Yep. You may not like it though...

Cheers,
Ian

With the exception of an original Stylewriter (which, I seem to remember, shared a lot of components with a Canon in the PC universe at the time), I have never had any form of good experience with an inkjet by any manufacturer. It's actually why I ended up with the Lexmark laser in the first place.

For their time, when your alternative was dot matrix or a third mortgage, inkjet printers were astonishing. That time has gone for a while now I think, time to dump the lot and concentrate on low-end colour lasers.

Cheers,
Ian

Yes, I certainly have. My old Lexmark Optra SC 1275 EN networked colour laser did absolutely great for years. Eventually, and by 'eventually' I mean after around ten years, I had a motor issue that was too expensive to economically repair, but for a decade that thing sat in my room reliably churning out good quality print.

Cheers,
Ian

Associating them with depression however leads to them being available on medical prescription...

Cheers,
Ian

Sad to see many posters trotting out old reliability myths.

Jaguar have topped JD Power Satisfaction rankings, and many other rankings, on and off for years now. The unreliable ones you're talking about were made in the 70s and 80s by, effectively, British Leyland.

Things looked up in the early 90s when Ford took over. They started bringing modernised toolsets to the construction process, and as a result reliability started climbing. It has continued climbing until it is now well ahead of <a href="http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=mercedes%20reliability&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8">Mercedes</a>, for example, which is trotted out often as some form of reliability paragon.

It takes a long time to change reputation, that's the problem. That reputation didn't match reality as of about 1995 onwards (possibly slightly earlier) with the dumping of the XJ40 and the move to the X300 design (still marketed as XJ6/XJ8), but people still trot out what they once heard in a bar or from their dad. It's annoying - drop it. Jaguars are as reliable, if not more so, as anything else in their class.

Personally I've owned XJ40 and X300-type XJ6 cars (one a Sovereign, one an XJR). I've owned an X-Type and an S-Type, and am currently contemplating an older XF. During the same time period a friend of mine has owned BMWs and Audis - we've spent about the same on garage bills (an RS8 being a notable exception - bills dwarfed anything I'd seen on the Jags). The X and the S were fine, the XJ40 electrically temperamental, the X300 (XJR) was just superb.

Cheers,
Ian

Looked it up: Interesting. I've performed that reset before, but never heard that name for it.

Cheers,
Ian

They were great. With an SM124 mono monitor in hand, he ST was my first serious computer (coming off the back of a Spectrum and another Tramiel machine, the C64).

I learned C with the cheap GST C compiler. I did serious text crunching with Signum (superb output). I learned to do MIDI sequencing with Steinberg Pro 12. I used Spectre for Mac emulation and had a hardware 286 emulator fitte on which I ran Turbo Pascal. And then, of course, were the games.

Excellent machine. Tramiel's great hit, the C64, was also responsible for getting me into music in the first place. People like Rob Hubbard and Martin Galway got me hooked, and I still use C64 sounds today via plugins like QuadraSID.

Jack Tramiel's influence is severely understated by many (he schooled both Gates with the Commodore BASIC contract for instace) and I am sad to hear of him going.

Ian

It's slashdotted so I can't tell, but any definitive database really needs MOS and Zilog in there as well. The home and micro computer revolution depended on them, Zilog's Z80 and MOS's 6502.

Cheers,
Ian

I loved the idea of Elite but the implementation (particularly the later ones) was always a bit off for me. The crew based thing would be quite a bit of fun. Have a game that is part space shooty, part RTT or TBT crew management.

I want a remake of Psi 5 Trading Company. That's a great game which I still play now and again - for those that don't know it, you're the Captain of a freight-carring star ship and you command your crew. You can do nothing directly, all actions occur because you've instructed your crew to carry them out.

I'm a massive Elite (original, never got into Frontier) fan too - have a look at Oolite for a modern remake.

Cheers,
Ian

How many k? One. One k. Not two k, one k. And here it is.

Cheers,
Ian

I'm subscribed. When I subscribed, I had about 3.7k files < 256kbps (I remember the numbers because looked to see if it was worth it). After the matching, I now have ~ 1k files at < 256kbps. Of those, most are non-commercial tracks that have never appeared in any other form (hello http://remix.kwed.org) - I download their quarterly playlists.

So overall, a good job and I'm satisfied it saved me a ton of time upgrading my own rips. However that's the good - time for the bad.

Artwork. Artwork has been a mess. When I initially matched, I noticed a lot of my tracks had poor quality artwork (not due to match, they always had them). I went through and fixed them all - a few moments later, Match came back and blatted everything - right back to poor quality artwork again. Making it accept the newer high quality has been very hit and miss, usually involving deleting the track frmo my library and Match then re-importing - even then it doesn't always work.

That's artwork everywhere. Now to specific problems with the iPhone. I turned off Match due to a bad wi-fi area I was in - I had a connection, but couldn't get anywhere. As soon as I turned Match off, all artwork was wiped from my phone. Turning Match back on again appears to have randomly reinstated some artwork and not others.

Sorting. I had some hassle again and turned Match off on the iPhone. I then put it back on again, and suddenly the sort order of my artists was massively out - I have artists starting with K appearing under the 'I' section. It's not random, the artists are actually sorted in alphabetic order, however if you use your thumb to scroll down directly to letter 'M', for example, the first artist listed is James Newton Howard. Hmm....

The other thing is that I'm not sure I'll stay subscribed next year. As a labour-saving initial hit, the price was worth it for me. Now my files are matched anyway, I'm not sure it's worth it for me any more -I'm just as happy with the wireless syncing.

Cheers,
Ian

I've handed over some passwords to my wife. I try to keep them up to date, but admittedly that lags a little - at least she will know I have accounts there and may be able to act from that.

However, there's plenty of accounts that will simply wither. This one, for instance. It's not that I have anything to hide, it's just that I haven't enumerated the account as being one that needs dealing with. That's Slashdot, a relatively major case. I also have hundreds of accounts on single-purpose forums that I used maybe once in my life and that's it. VMware Forums? Cinemaware? Various coding sites? Music software sites? All that information will just go because I barely know every case I've registered for let alone be in a position to hand it to other people.

My hard drive? Again, my wife knows how to log in as me and is perfectly capable of using my machine. A few things, like the family accounts etc., are encrypted and she also has the password to that. Everything else - well, it's there but would she necessarily know there's something to look for? Again it's not deliberate, but I haven't pointed much out so it is an open question if everything relevant would be found. And if it is, in what format. A .pages document is one thing, a local svn repo in /opt/var or my local Confluence install is quite something else.

A lot of my stuff would disappear. A lot would seem to - wood for trees and not knowing where to look. In the end though, I think everything drastically important is covered.

Cheers,
Ian

With the finding of "The Underwater Menace" part 2, we now have a new "earliest surviving episode to feature Patrick Troughton."

Yeah...but having seen The Underwater Menace, I'm not terribly sure he'd thank us for it...

Cheers,
Ian

For cars I can imagine something similar to car audio. You get something up-to date with a new car, and you put up with the fact that it ages. Eventually someone purchases it as a used car and decides the audio isn't good enough, and fits an updated one.

Completely agreed, which is why I think form factor and interface need to be standardised rather than operating system. I can fit another stereo because I reliably know the original is a single or double DIN device, so my replacement will fit and can be powered/connected. What about the tablets?

Cheers,
Ian

I don't know, is the honest answer. People have found the binaries in iOS5, but Apple have stated they don't support it under that version. So honestly? No idea.

An interesting chat about the whole thing can be found on The Register.

Cheers,
Ian