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fscking sony...

25 08 06 - 11:40 This post contains no technical content. If you are offended by that, please do not read this.

You know what? Right now, I think Sony's reputation has completely crashed down. Not that it was too high before anyway.

What have they done?

• Dell batteries - everyone knows this one. I need not cover it. Six reported explosions, many more unreported.

• Apple batteries - a few have experienced problems. No explosions yet, just cells expanding to twice their normal size, and pushing the metal plate off, and a few meltdowns - no fires yet. I'm glad my PowerBook has a LG battery in it.

• They also made the infamous PowerBook 5300 lithium ion batteries as well. How nice of them. (One prototype caught fire at Apple. No released versions did, however, because Apple delayed the shipping, and instead shipped them with Ni-MH batteries. The whole 5300 series was a complete disaster.)

• Palm touchscreens - without something like WhineHack installed, my Palm TX screen makes a loud whining sound. Why? "It's a Sony."

• PS3 - You can buy an Xbox 360 and a Wii, and have money left over. Or you can buy a PS3.

• Sony also attempted to use the PS2's yabasic interpreter to argue it was a home computer as it was programmable, and dodge import taxes.

• Proprietary formats - Betamax for one. Atrac3 for another. Conveniently, only Sony stuff seemed to be able to work fine with them.

• XCP rootkit - Windows users probably deserve it - but they can get a nasty DRM rootkit installed on their machines just by playing a Sony audio CD on their drives.

• Un-copyable CDs - Sure they're not copyable (easily) on a PC, but they work fine in a Mac. With a little fiddling. Still annoying. I bought the CD, and I should be able to add it to my iTunes library. As long as I don't share it on P2P services (although it makes me want to.)

• Sony CD players - my Sony CD walkman seems completely unable to play CD-Rs or CD-RWs. I've seen CD players that can't do CD-RWs, but CD-Rs...

Probably more that I can't think of right now. Although, round about now, I think they are worse than Microsoft. Yeah, that is really bad.