Calvin and Hobbes has got to be the most overrated comic strip ever.

I don't mean I think it was bad; I don't. But it's not the be-all, end-all, god-tier, totally-original, nothing-else-compares, no-one-did-that-before that people make it out to be.

Nintendo's WiiU exclusives do tend to run at a solid 60fps at 1080p.

However, in large part that's because of the art design. The models and textures used are simply easier for the hardware to handle.

When you throw something like Bayonetta at it, the WiiU starts to chug in spots.

You can see that at work in other situations, too. World of Warcraft kept its models simple for a long time to keep performance up. But because the models and textures they used suited their art direction, it wasn't glaringly obvious.

(Some older MMOs still give my rig fits, and I pull 80+ FPS in Shadow of Mordor with all the options all the way up. Go to Bree in Lord of the Rings Online? Frames tank. Way too much reflection!)

You mean other than 'most of my games won't work on it'?

Carter hell.

The US started to metricize in 1875, and the kilogram and meter have been the official units of mass and length in the US since 1893.

No one, however, really seems to give a shit, and never has.
 

And the Shield Portable has been discontinued.

Which is a real shame, because all my friends that see mine want one - I bring it to work, and the general reaction is 'Whoa, what IS that?' followed by 'Does it run emulators?' and 'Where can I get it?' - to which the answer is now 'Ebay, for more than double the MSRP. If you're lucky.'

I really hope they make a Portable 2. The thing really is great for playing all sorts of games on.

Before switching from a prepaid carrier to an MVNO, make sure you read the MVNO's plan closely.

Some don't allow roaming at all, or only allow a minimal amount (like say, 25 megs of data). Some don't allow tethering/hotspot use, or charge an extra fee for it. Some shut off data when you hit the cap instead of throttling.

You can save money with an MVNO, but make sure you're actually getting the services you need.

64 bit Windows 8 will run 32 bit Windows 95/98 software just fine.

It's the 16 bit Windows 3.1 era stuff it craps out on.

(Okay, there is some 16 bit Win9x software. But most of what I have is 32 bit. The obnoxious exceptions are game installers. TIE Fighter for Windows? 32 bit. TIE Fighter's installer program? 16 bit.)

Actually, it was only supported when the GUEST was OS X Server in 10.6 and earlier. And it's only supported when the host is -some- form of Mac.

This is why Apple still sells MacOS 10.6 Server; so people can buy a version that will run in a VM that has Rosetta, for PPC apps.

(They charge about twenty bucks for it, and you need to call them and give the part number. But they have it.)

Me, I use OS X on my Mac because the ways that it sucks piss me off less than the ways Windows sucks or the ways Linux sucks.

They all suck. They just suck in different ways.

Did you know that for $30 you can get a floppy-to-USB device?

It's the size of a floppy drive, installs in a floppy bay, plugs up to the floppy and power connectors, and provides a USB port, a couple of buttons, and a numeric display.

You plug in a USB stick, use the buttons to select which diskette image you want to use, and it presents it to the host machine like a floppy disk.

You often see them advertised for Roland keyboards, but they should work with most floppy applications.

You can still get motherboards with floppy connectors, though you have to shop around a bit.

Usually not 'gamer class' boards, but some workstation and server boards have 'em.

Alternately, you can use an IDE or SCSI floppy drive, though those are getting hard to find too. (And they're all old.)

And I know people who use IMs on their PC but not their phone. An IM doesn't necessarily get read any faster than an email.

None of the IMs I've used will actually tell me a message is read. It'll let me know if it fails to deliver, but that doesn't mean Jim is actually at his desk and saw it.

I wasn't claiming there aren't uses for IMs.

My claim was that email isn't useless.

Not everyone's use case is the same as yours.

IM is a pain in the ass. Of any group of three people or more I want to send a message to, it's dead certain they're not all on the same IM network.

It's a nice theory, but it's nowhere near universal. Email is.

Define 'small'.

I have games that are pushing 50 gigs each.

It doesn't take many of those to fill up a 'small' SSD, and copying things back and forth between an SSD and a hard drive when you want to play a game gets annoying fast.

And yes, games benefit from being on an SSD. Besides the levels loading faster, I get much smoother framerates in games with large textures when playing from SSD. Seek times matter.

(This is especially visible in games that stream loading, like MMOs. Lord of the Rings Online, in particular, benefits from fast seek times; the framerate is visibly better on an SSD, particularly when riding a horse.)

You really don't have a choice about upgrading the Steam client. It installs its updates in the background.

I'm using the latest version, on Snow Leopard, and it works. If you're having problems on Lion, I'd suggest uninstalling, cleaning its preferences, and reinstalling perhaps?

There was an entry in the update notes that the latest patch was re-released on 11/25 due to a Mac problem.Maybe try updating it before anything else.

Beats me. I don't usually game on my Mac, but I just installed a random game from my list (The Binding of Isaac) and it ran just fine, and I'm on 10.6 Snow Leopard.