Raised a laugh here. Suspected cracked cylinder head, engine removed to remove the cylinder heads and check which one.

Older Porsche 911. Did I mention it was -expensive- magic smoke?

It let out the expensive magic white smoke a couple of weeks ago, and is currently sitting without an engine.

Sore point right now.

The article missed the rather crucial word 'switch'. Keyboard/Video/Mouse switch.

My most used operating system these days is iOS. This isn't an iOS rant, I imagine for others on here their most used would be Android.

That's the point of all the post-PC hype, right? I have a Mac and I use Windows at work and there's obviously times when mobile won't do, but neither desktop nor laptop are my most frequently used devices anymore.

Cheers,
Ian

Not to exempt the game from all criticism, but the one that's constantly cropping up is 'always on DRM'. Perhaps there is, I honestly don't know, but if so it's only part of the story.

The game is partly calculated server-side. This is why you need a constant internet connection, because some of their servers are doing the work for you. This is almost certainly also why they've collapsed in a heap.

It seems there are enough legitimate criticisms of the game without trotting out the true-but-half-the-story "always on DRM" line. I assume they'll eventually fix the servers and I need to wait for the Mac version anyway, but I'm still concerned - much more worried by fundamentals such as the overall city size for instance.

Cheers,
Ian

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