Just seen this - hopefully you read the reply. For MAME I have a real arcade cab with an old PC inside it, so I don't use the Mac for that. For the rest of the emulation scene on the Mac though, take a look at Open Emu, which has a lot of what's useful. Other ones I use are for Commodore - Vice64 for the C64, UAE for the Amiga.

Ever played Asteroids? If you haven't played it on the original arcade machine, chances are you're missing out on a large part of the experience because it runs on a vector monitor. Those beautiful glowing bullets simply don't show up on raster hardware in close to the same way. Same can be said for Star Wars - the sit-down vector monitor game was incredible.

I'm speaking as someone who has an arcade cabinet running MAME, and who regularly uses emulators on a Mac as well. I'm not perfectionist for a lot of the standard stuff, but I do appreciate that in some cases there are material differences to the real thing.

Smart for who? Not for the employee.

Unless flying regularly is clearly stated in your contract (and I mean regularly, not 'you may be asked to travel from time to time'), the company is inconveniencing you over and above your normal duties, and causing actual discomfort in the case of many economy flights. You ask for decent standards or refuse.

I'm astonished to see so many people defend this. For flights of two or three hours, fine. For anything longer - absolutely not.

Cheers,
Ian

I came out on the music reward scale at 32, well below their mean of 50. However, I spent fifteen years learning to play, I write for myself and have also published an album.

I don't use music as wallpaper, which is very much what the questions seemed geared around. Also questions like "Music calms me (agree 1-5)" - well, which music? Some of it very much does not calm me, and some quite definitely does.

Not sure that data collected by the questionairre wil be useful in drawing the right conclusions.

You're joking. The PC was an attempt to retain control, quickly churned out by IBM. It was just there to keep down the new micros that were starting to look popular, and the design was never intended to last.

It worked too - IBM retained control over the business market for quite a while, and didn't realise until OS/2 and microchannel that it had actually lost the control it thought it had kept.

Cheers,
Ian

Word 4.2 (I think it was .2) combined with my Mac LC and a Stylewriter was and remains my favourite word processor setup of all time - it got me through the last two years of university (first year I started with an ST, using First Word Plus). Loved 4.2 - perfect mix of simple but powerful.

5.x brought in envelopes and a bunch of stuff I don't recall and didn't use, but started to get slow. 6.x is where the rot set in for me and I've never really liked any version since, whether PC or Mac.

Cheers,
Ian

I had the same experience the first time I saw a GUI machine - an Atari ST in a shop. Although I'd read magazines (anyone remember Input magazine in the UK?) about graphical interfaces, I hadn't ever actually used one or seen one for real.

My first thought on seeing it was "how do I get out of this and where's the computer?". I was essentially looking to type load "" somewhere and was baffled that I couldn't do it.

Cheers,
Ian

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