strap

My first Sony portable player, a Walkman II that I bought new in the summer of 1982, was that same color of red. I thought that it was the coolest thing ever. It took two AA batteries and had an optional external battery pack that held two D cells. With homemade metal tapes it didn't sound half bad, either. If they offer an RH1 in red, I'm in.

I noticed that Parallels Workstation, which is in beta and hasn't been fully fleshed out yet, will allow for Mactel boxes to run Win XP at the same time as Mac OSX. In other words, you won't have to reboot like you do with Bootcamp. I was reading the other day that you will be able to copy and paste files from one OS to the other just by switching your OS. The XP apps, according to those who have played around with this a bit, run at the same speed you would expect for an XP box with a similar configuration. So, at least from a sound file import point of view, a dual OS box like this should make it relatively easy to get wav files out of XP and into whatever Mac app you want. Of course, it would be rather ridiculous to buy XP just so you could run Sonic Stage on your Mac box, but for those of us who have to have XP to do our job, this might be an option, at least for wav import.

Sorry, man. I didn't mean to send that yet, I was starting a reply and got a little distracted. I took absolutely no offense at what you wrote at any time.

You did not sound like one at all. And you're right, the fact that Sony may buy 20% of the memory that Samsung makes next year is a big deal. I read where some of the smaller companies are considering binding together so that they can bargain collectively and get the same discount that Apple is getting and (one would think) that Sony is negotiating for. I guess that the little guys are afraid they'll lose what little market share they already have. And if Sony is bargaining for that much of the production and if it isn't all slated to go to the PSP and will go (at least some of it) to their new players instead, then it looks like Sony is taking their battle with Apple seriously. And battles like that almost always benefit the consumer. I Googled and found another article that had some guy from Samsung saying that they now have a 16GB NAND chip scheduled for release sometime late in '06. Now THAT'S a big chip!

Actually I read several articles before I posted that one. Check this one out. http://today.reuters.com/News/newsArticle....REA-SAMSUNG.xml The interesting part of this story is: "The statement came in response to a Korea Economic Daily report that quoted an unnamed senior official at Samsung as saying Sony had offered to use Samsung's NAND flash chips for its MP3 players to be unveiled next year." Maybe true, maybe not true....but it's still a lot of memory.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=28563 According to the AP news story, Sony may be negotiating with Samsung for their NAND memory in the 8GB flavor. Whoa. Now that's a big chip...

That sysinternals article made me shudder. Essentially Sony is providing a back door into the registry that a hacker could exploit to install malware that would be extremely hard to detect. And then they tried to cover their bases by changing the EULA after the fact. Wow. If you read the posts that follow the article, you'll see lots of people talking about the laws that this breaks all over the world. I would be very surprised if litigation doesn't come out of it, and it's entirely possible that criminal proceedings will arise somewhere. There was already a poster on the sysinternals web site who appears to be an attorney asking for potential plaintiffs to come forward. You can bet that we haven't heard the end of this, either. I'm not trying to sensationalize anything, but IMHO this topic needs to be pinned. Anybody who buys CDs and plays them on their computer should read this. What Sony has done here is bad, bad wrong. Strap

Thank you Kurisu, for the heads up. Let us know what you can, when you can. This is all very frustrating, but that feeling isn't new to any of us.

Right before they started talking about the whole "sharing the excitement" thing, did he say that they were going to concentrate on HD? Or did I hear that wrong?

I know that Minidisc never took off big in the US, and that Sony could discontiue the format and not support it at all here and you wouldn't hear that much about it (except from us), but aren't there millions of minidisc users in Japan? And isn't that Sony's most important market? I have difficulty believing that they are going to dump the whole thing right away without some kind of support. Perhaps some of our members who live in Japan could comment. Is the minidisc entrenched enough in that market to make it difficult for Sony to just dump it? Will everyone there really just jump on the HD bandwagon? The point is that it would seem foolish (and yes, I know that we are talking about Sony) to not provide players/recorders and discs for some time to come, even if they don't put any more development money into the minidisc format. I hope. Also, what's the deveopment cycle like at Sony? How far ahead is their product design? Are there already some prototype 3rd generation Hi-MD recorders? Are the plants that are manufacturing the current Hi-MD stuff the plants that are going off line? How much of the process do they outsource? There are a thousand other manufacturing issues that could influence this decision one way or the other. And maybe Sony will still make Hi-MD stuff for the professional crowd. And maybe they will sell the technology to someone, though it seems like that would be difficult if there are a lot of third party patents involved. I guess that we will know Friday, right? Man oh man, I was really getting jazzed up about those mythical 4-5GB discs.