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...

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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 ?

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>> 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?

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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."

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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?

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