"Hey AtAT," we hear you pestering us, "how come you haven't broached the topic of Sony's new 'Connect' downloadable music service? Seeing as it's yet another in a long line of alleged 'iTunes killers,' after all." Well, yeah, see, about that... isn't anyone else a little bored with the services that keep popping up as competition for the iTunes Music Store? People keep setting us up for some scary and dramatic showdown, like the newcomer's finally going to show the iTMS a thing or two about how to sell music. So we get all excited and prepare for an epic battle, a clash of the titans (only the entertaining kind, you know, not the kind with Harry Hamlin in a bedsheet), and then what happens? We get the likes of BuyMusic.com. Or Napster. Talk about your letdowns. And since none of these "iTMS-killers" is ever even Mac- or iPod-compatible, frankly, it all seems like a major waste of our time.

Of course, that's when we remember that our time is utterly worthless, so we figure that if there's at least something wildly new and original about one of these pretenders to the throne, we might as well blather on about it for a bit. And that's about when faithful viewer Joshua Weiland clued us in to a simply nifty little review of Sony Connect in the Washington Post. The reviewer says that pricing is "fair" (and it's the same as the iTMS's) but slams just about everything else about Connect before concluding that "this service is an embarrassment to the company." In particular, we love the usage rights: you can apparently only burn each purchased song five times to audio discs and five times to proprietary ATRAC CDs; when you transfer songs to two additional authorized PCs, those PCs can't burn or transfer the songs at all; and while most songs come with "an unlimited number of transfers to portable players," songs from Warner Music Group labels "are restricted to three transfers. Ever."

All that aside, however, there's a real kicker about Connect-- a difference that really makes it stand out from the crowd. Whereas pundits regularly predict the eventual demise of the iTMS because it sells music that can only be played in iTunes or on an iPod (horror of horrors-- it will "only" work with the best jukebox software and the best portable player! We're fans of choice as much as the next staff of an online soap opera, but it hardly seems worth going Chicken Little over), Sony's gone one better: it's selling music that doesn't work in iTunes or the iPod or basically any other jukebox or player on the market, save Sony's own offerings. Which is a strategy that has a shot of working if, like Apple, you make some of the niftiest software and players ever created, but which, so far, Sony apparently does not.

So if you want to buy any music from Connect, you have to use Sony's "bloated, bug-ridden beast of a program" (for Windows only, natch), and if you want to take any of it with you, you either need a MiniDisc player, a CLIÉ PDA, or a Sony iPod wannabe, such as the newly-announced currently-Japan-only VAIO Pocket VGF-AP1, as noted by faithful viewer darknite. Which is maybe nice in some ways (long battery life, hi-res color screen), but it just isn't an iPod, which is what a whole slew of digital music fans currently own or are in the process of selling internal organs to buy.

Meanwhile, the name of Sony's format-- ATRAC-- sounds more than a little like "8-track." Coincidenza?

Again, in some sense, most of this is irrelevant to us anyway, since, despite Sony not climbing on the Windows Media Audio bandwagon, its service still isn't Mac-compatible-- despite Sony's home page showing Connect loaded in Internet Explorer for Mac OS X. It's kinda blurry and they've made a token attempt to genericize the browser window, but there's little mistaking that "go" button and, especially, the Aqua scroll bar. Apparently they were just trying to scare us, though. Don't worry folks-- Connect will not run on your Mac! Whew-- dodged a bullet there, huh?

Just like with the whole Sony Connect thing, we'd rather hoped to avoid incorporating the latest dustup involving analyst Rob Enderle into our plotline, in part because we're a little uncomfortable playing the role of "third wheel." See, our whole Enderlinian dynamic has been upended; normally he says or writes something unaccountably inane, and then we make snarky little comments about the man's IQ falling off the left edge of the bell curve and his predilection for low-grade crack. This time, though, Rob's managed to get himself into an all-out debate sorta situation with Bryan Chaffin from The Mac Observer. And since Bryan (not being three years old and feeble-minded) is doing a fine job of pointing out all the times when Rob wanders off the path of reality, our habitual oh-so-obvious observations about Mr. Enderle's evident state of Advanced Brain Meltedness™ would be even more superfluous than usual.

But then the guy just keeps going on and on about how Apple needs to switch to Intel processors or die a horrible twisted death. And really, no matter how terrific a job Bryan's doing, how can we possibly just ignore that kind of thing? (Especially since he originally predicted that Apple would be out of business if it hadn't switched by, oh, let's see, here... five months ago.)

So yeah, folks, in case you haven't seen it, faithful viewer N Gray points out that the debate is raging over at MacNewsWorld, and two Rob-vs.-Bryan installments have since been posted. If you want your fix of the usual Enderlicious inaccuracies and drug-addled non sequiturs, look no further. Rob manages to misidentify which processor platform Steve Jobs chose for his post-Apple NeXT hardware; no, it wasn't x86, Robbie-Boy, it was the same 68K platform Apple was using in Macs. He also states that a Popular Mechanics article claimed that Apple cheated on its G5 benchmarks and the G5 "got trounced," showing "no performance advantage with the PowerPC today"; if you actually read the article you'll find that it makes no such conclusions about cheating, and even mentions that the testers were "surprised" when "the G5 was 59.5 percent faster," "67 percent faster," and "89.5 percent faster" than their dual 3.2 GHz x86 test system at cross-platform gene-sequencing and image-processing tasks. Rob, Rob, Rob... Stoned again, and in public, no less. Tsk, tsk.

Don't even get us started on Rob's claim that Apple has little control over its own operating system because "FreeBSD provides the kernel, the heart, of the Mac OS today." Because if we have to explain that Mac OS X uses its own variant of the Mach kernel that was originally created by-- guess who?-- Avie Tevanian, Apple's Chief Software Technology Officer, who threw it together way back when he was a grad student at Carnegie Mellon and that FreeBSD has nothing to do with it, we'll have to do something drastic and painful to the next vaguely Enderlic-lookin', suit-wearin', moustache-sportin' white guy we see. And we're too pretty for jail.

Actually, you know what? We're really just going to have to stop there, because there's this neck vein that's started throbbing, and we really don't want to pull a Lou Ferrigno, wreck a bunch of stuff, and wind up having to hitch a ride out of town while someone plays that sad, sad walking-away music. So go infuriate yourself with Rob's goofy nonsense on your own time, and console yourself with the fact that there are folks like Bryan to set the facts straight. As for us, well... Rage... taking over...

Okay, we're going to finish up with something light 'n' kooky today, because after that whole Enderle thing, we need something to take the edge off before we inflict any damage on the expensive equipment here in the production room-- like, for instance, the Dancing Coke Can that faithful viewer Tom O'Drain bought for us off eBay a couple of years back, which figures heavily in our daily creative process and which we're assured was last appraised at $1.2 million. Actually, come to think of it, give us a minute while we let this little guy shake his groove thang.

Ha ha! Yeah! Check it out, the little dude's jammin' to Sir Mix-a-Lot! Classic!

Okay, we feel loads better. And though we can probably now get through the day without actually throttling anyone, we're not going to take any chances, so we'll be extending the whimsy with a quick peek at a tech oddity passed along by faithful viewer Xur and the Kodan Armada: the Floppy Disk RAID!

If you don't know what a RAID is, that means nothing to you. Basically, a RAID is a Redundant Array of Independent Disks, which is the sort of thing you often see set up in servers for speed or fault-tolerance purposes. The idea is to take a bunch of hard disks and set them up so that they act like a single logical volume; you can either stripe data across them so that, for instance, two 80 GB hard disks act like a single high-performance 160ish GB disk, or mirror data so that those two 80 GB disks act like a single 80 GB disk-- but the data is written to both drives, so that if one should fail, no data is lost and the system keeps right on ticking. Got the general idea? Again, it's usually done for very high-end sort of situations.

Which is why it's so geekishly cool that somebody made one out of five floppy disks.

Floppies, as you know, are slower than sludge on ice and have a data capacity roughly on par with a small bundle of twigs held together with a rubber band. This is the lowest-end data storage around-- assuming you can even find them anymore. Well, the guy in question just happens to work for a manufacturer of USB floppy drives, so he grabbed five of them, plugged them into his Bondi Blue iMac running Jaguar, inserted five disks, fired up Disk Utility, and set them up as a striped RAID. Six minutes later, he had a 4.22 MB disk on his Desktop comprised of five whirring floppies. Imagine the noise as he dragged a 3.6 MB file to it-- which copied in a mere 32 seconds, which, in floppy terms, does in fact technically qualify as "turbo lightning speed!!"

Interestingly enough, this guy originally tried to build his floppy RAID under Windows XP, but that "other" operating system wouldn't let him do it. Leave it to Apple, who ditched floppy drives six whole years ago, to allow a use for floppies that's actually cool. Now let's see, here... USB allows, what, 127 devices? Subtract a few for the keyboard and mouse, and maybe a bunch for hubs, since we're not sure if they count or not... All told, we figure it should still be possible for a Mac to host a 60ish MB RAID made up of about a hundred floppies, all spinning at once. (Finally, something to do with those old AOL disks!) Now that's something to add to the list of stuff to see before you die. If you're out of room, cross off the Sphinx. C'mon, it doesn't even have a nose. We're talking about a 60 MB disk made out of floppies, consarn it!