Why corporations suck.

A while ago, ok a long while ago, I worked for a large corporation, one of the largest in the world, with over 300.000 employees world-wide not counting all the contract workers they hire to keep their staffing costs down.

It sucked.

I thought it wouldn't but it did and I should've known better because I'd worked for another large corporation ten years earlier, another large corporation with over 100.000 employees world-wide, and that didn't hire people directly but used an agency so they could wash their hands of any claim regarding salary, promotions, etc.

In both cases working there was like working for McDonalds only worse because the scheduling was less flexible and you didn't get any free lunch, or any employee discount worth mentioning.

Enter Archos, a corporation that develops, builds and sells portable media players.

I never worked for them (probably never will) but from the way they work their corporate crap, you know I'd hate it.

Last spring I got myself an Archos 605 Wifi portable media player, 80Gb of storage (on HDD) and was supposed to play, well media.

The normal cost for the unit was 400$ but I paid 200$ for it minus some Future Shop card I had with about 50$ on it, a Christmas gift from my sister.

The issue is that Archos do not sell you a complete product. They sell you a product that is purposely crippled by having some of the more popular codecs be disabled, and having you pay an extra 20~40$ to enable it with a code.

To make matters worse, the operating system they put on these units is quite possibly the worst to come out of a non-Microsoft company, in other words it sucks.

It sucks so much that it took me several attempts to do something simple (connect the unit to my wireless network) because the OS is flawed.

You see, a WEP Shared Key passcode can be in one of two formats, either ASCII (text) or Hexadecimal (base 16 numbers). Like any other device, it will take the ASCII passcode, translate it into hexadecimal and send it to the router for it to authorize, or deny access.

The problem is that the Archos software is so idiotic that it mistranslates ASCII so that the Hexadecimal string it sends to the router is wrong (bitch!).

The only way to figure this out was to change it to hex on my router and notice that the hex string on the router was different from the one the Archos genarated.

An online translator proved that indeed it was the Archos that had the error.

This should've been corrected EONS ago on a device that actually carries WIFI as part of its name. Instead Archos, when ansked about it, simply replied that WEP is not supported.

A bold claim considering the OS has a WEP option for the wireless connection.

I think they were just lazy, or worse...

GREEDY (and bastards...)

Do I like my Archos device, sure, it plays vanilla divx files which is pretty cool on my daily train commute.

Will I buy another one when invariably this one brakes.

HELL NO!