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> 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 $$$s though :-)
> What, fundamentally, can we do about this? How can we make it
> unprofitable to produce poor quality products?
You need to stop the demand for cheap consumer goods - good luck with
that ;-)
Alternatively you could make it illegal to sell anything that hasn't
scored a certain amount in some unbiased consumer testing, but you're
likely to be pretty unpopular when the price of everything goes up.
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>> It still bemuses me that they could go to all the trouble of writing a
>> huge, complex USB driver,
>
> I doubt they wrote their own USB driver from scratch.
I doubt integrating whatever 3rd party code they bought into their own
codebase was a five minute job.
>> the minor glitches that the manufacturer didn't
>> bother to iron out in their rush to market are extremely annoying, and
>> they're going to annoy us for the next 10 years.
>
> They've already got your $$$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...
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> 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 :-)
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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
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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
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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> 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.
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