Just because you know how to do it, doesn't mean you have to knock the people who no longer care to do so.
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Read once again what Swordmaker wrote in #157:
"What you wrote reminds me of the heady days of playing with my Commodore and Amiga computers and how much fun it was to trick them out with new add-ons to the OS and how exciting each incremental upgrade and tweak to hardware and OS speed made things different... and how it was necessary to be a member of the local Amiga Users' Group to even make some of the hardware and software work together. It was no different for the Atari users, the DOS users, and later the Windows users... there were user groups to support them. And some of us made lots of money supporting all of the users who did not have the time to join the groups and learn how to do it themselves.""It was a fun time... but that was when computing was a hobby... and I have long grown out of that and have a lot better things to do with my time than tweak a device to get it to work right or spend hours trying to figure out what I need to get it to do what I want or look the way I want."
Just change that to "Apple ][+", "][e" or "//GS", and you describe when I was writing code in Pascal, BASIC, 6502 Assembler, or even in Binary (by flipping sixteen "bit switches" on the front panel of a "minicomputer" -- in 1978 or so.... And it was a heck of a lot of fun -- and a great sense of "power over the machine"!
No doubt, Swordmaker will remember when it was the user groups that held contests as to who could write the flashiest program in a single 80-character line of BASIC code. Some of us pushed the envelope by using BASIC "PEEKs" "POKEs" and "CALLs" to subroutines we had written in assembly code. And the users were the ones who developed the code that wound up in private-sale ROMs that turned 40 (uppercase) character/line machines into 80 (upper and lower-case) character lines and displayed them on screen. And those ROM codes wound up in the next generation of commercial microcomputer models.
Heck -- I even wrote my own "PowerPoint" years before it appeared commercially -- because I wanted to use complex computed transitions between screen buffers to add animations to my professional (CG Videotaped) presentations (created on an Apple //GS).
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Congratulations! You have (three decades after the fact) [re]discovered the "joy of hacking" (in its original good sense)... Just don't act supercilious toward those of us who now prefer to treat computing devices as tools -- not toys.
And -- unless you wrote the code, don't think you are hot $#]+ because you can load code someone else has written onto your latest toy -- and make it do something new (to you).
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FULL DISCLOSURE: I truly enjoy "hacking around" and making "the machine" do just what I want it to do.
But, when I retired from MA, and moved back to God's Country, I retired three things:
And I haven't missed them one bit! But I do love the freedom from those "balls and chains"!!
Just don't come here on FR and strut around as if you are a "hot ticket" -- merely because you have learned to "muck with your machine".
Just keep in mind that you are standing on the shoulders of a hell of a lot of us who made it possible for you to do so.
</RANT>
Then don’t do it then and see if anyone cares.
One thing you CAN’T deny though is that it gives added functionality to the device. Period.DOT