That is simply not true. You can buy notebooks with Win 7 pro installed from Dell. You can buy individual Windows 7 home/pro from Newegg and Amazon. There are plenty of places to get Windows 7 if that's what you want. Sure, if you walk into Best Buy and say "give me a 'puter" then you're going to get something with Win8 but it's not like Win7 is hard to find.

Pretty sure JBOLDEN was referring to the MacBook Pro, not the Mac Pro. Unless of course you are into building your own laptops.

"Clean Room Design"
"Chinese Wall Implementation"
"Brewer and Nash Model"

The key isn't replacing the code...it's replacing the code in such a way that it does not infringe on the copyright of the original code. Usually this means new code created by someone with no knowledge of the original code, therefore it cannot be a derivative work, therefore it does not infringe on the original copyright.

I looked up the power consumption of CRT vs. LCD TV's. Turns out for small screen sizes (around 30 inches), the difference isn't very big.

If your CRT TV is similar to the Toshiba 30HF83 (about the same weight as yours) it uses about 150 watts of electricity when in use, according to its manual. A new LED TV such as the Samsung UN32H5500 uses about 27 watts. Assuming 2000 hours of usage a year (about 6 hours a day) and 10 cents/kwh electricity cost, the LCD would save you only about $25/year on electricity. So that would be about 20 years for the $500 LCD to pay for itself.

Take it a step further, and say you invested that $500 at only 3% interest, and that $500 would earn about another $400 over 20 years. Not to mention that the LCD almost certainly wouldn't last 20 years, but the CRT might. I would say that if you are happy with the picture quality, then you got a pretty sweet deal. If electricity costs go up significantly, that would alter the calculus a bit. But as longs as they keep making devices with component outputs, I would say you're golden.

If this is what most companies do, then why is it evidence that Microsoft is poorly managed? (Other than to say, most companies are poorly managed.) Even if they are poorly managed, layoffs may still be the right decision. Say you wake up one day as the CEO of such a poorly managed company. What are you going to do? Change the culture from the inside? Promote radical change among set-in-their-ways engineers and middle managers? Hardly. You're going to stop the bleeding and deal with the problem in the most direct way possible - cut costs.

Of course that's not what happens. If they laid off each employee the second that they identified that employee as redundant or not needed or underperforming, then all 125,000 employees would feel like their head is always on the chopping block. The chaff builds up over time and eventually you trim it. Large companies really only know how to do two things: hiring people and firing people. It's much more efficient to axe entire divisions than it is to reassign everyone. Microsoft's responsibility is to its shareholders, not its employees. If you want to work for a company that is loyal to its employees, then work for a private company, or better yet, an employee-owned company. By this point, people should know what they're getting into when they go to work at Microsoft. They get a very competitive salary and the prestige of working at a Fortune 100 company. In return, if they have the misfortune of working in an unsuccessful division, they might be let go. Even then, I'm sure that top performers are reassigned.

Perl was used by programmers who wanted to spit out web pages or create back-end scripts to do things like send emails or file forms to a database. Non-programmers weren't invited.

Then PHP came along and could be used by web content creators who wanted parts of their page to be dynamic. This is just a better, easier to understand paradigm that allows people to collaborate much more easily.