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They still haven't fixed this:

http://www.pretentiousname.com/misc/win7_uac_whitelist2.html

In fact there's now exploits in the wild now, and frankly it was a stupid idea in the first place.

Also if the bad guys have access to a machine (yes, RDP counts) you lose.

I don't care how locked down you think your system is.

The only secure computer is one powered off and in a fire safe at the bottom of a mineshaft.

UAC is not much like sudo since it is not a security feature. It is not supposed to stop bad software doing bad things (since it can't, it's trivial to bypass), it's supposed to let users know that good software is doing system-level things.

http://www.pretentiousname.com/misc/win7_uac_whitelist2.html

If you have a separate admin account UAC does work more like sudo. But that's not the default, sadly.

Privilege escalation by any non-privileged GUI app you say? No they'd just say it's not a bug and that they have no intention of fixing it.

http://www.pretentiousname.com/misc/win7_uac_whitelist2.html

http://www.pretentiousname.com/misc/win7_uac_whitelist2.html

That means Microsoft's latest offerings get grouped with Mac OS and Linux because they have made pretty decent improvements.

In theory yes. In fact, Window's latest offerings are only protected from programs targeted at older versions of the OS. If you're targeting Windows 7 explicitly, it's actually fairly easy to get escalated privileges.

Well UAC is built-in to the system.

Yes, but it's almost completely ineffectual

sudo implements real privilege separation, UAC (in default mode) does not. sudo is very hard to bypass, UAC is not. UAC is not even supposed to improve security.

UAC's purpose is to make running as admin a bit more like running as a limited user and thereby push developers towards making their programs function well under limited user accounts (the long-term goal).

This page is a good starting point for UAC security, esp. under win7: http://www.pretentiousname.com/misc/win7_uac_whitelist2.html.

UAC is not a security barrier. It is trivial for programs to bypass, especially in win7. Its purpose is to make running as admin a bit more like running as a limited user and thereby push developers towards making their programs function well under limited user accounts (the long-term goal).

This page is a good starting point for UAC security, esp. under win7: http://www.pretentiousname.com/misc/win7_uac_whitelist2.html.

OK I was wrong, it's not a flaw to get root from an un-privileged account, but it does allow malicious code to completely bypass UAC for the default account, so UAC with Win7 default settings is completely broken out of the box, and it's also one MS say is by design and won't fix.

http://www.pretentiousname.com/misc/win7_uac_whitelist2.html

It's good they've responded, but this change does not fix the fundamental problems with win7's UAC whitelist.

The problem is that 70 applications are on the whitelist and are allowed to silently elevate without the user's knowledge. You just have to inject code into one of these 70 applications and you have admin rights. There are multiple ways of doing this. You can use the debug API, you can get them to load a DLL, use your imagination.

Here's a page with a sample exploit and a lot more information:

http://www.pretentiousname.com/misc/win7_uac_whitelist2.html

No, I don't just mean your strategy would break albums where artists put several minutes of silence before a hidden track. There are many times where one song will fade into silence before the next song starts. Other times when one song ends, there is a pause for a few seconds for dramatic effect before the next song starts. If you just truncate any ending silent sections (I believe the iRiver tried that), these will be lost and the two songs will be mashed together. For more information, you can check this page on gapless digital music.

Not meant to be a threadjack, but I'll ask anway: anyone know if the latest Ipods can do gapless playback, with or without the Rockbox firmware? Or any other MP3 player that isn't riddled with reports of hard drive failures? This page suggest IPODS can. I would really love to get one of these players (any kind) but gapless is an absolute must, and support for OGG and FLAC is highly preferred.

Too bad Apple has also been very good about resisting bug fixes in the iPod. Guess they don't want my money.

'Directory Opus' (www.gpsoft.com) is the file manager i've settled on after 12 years of working with Windows. It features it's own scripting interface to define custom views/buttons/contextMenus. It also provides a visual frontend to this scripting interface so that you can easily combine pre-defined commands to assign almost any file manipulation trick imaginable. Learning this tool can seriously shave time off of mundane everyday tasks.

If interested, the following URL provides a quick rundown of the power features:

http://www.pretentiousname.com/opus/index.html

The fuss about ogg, for those of us who care, is gapless playback.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gapless_playback
http://www.pretentiousname.com/mp3players/

That is why I own an iriver h340 and why I owned it for less than 30 minutes before loading the gapless capable rockbox firmware on.

The key point is that only the ultra-geek niche market cares, or even understands enough to care.

I've never heard of the Karma's wheel snapping off, but I have heard that the HD inside is tempramental, bordering on unreliable. Mine has performed flawlessly, but I suppose I just got lucky.

BTW, a good article on the whole gapless issue is http://www.pretentiousname.com/mp3players/.

Mod up! Also see this detailed discussion of the gapless MP3 playback issue.

While it is correct that the MP3 does not support "correct" gapless playback without adding explicit information on where the track ends, there are players like the Rio Karma which do a good job of detecting and removing the gap through their firmware.

Haha, I completely agree, just 10 mintues ago I read the comments here, while listening music with winamp. Niw I've just downloaded QCD and installed the "T0t4l pwn4g3" skin (one of the tiniest ones). I was looking for a media player that I could leave ONLY as a tray Icon, I read that for the Foobar one there was only a small patch but I didnt really liked that.

QCD is quite fine, the only downside again is that it has 23,648MB of private memory...

Niether of which will play back without a gap on an iPod. http://www.pretentiousname.com/mp3players/

The obvious answer is that sometimes you want to listen to the whole thing, and sometimes you want to access a specific track. There are plenty of mix albums, live albums, and 'concept albums' (not to mention Wagner-length operas and other extended classical stuff) where frequent gaps ruin the music, but encoding as a single (maybe hour-long!) track is massively inconvenient. The (discontinued) Rio Karma showed that it's technically possible to have continuous music from separate tracks in a portable player. Why can't the iPod (or most of its 'killers') do this?

Incidentally, the iPod is a particularly serious offender here, with bigger gaps than some of its competitors. See:

http://www.pretentiousname.com/mp3players/

for an analysis (and why crossfading is no solution).

Still, who needs an overpriced Apple when a Creative Zen player offers better sound quality and higher storage capacity for a lower price?

Anyone who wants seamless integration between their music library and their portable device. Anyone who wants the smallest physical size per storage amount in their portable device. Anyone who wants a clean user interface uncluttered by "kitchen sink" syndrome.

I've looked at the Zen and others, but none come even close to Apple's solution with iTunes and iPod. My music is automatically synchronized when connecting the iPod to the computer, both ways. Maybe I'm weird, but I like tracking data like Last Played Time and Play Count, making Smart Playlists based on them. When I hook up the iPod, all the tunes I played while I was out get updated in the library. And I love Smart Playlists. Keeps things nice and organized based on just about any criteria I can possibly imagine. It's in my library and on my portable device.

Nobody needs it, but all of the above is worth the small bit of extra money to me. If it isn't to you, cool. Get something else and be happy.

Believe me, I'd love to jump ship to another product because Apple's continuing lack of attention to the gapless playback problem is getting irritating. They obviously don't care at all, because 99.99% of their customers don't care. Unfortunately I'm one of the few who does. I've looked at the alternatives. And I've found no other solution that comes close to Apple's in every other facet of the system. Guess that makes me a stupid fanboy who only cares about being trendy and fashionable, huh?

No gapless playback!

It's not that difficult, Apple, really.

See also: http://www.pretentiousname.com/mp3players/

There's a prety good summary of the issue (with some strong arguments in favour of gapless playback) here:

http://www.pretentiousname.com/mp3players/

Only a minority of albums are badly affected, but if you like certain genres of music (live recordings/mix albums/'concept albums'/classical) you might find a lot of your favourite stuff is seriously marred by gaps.

Perhaps the IP transfer means there's an outside chance that the Rio Karma's gapless technology might make it into the iPod...

If you are speaking of mp3s, this is actually a fairly hard problem to solve perfectly due to the fact that the gaps are part of the mp3 itself. However, the Rio Karma I guess solves it all right.

Can it now do gapless playback? If not, I still won't buy one. I'm thinking about getting a Rio Karma though.

• Speed. Though I'm sure many can provide their own anecdotal evidence on how iTunes works fine on their machines, that doesn't invalidate the many, MANY claims of iTunes being a bloated, resource hog (at least on Windows.). Foobar and Winamp with a little tweaking open almost instantaenously, while iTunes lags behind on starting up. Even when minimized, iTunes is taking up far more CPU than a media player should (even more than WMP!).
• MPC/FLAC/SHN/APE/etc. support. If applications like Foobar, Winamp, and QCD can pull it off, why can't iTunes, with it's beefy 19.5 MB download, play simple file formats like these that've been around for years? Wouldn't it work in their favor to allow their users more choice, to let their users listen to their music in whatever format they've chosen to encode them in?
• Queueing. Once again, something included with XMMS, Winamp, and even MMJB. If your listening to a huge random playlist of songs in Winamp, but want to hear a particular song after the one your listening to, just select the song in the playlist and hit 'Q'. Winamp will finish the currently playing song, then play the song you selected, then return to randomly shuffling the tracks automatically. You can do this with multiple tracks, picking an order you want to hear those songs, and then shuffling the rest. Or you can hit 'J' to search the list of the songs in the playlist, and select the song(s) you want to enqueue.
• Downloading Songs Off iPod Through The Media Player. Instead of assuming your user is doing something criminal and (flimsily) preventing them from easy access to the songs on their iPod, why not give them the freedom to move songs back and forth onto their hard drives. ml_ipod, a plug-in that lets you manage your iPod through Winamp's media library, not only allows you to transfer songs from your iPod, but lets you even "reverse-sync" them.
• Support for competing MP3 portables. I think I read somewhere that iTunes may support another mp3 player besides the iPod, but that really isn't enough. Once again, I think it'd be beneficial the popularity of the program if they supported other players. Have they released an SDK for their community to toy with? The Foobar and Nullsoft teams did this, and they got great results.
• Gapless playback on iPod. This is a big deal to audiophiles, and I'm really surprised by the iPod's lack of support on this. The Rio Karma does this. Why not iPod?

Though I'll admit that the join-tracks feature was much-welcomed, what else did iTunes users get? Instead of downloading songs with propietary DRM, now we can encode our songs with a new proprietary DRM--songs that won't play on anything else? I think I'll stick with FLAC. The ability to publish my important music playlists for the whole world to see? I think I'll stick with Audioscrobbler. A free song from another bland RIAA-sponsored band? Epitonic has always provided a good sampling of independent artists and their music for you to try out. A wishlist to download those Top 40 songs later? Well, why don't I just download the songs now off allofmp3 now with their ridiculously low prices, in whatever format I want, without DRM? Import unprotected WMA files? Winamp

MP3 players are more for the convenience of not having to bring ejectables (CDs, cassetes) just to listen to different kinds of music. Appart from that you can buy several kind of players depending on your needs.

Style - Ipod

Space - Creative

Recording capabilites - Iriver

Listening to music - Rio

Why do I say Rio is for listening music while not the rest? I don't know for Iriver and Creative (or other brand) players, but Ipod are just stylish and lack gapless playback, and fall behind in the battery lasting time comparision.

Why is important gapless playback? this web will explain it better than me.

Just get what is better for you. May it be a walkman, an Ipod, a Rio Karma or somebody playing drums.