hmm .. see. That's where our experience differ. I write internal tools for Macs, Windows and Linux systems, and the ones making the least problems are actually the Windows7 ones. Linux gives me hardware related headaches at times, but nothing a short internet search won't solve and which generally boils down to "Hardware support for this particular device is shitty, thanks to the manufacturer being a giant dick". Macs are just painfull and unintuitive to use (for me), they lack any kind of flexibility and Apple seems to be doing its worst to stop any kind of cross-platform development. Speaking of X-Platform, I seriously have to wonder about "It Just Works" when Apple's own XCode tells me my MacRuby script is completely okay (And even runs it, albeit without any output) and the same script in a terminal pukes out errors.

You mean, the same way Mac Advocate are firmly in denial of the serious shortcomings of Apple Products and the Walled Garden culture?
No OS is perfect, and I don't know anybody who would say that Linux doesn't have its share of problems, although many of those are down to proprietary drivers and non open-sourced specs making it tough to get *some* hardware working correctly.
Your statement that it's difficult to find answers concerning LInux issues, on the other hand, is very questionable, unless you use a very obscure distro with no user-base, which you shouldn't use if you don't know what you are doing anyway. Most other distros all have similar bases and many problems you might encounter with, for example, a Debian based distro (Debian, Ubuntu, MInt...) can be solved by reading wikipages writen for, again as an example, Arch Linux if you don't find a solution on the Ubuntu or Debian or Mint forums and Wikis (which would be a surprise)

the point that this often repeated argument ignore lies in the "similar spec'd" part of the sentence. With a thinkpad or any other non-Apple PC you can choose your PC's specs according to your need, and not based upon what Apple thinks you will need. You can even, and this might come as a shocker to Apple users, choose NOT to go for the most expensive alternative because your budget doesn't allow for it.
When you buy a Mac, you have a very limited set of alternatives to choose from. When you buy a PC, you have tons of alternatives to choose from (especially if your choices are not brand-centric). This means that you can choose a PC that won't have a Thunderbolt IO port, but a couple of additional USB3 ports instead, for example, and it means that you can choose to have a cheap plastic case instead of an aluminium (or whatever the current flavour of the month in metallic cases is) if you don't see the necessity, or your budget won't allow for it. You can also forgo some aspects to have a similarly priced PC with, if you are a gamer for example, a better graphic card and more RAM while forgoing some other aspects which you might not need.

So, yes .. similarly spec'd PCs might cost about the same as a Mac, but why would you buy a similarly spec'd PC in the first place?

posting to negate accidental flamebait-mod

wtf is rockmelt?

just tried it, out of curiosity.

This is what I got :
"To use iCloud, first set it up with your Apple ID on a device with iOS5 or a Mac with OS X Lion 10.7.2. Not sure which Apple ID to use? Learn More"

So the answer ist actually "No. You can't"

genuine question, which indirectly might answer yours : can you easily access iCloud from non-Apple devices?

I generally don't feed your kind, but if PHP was from Microsoft it would be left unpatched for Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008 would get a temporary patch blocking most of the functionalities and there would be an announcement that, due to technical restrictions, everybody needs to upgrade to Windows Server 2013 (release date : late December 2015) to get an actual fix. People running iis on XP, Vista or Win7 wouldn't get a patch at all. Of course, anybody running another server than iis would be left in the cold too.

On the positive side, it could be worse ... Apple would just ignore any mention of security problems and systematically erase any posts on their message board refering to them.

That being said : you might want to steer away from PHP anyway. it's a stinking pile of donkey dung

Cheers

yeah .. that's the part where I was just too lazy to find the correct parts, although, to be fair, the issue is raised a couple of times in the book.

Chapter 10 - Gnu/Linux

or, in a slightly more ambiguous way, in CHAPTER 5 - SMALL PUDDLE OF FREEDOM

The GNU/Linux naming issue has nothing whatsoever to do with the use of proprietary blobs, even though your completely uneducated opinion is widely held. Read "Free as in Freedom" before trying to express yourself on the subject.

Last I checked, Calibre was free and could convert (more or less successfully) from and to most formats.

Tim Minchin said it best : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCNvZqpa-7Q :)

Considering Steam's EULA it is not far fetched to assume compromised accoutns will be banned.

but what do you do in the meantime?

If I read this correctly, now you are unable to play the games you ~rented~ from Steam because *they* got hacked? And nobody sees anything wrong with that picture?