Seeing those tiny offices with that white and purple furniture brings back a lot of memories.

Like with #2, I always remembered that as a very nice, clean, bright building. The customer showroom was very cool, and they had the first SPARC (serial #3 if I recall) on display there. The company store was there, too.

The last couple exterior shots, you can clearly see Scott McNealy's office (5th floor, "bay" part on the right side of the building -- Google Images for "Scott McNealy's Office").

Working at Sun in the mid 90s as a contractor, I spent a lot of time at that building. It's totally nuts to see how much it's declined since then.

Shockingly, this release actually supports Unicode (sort of) and it recognized my iPod right out of the gate. I doubt it will replace iTunes for me, but it is showing some real promise for the first time in a long time. Of course, in a few days I'll probably end up eating my words.

What about those crazy audiophile people who will pay hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to replace their power cord and speaker wire made of exotic materials and manufacturing techniques?

Try reading sites like audophilia.com and there's people who swear that just replacing their power cord with one that costs $3000 actually makes their music sound significantly better (after a customary "break in period" -- who the hell breaks in a power cable??). Just read something like http://www.audiophilia.com/hardware/Cables/reviews/ma14.htm to get a feel for the insanity. These people are nuts.

Yes, quality cables with quality shielding for analog components can certainly make a difference, but there quickly becomes a point of diminishing returns in my opinion.

I guess if I paid $1000 for a few feet of speaker wire, and another $5000 for a special power cable, I'd swear up and down that it made my music sound better.

The Q&A in the auction is especially funny.