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>> 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 :-)
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> 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...
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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?
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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] dev null> 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] dev null> 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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