Go baby go!
Living in caves? Well I got good news for ya Viper ... its looking like thats where we are headed 😉 . I realize this thread has now taken an abrupt turn but I can't help but respond to your comments.
I agree with what you say. I've been a developer with large corps (now independent) for years and have been perpetually reminded of the PRICE we truly pay for the value choices of our capitalistic system.
I'm not saying capitalism is the problem, but what my experience has shown me is that everyone is so primarily motivated by the MARKETING objectives, ie. get the product out now (despite the fact that its full of hacks and bugs) rather than focusing on quality, reusability, reliability, etc ... and thus all developers (like you and me) pay a cost as a result of that due to the nature of the system architecture (your code layers are riding on less than acceptable layers which are riding on other crappy layers, ... ultimately riding upon the OS itself which is mismanaged by the monolithic corps with malaligned objectives. and hence kerplunk! we find ourselves in this economy which is an organism spawning more cancerous symptoms by the day.
What else is interesting (and unsettling) is the exponential cost imposed on us due to the fact that there are all of us developers depending on a few core systems. The faults of those systems now being multiplied by the number of developers striving to write clean stuff (which unfortunately is intrinsically dependent on the crap that msoft and others have shoveled into the market).
In their defense, I gotta say, its real easy to criticize. I can't say my code is perfect. But I shoot as high as I can!
And look at the bright side, because of all this stuff you and I got to meet! 😉
(and I too find OS X to be encouraging)