words that didn't need inventing, part 5714328 of an infinte series

[waider]

"podslurping". This guy has not only coined (or maybe just promulgated) this inane word, he's written an application to copy files to your iPod. Not only that, but it comes in two versions, one with, and I quote, "reduced functionality". Now, I could be missing something here, but when I snagged an iPod off a coworker and plugged it into my desktop box, it showed up as a removable storage device; copying files to it in the fashion described was simply a matter of dragging them to the appropriate folder. Yeesh.

Comments

[mskala.livejournal.com]

Playing devil's advocate here: I think the coined word is specific to the industrial espionage application, and the point of the software is that it can be automated to grab interesting files without a human having to choose them, and the result is very fast. You can't dig through the all the folders looking for "dirt" and click and drag individual files in the same time that the software will do it; and even if that were humanly possible, the spy who would do it would need a lot more training than the spy who simply plugs in the iPod and runs one command.

The guy's point still seems trivial to me, but I don't thinks it's quite as trivial as "Whoo, it's possible to copy files to an iPod!"

[kodi]

Yeah, the place where a slurp.exe would come in really handy is if you were looking for something specific - something that couldn't be copied by slurp.bat:

xcopy /s c:\*.doc
xcopy /s c:\*.xls
xcopy /s c:\*.htm
...

Of course, the problem with slurp.bat is there's no good way to "cripple" it, I suppose. (The other problem with his slurp.exe as written is that if he ran it on the last computer I used for work, he would have gotten my resume, four years worth of performance reviews, and the phone number for my insurance adjuster - oh, and a few MB worth of temporary internet files, of course. Anything juicy was in directories off root, not in "Documents and Settings".)

[ikkyu2.livejournal.com]

I don't know for sure if this is what the app does, but if this is an app that copies music files to your iPod in such a way that they could be played by the iPod, it'd be hugely useful.

Check out the way iTunes stores music files on your iPod. They use some kind of bizarre hash to make it difficult and annoying to manually put music on an iPod or move it to another iPod.

[waider.livejournal.com]

Nah, go back and read the article. The guy's all sensationalist about copying data files out of the office on (shock, horror) an external storage device. As far as music files go, the iPod I did check out was happily storing MP3 files as-is; maybe the AAC files get hashed using a per-iPod key, but I can't tell since i don't have full-time access to the bits myself.