Are retirement calculators useful in this volatile economy?

I'm more than a little disappointed with calculators. I began saving regularly for retirement in the late 1970s and according to the calculator I was supposed to be pretty well off by now. What actually happened, though, was that I did OK until about 2000 but not very well since then. I'm glad I saved, but the calculator was wrong. --David R., Phoenix, Arizona

Out-of-this-world software engineering

Without Charles Simonyi the seemingly simple act of composing documents on a computer would be far less intuitive and visually straightforward. As a computer programmer at Microsoft in the 1980s, he led the team that created Word, the ubiquitous word-processing program (he also led the Excel team). Before joining Microsoft, Simonyi (pronounced sim-OH-nyee) worked at Xerox PARC, where he had a hand in inventing the graphical user interface that enabled consumers to see text and formatting on the screen as it would appear in the final document -- an interface known as WYSIWYG, or "what you see is what you get."

We like our PCs -- but love our Macs

Americans' satisfaction with their personal computers is at an all-time high, but buyers' happiness with Apple's Macs continues to top Windows PCs.