Ok, well, that's a tale of a different sort...

You sound like one of my wiccan girl friends (I was some how gifted with three without really trying). Boring. If there were a higher power it should be noted that it left the building millenia ago. Halloween, great if your a kid. A waste of time if your an adult with an ounce of brains.

I employed a double entendre as well; the lowest form of humor.

Sure, cherry pick an obscure use case with old Atmel hardware. I think I'm ok with the arm stuff for now.

I'm in a real quandry here with the whole windows 8 thing; as a programmer I have no use for a touch screen so windows 8 is absolutely useless to me. On the other hand Microsoft used to get castigated for not innovating. So is the touch screen not the interface of the future, or did Microsoft simply blow it? I'm no fan, but the deal kind of smells like "damned if you do, damned if you don't."

I don't think so. The gcc & it's toolchain, and the arm cross-compiler, are indispensable where I'm at. The current licensing is little more than an annoyance right now.

When you sell off two successful companies you can take all that money and burn it if you like. Rothberg chose his route.

But that is the root of the problem.

Oh really? And how many Macs did Dell make for Apple? Oh, that's right, they made PCs.

The ceo doesn't have to say anything, any probe of him by any agency will be met by a phalanx of lawyers court with orders to leave him alone and instructions to question underlings and minions. The only time ceos and other top dogs have to face the music is in front of senate subcommittees, and that's rare enough.

Villifying a dead man, nice. Look, I respect you, and I agree with what you say, most of the time, but now that man is dead, and all the grousing about him now is wankerism to an extreme degree, sigifying nothing. And I'm no Apple fan boy, trust me. But it took Jobs to get pc's in consumers hands, and there's no complaints against the man you can make to change that. Give the man that legacy.

Yeah, but he was a competitor. It was a bald-faced competitor thing to say at the time, and a little dumb, but I don't fault him for it. Now he has a huge opportunity to buy back his old company, give it a little "Dell Magic", and sell the whole useless lot off for a huge profit. If that's what he does, he's simply being smart and I would do the exact same thing in his shoes.

Let them keep using xp. Doesn't stop you from doing what YOU want, after your "people" are taken care of. Give the people what they want, if they want to keep using crap, that's up to them. I never advocate upsetting the status quo, unless I can benefit some how. In this particular case, I, and You, would gain no discernable benefit. Are we agreed?

Not a viable business strategy for Microsoft.

Well... Linux works for me, I run 7 in a vm for those rare times I need it, but as a posix/Foss developer Linux is indispensable. It may not work for you, perhaps, but it is a viable alternative, a better one in my opinion, d00D.