I have the first gen XT and I can say is that these things are everything they're cracked up to be. If you're not buying an SSD then you should be getting one of these. Generally if you strip away the SSD portion you're still left with one of the best mechanical drives on the market, but the SSD portion really and truly does make a solid and positive difference in everyday computing life.

Actually a group went around testing honey from local retailers and found that 100% or nearly 100% of all honey purchased at places like CVS, Wal-Mart and a few grocers were at minimum ultrafiltered. Normally they filter out chunks of flowers and bee parts, but leave the pollen in. The ultrafiltered stuff is filtered to the point where the pollen is also extracted which is a costly and completely unnecessary step that just happens to mask the honey's origin. You can tell where honey came from based upon what the pollen is.

http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2011/11/tests-show-most-store-honey-isnt-honey/

Meanwhile the old classic MacOS systems would stop the world whenever you held the mouse down. Have a BBS running in the background? Watch the modem literally stop blinking just because you're holding down the mouse button.

Some games let you mash the both at the same time to do a rage reset.

Says you. Adobe Lightroom is easily worth every penny.

How could you forget the Pioneer LaserActive? That bitch was rackable. How about the 3DO??? Huh? Ppfft... and you call yourself a gamer.

Or to put it another way, name a PC manufacturer who uses OCZ drives. Go ahead and try. Yep, didn't think so. Above and beyond performance, reliability is the primary concern for a drive, and OCZs aren't there. Samsungs and Toshibas are.

I don't quite trust ext4 for writes.

app: Hey, can you write this data out to
ext4: DONE!
app: Uhh, that wasn't long enough to actually write the data.
ext4: Sure it was, I'm super faGRRRRRRRRRRRRRst at writing too.
app: wait, did you just cache that write and report it written but then not actually write it to disk until 30 seconds later?
ext4: Yeah, what about it?

That being said, ext3 and mount it with the noatime flag. If you're on a web server you don't want to be hammering it with writes to update the last access time. That's just silly.

I fail to see the difference in real terms between a desktop PC and a laptop with a keyboard and mouse hanging off of it. Likewise you can hook up a mouse, keyboard and external monitor to Android. You can also buy an Android tablet for a quantity of dollars down in the double digits. The high end classes of computing will always get eaten from below as the low end matures. The higher end stuff will always remain as a niche product, but for the masses it is always a race to the bottom.

Portability is a plus, but the main factor is cost.

This is a metrics problem. Management typically has to perform versus metrics and if the metrics are shit, the product will be shit as well. "cut IT costs" is a terrible metric by itself given that IT is pervasive to the functionality of a modern corporation.

Oh, like the Chinese government hasn't already stolen this technology to disseminate to their companies.

Pffft... $400? We're looking for CHEAP here guys.... How about $12? You can drive that down an extra 20% if you use a coupon in the second link. Be sure to get your free flashlight!

http://www.harborfreight.com/ultra-ear-sound-amplifier-66577.html

http://www.harborfreight.com/digitalsavings.html

As for quality issues, Sony's been outsourcing lots of their lower end products. What people are likely complaining about are the lower end products that aren't really Sony products anyway.

I'm in here just to put in props for Sennheiser. Keep in mind that you can replace parts like earcups and cords on anything but the very bottom tier Sennheisers so picking up a used pair is certainly not out of the question. $50 of used Sennheiser will likely beat $50 of new anything that's suggested here today.