People seem to forget that different levels of machines are suited to different tasks. To elaborate, I have 3 PC's at home: An Athlon 1600+, a Duron 1.3, and a Celeron 667.
I use the 1600+ for the tougher stuff - MP3 and SVCD encodes. The Duron is my movie/mp3 playback system, residing in my living room. The Celery is for the girlie, who checks her email/surfs the web, and does little more.
The Celery won't cut it for the tougher stuff. The Duron is in the same boat. Both were very good choices (based on price mostly), but neither can do what I want.
The Athlon gets used heavily for other work that simply can't be done on a lower-spec machine - 3D rendering being one.
But you want a killer app that will force us to all upgrade? Take a look at There. This thing is drawing a big crowd, but runs like crap on low-end machines (by low end, I mean my Celery, with it's on-board video). Apps like these (Sims Online, There, EverCrack, etc) are raising the bar because they appeal to non-geeks and geeks alike.
Incidently, no matter what anybody says WinXP runs like a dog with no legs on anything less than a Pentium 2. Plus, I'm not going back to Win95. Nuh-uh, not me, not ever. I like having a workstation with a weeks uptime (compared to 2 hours).
Q3 featured strongly in their list of benchmarks, especially when they measured the impact of anti-aliasing and dual-head setups.
2D performance is almost irrelevant, and if you understood most of their benchmarks you'd know that despite them not being 3D games, they were still mostly 3D related.
What I want to know is why they didn't include a review of my Riva 128 based card?
I mean, I've built myself an awesome little dual-processor Xeon machine, but I really want to know how it stands up to those Voodoo2 SLI configurations I keep hearing about.
Nothing new in there, the hardware was either old or uncommon, and I didn't see a single detail that was unique to them.
What the f&#k were they thinking, including an antique Matrox in the list? And that Radeon 7500...? OK, they were nice a year ago, but who cares! I mean really, if you are going to invest in a dual-CPU machine you obviously have a clue about performance. Why the hell would you read a review of crappy old cards?
They skim over dual-head results, which was the thing I was really interested in, since despite having a dual-monitor setup at home I have yet to find a game that makes use of it in a nice way (except FlightSim 2003, which really benefits from it).
Come on editors, wake up and post something relevant! (or at least have the decency to read the review before putting it on the front page, duh!)
I just posted my thoughts on this in my journal, if anybody is interested. It's a longish post, so I won't put it all here, but the basic point was that Gibson helped shape my perception of a world that doesn't really exist. I read his work, and honestly didn't "get it" the first time through. It probably took 3 or 4 reads before it really made sense to me, but the depth of it makes it worth coming back to. Not many authors can do that, and I have to say it really impressed me.
His other work, while not quite up to the standard of Neuromancer, were brilliant - if Pattern Recognition comes close, I'll be happy with my purchase.
When I accept a job, I'm entering into a mutually beneficial arrangement. I'm not some grunt off the street with a piece of paper they got out of a cornflakes box - I'm a valuable asset to any organisation.
As such, I expect to be treated with respect. Regardless of how many other possible employees are out there, I'm the one they chose, and that should say it all.
If an employer asks for my marital status, I politely reply that it's none of their business. My health? Unless I have a debilitating illness, they can't ask. Why? Because it's descrimination to make a decision based on that information.
My sexual preference, taste in beer, favorite colour, penis length, belching record, and bellybutton content all fall into the same category - none of their business.
If an employer asks for proof of my qualifications, they get certificates. Why? Because it measures my ability to do my job.
My personal finances are definitely not part of my job though. Would an employer be permitted to use my (home) Internet browsing history to measure my ability to do my job? Of course not - because anything I do outside of business hours is none of their fucking business.
An employer who crossed the obvious boundary, and intruded so deeply into my personal life would receive one of three responses:
1. Go fuck yourself. 2. Refuse to allow the check, and let them deal with the discrimination suit 3. Insist on full salary report, credit checks, and financial statements from management and the company itself before allowing myself checked.
I should also point out that I have an excellent credit record - no bad debts, no large loans, no refusals, nothing like that at all. But I resent this sort of unfair intrusion. I won't allow a DNA check, a sperm count, or reveal my preferred Spice Girl just for the sake of employment.
Finally, picture this - after many years of allowing such checks, you get refused for employment. Why? Because you once posted a comment on Slashdot criticising the practice of running credit checks on potential employees. Sounds unlikely? Not really - these posts are easily found, and all it takes is for people to allow such discrimination in small increments. Today they can check our health and credit. Tomorrow our political alignment. Next year, our personal opinions. Eventually, you stop having any privacy.
I used a Lian Li PC9300 case for my entertainment centre machine. It's not the same width as my other components, but it looks appropriate.
Bear in mind though that any case suitable for a home theatre system will be cramped... this particular case is pretty small, I had trouble finding the right power supply to fit inside it.
Incidently, my system works perfectly - if you're serious about setting up such a machine, I'd strongly advise buying a Realmagic X-Card, and a copy of Jove Player (www.8dim.com I think). That's what I use, and I barely ever have to switch back to the Windows desktop for anything.
(Complete system includes a Yamaha RX-V995 amp, custom built speakers from Equinox, Jamo sub, centre, and rear speakers, 80cm television, etc. My shelf unit DVD player hasn't seen any use since I finished building this particular PC).
Why does everybody sound so worried about how many slots this thing takes up?
I barely use my PCI slots - I've got a sound card in one, a network card in another, and that's it. Even if I added a SCSI card, and maybe a TV Tuner or DVD decoder card, that's a mere 4 slots taken up. Sillier still, I have on-board sound. And all new board seem to include on-board network cards.
PCI slots are less relevant every year. I waste two of mine with my extra USB ports on a backplate, and another one with a serial port that never gets touched. nVidia are welcome to chew up two slots on my system, provided their hardware fits around my CPU heatsink and hard disks.
Incidently, 10fps improvements don't seem to be nVidias approach (unlike 3dfx and ATI). I went from an original GeForce to a GF2, and it was easily a 25% jump. I then skipped the GF3 (didn't need one, the GF2 was plenty), and went to a GF4 4200 (8xAGP) - again, a huge jump (50% or more). I only buy their cards when they've been superceeded, and only once they drop below about US$120. This way, I never waste too much money on parts, and always get good value.
Try JovePlayer (http://www.8dim.com) with a RealMagic X-Card. It's not perfect (yet), but it's getting closer. It has all the catalog, search, library type functions you could ask for, and is designed with TV-Out in mind.
I have myself a nice small machine (Lian Li PC9300 case, with an X-Card, a TV Decoder, plenty of disk space, and DVD support. I barely ever see the Windows desktop - 90% of what I use it for is handled by Jove (MP3's, AVI, DVD, MPEGs, etc). And it's a fairly cheap option (low-spec machine, only a Duron 1300. X-Card isn't much, JovePlayer is only $20US).
Of course, the biggest downside is the startup time. Unless you leave it running all the time, you have to get used to waiting 30 seconds for it to power up. Might not seem like a bit deal, but compared to 2-5 seconds for a normal DVD player it can become annoying.
Personally though, I think we aren't that far from being able to throw away our DVD, VCR, Cable TV decoder, and CD Player in favour of such a machine. It just takes creative software design, and a bit of effort. But it will be a looooong time before the non-geeks of the world can do this.
(Incidently, I can't imagine going back to my old DVD player - being able to watch any format movie in my living room is a huge step forward.)
Surely this opens the Registrar up to possible legal action? I know that if this were my company, and I had just lost my domain name because of a mistake by the registrar, I'd sue them.
It will be interesting if the Age bothers to actually follow this up should further legal action take place - they have a tendancy to forget about interesting issues pretty fast:(
We've never truly seen Google behaving in an agressive, competative way. They've always been fairly quiet, fairly "nice", and generally good net citizens.
Now that Yahoo has pulled away, perhaps they'll shed their "Mr Nice Guy" disguise, and go after the competition with a chainsaw.
Either way, Google holds their (current) market share through having a powerful, accurate and easy-to-use product. Until the other companies ditch the in-your-face popups, the graphically cluttered interfaces, the slow searches, and the plethora of irrelevant search results, Google will remain popular.
Gobbles does have a slight tendancy to exagerate... still, despite his poor grasp of the English language, he's managed to release some fairly amazing exploit code in the past. 95% is probably a tad high, but 5% wouldn't surprise me at all (and given the number of peer-to-peer hosts out there, 5% is a frighteningly large number of users).
Last time I heard, it wasn't illegal to think about killing somebody. Hell, I didn't even know it was against the law to WANT to! In fact, up until today I was pretty darn certain that unless you actually DID kill them, you were pretty much OK....
I've gone for years hating my boss, WANTING to do baaaad things to him. I've thought about it, wanted to do it, but naturally I've never given in to temptation. I guess the world is changing... will I get arrested for thinking about pushing him down a stairwell? Or fined for considering parking in a handicap space? What if I glance twice at an underage girl, does that constitute statutory rape?
Thank Christ I live in Australia, where stupid shit like this doesn't seem to happen so often.
I tend to consider anybody who can't actually DO the job to be deadweight. I spent 3 years in university, surrounded by idiots who couldn't even handle the basic first-year content. A degree means nothing, in much the same way that a drivers license doesn't actually mean you can drive (take a look out there on the roads, hehehehe).
I've interviewed many people who have great qualifications (on paper), lots of experience, but don't know the first thing about the actual job. I've worked with quite a few who obtained their "experience" by hanging onto a job for as long as possible, doing their best to dodge the shit that inevitably hits the nearest fan.
Mind you, I can't speak for your particular abilities - the job market is screwed at the moment, that's no secret. There are lots of deadweights out there, and there are a hell of a lot of highly skilled, highly capable people - both categories have lots of unemployed techs in them.
Ahhh, subtle distinctions often make all the difference. In my situation, the employment contract, the confidentiality agreement (NDA), and the designs/patents contract are all seperate documents, with nothing tying them together (other than the folder they were handed to me in).
I always make sure to sign all the important stuff, including the NDA. It's usually just the designs & patents agreement that gets misplaced:)
At my last three jobs, I have conveniently "forgotten" to submit a signed copy of the document that lets them own everything I create. For years now I've hated the idea that anything I do while employed (even if it's not work related) could be taken away from me.
I write (or should say, wrote) magazine articles as a freelance writer in my spare time. Despite the fact that I always wrote these from home, the current Intelectual Property contracts in Australia would have meant that my employer owned my words - not ideal.
Despite having failed to submit signed copies of these contracts for 3 jobs in a row (over a 4 year period, no less), I've never been hassled over it.
I guess my point is this: don't sign it if you don't agree with it. Sure, you might not get the job, but think of the implications if your "hobby" becomes an overnight hit!
As a side point, imagine how the guys from id would have felt if they had been forced to hand over their revolutionary 3D game engines to their employer at the time, simply because they thought of the ideas while sitting on the toilet at the office.
In my opinion, the way forward is to go back to recognising that we are just a part of the corporate machine. That IT is a SERVICE, and that if we don't get back to providing the business (you know, the guys who write our paycheque?) with a service that improves and facilitates their business, we're out of a job.
We are no different to the cleaning staff, the building maintenance guys, or the company that serices the company cars. Computers are just tools used by a company to make money. If the computers (or any other tool for that matter) cost more than they can earn the company, they get thrown away - quite simple really.
Too many of us forget this, and act as though the business should be grateful to have us on board (even though we sit at our desks reading/. most of the day!)
I've been reading this thread, and something struck me as amusing - there seems to be an unusually high number of Anonymous Cowards contributing comments to this thread.
Could it be that the dead-weight that flocked to the IT community (at roughly the same time as salaries boomed) are worried that their lack of skill is about to be revealed? Or that they can no longer count on getting their old jobs back (as a janitor, bus driver, or shoe shiner)?
That's a fair point indeed - you are the only company producing such a product that will actually work here (power supply differences being the major show-stopper).
I'm one of those guys who prefers to actually touch something before buying it, but the time is getting closer when I give up waiting. Also, I'm one of those annoying bastards who _really_ wants digital outputs from such a toy.
As an aside, I've thoroughly investigated the shelf-unit MP3 products available on the first world markets... Only two seemed even remotely worth purchasing: SliMP3 and Audiotron. Audiotron is prettier (fits in nicely with the rest of my components, digital outputs), but doesn't support Aussie power supplies. SliMP3 seems to have better software, is quieter, cheaper (!), supports Aussie power supplies (!!), but has no digital outputs.
What are the odds of us ever seeing one of these here in Australia? All the cool MP3 related devices (eg Voyetra's AudioTron, the SliMP3, etc) are unavailable here for various reasons...
Slashdot Mirror
People seem to forget that different levels of machines are suited to different tasks. To elaborate, I have 3 PC's at home: An Athlon 1600+, a Duron 1.3, and a Celeron 667.
I use the 1600+ for the tougher stuff - MP3 and SVCD encodes. The Duron is my movie/mp3 playback system, residing in my living room. The Celery is for the girlie, who checks her email/surfs the web, and does little more.
The Celery won't cut it for the tougher stuff. The Duron is in the same boat. Both were very good choices (based on price mostly), but neither can do what I want.
The Athlon gets used heavily for other work that simply can't be done on a lower-spec machine - 3D rendering being one.
But you want a killer app that will force us to all upgrade? Take a look at There. This thing is drawing a big crowd, but runs like crap on low-end machines (by low end, I mean my Celery, with it's on-board video). Apps like these (Sims Online, There, EverCrack, etc) are raising the bar because they appeal to non-geeks and geeks alike.
Incidently, no matter what anybody says WinXP runs like a dog with no legs on anything less than a Pentium 2. Plus, I'm not going back to Win95. Nuh-uh, not me, not ever. I like having a workstation with a weeks uptime (compared to 2 hours).
I read the article you fool.
Q3 featured strongly in their list of benchmarks, especially when they measured the impact of anti-aliasing and dual-head setups.
2D performance is almost irrelevant, and if you understood most of their benchmarks you'd know that despite them not being 3D games, they were still mostly 3D related.
What I want to know is why they didn't include a review of my Riva 128 based card?
I mean, I've built myself an awesome little dual-processor Xeon machine, but I really want to know how it stands up to those Voodoo2 SLI configurations I keep hearing about.
It's not a "Good read", it's a bloody lousy read!
Nothing new in there, the hardware was either old or uncommon, and I didn't see a single detail that was unique to them.
What the f&#k were they thinking, including an antique Matrox in the list? And that Radeon 7500...? OK, they were nice a year ago, but who cares! I mean really, if you are going to invest in a dual-CPU machine you obviously have a clue about performance. Why the hell would you read a review of crappy old cards?
They skim over dual-head results, which was the thing I was really interested in, since despite having a dual-monitor setup at home I have yet to find a game that makes use of it in a nice way (except FlightSim 2003, which really benefits from it).
Come on editors, wake up and post something relevant! (or at least have the decency to read the review before putting it on the front page, duh!)
I just posted my thoughts on this in my journal, if anybody is interested. It's a longish post, so I won't put it all here, but the basic point was that Gibson helped shape my perception of a world that doesn't really exist. I read his work, and honestly didn't "get it" the first time through. It probably took 3 or 4 reads before it really made sense to me, but the depth of it makes it worth coming back to. Not many authors can do that, and I have to say it really impressed me.
His other work, while not quite up to the standard of Neuromancer, were brilliant - if Pattern Recognition comes close, I'll be happy with my purchase.
When I accept a job, I'm entering into a mutually beneficial arrangement. I'm not some grunt off the street with a piece of paper they got out of a cornflakes box - I'm a valuable asset to any organisation.
As such, I expect to be treated with respect. Regardless of how many other possible employees are out there, I'm the one they chose, and that should say it all.
If an employer asks for my marital status, I politely reply that it's none of their business. My health? Unless I have a debilitating illness, they can't ask. Why? Because it's descrimination to make a decision based on that information.
My sexual preference, taste in beer, favorite colour, penis length, belching record, and bellybutton content all fall into the same category - none of their business.
If an employer asks for proof of my qualifications, they get certificates. Why? Because it measures my ability to do my job.
My personal finances are definitely not part of my job though. Would an employer be permitted to use my (home) Internet browsing history to measure my ability to do my job? Of course not - because anything I do outside of business hours is none of their fucking business.
An employer who crossed the obvious boundary, and intruded so deeply into my personal life would receive one of three responses:
1. Go fuck yourself.
2. Refuse to allow the check, and let them deal with the discrimination suit
3. Insist on full salary report, credit checks, and financial statements from management and the company itself before allowing myself checked.
I should also point out that I have an excellent credit record - no bad debts, no large loans, no refusals, nothing like that at all. But I resent this sort of unfair intrusion. I won't allow a DNA check, a sperm count, or reveal my preferred Spice Girl just for the sake of employment.
Finally, picture this - after many years of allowing such checks, you get refused for employment. Why? Because you once posted a comment on Slashdot criticising the practice of running credit checks on potential employees. Sounds unlikely? Not really - these posts are easily found, and all it takes is for people to allow such discrimination in small increments. Today they can check our health and credit. Tomorrow our political alignment. Next year, our personal opinions. Eventually, you stop having any privacy.
I used a Lian Li PC9300 case for my entertainment centre machine. It's not the same width as my other components, but it looks appropriate.
Bear in mind though that any case suitable for a home theatre system will be cramped... this particular case is pretty small, I had trouble finding the right power supply to fit inside it.
Incidently, my system works perfectly - if you're serious about setting up such a machine, I'd strongly advise buying a Realmagic X-Card, and a copy of Jove Player (www.8dim.com I think). That's what I use, and I barely ever have to switch back to the Windows desktop for anything.
(Complete system includes a Yamaha RX-V995 amp, custom built speakers from Equinox, Jamo sub, centre, and rear speakers, 80cm television, etc. My shelf unit DVD player hasn't seen any use since I finished building this particular PC).
Correct! And as both a nerd AND a hermit, I'm gonna buy me one of these. Now fuck off.
Why does everybody sound so worried about how many slots this thing takes up?
I barely use my PCI slots - I've got a sound card in one, a network card in another, and that's it. Even if I added a SCSI card, and maybe a TV Tuner or DVD decoder card, that's a mere 4 slots taken up. Sillier still, I have on-board sound. And all new board seem to include on-board network cards.
PCI slots are less relevant every year. I waste two of mine with my extra USB ports on a backplate, and another one with a serial port that never gets touched. nVidia are welcome to chew up two slots on my system, provided their hardware fits around my CPU heatsink and hard disks.
Incidently, 10fps improvements don't seem to be nVidias approach (unlike 3dfx and ATI). I went from an original GeForce to a GF2, and it was easily a 25% jump. I then skipped the GF3 (didn't need one, the GF2 was plenty), and went to a GF4 4200 (8xAGP) - again, a huge jump (50% or more). I only buy their cards when they've been superceeded, and only once they drop below about US$120. This way, I never waste too much money on parts, and always get good value.
Final comment? Moore was wrong. *grin*
Free, as in you get what you pay for....
Typical bloody slashdot - who cares what OS this sort of software is developed for?
If you want the software to work, to be usable in your living room, and to do everything you ask, be prepared to accept alternative operating systems.
The pro-linux bias shouldn't be this obvious, otherwise you all look like fanatics.
Try JovePlayer (http://www.8dim.com) with a RealMagic X-Card. It's not perfect (yet), but it's getting closer. It has all the catalog, search, library type functions you could ask for, and is designed with TV-Out in mind.
I have myself a nice small machine (Lian Li PC9300 case, with an X-Card, a TV Decoder, plenty of disk space, and DVD support. I barely ever see the Windows desktop - 90% of what I use it for is handled by Jove (MP3's, AVI, DVD, MPEGs, etc). And it's a fairly cheap option (low-spec machine, only a Duron 1300. X-Card isn't much, JovePlayer is only $20US).
Of course, the biggest downside is the startup time. Unless you leave it running all the time, you have to get used to waiting 30 seconds for it to power up. Might not seem like a bit deal, but compared to 2-5 seconds for a normal DVD player it can become annoying.
Personally though, I think we aren't that far from being able to throw away our DVD, VCR, Cable TV decoder, and CD Player in favour of such a machine. It just takes creative software design, and a bit of effort. But it will be a looooong time before the non-geeks of the world can do this.
(Incidently, I can't imagine going back to my old DVD player - being able to watch any format movie in my living room is a huge step forward.)
Surely this opens the Registrar up to possible legal action? I know that if this were my company, and I had just lost my domain name because of a mistake by the registrar, I'd sue them. It will be interesting if the Age bothers to actually follow this up should further legal action take place - they have a tendancy to forget about interesting issues pretty fast :(
I'd be more worried about accidently ingesting one, and being mistaken for something else at the airport.
Imagine look on the customs officers face when his scanner insists that the guy in front of him is actually a banana? Or worse still, a case of beer.
Imagine explaining that one away... "honestly sir, I'm a person! Please, you gotta believe me!"
We've never truly seen Google behaving in an agressive, competative way. They've always been fairly quiet, fairly "nice", and generally good net citizens.
Now that Yahoo has pulled away, perhaps they'll shed their "Mr Nice Guy" disguise, and go after the competition with a chainsaw.
Either way, Google holds their (current) market share through having a powerful, accurate and easy-to-use product. Until the other companies ditch the in-your-face popups, the graphically cluttered interfaces, the slow searches, and the plethora of irrelevant search results, Google will remain popular.
Gobbles does have a slight tendancy to exagerate... still, despite his poor grasp of the English language, he's managed to release some fairly amazing exploit code in the past. 95% is probably a tad high, but 5% wouldn't surprise me at all (and given the number of peer-to-peer hosts out there, 5% is a frighteningly large number of users).
Last time I heard, it wasn't illegal to think about killing somebody. Hell, I didn't even know it was against the law to WANT to! In fact, up until today I was pretty darn certain that unless you actually DID kill them, you were pretty much OK....
I've gone for years hating my boss, WANTING to do baaaad things to him. I've thought about it, wanted to do it, but naturally I've never given in to temptation. I guess the world is changing... will I get arrested for thinking about pushing him down a stairwell? Or fined for considering parking in a handicap space? What if I glance twice at an underage girl, does that constitute statutory rape?
Thank Christ I live in Australia, where stupid shit like this doesn't seem to happen so often.
I tend to consider anybody who can't actually DO the job to be deadweight. I spent 3 years in university, surrounded by idiots who couldn't even handle the basic first-year content. A degree means nothing, in much the same way that a drivers license doesn't actually mean you can drive (take a look out there on the roads, hehehehe).
I've interviewed many people who have great qualifications (on paper), lots of experience, but don't know the first thing about the actual job. I've worked with quite a few who obtained their "experience" by hanging onto a job for as long as possible, doing their best to dodge the shit that inevitably hits the nearest fan.
Mind you, I can't speak for your particular abilities - the job market is screwed at the moment, that's no secret. There are lots of deadweights out there, and there are a hell of a lot of highly skilled, highly capable people - both categories have lots of unemployed techs in them.
Ahhh, subtle distinctions often make all the difference. In my situation, the employment contract, the confidentiality agreement (NDA), and the designs/patents contract are all seperate documents, with nothing tying them together (other than the folder they were handed to me in).
:)
I always make sure to sign all the important stuff, including the NDA. It's usually just the designs & patents agreement that gets misplaced
At my last three jobs, I have conveniently "forgotten" to submit a signed copy of the document that lets them own everything I create. For years now I've hated the idea that anything I do while employed (even if it's not work related) could be taken away from me.
I write (or should say, wrote) magazine articles as a freelance writer in my spare time. Despite the fact that I always wrote these from home, the current Intelectual Property contracts in Australia would have meant that my employer owned my words - not ideal.
Despite having failed to submit signed copies of these contracts for 3 jobs in a row (over a 4 year period, no less), I've never been hassled over it.
I guess my point is this: don't sign it if you don't agree with it. Sure, you might not get the job, but think of the implications if your "hobby" becomes an overnight hit!
As a side point, imagine how the guys from id would have felt if they had been forced to hand over their revolutionary 3D game engines to their employer at the time, simply because they thought of the ideas while sitting on the toilet at the office.
In my opinion, the way forward is to go back to recognising that we are just a part of the corporate machine. That IT is a SERVICE, and that if we don't get back to providing the business (you know, the guys who write our paycheque?) with a service that improves and facilitates their business, we're out of a job.
/. most of the day!)
We are no different to the cleaning staff, the building maintenance guys, or the company that serices the company cars. Computers are just tools used by a company to make money. If the computers (or any other tool for that matter) cost more than they can earn the company, they get thrown away - quite simple really.
Too many of us forget this, and act as though the business should be grateful to have us on board (even though we sit at our desks reading
I've been reading this thread, and something struck me as amusing - there seems to be an unusually high number of Anonymous Cowards contributing comments to this thread.
Could it be that the dead-weight that flocked to the IT community (at roughly the same time as salaries boomed) are worried that their lack of skill is about to be revealed? Or that they can no longer count on getting their old jobs back (as a janitor, bus driver, or shoe shiner)?
That's a fair point indeed - you are the only company producing such a product that will actually work here (power supply differences being the major show-stopper).
I'm one of those guys who prefers to actually touch something before buying it, but the time is getting closer when I give up waiting. Also, I'm one of those annoying bastards who _really_ wants digital outputs from such a toy.
As an aside, I've thoroughly investigated the shelf-unit MP3 products available on the first world markets... Only two seemed even remotely worth purchasing: SliMP3 and Audiotron. Audiotron is prettier (fits in nicely with the rest of my components, digital outputs), but doesn't support Aussie power supplies. SliMP3 seems to have better software, is quieter, cheaper (!), supports Aussie power supplies (!!), but has no digital outputs.
Oh well, you can't win everything I guess.
What are the odds of us ever seeing one of these here in Australia? All the cool MP3 related devices (eg Voyetra's AudioTron, the SliMP3, etc) are unavailable here for various reasons...
:(
I hate living in the technological third world
I miss Clippy :(