The use itself must go on his tax form. A company car has to be declared. At the value and value-declination of a 500SL, this could net him a year or two in prison if not.

Stop trying your simplistic example and admit it was either inaccurate or made up.

windows: where only way to make font processing fast was to do it in kernel spacen. What a crappy OS.

Their business is going well. Why would they care about their customers? Of course, if ever a real alternative comes along (or they cannot bribe enough people anymore), quite a few people will never look back.

They are just true to themselves with the most crappy thing they can offer. As there are by far enough stupid MS fanbois and people that think there is no alternative, they do not have to do anything well in order to continue to make huge and entirely undeserved, profits.

That said, the only legitimization for an OS-vendor App-Store is a high quality level and security level. Otherwise you can just download and buy anywhere.

FUD Reichmeister strikes again. Nothing works perfectly for every(one|thing) when it comes to OS's, so your partly right, although when the comparison is with MS Bullshit...

Bullshit and bullshit. The 500SL needs to go on his tax forms as income, otherwise he faces tax fraud. It needs to be transferred form their official inventory to his ownership, otherwise it stays theirs. For that he needs to officially register as the new owner. So there will be nothing "off the books" here.

It is true that aural contracts are binding in Germany, but they went out of fashion a long time ago because with them nobody can prove anything.

And who the hell is this General Failure anyway, and why is he reading my floppy drive!?

You also miss that this is German company, not an US one. Culture is different. Also, you cannot order anything bindingly over email in Germany.

I can haz games fine on linux too - especially as there's a well knows FOSS software to provide Windows API for, and run large set of Windows applications. Sure, I can't get every/any game to work, but I consider myself a hardcore gamer and yet don' need to have all of them. There's way more good games that work on it for me to ever play all of them. And I've run linux almost extensively since 02 - when I switched I first thought I'd keep windows as dual boot for games, but after 2 weeks in linhx I never went back.

Linux has worked fine for most peoples needs on desktop for ages. I dont see much additional benefit for it from android, which is really for mobile devices, or Chrome OS, which is mostly good for lightweight netbooks.

People just need to get over whatever it is keeping them for believing it don't work on desktops. Please, no quoting ones special needs cases as rebbutals.

Word! Large!
   

Problem is you are almost right. Actual qualified engineers doing software are a rare thing.

From what I have seen who gets laid-off, there are a lot of really bad engineers, especially in the software area. Then there are those that have not learned anything new in years and have become obsolete. Surprisingly, this can frequently hit young people that did not bother with the basics, but went straight to "Java Script Engineer" or the like but cannot do anything else and cannot learn due to missing general computing skills.

You cannot do "cheap oversees engineering" for anything that requires good engineers. For bad engineers that maybe reach the "works somehow" product quality level, you can. If you are bad at what you do, you are always easy to replace, no matter the job.

Which is pretty much a meaningless number for software. No, the engineer should have an idea of the overall business plan and may have input for it.