The moment you decide to require ALL of those things to be validated some dumbass will put them all in a database record side by side unencrypted with no password protection. The end user will be forced to endure more hoop jumping but the sum total of added security would be quickly nullified by the morons of the IT world. It only takes one village idiot to ruin things.
I predict that should such a device be plugged into my car my mileage would suddenly plummet to about 3MPG for no explicable reason.:-) I predict it will take mere moments for most gearheads to take care of these devices and begin recording only minimal mileage at the pumps.
California really does need to hurry up and break off into the ocean. The nutcases out there only serve to make the rest of us look bad...
Honestly, I'm not sure. However I can tell you that this thnig was FAR bigger than a pencil eraser. Judging from the hole they left in his leg taking it out it was at least an inch or three around:-O They took a decent chunk out of him and declared him good to go! A year later he began breaking vertabra while lifting weights and it was downhill from there. They did an operation where they drew marrow, then killed his, then replaced it with his own marrow that put him into remission but now a few years later it seems to be back.
All in all this is a BIG mess. Had he been more proactive in the first place or the Dr. a little more diligent about the mole he would've been much better off. No way in hell do I wish this fate on even the worst person - it's living hell.
My father had a mole on his leg that got bigger and bigger. He fnially had it removed but no further treatment was ordered. It wasn't until he began fracturing vertebra in his back that someone figured out something was wrong (his Chiropractor of all things!). Seems he has cancer in his spine that started with *drumroll* the mole on his leg! The original doctor was quite difficult to work with and in the end was probably negligent but frankly pursuing him when you've got cancer eating your spine is sort of a low priority.
Needless to say - had my Father been more diligent and perhaps the Doctor a little swifter he'd be doing MUCH better than he is today. He's alive but it's not much of a life and certainly nothing like what he had before when he was healthy as a horse. Be careful out there...
Agreed that this wouldn't end up the sole evidence but it's a view into my purchases that I prefer didn't exist. It's an invasion of sorts that I and others do not appreciate. It gives the merchant insight and for little compensation or advantage to the consumer. Don't even get me started on RFID:-(
Okay, I see where that data might be of interest to a retailer. However I still have issue with their profiling, in particular when it's tied to an individual. Certainly it can be done anonymously and yeah some do it but at a later date there's nothing stopping "someone" from tying you to the card. I have to giggle when I see some law enforcement shows on the tube using just such things when they find a suspect has such a card but really - how far is it from the truth? "Joe Schmoe" bought duct tape and rope the day before Suzy was murdered, we ran his card! Is this the world we wish to live in? How about a giant registeed DNA database, is that okay too? I just don't like where this all seems to be headed.
As to data poisoning - I have never really taken an aggressive stance on this, my using other's cards wasn't an overt attempt at it but simply what occurs because I avoid these cards. Now that I've realized that it might be possible, if even in some small way, to screw with these I might start being more active.:-) If enough people do it then perhaps they will go away....
Hrm, I don't use coupons. Instead I decide what I wish to purchase based on price for value received. Price too high? No purchase. Certainly I may miss out on a few bux here and there but I also don't have to track the silly coupons, cut them out, or worry that I've picked up the "right" product for a specific coupon. I'll pay the extra and save the headache thanks.
As to putting things close by on shelves using this tracking - why exactly do they need a coupon card for this? They pull the sales records from the registers to stock shelves, surely they must know that two items were sold on the same ticket without having to know WHO made the purchase right? This argument makes no sense to me. I'll gladly "poison" their system and I do it already. When the cashier askes me for my card I tell them I have none and either the person bhind me uses their's or the a cashier uses the one they have at hand - otherwise no sale!
I look forward to your next article! sadly this is an area I've been VERY interested in in the past but have not been keeping up with. It seems that thnigs have changed a great deal while I wasn't paying attention with some very nice tools having come out. Has WPA also been found vulnerable? I dont see any mention in the current article about it but at the rate things are going nothing is safe:-) My AP doesn't spit many weak packets but it DOES spit some - looks like I'll be having some fun tonight!
Thread of probability is VERY thin here. Let's say they DO mail such a package and that no screening catches it. So now we have a pic of someone who likely disguised themselves to go after - AFTER the plane explodes? No doubt if they were required to show ID it was fake too. So what was accomplished here exactly? Since this is so easy and this will obviously stop lots of plane bombings let me ask - when was the last time this occured?
Terrorists wish to disrupt our way of life. They wish to disrupt our freedoms. At the rate we're going they will have accomplished what they wanted without having to ever have attacked us again - we'll have done it to ourselves. Wake up - they WANT this and we're helping them by allowing things like this to occur. Our way of life is changing for the worse.
Frog analogy - throw a frog in boiling water and he will leap out. Place a frog in tepid water and turn on heat - he will sit and cook fat dumb and happy. If ALL of these things being proposed these days had been done all at once in a single Govt. bill folks would've grabbed torches and pitchforks to storm the castle. So instead our freedoms are being taken away piece by piece, bit by bit, and folks with thumbs up their ass sit around and say stupid things "if you were an honest person you wouldn't care". It'll be a shame when they finally come to take those folks away and there's no one left to protest....
So out of 3bazillion pieces of processed mail there were how many "bad" things mailed exactly? Oh yeah - a miniscule amount and for that we should *ALL* give up a little more freedom? No thanks!
Alot of file sharing programs won't let you login without Gigs shared? Umm, could you name a few? I've never seen one that required ANYTHING to be shared....
Interesting!
on
The Music Man
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· Score: 2, Insightful
He seems to think our way of life is doomed and that we're fighting WWIII but midway through the interview he's talking about how it's going to be a decade before everyone has "gone digital". So do we or don't we have a bright future where the world "goes digital" and we all hum along together?
LOL, there's an industry revolving around this. They make adapter harness day and night. If they don't happen to have one for the oddball POS you drive then you simply wire it yourself. How hard exactly is it to run power, ground, switched ground, and lighting inputs to a headunit? Speakers are no big deal either and if you're running amps you can run fiber or RCA shielded cables. This is so simple we have the likes of BestBuy and Circuit City selling and installing stereos. Believe me their installers are FAR from the best and yet they manage to do this no problem.
The hardest part these days is installing the physical unit since the auto manufacturers have begun trying to make this more difficult. When they integrate silly things like heating and cooling into the stereo it further complicates things - stupidly. Folks who care about such issues generally shy away from vehicles that have this crap and the aftermarket fights this too via SEMA or their own industry lobbying effort.
Is it possible you simply don't have a clue what you're talking about?
Hell in my area you can actually buy a car, have it shipped to a dealer authorized stereo shop, have the nicest stereo you want installed, and roll the price of the install into the loan for the car. Yup, nobody would dare do that to a new car - lol!
I think that one of the aftermarket companies may be doing this actually. Unfortunatly most of what has been offered aftermarket for MP3 playback other than off of CDs has been encumbered with either DRM nastieness or with some sort of oddball format where they want to force you into buying their hardware for media - ick. As the market moves forward offerings have gotten better but so far I've yet to find something better than my CD playing Alpine for MP3s and it's transport finally died after umm more than a few hours of play time;-) Radio, wazzat? A small portable might be okay for this, I have a Karma, but hookup and ease of theft aren't to great. A device like you've envisioned would be better.
Unfortunatly there's no one standard for this kind of thing so they would have to build multiple interface boxes. Doable but unfortunatly not a one shot design deal:-(
Are you REALLY that far out of touch with the aftermarket entertainment offerings or is this a Troll? Most of what the OEMs offer is utter crap and built by the lowest bidder. MANY people replace their stereos with aftermarket components and $500 for a good headunit is CHEAP. Hell, there's an entire industry revolving around aftermerket entertainment systems for vehicles and several magazines devoted to it as well. Pull your head out once in awhile and look around for kripes sakes. Crutchfield http://www.crutchfield.com/ is but one example of a thriving online business revolving aorund this and if you take a look around one day you might even notice stereo shops in your community. I can think of three within a 5 minute driving distance of my home and I do NOT live in a city...
Wow, thank you! Bummer that this is somethnig I'd have to PAY for but hell if it's that much better then perhaps it's worth the 25 clams. I'll check out the trial - appreciate the tip!!!!
Nope, I've not gotten that bold:-) I've had no other issues with the device and it's performed well other than the occasional lockup. If I were a rare case having this lockup I might feel a need to open it up but that's not the case. Trust me, if you heard this sucker banging you wouldn't think it was an intermittent connection either - it sounds like a HD that has gone bad and is repeatedly parking it's heads with decent force. Sort of a whiiiiir, clickety clack over and over. Chilling sound to say the least...
Eh, it's not like I'm jogging or anything:-) noisy mower, 45mins worth of time sitting... Seemed like it might work and shield me from the noise of the mower (noise cancelling headphones). For awhile it worked well, until it didn't:-O It's not a really rough ride but there's vibration. Not like I bolted it to the mower either so I had hoped the vibration would be dampened somewhat. Apparently not!
(I believe) The RIAA has pressured manufacturers to not make it so simple as it might be used to "pirate" content. This isn't an uncommon belief judging from some of the comments I've read on the RIO support forums in the past.
Stiction is the suspected issue. Heads gettign stuck at the inner platter area. Seen this on full sized drives years ago made by Seagate. Smacking them or spinning them physically would allow them to spin up - until the next lockup. My Karma, after the paper clip, would reboot just fine - until it got the HD error and would then rebot again. The drive itself is the issue, not the firmware. Vibration appeaars to be what causes this - in my case riding a mower:-) Casual use walking or flying in planes hasn't caused me any issues like this with mine - just the mower!
I have one and it's not a firmware issue with the lockups near as I can tell - it's vibration! I have a riding mower, if I take my Karma on that thing for evena short mowing session it locks up. It cannot be shut off, it makes awful sounds, and you have to use the paperclip thing to shut it off. Just as the reviewer discovered - it will not boot up properly afterwards! The solution, as he discovered, is to smack it. I do this on edge in an attempt to help spin the drives as I believe the heads are somehow stuck. Sure enough this fixes it! So far I've only had to do this 2 or 3 times thankfully!
That said - the unit is terrific when it's not being bounced around or vibrated. I use it on travel in airplanes and hooked to my stereo in the garage in it's cradle. Battery life is excellent on plane rides and in my garage I've probably put a couple hundred hours worth of playing into it. I've not yet come close to filling it's drive up but have also not taken much time slecting music (I've got over 130Gig). I do NOT like the interface software to the device, it's not a simple drive letter that I can copy music over to thank you RIAA. If it were I'd have already put much more music on it I'm sure. The software isn't bad, it's just not that great and it insists on indexing my music first which with over 100Gigs takes FOREVER and has caused the software to fail a time or two. My solution is to point it at a folder with only the music I want to transfer over - this multi-step process is why I have so little (about 2gig) music on it.
I've not looked lately for software updates or firmware upgrades but their update process isn't too bad in my experience. What I'd REALLY like, but haven't found, is a WEB interface that would allow me to remotely control the device over the network. Perhaps I'm blind but it seems to me such an interface would be a really good idea considering the silly thing is IP enabled. I've just nto spent too much time loking and havespent more time listening to it I guess (lol). If anyone has found software like this or can point out a feature I've overlooked that allows this I'm all ears!
I used to replace tubes in old monitors many moons ago. I oncve had a spark jump off the screwdriver, through me, out my leg into a metal table. On that table was a PBX phone that promptly lit up all lights in pretty patterns and began bleating much like I was at the time having been half baked by the shock. The tech who was with me found this amusing and the officeworker was somewhat amused too until he realized that his phone was likely toast.:-)
So, I can attest that YES they hold a charge. In fact I found out the hard way that NEW tubes not only held a MUCH bigger charge but that after discharge they tend to RECHARGE. A new one (a rarity when working on junk this old) being serviced lifted me off the floor and back a few feet - this was AFTER having discharged it to ground a few times!
Umm, I've actually seen video of a demo where that was done. A guy was attempting to demo some software and shouting from the crowd, from different people no less, managed to hose the guy's computer. I believe they were formatting the drive but cannot clearly recall - I'd love to find that clip again though! (lol) What was funny was that it was obviously not planned and I seem to recall each participant sounding as if they didn't quite believe that their particular command would be taken - and it was!
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The moment you decide to require ALL of those things to be validated some dumbass will put them all in a database record side by side unencrypted with no password protection. The end user will be forced to endure more hoop jumping but the sum total of added security would be quickly nullified by the morons of the IT world. It only takes one village idiot to ruin things.
I predict that should such a device be plugged into my car my mileage would suddenly plummet to about 3MPG for no explicable reason. :-) I predict it will take mere moments for most gearheads to take care of these devices and begin recording only minimal mileage at the pumps.
California really does need to hurry up and break off into the ocean. The nutcases out there only serve to make the rest of us look bad...
Honestly, I'm not sure. However I can tell you that this thnig was FAR bigger than a pencil eraser. Judging from the hole they left in his leg taking it out it was at least an inch or three around :-O They took a decent chunk out of him and declared him good to go! A year later he began breaking vertabra while lifting weights and it was downhill from there. They did an operation where they drew marrow, then killed his, then replaced it with his own marrow that put him into remission but now a few years later it seems to be back.
All in all this is a BIG mess. Had he been more proactive in the first place or the Dr. a little more diligent about the mole he would've been much better off. No way in hell do I wish this fate on even the worst person - it's living hell.
My father had a mole on his leg that got bigger and bigger. He fnially had it removed but no further treatment was ordered. It wasn't until he began fracturing vertebra in his back that someone figured out something was wrong (his Chiropractor of all things!). Seems he has cancer in his spine that started with *drumroll* the mole on his leg! The original doctor was quite difficult to work with and in the end was probably negligent but frankly pursuing him when you've got cancer eating your spine is sort of a low priority .
Needless to say - had my Father been more diligent and perhaps the Doctor a little swifter he'd be doing MUCH better than he is today. He's alive but it's not much of a life and certainly nothing like what he had before when he was healthy as a horse. Be careful out there...
Agreed that this wouldn't end up the sole evidence but it's a view into my purchases that I prefer didn't exist. It's an invasion of sorts that I and others do not appreciate. It gives the merchant insight and for little compensation or advantage to the consumer. Don't even get me started on RFID :-(
Okay, I see where that data might be of interest to a retailer. However I still have issue with their profiling, in particular when it's tied to an individual. Certainly it can be done anonymously and yeah some do it but at a later date there's nothing stopping "someone" from tying you to the card. I have to giggle when I see some law enforcement shows on the tube using just such things when they find a suspect has such a card but really - how far is it from the truth? "Joe Schmoe" bought duct tape and rope the day before Suzy was murdered, we ran his card! Is this the world we wish to live in? How about a giant registeed DNA database, is that okay too? I just don't like where this all seems to be headed.
:-) If enough people do it then perhaps they will go away....
As to data poisoning - I have never really taken an aggressive stance on this, my using other's cards wasn't an overt attempt at it but simply what occurs because I avoid these cards. Now that I've realized that it might be possible, if even in some small way, to screw with these I might start being more active.
Hrm, I don't use coupons. Instead I decide what I wish to purchase based on price for value received. Price too high? No purchase. Certainly I may miss out on a few bux here and there but I also don't have to track the silly coupons, cut them out, or worry that I've picked up the "right" product for a specific coupon. I'll pay the extra and save the headache thanks.
As to putting things close by on shelves using this tracking - why exactly do they need a coupon card for this? They pull the sales records from the registers to stock shelves, surely they must know that two items were sold on the same ticket without having to know WHO made the purchase right? This argument makes no sense to me. I'll gladly "poison" their system and I do it already. When the cashier askes me for my card I tell them I have none and either the person bhind me uses their's or the a cashier uses the one they have at hand - otherwise no sale!
I look forward to your next article! sadly this is an area I've been VERY interested in in the past but have not been keeping up with. It seems that thnigs have changed a great deal while I wasn't paying attention with some very nice tools having come out. Has WPA also been found vulnerable? I dont see any mention in the current article about it but at the rate things are going nothing is safe :-) My AP doesn't spit many weak packets but it DOES spit some - looks like I'll be having some fun tonight!
I like them just fine, do you think they mind taking a picture of my palm?
Thread of probability is VERY thin here. Let's say they DO mail such a package and that no screening catches it. So now we have a pic of someone who likely disguised themselves to go after - AFTER the plane explodes? No doubt if they were required to show ID it was fake too. So what was accomplished here exactly? Since this is so easy and this will obviously stop lots of plane bombings let me ask - when was the last time this occured?
Terrorists wish to disrupt our way of life. They wish to disrupt our freedoms. At the rate we're going they will have accomplished what they wanted without having to ever have attacked us again - we'll have done it to ourselves. Wake up - they WANT this and we're helping them by allowing things like this to occur. Our way of life is changing for the worse.
Frog analogy - throw a frog in boiling water and he will leap out. Place a frog in tepid water and turn on heat - he will sit and cook fat dumb and happy. If ALL of these things being proposed these days had been done all at once in a single Govt. bill folks would've grabbed torches and pitchforks to storm the castle. So instead our freedoms are being taken away piece by piece, bit by bit, and folks with thumbs up their ass sit around and say stupid things "if you were an honest person you wouldn't care". It'll be a shame when they finally come to take those folks away and there's no one left to protest....
So out of 3bazillion pieces of processed mail there were how many "bad" things mailed exactly? Oh yeah - a miniscule amount and for that we should *ALL* give up a little more freedom? No thanks!
Alot of file sharing programs won't let you login without Gigs shared? Umm, could you name a few? I've never seen one that required ANYTHING to be shared....
He seems to think our way of life is doomed and that we're fighting WWIII but midway through the interview he's talking about how it's going to be a decade before everyone has "gone digital". So do we or don't we have a bright future where the world "goes digital" and we all hum along together?
"Most" folks I know don't have factory decks in their cars.
LOL, there's an industry revolving around this. They make adapter harness day and night. If they don't happen to have one for the oddball POS you drive then you simply wire it yourself. How hard exactly is it to run power, ground, switched ground, and lighting inputs to a headunit? Speakers are no big deal either and if you're running amps you can run fiber or RCA shielded cables. This is so simple we have the likes of BestBuy and Circuit City selling and installing stereos. Believe me their installers are FAR from the best and yet they manage to do this no problem.
The hardest part these days is installing the physical unit since the auto manufacturers have begun trying to make this more difficult. When they integrate silly things like heating and cooling into the stereo it further complicates things - stupidly. Folks who care about such issues generally shy away from vehicles that have this crap and the aftermarket fights this too via SEMA or their own industry lobbying effort.
Is it possible you simply don't have a clue what you're talking about?
Hell in my area you can actually buy a car, have it shipped to a dealer authorized stereo shop, have the nicest stereo you want installed, and roll the price of the install into the loan for the car. Yup, nobody would dare do that to a new car - lol!
I think that one of the aftermarket companies may be doing this actually. Unfortunatly most of what has been offered aftermarket for MP3 playback other than off of CDs has been encumbered with either DRM nastieness or with some sort of oddball format where they want to force you into buying their hardware for media - ick. As the market moves forward offerings have gotten better but so far I've yet to find something better than my CD playing Alpine for MP3s and it's transport finally died after umm more than a few hours of play time ;-) Radio, wazzat? A small portable might be okay for this, I have a Karma, but hookup and ease of theft aren't to great. A device like you've envisioned would be better.
:-(
Unfortunatly there's no one standard for this kind of thing so they would have to build multiple interface boxes. Doable but unfortunatly not a one shot design deal
Are you REALLY that far out of touch with the aftermarket entertainment offerings or is this a Troll? Most of what the OEMs offer is utter crap and built by the lowest bidder. MANY people replace their stereos with aftermarket components and $500 for a good headunit is CHEAP. Hell, there's an entire industry revolving around aftermerket entertainment systems for vehicles and several magazines devoted to it as well. Pull your head out once in awhile and look around for kripes sakes. Crutchfield http://www.crutchfield.com/ is but one example of a thriving online business revolving aorund this and if you take a look around one day you might even notice stereo shops in your community. I can think of three within a 5 minute driving distance of my home and I do NOT live in a city...
Wow, thank you! Bummer that this is somethnig I'd have to PAY for but hell if it's that much better then perhaps it's worth the 25 clams. I'll check out the trial - appreciate the tip!!!!
Nope, I've not gotten that bold :-) I've had no other issues with the device and it's performed well other than the occasional lockup. If I were a rare case having this lockup I might feel a need to open it up but that's not the case. Trust me, if you heard this sucker banging you wouldn't think it was an intermittent connection either - it sounds like a HD that has gone bad and is repeatedly parking it's heads with decent force. Sort of a whiiiiir, clickety clack over and over. Chilling sound to say the least...
Eh, it's not like I'm jogging or anything :-) noisy mower, 45mins worth of time sitting... Seemed like it might work and shield me from the noise of the mower (noise cancelling headphones). For awhile it worked well, until it didn't :-O It's not a really rough ride but there's vibration. Not like I bolted it to the mower either so I had hoped the vibration would be dampened somewhat. Apparently not!
(I believe) The RIAA has pressured manufacturers to not make it so simple as it might be used to "pirate" content. This isn't an uncommon belief judging from some of the comments I've read on the RIO support forums in the past.
Stiction is the suspected issue. Heads gettign stuck at the inner platter area. Seen this on full sized drives years ago made by Seagate. Smacking them or spinning them physically would allow them to spin up - until the next lockup. My Karma, after the paper clip, would reboot just fine - until it got the HD error and would then rebot again. The drive itself is the issue, not the firmware. Vibration appeaars to be what causes this - in my case riding a mower :-) Casual use walking or flying in planes hasn't caused me any issues like this with mine - just the mower!
I have one and it's not a firmware issue with the lockups near as I can tell - it's vibration! I have a riding mower, if I take my Karma on that thing for evena short mowing session it locks up. It cannot be shut off, it makes awful sounds, and you have to use the paperclip thing to shut it off. Just as the reviewer discovered - it will not boot up properly afterwards! The solution, as he discovered, is to smack it. I do this on edge in an attempt to help spin the drives as I believe the heads are somehow stuck. Sure enough this fixes it! So far I've only had to do this 2 or 3 times thankfully!
.
That said - the unit is terrific when it's not being bounced around or vibrated. I use it on travel in airplanes and hooked to my stereo in the garage in it's cradle. Battery life is excellent on plane rides and in my garage I've probably put a couple hundred hours worth of playing into it. I've not yet come close to filling it's drive up but have also not taken much time slecting music (I've got over 130Gig). I do NOT like the interface software to the device, it's not a simple drive letter that I can copy music over to thank you RIAA. If it were I'd have already put much more music on it I'm sure. The software isn't bad, it's just not that great and it insists on indexing my music first which with over 100Gigs takes FOREVER and has caused the software to fail a time or two. My solution is to point it at a folder with only the music I want to transfer over - this multi-step process is why I have so little (about 2gig) music on it
I've not looked lately for software updates or firmware upgrades but their update process isn't too bad in my experience. What I'd REALLY like, but haven't found, is a WEB interface that would allow me to remotely control the device over the network. Perhaps I'm blind but it seems to me such an interface would be a really good idea considering the silly thing is IP enabled. I've just nto spent too much time loking and havespent more time listening to it I guess (lol). If anyone has found software like this or can point out a feature I've overlooked that allows this I'm all ears!
I used to replace tubes in old monitors many moons ago. I oncve had a spark jump off the screwdriver, through me, out my leg into a metal table. On that table was a PBX phone that promptly lit up all lights in pretty patterns and began bleating much like I was at the time having been half baked by the shock. The tech who was with me found this amusing and the officeworker was somewhat amused too until he realized that his phone was likely toast. :-)
So, I can attest that YES they hold a charge. In fact I found out the hard way that NEW tubes not only held a MUCH bigger charge but that after discharge they tend to RECHARGE. A new one (a rarity when working on junk this old) being serviced lifted me off the floor and back a few feet - this was AFTER having discharged it to ground a few times!
In short - beware of picture tubes!!!
Umm, I've actually seen video of a demo where that was done. A guy was attempting to demo some software and shouting from the crowd, from different people no less, managed to hose the guy's computer. I believe they were formatting the drive but cannot clearly recall - I'd love to find that clip again though! (lol) What was funny was that it was obviously not planned and I seem to recall each participant sounding as if they didn't quite believe that their particular command would be taken - and it was!