1 Just for a sec, the image of you wearing hip shorts, drinking organic coffee and pontificating on the profoundness of FMA came to my mind. Just for a sec.

Out of curiosity, have you ever tried the new macs? (I get the feeling you are familiar with the old Apple ones) 

2 No, I haven't. No, I won't.

3 Based on this post, I wasn't prepared for his verdict. It would have been a drink-spitting moment, so I'm glad I wasn't drinking anything.

4 The funny thing about that thread was how quickly it seemed to turn into a Vista-bashing thread.

I used Vista for about a year (I have since given that computer to someone else) and I never really had any problems with it.

As for the current state of MacOS X: If I didn't have parallels installed and couldn't tap into the whole debian ecosystem, I'd probably be a lot more frustrated. There's just too much stuff in the "Macports" project that _almost_ works but doesn't. And the new app store is apparently carefully, exquisitely, and precisely nerfed to keep from being a for-pay equivalent of the debian app repositories.

5 Oh, and that reminds me of a question I've been meaning to ask our gracious host.

Do you ever use any virtual-machine apps, such as parallels or vmware or anything like that?

6

No, never have, except "DOSBox", which creates a virtual 8086 for old DOS games to run in.

It's a peculiar question. Why would you wonder about that?

7 Because I'm interested in comparing notes with someone who's been using that sort of thing in Windows, and I thought you might be using them. (I hear it's useful for running old programs, or for security purposes, i.e. running potentially malicious code in a sandbox environment).

8

It doesn't come with Win7 Home Premium, the version of Win7 which came on Alcyone. I just checked, and an upgrade to Win7 pro is $90 and an upgrade to Win7 ultimate is $150, and that's what I'd have to do to get that feature.

And I really have no need for it.