Rockbox on a Sansa Clip+ (2009) was my personal peak for portable music - overtaking ye olde mini-disc player. The newer models all sucked usability-wise in comparison - screen-wise/button-wise etc. etc.
It was 2 colour, only had 6 or 7 buttons, I could completely operate it without looking at it, and Rockbox gave it the two main features I really wanted: flac support and gapless playback.
The main advantage I have now is I can have my entire (digitised) music collection on my phone - mostly ripped from CD's or purchased from Bandcamp, because it's > 400GB, and I think the Sansa Clip+ only supported 8GB maximum back in the day. Was considering digitising stuff we only have on vinyl as there is a USB output on our turntable, but decided to just leave it in its pure form. Plus recording at 1x speed is almost like going back to the dual cassette tape recorder era and high-speed dubbing was 'special'.
Hardware-wise the clip on the back always broke quickly and then the headphone socket went at some point. Went through about 5 of them before they were obsolete/or on eBay for $100s, but were good enough and cheap enough to keep replacing. One interesting upside of the space constraint was that it made you curate your own music collection, and then opt for a different set (particularly after a few new purchases).
Looks like Rockbox now does a heck of a lot more than it used to back in the day. It's great you've breathed additional life into it.
Not that I'm against the idea behind the software, but the amount of name-stealing because it sounds cool (sometimes kind of relevant, sometimes not) that software has done, has totally polluted the original words to the point they sometimes don't show up in search results.
Even the two Steve's and their Apple company had this issue (as did record companies etc. etc.). Try searching for python now and 'nary a snake to be mentioned.
To be fair I'm equally pissed off that a bunch of different pharmaceutical companies re-brand identical molecules with different names for each company and sometimes for different countries even within a single company.
Sometimes all this naming cleverness or arbitrariness just makes the world more confusing for everyone.
The last things the capitalist powers that be want, is any sort of socialism. Profit > people, rather than People > profit.
Just a reminder - socialism does not necessarily imply communism, and and implementation of communism thus far has been extremely corrupt.
I lived the in the UK for a couple of years in the early 2000's, the NHS was awesome. It's now a shallow shell of its former self.
Australia where I'm from is trying to imitate the privitisation of health, but my state-local for-profit hospital just went tits up and has been acquired by the government. Partially because a baby needlessly died because profit > caring about human lives, but it wasn't accountable and used tax havens etc. etc.
Fuckin' mess.
I feel for the the UK, because at their best, they probably had the best socialised healthcare system in the world (partly because their population size afforeded them access to medical equipment that other similar countries in Scandinavia etc. can't quite afford).
The US profit motive trumps well-being and healthcare tied to your employment just screws with our heads for most reasonable people. The people that need the help the most are denied it, whilst for the rich - it's built in.
One also has to wonder how much local and non-local political interference was involved as well, considering most speakers were unlikely to support the 'status quo'.
> One also has to wonder how much local and non-local political interference was involved as well
Most likely very little. To clearly re-iterate the point I made above ...
1. this is a country which requires political and government clearance for events; and
2. they wanted to host a Human Rights conference
1 + 2 = They were lining themselves up for failure from Day Zero. It was merely a case of when, not if.
If there was any "interference", that would merely be icing on the cake.
With a conference topic like that, both they and their international speakers would have been enduring tons of perfectly standard bureaucracy and paperwork whilst government departments trawled through people's LinkedIns and social media ... all standard stuff, none of which would be related to "interference".
The bottom-line reality is they should have hosted it in a country that did not require clearance.
>Of course, many people are building their business on huge AI scaffolding.
It's similar in the way many businesses transitioned their scalability etc. to 'the cloud' starting a couple of decades ago.
It's a combination of loss of control and abdication of responsibility. They can claim to the customer the reason the service went down is now Microsofts or Amazons etc. etc. fault. Ultimately the end-user was the one that ended up losing.
It was a choice. There was something they could do - and keep everything in house, although cost-competiveness becomes an issue at some point and you get priced out of your target market. Everyone loses except for the cloud computing (or now AI) providers.
This guy is a complete dick. He also falsified travel expenses (verifiable via save history) in a Word document so he could complain about an independent local Mayor.
I think most people outside Australia (I'm Australian but have lived in the US for a long time now) wouldn't get this reference.
(Essentially, it's a politician who sockpuppeted his own social media posts to pat himself on the back, inevitably forgetting to change accounts and outting his efforts.)
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