I take it, then, that you'd have more sympathy with a bunch of elitist, narrow minded idiots who's politics you agree with?
But of course, he would like CBC TV replaced with the FOX channel and CBC Radio with Clear Channel + Rush Limbaugh. Then he would sing praises of the new arrangement being "fair and balanced" and "open minded", like, say, Ann Coulter.
Why is it that all the pro-ipod posts are modded up, and all the pro-rio posts are modded down?
I was actually taken aback by this. Since I am rather liberal in many of my opinions I imagined that people who indentify with progressive views, who claim to be "reality-based" and purport to think logically, proponents of small business over multinationals, advocates of consumer choice, champions of efficient and effective free markets, self-professed Linux users (most Rio systems worked with Linux out-of-the-box - one of the main reasons I bought mine) and the like would be with me on this one. Boy, was I ever mistaken. I am starting to suspect that the Slashdot crowd is far more concerned with appearance of being progressive rather then following the tenets to their logical conclusion, and watch out if these ideas happen get in the way of cappuccino consumption or the latest fashionable gizmo from the same very callous multi-nationals about which they nodded vigorously when I was exposing their detremental to humanity at large nature. Just look at their reaction when I dared to suggest that maybe, just maybe, they were influenced an itsy-bitsy tiny wee bit by the ever-present Apple marketing circus.
My point is just that this doesn't make the ipod bad, just something that is not entirely suitable for you.
I never argued that iPod is "bad". I merely argue that its market penetration and its power to destroy competing choices is not based on rational factors, such as its features, but on hoopla, hype and herd mentality. A majority of iPod buyers have little or no clue about the tech, they are buying a "trendy brand". And it is those buyers, not the minority who does so out of their true product knowledge, which is making the marketplace miserable for everybody else, since it would not matter what features Rio could come up with, they would still lack the "celebrity appeal", "trendiness" and exclusive contracts with major labels available to a "hip" company like Apple. So people who want choices based on the features and the tech are out of luck, trumped by those who prefer looks, hype and fashion conformity. That is my beef with the iPod crowd, even though I do realize that some of them are making their choice for rational reasons.
But I argue elsewhere that flash players are now cheap to the point of being disposable, so your choice is not being restricted too much.
Not really, I was not concerned about the cost but the feature-set. Sadly all those cheap flash based players feature... a low-end set of functions. Majority also require propretary, DRM-crippled, software to be used to transfer files or have some other egregious gaps in their functionality.
Right, because now that Rio's gone, we'll all have to buy iPods. No alternatives left. Crushed by the marketing machine that made the MacOS #1
Sure. List all those locally-supported, excellent sound quality, user customizable EQ equipped, meta-data based selection capable, flash based, expandable storage MP3 players with no DRM that you can buy in Best Buy or Future Shop (here in Canada). How about gap-less playback HDD-based MP3 players?
....
How does none sound, jackass? Rio was it.
Oh and MacOS is (and always was) #1 for cappuccino-drinking, beret wearing, artsy-fartsy snobs, its recent foray into technically literate crowd notwithstanding. Just so you know.
If only they had a few year lead on Apple when they introduced the Rio, or perhaps if the iPod had be restricted to a computer platform that had only 3% market penetration when it was released, then maybe poor Rio would have had a chance against the marketing machine that made the Newton the king of the PDA market.
... and who had pockets deeper by a few billion dollars then Rio. And Newton was the king for a while as it was the only PDA long before technology made PalmPilot (or any other practical PDA) possible. Look genius, not all marketing campaigns work. That is why companies try all sorts of crap, one after another, to take over some slice of the sheeple market. Unlike those who focus on one particular segment, like Rio who only made MP3 players, Apple tried one thing after another until something stuck. They could afford it.
Let me explain it to you in some simpler way which might even penetrate that thick skull of yours: how many Rio ads did you see versus the iPod ones? How many celebrities did you see peddling iPods because its "soo kewl, man!" vs Rios? Ponder that and you will get closer to understanding the anatomy of hype-driven marketing. Apple has had that nailed down for ages. There is nothing technologically superior about an iPod. People like its UI but even that is in many cases a rationalization of a pre-determined choice instilled by ads and peer pressure. In a true free market where consumers are educated, there are hundreds of choices and no dominant players. That is what the theory of capitalism claims. And now back to examining your regularly scheduled apologisms for your personally favourite oligopolies.... (and we all know that because they are your personal choices, that makes it all right, no?)
I for one support increasing taxes to prop up Rio. And making successful products like the iPod and sliced bread illegal.
That is too bad as no sane person would do so. But to each their own. I only point out the failure of the capitalist marketplace resulting in increasing consolidation of one company's market-share, reducing the consumer choice and undue influence of brainwashing techniques and you go off and try to make a case for selective taxation and banning of competing products. Logic is not your strong suite, I see, but judging from the examples you've chosen and their presentation, throwing tantrums and strong-arm tactics are. Also I am getting a strong impression that you would consider a 100% market penetration (aka monopoly) by a "successful" product to be quite all right as long as you personally like that product -- and to Hell with anyone else, no?
Maybe I don't want my bread sliced? Maybe I don't want to pick one of the numerous loaves of bread that are still available unsliced.
Those are still available on store shelves. The choices Rio offered are no longer there. Perhaps mail-order, no-returns, pig-in-a-poke from some manufacturer overseas. But no longer "pick another one of the numerous choices" conveniently. They are not only not numerous, they are non-existent.
Maybe I just want to stamp my feet and cry a river into my diapers!
Your mental breakdowns and the resulting wetness of your diapers are none of my concern.
Well, I suspect anyone not standing within 12 feet of Steve Jobs will agree with your insight that a disk based ipod is a bad choice if you want a device with all the properties of a flash based music player. It's sort of inevitable that if you put a hard disk in something it's going to weigh more and not run on AA batteries.
Yes indeed and somehow we get people here screaming "iPod pwnz j00" as if anyone not choosing an iPod was some sort of incompetent loser. Rio, unlike Apple had a large product line with many types of players, some disk based, some flash. It is a sad day when all these choices are taken off the market. Less consumer choice is never a good thing.
Potential purchasers should also be aware that the ipod is also a bad choice if you want a blender, a load bearing beam in a skyscraper, or a vegetarian alternative for a dinner party.
You are attempting to make it sound as if I was advocating that all iPod users should use flash systems. You must have missed my explicit indication as to this being my personal preference. It is the iPod users who seem to demand that I conform to their view of things, not the other way around. And it is them who appear to be glad when alternatives vanish. I would never cheer if Apple took iPod off the market because I do understand that there are poeple for whom the Apple way is right. But to allow themselves to get brainwashed to the point where they consider their choice to be the last word in fashion and trendiness and everybody else as "losers" is going way too far. Such members of the "iPod pwnz" crowd are indeed the lemmings I accuse them of being.
Having menu in 20 languages is not the same as being able to display song names in the correct language.
I would assume if there are fonts for the menus and it is a modern firmware, the same fonts would be used for the song titles. But I never tried so don't take my word for it.
iTunes can live without iTMS (the iTunesMusicStore). In fact, iTunes predates iTMS and even the iP
I thought these things were integrated into one these days and it was the main "selling feature" of iTunes. But since I do not use the stuff, I was probably mistaken.
I won't say the iPod is better, but it was a better solution for me, and it is a better solution for most people that don't just want to be the guy looking in claiming to be a rebel buying into brainless marketting and using it to their own badass disadvantage.
May I point out to you that it is the grand-parent poster here with "iPod pwn3d the world!" or some such, not me. I can understand people who like iTunes and think iPod is best for them. But just listen to yourself: "and it is a better solution for most people". If that does not scream "kool-aid drinker" I am not sure what would. You are in no position to speak for "most people". "Most people" are technology illiterate and are perpetual victims of ads-driven brainwashing, brand worship and similar gems of consumerism in any field. That is how you get multi-national corporations making billions of dollars by "manufacturing" brand-name beef patties on a bun.
Isn't the virtual item a representation of said labor?
Yes it is, but not a valid one.
Not all labour is valid from the trade point of view and neither are all the representations of labour or property. For example a thief also has to work on his "art" and yet his labour is not a valid object of trade as per the rules of society. Coming back to the virtual sword, that representation is incomplete and not valid from a point of view of trade. It can be only useful if a lot of other external conditions are met. In case of currency, the bank is not allowed to arbitrarily remove or add zeros to your balance because that would alter the amount of physical property to which the representation is supposedly linked. In case of the the virtual sword the game company is perfectly within their rights to delete or to make 10000 swords like that at any time. Thus the one-to-one relationship of the representation is broken. Or to put it in the old fashioned way: fools gold.
Trading in such "representations" is a trade in phonies.
Also note that even if those additional conditions were met, the representation on its own is still just an abstract and immaterial. It is the trade of labour/goods that matters.
Sure the labor isn't digging trenches, but it is still effort... If someone paid me to sit and watch TV all day, would that make it ok to steal the money, peanuts, beanie babies, or "pepsi-points" I earned at it?
No it would not because you are reversing the logic of the argument. The peanuts and the other things are physical objects and your "labour" is (if someone was silly enough to consider it such) directly exchanged for those things. It would only be the case of either stupidity of the "payer" or a case of fraud on your part should you have somehow convinced him to do so by chickanery and mis-representation. In which case your "effort" would not be a valid object of trade.
In the case of the virtual sword, what was "stolen" is an inadequate and invalid representation of some sort of labour. Something which should not be a valid subject to trade and thus not being able to be "stolen". The game company could simply issue another sword to the victim at $0 cost with no real-world side-effects.
In your "get paid to watch TV" example, should someone steal your beanie babies, there is noone who can re-issue them to you at $0 cost.
Where I live everyone has an MP3 player, but I've never seen the Rio in person and none of my friends have even heard of the brand.
What brands do you have? My Rio does not require any subscription service or other crap and its menu comes in 20 languages or so. iPods on the other hand cant live without iTunes so I am not sure how much appeal they would have in places where you cannot subscribe to its on-line store.
I think your critique of the iPod is way overblown, you make it seem as if the iPod is some huge, clunky system that requires iTunes.
You missed the point. It is my personal impression of iPod "system". The parent/grand-parent posters treat this like it is a winner-takes-all game and the iPod was the obvious unquestionable "winner" because... well because... "we pwn j00!".. or something like it. I merely emphasized the fact that other people have other preferences and that hailing a "victory" by one brand while considering a mono-culture and lack of consumer choice to be a good thing is brainless. Some apparently took exception to that.
But, you're seeing it the wrong way, people wanted iTunes because it is elegant and easy to use, and it worked exceptionally well with the iPod, which also had a great interface that was easy and relatively intuitive to most people.
Again this is highly subjective. Rios were MP3 players. iPods are "lifestyle/way of doing things/packaged service/software/hardware suite". I can see some might like that kind of thing but it is by no means the only choice. I prefer my MP3 players to be actual players and do not require additional software. I want them to be standard USB storage devices which work on any USB enabled system. And i have no use for iTunes.
As for HDD over Flash, lots of people wanted to store large (5GB+) amounts of music and Flash hasn't gotten there; yet.
True but then some prefer not to have mechanical drives in their MP3 players. Again a matter of choice, one of such choices which are slowly diminishing with the "victories" of iPod monoculture.
And, there are lots of people who don't see FAT-formatted SD cards as an advantage, but yet another thing to buy, break, lose.
This is a red herring, one does not buy an expandable MP3 player if one has no use for expansion cards. FAT is the only system which is universally readable/writeable by all OSs.
And, I'm not sure why you care what files are named, it's the meta-data that counts.
That is because I keep them organized in the file system not in some iTunes monstrosity.
The Rio Karma and Forge were good products, but the iPod was better and has kept getting better
No these were merely different, something which seems iPod users cannot stand.
Stop acting as if every iPod owner is the victim of 'brainless hype and marketing'
Thei iPod lover's behaviour suggests many of them are
and accept that Rio failed to bring to market a player that had a great feature set, a great interface,
False
... and a music store specifically designed for it.
Bingo. The masses want yet another lock-in subscription service to be addicted to. We were talking about lemmings, were we not?
Face it, Rio got flanked on almost every front.
On the subscription/DRM crapola front they did get creamed. Too bad I have no use for any of it.
And technology was definitely a place that Rio lost.
Really? How so? Shorter battery life? Lower sound quality? Inability to play/shuffle/reorganize storage? Lack of expansion options? Name it, I seem to have trouble seeing what do you mean. Unless of course you were referring to the "personalized faceplates in 207 colours!" and Guci carrying cases.
Features, add-ons, iTMS, and a elegant experience with iTunes which worked for both Windows and Mac-users (meanwhile Rio acted as if Mac-users were strange secret species) is what made the iPod popular
Here is where we differ significantly as to what MP3 player is supposed to be. I do not want iTunes, iTMS, iCrap and iCorporateTit. MP3 player for me is supposed to be a practical, inexpensive, easy to operate, expandable, low maintenance, long battery life, mechanical shock-immune, no-add-on-software required device which appears as plain USB storage to my PC. Linux, Mac, Windoze, whatever. iPod is not an MP3 player, it is a whole software suite/"way of doing things" which does not appeal to me in the slightest.
ep, all those Lemmings, you're so much better I guess because you are a counter-culture revolutionary.
It is not question of being better, it is a question of having a mass-hyped "trend" smother alternative choices in the marketplace and create a culture of lemming-like conformism and deep dislike for alternatives. Witness the parent of this thread and all the other posts in the vain of "We pwn j00!" as if the Rio vs Apple was some kind of a football match.
Yes, that's it....the iPod pwn3d the market and the device you prefer lost because everyone else but you is stupid
If you are going to deny the power of marketing hype over everything else in Western consumer society, then there is very little I can do to enlighten you. Perhaps you noticed that the arguments for the iPod here (along with emotional reponses of modding contrary opinions "flamebait") are mostly based on "Kewl looks, man!", "we pwn j00s Azz!" etc, and somehow very few seem to be listing and contrasting the technical features of Rios vs iPods.
The thing is, most of the iPod detractors don't seem to figure in the user interface. I've tried all the different devices at Best Buy and any other retailer that has them out to play with. I pretty much concluded that most, if not all of the competitors are quite a bit more clumsy in the UI department than they need to be. I realize that there is a matter of personal preferences here but the operation and button layout often didn't seem to be as intuitive as it should be.
I have the Rio forge and I find the interface simple, effective and efficent. After all what the heck are you trying to do with an MP3 player? It is supposed to let you navigate to a song/album/artist/playlist and play it. While granted, some knock-off MP3 players manage to make even that difficult, I think the bar is really low on this and there are 5 buttons (plus menu, volume and power) to operate on the Rio. Play/Stop/Back/Forward and Select which double as menu controls of up/down/left/right. I cannot think of a simpler and more efficient setup. I find the iPod "scroll wheels", touch sensors and what not a bunch of whiz-bang frills, bells and whistles which bring nothing of value to the equation (plus the fact that iPods are HDD based heavy and sizeable devices with non-user servicable battery/storage).
It's hard for me to understand how Rio went under, because I have a Rio S30 and think it's great.
I have a Forge and I love it. Dont forget the amazing sound quality that little devil puts out and the very good EQ that it has. It is a very well designed piece of hardware and although it has some (minor) glitches I am very happy with it. I think the failure of Rio must have something to do with some imbecilic beancounting (brought on by pin-headed "executives" surrendering to iPod hype) because the tech was very good.
"Looks" are subjective. For me the iPod is ugly. Furthermore I found Rio Forge far more practical (for me) then any iPod. You are projecting your own personal preferences on everyone else. iPod is the "winner" and consumers are losers because of the sad success of marketing hoopla and hype coming from Apple combined with big-box sales system over our plain consumer choice. Apple managed to make people believe that owning an iPod is a "status" or "fashion" symbol. At one time cigarettes held that dubious distinction. And bell-bottoms at another. So today its iPod and thy name is Lemming.
Right. Plays music and can organize it. So can any Rio. All the other features? For me iPod loses hands down. And style and grace are in the eye of the beholder.
Expensive, yes.
Overpriced hype, yes.
Awesome, yes.
I beg to disagree. Much bigger then a flash based Rio, like my Forge. Much heavier. Uses non user serviceable battery. Non user serviceable storage. Gets me nothing of imporance which the Rio does not already have, i.e. play good quality music in MP3 format for 18 hours on 1AAA cell. Also the rio uses plain FAT formatted SD cards and mounts as removeable storage under any Linux/Windoze with USB. And the files are named as I please as opposed to some wacko sequential renaming scheme iPod uses. I do not need any special software to manage the Rio. iPod would make me use their (unwelocme by me) iTunes junk.
Worth it? You bet your sweet (or unsweet) music collect
I would not use an HDD based iPod if it was given to me. And that is not only due to my natural aversion to brainless hype and marketing over everything else but for the reasons I mentioned.
In your uncritical fawning over a brand and submission to marketting hype you forgot (as the Apple salesmen intended) that many people have different preferences and requirements which the Rio addressed. The "victory" of iPod lemmings is the prime example of how capitalism is being corrupted by hype over substance.
Hell, just bother to know what you're talking about sometime.:)
Perheaps you should read some:
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possess the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lites his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement, or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
And this is different from single-payer national healthcare how?
Far more profit opportunities. In a private system you get to charge well-off, healthy, young people a lot of money hoping they dont get sick and you get to refuse insurance to those you dont think you can make money on. You also get to charge astronomical sums, claiming that some poor wretches who you did stich up and kept for 2 days in a hospital you own are making you go broke (that is why doctors own these hospitals and clinics, they do it due to their general poverty). In a single-payer system, there is no profit for the insurers. Blasphemy. Communist utopia and all that jazz.
So then, faced with a single payer system, of course, the doctors create a maze of artificial barriers for new interns, engage in subtle sabotage, create inefficiencies, etc and after a while, voila, some people get to wait in queues for some elective surgeries even if the funding of the system ends up as high per capita as in other places. Then the profiteers go to court "because they are worried about their inability to help the patients" (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) and back to greed mongering private insurance system we go. All these "bleeding heart, eager to help" doctors rush to the private system with their coats fluttering behind them, thinking yachts and sea-side estates, something the public system would require them to actually work for. Drug prices quarduple. Some time later the economic situation cycles for the worse (as its nature), a lot of uninsured people die and if your country still has any real politicians who at least make the motions of caring for populace they introduce this brand new idea of single-payer insurance... you get the picture.
It is a struggle between the need for medical coverage to society and the selfish and callous greed of most of the "medical profession", drug industry and the insurance middle-men. Medicine has the unique quality of being able to squeeze people out of their last penny because the alternative is death. And because many illnesses are of rapid progrression, no "shopping around" for best bang for the buck is possible, this feature of course circumventing the competition process of capitalism.
Private medical care sounds reasonable to the ears of some, but a racket is still a racket by any name. One has to be prepared to fight the greed worshippers tooth and nail. They are a clever bunch, politically, and are "supportive" of the public system (in voice only) when they see themselves on the defensive in public opinion. But as soon as they manage to create an opening, they will quickly wrap themselves in "best ways to help patients" rethoric and manouver furiously with luxury cars and villas in Bahams on their minds.
This was a reply to your insistence that the social problems which password policies attempt to address could be solved by the software you mentioned. To which I again provided a social (as in people circumventing the not-so-idiot-proof heuristics) difficulty rendering such software either ineffective or (if you manage to fix the heuristics) too intrusive and expensive from the organisational/support point of view. To which you accused me of "complaining about technical problems". You can't just pick a select, out-of-context quote from mid-thread and ignore the rest to try to prove your point.
For those not processing 6M online transactions a year, the verification process is pretty lax (so I am guessing most businesses don't even bother).
Most companies I deal with (some also have POS systems) use a specialized terminal device provided by a bank which has its own CPU/printer/PIN-pad etc. Most of these have either serial or LAN input which you can use to feed the sale amount through but not the CC# itself which has to be swiped at the device. They also have a heavilly encrypted dialup or LAN outbound connection (in case you need speed for large number of transactions although dialup is suprisingly fast). Simple, effective and eliminates all the headaches for the business. The POS operation is a breeze, they just swipe at the terminal instead of the POS PC. I've seen this system deployed in about 95% retailers around here in Canada. Only very few of the very large chains use their own CC processing software. No one sane stores any CC/Debit Card info on any of their systems, they let the bank take all the flack should something go south.
The same standard requires that paper receipts be physically secured
And the way it is usually done today is by... having all the credit card processing farmed out to either a bank or a specialized on-line firm. I guess for most businesses it is way too much trouble to bother, which I assume is the main purpose of the standard: pork for those who lobbied for it. And now we return to our regularly scheduled discussion of average, non-defense contractor, password policy.
One of the prerequisites that is required by *any* credit card merchant is that *only* those who need access to certain credit card information can access it. For those who accept online transactions, this is usually done via a system of internal firewalls, and strong access control measures (secure, secret passwords are a minimum, but the cost of failure is high enough I usually back this up with a MAC implimentation, such as SE-Linux).
Which should be achieved by having a write-only system dealing with these transactions, separate from all the others and with one specially authorized admin. And biometrics or something other then dumb passwords. You are talking special requirements again which fall way above and beyond what most people will do. Look, all of this crap came about as soon as people started believing that computers are either cure-all things made out of magical pixie dust or the tool of the Devil himself. To return to planet Earth you should ask yourself the simple question of "how was it done before they had computers"? Usually you will find out that thay had a shoe-box labeled "credit card transactions".
We could go on like this all day, but it would be cruel to pick on a dyslexic.
Ay carramba! Today the Slashdot edit box seems to be combating me mightily. That fiendish thing was always my nemesis. In most of my longer posts, when I am not too lazy, I engage in cut-and-paste dance with the OpenOffice. Alas today.. well.. what can I say. You got me.
If you are such a small business that you cannot afford to actually look at your security footing, etc. and write a reasonable plan, then obviously the keylogger issue doesn't apply to you anyway. In that case, you probably don't have an MIS department, so the MIS department won't have access to the password history.
I deal with all sizes of businesses, small and large. In small business they cant affort much of anything. In medium size, where a small MIS departament exists, the provisions are precursory. Only very large companies can afford the sort of tracking scenarios (all involving multiple people in the same position or a dedicated "security" team which monitors admins). The policy I speak of applies to a vast majority of small and medium size companies and in some cases to certain areas of large ones. In a small company the password tracking is simply done by the "IT guy" who is also usually the GM of the business or its comptroller.
We are talking about giving the entire MIS department access to all the user accounts without any real accountability or tracking in place.
That is a strawman. I never advocated the entire MIS to have it, merely that some security team within MIS should deal with this.
If password tracking is what you want to impliment, why not just store them in a shadow directory, (like shadow passwords in UNIX) as plain text? That would easily enough solve the problem.
There is no problem on UNIX systems at all. Root can "su" to any user without the need for passwords (until you run into the accounting package where they asked you to do some testing or what not and which has its own password... and so on).
Part of the problem is this. If you don't know my password, you can access my account by changing my password. But now I cannot access my password until it is changed again.
Only a retard would do so. Keyboard sniffer is #1 choice of all hackers/villains with a brain. Then I log in as you. If I want an additional level of blame to be laid on you, I will login remotely from your station via remote-control software. All of this is trivially easy and you can googe for HOWTOs meant for idiot script kiddies.
Personally, I think that any time you require a shared password because of flawed technology (which we know exists) then this needs to be stated as the exception rather than the rule. These passwords can then be written down and stored in a safe-deposit box. But the organization needs to understand the risks.
Here is the problem: people are dumb. Computer users are dumber. If you make a policy which applies to this and that, and then has an exception here and there. It will never be followed. If you make a simple rule of "call extension 671 to change any password on anything" it will be followed. If you think otherwise you must be working in some sort of utopian Shangri-La Inc.
As you pointed out, good password security is pretty cheap. I think it would be pretty easy to modify/bin/passwd to require that at least x number of characters must change on each password change. And maintaining a salted, hashed history for checking against prior passwords might be reasonably secure. These are not hard problems. And the only time I need to access the passwords of users is when they need me to log in *in their absense* and then I make it clear that they should change their passwords later.
Again, reality calling! That software was available for ages, and this is what happens: users try to set new password, the system says "add more punctuation or make it uppercase or use numbers or what not", so they either use "passwordABC123" or "password123ABC" next time or make up something actually secure and... forget it 5 minutes later. Next time they have it glued to the monitor on a sticky note in black fat marker. I am beginning to wonder how much experience with real people do you have.
Slashdot Mirror
But of course, he would like CBC TV replaced with the FOX channel and CBC Radio with Clear Channel + Rush Limbaugh. Then he would sing praises of the new arrangement being "fair and balanced" and "open minded", like, say, Ann Coulter.
I was actually taken aback by this. Since I am rather liberal in many of my opinions I imagined that people who indentify with progressive views, who claim to be "reality-based" and purport to think logically, proponents of small business over multinationals, advocates of consumer choice, champions of efficient and effective free markets, self-professed Linux users (most Rio systems worked with Linux out-of-the-box - one of the main reasons I bought mine) and the like would be with me on this one. Boy, was I ever mistaken. I am starting to suspect that the Slashdot crowd is far more concerned with appearance of being progressive rather then following the tenets to their logical conclusion, and watch out if these ideas happen get in the way of cappuccino consumption or the latest fashionable gizmo from the same very callous multi-nationals about which they nodded vigorously when I was exposing their detremental to humanity at large nature. Just look at their reaction when I dared to suggest that maybe, just maybe, they were influenced an itsy-bitsy tiny wee bit by the ever-present Apple marketing circus.
Go figure.
I never argued that iPod is "bad". I merely argue that its market penetration and its power to destroy competing choices is not based on rational factors, such as its features, but on hoopla, hype and herd mentality. A majority of iPod buyers have little or no clue about the tech, they are buying a "trendy brand". And it is those buyers, not the minority who does so out of their true product knowledge, which is making the marketplace miserable for everybody else, since it would not matter what features Rio could come up with, they would still lack the "celebrity appeal", "trendiness" and exclusive contracts with major labels available to a "hip" company like Apple. So people who want choices based on the features and the tech are out of luck, trumped by those who prefer looks, hype and fashion conformity. That is my beef with the iPod crowd, even though I do realize that some of them are making their choice for rational reasons.
But I argue elsewhere that flash players are now cheap to the point of being disposable, so your choice is not being restricted too much.
Not really, I was not concerned about the cost but the feature-set. Sadly all those cheap flash based players feature ... a low-end set of functions. Majority also require propretary, DRM-crippled, software to be used to transfer files or have some other egregious gaps in their functionality.
Sure. List all those locally-supported, excellent sound quality, user customizable EQ equipped, meta-data based selection capable, flash based, expandable storage MP3 players with no DRM that you can buy in Best Buy or Future Shop (here in Canada). How about gap-less playback HDD-based MP3 players?
How does none sound, jackass? Rio was it.
Oh and MacOS is (and always was) #1 for cappuccino-drinking, beret wearing, artsy-fartsy snobs, its recent foray into technically literate crowd notwithstanding. Just so you know.
If only they had a few year lead on Apple when they introduced the Rio, or perhaps if the iPod had be restricted to a computer platform that had only 3% market penetration when it was released, then maybe poor Rio would have had a chance against the marketing machine that made the Newton the king of the PDA market.
... and who had pockets deeper by a few billion dollars then Rio. And Newton was the king for a while as it was the only PDA long before technology made PalmPilot (or any other practical PDA) possible. Look genius, not all marketing campaigns work. That is why companies try all sorts of crap, one after another, to take over some slice of the sheeple market. Unlike those who focus on one particular segment, like Rio who only made MP3 players, Apple tried one thing after another until something stuck. They could afford it.
Let me explain it to you in some simpler way which might even penetrate that thick skull of yours: how many Rio ads did you see versus the iPod ones? How many celebrities did you see peddling iPods because its "soo kewl, man!" vs Rios? Ponder that and you will get closer to understanding the anatomy of hype-driven marketing. Apple has had that nailed down for ages. There is nothing technologically superior about an iPod. People like its UI but even that is in many cases a rationalization of a pre-determined choice instilled by ads and peer pressure. In a true free market where consumers are educated, there are hundreds of choices and no dominant players. That is what the theory of capitalism claims. And now back to examining your regularly scheduled apologisms for your personally favourite oligopolies .... (and we all know that because they are your personal choices, that makes it all right, no?)
I for one support increasing taxes to prop up Rio. And making successful products like the iPod and sliced bread illegal.
That is too bad as no sane person would do so. But to each their own. I only point out the failure of the capitalist marketplace resulting in increasing consolidation of one company's market-share, reducing the consumer choice and undue influence of brainwashing techniques and you go off and try to make a case for selective taxation and banning of competing products. Logic is not your strong suite, I see, but judging from the examples you've chosen and their presentation, throwing tantrums and strong-arm tactics are. Also I am getting a strong impression that you would consider a 100% market penetration (aka monopoly) by a "successful" product to be quite all right as long as you personally like that product -- and to Hell with anyone else, no?
Maybe I don't want my bread sliced? Maybe I don't want to pick one of the numerous loaves of bread that are still available unsliced.
Those are still available on store shelves. The choices Rio offered are no longer there. Perhaps mail-order, no-returns, pig-in-a-poke from some manufacturer overseas. But no longer "pick another one of the numerous choices" conveniently. They are not only not numerous, they are non-existent.
Maybe I just want to stamp my feet and cry a river into my diapers!
Your mental breakdowns and the resulting wetness of your diapers are none of my concern.
Yes indeed and somehow we get people here screaming "iPod pwnz j00" as if anyone not choosing an iPod was some sort of incompetent loser. Rio, unlike Apple had a large product line with many types of players, some disk based, some flash. It is a sad day when all these choices are taken off the market. Less consumer choice is never a good thing.
Potential purchasers should also be aware that the ipod is also a bad choice if you want a blender, a load bearing beam in a skyscraper, or a vegetarian alternative for a dinner party.
You are attempting to make it sound as if I was advocating that all iPod users should use flash systems. You must have missed my explicit indication as to this being my personal preference. It is the iPod users who seem to demand that I conform to their view of things, not the other way around. And it is them who appear to be glad when alternatives vanish. I would never cheer if Apple took iPod off the market because I do understand that there are poeple for whom the Apple way is right. But to allow themselves to get brainwashed to the point where they consider their choice to be the last word in fashion and trendiness and everybody else as "losers" is going way too far. Such members of the "iPod pwnz" crowd are indeed the lemmings I accuse them of being.
I would assume if there are fonts for the menus and it is a modern firmware, the same fonts would be used for the song titles. But I never tried so don't take my word for it.
I thought these things were integrated into one these days and it was the main "selling feature" of iTunes. But since I do not use the stuff, I was probably mistaken.
May I point out to you that it is the grand-parent poster here with "iPod pwn3d the world!" or some such, not me. I can understand people who like iTunes and think iPod is best for them. But just listen to yourself: "and it is a better solution for most people". If that does not scream "kool-aid drinker" I am not sure what would. You are in no position to speak for "most people". "Most people" are technology illiterate and are perpetual victims of ads-driven brainwashing, brand worship and similar gems of consumerism in any field. That is how you get multi-national corporations making billions of dollars by "manufacturing" brand-name beef patties on a bun.
Yes it is, but not a valid one.
Not all labour is valid from the trade point of view and neither are all the representations of labour or property. For example a thief also has to work on his "art" and yet his labour is not a valid object of trade as per the rules of society. Coming back to the virtual sword, that representation is incomplete and not valid from a point of view of trade. It can be only useful if a lot of other external conditions are met. In case of currency, the bank is not allowed to arbitrarily remove or add zeros to your balance because that would alter the amount of physical property to which the representation is supposedly linked. In case of the the virtual sword the game company is perfectly within their rights to delete or to make 10000 swords like that at any time. Thus the one-to-one relationship of the representation is broken. Or to put it in the old fashioned way: fools gold.
Trading in such "representations" is a trade in phonies.
Also note that even if those additional conditions were met, the representation on its own is still just an abstract and immaterial. It is the trade of labour/goods that matters.
Sure the labor isn't digging trenches, but it is still effort... If someone paid me to sit and watch TV all day, would that make it ok to steal the money, peanuts, beanie babies, or "pepsi-points" I earned at it?
No it would not because you are reversing the logic of the argument. The peanuts and the other things are physical objects and your "labour" is (if someone was silly enough to consider it such) directly exchanged for those things. It would only be the case of either stupidity of the "payer" or a case of fraud on your part should you have somehow convinced him to do so by chickanery and mis-representation. In which case your "effort" would not be a valid object of trade.
In the case of the virtual sword, what was "stolen" is an inadequate and invalid representation of some sort of labour. Something which should not be a valid subject to trade and thus not being able to be "stolen". The game company could simply issue another sword to the victim at $0 cost with no real-world side-effects.
In your "get paid to watch TV" example, should someone steal your beanie babies, there is noone who can re-issue them to you at $0 cost.
What brands do you have? My Rio does not require any subscription service or other crap and its menu comes in 20 languages or so. iPods on the other hand cant live without iTunes so I am not sure how much appeal they would have in places where you cannot subscribe to its on-line store.
You missed the point. It is my personal impression of iPod "system". The parent/grand-parent posters treat this like it is a winner-takes-all game and the iPod was the obvious unquestionable "winner" because ... well because ... "we pwn j00!" .. or something like it. I merely emphasized the fact that other people have other preferences and that hailing a "victory" by one brand while considering a mono-culture and lack of consumer choice to be a good thing is brainless. Some apparently took exception to that.
But, you're seeing it the wrong way, people wanted iTunes because it is elegant and easy to use, and it worked exceptionally well with the iPod, which also had a great interface that was easy and relatively intuitive to most people.
Again this is highly subjective. Rios were MP3 players. iPods are "lifestyle/way of doing things/packaged service/software/hardware suite". I can see some might like that kind of thing but it is by no means the only choice. I prefer my MP3 players to be actual players and do not require additional software. I want them to be standard USB storage devices which work on any USB enabled system. And i have no use for iTunes.
As for HDD over Flash, lots of people wanted to store large (5GB+) amounts of music and Flash hasn't gotten there; yet.
True but then some prefer not to have mechanical drives in their MP3 players. Again a matter of choice, one of such choices which are slowly diminishing with the "victories" of iPod monoculture.
And, there are lots of people who don't see FAT-formatted SD cards as an advantage, but yet another thing to buy, break, lose.
This is a red herring, one does not buy an expandable MP3 player if one has no use for expansion cards. FAT is the only system which is universally readable/writeable by all OSs.
And, I'm not sure why you care what files are named, it's the meta-data that counts.
That is because I keep them organized in the file system not in some iTunes monstrosity.
The Rio Karma and Forge were good products, but the iPod was better and has kept getting better
No these were merely different, something which seems iPod users cannot stand.
Stop acting as if every iPod owner is the victim of 'brainless hype and marketing'
Thei iPod lover's behaviour suggests many of them are
and accept that Rio failed to bring to market a player that had a great feature set, a great interface,
False
Bingo. The masses want yet another lock-in subscription service to be addicted to. We were talking about lemmings, were we not?
Face it, Rio got flanked on almost every front.
On the subscription/DRM crapola front they did get creamed. Too bad I have no use for any of it.
And technology was definitely a place that Rio lost.
Really? How so? Shorter battery life? Lower sound quality? Inability to play/shuffle/reorganize storage? Lack of expansion options? Name it, I seem to have trouble seeing what do you mean. Unless of course you were referring to the "personalized faceplates in 207 colours!" and Guci carrying cases.
Here is where we differ significantly as to what MP3 player is supposed to be. I do not want iTunes, iTMS, iCrap and iCorporateTit. MP3 player for me is supposed to be a practical, inexpensive, easy to operate, expandable, low maintenance, long battery life, mechanical shock-immune, no-add-on-software required device which appears as plain USB storage to my PC. Linux, Mac, Windoze, whatever. iPod is not an MP3 player, it is a whole software suite/"way of doing things" which does not appeal to me in the slightest.
ep, all those Lemmings, you're so much better I guess because you are a counter-culture revolutionary.
It is not question of being better, it is a question of having a mass-hyped "trend" smother alternative choices in the marketplace and create a culture of lemming-like conformism and deep dislike for alternatives. Witness the parent of this thread and all the other posts in the vain of "We pwn j00!" as if the Rio vs Apple was some kind of a football match.
If you are going to deny the power of marketing hype over everything else in Western consumer society, then there is very little I can do to enlighten you. Perhaps you noticed that the arguments for the iPod here (along with emotional reponses of modding contrary opinions "flamebait") are mostly based on "Kewl looks, man!", "we pwn j00s Azz!" etc, and somehow very few seem to be listing and contrasting the technical features of Rios vs iPods.
I have the Rio forge and I find the interface simple, effective and efficent. After all what the heck are you trying to do with an MP3 player? It is supposed to let you navigate to a song/album/artist/playlist and play it. While granted, some knock-off MP3 players manage to make even that difficult, I think the bar is really low on this and there are 5 buttons (plus menu, volume and power) to operate on the Rio. Play/Stop/Back/Forward and Select which double as menu controls of up/down/left/right. I cannot think of a simpler and more efficient setup. I find the iPod "scroll wheels", touch sensors and what not a bunch of whiz-bang frills, bells and whistles which bring nothing of value to the equation (plus the fact that iPods are HDD based heavy and sizeable devices with non-user servicable battery/storage).
I have a Forge and I love it. Dont forget the amazing sound quality that little devil puts out and the very good EQ that it has. It is a very well designed piece of hardware and although it has some (minor) glitches I am very happy with it. I think the failure of Rio must have something to do with some imbecilic beancounting (brought on by pin-headed "executives" surrendering to iPod hype) because the tech was very good.
"Looks" are subjective. For me the iPod is ugly. Furthermore I found Rio Forge far more practical (for me) then any iPod. You are projecting your own personal preferences on everyone else. iPod is the "winner" and consumers are losers because of the sad success of marketing hoopla and hype coming from Apple combined with big-box sales system over our plain consumer choice. Apple managed to make people believe that owning an iPod is a "status" or "fashion" symbol. At one time cigarettes held that dubious distinction. And bell-bottoms at another. So today its iPod and thy name is Lemming.
Right. Plays music and can organize it. So can any Rio. All the other features? For me iPod loses hands down. And style and grace are in the eye of the beholder.
Expensive, yes.
Overpriced hype, yes.
Awesome, yes.
I beg to disagree. Much bigger then a flash based Rio, like my Forge. Much heavier. Uses non user serviceable battery. Non user serviceable storage. Gets me nothing of imporance which the Rio does not already have, i.e. play good quality music in MP3 format for 18 hours on 1AAA cell. Also the rio uses plain FAT formatted SD cards and mounts as removeable storage under any Linux/Windoze with USB. And the files are named as I please as opposed to some wacko sequential renaming scheme iPod uses. I do not need any special software to manage the Rio. iPod would make me use their (unwelocme by me) iTunes junk.
Worth it? You bet your sweet (or unsweet) music collect
I would not use an HDD based iPod if it was given to me. And that is not only due to my natural aversion to brainless hype and marketing over everything else but for the reasons I mentioned.
In your uncritical fawning over a brand and submission to marketting hype you forgot (as the Apple salesmen intended) that many people have different preferences and requirements which the Rio addressed. The "victory" of iPod lemmings is the prime example of how capitalism is being corrupted by hype over substance.
Perheaps you should read some:
Far more profit opportunities. In a private system you get to charge well-off, healthy, young people a lot of money hoping they dont get sick and you get to refuse insurance to those you dont think you can make money on. You also get to charge astronomical sums, claiming that some poor wretches who you did stich up and kept for 2 days in a hospital you own are making you go broke (that is why doctors own these hospitals and clinics, they do it due to their general poverty). In a single-payer system, there is no profit for the insurers. Blasphemy. Communist utopia and all that jazz.
So then, faced with a single payer system, of course, the doctors create a maze of artificial barriers for new interns, engage in subtle sabotage, create inefficiencies, etc and after a while, voila, some people get to wait in queues for some elective surgeries even if the funding of the system ends up as high per capita as in other places. Then the profiteers go to court "because they are worried about their inability to help the patients" (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) and back to greed mongering private insurance system we go. All these "bleeding heart, eager to help" doctors rush to the private system with their coats fluttering behind them, thinking yachts and sea-side estates, something the public system would require them to actually work for. Drug prices quarduple. Some time later the economic situation cycles for the worse (as its nature), a lot of uninsured people die and if your country still has any real politicians who at least make the motions of caring for populace they introduce this brand new idea of single-payer insurance... you get the picture.
It is a struggle between the need for medical coverage to society and the selfish and callous greed of most of the "medical profession", drug industry and the insurance middle-men. Medicine has the unique quality of being able to squeeze people out of their last penny because the alternative is death. And because many illnesses are of rapid progrression, no "shopping around" for best bang for the buck is possible, this feature of course circumventing the competition process of capitalism.
Private medical care sounds reasonable to the ears of some, but a racket is still a racket by any name. One has to be prepared to fight the greed worshippers tooth and nail. They are a clever bunch, politically, and are "supportive" of the public system (in voice only) when they see themselves on the defensive in public opinion. But as soon as they manage to create an opening, they will quickly wrap themselves in "best ways to help patients" rethoric and manouver furiously with luxury cars and villas in Bahams on their minds.
This was a reply to your insistence that the social problems which password policies attempt to address could be solved by the software you mentioned. To which I again provided a social (as in people circumventing the not-so-idiot-proof heuristics) difficulty rendering such software either ineffective or (if you manage to fix the heuristics) too intrusive and expensive from the organisational/support point of view. To which you accused me of "complaining about technical problems". You can't just pick a select, out-of-context quote from mid-thread and ignore the rest to try to prove your point.
Most companies I deal with (some also have POS systems) use a specialized terminal device provided by a bank which has its own CPU/printer/PIN-pad etc. Most of these have either serial or LAN input which you can use to feed the sale amount through but not the CC# itself which has to be swiped at the device. They also have a heavilly encrypted dialup or LAN outbound connection (in case you need speed for large number of transactions although dialup is suprisingly fast). Simple, effective and eliminates all the headaches for the business. The POS operation is a breeze, they just swipe at the terminal instead of the POS PC. I've seen this system deployed in about 95% retailers around here in Canada. Only very few of the very large chains use their own CC processing software. No one sane stores any CC/Debit Card info on any of their systems, they let the bank take all the flack should something go south.
And the way it is usually done today is by ... having all the credit card processing farmed out to either a bank or a specialized on-line firm. I guess for most businesses it is way too much trouble to bother, which I assume is the main purpose of the standard: pork for those who lobbied for it. And now we return to our regularly scheduled discussion of average, non-defense contractor, password policy.
Which should be achieved by having a write-only system dealing with these transactions, separate from all the others and with one specially authorized admin. And biometrics or something other then dumb passwords. You are talking special requirements again which fall way above and beyond what most people will do. Look, all of this crap came about as soon as people started believing that computers are either cure-all things made out of magical pixie dust or the tool of the Devil himself. To return to planet Earth you should ask yourself the simple question of "how was it done before they had computers"? Usually you will find out that thay had a shoe-box labeled "credit card transactions".
Ay carramba! Today the Slashdot edit box seems to be combating me mightily. That fiendish thing was always my nemesis. In most of my longer posts, when I am not too lazy, I engage in cut-and-paste dance with the OpenOffice. Alas today.. well.. what can I say. You got me.
I deal with all sizes of businesses, small and large. In small business they cant affort much of anything. In medium size, where a small MIS departament exists, the provisions are precursory. Only very large companies can afford the sort of tracking scenarios (all involving multiple people in the same position or a dedicated "security" team which monitors admins). The policy I speak of applies to a vast majority of small and medium size companies and in some cases to certain areas of large ones. In a small company the password tracking is simply done by the "IT guy" who is also usually the GM of the business or its comptroller.
We are talking about giving the entire MIS department access to all the user accounts without any real accountability or tracking in place.
That is a strawman. I never advocated the entire MIS to have it, merely that some security team within MIS should deal with this.
If password tracking is what you want to impliment, why not just store them in a shadow directory, (like shadow passwords in UNIX) as plain text? That would easily enough solve the problem.
There is no problem on UNIX systems at all. Root can "su" to any user without the need for passwords (until you run into the accounting package where they asked you to do some testing or what not and which has its own password ... and so on).
Part of the problem is this. If you don't know my password, you can access my account by changing my password. But now I cannot access my password until it is changed again.
Only a retard would do so. Keyboard sniffer is #1 choice of all hackers/villains with a brain. Then I log in as you. If I want an additional level of blame to be laid on you, I will login remotely from your station via remote-control software. All of this is trivially easy and you can googe for HOWTOs meant for idiot script kiddies.
Personally, I think that any time you require a shared password because of flawed technology (which we know exists) then this needs to be stated as the exception rather than the rule. These passwords can then be written down and stored in a safe-deposit box. But the organization needs to understand the risks.
Here is the problem: people are dumb. Computer users are dumber. If you make a policy which applies to this and that, and then has an exception here and there. It will never be followed. If you make a simple rule of "call extension 671 to change any password on anything" it will be followed. If you think otherwise you must be working in some sort of utopian Shangri-La Inc.
As you pointed out, good password security is pretty cheap. I think it would be pretty easy to modify /bin/passwd to require that at least x number of characters must change on each password change. And maintaining a salted, hashed history for checking against prior passwords might be reasonably secure. These are not hard problems. And the only time I need to access the passwords of users is when they need me to log in *in their absense* and then I make it clear that they should change their passwords later.
Again, reality calling! That software was available for ages, and this is what happens: users try to set new password, the system says "add more punctuation or make it uppercase or use numbers or what not", so they either use "passwordABC123" or "password123ABC" next time or make up something actually secure and ... forget it 5 minutes later. Next time they have it glued to the monitor on a sticky note in black fat marker. I am beginning to wonder how much experience with real people do you have.
Fina