@ coolestguynever ....May your beauty remain flawless and impervious to time's unwavering advance.

I am a .NET developer. We use 2008 Team Suite, and it works well. .NET 2008 works well. Office works well.

The applications side of MS makes great products. The OS side of MS has sucked all the way back to the days of DOS. To use there applications, you are forced to use there operating systems.

Trust me, if .NET ran on OSX, and the .NET Framework ran on anything other then IIS (Mono is a joke), then we would not have a single Microsoft OS in our shop.

Well, we can develop Java for any platform we would like and we are all WXP.

I don't disagree with any of the first part, but about the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation:

a) It's more like 25%. His net worth is $58 billion, the foundation has an endowment of $38 billion. Half of that endowment was endowed by Warren Buffett. (A quick word on how an endowment works: it's money that cannot be touched, and instead all donations are made off of interest and investments made with the endowment. Since a massive portion of this endowment is invested in Berkshire Hathaway stock, that's a lot of money constantly being made and thus donated)

b) The foundation donates billions and billions of dollars worldwide towards a multitude of causes, including fighting AIDS in Africa and promoting education all over the globe. The Gates family doesn't simply "donate to charity." Even if they did, yes, $19 billion donated is more to admire than 15% of whatever money you've donated to Greenpeace or whathaveyou. No offense to you--it's great to do such a thing, but obviously much more can be done with Gates' money than your. In addition, by starting such a foundation and shaping everything it does, he's taking an active part in the philanthropy, not simply passively donating it all to, say, the UN (as when Ted Turner donated $1 billion to the UN). Again, not that such a thing would be bad, just that what he's doing is massively more important, and more admirable.

Microsoft had/has terrible business practices. They're monopolistic and often try to copy competitors, most famously vis a vis Windows' suspiciously similar qualities to the Macintoch OS. However, unlike other companies, they never abused their employees (apparently he can be a demanding boss, but all employees get stock options), they employ primarily in the US and avoid international sweatshops, they are making strides to try to be a green company, and they don't partake is massive fraud. All of those qualities, found in many, many corporations, are worse than monopolistic practices. The worst thing about trusts in the early 20th century was that they used their monopoly to do some of the things I just listed. Microsoft does not do such things. This is not to say what Microsoft does is good (I'm typing all of this on a Mac Book Pro, browsing via Firefox), but the company hasn't seriosly harmed the world the way some companies have, and thus the massive good the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has done does indeed well compensate for Gates' wrongs at Microsoft. As I said before, it's the largest foundation of it's kind in the world. That's simply amazing.

She actually looks fine--not incredibly attractive, but not ugly either. She's just 44, and thus doesn't look as good as, say, a 24 year old.

^^Well said sir.

Funny that you are all on a 7 year old OS that's about to no longer be supported. Why has the world not moved to MS's next OS?

Because M$ f***** it up. However, this is not Bill Gates fault. Yes he can be a ruthless businessman and all, but at last he's doing something good with his dough. I mean it is his money and he can do what he wants with it. He could just sit on and gloat like that idiot Mexican (Carlos Slim or something) who says he'll never give any of his $60 billion away. But ol' Bill is using his money to do something good in the world and I respect him for that.

 Actually, M$ said they are supporting XP until 2014 because they understand that they made a mistake with Vista.

That's good. Many people would be greedy and just keep all that money for themselves. Well at least he's leaving with a good reason and that will give people a good memory of him.