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

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