This absurdly high rating was actually earned.
929508
Being an infrastructure engineer that has hassled with networking equipment all his (this is the husband) life, all I can say is that in this case you are absolutely getting significantly more than you pay for. While I would recommend the LR variant for just slightly more, the ease of setup, intuitive management UI, scalability of the system, performance, and finish are unparalleled at this price point. It's a breath of fresh air, not having to futz with literally 100 features. Everything you need, nothing you don't.
2442907
This actually exceeded my expectation as far as the quality of the unit and also the service from the company.
4730777
Met all my expectations, and they were pretty high!
3403648
Just ridiculous in its uniqueness and genius. It is world building that is unbelievable in its believability. It is characterization at its best. Truly amazing characters. It is brutal and extremely sweet at the same time. And it is funny as hell. All this inside a story that is crafted by a genius. I cried when Milar told Tatiana to not let his brother get captured. I have never cried from reading, and I rarely cry from movies/tv. It was torture to put this book down and I literally did not sleep. But in all its greatness, what I loved most about this writing was the complete and inherent non-stereotyping of gender. I have never come across such writing before.
2650828
Others are not exaggerating. You keep your expectation fairly high, yet this will meet your expectation. Awesome stuff.
566746
Bought because it is highly rated. And indeed it is good!
1196707
This album defies the conventional rating system. It is beyond the stars (in more ways than one). It is an otherworldy entity, neither good nor bad and ultimately unfathomable. Yet, I must try to fathom it, if only for the purposes of this review. What Shatner has done here has never been done before and will likely never be done again. It is like having your brain sucked out an airlock and then splattered across the windshield of a space shuttle (but in a fun way). As with gravity, the pull of "Seeking Major Tom" is inescapable. All should experience it. All will experience it!
2509830
I actually would give it 20 stars if I could. I'll also watch it again in the near future.
2222707
First off, one can only imagine the royalties they had to pay to record this thing... LOLOLOL

Meanwhile, they did something amazing here, as the riffs from about 2 dozen songs get blended into an insane medley of insanity. Yes it's that insane. Or inane. Hard to tell which half way through. Scatterbrain proved, though, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you could be near-virtuso musicians and still play like five-year-old children in a music store.
And achieve perfection as only truly gifted idiot savants could.

All praise to all of the creative forces that re-banded and re-branded from Ludichrist for this insane album and song. I bought the cassette as soon as it was out, and well, I'm buying it again digitally. Even though my cassette still plays fine, as my neighbors are hearing this afternoon! :D
3881463
I'm a musician, which means I'm pretty good at separating what is good and what is kitch, in terms of music. I've just finished listening to the DVD-Audio version of this soundtrack, and I am absolutely blown away. Firstly, for all the learned researchers out there who continue to muse about whether or not the human ear can actually hear the difference between the enhanced DVD-audio sound and CD-quality sound, I would like to say that yes, there is a difference, and yes, it can be heard. It can be heard in the same way that a good listener can hear the difference between the warmth of a vinyl album and the early sound of the original analogue-to-digital transfers that went into the first commercial CD's. I would ask you to do the following, if you are skeptical: place the DVD-audio version of this soundtrack in your computer (which is the only thing I have a 5.1 set of speakers attached to) and crank up the volume. If the hair on the back of your neck isn't on end after you've made it through the first few minutes of prologue, then you are dead.

As for the music itself, I've never bought a soundtrack album in my life, previous to this. Most soundtracks are crap. This one is absolutely remarkable, even for the slight flaws that have crept into the production. Firstly, I don't actually agree all that much with the one reviewer who finds Ian McKellan singing near the beginning to be disconcerting. I DID find the sudden break between two pretty ominous passages, in order to hear hobbits singing, slightly jarring, but of course this IS a soundtrack following the movie narration, and it DOES actually make sense to create a small break between two heavy sections with a lighter passage. Secondly, there are spots when the DVD moves from one track to another where the audio "dies" and then returns as the music moves from track to track. And yeah, that's annoying after one has gotten immersed in the music and suddenly is confronted with the reality that this really is a facsimile of a musical performance, and not the performance itself. Otherwise, though, the sound quality here is extraordinary. I've heard the terms "pompous" and "bombastic" used to describe Shore's music, but this isn't really fair. The movies themselves are really just a modern interpretation of the Nibelungenlied and a few other Northern European sagas mixed in for good measure, so it makes perfect sense for the soundtrack to have a Wagnerian atmosphere to it. Well, I highly recommend this soundtrack.
1174511
Can't believe how well done this was. What an original and novel concept.
763557
Not for most people, but we think it was brilliant!
2217910
The five star reviews have it all covered. How intense the story is, how clearly drawn the characters are, how tight the plot is. How satisfying it was to reach the end. Relationships like this need to be seen for what they are. No matter what the age.
As a reader with an eclectic taste, from adult non-fiction to children's fantasy, I found this novel to be tangibly moving. Deeply believable. Real.
I look forward to this author's next efforts.
4739618
Quite frankly, this book is far better and far more intelligent than it has a right to be.  I read it in one sitting, constantly astounded that what was packaged as "High Fidelity for Atari fans," was actually a genuine piece of literature and social criticism.  The book is hilariously funny, but without any of the cloying sarcastic sensibilities of most Gen-X novels.  Instead, the author uses Pennyman to depict a kind of isolation and obsessiveness that's very familiar nowadays.  He's a truly fascinating psychological portrait, an overly smart man who cannot cope with the inanities of the everyday world.  So he finds solace in something seemingly even more inane, yet invests it with the entire weight of his scientific intelligence.  He reminds me of those people with IQs too high to fit into everday society--the people who wind up bagging groceries while they muse about philosophers and string theory.  But what's most remarkable is that the novel is never pretentious, never forced, never desperate.  Weiss is a very assured writer, who unravels his complicated plot with patience, and who shows great empathy for his lead character.  In short, this brightly packaged book, this tangle of wires put out as a concept--might just be one of the best books of the year.  I can't think of another book that so effortlessly seemed to capture the zeitgeist.
3862521
They had a price special that was unbelievable. I am more than satisfied
3681930
This story is unbelievable, and the prose is amazing (I'm an engineer and don't typically comment on prose - it's that good). There are so many reviews that have been written that I don't know what to add. Not only did I read the book, but I also got the young adult audio book and listened to it with my family while driving on vacation out west. They too loved it (children are teenagers). We gave a copy to my father-in-law who also enjoyed it. In short, it's worth the incredibly high ratings. The story of what Louie and Phil survived is just stunning. Highly recommended.
1213952
Excellent coffee.  Now I know why the ratings were so high.