I counted to 4 in binary on my fingers and just stayed with that.

You have no contract? Or a very incomplete contract? I've never worked anywhere, except perhaps as an hourly dishwasher in high-school, without a contract. That's like accepting a job only knowing that your salary will be "pretty good".

The main thing that has changed over the years is that the software stack has grown deeper, and today there are many more people working at higher abstraction levels where a lot is handled for them.

But under the covers, little has changed. Someone must write and understand code all the way down to the hardware. You can bet that people writing kernels and drivers think a lot about space and speed. Or write some code for one of the low cost micro-controllers that are in virtually all electronic devices and you won't have the luxury of a large software stack.

There are very likely *more* people writing low level code today than 20 years ago. Only the percentage of programmers writing low level code is declining because there are many orders of magnitude more programmers writing higher level code.

It is a rabbit with a nasty cancerous virus. Just want I'd like my desktop named after!

Aka recents. You can't even tell how long an individual call lasted with the current implementation.

TFA seems to get the distinction, but /.ers should note that at software companies like MS the D part of R&D is everyday product development which is always ongoing. So at MS R&D will always be a major part of overall expenses. The article argues that MS isn't getting enough return from total R&D spending (which includes product development). People here just need to remember that R&D does not equate to just the R (research) part.