The Surgery

Has Sony learnt nothing from dodgy techno-social experiments like ATRAC and SonicStage? Good grief. The latest so-called Walkman phones come with proprietary “Disc2Phone” software for transferring music from your PC or Mac.

Why? Excellent question my friend.

When you connect the phone to your PC via the supplied USB cable, it looks like a USB storage device; you should just be able to plug the phone in and use your file explorer of choice to drag and drop files into the phone’s memory or storage card. This is as complicated as it needs to be.

Sony, we don’t want more programs installed on our systems just for transferring files between devices.

Unfortunately the “Playback failed” bug that I (and many other owners of SE mobiles) reported only seems to be fixed by using Sony’s Disc2Phone software to transfer files between PC and mobile.

And of course it only comes as a Windows installer, despite the alleged “PC Suite” software. (It definitely doesn’t install on my Ubuntu desktop which happens to run on a PC.) So now I find myself maintaining a Windows machine simply to move MP3 music files and podcasts to my telephone. Well … not maintaining it exclusively for this, but you get the picture…

Also, pity help Mac users unless you’re running some form of Windows virtual machine, like Parallels. No Mac software to be seen.

Similarly, the latest TTR Gadget of the Week is the new Sony B100 MP3 player & music recorder… looks like a great little unit, and at least they’ve done away with ATRAC, but you still need to use proprietary software (SonicStage) to copy/move files.

Helloooo Sony: we DON’T NEED PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE to move files around! It’s cumbersome, slow, feature-bloated and unnecessary. And you forgot the right-mouse-button support. Again.

The “Ericsson” half of the SE-combination is doing a great job. It’s a beaut little phone. But Sony, however, is really letting the side down.

What the….!??!!

On Tech Talk Radio we’ve had Odd Spot segments which are funny, sad, tragic, bewildering, pointless, controversial, political and even perplexing.

I think that this week’s Odd Spot fits all these categories.

In Sydney on Saturday the 14th of July, a man allegedly drove over seven mobile phone base stations in a stolen army tank because “he believed mobile phone waves had ‘harmed his head’.”

The full news story is called “Tank-rampage caused by mobile phone tower radiation” and has been published by CNET.

I added a post to the official TTR blog after this week’s show, but there are heaps more photos on my Flickr account which were sent to me by an anonymous listener / contributor. This contributor works for one of the organisations which sustained damage to their network equipment.

All I can say is … well, I can’t say anything. I am without speech. The offending tank driver is obviously suffering a mental illness and it’s lucky that no-one was seriously injured. Imagine the different outcome if field technicians had been working in or on any of these base stations when the tank ploughed through them. I’ve spent countless hours at radio base sites like these and I can assure you, the last thing on your mind when you’re swapping a board or resetting a power supply is that an Armoured Personnel Carrier is about to drive through your workplace!

It’s also worth noting the resilience of the phone networks, and the “minor” effect that this incident had on subscribers. An Optus spokesman said “there had been only minimal disruptions to services”.

More news stories on the same incident:

• The Age: NSW man refused bail over tank rampage
• NineMSN
• Yahoo!7 News
• The Australian: Man goes on rampage with tank in suburbs

… plus Odd Spot audio clip from this week’s Tech Talk.

I bet you can’t wait for next week’s Odd Spot! :-\

Crikey, what a truck-load of work over the last few days! Andrew has run away to join the circus, and taken Mark with him. So I will be hosting tonight’s episode of Tech Talk Radio on 3WBC.

In actual fact, Andrew and Mark have gone to Mt Gambier in South Australia, on special assignment for Tech Talk. I expect they will have a full report next week.

In the meantime, Graeme and I have been left to do the production work for the show. Andrew made it easy for us by setting up a lot of the pre-production last week. But I’ve never put a show together from the ground-up before. This has contributed to the workload… that is to say, if (when) I do all this again, a lot of the setup has been done and it shouldn’t take me nearly as long.

Graeme has been very helpful and will be working into the wee-small hours of tomorrow morning to get the podcasts done.

Then Andrew will return and normality will be restored.

Enjoy the show! Over and out.