is the end life product we will not be getting updates anymore and we are sorry to inform you that the product is defective so We apologize for this inconvenience caused.

Sorry to inform you that the product is out of hardware warranty, hence it is not possible for us to replace the product. Please find the warranty information below.

Hardware: Dec 22, 2011 (-314)
Software: Mar 22, 2011 (-589)
Power Supply: Dec 22, 2011 (-314)
Accessories: Dec 22, 2011 (-314)

We apologize for the inconvenience caused.

 --

I am accusing them of placing a backdoor into a computer system that allowed them to remotely deactivate the machine once it hit end of life.

Let me know if you owned a netgear product that might have also been deactivated in this way.

--

Day 3, still just being politely told to piss up a rope.  They are not letting me talk to any manager or tier II support, despite numerous requests from me.

--

I ordered a 3D printer

A Replicator 2 from Makerbot. It is sturdily built and is ready to print in less than an hour after being taken out of the box. The only downside is that it is more expensive and more of a "prosumer" level printer than the others. It also uses a renewable plastic called PLA which has characteristics different than that of the ABS plastics.

Looking at the less expensive printers, I was not impressed by their stability and repeatable accuracy. And the time it took to begin getting reliable prints was too high for my needs. 

My plan is to learn how to make computer models, learn how to do 3d scanning of real items, and then print those models precisely on the printer.  And to have that mastered in about 6 months.  I will also be printing parts out from thingiverse.com.

 I won't get the printer for a month or two.  Waiting is tough.

Using Orange to generate association rules for a dataset.

by James M. Rogers on Friday, October 26, 2012 at 3:59am ·

MIS 420 Data Warehousing
26 Oct 2012

Everything I know about association knowledge mining in Orange comes from this web page: http://orange.biolab.si/doc/ofb/assoc.htm. Let's discuss the incoming data first, then talk about how the data is processed into rules, and finally discuss what we can do with the rules once we have them. 


In the examples we used the datafile imports-85.tab. If you click on that link you will see the data file is set up in a tabular format, with tabs between each attribute or field and a newline between each data tuple or record. Once the data is set up in the tabular format you can bring the data into the program to be processed:

import Orange  
data = Orange.data.Table("imports-85.tab")  

The data must not be continuous in a column. If it is, then you have to categorize the column. You can use the following command to convert continuous fields into discrete sets of three equally populated intervals:

data = orange.Preprocessor_discretize(data, method=orange.EquiNDiscretization(numberOfIntervals=3))

To select a sub set of the data, such as the first ten columns you can specify a range like so:

data = data.select(range(10))

At this point you can convert the data into a set of rules and calculate the confidence, support and lift of every rule using orange.AssociationRulesInducer like so:

rules = orange.AssociationRulesInducer(data, support=0.78)

The data is just the set of data we have imported, maybe converted to discrete values, and maybe sub-selected a range of values. The support is the minimum support we are going to accept as a rule. If the support is equal to or greater than this support value, the rule is dropped. This conversion is based on the APRIORI algorithm from Agrawal et al.'s Fast discovery of association rules, a chapter in Advances in knowledge discovery and data mining published in 1996. This algorithm is optimized to work on the tabular format we imported. Class variables are treated like attributes by this function.

Now that we have the rules in the list named rule we can now work with the list just like any other python list. The orngAssoc module is already written to work with the rules and includes two functions to conveniently work with the rule set directly, from http://orange.biolab.si/doc/modules/orngAssoc.htm:

printRules(rules, ms = []) Prints out the rules. If ms is left empty, only the rules are printed. If ms contains rules' attributes, e.g. ["support", "confidence"], these are printed out as well.

sort(rules, ms = ["support"]) Sorts the rules according to the given criteria. The default key is "support"; you can list multiple keys.

You can also select() parts of the rule list, del() rules, append() rules.

Once you have the rules you can then filter on confidence and lift using the python lambda function, which is an way to do an unnamed function:

conf = 0.8; lift = 1.1
print "\nRules with support>%5.3f and lift>%5.3f" % (conf, lift)
rulesC=rules.filter(lambda x: x.confidence>conf and x.lift>lift)

rulesC now contains only the rules with confidence above 0.8 and lift above 1.1. Then you can sort by confidence and print out the confidence, support, lift and the rule:

orngAssoc.sort(rulesC, ['confidence'])
orngAssoc.printRules(rulesC, ['confidence','support','lift'])

These orange functions make generating association rules from tabular data almost trivially easy. You can import the data, convert continuous columns to discrete columns, and finally generate rules with confidence, support and lift. Once the rules are generated it is easy to sort, filter, and select subsets of the data and then print out the results you require.