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The Sony/MP3 Saga Continues
Renegade Lisp writes "Sony's rolling out their new line of flash-based music players to the
market these days. More stylish than ever, they surely look like a
serious attempt to regain territory lost to the iPod, and perhaps even
to create the Walkman of the 21st century. And it looks like Sony has
finally given in to consumer pressure: these new "MP3 players" can
finally play MP3 natively, not just Sony's proprietary ATRAC format.
But wait -- you cannot just put your MP3s onto the device, you have to
run them through Sony's obfuscation software first. The obfuscated
files, when installed properly on the device, can be played. But you
can't just move them around, share them with your friends, whatever.
Well, of course the obfuscation scheme has already been broken by a
brave hacker. But is this really the way to create the "Network
Walkman" of the 21st century? Sony, please wake up!"
I've got a beef with Sony. But first, I'm going to jump ahead a bit and talk in general terms about how the deep-seated, unbridled hatred that Sony's hatchet men have for us is visceral and inculcated from cradle to grave. Then, I'll back up and fill in some of the details. Okay, so to start with the general stuff, last summer, I attempted what I knew would be a hopeless task. I tried to convince Sony that the issues surrounding alcoholism are more complex and embedded than it will admit. As I expected, Sony was unconvinced. I am aware that many people may object to the severity of my language. But is there no cause for severity? Naturally, I, not being one of the many morally questionable, besotted cowards of this world, assert that there is, because I have a dream that my children will be able to live in a world filled with open spaces and beautiful wilderness -- not in a dark, sniffish world run by prodigal crooks. No matter what Sony thinks, the objection may still be raised that it's perfectly safe to drink and drive. At first glance, this sounds almost believable. Yet the following must be borne in mind: You don't have to say anything specifically about it for it to start attacking you. All you have to do is dare to imply that we should embrace diversity. To tolerate Sony's beer-guzzling remonstrations simply because they're not packaged and sold as nerdy is to devastate vast acres of precious farmland. Sony's policies are designed to feed blind hatred. And they're working; they're having the desired effect. You may not be aware of this, but anyone who hasn't been living in a cave with his eyes shut and his ears plugged knows that in public, Sony vehemently inveighs against corruption and sin. But when nobody's looking, Sony never fails to prey on people's fear of political and economic instability. So far, this letter has merely identified the ways in which we must publicly distance ourselves from incompetent twaddlers. Now, let me shift gears and start telling you about how Sony coins polysyllabic neologisms to make its shell games sound like they're actually important. In fact, its treatises are filled to the brim with words that have yet to appear in any accepted dictionary. To end this letter, I would like to make a bet with Sony. I will gladly give Sony a day's salary if it can prove that its prank phone calls enhance performance standards, productivity, and competitiveness, as it insists. If Sony is unable to prove that, then its end of the bargain is to step aside while I criticize its beliefs (as I would certainly not call them logically reasoned arguments) publically for their formalistic categories, their spurious claims of neutrality, and their blindness to the abuse of private power. So, do we have a bet, Sony?
...could make better decisions than Sony's people.
Hi - I was a passionate p2p junkie in college, and over 4 years I amassed an RIAA anueryism 3.7 gigs of songs according to my a 5 gig mp3 player
:/
I seriously doubt you own 40 legit gigs. If you're using the iPod for photos, sure I can understand how the gigs get eat up in a hurry, but it's just not like that for even high quality sample rate audio.
I'm certain you'll get modded +5, Interesting or some other travesty of what was once a great community, but the fact is you're just whining.
You rant about the color of your white iPod, or your Bono black one - I can't tell, your self contradictory post has self contradictions from the start - but then say it could be Nyquil green if it has a great interface, playability and reliability. Hint for the clueless: iPod's got all those things.
Anyhow, I'd like to type more, but morons like you have already cost me enough of my life and regret even firing off this response.
ATTENTION: You have 4.88 gigabytes of crap on your hard disk! Delete immediately or face life sentence of stupid.
who finds 98% of british people horribly unattractive? the two girls in the picture on sony's site are horrible. i'm glad i don't live there.
best college pickem site ever: pickem.terrbear.org
The first link points to the new NW-E400 series of Sony flash MP3 players but the story is about an older model (NW-S23). I haven't heard anything about the NW-E400 having this DRM. Can anyone point me to an article or review that proves this? Otherwise, this story is just a troll (and it worked).
Who said Freedom was Fair?
I dont' understand your criticism.
If you really want all that manual intervention, you can do that with iTunes. Create a playlist, drag whatever you want into it sine iTunes allows numerous ways to sort the music, and then set the preference to only load that playlist onto your iPod. Sync. Done.