Dammit! If I had mod points I'd mod you up. I'm in the IT VAR biz, and I've seen the quality slowly degrade over time. The margins are tight in the hardware business, and there's no incentive for the manufacturers to dial it up. You have to go with niche players if you want hardware with the quality that meets your standards. Gaming portables are intersting, as a re mobile workstations, but $$, weight, and battery life are the trade-offs.

Yup. Been there and done that. My Lenovo T510 with bumped up HD and 8Gb RAM is now a Hackintosh running Mavericks just sweet and fine, and it is my primary lappy. The ability to survive spills is its key selling point (I'm a klutz with 2 cats and 2 dogs). It was previously running Mint. A couple of spare 2.5" drives will shortly be configured for Mint again and Windows 8.1 for software testing.

Well said Dave. I'm also shocked that no one has replied with an obligatory "Surprised with off-topic garbage replies...you must be new here." ;-) Kudos to you, Paul, and Nathan. This will provide many, many, teaching moments and hopefully inspiration for other kids with an interest in science generally and science specifically.

99.8% right: the big team consists of Dave Lane and his supportive wife, both very wonderful people, btw. Trivia: Dave is also past President of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada.

Bah! Rushing through things. My AC post was the one where I declined to give them access to my contacts list and they disregarded my selection and spammed everyone whom I ever corresponded with.

I posted the above comment. Thought I was logged in :-/

Wishing for mod points. +1. I can count almost a half-dozen PC issues I troubleshooted (troubleshot?) over the years that were because of a flaky PSU. I only use top-end PSU's nowadays: PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750 Mark 1 on the media server (recycled from my old game rig), Cooler Master 1200W Silent Pro Gold (powering dual overclocked EVGA GTX 680's, 2 SSD's, 4x 7500 RPM HD's, Intel i5 2500k overclocked 45%, occasional hot-swap drives) on my current rig. More unnecessary crap to be installed shortly...(and I got the PSU on sale for $170 Canadian)

Errrrrrmmmmm.....http://botr.comeze.com/

All the engineers left when HP split into 2 companies a few years ago. They're still going strong at Agilent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agilent_Technologies

Wow. Drink too much often? Seriously.

I just add files to the folders on the NAS and XBMC finds them, every time. The ATV replaced my PS3 streaming files from PS3 Media Server running on the NAS (the NAS is a Core 2 Duo PC running Ubuntu server). I really like the Apple TV over-all. Have you updated to the latest version of XBMC? Having said all that, XBMC crashes daily on my Apple TV. I've re-flashed it and all that, but I believe the unit is a dud. Once the IOS on the v.3 units have been jail broken, then I'll send it back to Apple for replacement. So many others, including many friends, have units that work just fine so I believe mine is just a random ATV with issues.

Check out "1Channel". Also, Icefilms seems to be back at or very near to its old goodness.

1.) Extensible via add-on streams and apps 2.) Navi-X add-on program 3.) Stream just about any TV show or movie over the Internet (with appropriate add-ons) 4.) Run it on a rooted AppleTV (Sure, you can run it on a desktop PC if you want. I do as a test environment and for watching stuff when my wife is using the TV). 5.) Full access to your media files on your network shares with minimal/no fuss It excels as a HTPC environment, which is the whole point of it. This is how it was used on the XBox. Now it can go on many different devices. My AppleTV 2 is the perfect HTPC. Small, unobtrusive, can be controlled via my iPhone, low power... Goodbye Satellite TV.

You assume/oresume that kids have the $$$ to buy cocaine? Your reality distortion-field is clearly superior to any that has made its way to my poor neck of the woods.

That, sir, is frankly fucked. I've perfected the unblinking stare. I'd just stare at the ass-hat that tried to demand any amount of $$ out of my wallet. Pity the damned fool that pushed the issue.