No, I mean you're trolling in that you basically read nothing about my original comment.
1) You give a response that doesn't meet half of my requirements.
2) You then give a suggestion that's is fundamentally what I said I did in my original response. Congrats, you demonstrated my gripe about the comments on here too in my original response.
I swear, this site jumps on the tactile control bandwagon when it comes to something like cars, but for this thread, it's all "meh, everything's touchscreen these days. Get used to it."
I just stated it above. Because I don't want a touchscreen, I want to eventually replace the battery when it starts going bad, I want a good software experience along with it.
Fiio can't even keep their site in order. They have broken links everywhere. Nothing about it makes me think it isn't just another shitty Chinese-made disposable.
Apple got it right with the original iPod, and your ask, and others, is just to extend it to modern times. A lot of these comments simply aren't helpful, and people chiming in know it. For me, I was looking for
1) Music player that holds a ton of songs.
2) Lossless.
3) No touch screen control.
4) Battery that is long lasting and semi-replaceable.
5) Smaller than modern phones.
6) Great software experience, which for me meant Apple Music compatible.
7) Wired. Not Bluetooth.
A $400 Sony Android-based player doesn't meet 3, 4, nor 5. Most importantly, $400 for a product that doesn't meet some pretty important criteria is ridiculous. A shitty tiny Chinese player isn't going to meet 3, 4, 6 and it'll die on you in a couple of years and you'll be back at square one.
My solution was to buy a 5.5 Gen iPod off eBay ($100), a microSD card carrier (iFlash.xyz - $40), and four microSD cards (Back in my day, $50 each for 256gb). Yes, I had to open the iPod, but yes, it checks all my boxes. And it came in less than the Sony player.
Apple got it right with the original iPod, and your ask, and others, is just to extend it to modern times. A lot of these comments simply aren't helpful, and people chiming in know it. For me, I was looking for
1) Music player that holds a ton of songs.
2) Lossless.
3) No touch screen control.
4) Battery that is long lasting and semi-replaceable.
5) Smaller than modern phones.
6) Great software experience, which for me meant Apple Music compatible.
7) Wired. Not Bluetooth.
A $400 Sony Android-based player doesn't meet 3, 4, nor 5. A shitty tiny Chinese player isn't going to meet 3, 4, 6 and you'll be probably tossing them out after a few years.
My solution was to buy a 5.5 Gen iPod off eBay ($100), a microSD card carrier (iFlash.xyz - $40), and four microSD cards (Back in my day, $50 each for 256gb). Yes, I had to open the iPod, but yes, it checks all my boxes. And it came in less than the Sony player.
Cameras need to connect somewhere, somehow to offload their videos/photos. Whether that's network, USB, SD card, those are all attack vectors. Hell, even the files themselves can act as payloads.
I did a code review for a really, let's just say "challenging", co-worker a few years ago. There was one block of code that was really obtuse and I couldn't figure out why it was there and what it did. So I asked him.
He sighed like he was taking responsibility for a grave sin and I should admire him for it, and said, "I don't know. I copied that from StackOverflow."
I've felt that AI is just an amplification of what we've all done and been through with SO answers.
I worked for the research branch of a children's hospital. At one point, I was brought into vendor evaluations a department wanted to buy. Their tool had something to do with visualizing protein interactions, which was highly networked. It was basically a Neo4j database with a React UI on top of it.
God dammit, yes I have Silverpremium. What the hell? Oh, us-east-1 is down.
Damn, I felt so sad typing that. If us 90's internet builders knew what we were pushing the world towards, I think many of us would have quit and become farmers.
This driving session brought to you by your friends at PepsiCo. There's a Buc-ee's on your route. Would you like to add a stop to grab a cool refreshing 44 oz Mountain Dew Code Red?
Last year, I rented a Kia. I was coasting downhill on a curve and approached a group of bikers. Everything was fine. I was a little below the speed limit, they were in the bike lane, I was in my lane, it was a sunny day. The car detected them as a hazard to avoid and STRAIGHTENED AND LOCKED MY STEERING WHEEL in the middle of the curve turn. I ran into a shallow ditch, but holy shit, what if it took control and over corrected onto an oncoming car?
Years ago, like around 2000, I had a personal blog where I mentioned a local TV celebrity talking about something. The post was about 90% the topic, but in referencing the guy himself, I said something like, "this guy's cool." The local celeb had a trademarked moniker "The Car Czar," and I used it in reference to him.
I swear, on a busy week I had about 5 people reading that blog and they were all coworkers. The next day, I had a 6th visitor from Los Angeles and got excited. Who was this mysterious visitor? I found out when I opened my email and saw a C&D from Universal's lawyers saying I was abusing the trademark.
I blogged the next day, "Wtf, Universal?" and a few days later, got an email from the local celeb apologizing for the overzealous legal team. He was indeed totally cool about it.
Yep. Along with your other comment, I also think they're too big to be messed with for now. Last company I was at maybe serves as predictions of what's to come.
It's also blue collar tech, thirty years old, was the first or second player in the market. It fell behind quickly, but served a niche. The market completely changed on them in the last 15 years or so, lots driven by private equity. The company never changed. Customers kept telling them the old "hookers and blow" sales pitches (literally) isn't going to win renewals and new customers, but they never listened, never fixed things. Now the new PE owners don't know what to do with this boondoggle that never made money.
I've always find it an interesting dichotomy between their public image, retail worker reputation, and corporate reputation. The former two are fantastic. I live in Seattle metro area where they are headquartered, and the last is horrible.
I've had more than one recruiter tell me it's a classic, blue collar, "we've always done it this way" environment since many of their corporate people rose through the ranks in stores, not tech. As I believe Warren Buffet put it, "every company is a tech company these days," so this creates problems. I met someone at a party there about three years ago tell me a data migration went so poorly, they'll have to use two financial systems for at least ten years because the previous system was homegrown with ancient tech.
As an ENTJ, the later would drive me crazy, and I've declined when recruiters want to talk to me about such and such manager position at Costco.
Thanks for doing this. I don't know if this is still the case, but I looked into high end consumer headphones ($700+) about three years ago and concluded almost all of them had a bad sustainability problem.
I looked at cosmetic repairability and battery replacement. All of them were impossible or near impossible to officially get non-electronic parts for. If you dig enough, you might be able to find sources for non-electronic parts.
For batteries, one or two, Focal Batys, I remember is one, had a battery swap program like Apple does. Some like Sony were quasi end-user serviceable. Some gave you like a $100-$150 credit on a new one if you sent the old one in. Bower Wilkins was the worst. If you needed repair or if your battery was dead, their response to me was, "We don't do that."
I found the whole thing hypocritical. All but one or two were based in Europe and touted sustainability commitments on their sites, but their replacement policies did not back it up.
I briefly attended a CSU in the 90's and this was well discussed even back then with predicted population declines. There's just too many CSUs. You'll always need the ones like Stanislaus and Bakersfield to serve their communities and it turns out, they're the ones doing ok. However, there's too many in LA and SF, and the situation is not helped by housing costs in those cities. SFSU itself has had -30% enrollment in the past 10 years.
The CSU system is going to have to to make tough consolidation decisions soon because you can't have declining urban and suburban campuses at the same time.
We all know Google search has been broken for a long, long time. SEO trash will fill up your first page with results from trash content generation sites that repeat the same thing, usually flat out wrong. Actual meaningful results are buried deep, if Google will even let out of the "In order to show you the most relevant results" hell hole.
My experience with AI searches is that they'll still be wrong a lot of times, but it will condense/flatten the content generating trash sites and give me alternatives from these deeper results. What I'm looking for is usally in there.
1) You give a response that doesn't meet half of my requirements. 2) You then give a suggestion that's is fundamentally what I said I did in my original response. Congrats, you demonstrated my gripe about the comments on here too in my original response.