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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