OK, Calvin...

You've got your Flourescent Disk Player with 3,000 hours of uncompressed music on it -- every song you've ever heard, or think you might ever want to hear.

That's going to be about 60,000 songs.

Please play for me "Red Barchetta" by Rush. While you're rummaging around through 60,000 songs trying to find it, I'll just go home and listen to my own copy of it.

As the guys@empeg have said, the hardware is not the most important thing about the empeg. Any deep-pocket electronics company (Sony, Panasonic, Samsung, etc.) could knock out an empeg clone in a few weeks or months. But it wouldn't have the functionality required to deal with such a large amount of music without the UI to make it accessible. By the time you add that to your FDP, you've got yourself another empeg. And a good workable UI like emplode is not a quick and easy project -- just ask Mike Crowe! I'll bet that there are several man-years in the empeg software to date, and it still isn't done. And this kind of software development is pretty resistant to being expedited by throwing large sums of money at it. (Bill Gates -- are you listening?)

If this Flourescent Disk technology takes off, you can bet there will be upgrades offered for existing empegs, or possibly it will be the impetus for the Empeg Mark III.

tanstaafl.

"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"