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.

None of this crap with forwarding port

which is absolutely terrible in the first place, and one huge reason why NAT is bad.

I may know the difference between a firewall and NAT but many people out there do not (including the OP it appears). These people click the "enable DMZ" option to port-forward all ports to their main PC so they can download torrents or use some P2P application or run a web/ftp/email server whatever.

These people just opened up a huge security hole, bypassing what benefits NAT gives you, and often still thinking their NAT router is protecting them by blocking unwanted traffic.

If getting rid of this security nightmare means getting rid of NAT so people have to understand how a firewall works, then good! (getting rid of NAT is just a nice bonus :-)

Last time I was at the movie theatre, the sound was turned up so loud the speakers were distorting. I stopped bothering with theatres around then.

Its a network driver that doesn't work. No network activity, ergo 100% security against network-bourne threats!

See, I should have been in marketing!

and don't forget the slow loading pages that always seem to get stuck on google analytics or similar that it insists on loading first before showing you what you went to see.

It can be about systems - what policies you have, and have you been audited for security shortcomings. People and process are important factors, but they do not count if you have no security system in place and no way of knowing if its been configured to work.

Hopefully this will drive more established standards for IT security, along the lines of both having a world-class 'lock' but also "you left the key under the mat" so it doesn't count.

They did it in Argo.. why not make a company with irresistible tech that makes everyone give the company their secrets

well, I guess that's one reason why Facebook exists at all.

or Directors of Diversity and Inclusivity.

Which is maybe why girls are studying English Lit instead of STEM courses - why work hard when you can spout a load of bull from a cosy office and get paid far more?!

They always said girls were more intelligent than boys, if they've seen the way the world works and are exploiting it while the boys are shouting "your code is teh sux0r, n00b" at each other, its probably true