I spend my workdays with programming, system administration, and all kinds of sucky IT business, and large amounts of my free time I spend with programming as well. I'm not maintaining a workplace with dremels and vacuum pumps for desoldering and the like. I have a soldering iron and tools for some elementary tasks, but if I can't accomplish a hardware job myself, I'm attending an electronic shop, or ask friends of mine who are more of the hardware kind like you. If they have a software problem, I'm trying to help them in return. You may call us whiny ####es, but that's how it works here. Maybe people are different in the beantown where you live.

It's all about specialization. At the time I bought my A3000 it costed the equivalent of EUR 3000, which was about the best money I ever spent. The machine worked for years before I for the first time had a reason to open it. From a computer I expect that it ####ing works and can be easily extended, and if the Pegasos doesn't qualify for this, we would indeed have to call it a "geek computer", which would be a pitiful excuse for a piece of crap for that you need a soldering iron to keep working. Yuck!

> In the end your way of thinking is why computers are in such a sorry state. You only want to understand your stupid little narrow band of computers, rather than have any general knowledge of how they work.

You definitely have a point here, but you seem to have no idea about how much open-mindedness is already drained from all kinds of highlevel software architecture, development tools and programming languages. Most (ex-) Amiga users are ####ing clueless retards in this regard, mainly because they have long ago given up to consider their computer a helpful tool for supporting someone's living.

I'm trying the best I can to work my way through all kinds of layers and abstraction levels, but hardware is where I have to draw the line.

> now... Paying someone to fix your bicycle for you.. that is lame on a grand scale!

No, that's how this economy works. I'm not keeping all the tools around that I'd require for bicycle repair, only some screwdrivers and an oilcan, but not more.