What the user manual says:

"To expend the available recording capacity, simply purchase an external 
USB harddrive or flash drive and connect it to the USB socket at the 
back of the device."

What you actually have to do:

1. Purchase a USB HD.
2. Connect it to a computer running Linux.
3. Create a partition.
4. Format it with ext3.
5. Create at least one empty folder.
6. Connect it to the device.

Note, in particular, that if you do not possess a computer, then you 
*cannot* expend the recording capacity of your device. Just back up and 
think about that for a moment. We're talking about a set-top box for a 
TV. You plug it into a power source, a TV and an aerial, and it lets you 
watch digital TV. It also lets you record and play back TV. Now why IN 
THE NAME OF GOD should you need to possess a computer just to upgrade 
the storage capacity?

Seriously. You should be able to just plug in a HD and the device itself 
should format it. Why the hell do you need a computer to do that?

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.

(Notice that's ext3. The device does not support ext2 or ext4. Only 
ext3. Please get it right when formatting!)

Also, even if you format the drive, the set-top box still acts as if 
it's read-only until you create at least one empty folder. At that 
point, suddenly it works just fine. WTF?

Don't even get me started on the infelicities of *using* the external 
storage.

1. Copying a file to the external HD allows you to keep watching TV, but 
disables all controls. (E.g., you cannot change channel.) Mercifully 
there's a cancel button. But cancel is the only operation you can 
perform while the copy is in progress.

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.

3. You cannot copy folders, only files. To copy a folder, you must 
manually create the destination folder, open the source folder and 
destination folder, select-all and copy. If a folder contains folders, 
you must select-all and manually unselect any folders.

Still, what do you expect for several hundred pounds worth of hardware? 
Oh, wait...

Post a reply to this message

Le 04/04/2011 11:34, Invisible a écrit :
> 
> Still, what do you expect for several hundred pounds worth of hardware?
> Oh, wait...

Benefits for the shareholders, what else ?

Post a reply to this message

>> Still, what do you expect for several hundred pounds worth of hardware?
>> Oh, wait...
>
> Benefits for the shareholders, what else ?

Well, yeah. On the other hand, there are laws and things that require 
that if you pay money for something, it actually *works*. Unfortunately 
these laws do /not/ require that it works *well*...

The market theory is that if a device doesn't work very well, everybody 
will buy a competing product instead. Except that, as far as I can tell, 
almost all of these devices tend to be equally inept.

Post a reply to this message

> The market theory is that if a device doesn't work very well, everybody
> will buy a competing product instead. Except that, as far as I can tell,
> almost all of these devices tend to be equally inept.

Maybe it wasn't possible to make a better one for that price and still 
make a profit?

Post a reply to this message

On 04/04/2011 01:43 PM, scott wrote:
>> The market theory is that if a device doesn't work very well, everybody
>> will buy a competing product instead. Except that, as far as I can tell,
>> almost all of these devices tend to be equally inept.
>
> Maybe it wasn't possible to make a better one for that price and still
> make a profit?

How hard would it be to add 3 lines of code to display the number of 
files still to be copied? I mean, maybe it would actually be difficult 
to add a second progress bar, I don't know, but I can't imagine adding a 
little bit of text could be that hard.

There's already an option to reformat the internal HD. So why isn't 
there one to format an external one? The necessary code obviously exists 
already, so...?

Alternatively, if you actually need a PC, why not document this fact 
correctly? If the drive has to have at least one empty folder on it, 
document that too! (Weirdly, you can create and delete folders from the 
device. You just can't until at least one empty folder exists, WTF?)

We're talking about tiny little changes that would have made a big 
difference to how easy to use the product would have been. OK, making it 
so that you can still change channel while a file copy is in progress 
*might* actually be difficult. Most of the other stuff would have been 
trivial.

Post a reply to this message

On 4/4/2011 7:25, Invisible wrote:
> We're talking about tiny little changes that would have made a big
> difference to how easy to use the product would have been.

It's all about priorities and deadlines.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

Post a reply to this message

On 4/4/2011 2:34 AM, Invisible wrote:
> 3. You cannot copy folders, only files. To copy a folder, you must
> manually create the destination folder, open the source folder and
> destination folder, select-all and copy. If a folder contains folders,
> you must select-all and manually unselect any folders.
>
Sounds like Yahoo Small Business' "file manager". Stupid thing lets you 
move/copy files up/down a level in the tree, but not "across", to 
entirely other locations. And, you can't do shit with folders.

I seriously wonder, at times, what people are thinking when they do 
stupid shit like this, then claim it "helps" you do anything. Luckily, 
in my case, I was able to activate FTP, then make changes on my own 
system. Maybe, in your case, you just boot a completely different OS, 
make the changes/copies, then... lol

Post a reply to this message

On 04/04/2011 05:06 PM, Darren New wrote:
> On 4/4/2011 7:25, Invisible wrote:
>> We're talking about tiny little changes that would have made a big
>> difference to how easy to use the product would have been.
>
> It's all about priorities and deadlines.

Indeed. And as usual, customer satisfaction is not a priority.

Post a reply to this message

> How hard would it be to add 3 lines of code to display the number of
> files still to be copied? I mean, maybe it would actually be difficult
> to add a second progress bar, I don't know, but I can't imagine adding a
> little bit of text could be that hard.
>
> There's already an option to reformat the internal HD. So why isn't
> there one to format an external one? The necessary code obviously exists
> already, so...?
>
> We're talking about tiny little changes that would have made a big
> difference to how easy to use the product would have been. OK, making it
> so that you can still change channel while a file copy is in progress
> *might* actually be difficult. Most of the other stuff would have been
> trivial.

You'll probably find a lot of the code is just copied from an earlier 
generation product (where HDs were much smaller), and the external drive 
thing was a last minute add-on.  To go through a thorough a test, code 
and test cycle would probably end up way more expensive than any 
additional profits they could make over just shipping it "as-is" with 
minimum modifications ("how can we make huge external drives work as 
quickly as possible").

Don't forget these type of products sell for 12 months or so until the 
next better one comes along, in a lot of cases it's much more profitable 
to sell your product NOW with a few bugs rather than wait some time to 
iron them out.  And in the end a company that makes amazing products but 
no profit will not last very long.

Post a reply to this message

> You'll probably find a lot of the code is just copied from an earlier
> generation product (where HDs were much smaller), and the external drive
> thing was a last minute add-on.

It still bemuses me that they could go to all the trouble of writing a 
huge, complex USB driver, and yet not bother to add 3 lines of code to 
display a file count.

> Don't forget these type of products sell for 12 months or so until the
> next better one comes along

As the manufacturer, this is probably true. As the consumer, we've 
bought this thing and we're probably going to use it for at least 10 
years, if not longer. So the minor glitches that the manufacturer didn't 
bother to iron out in their rush to market are extremely annoying, and 
they're going to annoy us for the next 10 years.

> in a lot of cases it's much more profitable
> to sell your product NOW with a few bugs rather than wait some time to
> iron them out.

Reminds me of my PC motherboard. Splashed across the [very shiny] box is 
something about RAID support and dual-BIOS support. You know what? The 
product in the box doesn't actually possess either of these features. 
(!!) But about a year later, Gigabyte released a BIOS update that makes 
these features work as advertised.

(I especially love that you have to bypass the dual-BIOS in order to 
make the dual-BIOS work...)

> And in the end a company that makes amazing products but
> no profit will not last very long.

I would pay serious money to obtain hardware and software which isn't 
infuriatingly awkward to use. But unfortunately, that doesn't appear to 
be an option. Nobody makes it.

What, fundamentally, can we do about this? How can we make it 
unprofitable to produce poor quality products?

Post a reply to this message

> It still bemuses me that they could go to all the trouble of writing a
> huge, complex USB driver,

I doubt they wrote their own USB driver from scratch.

> As the manufacturer, this is probably true. As the consumer, we've
> bought this thing and we're probably going to use it for at least 10
> years, if not longer. So the minor glitches that the manufacturer didn't
> bother to iron out in their rush to market are extremely annoying, and
> they're going to annoy us for the next 10 years.

They've already got your $$$s though :-)

> What, fundamentally, can we do about this? How can we make it
> unprofitable to produce poor quality products?

You need to stop the demand for cheap consumer goods - good luck with 
that ;-)

Alternatively you could make it illegal to sell anything that hasn't 
scored a certain amount in some unbiased consumer testing, but you're 
likely to be pretty unpopular when the price of everything goes up.

Post a reply to this message

>> It still bemuses me that they could go to all the trouble of writing a
>> huge, complex USB driver,
>
> I doubt they wrote their own USB driver from scratch.

I doubt integrating whatever 3rd party code they bought into their own 
codebase was a five minute job.

>> the minor glitches that the manufacturer didn't
>> bother to iron out in their rush to market are extremely annoying, and
>> they're going to annoy us for the next 10 years.
>
> They've already got your $$$s though :-)

Indeed. And that seems to be all they care about.

(E.g., the user guide has a "go to this URL for support" printed in it. 
The URL is 404, and when you check out their support section, the model 
we bought isn't even listed. Not bad for a 4 month old product...)

>> What, fundamentally, can we do about this? How can we make it
>> unprofitable to produce poor quality products?
>
> You need to stop the demand for cheap consumer goods - good luck with
> that ;-)

If we paid £20 for this thing, I wouldn't mind it being a bit naff. But 
we didn't. It cost hundreds and hundreds of pounds. For that price, you 
damned well *expect* it to be good quality!

> Alternatively you could make it illegal to sell anything that hasn't
> scored a certain amount in some unbiased consumer testing, but you're
> likely to be pretty unpopular when the price of everything goes up.

Yeah, I'm guessing that's not going to work too well...

Post a reply to this message

> I doubt integrating whatever 3rd party code they bought into their own
> codebase was a five minute job.

I wonder what OS is it using?  Also they probably have some 3rd party to 
write the software anyway, so have no direct control over exactly how 
things are implemented internally, so long as it works.

> If we paid £20 for this thing, I wouldn't mind it being a bit naff. But
> we didn't. It cost hundreds and hundreds of pounds. For that price, you
> damned well *expect* it to be good quality!

Just change your expectations, then your problems are solved :-)

Post a reply to this message

On 05/04/2011 02:11 PM, scott wrote:
>> I doubt integrating whatever 3rd party code they bought into their own
>> codebase was a five minute job.
>
> I wonder what OS is it using?

It supports FAT16, FAT32 and EXT3. It does not support NTFS. Take a wild 
guess...

[Assuming that they're using a full off-the-shelf OS, and not a smaller 
piece of custom software.]

> Also they probably have some 3rd party to
> write the software anyway, so have no direct control over exactly how
> things are implemented internally, so long as it works.

If it's actually running a standard desktop OS, adding a USB driver is 
probably trivial. If it's a custom product, arranging for interrupt 
handlers to fire and so forth is probably not trivial at all, even if 
the handlers were written for you by somebody else.

>> If we paid £20 for this thing, I wouldn't mind it being a bit naff. But
>> we didn't. It cost hundreds and hundreds of pounds. For that price, you
>> damned well *expect* it to be good quality!
>
> Just change your expectations, then your problems are solved :-)

And people wonder why Britain is no longer great. :-P

Post a reply to this message

Invisible wrote:
> On 04/04/2011 01:43 PM, scott wrote:
>>> The market theory is that if a device doesn't work very well, everybody
>>> will buy a competing product instead. Except that, as far as I can tell,
>>> almost all of these devices tend to be equally inept.
>>
>> Maybe it wasn't possible to make a better one for that price and still
>> make a profit?
> 
> How hard would it be to add 3 lines of code to display the number of 
> files still to be copied? I mean, maybe it would actually be difficult 
> to add a second progress bar, I don't know, but I can't imagine adding a 
> little bit of text could be that hard.
> 
> There's already an option to reformat the internal HD. So why isn't 
> there one to format an external one? The necessary code obviously exists 
> already, so...?
> 
> Alternatively, if you actually need a PC, why not document this fact 
> correctly? If the drive has to have at least one empty folder on it, 
> document that too! (Weirdly, you can create and delete folders from the 
> device. You just can't until at least one empty folder exists, WTF?)
> 
> We're talking about tiny little changes that would have made a big 
> difference to how easy to use the product would have been. OK, making it 
> so that you can still change channel while a file copy is in progress 
> *might* actually be difficult. Most of the other stuff would have been 
> trivial.

It always seems to me that usability is the lowest possible priority of 
set top box hardware. I won't even go into how much I despise the 
software on our cable box. I'm rather busy when I get home. I expect 
that my favorite shows will be dutifully recorded by the box, stored, 
and the box will warn me if I'm running out of storage. It seems rather 
simple. Every week record show with title X. When new data comes in, add 
anything that matches my list to the schedule. If a show conflicts, the 
highest priority always wins. If a show is set to record both new and 
repeats, then record both new and repeats. How hard can it be? And yet 
... the functionality is so broken that if I don't babysit the device, 
it fails to record anything. I noticed my selection of shows was growing 
rather thin, so I looked at the future recordings. Nothing. I had to 
re-enter all of the series I had set to record. Now it records fine. My 
wife reminds me to check that our favorite show is being recorded, about 
30 minutes in (we were busy ... this is what a DVR is for...) No, it was 
not recording. The show is set to record new and repeat (because new 
doesn't always work) and is Priority 1 on the DVR's list. and it was not 
set to record. WTF... Oh, but it was recording something further down 
the list, and still had an open receiver for recording another show.

Oops... it looks like I just did.



-- 
~Mike

Post a reply to this message

Le 05/04/2011 15:21, Invisible a écrit :
> 
>>> If we paid £20 for this thing, I wouldn't mind it being a bit naff. But
>>> we didn't. It cost hundreds and hundreds of pounds. For that price, you
>>> damned well *expect* it to be good quality!

This is so 20th century...

>>
>> Just change your expectations, then your problems are solved :-)

Welcome to the 21th century!
Were the price is not fixed by how much it costs to produce, but how
much the target is ready and expecting to pay.

In this wonderful time, selling a set of identical items with different
price is just an opening.

A 2TB hard drive at 25$ : it must be crap.
At 100$ : it's cheap and ok.
At 130$ : it is a bit of margin for the seller.
At 200$ : it must be real good.
At 500$ : it's only for the pro.

It's also a sad time: the expected time life of any product is about the
one provided by the law. (and that might be short!)

> 
> And people wonder why Britain is no longer great. :-P

If Britain  was great, what about the United Kingdom ?
and the Common Wealth ?

-- 
Software is like dirt - it costs time and money to change it and move it
around.

Just because you can't see it, it doesn't weigh anything,
and you can't drill a hole in it and stick a rivet into it doesn't mean
it's free.

Post a reply to this message

On 05/04/2011 02:29 PM, Mike Raiford wrote:

> It always seems to me that usability is the lowest possible priority of
> set top box hardware. I won't even go into how much I despise the
> software on our cable box.
>
> Oops... it looks like I just did.

I think perhaps the problem is that

1. You cannot tell how good the software is until *after* you bought the 
device.

2. Once you bought the device, there is no come-back.

Before you buy, you have several competing products that you could 
select. The manufacturers do all they can to make you buy their product 
rather than somebody else's. This usually involves stuffing as many 
features as possible into the device for the lowest possible price, and 
then loudly shouting about all the features on the product packaging.

After you buy... the manufacturers have your money. They don't *care* 
what happens next. It is of no consequence to them. Needless to say, if 
you buy a set-top box and discover 4 months later that the functionality 
for using an external storage device sucks arse, there is nothing you 
can do about it. You cannot possibly take the device back and demand a 
refund [unless you can show that it is actually failing to operate as 
advertised, which you can't].

I think perhaps the way to remedy this is to make it possible to do 
something about poor quality products. Make it so that if the customer 
is not happy, it directly affects the manufacturer in some way. Damned 
if I know how though...

Post a reply to this message

On 05/04/2011 02:31 PM, Le_Forgeron wrote:

> Welcome to the 21th century!
> Were the price is not fixed by how much it costs to produce, but how
> much the target is ready and expecting to pay.

Well, the price of cotton has been determined that way for millennia. 
Then again, you can more or less tell what you're getting as soon as you 
see it...

> In this wonderful time, selling a set of identical items with different
> price is just an opening.
>
> A 2TB hard drive at 25$ : it must be crap.
> At 100$ : it's cheap and ok.
> At 130$ : it is a bit of margin for the seller.
> At 200$ : it must be real good.
> At 500$ : it's only for the pro.
>
> It's also a sad time: the expected time life of any product is about the
> one provided by the law. (and that might be short!)

I know people like HP and IBM like to charge 10x for the same harddrive. 
But they *claim* that it's because the device is engineered for greater 
fault-tolerance. (E.g., take a 2TB drive, reconfigure the firmware so it 
shows up as 1TB, but up to 50% of the sectors can go bad before it stops 
working.)

I have absolutely no idea whether these "server-grade" drives really 
*are* more reliable, or whether it's just a sucker tax.

Post a reply to this message

Am 05.04.2011 16:09, schrieb Invisible:

> I have absolutely no idea whether these "server-grade" drives really
> *are* more reliable, or whether it's just a sucker tax.

Server drives are designed to endure continuous use.

Desktop drives are designed to endure lots of power cycles.

The latter may or may not be easier, but there happens to be a high 
correlation between usage profile and budget.

Post a reply to this message

> I think perhaps the way to remedy this is to make it possible to do
> something about poor quality products. Make it so that if the customer
> is not happy, it directly affects the manufacturer in some way. Damned
> if I know how though...

Write a review on amazon.

Post a reply to this message

On 05/04/2011 04:19 PM, scott wrote:
>> I think perhaps the way to remedy this is to make it possible to do
>> something about poor quality products. Make it so that if the customer
>> is not happy, it directly affects the manufacturer in some way. Damned
>> if I know how though...
>
> Write a review on amazon.

How does that help?

Post a reply to this message

> How does that help?

You don't read reviews before buying something?

Post a reply to this message

On 4/5/2011 7:41, clipka wrote:
> Am 05.04.2011 16:09, schrieb Invisible:
>
>> I have absolutely no idea whether these "server-grade" drives really
>> *are* more reliable, or whether it's just a sucker tax.
>
> Server drives are designed to endure continuous use.
>
> Desktop drives are designed to endure lots of power cycles.

The drives in a NAS are exactly the same as what you'd buy off the shelf in 
an electronics store.

Google has a whitepaper telling about the drive reliability based on 
statistics from half a million disk drives. There's little correlation 
between "category" and reliability.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

Post a reply to this message

On 4/5/2011 3:14, Invisible wrote:
> I would pay serious money to obtain hardware and software which isn't
> infuriatingly awkward to use. But unfortunately, that doesn't appear to be
> an option. Nobody makes it.

I have found that is just plain how it works in video. I'm not sure why. I 
haven't been able to find a capture card that will process HD coming off a 
TV cable, in spite of every TV having this capability. The few capture cards 
that *seem* to have this capability require you to use their custom playback 
software that only runs on the same machine where you have the card plugged 
in, which kind of defeats the purpose of capturing the stuff in the first place.

Find a set-top box that'll play files *and* record TV.

Don't even get me started on the PS3 usability failures. :-)

Every day I notice 101 minor things where I say "with a little thought (or, 
if they didn't make the compromise this way) it would have been much less 
annoying."

 > I doubt integrating whatever 3rd party code they bought into their own 
codebase was a five minute job.

You'd be surprised.

 > What, fundamentally, can we do about this?

Shop someplace like Amazon where people give reviews that the company 
doesn't get to vet.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

Post a reply to this message

On 05/04/2011 04:50 PM, scott wrote:
>> How does that help?
>
> You don't read reviews before buying something?

No. But generally I don't buy hardware from Amazon anyway...

(Usually I only buy music from Amazon. And then only when I already know 
what I'm trying to buy, so the reviews are irrelevant.)

 From what I've seen, the reviews for just about *everything* are 
unwaiveringly positive.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

Post a reply to this message

On Tue, 05 Apr 2011 19:54:23 +0100, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

> On 05/04/2011 04:50 PM, scott wrote:
>>> How does that help?
>>
>> You don't read reviews before buying something?
> 
> No. But generally I don't buy hardware from Amazon anyway...
> 
> (Usually I only buy music from Amazon. And then only when I already know
> what I'm trying to buy, so the reviews are irrelevant.)
> 
>  From what I've seen, the reviews for just about *everything* are
> unwaiveringly positive.

That's not been my experience.  But more to the point, if you had a 
problem and you don't write a review, you're not helping the next buyer 
make an informed decision.

Jim

Post a reply to this message

On 4/5/2011 11:54, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>  From what I've seen, the reviews for just about *everything* are
> unwaiveringly positive.

Maybe for music...

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

Post a reply to this message

On 05/04/2011 8:16 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> That's not been my experience.  But more to the point, if you had a
> problem and you don't write a review, you're not helping the next buyer
> make an informed decision.

I agree.

-- 
Regards
     Stephen

Post a reply to this message

On 05/04/2011 06:07 PM, Darren New wrote:
> On 4/5/2011 7:41, clipka wrote:
>> Am 05.04.2011 16:09, schrieb Invisible:
>>
>>> I have absolutely no idea whether these "server-grade" drives really
>>> *are* more reliable, or whether it's just a sucker tax.
>>
>> Server drives are designed to endure continuous use.
>>
>> Desktop drives are designed to endure lots of power cycles.
>
> The drives in a NAS are exactly the same as what you'd buy off the shelf
> in an electronics store.
>
> Google has a whitepaper telling about the drive reliability based on
> statistics from half a million disk drives. There's little correlation
> between "category" and reliability.

So it *is* a sucker tax then.

Post a reply to this message

On 05/04/2011 08:33 PM, Stephen wrote:
> On 05/04/2011 8:16 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> That's not been my experience. But more to the point, if you had a
>> problem and you don't write a review, you're not helping the next buyer
>> make an informed decision.
>
> I agree.

Well, perhaps. Perhaps if I actually bought hardware from Amazon instead 
of the 10^17 other suppliers, and for every single one I wrote a long 
description of why it sucks, the manufacturers might lose 0.02% of their 
sales, and a tiny few people would be spared buying one sucky product 
only to buy another equally sucky product. I doubt this is going to 
bring quality back to the marketplace.

Post a reply to this message

>> You don't read reviews before buying something?
>
> No. But generally I don't buy hardware from Amazon anyway...

You don't need to buy it from amazon, but generally enough people have 
that there will be a good range of reviews from people using it in 
different ways.  After reading a couple of pages of comments it usually 
becomes quite obvious if there are problems with the features you are 
interested in.

Also check the "What people buy after looking at this page" section, it 
seems to me like bad reviews certainly affect what people buy.

Is the recorder you have listed on amazon?  If it is then I'd definitely 
leave a review highlighting the points you mentioned here - you'll get a 
much bigger audience and actually influence future purchasers.  You 
didn't even mention the make/model number here, so how are we meant to 
avoid it :-)

Post a reply to this message

> Well, perhaps. Perhaps if I actually bought hardware from Amazon instead
> of the 10^17 other suppliers, and for every single one I wrote a long
> description of why it sucks, the manufacturers might lose 0.02% of their
> sales,

Amazon has about a 10% market share for online sales...

Post a reply to this message

On 06/04/2011 09:18 AM, scott wrote:
>> Well, perhaps. Perhaps if I actually bought hardware from Amazon instead
>> of the 10^17 other suppliers, and for every single one I wrote a long
>> description of why it sucks, the manufacturers might lose 0.02% of their
>> sales,
>
> Amazon has about a 10% market share for online sales...

How did you calculate that?

Also, what percentage of the total market is online sales?

Post a reply to this message

On 06/04/2011 09:06 AM, scott wrote:
>>> You don't read reviews before buying something?
>>
>> No. But generally I don't buy hardware from Amazon anyway...
>
> You don't need to buy it from amazon, but generally enough people have
> that there will be a good range of reviews from people using it in
> different ways. After reading a couple of pages of comments it usually
> becomes quite obvious if there are problems with the features you are
> interested in.
>
> Also check the "What people buy after looking at this page" section, it
> seems to me like bad reviews certainly affect what people buy.
>
> Is the recorder you have listed on amazon? If it is then I'd definitely
> leave a review highlighting the points you mentioned here - you'll get a
> much bigger audience and actually influence future purchasers. You
> didn't even mention the make/model number here, so how are we meant to
> avoid it :-)

First of all, AFAIK, most people don't bother with reviews. If you want 
to buy some item of electronics, you go to one or maybe a few shops, 
look at what they sell, analyse the features vs price landscape, and 
select the product with the features that are most important to you for 
the best price.

Even if I put something on Amazon, 99.99% of purchasers will never see 
this review, and it will have no influence on their decision at all. And 
even the tiny minority of people who read reviews... there are millions 
of different places where you can post a review. There are reviews 
written in printed and electronic magazines. There are user-submitted 
reviews on Amazon and a bazillion other online stores. I can't post to 
all of them.

Is the recorder listed on Amazon? Yes it is. And according to Amazon, 
the device earned the What Hi-Fi 2009 Best PVR Award. (!) If I were to 
read reviews, What Hi-Fi is probably *the* number one review I would 
look at. And the fact that this device is top-rated would probably lead 
me to buy it.

The actual user reviews all mention an endless succession of bugs, 
glitches and annoyances. But with a top recommendation from the printed 
press, I doubt this will make any impact on sales at all.

Secondly, I think the top-rated status reflects another big problem: 
There isn't anything better on the market. ALL of these devices are 
buggy and fiddly to use. If you read all the reviews, you'd just end up 
buying nothing at all, because none of them work very well.

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>> Amazon has about a 10% market share for online sales...
>
> How did you calculate that?

Amazon sales from 2009 (from their annual report) divided by total 
online sales (found the same number from various sources via google). 
This was for the US only, amazon didn't break the non-US sales down by 
region.

> Also, what percentage of the total market is online sales?

I guess it depends on what products you look at, you probably would have 
to limit offline spending only to those items that are available online 
(eg not include things like gas/petrol).

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> What the user manual says:

  The user manual of what?

> 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.)

  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).

  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.

> 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.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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> The actual user reviews all mention an endless succession of bugs,
> glitches and annoyances. But with a top recommendation from the printed
> press, I doubt this will make any impact on sales at all.

Personally I would pay more attention to the actual user reviews from 
people who have paid for the equipment and use it everyday, as opposed 
to one or two guys who got it for free and used it for a couple of 
evenings and probably only tried out 10% of the functionality.  Did they 
even test out the external HD capability in their review?  If so did 
they mention the problems you had?

> Secondly, I think the top-rated status reflects another big problem:
> There isn't anything better on the market. ALL of these devices are
> buggy and fiddly to use. If you read all the reviews, you'd just end up
> buying nothing at all, because none of them work very well.

Some appear to work better than others though (according to the reviews 
I read), at least you know you bought the one with the fewest bugs :-)

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On 06/04/2011 10:19 AM, scott wrote:
>>> Amazon has about a 10% market share for online sales...
>>
>> How did you calculate that?
>
> Amazon sales from 2009 (from their annual report) divided by total
> online sales (found the same number from various sources via google).
> This was for the US only, amazon didn't break the non-US sales down by
> region.

Right. So we don't know by what methods this data was collected then, or 
how reliable it is.

>> Also, what percentage of the total market is online sales?
>
> I guess it depends on what products you look at

Quite likely. I doubt many people buy food online. I'm having trouble 
thinking of anything that more people buy online than offline. Computer 
games maybe?

> you probably would have
> to limit offline spending only to those items that are available online
> (eg not include things like gas/petrol).

Hey, you can probably order that stuff online! :-D

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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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On 4/6/2011 2:21, Warp wrote:
>    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.)

More precisely, the file size limit on the file system is 4G, and some 
implementations have bugs that limit it to 2G. :-)

>    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.

Considering a FAT formatting routine is like 20 lines of C code, and if it 
supports ext3 they already *have* the formatting routine.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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On 4/6/2011 3:15, Invisible wrote:
> But that size wasn't 4GB.

*File* size.  The file size is recorded in a 32-bit integer in the 
directory. It doesn't matter how big the drive is, but one file is limited 
to 4G.

> still happening (i.e., it hasn't locked up).

The best are the Windows file copying progress bars, which keep progressing 
even when copying has stalled.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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On 06/04/2011 05:08 PM, Darren New wrote:
> On 4/6/2011 3:15, Invisible wrote:
>> But that size wasn't 4GB.
>
> *File* size.

Oh, right, I see.

Yes, that could be a problem...

>> still happening (i.e., it hasn't locked up).
>
> The best are the Windows file copying progress bars, which keep
> progressing even when copying has stalled.

Ah yes! An activity indicator that doesn't even indicate activity. Pure 
liquid evil! >_<

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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On Wed, 06 Apr 2011 08:59:32 +0100, Invisible wrote:

> On 05/04/2011 08:33 PM, Stephen wrote:
>> On 05/04/2011 8:16 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
>>> That's not been my experience. But more to the point, if you had a
>>> problem and you don't write a review, you're not helping the next
>>> buyer make an informed decision.
>>
>> I agree.
> 
> Well, perhaps. Perhaps if I actually bought hardware from Amazon instead
> of the 10^17 other suppliers, and for every single one I wrote a long
> description of why it sucks, the manufacturers might lose 0.02% of their
> sales, and a tiny few people would be spared buying one sucky product
> only to buy another equally sucky product. I doubt this is going to
> bring quality back to the marketplace.

Not doing it is guaranteed to have no affect on quality.  It isn't about 
changing the manufacturer's process, it's about helping others make 
informed decisions.  They can't use your opinion as part of their 
decision making process if you don't share it.

Jim

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On Wed, 06 Apr 2011 08:57:17 +0100, Invisible wrote:

> On 05/04/2011 06:07 PM, Darren New wrote:
>> On 4/5/2011 7:41, clipka wrote:
>>> Am 05.04.2011 16:09, schrieb Invisible:
>>>
>>>> I have absolutely no idea whether these "server-grade" drives really
>>>> *are* more reliable, or whether it's just a sucker tax.
>>>
>>> Server drives are designed to endure continuous use.
>>>
>>> Desktop drives are designed to endure lots of power cycles.
>>
>> The drives in a NAS are exactly the same as what you'd buy off the
>> shelf in an electronics store.
>>
>> Google has a whitepaper telling about the drive reliability based on
>> statistics from half a million disk drives. There's little correlation
>> between "category" and reliability.
> 
> So it *is* a sucker tax then.

It depends.  If you purchase through, say, EMC, what you're paying the 
'big bucks' for is the service contract, which in my experience is worth 
its weight in gold - they consider a single reported *recoverable* bit 
error on a drive in their cabinets as reason enough to replace the 
drive.  The system calls them and a technician calls the named contact to 
schedule the hot replacement of the drive that reported the error.

But such service certainly ain't cheap.  But their NAS devices are 
*solid* and their service (again in my experience) is second to none.

Jim

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On 4/6/2011 19:20, Jim Henderson wrote:
> they consider a single reported *recoverable* bit
> error on a drive in their cabinets as reason enough to replace the
> drive.

Google's whitepapaer basically said "Nothing says when a drive is going to 
die, but you have a +30% chance of it dying in the next six months if you 
get any read errors at all, recoverable or not."

In particular, all that S.M.A.R.T. stuff was stupid.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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On Wed, 06 Apr 2011 19:53:54 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> On 4/6/2011 19:20, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> they consider a single reported *recoverable* bit error on a drive in
>> their cabinets as reason enough to replace the drive.
> 
> Google's whitepapaer basically said "Nothing says when a drive is going
> to die, but you have a +30% chance of it dying in the next six months if
> you get any read errors at all, recoverable or not."
> 
> In particular, all that S.M.A.R.T. stuff was stupid.

I'd believe that - which is why for critical data, I'd prefer an 
arrangement like the one my previous employer had with EMC to deal with 
it.

Jim

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>> So it *is* a sucker tax then.
>
> It depends.  If you purchase through, say, EMC, what you're paying the
> 'big bucks' for is the service contract, which in my experience is worth
> its weight in gold.

This is presumably why all Dell products are 7x the price of any other 
supplier. Which would be great, if their service contract was worth its 
weight in paper clips. But it isn't.

Hypothetically, in the event of a hardware fault, they're supposed to 
come over here and fix it within 4 hours. In reality, in the event of a 
hardware fault, THEY DO NOT GIVE A DAMN. They're just not interested. 
You file a trouble ticket and NOTHING HAPPENS. You call them, they take 
down all the details, and NOTHING HAPPENS. They don't lift a finger to 
help you in any way at all.

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On 4/7/2011 1:04, Invisible wrote:
> Hypothetically, in the event of a hardware fault, they're supposed to come
> over here and fix it within 4 hours.

It's not just Dell, either.  Sun did the same thing to us, back when a Sun 
16-core machine cost $100K or so.  We had 24x7 4-hour replacement contracts, 
as long as it didn't happen on a weekend and you were really close to where 
the tech guy was already.

We had contracts on our stack of Dell machines, and they'd come out and fix 
the stuff, but they'd come out pretty promptly, decide yes indeed it's 
broken, and we'll expect the parts to arrive by mid next-week. And about 
half the dell machines crapped out in the first 3 or 4 months, one way or 
the other, with two or three being DOA.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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>> Hypothetically, in the event of a hardware fault, they're supposed to
>> come over here and fix it within 4 hours.
>
> It's not just Dell, either.

Worrying, but not surprising.

> We had contracts on our stack of Dell machines, and they'd come out and
> fix the stuff, but they'd come out pretty promptly, decide yes indeed
> it's broken, and we'll expect the parts to arrive by mid next-week. And
> about half the dell machines crapped out in the first 3 or 4 months, one
> way or the other, with two or three being DOA.

At least all our Dell stuff has had flawless reliability. Oh, except 
that ancient tape robot that was out of warranty anyway...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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On Thu, 07 Apr 2011 09:04:16 +0100, Invisible wrote:

>>> So it *is* a sucker tax then.
>>
>> It depends.  If you purchase through, say, EMC, what you're paying the
>> 'big bucks' for is the service contract, which in my experience is
>> worth its weight in gold.
> 
> This is presumably why all Dell products are 7x the price of any other
> supplier. Which would be great, if their service contract was worth its
> weight in paper clips. But it isn't.

My experience has differed.  I had a laptop (for example) in a class that 
had a hard drive failure - I called Dell support and they overnighted me 
a replacement hard drive so I could get the student working the next 
day.  Not as good as "a tech is on the way", but we paid for overnight 
service and got it.

> Hypothetically, in the event of a hardware fault, they're supposed to
> come over here and fix it within 4 hours. In reality, in the event of a
> hardware fault, THEY DO NOT GIVE A DAMN. They're just not interested.
> You file a trouble ticket and NOTHING HAPPENS. You call them, they take
> down all the details, and NOTHING HAPPENS. They don't lift a finger to
> help you in any way at all.

Do you have an account manager with them?  I know some companies do have 
service account managers/technical account managers (not sure what the 
Dell analogue is), but if you are a named account for them, then you 
should be able to escalate the issue, since that's what your company is 
paying for.

And if you don't get what you're paying for, then it's time to look to 
another supplier or to raise holy hell with the supplier you're dealing 
with.

That said, I have heard that there are *huge* disparities in how Dell 
deals with US customers vs. customers outside the US - so your issues 
aren't unique to the best of my knowledge.

Jim

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