Discferret broken?

My reply is somewhat academic in that I am unable to use either device at the moment. However, if I was going to buy one, I know which one I'd choose. It's partly that, but actually I think there's more to it. Firstly, I think it is a very bad idea to archive someing in a format which is not fully docuemtned. The fact that there's somehign around _now_ that can read it does not mean there will be soemthing aroudn in 50 years time that can read it. At least if you know the archive format then you have a chance of creatign somethign to make sense of it. Seocndly, these disk readers are, or at least should be, very verstile devices. I know that the FPGA code for the Diskferret is available, so if you want to modify it (at your own risk, of course) to read some other type of disk then you can do so. And thirdly, there;'s the question of support. I've had _much_ better support -every time -- from the authors of free software than from commerical software companies. This may be becuase I am often talkign to the guy who wrote hte code in the former case. It may be becuase they genuinely care. It may be becuase they don't simply say 'That information is proprietory'. Nto that I need such support very often, if I have the source code, schematics, etc, then I'll probably fix it myself (and tell the author the problem I had, the fix, and so on). I think that's one of the msot insulting things against all the excellent free software uthors that I have ever read. Are youy seriosuly claiming that a program like gcc is no good becuase it's free and that the programmers who wrote it are clueless and not motivated? [No, gcc is not perfect. But it's better than several commercial C compilers I've been forced to use]. Quite simply if that's your attidude I do not wish to do business with you. -tony