scott wrote:
>> It just amuses me though that a bunch of people can take the device 
>> apart and figure out how it works with no access to any technical data 
>> at all. This should be 100% impossible, but somehow they did it. And 
>> they did it better than the makers themselves...
> 
> I'm sure the total number of man-hours they spent reverse engineering it 
> and rewriting the firmware *far* outweighs what the OEM spent on it.  
> For a commercial venture it just wouldn't be profitable, but if a group 
> of people enjoy doing that for a hobby, sure.

The OEM has the spec sheet though, so it should be many millions of 
times easier for them to design software for it.

I mean, an MP3 player isn't exactly a complex piece of hardware. There's 
a battery, a harddrive, a processor, and a DAC. I would think those are 
all off-the-shelf components. Just stick them in a box, put in the 3 
microswitches for the buttons, and your hardware is done.

The *software* is what makes it a useful device...

Still, I suppose if you can limit the number of crashes to less than 
once per day, you can probably get people to buy it before they realise 
there's a problem.

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