True. I've found that engineers who don't care about how things look on the outside generally don't care too much about how they work on the inside either. Meaning no features that aren't in the spec, no effort expended to fix designs that sound good but won't work in the real world. So we get things like the flimsy door covering the ports on the front of a Dell precision desktop (ports which are impossible to see and useless if you put the tower on the ground, like everybody I work with)...
Apple's design is more than simply "superficial." It's thorough. When I was looking for laptops, I found plenty of really nice machines with big, fast, hot processors that only got a little more than an hour of battery life. And I found machines with nice, big 17" screens that had super high resolutions, but were only viewable from a tiny angle. And any machine that had similar features and speed were close to two inches thick and weighted upwards of 15 pounds.
I only found one that was even close to the footprint of my 15" with similar specs, and it was the Apex Ferrari. Now, since I'm not going to buy a gaudy red laptop with a ferrari logo on it, I only had the one choice:).
Well, it's apparently pretty quiet. There's something for modders to work on -- they prefer their machines to sound like a VTOL aircraft landing on a swedish death metal band.
I use both. The eclipse development environment got this feature WELL after the dot net betas had it. However, I think they both cloned it from NetBeans...
Actually, what ticks me off is that Windows makes it easier to unplug a device incorrectly than it does to do so correctly.
On Windows, if I want to eject my iPod or my camera, I have to click unplug device. Then I have to click the device i want to unplug. Then I have to select the device. Then it tells me I'll also be turning off the filesystem on the drive (duh). Then is asks if I'm sure. Then it tells me it ejected okay.
That's 4 windows opened. If I just pull the cable, I only get one window. Guess which one I do?
On Mac OSX, if I jack the plug on my iPod or my camera, I get a single message telling me I did something stupid and probably screwed my file system (whcih, on the camera, i probably did). If I drag it to the trash, or click the eject button over the volume in the finder, and i'm not using a file on the drive, it ejects and doesn't even give me a window. It becomes LESS of a hassle to do it right!
Well, the problem here is that the cell phone companies are expected to hold on to your text messages for a certain amount of time, anyway...otherwise, they wouldn't be able to deliver them nor store a history.
Obviously, Fed-Ex doesn't store a copy of every package you receive...but they do store a record of the package's delivery, and for quite a long time. This information can and has been subpoena'd. Something to think about next time you buy pot seeds from Manitoba.
Noooo, that was a message sent to the wrong person, who then notified the Special branch. Not anything like active monitoring really. But thanks for playing the "Tin Foil Thousand Dollar Pyramid."
You're right. Asking for decency during a sports broadcast isn't the same as censorship. If they were merely asking, I don't think anybody would be upset.
But mandating and enforcing decency through unfair fines *IS* the same thing as censorship.
I think it's obvious that certain broadcasts go to far. If we were ASKING the broadcasters to please tone it down a bit, they probably would. After all, they NEED people to feel that they can watch programs without being offended, or they will lose advertisers. Ever notice how FEW advertisers there are for the Howard Stern program? They must be paying well, because the big guys won't touch the show. It's too edgy to associate with.
But a lot of the time, we aren't asking. We're letting them slide, and then fining them well after the fact for violating regulations we didn't tell them we had. And that, my friend, is CENSORSHIP. It's saying, "we don't like what you did, so we are going to use economic sanctions to stop you from doing anything in the future."
I don't think that people understand everything the FCC does. It's not all sucking up to radio stations and keeping cuss words off TV. In fact, TV and Radio make up a very, very, very tiny portion of the spectrum, the rest of which is full of army and civillian communications, navigation information, satelite telemetry, cell phones, etc.
The reason the FCC exists is to force everybody to play fair with the airwaves. Without them, everybody would just take the easiest-to-use wavelengths, right now those in the 700 Meg - 3 GHz band. After all, nobody really wants to use old low bandwdith communications...they all want shiny, new digital systems, but there just isn't the bandwidth for it (no, not even with spread spectrum). Try to push all of these discordant systems into the same band would be like a hundred people trying to leave through the same small door. And none of them wants to be the guy who's last out because he lets the others through.
Scrapping the FCC would lead to complete anarchy which would in turn result in very bad things for consumers, such as cell phones that only worked half the time or in certain parts of the country, or radio stations trying to muscle each other out by broadcasting static on each others' stations. Yes, maybe it is a little annoying that the FCC allowed radio consolidation, but really that should have been under the auspice of the FTC, right? The FCC should stick to what it does best -- regulating airwaves -- and leave the anti-monopoly protection to somebody who knows how to do THAT.
I just do what we used to do at the TV station: I carry a piece of 96 bright laserjet paper with me. Put it down, aim the camera at it (from an angle...no shadows please) and hit the auto white balance button. No issues.
The coffee filter idea doesn't work quite so hot, since they aren't really white either. But that 96 (or brighter) paper almost GLOWS, even in low light.
Oh, and today at the arena, I was having trouble getting a good balance because of smoke from pyrotechnics. So I zoomed in on the abdomen of a woman in a white shirt. Look at the shots I took after that, there's a noticable difference in the color histogram.
Don't use the flash unless it is so dim, and the action is so fast, that you absolutely have to. Flash light is unnatural, causes skin to look shiny and brings blemishes out of nowhere. Not using a flash in low light means shots could be blurry with a 1/20 shutter or slower...but the colours will look so much more natural.
Fix your goddamn white balance! Don't use the same white balance indoors you use outdoors or people will look all purple. And don't use the same with your flash that you use without!
Another colour thing: most digitals have a really crummy ISO rating, so if you keep your camera on Auto Shutter, it'll adjust itself to use a really long exposure. So either put the camera down, put it on a tripod or if you can't, adjust the shutter to at least 1/20 if you're steady, 1/40 if you've been drinking, and 1/100 if the subject is moving at all. And keep your elbows tight against your sides, just like shooting a rifle.
Something some people don't understand is that modern cameras have two positions for the shutter. Press down a little, and the camera does all of its auto work (focusing, metering, adjustments, etc). Press it again and it takes the picture. If you push the shutter all the way down before these adjustments are done, some cameras will take your word for it...and take a shitty picture! So, press down, give it a second, and press again. Kodak cameras force you to do this with a red light in the viewfinder. Best of all, put it on full tilt manual, do your adjustments before your subjects know you're taking the picture, and you're ready to hammer away whenever you like.
Check out my digital photos to see how following these simple, stupid rules on colour and shutter speed can lead from SHITTY photos (like the ones I took in 2001) to PRETTY DAMNED GOOD ONES (like the ones I've taken this year).
Shit no. But a RAID 0 setup will result in greatly reduced query times and thus a much faster overall database machine. Even a software RAID will result in faster read/write times...and since you can get a second hard drive for less than half the cost of that $250 graphics card the grandparent was touting, which would you suggest for "database studies?"
He means it will be hard to get permission to dig on the site. Excavating public parks means getting support from the national entity, which would be easy if he had something more substantial than a suspicious satelite photo. Furthermore, it will be more expensive to dig on public land than private land, as there are no doubt a ton of regulations.
Incidentally..the "tooth brush like brush" thing doesn't really happen all that often, because it's expensive and slow and generally unnecessary.
Would you like to know how archeologists REALLY work? Well, they start by digging a series of post holes, 18 inches by 18 inches and as deep as possible, with a random spread over the suspected area (called a Phase 1a, as I understand it). The density of hole selection is based on what era you suspect you're lookin for...historical sites are more concentrated (to find the edges of features) and prehistoric sites more sparse (to find flakes, pottery bits, firepits and other stuff which may be spread out over the whole area). They just dig through everything, dump the dirt into a grate, sift it down quickly, and fill it back in if they don't find anything. They do these very quickly...my wife commonly does 25+ holes per day. If they found something, they continue by getting a backhoe and digging a HUGE deep trench on the edge of the suspected area to see if there's really something there, and how old it is. If, and only if, backhoe trenching pulls up a site, they dig more holes and set up a grid, to start a more invasive procedure like the ones you see on the History Channel.
Either way, you're going to be digging holes all over the place. Which is a nuisance and is also expensive. So you'll need support and money to get started.
In a state/national park, looking for old buildings that probably aren't there, they'll first have to whip out the ground invasive radars and prove there's something to the rumors and vague photos before they can even do a Phase 1a. Then they'll need to find somebody to fund the thing. Then they'll have to hope they find enough cool stuff to fund MORE digging. Many, many interesting archeological sites are lost to looters and lack of funds -- which is a shame, because archeology is the only way for modern man to discern first hand what's happened in his history, and artifacts without context are useless for analysis.
Your microtreatise on programmatic archeology intrigues me. Perhaps one can cut through swaths of code, identifying deprecated practices and using historic information to put a date on these, in much the same way you can track the history of a parcel of land by following the statigraphy. After all, with a wide enough sample, they've even been able to track revisions of the Judeo-christian bible, and identitfy through context, voice and historical record the authors of different passages.
I think I'll use this argument next time I have to explain to my manager why I'm so lazy with source control.
Oh, and my wife majored in Archeology, with a minor in theatre...so she can act like she found something! Ba zing!
I agreed with you in theory. In practice, the dog eats all the cuddly toys, the candles melt because she doesn't believe in air conditioning, and the pot plants are absolutely essential.
Furthermore, the 250 exotic beer bottles that sit atop the sconce in the sunroom are a stroke of Feng Shui genius, far outstepping the framed monochrome pictures of Erwin Schrodinger, Steve Wozniak, Jim Henson and Del tha Funkee Homosapien in my writing room.
Now, if you want to complain about all the damned seashell fragments, I'm willing to discuss.
You know, I think it's a bit silly to think that every device needs to be hidden to improve the "decor." Doesn't that show a great deal of disdane for the modern world: that we want these things to run our lives, but we don't want to actually see them?
My family were farmers. Their tools were their livelihood, so they decorated with old tools. Spinning wheels and hand saws still have a place my mom's decor. Well, my livelihood is software. So my decor is built around that. There's a small desk in the office with room enough for keys and a Mac SE, where guests can check their email on its 9 inch screen. It's also quite uncluttered. Unless, like my wife, you consider a single short wire "clutter."
Congratulations. You have created a detailed Apple-is-Too-Expensive response to an Apple article. Your numbers were nice, and though your prose lacked both quality and originality, I assume you care about either and merely wanted the most cost effective language that could complete the task. As a Slashdot-pronounced "Mac-loving, astroturfering fag" I should attempt to construct the requisite "stupid windows user, nobody cares how cheap your Athlon 64 system was, the Mac is a superior package" response. But my heart's not really into it. So I'll respond thusly:
Good for you. You should be very proud of yourself, creating a nice, fast, usable computer for a very decent price. I personally have been scammed into purchasing four of their computers over the past 10 years for prices that were 10-30% higher than their warranty-free open market PC equivalents. I suppose I should be upset about being a victim of Apple's unfair pricing, but I'm not. I like my Apple gear. It's really good stuff.
Incidentally, if your friend was REALLY doing anything serious with databases, he'd have asked you to scrap the fancy graphics card for a RAID setup with dual CPUs.
Apple's whole thrust into the consumer market is based on their iMac and eMac computers not looking like computers. Which is amazingly effective...people are willing to spend more money for slower hardware because it's easy to use and looks fucking awesome.
Why should you care? Hey, if you want an ugly ass machine, be my guest. I'm not going to waste time convincing you that the soft white corrugated look of the Apple 23" cinema display is the reason why I'd buy one...that's the last of maybe 15 reasons, of which viewing angle, refresh rate and warranty quality being at the top. But think: with all else being equal, wouldn't you choose the interesting case over the bland one?
What I've found is that Apple generally has a nice "old equipment sell off" about a week or so after bumping specs. The deal is not as good as 20% off usually, but it's quite good.
What's better is that, two to three weeks after this, they have a quick run of last gen refurbs. These are machines that had problems and were swapped out, fixed, and now are being resold. These sell for as much as 40% off the latest model and are generally in sound shape, with 1 year of applecare and eligible for the three year extension. I got my 15.1 1.25 GHz 80 gig Superdrive laptop for $1900...it did have a problem with the logic board (for shame, refurbisher!) when i picked it up, but they fixed that and had it back to me in less than a week. It's run amazing ever since.
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True. I've found that engineers who don't care about how things look on the outside generally don't care too much about how they work on the inside either. Meaning no features that aren't in the spec, no effort expended to fix designs that sound good but won't work in the real world. So we get things like the flimsy door covering the ports on the front of a Dell precision desktop (ports which are impossible to see and useless if you put the tower on the ground, like everybody I work with)...
:).
Apple's design is more than simply "superficial." It's thorough. When I was looking for laptops, I found plenty of really nice machines with big, fast, hot processors that only got a little more than an hour of battery life. And I found machines with nice, big 17" screens that had super high resolutions, but were only viewable from a tiny angle. And any machine that had similar features and speed were close to two inches thick and weighted upwards of 15 pounds.
I only found one that was even close to the footprint of my 15" with similar specs, and it was the Apex Ferrari. Now, since I'm not going to buy a gaudy red laptop with a ferrari logo on it, I only had the one choice
Well, it's apparently pretty quiet. There's something for modders to work on -- they prefer their machines to sound like a VTOL aircraft landing on a swedish death metal band.
I use both. The eclipse development environment got this feature WELL after the dot net betas had it. However, I think they both cloned it from NetBeans...
Actually, what ticks me off is that Windows makes it easier to unplug a device incorrectly than it does to do so correctly.
On Windows, if I want to eject my iPod or my camera, I have to click unplug device. Then I have to click the device i want to unplug. Then I have to select the device. Then it tells me I'll also be turning off the filesystem on the drive (duh). Then is asks if I'm sure. Then it tells me it ejected okay.
That's 4 windows opened. If I just pull the cable, I only get one window. Guess which one I do?
On Mac OSX, if I jack the plug on my iPod or my camera, I get a single message telling me I did something stupid and probably screwed my file system (whcih, on the camera, i probably did). If I drag it to the trash, or click the eject button over the volume in the finder, and i'm not using a file on the drive, it ejects and doesn't even give me a window. It becomes LESS of a hassle to do it right!
Well, the problem here is that the cell phone companies are expected to hold on to your text messages for a certain amount of time, anyway...otherwise, they wouldn't be able to deliver them nor store a history.
Obviously, Fed-Ex doesn't store a copy of every package you receive...but they do store a record of the package's delivery, and for quite a long time. This information can and has been subpoena'd. Something to think about next time you buy pot seeds from Manitoba.
Noooo, that was a message sent to the wrong person, who then notified the Special branch. Not anything like active monitoring really. But thanks for playing the "Tin Foil Thousand Dollar Pyramid."
Some men are more equal than others. For the rest of us, there's Levitra. Ask your doctor if it's right for you.
Incidentally, I hear Thomas Jefferson was hung like the Liberty Bell.
You're right. Asking for decency during a sports broadcast isn't the same as censorship. If they were merely asking, I don't think anybody would be upset.
But mandating and enforcing decency through unfair fines *IS* the same thing as censorship.
I think it's obvious that certain broadcasts go to far. If we were ASKING the broadcasters to please tone it down a bit, they probably would. After all, they NEED people to feel that they can watch programs without being offended, or they will lose advertisers. Ever notice how FEW advertisers there are for the Howard Stern program? They must be paying well, because the big guys won't touch the show. It's too edgy to associate with.
But a lot of the time, we aren't asking. We're letting them slide, and then fining them well after the fact for violating regulations we didn't tell them we had. And that, my friend, is CENSORSHIP. It's saying, "we don't like what you did, so we are going to use economic sanctions to stop you from doing anything in the future."
But...but...
Bill Gates is a borg! It is funny because he wants to assimilate us all with his nefarious popular operating system!
Don't you get it!
I don't think that people understand everything the FCC does. It's not all sucking up to radio stations and keeping cuss words off TV. In fact, TV and Radio make up a very, very, very tiny portion of the spectrum, the rest of which is full of army and civillian communications, navigation information, satelite telemetry, cell phones, etc.
The reason the FCC exists is to force everybody to play fair with the airwaves. Without them, everybody would just take the easiest-to-use wavelengths, right now those in the 700 Meg - 3 GHz band. After all, nobody really wants to use old low bandwdith communications...they all want shiny, new digital systems, but there just isn't the bandwidth for it (no, not even with spread spectrum). Try to push all of these discordant systems into the same band would be like a hundred people trying to leave through the same small door. And none of them wants to be the guy who's last out because he lets the others through.
Scrapping the FCC would lead to complete anarchy which would in turn result in very bad things for consumers, such as cell phones that only worked half the time or in certain parts of the country, or radio stations trying to muscle each other out by broadcasting static on each others' stations. Yes, maybe it is a little annoying that the FCC allowed radio consolidation, but really that should have been under the auspice of the FTC, right? The FCC should stick to what it does best -- regulating airwaves -- and leave the anti-monopoly protection to somebody who knows how to do THAT.
I just do what we used to do at the TV station: I carry a piece of 96 bright laserjet paper with me. Put it down, aim the camera at it (from an angle...no shadows please) and hit the auto white balance button. No issues.
The coffee filter idea doesn't work quite so hot, since they aren't really white either. But that 96 (or brighter) paper almost GLOWS, even in low light.
Oh, and today at the arena, I was having trouble getting a good balance because of smoke from pyrotechnics. So I zoomed in on the abdomen of a woman in a white shirt. Look at the shots I took after that, there's a noticable difference in the color histogram.
Or maybe a program that would burn a CD of your DRM songs, and then let you make a lossless copy of them?
You could even call it iTunes.
Well, there are a few other basic ones too:
Don't use the flash unless it is so dim, and the action is so fast, that you absolutely have to. Flash light is unnatural, causes skin to look shiny and brings blemishes out of nowhere. Not using a flash in low light means shots could be blurry with a 1/20 shutter or slower...but the colours will look so much more natural.
Fix your goddamn white balance! Don't use the same white balance indoors you use outdoors or people will look all purple. And don't use the same with your flash that you use without!
Another colour thing: most digitals have a really crummy ISO rating, so if you keep your camera on Auto Shutter, it'll adjust itself to use a really long exposure. So either put the camera down, put it on a tripod or if you can't, adjust the shutter to at least 1/20 if you're steady, 1/40 if you've been drinking, and 1/100 if the subject is moving at all. And keep your elbows tight against your sides, just like shooting a rifle.
Something some people don't understand is that modern cameras have two positions for the shutter. Press down a little, and the camera does all of its auto work (focusing, metering, adjustments, etc). Press it again and it takes the picture. If you push the shutter all the way down before these adjustments are done, some cameras will take your word for it...and take a shitty picture! So, press down, give it a second, and press again. Kodak cameras force you to do this with a red light in the viewfinder. Best of all, put it on full tilt manual, do your adjustments before your subjects know you're taking the picture, and you're ready to hammer away whenever you like.
Check out my digital photos to see how following these simple, stupid rules on colour and shutter speed can lead from SHITTY photos (like the ones I took in 2001) to PRETTY DAMNED GOOD ONES (like the ones I've taken this year).
Shit no. But a RAID 0 setup will result in greatly reduced query times and thus a much faster overall database machine. Even a software RAID will result in faster read/write times...and since you can get a second hard drive for less than half the cost of that $250 graphics card the grandparent was touting, which would you suggest for "database studies?"
He means it will be hard to get permission to dig on the site. Excavating public parks means getting support from the national entity, which would be easy if he had something more substantial than a suspicious satelite photo. Furthermore, it will be more expensive to dig on public land than private land, as there are no doubt a ton of regulations.
Incidentally..the "tooth brush like brush" thing doesn't really happen all that often, because it's expensive and slow and generally unnecessary.
Would you like to know how archeologists REALLY work? Well, they start by digging a series of post holes, 18 inches by 18 inches and as deep as possible, with a random spread over the suspected area (called a Phase 1a, as I understand it). The density of hole selection is based on what era you suspect you're lookin for...historical sites are more concentrated (to find the edges of features) and prehistoric sites more sparse (to find flakes, pottery bits, firepits and other stuff which may be spread out over the whole area). They just dig through everything, dump the dirt into a grate, sift it down quickly, and fill it back in if they don't find anything. They do these very quickly...my wife commonly does 25+ holes per day. If they found something, they continue by getting a backhoe and digging a HUGE deep trench on the edge of the suspected area to see if there's really something there, and how old it is. If, and only if, backhoe trenching pulls up a site, they dig more holes and set up a grid, to start a more invasive procedure like the ones you see on the History Channel.
Either way, you're going to be digging holes all over the place. Which is a nuisance and is also expensive. So you'll need support and money to get started.
In a state/national park, looking for old buildings that probably aren't there, they'll first have to whip out the ground invasive radars and prove there's something to the rumors and vague photos before they can even do a Phase 1a. Then they'll need to find somebody to fund the thing. Then they'll have to hope they find enough cool stuff to fund MORE digging. Many, many interesting archeological sites are lost to looters and lack of funds -- which is a shame, because archeology is the only way for modern man to discern first hand what's happened in his history, and artifacts without context are useless for analysis.
Easy. You enlist the help of the Faerie Queen. That is, of course, if neither Adam nor Eve is available.
Say, you're right. It looks like Poseidon was near-sighted...and he has an "M" endorsement, I guess to haul ass around town on a chopped seahorse.
Your microtreatise on programmatic archeology intrigues me. Perhaps one can cut through swaths of code, identifying deprecated practices and using historic information to put a date on these, in much the same way you can track the history of a parcel of land by following the statigraphy. After all, with a wide enough sample, they've even been able to track revisions of the Judeo-christian bible, and identitfy through context, voice and historical record the authors of different passages.
I think I'll use this argument next time I have to explain to my manager why I'm so lazy with source control.
Oh, and my wife majored in Archeology, with a minor in theatre...so she can act like she found something! Ba zing!
I agreed with you in theory. In practice, the dog eats all the cuddly toys, the candles melt because she doesn't believe in air conditioning, and the pot plants are absolutely essential.
Furthermore, the 250 exotic beer bottles that sit atop the sconce in the sunroom are a stroke of Feng Shui genius, far outstepping the framed monochrome pictures of Erwin Schrodinger, Steve Wozniak, Jim Henson and Del tha Funkee Homosapien in my writing room.
Now, if you want to complain about all the damned seashell fragments, I'm willing to discuss.
What Wig?
This is quite possibly the dumbest acronym I've ever seen.
You know, I think it's a bit silly to think that every device needs to be hidden to improve the "decor." Doesn't that show a great deal of disdane for the modern world: that we want these things to run our lives, but we don't want to actually see them?
My family were farmers. Their tools were their livelihood, so they decorated with old tools. Spinning wheels and hand saws still have a place my mom's decor. Well, my livelihood is software. So my decor is built around that. There's a small desk in the office with room enough for keys and a Mac SE, where guests can check their email on its 9 inch screen. It's also quite uncluttered. Unless, like my wife, you consider a single short wire "clutter."
Congratulations. You have created a detailed Apple-is-Too-Expensive response to an Apple article. Your numbers were nice, and though your prose lacked both quality and originality, I assume you care about either and merely wanted the most cost effective language that could complete the task. As a Slashdot-pronounced "Mac-loving, astroturfering fag" I should attempt to construct the requisite "stupid windows user, nobody cares how cheap your Athlon 64 system was, the Mac is a superior package" response. But my heart's not really into it. So I'll respond thusly:
Good for you. You should be very proud of yourself, creating a nice, fast, usable computer for a very decent price. I personally have been scammed into purchasing four of their computers over the past 10 years for prices that were 10-30% higher than their warranty-free open market PC equivalents. I suppose I should be upset about being a victim of Apple's unfair pricing, but I'm not. I like my Apple gear. It's really good stuff.
Incidentally, if your friend was REALLY doing anything serious with databases, he'd have asked you to scrap the fancy graphics card for a RAID setup with dual CPUs.
Actually, your G4 iBook has an F key mapped to "num lock". You can remap it if it bothers you that much...i have mine mapped to Expose Desktop.
It would be a useful key, if you knew the alternate numlock setup on your laptop by heart. I don't, but I knew a guy who did.
Apple's whole thrust into the consumer market is based on their iMac and eMac computers not looking like computers. Which is amazingly effective...people are willing to spend more money for slower hardware because it's easy to use and looks fucking awesome.
Why should you care? Hey, if you want an ugly ass machine, be my guest. I'm not going to waste time convincing you that the soft white corrugated look of the Apple 23" cinema display is the reason why I'd buy one...that's the last of maybe 15 reasons, of which viewing angle, refresh rate and warranty quality being at the top. But think: with all else being equal, wouldn't you choose the interesting case over the bland one?
What I've found is that Apple generally has a nice "old equipment sell off" about a week or so after bumping specs. The deal is not as good as 20% off usually, but it's quite good.
What's better is that, two to three weeks after this, they have a quick run of last gen refurbs. These are machines that had problems and were swapped out, fixed, and now are being resold. These sell for as much as 40% off the latest model and are generally in sound shape, with 1 year of applecare and eligible for the three year extension. I got my 15.1 1.25 GHz 80 gig Superdrive laptop for $1900...it did have a problem with the logic board (for shame, refurbisher!) when i picked it up, but they fixed that and had it back to me in less than a week. It's run amazing ever since.