My C64 was a C64...:-) The original one, not the flat new models. It was in 1984. When we look at the computers of this era we cannot find the answers to these questions just by looking at the computer itself. It is all about the technical things around at that time. There was, compared to today, simply NO technology all around us. We need to remember: In our family, we even didn't had a telephone at home. We had one TV with only few channels. High tech was a Tape Recorder with multiple speed and a Super 8 camera. Just new were cassette recorders. The best was a video game named Pong - wow! We could ACTIVELY change the contents of the TV screen! And then came the C64. Multicolor, electronic sound like we just heard from Jean Michele Jarre, arcade games which we saw only in fancy American films or maybe in a game hall. Everything at home! And best of all - we could sit down and program that thing, so it does what WE want. And to get out everything possible you of course need a lot to learn like assembly or the system of pokes and peeks or the different memory layers and so on - but at the end we could say: Yeah, I know the complete machine, every bit, and I can get everything out of it. And there were a lot genius programmers who even got a lot more out of it like we saw in genius cracker demos and so on. That was real science fiction at home, we were heroes (=nerds..freaks.."guys with special interests"...:-) ) in the eyes of all who didn't own one or just started with it. Today? We have Gigabytes of OS where no one really knows what it does and where a lifetime is not enough to learn all about it. Software and hardware changes so fast that only very specialists knows about small parts of all of this. Only few people (even such which are programmers of any kind) just want to know HOW it works, what a bit is, why the computer can count only from 0 to 1 and not more. Every minute a new "free" app appears, whose main purpose is to feed more of our data to the creator, nobody has even enough time to learn about the pure funcionality of even a small part of these apps - and only few people wants to know more about the internal function because technology is ALL around us. So the complete "spirit" of that time in the 80s is gone, nobody is impressed today if you were able to program a cool application on your computer or mobile. There is no exploratory spirit anymore, if you don't have somethin

Hi, sound like a funny thing, getting "achievements". Yeah, I can be proud of getting silly "awards" mostly for problems in my code. And I tell everyone in the world what kind of code it is I'm working with, regardless of it is mine or code from newbie programmers. And links to data octopus like Facebook, Twitter and other "social" networks don't let me get a better feeling about that. Yes, the data might "only" be what you described but the data you get out of a database full of that information is a lot more. Do you really think that the Visual Studio Team at Microsoft does have the time to develop such "funny" things without targeting at a business demand? I don't believe that they have done all this in their freetime and I also do not believe that they invest their private money to set up a server farm which is fast enough to handle all the input. So if someone invest money in a company he wants to get a benefit back. The benefit is Data Mining using all the input coming from all the Visual Studio installations which uses this "feature". You could get statistical data like: - in which countries is VS installed? - how many installations of VS exists in which country? - how many developers are interested in social networks? - which kind of programming will be mostly used in VS, which programming language? - where can we invest more in developing extensions, i.e. LINQ, database support and so on? - which features of VS are mostly used, which are never or rarely used? - which exact programmer (link to account) does use which features? - how long is VS used daily? And a lot more things like that, you can get a LOT more information about the product usage than with the customer experience program which mostly will be used to report crashes and their reason to Microsoft. Yes, the "benefit" we have MAY be that the product gets a better development experience in future with all this data, but I also think that we deliver a lot of data about ourselfs daily without the knowledge what happens with all this (or the knowledge THAT we deliver data, like opening an email and downloading graphics and deliver informations to the sender that we read/open the newsletter and when and so on..). I don't think that we should support all the data madness only to satisfy other's business and their earning of money with our data. You may call it paranoid, but the examples above should let you think a little about if you want to be a transparent human. I personally prefer privacy at every point where I can