our 3 core ambitions are

Create more personal computing; reinvent productivity and business processes; build the intelligent cloud and integrate business decisions . Ah, our 4 core ambitions are more personal computing, reinvent productivity, build intelligent cloud, integrate business decisions and drive market excellence... , our 5 core, no. amongst our core ambitions are reinvent productivity and business processes; build the intelligent cloud, integrate business decisions, drive market excellence and get nice red uniforms.

oh damn, I'll come in again.

four negatives in a row

I believe this is easily parsed:

Stephen Elop, Mark Penn, Kirill Tatarinov and Eric Rudder.

they can expect as much as they like... but in these times, the money comes from pumping up expectations and selling overpriced shares to investors, and then selling the company to facebook or Google for way more than its worth!

See sourceforge - this is how you make money, get a VC to fund your 'exciting and innovative game-changing' service and get pots of cash. Revenue totally optional, advertising irrelevant.

The trouble with businesses today is that some of them have a bricks-1.0 mindset that expects to receive revenue by selling stuff (even if its adverts and malware)! pffft.

I use Mozy to back it up, and BTSync to sync it with my phone.

And how else are you going to manage the hundreds of dozen-character long, unique, and complex passwords you want to use with each site?

with an offline tool, like keepass. Same functionality, only stored locally (or on your phone), not on the cloud.

I am not sure how they got the 3 or 4 digit number on the back of the card

only takes a thousand attempts (at worst) to guess that number. You'd hope the card system would block it after 3 or so failed attempts, but you never know if they do.

I think there's a simple reason why this happens - the developer division is the one that goes for all this new hotness crap, and invariably makes a relatively poor product that is tainted with the "internet time" development methodology - ie once its finished, throw it away and make something else.

Win32 is still made and managed by the Windows team who take a different approach - that of making things fast, reliable and stable (well, as much as you can make such a complex beast as Windows, though I think a lot of the crapware we have layered on top comes from other divisions anyway)

Take a look at WCF aand WWS - these are both comms technologies, dev div made WCF, then someone looked at the bloated mess of .NET layers that it is, and wrote the exact equivalent in C, that is significantly faster and uses a ton less memory. WWS is bundled in Windows 7, WCF comes with the .Net framework. I think the same differences apply to the rest of the products that comes out of those 2 teams

Fine.. then we should just close all university courses, except of course, for MBAs. Then we'll get the maximum ROI for our money and everyone will be perfectly happy.

Or maybe, as the OP said, money isn't the end-all of human existence.

the opposite is probably true - the experienced employees will look at their skillsets and start to think how unemployable they are becoming, and jump ship while they still can.

I've seen it happen with a company that used a DSL, people gained skills in various systems (eg DBs, SQL etc) and then jumped when they could. All the remaining devs were either then ones making the DSL or were new kids who were just happy to have a job.. until they too realised their skills were not up to much.

sure, but then they could just stick with C++, and focus their energies on making good quality libraries and tools to work with it and let the good developers learn how to use it properly.

Its not as hard as many people think, but maybe they're confused by the possibilities the language affords, many of which nobody uses for day-to-day programming tasks.

because the same reason we say "mankind" and mean girls too.

In old English the gender-neutral pronoun is 'man; (as opposed to wer for males, and wif for females) but as wer fell out of usage, man was used to refer to males and neutral.

The only reason its getting changed now is by the politically correct crowd who basically want to knock down the established systems for their own benefit, as if we replace writing that says "he did this"with "she did this" they definitively exclude males from that sentence. They say this is OK as it rebalances the gender oppression of centuries (sigh) but really just serves to promote themselves and their ideology.

He means "I tinkered with this new thing and it seemed pretty easy enough, so that was enough - I never needed to use it, so I never found out all the edge cases I know about in the mainstream languages I use every day".

Its why many people like new languages and things, they think they're simple because they only have to scratch the surface for some simple example and think that's all there is to it.

Conversely I, as a professional, can assume the risk of using IE as the browser that hosts the NPAPI Java applet he wants and not going all fanboi over using a particular tool for all tasks because its the one he likes best.

I applaud your common sense attitude to using these tools in as safe a manner as appropriate, too bad too many have attitudes that prefer the tool over the tool's use.

The one that comes with your OS. That's free.