> A complete nightmare, and even if you get it working, you wind up with an unstable system.

It's not as bad as that. I built 2 back back in 2008-2009, and they were rock stable-- kernel panics were extremely rare. They also didn't require much in the way of hackery. I put the EFI boot loader on a thumb drive and kept my OS X drive as free of hacked bits as possible. I wanted to be able to hook it up to a real Mac and boot it without issue, and I achieved this goal. Still, I would never recommend them in a business setting.

One of the machines was my daily driver, and dual booted Windows. The other ran OS X Server and was the fileserver in my house. The specs on the server were enough to get the job done, but my daily driver gave me top of the line Mac Pro performance for about $1200.

The only problem was OS updates-- they usually broke something. I maintained a bootable clone of both machines' boot drives, and waited a few days for other hackintoshers to find and figure out how to fix the issues before installing those updates. Both machines ran Snow Leopard for their entire term of service, which ended last year. They were replaced with refurb Mac minis. The hackintoshing was an interesting experiment, but I wanted a new OS without more hackery, supported hardware, and worry-free updating again. As a side effect, my electric bill fell off a cliff, which was nice.

...you deserve what you get, and any liability for a resulting "security breach" should be on you-- not on someone who can find a copy of a user's manual online.

Like previous commenters have said, these kids are damn lucky they're in Canada. In the US they'd have been fucking crucified.

I had an Apple LaserWriter Select 360 (built around a Canon engine, IIRC) that I bought new in 1994 last me until mid 2011. HP was putting out some damned good printers back then, too, before Carly Fiorina came in and turned HP into peddlers of second-rate shit.

Honorable mention to the TV in my basement, an RCA F35751MB-- the biggest CRT TV I could find in 1994. I don't yet own a flatscreen, because I'm just letting them get better and cheaper until the RCA finally gives up the ghost.

I've been doing it for years. I found that the best learning technique for me is to build something, blow it up, and then build it again, until the moving parts are second nature to me-- so it's handy to have a server/network I can blow up without getting fired.

A lot of the techniques and scripts I've developed on my network at home have ended up in use at client sites, and vice versa.

"I would guess" you're making shit up. You're willing to throw out anonymity and privacy because some people might be circumventing copyright somehow? You're pathetic. (Or you're a government astroturfer. But I repeat myself.)

>The number of people who still "specifically need" the Mac Pro aren't very different since Apple hasn't upgraded the expansion capacity of their other headless Macs.

Yes, I know. I thought that in the context of my statement, "the abilities of a Mac Pro" pretty clearly referred to its greater expandability.

IIRC, Tim Cook already publicly stated a redesigned Mac Pro would be released in 2013.

The other Macs in the lineup have grown more powerful over the years, so the number of people who still specifically need the abilities of a Mac Pro is relatively small. It would make no financial sense for Apple to address these regulations by changing the current Mac Pro design. The best move was what they did-- simply giving those people some warning so anyone who was planning future Mac Pro purchases could decide if they needed to buy the existing model or could afford to wait for the redesigned model to be announced.

On Black Friday, one of my coworkers bought a new laptop that came preloaded with Windows 8. Last week she brought it in and asked me to look at it because she couldn't get anything with Flash to work in IE.

I know Flash in the "metro" IE is supposed to be severely limited in what it can do, but even the desktop mode IE refused to run Flash. This despite the add-on being present and showing as enabled. After googling around and fucking with it for about 45 minutes, trying to get something to work that should have just worked right out of the box, I gave up and just installed Chrome for her so she'd have something that could run Flash stuff.

She later managed to find a Windows 7 laptop somewhere, bought it, and returned the Windows 8 laptop. When she returned it, the clerk asked her why, and she told him it was because Windows 8 was awful. He told her that Windows 8 machines were being returned to that store in droves, and every person he asked gave him the same reason.

Messing with her laptop was my first experience with Windows 8, and if I can help it, it will be my last. I found it to be a jumbled mishmash of confusing crap, and I've been doing IT for 20 years-- I can only imagine how hard non-techies are going to reject it. I am going to cling to Windows 7 for as long as I can.

Now making about 50 percent more in Australia. Went from high five figures to low six. Living the American Dream(TM) in the southern hemisphere.

You're out of your fucking mind if you think a Romney presidency wouldn't be worse than what we've got right now.

It would be an utter and complete horrorshow.

Has this ever, in the history of the United States, actually worked?

I'll spare you the research: no, it hasn't.