Every time I hear or read about people demanding that electric cars somehow make unnecessary noises I get a little annoyed. One of the great things about electric cars (beyond not running on fossil fuel) is that they don't contribute to noise pollution.
This wouldn't be a problem if people just paid a little attention before crossing the street, I've never been hit by a car even though I frequently listen to music while walking or riding my bicycle (not counting the time I was drunk and not paying attention, but that was all my own fault and luckily I wasn't injured beyond a few bruises).
I just don't get what is so hard about not randomly walking out into the middle of the street without first checking that there aren't any vehicles headed your way
That's a good question, but a more pressing one is whether the software will be GPL 3 and will talking to other people be considered distributing it? Because then you might end up having to open source all your thoughts.
We are the borg, this program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the term of the GNU General Public License as published by...
Because I've been a vegetarian for more than ten years and whenever I eat out I find myself having to double check that the "vegetarian-friendly" items on the menu don't contain meat because there are lots of "vegetarians" running around who seem to think fish and birds aren't animals...
That's how it works in Sweden. You go to Amsterdam over the weekend, smoke a couple of joints, come back to Sweden, hit the bars the next weekend, a cop sees you on the street and thinks you look "tired" (I have myself been threatened with arrest for drug use on my way home from work on a friday night when a police officer approached me and stated I looked, that's right, "tired". A joke I've heard from Swedish cannabis smokers is that Sweden is the only country in the world where you can get arrested for being happy or sleep-deprived), arrests you, you get to urinate into a cup, they find 11-COOH-THC or 11-OH-THC in your urine and that's it, you just got a conviction for drug use on your record.
The reason we have this system you ask? In the 80s the right-wing parties were falling behind in polls so they started ranting about rampant drug use and how use itself needed to be made illegal (despite the fact that at the time reported drug use among Swedes was at a multi-decade low), as always the left decided to join in on the "OMG DRUGS!!1" panic and a law was passed making drug use illegal (prior to that regular users were only arrested for possession, not use). A few years later they realized the law was rarely used since you could only be fined for drug use (which meant the police weren't allowed to force you to take a drug test) so they promptly added the possibility of jail time for drug use.
Why hasn't this been abolished? Because our politicians who deal with drug-related matters don't know anything about it beyond the political consensus that we need to "send the right signals" to people who use drugs (or might start using drugs) and happily dismiss the opinions of actual experts. Welcome to Sweden, where "signals" are more important than sanity (I don't remember which politician it was but one of them famously stated that she thought it was more important to send the right signals than it was to save lives).
Virtually all of the questions asked there can be answered by doing the following:
1) Reading the documentation of the programming language, library or software in question.
2) Having even a basic level of skill with the technology in question.
A big problem with this is that when "the library" is "All of the.NET framework" just going through the docs isn't always as easy as it seems. And even if you do find what you think is the right parts of it to use you can find yourself confused right up to the point where you ask a question on StackOverflow and someone helpfully points out that.NET actually has multiple implementations of what you want to do and that the obvious one is rarely the right one. Not to mention actual honest-to-god bugs and implementation quirks that aren't mentioned in the official docs (sure, you can search all of MSDN and hope to stumble across some MS advisory that explains a workaround but even then you might find it is overly specific, if you find it at all).
As for JavaScript there are definitely a lot of beginners out there trying to use it. There is also the issue of JavaScript being frequently used with (X)HTML, CSS and some web service that it fetches data from. Couple this with a lot of the information about JavaScript out there being wrong or outdated and it isn't really that strange that a lot of developers who would normally mainly work in say, Java, C# or Python, find themselves confused and facing conflicting information on how to solve a seemingly strange problem. JavaScript as implemented by various browsers also has a few oddities (both in terms of differing implementations and plain WTFs that are bound to baffle developers unfamiliar with it).
I hardly consider myself a guru when it comes to coding and I haven't really touched C or C++ in years but for some reason that doesn't really seem like a hard problem to solve, if anything it sounds more like the mode 13h stuff you'd do in an "Intro to programming" high school course in the 1990's...
Which sort of raises a question, if people who can't pass that test are still finding jobs, why did I get stuck working tech support for almost two years after college?
My experience from working for completely different companies is that the standard approach to product flaws is to ignore them completely or at least stay quiet until your people in-house have verified the problem and are halfway done with a fix or workaround (or the lawyers have concluded that the company isn't liable in which case it is somehow not a problem anyway no matter what the customers claim).
It's because the GUIs are so dumbed down, that only a dumb person can still use them.
The moment I noticed this, was when I tried to help my n00b brother with his new Mac Pro. I couldn't do simple things like configure the network unless I started to think "Hmm... what would a dumb person do?". And what do you know, that worked! But since everyone else is just copying off each other and OS X, this is true for all of them too, to some extend.
I was a bit shocked.
What are you comparing Mac OS X to here? Because I'm not sure I get the problem with the way you configure the network settings in OS X. "Apple menu" - "System Preferences" (where all such system settings are) - "Network". If you manage to "master" OS X enough to figure out that the Apple menu is where you'll find stuff like that and that System Preferences is where you change system-wide settings you're pretty much set.
For some reason I'm imagining you as one of those guys who rant and curse about how crappy OS X is while desperately trying to find "that little flag thing"/"the start menu" (depending on computer proficiency) in the bottom left corner, and when you finally find the System Preferences you rant about how it is nothing like the Control Panel on Windows. And yes, I've heard those rants from gamer friends who tried using macs way too many times...
If people drove cars the way they use computers we'd have a world filled with people who only knew how to operate Fords (and most likely only a specific model) and if they ever had to use a Mazda or a Chevy they'd either have a stroke or drive around in first gear all the time because the gear stick in the Mazda didn't look exactly like the one in their Ford...
Geeks claim to be all about change and innovation but in all honesty in many ways they're as set in their ways as anyone else.
I suspect this is definitely true, I know people who were still toying around with the whole "no window manager" style of computing just a few years ago (these also being the same kind of people who went on about how liberating it felt to configure their web browser to never display images and to ignore CSS). Watching them use it just made me think "wow, that's clunky and inefficient". Sure, I've occasionally found myself in a similar situation, but that was on Solaris 8 when my window manager refused to start and I figured it was easier to just fire up a few xterms, never deliberately.
According to Geeks the window manager was perfected by Microsoft in Windows 95 and everything else has been an abomination.
Nah, most proper geeks seem to really dislike Microsoft's UIs, including the win9x ones. Often they're more likely to stick to something even older or get obsessed with some highly specialized GUI that gets in the way as often as it is useful.
Someone below mentioned they disable Aero in order to avoid the window manager using system resources... even though it probably uses 1MB of RAM of their 8,000 MB system. There are legions of geeky cargo cults who still live in 1998 and practice superstitious rituals to make their computers go faster.
I have my work laptop set to use the "classic" win2k-style UI simply because the "Aero" look drives me nuts.
That said, I do think geeks often can move on and learn to love something new and different, there just have to be clear benefits to the new way of doing things. I resisted Mac OS X for a long time, when I finally tried it (after several very geeky friends had gotten macs) I was hooked. Now, I'm not one of those guys who want an Apple machine for everything, but I do appreciate the simplicity and cleanliness of the UI, the fact that there's a full-fledged UNIX system under the hood and the fact that most application developers who develop for OS X actually follow Apple's UI guidelines. So, my main workstation at home is a mac, the rest of my machines are a mix of FreeBSD and Debian. But yes, for a long time I resisted and just assumed that macs were useless "toy" computers (an image I had gotten in the pre-OS X days).
This sounds like the Swedish governments "statistics" on "cannabis-related" car accidents where anyone who is in a car accident who happens to have had THC metabolites in his/her bloodstream is counted as someone involved in a "cannabis-related" accident (which of course also opens up to "cannabis-related" deaths, if the driver of one of the cars in a pileup that killed six people had THC metabolites in his body those were all suddenly cannabis-related deaths, it's a neat way of counting if you want to inflate the numbers since the methods used for detecting cannabis use rely on the detection of metabolites that can be detected in urine for a long time after the actual use).
Personally, considering how poorly regulating booze and cigarettes is going, I don't think that opening up an additional drug is really the right call.
So it's better to not regulate it at all? Because that's the current state of the cannabis market. Production, wholesale distribution, sale and possession are all illegal, yes. But that just means that the current market is unregulated, and it is clearly not going away (to put it bluntly, a large enough portion of the public clearly isn't the least bit interested in this happening).
The comparisons to older "samples" the police took have to my knowledge been flawed since back in the day they didn't really care about preserving it. So they're comparing some marijuana from a bust 30 years ago where they measured the THC level after it sat exposed on a shelf in a hot evidence room to modern samples where they know they can't do that and expect good results (exposure to heat and air breaks down THC).
Also, "back in the day" with bad weed people would often sit around smoking several joints before getting properly stoned, with good marijuana (which is thankfully a lot more common, from what I've heard from those who smoked decades ago) you'll take a couple of "hits" and that's it.
You don't smoke a whole joint of high-quality, 15% THC marijuana by yourself in one sitting like you'd smoke a cigarette, you'll put a little in your pipe (one-hitter or bong) and take a couple of puffs. The days of sitting around with a joint inhaling lung-full after lung-full of smoke are mostly gone.
So why aren't you complaining about MS doing this? They've been this sort of thing for ages, they used to be infamous for doing things like this any chance they got. I'm not saying Apple doing this is any better, I'm just curious as to why people are so focused on it being bad when Apple does it but no one really seems to care about when MS does it anymore...
Mhm, but it's amusing how similar the scenarios are to what was bitched about back in the day with regards to Microsoft...and yet seems so different. It didn't really (to my experience) polarise people along these lines. You had Microsoft haters, and you had apathists; apart from a few shills, there didn't seem to be zealots engaging in a Holy War to protect Lord Gates. Now days though, if you deign to appear to denigrate an apple product..
True enough, although these days there do seem to be quite a few Microsoft zealots as well. I'm not quite sure where they all came from but I'm a fan of the "XBox theory", that those who weren't around in the bad old days think Microsoft have always had decent to good products and that they somehow beat everyone else out of the market by having superior technology...
I've tried writing COBOL and quite frankly it has some weird stuff going on compared to more modern languages that seriously makes it harder to learn than languages like Python and Perl.
Just because it's readable doesn't mean it's intuitive...
Most likely as there is no negative feedback for doing so, but there is positive feedback for using other systems this way. It's like the C and CE buttons on calculators, if you want to set your calculator to a known "safe" state it's generally easier to just hit both buttons a few times than learn what the buttons actually do (especially since not all calculators behave exactly the same when it comes to these buttons, much like not every heating or cooling system behaves exactly the same, I've seen thermostats wired up to both the heating and air conditioning systems where turning the heat to max would actually result in more hot water flowing through the radiators and underfloor heating than if you just upped it by a few degrees).
I know you're an AC and most likely a troll. But regardless, just in case someone else out there truly believes that Apple would never in any way deal with open source software. Never mind their contributions to LLVM and other projects.
No, Apple are evil and for the sheeple. And if we're going the "XBox-fan route" we might as well claim Microsoft are much more open and the Good Guys(tm) because they're so open and only use established industry standards like SMB, BMP, MSNP and OOXML while Apple uses horrible proprietary Apple-only technology like NFS, PNG, XMPP and PDF...
That is just downright rude. If it were Microsoft doing this, then people wouldn't stand for it.
More likely they'd push their new connector as an "industry standard", demand licensing fees and make sure there was a layer of encryption somewhere to make sure it was extremely hard to have two devices connected without at least one running Windows.
Or if they used an existing standard for the communication they'd throw in just enough changes that everyone else would end up a few months behind while figuring out their weird extensions to the existing standard.
I thought "pre-classic" was just a term used to describe late neolithic civilizations when they happened to have been based in the Americas instead of anywhere else in the world?
Ah, to quote an economist acquaintance of mine "Economics isn't about numbers, it's just psychology on a mass scale" and "In school they teach us that everyone is a rational actor but everyone is completely irrational and refuses to admit it because then their models wouldn't be accurate".
I agree that things in the Windows world are better these days. Still, I did try moving a Windows 2003 install (admittedly not the latest version of Windows) to a machine that was supposed to be "identical" (as in, exactly the same hardware) and it still required a bunch of reboots to install drivers for various pieces of hardware (even though drivers for that hardware were already installed it refused to recognize the hardware until I had installed the drivers again). Nothing compared to the NT4 days of course, back then a move like that would take the better part of a day...
But it's good to hear you've had better luck in that department, maybe some day in the near future we'll get to the point where you can just assume that your system disk will Just Work(tm) if you stick it in another machine.
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Every time I hear or read about people demanding that electric cars somehow make unnecessary noises I get a little annoyed. One of the great things about electric cars (beyond not running on fossil fuel) is that they don't contribute to noise pollution.
This wouldn't be a problem if people just paid a little attention before crossing the street, I've never been hit by a car even though I frequently listen to music while walking or riding my bicycle (not counting the time I was drunk and not paying attention, but that was all my own fault and luckily I wasn't injured beyond a few bruises).
I just don't get what is so hard about not randomly walking out into the middle of the street without first checking that there aren't any vehicles headed your way
That's a good question, but a more pressing one is whether the software will be GPL 3 and will talking to other people be considered distributing it? Because then you might end up having to open source all your thoughts.
We are the borg, this program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the term of the GNU General Public License as published by...
I'm sure someone will build an interface for it, and then there will be an open source driver within days.
If not that then let's at least hope our robotic overlords have it in their perfectly synchronized hearts to backport some of the major features...
Because I've been a vegetarian for more than ten years and whenever I eat out I find myself having to double check that the "vegetarian-friendly" items on the menu don't contain meat because there are lots of "vegetarians" running around who seem to think fish and birds aren't animals...
Also, most vegetarians I know eat fish.
Those aren't vegetarians. Really, it bugs me when people call themselves "vegetarian" even though they eat meat.
At work we actually mostly use Dia.
I have used OmniGraffle a bit at home though, the UI easily beats Dia. Haven't tried the Visio import/export functionality though...
Well, technically I still use Windows at work but that isn't really up to me, I need Visual Studio (and running it in a VM seems kind of ridiculous).
At home I haven't run Windows (except in a VM) for a long time.
That's how it works in Sweden. You go to Amsterdam over the weekend, smoke a couple of joints, come back to Sweden, hit the bars the next weekend, a cop sees you on the street and thinks you look "tired" (I have myself been threatened with arrest for drug use on my way home from work on a friday night when a police officer approached me and stated I looked, that's right, "tired". A joke I've heard from Swedish cannabis smokers is that Sweden is the only country in the world where you can get arrested for being happy or sleep-deprived), arrests you, you get to urinate into a cup, they find 11-COOH-THC or 11-OH-THC in your urine and that's it, you just got a conviction for drug use on your record.
The reason we have this system you ask? In the 80s the right-wing parties were falling behind in polls so they started ranting about rampant drug use and how use itself needed to be made illegal (despite the fact that at the time reported drug use among Swedes was at a multi-decade low), as always the left decided to join in on the "OMG DRUGS!!1" panic and a law was passed making drug use illegal (prior to that regular users were only arrested for possession, not use). A few years later they realized the law was rarely used since you could only be fined for drug use (which meant the police weren't allowed to force you to take a drug test) so they promptly added the possibility of jail time for drug use.
Why hasn't this been abolished? Because our politicians who deal with drug-related matters don't know anything about it beyond the political consensus that we need to "send the right signals" to people who use drugs (or might start using drugs) and happily dismiss the opinions of actual experts. Welcome to Sweden, where "signals" are more important than sanity (I don't remember which politician it was but one of them famously stated that she thought it was more important to send the right signals than it was to save lives).
Virtually all of the questions asked there can be answered by doing the following:
1) Reading the documentation of the programming language, library or software in question.
2) Having even a basic level of skill with the technology in question.
A big problem with this is that when "the library" is "All of the .NET framework" just going through the docs isn't always as easy as it seems. And even if you do find what you think is the right parts of it to use you can find yourself confused right up to the point where you ask a question on StackOverflow and someone helpfully points out that .NET actually has multiple implementations of what you want to do and that the obvious one is rarely the right one. Not to mention actual honest-to-god bugs and implementation quirks that aren't mentioned in the official docs (sure, you can search all of MSDN and hope to stumble across some MS advisory that explains a workaround but even then you might find it is overly specific, if you find it at all).
As for JavaScript there are definitely a lot of beginners out there trying to use it. There is also the issue of JavaScript being frequently used with (X)HTML, CSS and some web service that it fetches data from. Couple this with a lot of the information about JavaScript out there being wrong or outdated and it isn't really that strange that a lot of developers who would normally mainly work in say, Java, C# or Python, find themselves confused and facing conflicting information on how to solve a seemingly strange problem. JavaScript as implemented by various browsers also has a few oddities (both in terms of differing implementations and plain WTFs that are bound to baffle developers unfamiliar with it).
I hardly consider myself a guru when it comes to coding and I haven't really touched C or C++ in years but for some reason that doesn't really seem like a hard problem to solve, if anything it sounds more like the mode 13h stuff you'd do in an "Intro to programming" high school course in the 1990's...
Which sort of raises a question, if people who can't pass that test are still finding jobs, why did I get stuck working tech support for almost two years after college?
My experience from working for completely different companies is that the standard approach to product flaws is to ignore them completely or at least stay quiet until your people in-house have verified the problem and are halfway done with a fix or workaround (or the lawyers have concluded that the company isn't liable in which case it is somehow not a problem anyway no matter what the customers claim).
It's because the GUIs are so dumbed down, that only a dumb person can still use them. The moment I noticed this, was when I tried to help my n00b brother with his new Mac Pro. I couldn't do simple things like configure the network unless I started to think "Hmm... what would a dumb person do?". And what do you know, that worked! But since everyone else is just copying off each other and OS X, this is true for all of them too, to some extend. I was a bit shocked.
What are you comparing Mac OS X to here? Because I'm not sure I get the problem with the way you configure the network settings in OS X. "Apple menu" - "System Preferences" (where all such system settings are) - "Network". If you manage to "master" OS X enough to figure out that the Apple menu is where you'll find stuff like that and that System Preferences is where you change system-wide settings you're pretty much set.
For some reason I'm imagining you as one of those guys who rant and curse about how crappy OS X is while desperately trying to find "that little flag thing"/"the start menu" (depending on computer proficiency) in the bottom left corner, and when you finally find the System Preferences you rant about how it is nothing like the Control Panel on Windows. And yes, I've heard those rants from gamer friends who tried using macs way too many times...
If people drove cars the way they use computers we'd have a world filled with people who only knew how to operate Fords (and most likely only a specific model) and if they ever had to use a Mazda or a Chevy they'd either have a stroke or drive around in first gear all the time because the gear stick in the Mazda didn't look exactly like the one in their Ford...
Geeks claim to be all about change and innovation but in all honesty in many ways they're as set in their ways as anyone else.
I suspect this is definitely true, I know people who were still toying around with the whole "no window manager" style of computing just a few years ago (these also being the same kind of people who went on about how liberating it felt to configure their web browser to never display images and to ignore CSS). Watching them use it just made me think "wow, that's clunky and inefficient". Sure, I've occasionally found myself in a similar situation, but that was on Solaris 8 when my window manager refused to start and I figured it was easier to just fire up a few xterms, never deliberately.
According to Geeks the window manager was perfected by Microsoft in Windows 95 and everything else has been an abomination.
Nah, most proper geeks seem to really dislike Microsoft's UIs, including the win9x ones. Often they're more likely to stick to something even older or get obsessed with some highly specialized GUI that gets in the way as often as it is useful.
Someone below mentioned they disable Aero in order to avoid the window manager using system resources... even though it probably uses 1MB of RAM of their 8,000 MB system. There are legions of geeky cargo cults who still live in 1998 and practice superstitious rituals to make their computers go faster.
I have my work laptop set to use the "classic" win2k-style UI simply because the "Aero" look drives me nuts.
That said, I do think geeks often can move on and learn to love something new and different, there just have to be clear benefits to the new way of doing things. I resisted Mac OS X for a long time, when I finally tried it (after several very geeky friends had gotten macs) I was hooked. Now, I'm not one of those guys who want an Apple machine for everything, but I do appreciate the simplicity and cleanliness of the UI, the fact that there's a full-fledged UNIX system under the hood and the fact that most application developers who develop for OS X actually follow Apple's UI guidelines. So, my main workstation at home is a mac, the rest of my machines are a mix of FreeBSD and Debian. But yes, for a long time I resisted and just assumed that macs were useless "toy" computers (an image I had gotten in the pre-OS X days).
This sounds like the Swedish governments "statistics" on "cannabis-related" car accidents where anyone who is in a car accident who happens to have had THC metabolites in his/her bloodstream is counted as someone involved in a "cannabis-related" accident (which of course also opens up to "cannabis-related" deaths, if the driver of one of the cars in a pileup that killed six people had THC metabolites in his body those were all suddenly cannabis-related deaths, it's a neat way of counting if you want to inflate the numbers since the methods used for detecting cannabis use rely on the detection of metabolites that can be detected in urine for a long time after the actual use).
Personally, considering how poorly regulating booze and cigarettes is going, I don't think that opening up an additional drug is really the right call.
So it's better to not regulate it at all? Because that's the current state of the cannabis market. Production, wholesale distribution, sale and possession are all illegal, yes. But that just means that the current market is unregulated, and it is clearly not going away (to put it bluntly, a large enough portion of the public clearly isn't the least bit interested in this happening).
The comparisons to older "samples" the police took have to my knowledge been flawed since back in the day they didn't really care about preserving it. So they're comparing some marijuana from a bust 30 years ago where they measured the THC level after it sat exposed on a shelf in a hot evidence room to modern samples where they know they can't do that and expect good results (exposure to heat and air breaks down THC).
Also, "back in the day" with bad weed people would often sit around smoking several joints before getting properly stoned, with good marijuana (which is thankfully a lot more common, from what I've heard from those who smoked decades ago) you'll take a couple of "hits" and that's it.
You don't smoke a whole joint of high-quality, 15% THC marijuana by yourself in one sitting like you'd smoke a cigarette, you'll put a little in your pipe (one-hitter or bong) and take a couple of puffs. The days of sitting around with a joint inhaling lung-full after lung-full of smoke are mostly gone.
So why aren't you complaining about MS doing this? They've been this sort of thing for ages, they used to be infamous for doing things like this any chance they got. I'm not saying Apple doing this is any better, I'm just curious as to why people are so focused on it being bad when Apple does it but no one really seems to care about when MS does it anymore...
Mhm, but it's amusing how similar the scenarios are to what was bitched about back in the day with regards to Microsoft...and yet seems so different. It didn't really (to my experience) polarise people along these lines. You had Microsoft haters, and you had apathists; apart from a few shills, there didn't seem to be zealots engaging in a Holy War to protect Lord Gates. Now days though, if you deign to appear to denigrate an apple product..
True enough, although these days there do seem to be quite a few Microsoft zealots as well. I'm not quite sure where they all came from but I'm a fan of the "XBox theory", that those who weren't around in the bad old days think Microsoft have always had decent to good products and that they somehow beat everyone else out of the market by having superior technology...
I've tried writing COBOL and quite frankly it has some weird stuff going on compared to more modern languages that seriously makes it harder to learn than languages like Python and Perl.
Just because it's readable doesn't mean it's intuitive...
Most likely as there is no negative feedback for doing so, but there is positive feedback for using other systems this way. It's like the C and CE buttons on calculators, if you want to set your calculator to a known "safe" state it's generally easier to just hit both buttons a few times than learn what the buttons actually do (especially since not all calculators behave exactly the same when it comes to these buttons, much like not every heating or cooling system behaves exactly the same, I've seen thermostats wired up to both the heating and air conditioning systems where turning the heat to max would actually result in more hot water flowing through the radiators and underfloor heating than if you just upped it by a few degrees).
I know you're an AC and most likely a troll. But regardless, just in case someone else out there truly believes that Apple would never in any way deal with open source software. Never mind their contributions to LLVM and other projects.
No, Apple are evil and for the sheeple. And if we're going the "XBox-fan route" we might as well claim Microsoft are much more open and the Good Guys(tm) because they're so open and only use established industry standards like SMB, BMP, MSNP and OOXML while Apple uses horrible proprietary Apple-only technology like NFS, PNG, XMPP and PDF...
That is just downright rude. If it were Microsoft doing this, then people wouldn't stand for it.
More likely they'd push their new connector as an "industry standard", demand licensing fees and make sure there was a layer of encryption somewhere to make sure it was extremely hard to have two devices connected without at least one running Windows.
Or if they used an existing standard for the communication they'd throw in just enough changes that everyone else would end up a few months behind while figuring out their weird extensions to the existing standard.
I thought "pre-classic" was just a term used to describe late neolithic civilizations when they happened to have been based in the Americas instead of anywhere else in the world?
Ah, to quote an economist acquaintance of mine "Economics isn't about numbers, it's just psychology on a mass scale" and "In school they teach us that everyone is a rational actor but everyone is completely irrational and refuses to admit it because then their models wouldn't be accurate".
I agree that things in the Windows world are better these days. Still, I did try moving a Windows 2003 install (admittedly not the latest version of Windows) to a machine that was supposed to be "identical" (as in, exactly the same hardware) and it still required a bunch of reboots to install drivers for various pieces of hardware (even though drivers for that hardware were already installed it refused to recognize the hardware until I had installed the drivers again). Nothing compared to the NT4 days of course, back then a move like that would take the better part of a day...
But it's good to hear you've had better luck in that department, maybe some day in the near future we'll get to the point where you can just assume that your system disk will Just Work(tm) if you stick it in another machine.