It's that time again-- time to Beat The Analysts, and you have just slightly more than 24 hours to enter this time around, right after an AtAT hiatus (so if you're enough of a fan to be reading this in time, your odds are better than ever). Apple's second fiscal quarter ended a few weeks ago, and according to Yahoo! Finance, the analysts are now predicting that Apple will post a profit of 24 cents a share excluding one-time charges and gains. With 817.17 million shares outstanding (they split, remember?), we figure that comes to a profit of $196,120,800. That sounds higher than usual, but hey, the iPod's still hot. So will Apple beat the Street?

The entrant with the closest guess to Apple's posted results (excluding one-time charges and gains) will win his or her choice of either a super-stylish AtAT t-shirt or mock turtleneck-- or, alternatively and purely for reasons of tradition, an antiquated software title from the AtAT Baffling Vault of Antiquity®! There's actually some "new" stuff in there, believe it or not; in addition to mainstays such as Zork: Nemesis (1996), The X-Fools (1997), Duke Nukem 3D (1998-- but there's a native Mac OS X port of the application to use with the CD now!), and some ancient thing called Maniac Sports (1994-- requires at least 4 MB of RAM!), there are now actually a few shrinkwrapped copies of-- ready for this?-- Leisure Suit Larry 5: Passionate Patti Does A Little Undercover Work (1991!!). It requires 2 MB of RAM, System 6.07 or above, 256 colors, "Apple Super Drive" (the old kind, not the DVD-R-- yup, this sucker's on floppies!), a hard drive, and no shame.

You must include your name and email address for your entry to be valid. The contest is open until 4:00 PM EST on Wednesday, April 13th, at which time we will seal the entries. The winning entry will be posted once we get done crunching the numbers. Good luck!

(Contest void where prohibited. Export laws may limit the prize choices if overseas shipping is required. One entry per person-- duplicates will be ignored. In the event of a tie, the earliest received entry among the correct guessers will be deemed the winner. Play fair; if you're the guy CFO Peter Oppenheimer hired to watch over him with garlic and a stake in case he's attacked by vampires and you already know Apple's final Q2/05 results because he talks in his sleep, please refrain from entering. And as usual, AtAT will never give out or sell your email address to anyone-- our Privacy Policy has more on that.)

Okay, read these instructions carefully, because people screw this up all the time:

• Your "guess" should not include any one-time gains and charges. That means if Apple got $30 million from selling some stock, you should not take that into account. We're looking for honest-to-goodness recurring profit or loss, here.

• Make sure you enter your "guess" in actual U.S. dollars, not in millions of dollars or in shekels or anything like that. If you are predicting a $10 million profit, enter 10000000, not 10, and leave the "profit" radio button checked. If you're feeling glass-97%-empty and you think Apple somehow spilled some red ink, you could register your pessimism with a guess of a $25 million loss by entering 25000000 and clicking the "loss" radio button. Commas are okay if you want to make things clearer, e.g. "10,000,000"-- but "$10 million," for example, is a no-no and will be counted as ten bucks. So count those zeroes. Got it?

What disappoints you most about the video iPod 1.0?
	It doesn't get Cinemax
	It requires far too much physical effort to cram a DVD into the Dock connector
	You can't stick your face in the screen like with the TV in Videodrome
	Showing home movies on the iPod makes it too easy for viewers to escape
	I can fit 140 hours of TV in my pocket, but it sure is a hassle lugging this couch everywhere I go
(62914 votes)