I'll admit right now that I'm using "Windows classic" as my theme on my work computer. The main reason for this is that the various "Aero" themes just look garish and clunky to me, I just can't stand them. Is there perhaps some way of theming Vista so that it looks clean and minimalistic without replacing system dlls? (the latter being what pretty much everyone seems to recommend doing when I complain about how it looks but I'm not in the mood for screwing up my work laptop since I need it for, well, work)
Also, there's a part of me that wonders why they didn't just implement an Aero version of the Windows classic theme, when I look at the desktops of most IT professionals/developers I know who use Windows they're using Windows classic, same for "artsy types" who aren't using macs. An acquaintance of mine even hypothesized that the only people who used Aero were "gamers and grandmas".
You can't be from around here. Around here most people will do their banking online and withdraw cash directly in stores or using an ATM. Those who don't do these things are generally either very old, very stupid or incapable of understanding Swedish or English.
With this in mind, when you are forced to go to the bank for something that can't be done online you can look forward to taking a small queue ticket that says you are number 917, looking up at a sign telling you that currently numbers 909,910 and 911 are being served and you'll instinctively know that you've got about 45 minutes to an hour of waiting ahead of you at the very least. At least you get all the fun of watching some little old lady demand that the bank teller count her huge collection of coins by hand because she doesn't trust machines...
First hit from google search for "carpet" is Wikipedia which states:
...affixed to a floor over a cushioned underlay (pad) using nails, tack strips (known in the UK as gripper rods), adhesives, or occasionally decorative metal stair rods, thus distinguishing it from rugs or mats, which are loose-laid floor coverings. For environmental reasons, the use of wool, natural bindings, natural padding, and formaldehyde-free glues is becoming more common. These options are almost always at a premium cost, though with no sacrifice to performance.
Yes, a lot of houses in the US are built using frames of two-by-fours with aluminum or vinyl siding (the vinyl being made to look like "authentic" wood).
Vinyl on floors is, as another poster pointed out, considered "cheap" and "white trash". Instead it is common to see people put in permanent carpets glued to the floor that get absolutely disgusting (since they don't take their shoes off indoors) and need to be cleaned using special carpet-cleaning equipment.
Of course, I'm from Sweden where you are more likely to see wood, tile or vinyl floors (the latter two mostly in bathrooms and kitchens). And around here we take our shoes off indoors because there's no point in dragging dirt and mud all over a clean floor, with or without a carpet...
Oh, Windows has antialiasing, it's just that it tries too hard to force fonts into the pixel grid so while it does make them readable it also makes them look sort of ugly and broken (unless specifically designed for ClearType).
Then of course as you pointed out there is the weird window tearing thing going on, which for some reason will happen even on a top-of-the-line Windows machine with no software running except the one explorer.exe window you're moving around.
And finally there's the general UI design where your choices boil down to "whatever crazy translucent shiny MS is making the current version default to" or "Windows Classic" which is grey and boring to say the least (and not in a minimalist way, in the "this must have been designed by an accountant" way).
Still, this doesn't excuse the fact that when someone presses the "guide" button it takes two seconds until their TV reacts at all. It could pop up a small "loading guide" message at the top left/right corner of the screen. It could also be a bit more clever about caching information needed to show the guide (some TVs obviously are and not necessarily the more expensive ones).
A lot of times I think lag issues like these pop up because the people building the software aren't using "real" hardware and thus aren't limited in the same way that a regular user is (like say, their lab setup pushes three channels worth of data directly into their software "TV simulator", IRL you're receiving the non-video transmissions at a lower data rate and it's being sent to you rather than just read from disk).
I always hoped that Bin Laden would end up choking to death on a handful of chili nuts just outside a Walmart (where he just purchased the aforementioned nuts), dressed in a pair of surf shorts and a mickey mouse t-shirt of course. That would've stirred up some very interesting controversy, bonus points if he had been using his real ID the whole time...
Sweden although those I've heard claiming that OBL was a CIA operative were all from the US (with the other conspiracy theories it seems no country is completely safe from crackpots).
I suspect that the range of "truths" available to the average person has also expanded. Most people used to only be exposed to the "normal extremes", perhaps reading about the truly crazy ideas and people from time to time without actually being exposed to them.
These days it's pretty easy to find entire online communities that agree with you that Osama Bin Laden was really a CIA operative performing covert false-flag ops against the US military to expose Barack Obama and the military a zionist space-lizards who are plotting to destroy the planet once they and the world's jews have built a spaceship financed with their jew-gold stolen from hard-working god-fearing christians.
And no, I haven't actually encountered that specific conspiracy theory. I did however hear several people claim yesterday that Osama was executed by the US military as revenge against him and his CIA handlers for their false-flag ops against US troops. And I have heard several people claim that the US government is run by zionist lizard-men from another world as well as the "theory" that all the world's jews are involved in some massive conspiracy to rob the rest of the world (and especially christians) of all their money. I just put all these together into one juicy ball of batshit crazy. My point being that even if you're spouting completely insane things you can find plenty of people online who will online disagree with you about minor details, overall they will agree with your crazy.
I'm swedish so caps aren't really of any concern to me. I do however monitor my bandwidth usage using SNMP + rrdtool with a small web page that shows bandwidth usage and some other statistics (including room temperature, system load and uptime for my home server).
I used to just use "rrdtool graph" to create images but I recently switched to using a jQuery-based client-side plotting library called flot since it produces my cleaner graphs and it also allows me to use AJAX to update only the data rather than push a whole new image on every update...
You could easily modify a solution such as this to also monitor total data transferred over a specified period of time (such as the current calendar month or the last 30 days).
Yet the "good guys" in the movie clearly weren't very good when you got down to it.
Also, if you truly think that someone successfully assassinating Hitler and a number of Nazi leaders would've led to less suffering and death you have a simplistic view of the political and military situation in Europe at that time.
Considering that the movie takes place several years before Operation Overlord the now-weakened axis forces would've been steamrolled by the soviets, allowing them to capture much larger parts of Europe than they did in real life.
But hey, I suppose if "WOO YEAH! AMERICA! KILL THEM THERE NAZI BASTARDS!" is more fun for you then I shouldn't complain, I just wish there were more movies that didn't play it fast and loose with historical, political, scientific and military accuracy...
The message I got from that movie was "It's ok to be evil, sadistic and generally a complete fucking ass if the other guy is German, no reason to check if he's a Nazi or not, just carve a swastika into his forehead and kill a bunch of people for no good reason. Yeehaw!".
Maybe it's because I'm not from the US but within the context of that movie I was actually rooting for the Germans...
First off, I've worked with various electronic payment systems (including building parts of them), I don't trust them, I've seen way too many screwups that end up with hundreds or thousands of users being told variations of "Oh, sorry about charging you ten times the normal amount, we'll have the money back in your account in a fortnight and according to the contract you signed with us we can't be held responsible for any family members of yours who starve to death due to this...".
So while I've been paying all my bills online for over a decade I do still receive paper bills for everything. I keep these in binders sorted in order of the payment date. I also note the date I paid the bill on the bill.
In addition to the paid bills I have a chronologically sorted section at the end of the binder for unpaid bills which I go through at the end of every month, paying those bills that are due.
As for invoices, receipts and such things I keep them in a separate binder sorted by date. I don't save receipts for things like groceries and other minor purchases as I have no reason to do so.
The third group of documents is "random important stuff", once again sorted chronologically, includes things like various official papers from schools, signed verifications of me not having thrashed previous apartments when moving out (always good to keep around just in case a previous landlord decides to be a dick years later, if you have that paper with a signature on it indicating they said the apartment was fine when you moved out then they can't make you pay for the next guy thrashing the apartment and then disappearing).
And finally I have a stack of "sort of important, maybe, or maybe not, I'd better just keep this around for a month or two" papers. I go through this pile at the end of every month while paying bills, throwing out those papers that were either not important or that are no longer important and filing those that should be filed in a binder in the appropriate binder.
This system has worked well for me since I moved to my first apartment and I suspect it will work fine for years to come.
That's what Onlinepizza.se is for. Of course, if they somehow make it figure out what pizza you want without you having to tell it...
Or just let you schedule pizza orders at that, that way when you wake up on saturday with a hangover it will be because the pizza guy just arrived with your pizza. Much better than having to drag yourself out of bed, order pizza and then wait for the pizza.
Actually, there are certain contexts in which it is apparently legal. Here in Sweden the royal library houses a copy of every magazine and book published in Sweden since whenever, and among these publications are a number of magazines from the 70s that are basically child porn magazines. They are required by law to keep these magazines while at the same time possession of these magazines is illegal these days (but from what I've understood from an acquaintance who's studied law the law that requires them to keep the magazines takes precedence over the law that makes them illegal).
Have you ever visited a company that's running all-MS software on the servers and desktops? Ever seen one of these companies try to switch away from MS?
Apple feel the need to control every aspect of the product.
Which product?
Apple dictate you must buy their hardware
Well, they do sell a system comprised of both hardware and software but it's not like you're forced to buy their solution, you can just as easily use someone else's software and hardware.
Apple dictate you must distribute applications by their distribution channel, Apple dictate what browser you are permitted to use, Apple dictate that flash is not permitted regardless of if you want it or not. MS has done nothing of the sort. They never even tried to cripple Steam when GFWL was floundering, MySQL runs fine on Windows Server.
I'm putting these together just to show how you're switching back and forth. Here you are comparing desktop/server versions of MS Windows to iOS (the mobile device OS from Apple).
Also, Apple and MS are both after your money, no surprise there. The difference is in business model, the MS model has long been to control the entire ecosystem by becoming the alpha predator, Apple's strategy is to dominate "their" niche completely.
The whole "mind, body and soul" thing you're going about sounds more like paranoia (or you confusing a handful of rabid Apple fanboys with Apple, the company).
You are exhibiting all the symptoms of cult-like behavior. You've got a set vocabulary of names to use for your perceived opponents, and stereotypical behavior sets to cast them into.
So according to you if a person has "a set vocabulary of names to use for perceived opponents" (I never claimed they were my opponents, I claimed they were disruptive to discussions about the subject at hand) and is able to identify "stereotypical behavior sets to cast them into" that is all that is required to reliably determine that the person is a cultist?
That makes you one of those Apple zealots that 'The Rest Of Us' have had to deal with for decades now. We're always happy to tell people like you to fuck off, btw.
I've never owned a 68k or PPC mac. So much for "decades". I have however owned two Intel-based macs. I've also owned dozens of other computers running everything from MINIX and SV-BASIC to Plan 9, Windows Vista and IRIX. I'm not saying Apple and their products are flawless, I'm saying that screaming that they're evil without even bothering to check the facts isn't really getting us anywhere as a civilization.
There's a difference between "be upset" and "lash out with rage based mostly on baseless speculation and preconceived notions", the latter is what bugs me. Those who immediately jump to "APPLE IS EVIL!" and make up "facts" based on the most inflammatory headline about the subject they could find (I've seen several major newspapers state outright that Apple was "tracking where you go" which was of course the "fact" all the Apple haters jumped on, not the articles that described in detail just how consolidated.db was used and stored).
Oh, I have no problem with discussions about this and related topics. I'm just fed up with the slobbering hordes of "anti-fanboys" who show up every time Apple is mentioned (there is a similar but smaller reaction for Google, Microsoft and most other high-profile tech companies, Apple seems to be the main target for the "cool to hate" crowd and has been so for a while now).
These commenters rarely contribute to the discussion, don't bother reading up on the issues at hand and instead tend to just resort to fear-mongering, misinterpretations and of course outright name-calling.
This is an issue that should be discussed but the vast majority of comments I've seen so far have been along the lines of "APPLE SI TEH EVül!!1 STAEV JOBS IS SUING IS SATTEILT IN ORBIT TO TARKC UR POSISHION!!! ANY1 STIL USING CRAPPLE IPHONIE IS AN IDIOTS OR A FAGET 4 STAVE JOBS CAWK!!11one" (really, when venturing outside of "geek circles" and onto the internet at large that isn't very far from a very large number of comments I've seen although most have worse punctuation and don't use all-caps, the caps-lock is pretty much implied from the tone of the posts though)
Hush now, don't ruin a good anti-Apple flamefest. You're not giving the haters a chance to proclaim that they've never used, never owned, never wished to own or even seen an Apple product in real life but they're still horribly outraged and this great assault on their human rights by the evil empire led by the great satan, Steve Jobs.
Yes, I'm exaggerating but I can't help but be slightly baffled by the hordes of people who seem to think that Apple is somehow more powerful in the world of computing than Microsoft or that they are "more evil" than MS has ever been. Not to mention the fact that about half of them swear they've never used a mac or iDevice in their lives yet they are experts on the subject...
There's also the issue of having at least a bit of overlap in skill sets and interests. Sure the "car guy" knows a lot about fixing cars up in various ways but his skills are not only highly domain specific (he doesn't have general knowledge about the things he does, he just knows the applications of the knowledge that are relevant to cars) but he also completely lacks interest in other things. Robotics? Boring. Video games? Does it have cars? No? Boring. Programming? What, like TV? Oh... Boring..
That's not to say that diverse skills aren't necessary, but there's a difference between diversity of skills and unrelated skills.
There's also the fact that you need to find people with the right personalities, people who just "click". That can be hard when there aren't all that many people around (town/city of 60k, assume a "generous" 10% being proper geeks of something (not counting "I'm a total sports/music geek, I know all the baseball stats/names of popular indie band singers..." geeks), that's 6,000 people, now even if we assume there are only say, 20 possible basic fields of interest (with each person having two or three secondary interests) with an even distribution that still puts it at 300 persons per primary interest. Oh, and you have to actually find these people as well).
And let's not mention the part about the majority of computer geeks (which seems to be the biggest group of geeks) being little more than video/computer game geeks who have pulled off a couple case mods and now consider themselves demigods.
In a big city it's just a lot easier to run into someone with a shared interest, or to come across a few people who have already banded together and put up fliers or posted on craigslist...
I've tried to set up my home network to prefer my IPv6 tunnel from Sixxs over IPv4 but there are oh so many hosts on the net that only support IPv4. Slashdot.org is a great example of such a host...
Maybe if more websites and other services actually supported IPv6 we'd see it "take off". Currently it's a bit like complaining about no one taking the train when there are only two stations in the whole country.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll admit right now that I'm using "Windows classic" as my theme on my work computer. The main reason for this is that the various "Aero" themes just look garish and clunky to me, I just can't stand them. Is there perhaps some way of theming Vista so that it looks clean and minimalistic without replacing system dlls? (the latter being what pretty much everyone seems to recommend doing when I complain about how it looks but I'm not in the mood for screwing up my work laptop since I need it for, well, work)
Also, there's a part of me that wonders why they didn't just implement an Aero version of the Windows classic theme, when I look at the desktops of most IT professionals/developers I know who use Windows they're using Windows classic, same for "artsy types" who aren't using macs. An acquaintance of mine even hypothesized that the only people who used Aero were "gamers and grandmas".
You can't be from around here. Around here most people will do their banking online and withdraw cash directly in stores or using an ATM. Those who don't do these things are generally either very old, very stupid or incapable of understanding Swedish or English.
With this in mind, when you are forced to go to the bank for something that can't be done online you can look forward to taking a small queue ticket that says you are number 917, looking up at a sign telling you that currently numbers 909,910 and 911 are being served and you'll instinctively know that you've got about 45 minutes to an hour of waiting ahead of you at the very least. At least you get all the fun of watching some little old lady demand that the bank teller count her huge collection of coins by hand because she doesn't trust machines...
You're an idiot.
First hit from google search for "carpet" is Wikipedia which states:
...affixed to a floor over a cushioned underlay (pad) using nails, tack strips (known in the UK as gripper rods), adhesives, or occasionally decorative metal stair rods, thus distinguishing it from rugs or mats, which are loose-laid floor coverings. For environmental reasons, the use of wool, natural bindings, natural padding, and formaldehyde-free glues is becoming more common. These options are almost always at a premium cost, though with no sacrifice to performance.
(Btw, "adhesive" in this context means "glue")
Yes, a lot of houses in the US are built using frames of two-by-fours with aluminum or vinyl siding (the vinyl being made to look like "authentic" wood).
Vinyl on floors is, as another poster pointed out, considered "cheap" and "white trash". Instead it is common to see people put in permanent carpets glued to the floor that get absolutely disgusting (since they don't take their shoes off indoors) and need to be cleaned using special carpet-cleaning equipment.
Of course, I'm from Sweden where you are more likely to see wood, tile or vinyl floors (the latter two mostly in bathrooms and kitchens). And around here we take our shoes off indoors because there's no point in dragging dirt and mud all over a clean floor, with or without a carpet...
Oh, Windows has antialiasing, it's just that it tries too hard to force fonts into the pixel grid so while it does make them readable it also makes them look sort of ugly and broken (unless specifically designed for ClearType).
Then of course as you pointed out there is the weird window tearing thing going on, which for some reason will happen even on a top-of-the-line Windows machine with no software running except the one explorer.exe window you're moving around.
And finally there's the general UI design where your choices boil down to "whatever crazy translucent shiny MS is making the current version default to" or "Windows Classic" which is grey and boring to say the least (and not in a minimalist way, in the "this must have been designed by an accountant" way).
Still, this doesn't excuse the fact that when someone presses the "guide" button it takes two seconds until their TV reacts at all. It could pop up a small "loading guide" message at the top left/right corner of the screen. It could also be a bit more clever about caching information needed to show the guide (some TVs obviously are and not necessarily the more expensive ones).
A lot of times I think lag issues like these pop up because the people building the software aren't using "real" hardware and thus aren't limited in the same way that a regular user is (like say, their lab setup pushes three channels worth of data directly into their software "TV simulator", IRL you're receiving the non-video transmissions at a lower data rate and it's being sent to you rather than just read from disk).
I thought they stopped selling the 24" models back in 2009?
I always hoped that Bin Laden would end up choking to death on a handful of chili nuts just outside a Walmart (where he just purchased the aforementioned nuts), dressed in a pair of surf shorts and a mickey mouse t-shirt of course. That would've stirred up some very interesting controversy, bonus points if he had been using his real ID the whole time...
Sweden although those I've heard claiming that OBL was a CIA operative were all from the US (with the other conspiracy theories it seems no country is completely safe from crackpots).
I suspect that the range of "truths" available to the average person has also expanded. Most people used to only be exposed to the "normal extremes", perhaps reading about the truly crazy ideas and people from time to time without actually being exposed to them.
These days it's pretty easy to find entire online communities that agree with you that Osama Bin Laden was really a CIA operative performing covert false-flag ops against the US military to expose Barack Obama and the military a zionist space-lizards who are plotting to destroy the planet once they and the world's jews have built a spaceship financed with their jew-gold stolen from hard-working god-fearing christians.
And no, I haven't actually encountered that specific conspiracy theory. I did however hear several people claim yesterday that Osama was executed by the US military as revenge against him and his CIA handlers for their false-flag ops against US troops. And I have heard several people claim that the US government is run by zionist lizard-men from another world as well as the "theory" that all the world's jews are involved in some massive conspiracy to rob the rest of the world (and especially christians) of all their money. I just put all these together into one juicy ball of batshit crazy. My point being that even if you're spouting completely insane things you can find plenty of people online who will online disagree with you about minor details, overall they will agree with your crazy.
I'm swedish so caps aren't really of any concern to me. I do however monitor my bandwidth usage using SNMP + rrdtool with a small web page that shows bandwidth usage and some other statistics (including room temperature, system load and uptime for my home server).
I used to just use "rrdtool graph" to create images but I recently switched to using a jQuery-based client-side plotting library called flot since it produces my cleaner graphs and it also allows me to use AJAX to update only the data rather than push a whole new image on every update...
You could easily modify a solution such as this to also monitor total data transferred over a specified period of time (such as the current calendar month or the last 30 days).
Congrats on only replying to the first sentence in my post.
Yet the "good guys" in the movie clearly weren't very good when you got down to it.
Also, if you truly think that someone successfully assassinating Hitler and a number of Nazi leaders would've led to less suffering and death you have a simplistic view of the political and military situation in Europe at that time.
Considering that the movie takes place several years before Operation Overlord the now-weakened axis forces would've been steamrolled by the soviets, allowing them to capture much larger parts of Europe than they did in real life.
But hey, I suppose if "WOO YEAH! AMERICA! KILL THEM THERE NAZI BASTARDS!" is more fun for you then I shouldn't complain, I just wish there were more movies that didn't play it fast and loose with historical, political, scientific and military accuracy...
The message I got from that movie was "It's ok to be evil, sadistic and generally a complete fucking ass if the other guy is German, no reason to check if he's a Nazi or not, just carve a swastika into his forehead and kill a bunch of people for no good reason. Yeehaw!".
Maybe it's because I'm not from the US but within the context of that movie I was actually rooting for the Germans...
First off, I've worked with various electronic payment systems (including building parts of them), I don't trust them, I've seen way too many screwups that end up with hundreds or thousands of users being told variations of "Oh, sorry about charging you ten times the normal amount, we'll have the money back in your account in a fortnight and according to the contract you signed with us we can't be held responsible for any family members of yours who starve to death due to this...".
So while I've been paying all my bills online for over a decade I do still receive paper bills for everything. I keep these in binders sorted in order of the payment date. I also note the date I paid the bill on the bill.
In addition to the paid bills I have a chronologically sorted section at the end of the binder for unpaid bills which I go through at the end of every month, paying those bills that are due.
As for invoices, receipts and such things I keep them in a separate binder sorted by date. I don't save receipts for things like groceries and other minor purchases as I have no reason to do so.
The third group of documents is "random important stuff", once again sorted chronologically, includes things like various official papers from schools, signed verifications of me not having thrashed previous apartments when moving out (always good to keep around just in case a previous landlord decides to be a dick years later, if you have that paper with a signature on it indicating they said the apartment was fine when you moved out then they can't make you pay for the next guy thrashing the apartment and then disappearing).
And finally I have a stack of "sort of important, maybe, or maybe not, I'd better just keep this around for a month or two" papers. I go through this pile at the end of every month while paying bills, throwing out those papers that were either not important or that are no longer important and filing those that should be filed in a binder in the appropriate binder.
This system has worked well for me since I moved to my first apartment and I suspect it will work fine for years to come.
That's what Onlinepizza.se is for. Of course, if they somehow make it figure out what pizza you want without you having to tell it...
Or just let you schedule pizza orders at that, that way when you wake up on saturday with a hangover it will be because the pizza guy just arrived with your pizza. Much better than having to drag yourself out of bed, order pizza and then wait for the pizza.
Actually, there are certain contexts in which it is apparently legal. Here in Sweden the royal library houses a copy of every magazine and book published in Sweden since whenever, and among these publications are a number of magazines from the 70s that are basically child porn magazines. They are required by law to keep these magazines while at the same time possession of these magazines is illegal these days (but from what I've understood from an acquaintance who's studied law the law that requires them to keep the magazines takes precedence over the law that makes them illegal).
Now you're just spreading FUD.
Apple like lock-in far more then MS.
Have you ever visited a company that's running all-MS software on the servers and desktops? Ever seen one of these companies try to switch away from MS?
Apple feel the need to control every aspect of the product.
Which product?
Apple dictate you must buy their hardware
Well, they do sell a system comprised of both hardware and software but it's not like you're forced to buy their solution, you can just as easily use someone else's software and hardware.
Apple dictate you must distribute applications by their distribution channel, Apple dictate what browser you are permitted to use, Apple dictate that flash is not permitted regardless of if you want it or not. MS has done nothing of the sort. They never even tried to cripple Steam when GFWL was floundering, MySQL runs fine on Windows Server.
I'm putting these together just to show how you're switching back and forth. Here you are comparing desktop/server versions of MS Windows to iOS (the mobile device OS from Apple).
Also, Apple and MS are both after your money, no surprise there. The difference is in business model, the MS model has long been to control the entire ecosystem by becoming the alpha predator, Apple's strategy is to dominate "their" niche completely.
The whole "mind, body and soul" thing you're going about sounds more like paranoia (or you confusing a handful of rabid Apple fanboys with Apple, the company).
You are exhibiting all the symptoms of cult-like behavior. You've got a set vocabulary of names to use for your perceived opponents, and stereotypical behavior sets to cast them into.
So according to you if a person has "a set vocabulary of names to use for perceived opponents" (I never claimed they were my opponents, I claimed they were disruptive to discussions about the subject at hand) and is able to identify "stereotypical behavior sets to cast them into" that is all that is required to reliably determine that the person is a cultist?
That makes you one of those Apple zealots that 'The Rest Of Us' have had to deal with for decades now. We're always happy to tell people like you to fuck off, btw.
I've never owned a 68k or PPC mac. So much for "decades". I have however owned two Intel-based macs. I've also owned dozens of other computers running everything from MINIX and SV-BASIC to Plan 9, Windows Vista and IRIX. I'm not saying Apple and their products are flawless, I'm saying that screaming that they're evil without even bothering to check the facts isn't really getting us anywhere as a civilization.
There's a difference between "be upset" and "lash out with rage based mostly on baseless speculation and preconceived notions", the latter is what bugs me. Those who immediately jump to "APPLE IS EVIL!" and make up "facts" based on the most inflammatory headline about the subject they could find (I've seen several major newspapers state outright that Apple was "tracking where you go" which was of course the "fact" all the Apple haters jumped on, not the articles that described in detail just how consolidated.db was used and stored).
Oh, I have no problem with discussions about this and related topics. I'm just fed up with the slobbering hordes of "anti-fanboys" who show up every time Apple is mentioned (there is a similar but smaller reaction for Google, Microsoft and most other high-profile tech companies, Apple seems to be the main target for the "cool to hate" crowd and has been so for a while now).
These commenters rarely contribute to the discussion, don't bother reading up on the issues at hand and instead tend to just resort to fear-mongering, misinterpretations and of course outright name-calling.
This is an issue that should be discussed but the vast majority of comments I've seen so far have been along the lines of "APPLE SI TEH EVül!!1 STAEV JOBS IS SUING IS SATTEILT IN ORBIT TO TARKC UR POSISHION!!! ANY1 STIL USING CRAPPLE IPHONIE IS AN IDIOTS OR A FAGET 4 STAVE JOBS CAWK!!11one" (really, when venturing outside of "geek circles" and onto the internet at large that isn't very far from a very large number of comments I've seen although most have worse punctuation and don't use all-caps, the caps-lock is pretty much implied from the tone of the posts though)
Hush now, don't ruin a good anti-Apple flamefest. You're not giving the haters a chance to proclaim that they've never used, never owned, never wished to own or even seen an Apple product in real life but they're still horribly outraged and this great assault on their human rights by the evil empire led by the great satan, Steve Jobs.
Yes, I'm exaggerating but I can't help but be slightly baffled by the hordes of people who seem to think that Apple is somehow more powerful in the world of computing than Microsoft or that they are "more evil" than MS has ever been. Not to mention the fact that about half of them swear they've never used a mac or iDevice in their lives yet they are experts on the subject...
There's also the issue of having at least a bit of overlap in skill sets and interests. Sure the "car guy" knows a lot about fixing cars up in various ways but his skills are not only highly domain specific (he doesn't have general knowledge about the things he does, he just knows the applications of the knowledge that are relevant to cars) but he also completely lacks interest in other things. Robotics? Boring. Video games? Does it have cars? No? Boring. Programming? What, like TV? Oh... Boring..
That's not to say that diverse skills aren't necessary, but there's a difference between diversity of skills and unrelated skills.
There's also the fact that you need to find people with the right personalities, people who just "click". That can be hard when there aren't all that many people around (town/city of 60k, assume a "generous" 10% being proper geeks of something (not counting "I'm a total sports/music geek, I know all the baseball stats/names of popular indie band singers..." geeks), that's 6,000 people, now even if we assume there are only say, 20 possible basic fields of interest (with each person having two or three secondary interests) with an even distribution that still puts it at 300 persons per primary interest. Oh, and you have to actually find these people as well).
And let's not mention the part about the majority of computer geeks (which seems to be the biggest group of geeks) being little more than video/computer game geeks who have pulled off a couple case mods and now consider themselves demigods.
In a big city it's just a lot easier to run into someone with a shared interest, or to come across a few people who have already banded together and put up fliers or posted on craigslist...
If you've only seen two then you must have been trying very hard to avoid them...
As constrast to your statement, my work laptop has more than a dozen programs that installed themselves as 64-bit by default.
I've tried to set up my home network to prefer my IPv6 tunnel from Sixxs over IPv4 but there are oh so many hosts on the net that only support IPv4. Slashdot.org is a great example of such a host...
Maybe if more websites and other services actually supported IPv6 we'd see it "take off". Currently it's a bit like complaining about no one taking the train when there are only two stations in the whole country.