I assume he meant virtual *hosts*, which is fair enough, though vhosts arent necessarily the answer to everything.

If you had two physical interfaces to a machine then its not a stretch to suggest you might want to glom an instance of httpd onto each.

A fair, and unfortunate point :/

Haha. Excellent reposte! :D

Parliament is in charge, the Queen is the head of parliament.

"Privacy Advocates" vs "Police Transparency Enthusiasts"

Should be a good battle.

I cetainly did! Fortunately I enjoy sitting ;)

If you are defining the establishment as inclusive of the monarchy, then yes the queen wouldn't exist.

They would be some crazy times though. A motion of no confidence might be a much better starting place!

As for the people queen analogy, I didn't really think it was a very good one either.

Confusion abound!

You can argue that a constitutional monarchy is a form of government, you would be right but this is an axiom and so I don't know why anyone would be arguing this point.

The Government (UK, capital G) is merely the majority party (or parties) in the House of Commons at any given time, and The Queen is not a part of this.

The House of Commons itself is just one part of parliament. Parliament is the authoritative legislative body in the UK. It comprises the Houses of Parliament, the House of Lords and the Monarch, who is head of parliament.

Parliament is routinely dissolved 17 days before a general election, at which point the Members of Parliament no longer carry title, and the Government no longer exists. During this time, the Monarch continues to reign. They exist without the Government.

It is by royal decree that a new parliament is summoned, a general election is held, which may or may not form a new Government.

So although the Queen is not part of the Government, she is part of Parliament. Her position as Monarch is not dependant on the existence of Parliament no less than it depends on the existence of the Government.

The British Monarchy exists as constitutional monarchy however, such that significant power has been ceded to the Government where 'running the country' is concerned. Such that even the Royal Prerogative itself has now been diminished to such an extent that most decisions are taken by government without royal approval, and in fact the Prime Minister is not obliged to take heed of the monarch.

So its easy to assume the queen cannot exist without the Government, I suspect the real truth is that the Queen cannot rule without the government.

Without a government though, I would assume that the Queen would in fact rule in their stead. This is total conjecture though.

Maybe they are just fulfilling their role as the new evil empire.

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

All they need now is a few more developers.

I think they will, history may even repeat itself...

There are four lights.

If you are shorting, you aren't investing. If you are buying on leverage, you aren't investing. Investors, they buy and hold through though 'noise' - however loud, they don't get margin called, they don;t get short squeezed.

If you are shorting, you are trading, if you are using leverage you are trading. Trading *is* gambling, and in gambling, the house always wins.

I read all this before I started 'investing', and still i've ended up learning the hard way :/

I do everything on a laptop (15"MBP). I haven't used a desktop for around 5 years now. LAMP and Rails development might not be considered 'serious' enough though ;)

I really thought I would miss it, turns out I was wrong. I would hate to be tied to a desktop now.

Desktops will stick around though I'm sure.

Yes I wasn't clear. I was alluding to the app store being quite a good central repository of software. Consumer software though.

If you need apache/perl you'll be messing with the internals, in which case you are going to probably going to have to get used to apple's particular flavour of *nix. For me it was no more or less difficult than figuring out the implementation details of various other distros (eg launchd vs sysvinit)

I'd recommend homebrew (some prefer macports) - analagous to portage, or yum. It's pretty straightforward.

OSX isn't a magic bullet for everything i still find myself tinkering under the hood with 'developer' stuff, same as I would on a linux box.

The rest of the stuff, day to day, all tends to work on the whole with little to no input from me. This frees up my time to get on with real work, where before I was distracted by tweaking and fixing the little glitches that every linux system seemed to have. Maybe it was me though, I dunno. Now though the choice is no longer there! Some say thats a bad thing. *shrugs*. works for me.

It sure sounds like rage! "Vile", "boycotted" and "making you feel ill", such dramatic language for one so allegedly unruffled. You might start by having the composure to produce a legible post!

They are successful, you hate that, I get it.

They are only overpriced if you don't value the product. To me they are quite reasonably priced, but then I am considering their value to me in day to day use, their longevity (i can burn through cheap laptops in 12 months) not to mention the initial cost is also offset by there resale value.

Your use of the word "closed" as some irrefutably negative aspect suggests you are more bothered about open source as a religion, than the practical use of a computing device. OSS and proprietery software both exist both have their relative merits and both have a place in the computing ecosystem. I am no stranger to open source. I support the concept of opensource, but I don't feel that doing so mutually excludes my use and/or acceptance of propritery software as a concept. I'm going to judge software by my own measure whether its closed or open doesn't have much of fundamental effect on my decision thesedays. I've been to FOSS and back, the pent up rage of being forced to use windows for a decade fuelled my view that linux was the holy grail, but as my rage softened and I started to see clearly again I started to see that linux too has its downsides. The thing is the shiny has worn off of MacOS now for me too. So I feel (note: opinion) I'm left with a fairly objective view of what works best for me, and as I said earlier the choice for me was between windows or *nix. I chose *nix, my distro of choice (because it seemed to be the one that had its shit together most) was OSX. I'm sure i will be derided for not being a 'true' linux fanboi, and mocked for being an apple fonboi, but really that comes so far down my list of "reasons why I do stuff" that I'm not even sure if it might have fallen off the bottom. Oh well, it won't be missed.

If there is some real solid reason that you want to be able to go digging around in the GUI subsystem or need source code access some other proprietery aspect of OSX then I can see your point about how 'closed' is a bad thing (for you) and you should pick something else.

I am aware of the arguments about the relative technical merits of closed vs open source, security, maintainability and even cost. They are arguments though, neither has been conclusively proven as better, so why not let the free market decide.

In closing why not just choose what suits you best and feel comfortable. If somebody comes along and makes a compelling argument why I need to shift from OSX back to (say) windows 8, my choices are to dismiss them out of hand or to listen to what they have to say, see if what they are saying makes sense in my particular use case, and if it does go ahead and try it out. I'm not saying you haven't tried OSX (I mean really tried it, like give it a year) you may have, but your post seemed to imply that there was no way in hell you would move to osx because you have something against the company. So long as thats the case then by all means boycott away, but you might want to check out that world view of yours, see whether its really serving your best interests.

(pre-emptive "apology for being selfish western world white trash". I am. I'm over it. What am I gonna do rage at the world for being born into the relative wealth of working class Britain? Fish gotta swim. Birds gotta eat. We are only human, trying to pretend we aren't is noble but ultimately doomed to failure.)