It might be the app but it happens several times a day with my ~2 year old Mac mini when using VLC (pretty much all I use it for). Might very well be the app itself but since it was updated (think when iOS 8 came out it is weird. First off opens up shows that the media library is empty for about 1-2s then "realizes" I always have 5-100 TV show rips in it. Then I can't scroll/interact with the app for about another 5-10s. It seems to remember things I did just doesn't actually start interacting (not responding to the message pump?). Next up I try to increase the speed of playback (1.0X is for suckers;)): that 50% of the time leads the app to freeze and need to be restarted.
I'm not sure if it is the version of VLC, its interaction with iOS or iOS fault but that is what I've seen. Also about once a month I get a straight up crash of the device: pow black screen and reboots.
The article: Sony's supply chain lessons? Doesn't mention what it means by that I'm assuming it is about the issues with PS3. So let me get this straight: Apple's 2006 switch to intel (which probably was in the works for 1+ years) is due to them learning lessons from Sony's 2007 problems? At least in my opinion Apple probably should have been on Intel or AMD for ages. They picked PowerPC and were on the wrong horse for a long time. PowerPC had some advantages but anyone with half a brain (especially one so good as to learn lessons from 2 years in the future) should have known whatever MS does is going to be the volume market with component costs the lowest and a lot of pressure to meet deadlines. The bonus is your deadlines would also be your competitors: so if Intel delays a CPU release well at least Windows PCs aren't going to come out faster than you are this holiday season: they have the same problem.
Developers like developing for Unix: wow, really? I'd say a lot do. But a lot do just because it is free (Linux, BSD etc) so they can get started as a student when dead broke with a 10yr old computer. Yeah open source helps and has several cool communities. But I can't think of a tool that I use on OSX that I can't find an alternative (and usually just as free) on windows. Given that Java is the number one programming language and.Net pretty popular too I'd say "developers like to develop for windows or really anywhere they can" would have been just as valid.
Anon-coward so not likely to get a response directly but its been a while: does the version of Debian/Ubuntu you install determine what happens when you update? Ie you do an apt-get update do you only get "long term support" updates if that was what you initially installed or does it by default get the newest version of whatever you have installed? If so I guess it is equivalent. I assume internally this has been going on in MS for a while/probably for ever. Devs on the OS team probably have builds running on at least one of their boxes/VMs that are 1 week old: they have to to do their job. It is just a matter of how early on the gravy train customers are allowed in that has changed.
VS and app availability are the winners for me. Sure they are FOSS alternatives to almost everything. But how much time do I need to spend to find them versus going for the known (and easily pirated or paid for by the employer so who cares) brand name product? How many snarky "well if you don't like it get the source and make it do what you want" comments do you need to take before you use the product that was designed by people that gave half a damn and have a financial incentive to make it better? VS for example: I haven't seen an IDE even with its worts (large memory footprint, once daily crash) that can touch it. The best they come are, mah good enough I guess, half assed look and feel, half assed layout of the toolbox etc. The fact that probably the most well known free alternative is Eclipse and it is even more of a dog (probably due to Java: I welcome your complaints: coffee is meant to be next to the computer not in it you file having singleclass not having Linq dolts;)) memory/performance wise.
Well at least in theory they are in a faster release cadence/no more big release mode: so "too far along" is now 6 months rather than 6 years: a big improvement.
I had the same experience in Canada. Lived in Vancouver was making 10% more but renting a 10x10 bedroom in a shared house was about $100 less than I'm paying for my mortgage in a suburb of Toronto. West coast living is just crazy expensive. The lady I was living with was sharing a mattress on the floor of the basement with her 10 year old son. Probably not legal and how much longer could she do that before it would get really creepy for the both of them? I asked her why she didn't move out east were she'd make a decent living: "oh but the weather is so nice". It is like you are on vacation and you live like it (ie spend every dime you have and are constantly checking to see if you still have any money left before buying that coffee). At the time ~5 years back a one bedroom condo was going for over $1M. Even at 100k a year you'll have a hard time living like a toy factory worker in Ontario.
You have to compare cost of living at the location of work. Sure you can commute but if part of getting that 140k is a 1.5hr commute each way then it really is more like 90k with overtime pay. So if I'm working downtown Manhattan and an 3 bedroom apartment goes for $4000 a month that is $48000 a year. Same thing in the middle of no where is maybe $12000 a year that is a $36000 after tax salary difference you need. Then comes food prices (usually higher) etc. There are exceptions but generally IT provides a nice comfortable lifestyle: you probably can have a corvette if you really want it but you'll have to sacrifice somewhere else, dido the extra nice house/appartment/alimony payments. We aren't rich because we can't have all 4 at the same time without worrying about it but we can get a comfortable mix of what we want and generally doing have to worry about how we are going to pay for that new gadget or night out at the pub.
That is my biggest complaint about windows phone: take a desktop animation then make it take 4X longer that is windows phone. Otherwise it is pretty nice though (if only they could convince more people to develop for it). I fully agree with you these days if someone is staring at a screen and clicks something they know what they expect to happen 90% of the time so you might as well just give it to them as quickly as possible.
Perhaps make the UI adaptive: have the wiz bang animations and after an hour ask the user: "hey do you like these or do you want us to just open the damn app already?"
Not saying there isn't work to do but I think betas/previews are debug builds with a lot of optimizations turned off. There is a minimum bar on all features I think before people start saying you don't look cool/add features etc. It is a constant battle as a developer pushing for a balance between new shinny and performance/maintenance.
That is the problem I think. The onus shouldn't be on the person on the list to find out they are on the list and then pay for a defence. Do you get notified you can't fly when you try to purchase your tickets? Somehow I doubt it. So by the time you realize you have a problem you are already out the price of your tickets and your plans are shot. A lot of people don't "need" to fly they choose to go somewhere for vacation, volunteer for an overseas business trip etc. That is the problem: the barrier to getting your rights restored might be more than they are worth to you. A quick solution might be to force the government to provide notice to everyone on the list and public defenders for anyone requesting removal. "National security" claims are such BS. If they really know enough about you to deny your rights without the benefit of trial then they should be willing to arrest you/start court proceedings. "I have a hunch about that guy" isn't sufficient to start taking away civil liberties.
I agree. They seemed to handle the "dockable" tablet market pretty well. I think this is the way the market is going. Laptops somewhat killed the desktops, tablets are killing the laptop because people don't want to lug an extra couple pounds, want 10 hr battery life etc. Soon the average user will realize: hey all I want is a mouse, a bigger screen and a keyboard at home not the whole box: win 10 seems like it will handle that pretty well.
Good points. I'd also add: management/companies can fail developers many ways.
1) Too cost sensitive so forcing developers to work with out dated tools/restrictive computers. I worked in healthcare and you needed middle manager approval for a monitor larger than 19" (not your boss but your bosses boss). So you got a single 19" screen and windows XP (because IT didn't want to bother trying to support anything but the standard that all the secretaries already knew how to use).
2) Similar to 1) but a lack of bravery. In this case there is money around your boss is just too shy to step up and say: "hey our development staff could use a couple new people, or a week off to do training, or a new CI server". Another one is culture: not fighting for a culture that is supportive of creative people/professionals. Requiring a 9-5 day in suits and ties from developers when the team would rather work 10:30-6:30 in shorts. Your free to require that and developers are free to go somewhere that doesn't make them dress up like they are front desk clerks dealing with customers face to face all day. They manage by keeping their department of senior managements TODO list.
3) Giving detailed technical specs when they no longer have the technical knowledge to understand the tools that are currently being used. Manage towards maintainable business outcomes not lines of code on a screen.
Part of the problem is as others have pointed out already too: most engineering isn't innovative. How much of everyone's day is adding/making more a new page to list a customers address and order information? But is more than that too it is inertia a lot of which we do to ourselves. Things were done a certain way because the projects senior dev at the time code reviewed it into that standard. Now you have 1M+ lines of code all structured a particular way. Guess which way you'll be expected to code your new module? Guess how far a request to change that still and refactor the existing code base this month rather than pound out a few more features will go? You can get lucky and have management that understands and is good enough to say: we aren't going to do it that way anymore but it becomes the culture. You can go to a newer project, perhaps even in the same company, where the culture is still forming and either it is the way you like our perhaps you can help steer it that way: but guess what? You've just become that senior developer that people 10 years from know will likely be wishing it wasn't done that way. Change is the way developers like it: standardization is the way process management and product lines like it.
What exactly wouldn't be "new media"? Does Flickr and the ilk count if they allow you to search what would otherwise be impossible with random hard copy photos? How about FB? If you start spending 4 hours a day reading your friends blog rather than watching TV does that become "new media"? Slippery slope. If they restrict it to precisely the areas of old media it is replacing, music, long format video maybe.
Yep right next the in seat TV there was a USB port. I've seen it on about half the flights I've been on over the last couple years. Though I'm usually flying transatlantic so perhaps it is only bigger planes or longer flights that they bother to provide it. Pretty sweet when they have them tough: you arrive at your destination and your gadgets are all still fully charged. No: I need to go to the hotel for a couple hours to get my phone/tablet charged again.
No I need the space to prevent serious cramping/bruising. They need the space (for the most part) because they want to take a knap. Pain wins over knap time.
Wrong. 36" between seats. Just measured it I'm 30" from ass to knee sitting with my ass right against a wooden seat. The other 6" is the thickness or close enough not to matter of the chair. It isn't 36" leg room it is 36" from one seat to the same spot on the seat in front so the thickness of the chair is a factor too. I can just barely not touch the seat in front if when I seat down I sit perfectly straight and press with my legs back to flatten my back padding as much as possible. Anything short of that and I'm touching the seat in front.
They absolutely must be placed there because they are attached to my leg. I can't raise my feet off the floor and to my chest for a 10hr flight without touching the seat in front sorry not going to happen. Why I do this is more times than not people start to move the seat back and feel some resistence. They look back see that there is a 6'3" person behind them and that it is my knees they are hitting and then they push to try to still get there seat back. Sorry jackness if we are in a pushing match I win. I'm not getting bruises on my knees so you can recline your sit 10 degrees.
Probably reasonable. The problem is the first time you fly with an airline you have no idea how crammed they are versus the competition. Add to that they keep changing the configuration of the planes and you have no idea. I flew recently to Prague on Air Transit. On the way there the most comfortable I've flown yet other than when in an emergency aisle (and in a way better since the seat in front was close enough that I had access to a usb charger). On the way back: cramped as hell with about 20 3 yr olds in the surrounding 5 rows front and back. Same airline and route 1 week apart. You never know what you are getting for your $1000 and that isn't right.
When a dude tries slamming their sit into my knees I press back. I'm 240lb 6'3" and a muscular frame. I win more times than not and the jackass in front of me gets a sore back for their troubles.
To get proposals funded you need to point to something already existing for the most part and say how yours is very similar to that/likely to succeed. So yeah the funding and financial steering is towards things that are not very innovative. However there are a few a compensating factors. 1) Doing something similar both verifies theories/that we actually understand what we thing we do and has the chance of something different happening which either invalidates the theory or adds nuance. 2) Most people aren't really that capable of innovation: science has their equivalent of timecard punchers too: lots of people are smart enough to do science, few are able to do it well, and even fewer will come up with the new ideas. 3) Even those that are innovative aren't going to come up with that many new ideas. Take Einstein, he was a theorist so didn't have as much of a time requirement in terms of designing ordering and using equipment etc. Still (I might miss something) he only had a 3 really big ideas: energy matter equivalence, Brownian motion, and arguably relativity (GR and SR are really just consequences of energy-matter equivalence + the invariability of the speed of light). 3 ideas in a 50 year career.
Once the idea is out there the timepunchers (relatively, still very smart people and they might be innovating techniques that make things more accurate, quicker etc but they aren't the one with the big foundational ideas) quickly become able to run the experiments that build up the data and there are much more of them. So naturally the job of allocating resources focuses on sending the money to the timepunchers not to the innovators: they'll likely hack something together with equipment they already have on the weekend for free anyways, be theorists so not need a lot of resources, or for biomed go the private financing/corporate route.
The technology in them is probably dirt cheap (and may have been at the time of release) a low res grayscale ~2" screen plus enough processing power to solve relatively simple math probably all of $5 cost. The rest is usability and brand recognition. That said there is something to being able to visualize things in your head. Perhaps not everyone is wired the same way but I managed my way through an honours physics degree with nothing better than a $10 basic scientific calculator: graphs, intersections, roots of a function etc I know how to calculate them and am pretty good at once I know where they are visualizing how the graph should look. Regardless of how common it is I suspect you never are going to be among those skilled at math intensive fields if you need to consult a calculator some times. Sometimes you just need to be able to figure out from the direction of current in a wire which direction the magnetic field will be generated and thus what direction the induced field in the second conductor will be traveling sort of like a sense of direction: if you don't have one don't be a cabby (though GPS makes that easier now I suppose).
Slashdot Mirror
It might be the app but it happens several times a day with my ~2 year old Mac mini when using VLC (pretty much all I use it for). Might very well be the app itself but since it was updated (think when iOS 8 came out it is weird. First off opens up shows that the media library is empty for about 1-2s then "realizes" I always have 5-100 TV show rips in it. Then I can't scroll/interact with the app for about another 5-10s. It seems to remember things I did just doesn't actually start interacting (not responding to the message pump?). Next up I try to increase the speed of playback (1.0X is for suckers ;)): that 50% of the time leads the app to freeze and need to be restarted.
I'm not sure if it is the version of VLC, its interaction with iOS or iOS fault but that is what I've seen. Also about once a month I get a straight up crash of the device: pow black screen and reboots.
The article: Sony's supply chain lessons? Doesn't mention what it means by that I'm assuming it is about the issues with PS3. So let me get this straight: Apple's 2006 switch to intel (which probably was in the works for 1+ years) is due to them learning lessons from Sony's 2007 problems? At least in my opinion Apple probably should have been on Intel or AMD for ages. They picked PowerPC and were on the wrong horse for a long time. PowerPC had some advantages but anyone with half a brain (especially one so good as to learn lessons from 2 years in the future) should have known whatever MS does is going to be the volume market with component costs the lowest and a lot of pressure to meet deadlines. The bonus is your deadlines would also be your competitors: so if Intel delays a CPU release well at least Windows PCs aren't going to come out faster than you are this holiday season: they have the same problem.
Developers like developing for Unix: wow, really? I'd say a lot do. But a lot do just because it is free (Linux, BSD etc) so they can get started as a student when dead broke with a 10yr old computer. Yeah open source helps and has several cool communities. But I can't think of a tool that I use on OSX that I can't find an alternative (and usually just as free) on windows. Given that Java is the number one programming language and .Net pretty popular too I'd say "developers like to develop for windows or really anywhere they can" would have been just as valid.
Anon-coward so not likely to get a response directly but its been a while: does the version of Debian/Ubuntu you install determine what happens when you update? Ie you do an apt-get update do you only get "long term support" updates if that was what you initially installed or does it by default get the newest version of whatever you have installed? If so I guess it is equivalent. I assume internally this has been going on in MS for a while/probably for ever. Devs on the OS team probably have builds running on at least one of their boxes/VMs that are 1 week old: they have to to do their job. It is just a matter of how early on the gravy train customers are allowed in that has changed.
VS and app availability are the winners for me. Sure they are FOSS alternatives to almost everything. But how much time do I need to spend to find them versus going for the known (and easily pirated or paid for by the employer so who cares) brand name product? How many snarky "well if you don't like it get the source and make it do what you want" comments do you need to take before you use the product that was designed by people that gave half a damn and have a financial incentive to make it better? VS for example: I haven't seen an IDE even with its worts (large memory footprint, once daily crash) that can touch it. The best they come are, mah good enough I guess, half assed look and feel, half assed layout of the toolbox etc. The fact that probably the most well known free alternative is Eclipse and it is even more of a dog (probably due to Java: I welcome your complaints: coffee is meant to be next to the computer not in it you file having singleclass not having Linq dolts ;)) memory/performance wise.
Well at least in theory they are in a faster release cadence/no more big release mode: so "too far along" is now 6 months rather than 6 years: a big improvement.
I had the same experience in Canada. Lived in Vancouver was making 10% more but renting a 10x10 bedroom in a shared house was about $100 less than I'm paying for my mortgage in a suburb of Toronto. West coast living is just crazy expensive. The lady I was living with was sharing a mattress on the floor of the basement with her 10 year old son. Probably not legal and how much longer could she do that before it would get really creepy for the both of them? I asked her why she didn't move out east were she'd make a decent living: "oh but the weather is so nice". It is like you are on vacation and you live like it (ie spend every dime you have and are constantly checking to see if you still have any money left before buying that coffee). At the time ~5 years back a one bedroom condo was going for over $1M. Even at 100k a year you'll have a hard time living like a toy factory worker in Ontario.
You have to compare cost of living at the location of work. Sure you can commute but if part of getting that 140k is a 1.5hr commute each way then it really is more like 90k with overtime pay. So if I'm working downtown Manhattan and an 3 bedroom apartment goes for $4000 a month that is $48000 a year. Same thing in the middle of no where is maybe $12000 a year that is a $36000 after tax salary difference you need. Then comes food prices (usually higher) etc. There are exceptions but generally IT provides a nice comfortable lifestyle: you probably can have a corvette if you really want it but you'll have to sacrifice somewhere else, dido the extra nice house/appartment/alimony payments. We aren't rich because we can't have all 4 at the same time without worrying about it but we can get a comfortable mix of what we want and generally doing have to worry about how we are going to pay for that new gadget or night out at the pub.
That is my biggest complaint about windows phone: take a desktop animation then make it take 4X longer that is windows phone. Otherwise it is pretty nice though (if only they could convince more people to develop for it). I fully agree with you these days if someone is staring at a screen and clicks something they know what they expect to happen 90% of the time so you might as well just give it to them as quickly as possible.
Perhaps make the UI adaptive: have the wiz bang animations and after an hour ask the user: "hey do you like these or do you want us to just open the damn app already?"
Not saying there isn't work to do but I think betas/previews are debug builds with a lot of optimizations turned off. There is a minimum bar on all features I think before people start saying you don't look cool/add features etc. It is a constant battle as a developer pushing for a balance between new shinny and performance/maintenance.
That is the problem I think. The onus shouldn't be on the person on the list to find out they are on the list and then pay for a defence. Do you get notified you can't fly when you try to purchase your tickets? Somehow I doubt it. So by the time you realize you have a problem you are already out the price of your tickets and your plans are shot. A lot of people don't "need" to fly they choose to go somewhere for vacation, volunteer for an overseas business trip etc. That is the problem: the barrier to getting your rights restored might be more than they are worth to you. A quick solution might be to force the government to provide notice to everyone on the list and public defenders for anyone requesting removal. "National security" claims are such BS. If they really know enough about you to deny your rights without the benefit of trial then they should be willing to arrest you/start court proceedings. "I have a hunch about that guy" isn't sufficient to start taking away civil liberties.
In the military you fix shit while in the shit and can't sleep till your done. Same with any good IT person.
Well to be fair being early and out of business is still worse than being "early" and a multibillion dollar company.
corporations = people, money = freedom of speech, MS has lots of money so if they say Vista is a number than most people agree.
I agree. They seemed to handle the "dockable" tablet market pretty well. I think this is the way the market is going. Laptops somewhat killed the desktops, tablets are killing the laptop because people don't want to lug an extra couple pounds, want 10 hr battery life etc. Soon the average user will realize: hey all I want is a mouse, a bigger screen and a keyboard at home not the whole box: win 10 seems like it will handle that pretty well.
Good points. I'd also add: management/companies can fail developers many ways.
1) Too cost sensitive so forcing developers to work with out dated tools/restrictive computers. I worked in healthcare and you needed middle manager approval for a monitor larger than 19" (not your boss but your bosses boss). So you got a single 19" screen and windows XP (because IT didn't want to bother trying to support anything but the standard that all the secretaries already knew how to use).
2) Similar to 1) but a lack of bravery. In this case there is money around your boss is just too shy to step up and say: "hey our development staff could use a couple new people, or a week off to do training, or a new CI server". Another one is culture: not fighting for a culture that is supportive of creative people/professionals. Requiring a 9-5 day in suits and ties from developers when the team would rather work 10:30-6:30 in shorts. Your free to require that and developers are free to go somewhere that doesn't make them dress up like they are front desk clerks dealing with customers face to face all day. They manage by keeping their department of senior managements TODO list.
3) Giving detailed technical specs when they no longer have the technical knowledge to understand the tools that are currently being used. Manage towards maintainable business outcomes not lines of code on a screen.
Part of the problem is as others have pointed out already too: most engineering isn't innovative. How much of everyone's day is adding/making more a new page to list a customers address and order information? But is more than that too it is inertia a lot of which we do to ourselves. Things were done a certain way because the projects senior dev at the time code reviewed it into that standard. Now you have 1M+ lines of code all structured a particular way. Guess which way you'll be expected to code your new module? Guess how far a request to change that still and refactor the existing code base this month rather than pound out a few more features will go? You can get lucky and have management that understands and is good enough to say: we aren't going to do it that way anymore but it becomes the culture. You can go to a newer project, perhaps even in the same company, where the culture is still forming and either it is the way you like our perhaps you can help steer it that way: but guess what? You've just become that senior developer that people 10 years from know will likely be wishing it wasn't done that way. Change is the way developers like it: standardization is the way process management and product lines like it.
Because just because I'm 20% bigger than you doesn't mean I'm 3X richer than you.
I know several white teenagers in the Eminem era that would disagree.
What exactly wouldn't be "new media"? Does Flickr and the ilk count if they allow you to search what would otherwise be impossible with random hard copy photos? How about FB? If you start spending 4 hours a day reading your friends blog rather than watching TV does that become "new media"? Slippery slope. If they restrict it to precisely the areas of old media it is replacing, music, long format video maybe.
Yep right next the in seat TV there was a USB port. I've seen it on about half the flights I've been on over the last couple years. Though I'm usually flying transatlantic so perhaps it is only bigger planes or longer flights that they bother to provide it. Pretty sweet when they have them tough: you arrive at your destination and your gadgets are all still fully charged. No: I need to go to the hotel for a couple hours to get my phone/tablet charged again.
No I need the space to prevent serious cramping/bruising. They need the space (for the most part) because they want to take a knap. Pain wins over knap time.
Wrong. 36" between seats. Just measured it I'm 30" from ass to knee sitting with my ass right against a wooden seat. The other 6" is the thickness or close enough not to matter of the chair. It isn't 36" leg room it is 36" from one seat to the same spot on the seat in front so the thickness of the chair is a factor too. I can just barely not touch the seat in front if when I seat down I sit perfectly straight and press with my legs back to flatten my back padding as much as possible. Anything short of that and I'm touching the seat in front.
They absolutely must be placed there because they are attached to my leg. I can't raise my feet off the floor and to my chest for a 10hr flight without touching the seat in front sorry not going to happen. Why I do this is more times than not people start to move the seat back and feel some resistence. They look back see that there is a 6'3" person behind them and that it is my knees they are hitting and then they push to try to still get there seat back. Sorry jackness if we are in a pushing match I win. I'm not getting bruises on my knees so you can recline your sit 10 degrees.
Probably reasonable. The problem is the first time you fly with an airline you have no idea how crammed they are versus the competition. Add to that they keep changing the configuration of the planes and you have no idea. I flew recently to Prague on Air Transit. On the way there the most comfortable I've flown yet other than when in an emergency aisle (and in a way better since the seat in front was close enough that I had access to a usb charger). On the way back: cramped as hell with about 20 3 yr olds in the surrounding 5 rows front and back. Same airline and route 1 week apart. You never know what you are getting for your $1000 and that isn't right.
When a dude tries slamming their sit into my knees I press back. I'm 240lb 6'3" and a muscular frame. I win more times than not and the jackass in front of me gets a sore back for their troubles.
To get proposals funded you need to point to something already existing for the most part and say how yours is very similar to that/likely to succeed. So yeah the funding and financial steering is towards things that are not very innovative. However there are a few a compensating factors. 1) Doing something similar both verifies theories/that we actually understand what we thing we do and has the chance of something different happening which either invalidates the theory or adds nuance. 2) Most people aren't really that capable of innovation: science has their equivalent of timecard punchers too: lots of people are smart enough to do science, few are able to do it well, and even fewer will come up with the new ideas. 3) Even those that are innovative aren't going to come up with that many new ideas. Take Einstein, he was a theorist so didn't have as much of a time requirement in terms of designing ordering and using equipment etc. Still (I might miss something) he only had a 3 really big ideas: energy matter equivalence, Brownian motion, and arguably relativity (GR and SR are really just consequences of energy-matter equivalence + the invariability of the speed of light). 3 ideas in a 50 year career.
Once the idea is out there the timepunchers (relatively, still very smart people and they might be innovating techniques that make things more accurate, quicker etc but they aren't the one with the big foundational ideas) quickly become able to run the experiments that build up the data and there are much more of them. So naturally the job of allocating resources focuses on sending the money to the timepunchers not to the innovators: they'll likely hack something together with equipment they already have on the weekend for free anyways, be theorists so not need a lot of resources, or for biomed go the private financing/corporate route.
The technology in them is probably dirt cheap (and may have been at the time of release) a low res grayscale ~2" screen plus enough processing power to solve relatively simple math probably all of $5 cost. The rest is usability and brand recognition. That said there is something to being able to visualize things in your head. Perhaps not everyone is wired the same way but I managed my way through an honours physics degree with nothing better than a $10 basic scientific calculator: graphs, intersections, roots of a function etc I know how to calculate them and am pretty good at once I know where they are visualizing how the graph should look. Regardless of how common it is I suspect you never are going to be among those skilled at math intensive fields if you need to consult a calculator some times. Sometimes you just need to be able to figure out from the direction of current in a wire which direction the magnetic field will be generated and thus what direction the induced field in the second conductor will be traveling sort of like a sense of direction: if you don't have one don't be a cabby (though GPS makes that easier now I suppose).