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.

Seasonic sells fanless power supplies up to 850 watts. That's enough for GeForce Titan in SLI.

How much power do you NEED?

The GBA did support a Suspend feature, but the games had to deliberately support it also, and few did.

I prefer the Micro to the GBA SP for one simple reason: The micro is wider. The SP is so narrow that I wind up with finger cramps from using the shoulder buttons. The Micro's easier to hold.

Where are the pirate servers for City of Heroes/City of Villains?

I've looked, and haven't found any. There was a server emulator project, but it never seems to have gotten very far.

I don't know that there are apps I *need* that I can't get through the Apple app store, but there are apps I *want* that Apple doesn't permit.

Emulators, for instance.

I get out of work at 6 AM, you insensitive clod!

But they're not tested much before they're given a license and allowed to drive.

And I honestly don't think I've been tested 'tens of thousands of times' by pedestrian traffic. I've had someone step out in front of me three or four times, maybe? Perhaps a hundred or so walk behind me while I'm backing up in parking lots?

You go through fifteen NEW, PREVIOUSLY UNKNOWN traffic lights every day?

I call bullshit. I don't think most city DOTs could manage to hang fifteen traffic lights a day.

That's what we're talking about here. NEW lights. Not existing, mapped lights. Those aren't a problem.

You can use a bootable DOS disk/USB stick to update the firmware.

The 'performance restoration' part just rewrites all the data on the disk. You can get the same effect by backing up the disk, formatting, and copying all the data back.

(Brief summary: The problem makes data slower to read as it sits there. The firmware fix prevents that from recurring, rewriting the data fixes it on already-existing data. There's no data loss associated with this, just speed.)

I have an Epson WF-7510 and the drivers for OSX, Windows, and Android seem solid. There's a lot of stupid optional cruft, but there's a just-the-driver option.

That really depends on what fills it up and how. I've had my torrent client glitch out and completely fill my drive a couple times, to the point where the UI was too slow to even move a window.

Fortunately I was able to ssh in and kill the program and delete the offending temp files, but the first warning I had was 'oh hey, trying to type locks the system.'

(And the other pain in the butt is that completely filling an OSX volume will tend to horridly fragment things, and defragging it isn't free.)