On 06/04/2011 10:21 AM, Warp wrote:
> Invisible<voi### [at] devnull>  wrote:
>> What the user manual says:
>
>    The user manual of what?

Digital TV recorder.

>> Another thing. Technically you don't need to use Linux. The device
>> supports FAT16 and FAT32 as well. But apparently none of those go up to
>> the size necessary to make expansion worth the effort. Only ext3 seems
>> to support really big filesystems.
>
>    FAT32 has a file size limit of 2GB. (Well, technically speaking the hard
> limit is 4GB, but if you exceed 2GB the system might start behaving in odd
> ways with it. At least Windows does.)

I ran the "create partition" wizard a couple of times. If the partition 
you tell it to create is larger than a certain size, FAT16 and/or FAT32 
don't show up as options. But that size wasn't 4GB. I'm fairly sure it 
was willing to let me format 100GB as FAT32. (Or was it 10GB? I don't 
remember.) But it wouldn't format the whole 2TB. And if you've paid for 
a 2TB drive, you wanna use it all.

(Maybe you could do multiple partitions, but I'm not sure how the device 
would react. Besides, AFAIK ext3 is journalled, which FAT isn't, so 
that's a worth while advantage right there. Especially for a device 
which is likely to be shut down improperly!)

>    If what you are recoding is MPEG-2 or something like that, 2GB could hold
> something like 30-60 minutes of video. I suppose that's not enough for some
> applications (such as recording an entire feature length movie).

More like recording an entire series of a dozen different programs.

They already filled a 320GB drive, which I thought would take forever, 
but apparently only took a few months...

>    The system not supporting formatting the external USB drive is just lazy,
> though. Almost seems like they added the support just as an afterthought,
> without investing much time on it.

Indeed. Especially when there *is* an option to format the internal drive.

Ditto for being able to copy multiple files, but not copy folders. 
That's just lame.

>> 2. When you copy a file, it gives you a progress bar. When you copy
>> multiple files, it gives you a progress bar FOR THE CURRENT FILE. It
>> provides no indication whatsoever of overall progress. And when a large
>> copy operation takes several hours, that's a problem.
>
>    Not as bad as that one application where the developer thought the
> progress bar is kind of like the hour glass icon, making it fill then
> unfill, repeat.

Oh yeah, WTF is up with that? A progress bar is supposed to SHOW 
PROGRESS. Far too many items of software these days don't bother to 
compute actual progress, and just show you an indicator to make it clear 
that progress is still happening (i.e., it hasn't locked up). That's a 
useful thing to know, but it's much less useful than knowing how far 
it's got.

On the other hand, there are applications that give time estimates, and 
get them horrifyingly wrong: http://xkcd.com/612/

If instead of estimating how much *time* is remaining, you just tell me 
how much *work* there is to do and how much is done, I could do the 
estimating myself - and probably far more accurately than you.

Which brings us to those applications where progress rapidly fills from 
0% to 99%, and then it sits there for 2 hours doing the last 1%...

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