If Sony's stupidity weren't so entertaining, I wouldn't harp on it. But it is, and I unabashedly do. (Here, here, and here, most recently.) The company has released its first MP3-compatible hard-drive players, after finally breaking its resistance to MP3 with a couple of flash-memory units. As previously noted, these are Euro-only releases for the time being, as if Sony had all the time in the world to correct its years-late anti-MP3 policy.

Sony is still pushing its ATRAC file format, about which very few Earthlings give a damn, or are aware of. Sony cites smaller files. Whatever. More hilariousl than that is this little print-bite—

Sony Europe President Chris Deering said the new Walkman was important to the success of Connect, whose performance to date he described as "not an entrenched recognizable service."

That's one way to put it. Another might be that Connect is the worst, most irrelevant, and most universally excoriated music service ever created.