No it wasn't a personal attack, if so I would have called you a **&^%ing moron, but I didn't, I simply stated a fact ... YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOUR'RE TALKING ABOUT, and you have further exemplified this fact with the following statement:

"OK, steady now: that card that's piggy-backed onto your Storm card, the one that you plug everything in to? That's an IEEE 1394 (firewire) card, it's what the Storm card retrieves all its data through. It can't be any, any, any times faster than any, any, any other IEEE 1394 (firewire) card, coz that's what it is. What the proprietary part of the card does, that was once useful, is fast hardware MPEGing - redundant on a well set up, modern, machine."

First of all, you're talking about the MPEG encoder card (StormEncoder) and NOTHING gets plugged into it whatsoever. Second of all, it's not a Firewire card, it's hardware MPEG encoder and has nothing to do with DV capture. Finally, no of course it can't capture faster, it can only capture in realtime like every other card on the planet. However, I can layer 5 PIP's, nearly unlimited static or moving titles, plus effects and filters, ALL IN REALTIME. This is where it is faster ... when YOU'RE EDITING ... where it really counts.

Also, the OPTIONAL MPEG ENCODER is no more proprietary than any other card. It's the format used to author DVD's for pete's sake, what the hell are you talking about??? You only capture to this directly when you don't need to edit your material and want to take it right to DVD. Again, you're completly clueless and probably need to be fired if you misunderstood the Storm this badly. You're beyond inept. The sad part is, it's not that difficult a concept to grasp.

It seems to me you're either a) Full of CRAP, or b) A total moron. I doubt it is the latter, which leaves full of crap. Which seems to be the case since anyone owning a Storm would easily no these simple differences without even cracking open the manual.

-Tim

PS> There are plenty of "suckers" who know how powerful the hardware is that will take it off your hands for you. Trust me.