I worked at one of the Max Planck Institutes in Germany, similar top notch calibre institutions: I as a sys admin was making as much as a group leader, their students were getting about $20,000 a year (but no tuition so there is that). That said when my girlfriend from there at the time graduated and took a postdoc she was getting closer to $55,000 so there is a big jump from no-PhD to PhD and then only a little bump later when you become a group leader. At least in Germany. Yeah you work much longer hours. My girlfriend was doing experiments with fish eggs. They needed to be checked every 12hrs or so. She did so, even on weekends, Christmas holidays etc etc. Probably closer to 60hrs a week on average from my peers. I was making more than 3X their salary and working strictly 40hrs a week... being smart doesn't always pay.
Maybe consider immigrating: Canada were I live I've been asked exactly twice: once for when I joined the army and once when I worked at a furniture factory in the summer. All my professional jobs didn't ask. Anyways, the US beats China as a police state there are much more liberal/accepting societies out there in terms of giving previous convicts the benefit of the doubt. That said it might be an issue getting residency/work visa: funny (in a sad way) that we don't care if you are from here and a felon but if your from somewhere else (where they do a really good job of manufacturing felonies) we do. Mah, anyways look around including not in your own country/telecommuting work etc.
I didn't have a good experience with Sun support but your milage might vary. I think very dependent on the skills of the person you deal with. We were in the process of migrating our SAN and a Sun box wouldn't see the luns that were being presented to it. Sun support at about $400 a pop, dude new about as much as we did in house. Ended up being a IBM guy who figured it out (got that for "free" because IBM was already on site installing their SAN and their tech escalated it): IBM support just happened to have a sun server just like ours, they installed it and tried to configure it the same as ours in their lab. Were then able to tell us which bits to twiddle in the FC card driver to get things working again. So in my experience IBM for the win. But didn't do a lot of direct to the electronics vendor IT stuff in my day, mostly medical software and our initial support always went through the vendor and off then to MS, IBM etc who ever supplied the hardware. Anyways, I was really impressed when the IBM guy was telling the Sun guy what bits to twiddle in their OS.
CERN and the like are probably an exception because they are so high profile/budget but the thing is with most academia: who really cares if your cluster is down for a week? So you have to work through the holidays to get your thesis done, or you hire another intern at $10/hr to maintain things etc. Most people are working for really low salaries and putting in way more than 40hr work weeks. It is hard to justify borrowing staff from your contractor when you can get your own people so cheaply. Instead you cobble something together and if it breaks you spend a weekend and cobble something else together. Stability isn't that important as long as you don't lose data you are golden.
Yeah exactly. Its a trade off but you just tell the guy writing the checks we either have a service agreement or be prepared to pay ~300/hr to have someone fix our issue should it happen. As long as a company has a nice spare cash pot often the ad hoc is the way to go. I find often the techincal people in house can figure it out, few things are really that bad (often things are memory leaks or something which requires a restart over night or something, and of those few systems matter after hours), and for those that are it ties the problems directly to a cost centre giving you more justification when you need to say: this piece of crap needs to be replaced.
Don't the boxes usually ask if you've been convicted of a felony? If so you could answer truthfully no. I'm not in the US but oddly I've only had a background check for when I was in the military and when I worked in a factory. Since starting work in IT even at hospitals etc I've never even been asked to check a box.
I think those that do discriminate based on criminal background do so just to cover their ass. They don't want to be the one that hired the guy that had previous convictions and now went on a shooting spree in the office. It's a matter of due diligence: the standard magically changes after something bad has happened. A otherwise good guy becomes an "obvious bad hire" after they do something that lands you in the papers.
I personally love the concept of "constructive possession". Borrow a car from someone that happens to have a baggy with some residue wedged in one of the seats: your driving so you must have known it was there.
A lot of homeless the money wouldn't matter: it is mental illness or addiction that lead them to the street. Either way they'd be back on the street except perhaps a little more drink every year.
A credit is good. But lower income taxes would be better and trade them for consumption taxes: including implicit consumption like "usage fees" for the military necessary to secure oil resources. Still would help the homeless: very little usage = very little taxes (rest of which would be handled by your credits or a base writeoff amount before taxes apply). The costs to society of things would be more fairly proportioned: oil wars wouldn't be being paid for by hermits living in the mountains using solar power. Roads wouldn't be being paid for people out in the boonies that use dirt trails that were made 100 years ago etc. If consumption goes down then the need for government services does too so tying to consumption not production makes the funding go up and down based on demand not on ability to pay (and then government deciding what new services should be bought with the extra in fat years, and votes bought with borrowed money to keep service in lean years).
Robots don't push people into poverty. Sitting on your ass assuming that your skills will continue to be relevant at least long enough to make it to retirement does. The culture of education is that thing that you do before your real life starts needs to go away. Guaranteed income, or here's a thought: everyone works 30hr work weeks instead of 40 and still gets the same amount of stuff etc. We take all the production gains from tech and brainwash everyone into thinking they need more stuff (a TV isn't enough anymore, everyone needs their own TV in their room along with a computing device etc) rather than letting people have a day or two of their week back.
Happens with different cultures too. I was on trains in Japan and literally no one talked. This was 8 years ago or so so before the time when everyone had smartphones. Japan was always ahead of the curve with tech of course. But everyone just seemed to respect each others quite more. You either had a phone and texted people or you didn't and you sat and shut the hell up.
Not the case for me but I guess it depends how early in the run you get on, if your city has good infrastructure etc. I'm getting on a commuter train about 6 stops from the terminal always plenty of seats available. But the time we get into the city it is standing room only but then presumably the people standing had a shorter commute/lost less useful time than I would if I had to stand for the whole hour.
Anyways everyone's experience is different I guess. I've been lucky everywhere I've lived that even if the buses/trains were full by the time I got where I'm going they weren't when I needed to get on.
Bus drivers, at least where I live, are pretty well paid + nice benefits. Saving 50-100k a year X 2(presumably the bus is running more than a single shift a day) is worth it. The errors drivers do are worth it. Drivers often don't notice people at stops, nearly drive pass the one that you want so drive erratically to get over to the stop, take a washroom break at the terminal and come back to the bus a few minutes after it was supposed to leave etc. The scheduling headaches of planning around lunch breaks, vacation, calling in sick etc is worth it assuming that the robots have a better uptime than a human (not a hard feat to accomplish).
I agree a bus has diminishing returns but I think you missed the most important thing: the time of the passengers. People that drive are basically doing no valuable task for the whole time they are driving other than getting themselves from A-B. Replacing each car with a robot at least saves that for each driver freeing them up to read, do paperwork, etc other potentially paid work. It turns valueless time to (potentially) valued time for at least 1/5 people (assuming people are driving fully occupied sedans which we know is usually not the case). That is the entire reason I commute with public transit rather than drive. I'd rather spend 3hr a day commuting and being able to read and watch shows on my tablet during that time than 2hrs a day doing nothing but driving, that and the cost savings makes it a no brainer for me.
Yeah I'm in the it's nice camp. I mostly consume data. I develop software but that is a pittance of the bits I touch a day. Even counting for test builds and what not it is probably less than 1GB a day. It is really people generating uncompressed video that need this kind of throughput on a local machine. But those I'd lump into: 1) professionals so that is the cost of business or 2) amateurs so that is the cost of your expensive hobby (same like gamers piss money away on multi-GPU, liquid cooled etc systems, or hobbyist golfers on memberships etc). It is the fact that the average person doesn't need it that makes it a luxury and gives little incentive for your $1200 Dell to come with it. The vast majority of people are using a NAS for household backups and to push a compressed video to the tv or whatever. 1Gbps is more than enough for this.
Yeah a 10W nic is drawing "a lot" of power but so is the disks/switches to get you data at that speed. SSDs are low powered but you still are looking at using a few of them in parallel to feed you that quick and presumably the NAS device also must have a nic on its end. Not a huge issue other than heat though since I don't think 10Gbps makes sense on a laptop much yet, well I guess it does because at that speed you don't need much local storage, but if you were pulling stuff into local storage you'd fill up laptop class drives in about 10min of use.
So a 3TB drive is enough to store 15 pics a day for that 11 years a 50MB a piece. I assume back in 2003 you weren't taking 50MB pics but going forward it might grow I suppose. But still say you take 150 pics a day and then delete them all once you fill up the bad boy: it is still over a year between cycles. With at least 300 write cycles on an SSD you'll be fine: in 5 years you'll be picking up a replacement 10TB SSD for $200 from Best Buy.
Admittedly you said NAS but if NAS really means a box sitting next to the powerful computer that needs that kind of throughput then Thunderbolt will do that for you 20Gbps currently. I suspect the issue is a north bridge south bridge type of thing. Well now the north bridge is really in the CPU for the most part but I/O still lives one step removed from the CPU. To fix that you need to use a pcie card or something for the network interface which means you effectively need the equivalent of a dual graphics card mobo worth of hardware just so that 5% of the time you actually need that 10Gbps throughput on the network interface you have it.
I think you are spot on. Back in the day of 100GB drives you could easily fill empty the drive several times a year. Even standard def video you'd go through 10GB of data a week easy (~350MB each so about 300 shows compacity). But now go up to 1080p say 1.6GB compressed using normal codex. You are looking at 1-2000 episodes on a disk. So your write/delete cycle is 3-6X less even at 1080p. For the vast majority of people using large storage that is what it is being used for. Yeah I know: "but I have a lot of photos". 1: even at say 10MB a pop do you really have THAT many photos (about 100 a day for 8 years to fill a 3TB drive)? 2: if you do.. and is this personal or business? Yeah a professional might create a lot of content but then storage is a cost of business not just a routine maintenance thing you have to do to organize your personal life.
I agree. You have a good idea and domain knowledge. Next up is finding the passionate hacker that can say "yeah but" and get all the crap out of the idea, figure out how your idea for an internal document management system could be GoogleDocs instead etc. Sometimes it is the business person that finds the market and sometimes it is the technical person that finds the problem that the idea solves.
I'm not sure this thread is giving the poster enough credit it depends how hierarchical his last job was but in my experience IT/systems admins can have WAY more business experience than software developers. Often they handle purchasing of IT equipment meaning interviewing users and determining needs, specing out the boxes, finding a vendor etc. Since the users cross the corporate spectrum you get exposed to the business practices and relative skills of different departments which can help greatly when you realize that for example a good records clerk might be a wizard with Excel but otherwise be an idiot with how to use a computer, but that is okay they can still do their job.
Often they have to handle reporting in order to allocate the expense back to departments, have to write or help explain the corporate IT use policy in such a way that it conforms to regulations etc.. Managing a much more complicated budget (service contracts, internal and external employees, equipment purchasing and refresh cycle etc: it can be much closer to running a smaller business within the bigger business. In software development it is much easier to just become the guy that makes the widgets and doesn't have to worry his pretty little head about how it is used. At best, again in my experience, dev managers can manage people hiring and allocating to projects to try to keep the projects going. They have little experience managing other types of resources.
I agree just having a masters degree doesn't mean you are ready to run everything. Corporate culture vs university culture is completely different. Spending grant money you've convinced someone to give you for the next 3 years is much different than spending money you are borrowing from an investor/bank/your personal retirement savings in hopes of making a business that will be profitable. In university it is often okay to say: we experimented and proved it wasn't a good idea, in business it is waste and needs to be managed or you'll quickly be out of business.
Huh. "Article" more like an ad. Not really clear what "free phone calls mean". I guess we can assume they'll have some sort of voip setup. I was thinking the assumption was that free wifi=free phone calls because everyone has a smartphone with skype installed right? I wonder how many people will use this to replace long distance for when you need to call a land line/cell phone without the hassle of coordinating a Skype call.
So you have enough money for a wifi enabled device likely a cellphone at least, congrats here's your free wifi. If you happen to be somewhere without a cellphone or say a tourist who's phone doesn't work there sorry no handy phones around anymore sure hope you know enough to get skype or something on that bad boy should you need to call anyone. Tech is cool but there is still a lot of people out there that are clueless. My parents for example can't even figure out how to shutoff a computer or figure out what button to push to start a cellphone call. Their done because all the tech they are used to is being replaced with the assumption that you'll drop $500 a year on a shiny gadget rather than have a few quarters in your pocket when traveling.
Not clear from the brief question what the poster meant. For all we know the dude is Indian or another nationality in the area and just spending a year at home. Or has been there for a few months before etc. I agree not everything has to be job training but a year is a really long time. You can spend a few hours a day reading a book or hacking something and still have plenty of time to hang out with people, see the scenery etc. If for nothing else even if you make friends THEY likely will be working 8+ hours a day so you'll have to find something to do then.
I think all the 5"+ craze is people that were late to the tablet game deciding that they want one device that can suit two purposes, to me you end up with an awkward phone (and I'm 6'3" so I can't imagine a little 5'2" person) and a tiny tablet for watching shows on. Neither great but better to some than dropping another $2-500 on a second device.
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I worked at one of the Max Planck Institutes in Germany, similar top notch calibre institutions: I as a sys admin was making as much as a group leader, their students were getting about $20,000 a year (but no tuition so there is that). That said when my girlfriend from there at the time graduated and took a postdoc she was getting closer to $55,000 so there is a big jump from no-PhD to PhD and then only a little bump later when you become a group leader. At least in Germany. Yeah you work much longer hours. My girlfriend was doing experiments with fish eggs. They needed to be checked every 12hrs or so. She did so, even on weekends, Christmas holidays etc etc. Probably closer to 60hrs a week on average from my peers. I was making more than 3X their salary and working strictly 40hrs a week ... being smart doesn't always pay.
Maybe consider immigrating: Canada were I live I've been asked exactly twice: once for when I joined the army and once when I worked at a furniture factory in the summer. All my professional jobs didn't ask. Anyways, the US beats China as a police state there are much more liberal/accepting societies out there in terms of giving previous convicts the benefit of the doubt. That said it might be an issue getting residency/work visa: funny (in a sad way) that we don't care if you are from here and a felon but if your from somewhere else (where they do a really good job of manufacturing felonies) we do. Mah, anyways look around including not in your own country/telecommuting work etc.
I didn't have a good experience with Sun support but your milage might vary. I think very dependent on the skills of the person you deal with. We were in the process of migrating our SAN and a Sun box wouldn't see the luns that were being presented to it. Sun support at about $400 a pop, dude new about as much as we did in house. Ended up being a IBM guy who figured it out (got that for "free" because IBM was already on site installing their SAN and their tech escalated it): IBM support just happened to have a sun server just like ours, they installed it and tried to configure it the same as ours in their lab. Were then able to tell us which bits to twiddle in the FC card driver to get things working again. So in my experience IBM for the win. But didn't do a lot of direct to the electronics vendor IT stuff in my day, mostly medical software and our initial support always went through the vendor and off then to MS, IBM etc who ever supplied the hardware. Anyways, I was really impressed when the IBM guy was telling the Sun guy what bits to twiddle in their OS.
CERN and the like are probably an exception because they are so high profile/budget but the thing is with most academia: who really cares if your cluster is down for a week? So you have to work through the holidays to get your thesis done, or you hire another intern at $10/hr to maintain things etc. Most people are working for really low salaries and putting in way more than 40hr work weeks. It is hard to justify borrowing staff from your contractor when you can get your own people so cheaply. Instead you cobble something together and if it breaks you spend a weekend and cobble something else together. Stability isn't that important as long as you don't lose data you are golden.
Yeah exactly. Its a trade off but you just tell the guy writing the checks we either have a service agreement or be prepared to pay ~300/hr to have someone fix our issue should it happen. As long as a company has a nice spare cash pot often the ad hoc is the way to go. I find often the techincal people in house can figure it out, few things are really that bad (often things are memory leaks or something which requires a restart over night or something, and of those few systems matter after hours), and for those that are it ties the problems directly to a cost centre giving you more justification when you need to say: this piece of crap needs to be replaced.
Don't the boxes usually ask if you've been convicted of a felony? If so you could answer truthfully no. I'm not in the US but oddly I've only had a background check for when I was in the military and when I worked in a factory. Since starting work in IT even at hospitals etc I've never even been asked to check a box.
I think those that do discriminate based on criminal background do so just to cover their ass. They don't want to be the one that hired the guy that had previous convictions and now went on a shooting spree in the office. It's a matter of due diligence: the standard magically changes after something bad has happened. A otherwise good guy becomes an "obvious bad hire" after they do something that lands you in the papers.
But intending on using them on some combination of nuns and cheerleaders while a film rolls: that's free speech.
I personally love the concept of "constructive possession". Borrow a car from someone that happens to have a baggy with some residue wedged in one of the seats: your driving so you must have known it was there.
Billions served to 1 million lard asses. That has been my theory for a while.
A lot of homeless the money wouldn't matter: it is mental illness or addiction that lead them to the street. Either way they'd be back on the street except perhaps a little more drink every year.
A credit is good. But lower income taxes would be better and trade them for consumption taxes: including implicit consumption like "usage fees" for the military necessary to secure oil resources. Still would help the homeless: very little usage = very little taxes (rest of which would be handled by your credits or a base writeoff amount before taxes apply). The costs to society of things would be more fairly proportioned: oil wars wouldn't be being paid for by hermits living in the mountains using solar power. Roads wouldn't be being paid for people out in the boonies that use dirt trails that were made 100 years ago etc. If consumption goes down then the need for government services does too so tying to consumption not production makes the funding go up and down based on demand not on ability to pay (and then government deciding what new services should be bought with the extra in fat years, and votes bought with borrowed money to keep service in lean years).
Robots don't push people into poverty. Sitting on your ass assuming that your skills will continue to be relevant at least long enough to make it to retirement does. The culture of education is that thing that you do before your real life starts needs to go away. Guaranteed income, or here's a thought: everyone works 30hr work weeks instead of 40 and still gets the same amount of stuff etc. We take all the production gains from tech and brainwash everyone into thinking they need more stuff (a TV isn't enough anymore, everyone needs their own TV in their room along with a computing device etc) rather than letting people have a day or two of their week back.
Happens with different cultures too. I was on trains in Japan and literally no one talked. This was 8 years ago or so so before the time when everyone had smartphones. Japan was always ahead of the curve with tech of course. But everyone just seemed to respect each others quite more. You either had a phone and texted people or you didn't and you sat and shut the hell up.
Not the case for me but I guess it depends how early in the run you get on, if your city has good infrastructure etc. I'm getting on a commuter train about 6 stops from the terminal always plenty of seats available. But the time we get into the city it is standing room only but then presumably the people standing had a shorter commute/lost less useful time than I would if I had to stand for the whole hour.
Anyways everyone's experience is different I guess. I've been lucky everywhere I've lived that even if the buses/trains were full by the time I got where I'm going they weren't when I needed to get on.
Bus drivers, at least where I live, are pretty well paid + nice benefits. Saving 50-100k a year X 2(presumably the bus is running more than a single shift a day) is worth it. The errors drivers do are worth it. Drivers often don't notice people at stops, nearly drive pass the one that you want so drive erratically to get over to the stop, take a washroom break at the terminal and come back to the bus a few minutes after it was supposed to leave etc. The scheduling headaches of planning around lunch breaks, vacation, calling in sick etc is worth it assuming that the robots have a better uptime than a human (not a hard feat to accomplish).
I agree a bus has diminishing returns but I think you missed the most important thing: the time of the passengers. People that drive are basically doing no valuable task for the whole time they are driving other than getting themselves from A-B. Replacing each car with a robot at least saves that for each driver freeing them up to read, do paperwork, etc other potentially paid work. It turns valueless time to (potentially) valued time for at least 1/5 people (assuming people are driving fully occupied sedans which we know is usually not the case). That is the entire reason I commute with public transit rather than drive. I'd rather spend 3hr a day commuting and being able to read and watch shows on my tablet during that time than 2hrs a day doing nothing but driving, that and the cost savings makes it a no brainer for me.
Yeah I'm in the it's nice camp. I mostly consume data. I develop software but that is a pittance of the bits I touch a day. Even counting for test builds and what not it is probably less than 1GB a day. It is really people generating uncompressed video that need this kind of throughput on a local machine. But those I'd lump into: 1) professionals so that is the cost of business or 2) amateurs so that is the cost of your expensive hobby (same like gamers piss money away on multi-GPU, liquid cooled etc systems, or hobbyist golfers on memberships etc). It is the fact that the average person doesn't need it that makes it a luxury and gives little incentive for your $1200 Dell to come with it. The vast majority of people are using a NAS for household backups and to push a compressed video to the tv or whatever. 1Gbps is more than enough for this.
Yeah a 10W nic is drawing "a lot" of power but so is the disks/switches to get you data at that speed. SSDs are low powered but you still are looking at using a few of them in parallel to feed you that quick and presumably the NAS device also must have a nic on its end. Not a huge issue other than heat though since I don't think 10Gbps makes sense on a laptop much yet, well I guess it does because at that speed you don't need much local storage, but if you were pulling stuff into local storage you'd fill up laptop class drives in about 10min of use.
So a 3TB drive is enough to store 15 pics a day for that 11 years a 50MB a piece. I assume back in 2003 you weren't taking 50MB pics but going forward it might grow I suppose. But still say you take 150 pics a day and then delete them all once you fill up the bad boy: it is still over a year between cycles. With at least 300 write cycles on an SSD you'll be fine: in 5 years you'll be picking up a replacement 10TB SSD for $200 from Best Buy.
Admittedly you said NAS but if NAS really means a box sitting next to the powerful computer that needs that kind of throughput then Thunderbolt will do that for you 20Gbps currently. I suspect the issue is a north bridge south bridge type of thing. Well now the north bridge is really in the CPU for the most part but I/O still lives one step removed from the CPU. To fix that you need to use a pcie card or something for the network interface which means you effectively need the equivalent of a dual graphics card mobo worth of hardware just so that 5% of the time you actually need that 10Gbps throughput on the network interface you have it.
I think you are spot on. Back in the day of 100GB drives you could easily fill empty the drive several times a year. Even standard def video you'd go through 10GB of data a week easy (~350MB each so about 300 shows compacity). But now go up to 1080p say 1.6GB compressed using normal codex. You are looking at 1-2000 episodes on a disk. So your write/delete cycle is 3-6X less even at 1080p. For the vast majority of people using large storage that is what it is being used for. Yeah I know: "but I have a lot of photos". 1: even at say 10MB a pop do you really have THAT many photos (about 100 a day for 8 years to fill a 3TB drive)? 2: if you do .. and is this personal or business? Yeah a professional might create a lot of content but then storage is a cost of business not just a routine maintenance thing you have to do to organize your personal life.
I agree. You have a good idea and domain knowledge. Next up is finding the passionate hacker that can say "yeah but" and get all the crap out of the idea, figure out how your idea for an internal document management system could be GoogleDocs instead etc. Sometimes it is the business person that finds the market and sometimes it is the technical person that finds the problem that the idea solves.
I'm not sure this thread is giving the poster enough credit it depends how hierarchical his last job was but in my experience IT/systems admins can have WAY more business experience than software developers. Often they handle purchasing of IT equipment meaning interviewing users and determining needs, specing out the boxes, finding a vendor etc. Since the users cross the corporate spectrum you get exposed to the business practices and relative skills of different departments which can help greatly when you realize that for example a good records clerk might be a wizard with Excel but otherwise be an idiot with how to use a computer, but that is okay they can still do their job.
Often they have to handle reporting in order to allocate the expense back to departments, have to write or help explain the corporate IT use policy in such a way that it conforms to regulations etc.. Managing a much more complicated budget (service contracts, internal and external employees, equipment purchasing and refresh cycle etc: it can be much closer to running a smaller business within the bigger business. In software development it is much easier to just become the guy that makes the widgets and doesn't have to worry his pretty little head about how it is used. At best, again in my experience, dev managers can manage people hiring and allocating to projects to try to keep the projects going. They have little experience managing other types of resources.
I agree just having a masters degree doesn't mean you are ready to run everything. Corporate culture vs university culture is completely different. Spending grant money you've convinced someone to give you for the next 3 years is much different than spending money you are borrowing from an investor/bank/your personal retirement savings in hopes of making a business that will be profitable. In university it is often okay to say: we experimented and proved it wasn't a good idea, in business it is waste and needs to be managed or you'll quickly be out of business.
Huh. "Article" more like an ad. Not really clear what "free phone calls mean". I guess we can assume they'll have some sort of voip setup. I was thinking the assumption was that free wifi=free phone calls because everyone has a smartphone with skype installed right? I wonder how many people will use this to replace long distance for when you need to call a land line/cell phone without the hassle of coordinating a Skype call.
So you have enough money for a wifi enabled device likely a cellphone at least, congrats here's your free wifi. If you happen to be somewhere without a cellphone or say a tourist who's phone doesn't work there sorry no handy phones around anymore sure hope you know enough to get skype or something on that bad boy should you need to call anyone. Tech is cool but there is still a lot of people out there that are clueless. My parents for example can't even figure out how to shutoff a computer or figure out what button to push to start a cellphone call. Their done because all the tech they are used to is being replaced with the assumption that you'll drop $500 a year on a shiny gadget rather than have a few quarters in your pocket when traveling.
Not clear from the brief question what the poster meant. For all we know the dude is Indian or another nationality in the area and just spending a year at home. Or has been there for a few months before etc. I agree not everything has to be job training but a year is a really long time. You can spend a few hours a day reading a book or hacking something and still have plenty of time to hang out with people, see the scenery etc. If for nothing else even if you make friends THEY likely will be working 8+ hours a day so you'll have to find something to do then.
I think all the 5"+ craze is people that were late to the tablet game deciding that they want one device that can suit two purposes, to me you end up with an awkward phone (and I'm 6'3" so I can't imagine a little 5'2" person) and a tiny tablet for watching shows on. Neither great but better to some than dropping another $2-500 on a second device.