Are they going to ship out thousands of TVs for practically nothing? No way...it's not possible. However, something has to happen to that store is guaranteed to go out of business once it goes from >90% positive ratings to <50% positive ratings. They seem to be a heavily Amazon.com dependent store, and there is no way they will be able to continue to sell on Amazon.com with that kind of feedback. My guess is a few (early) people might get a TV or something else, a bunch will get coupons or discount codes, and the rest will get canceled. I think this will allow the company to stay in business. Either that or Amazon.com helps them out, but I doubt their management or shareholders will support anything that helps a seller's error in a large financial magnitude. As stated previously, Amazon.com should cover the first thousand or so of the orders and film the purchasers getting their orders as a promotion...awesome press and it's cheaper than a national TV commercial campaign.

1) Each device does take more power...just packing as many in as possible only works up to a point. I *think* you would be safe in a PCMCIA or ExpressCard slot, but it *could* be a problem.

2) In this setup, the cards are treated as a single drive via a background RAID-0 setup. If even one device has a problem, the data on the entire drive (all cards) can easily be lost. Flash memory is reliable, but it's not nearly 6+ times more reliable than conventional drives.

3) As per #2, you can't just remove individual cards or else you lose the data on all the cards, and the removed card has no usable data on it in the new machine (i.e. it needs to be formatted before it can be used).

1) No packing material in the box, so the box is dented all over.

2) It's an unlabeled refurb. The box is the "Go Pro" set, which stopped production very early this year. The label on the box indicates that it was made last year. However, there is another label (sticker) over the label on the box that indicates it was made in late April. In other words, it was made last year, sent back to MS (prob for repair), then repacked into a new box and is being sold as new, not refurbished. This is an outright lie.

3) Since it was actually made last year, it doesn't have one of the newer motherboards, so it has the much higher risk of RROD.

4) Since it's a refurb, it has an even greater risk of RROD than a new system.

Dell - don't misrepresent your items.

1) You are 100% correct that the rotation/translation is done at the hardware level. However, the flash drives that are most readily available do not do this. Well...let me rephrase that. I have not heard a reliable news source say they do, and this, in my opinion, critical feature is not advertised anywhere on the box of any flash-based drive I've seen. I could just be behind the times...I would love that to be the case. If you know of any reputable source that says otherwise, I would be more than glad to read it.

2) The "summary" features of XP and Vista, by default, tells Explorer to pull data from the metadata of all file types. This includes things like comments, audio/video bitrates and play length, etc. In order to do so, it has to access the file, which triggers the Last Accessed date/time to be updated. As a side note, you can disable the write part of this via the fsutil utility. Also, you are correct that this applies to the MFT of NTFS volumes.

3) I'm not anti-SSD. I know you never claimed I was, but I just felt the desire to state that. SSDs have their place, but I think the current state of SSDs is way too hyped up and people are buying into them without understanding the drawbacks. Companies are trying to sell SSDs to people without telling them the disadvantages, and that's a recipe for disaster that hurts the whole SSD market.

Also, the date last accessed timestamp on every file is updated whenever you even display the file in Explorer, by default. Just viewing your files will cause multiple writes in the FAT/MFT sectors.

As for the amount of time before this is an issue, I've seen quite a few USB flash drives reach their limit within a year or two, only being used with small files. This is especially true when working with many backup and temp files. What happens is the sectors that contain the FAT (or MFT) can not longer be overwritten, so it says the device is full even though you may have several GB left of unused space. You can't even rename the files. Erasing a file that has it's record in a different sector (no matter how big/small) allows the new file to be saved without an error. It's weird, and maybe you have to see it to believe it, but it's happened for a few of my customers when I was a tech.

That's not a good faith transaction, and can easily be reversed if challenged. Being predatory is not good for the economy. Being predatory is not ethical. Being predatory causes everyone harm in the long run (App store looks even a little worse now, his family or those close to him since poverty hurts those around him, etc.). Look at the mortgage crisis in the US...predatory lenders harmed the housing market billions of dollars.

@revolution-inc: Not to mention the entire real world.

Besides, the host said he didn't have an iPhone and didn't want one, so why would he be bias? He did purchase the G-tech device and had no complaints (he said he never used it), so you would think he'd have a bias for the thing he spent his money on, if he had any bias at all.

The phone is $200-300 + a 2-year contract, or an ETF. The iPod touch is $300-500 retail (somewhat cheaper for new ones on eBay). Anyways, the $13 cost is to add the functionality to the iPhone/iPod. Nobody said it's cheaper to buy an iPhone/iPod than the G-tech device. It's just much cheaper and generally better if you already have the hardware.

Do I think any modern system will be hackable? Absolutely. Can something be made unhackable? Probably, but it wouldn't be practical at all.

As for the remarks from above about the legal side of this, it is a 2-way contract. However, contracts can be broken with or without penalty under certain circumstances. If the sale was not made in good faith, then it can be easily voided. If this was either a joke or designed to rip people off, that would be grounds to void the sale.

As for the "Asians" watching in awe at our bandwidth...they [generally] don't have any caps and average speeds that are a magnitude above ours. Only 1 major ISP in Japan starting using any cap, and it was at 30 GB PER DAY. This isn't something that you can just use capitalism and it will fix itself.

First, I work in IT as a Sysadmin and programmer. I never worked at the geek squad or anything of the sort. The geek squad, and similar store techs, are all sales people except the poor sucker in the back that actually works on the computers.

Second, I actually do prefer *nix (gentoo ftw), but I run Windows. It's not because Windows is "better", it's just what I need to know. We have many *nix servers at my work, but we also have many Windows-only applications (i.e. specialized software for door-entry systems, biometric timecard and a payroll system, etc.). I hardly spend any time on a *nix box because I don't have problems with them so I don't have to do much with them once it's installed. The same cannot be said for Windows. On a side note, is update Tuesday this week or next? j/k...kinda.

Also, how does working on PCs mean you are any less grown up than somebody that works on a Mac? Even in many of the most open companies, IT personnel don't have any real say in what OS to use. For repairing computers, you fix what you're given.

Last, being so snobby isn't going to make people want to change. If Windows works for you, use it. If Ubuntu or a "less user-friendly" *nix works, use that. If a Mac works, use that. If Apple and the *nux community taught you anything, it should have been that there is no one-size-fits-all in OSes.

An entry-level employee not knowing what everything in the store does, even though the store carries everything from game systems to TVs to electrical supplies to cables and cable supplies to...you get the idea. Back in the day, radio shack people knew what everything in the store did and were properly compensated for their skill. Now, the stores carry too much other stuff and want low-paying, entry-level employees.