To be fair: us technology dorks aren't really in a position to say whether or not a computer meets someones needs. My sister only cares if she can get email and Facebook if she has to carve into stone tablets for it that is fine. The issue becomes security but functionality wise there are a lot of people like her (including most business use cases).
Sometimes it isn't even that the specs matter it is Apple decides they matter. A few years back working with old Mac hardware G4 systems couldn't be upgraded past Jaguar but G5 could get Tiger or whatever it was. It wasn't a technical limitation it was just Apple arbitrarily decided that computers 3.5 years old don't get the upgrade but ones 3 years old do. Similar to how they limit which iPhone gets which version of iOS. Microsoft will give you a relatively low recommended specs and you are free to try it at that. Apple I think has more of a mentality that they want users to have a certain base experience and refuse to allow you to run it if it would be slower than they deem acceptable (whether or not you want to/technically can).
Except nearly every computer comes with a version of windows installed. Sure you can look around for a model that comes bare, or go to the effort to buy online and untick that box for a $20 savings (if you are lucky and your model provides you with any os choice but you typical computer deals in big box stores, and your Dell/HP etc online stores) come with a flavor of windows. Often annoyingly not the one you want: by a mid range desktop and get home premium or whatever they call it now, want ultimate? There isn't a box for you to check so you have to upgrade on your own later.
If both OS X and Windows goes the way of cell phones and keeps giving you free upgrades for the reasonable life of your computer (say 5 years) the fact that linux is free (in the sense that 99% + of people care, not the rare coders/IT guru that would actually tweak anything that requires greater effort than running an installer) just won't matter.
Interesting. It was my understanding that here in Canada those with the infrastructure monopolies are required to sell to the smaller ISPs at a reasonable per MB rate not bandwidth. Could be wrong but that would match how their usage caps work for residential customers. You get dinged both coming and going. I agree with a symmetric connection you essentially wouldn't care about the upload especially since most offerings are biased towards download anyways (ex. mine is 150/10 and was 50/2 till a year ago or so). Also in a world where every ISP ultimately has a symmetric connection fee they will never match upload/download from the residential prospective. There is always the last one to download something so it is always at worse n downloads and (n-1) uploads (or n/n I suppose if you count the original source of the file). For really popular things it might actually help because seeders and leechers might be closer to each other on the network essentially acting as a content cache saving the ISP on any cross network fees they might have to pay.
As another poster has already replied the difference is the NSA/CIA and other militaristic government entities are by design meant to look out for any potential threats to the US. Since anyone could potentially be a threat you need to spy on everyone to find out if they are smiling to your face while they arm up.
The Enron example would be more like: "Can anyone honestly believe that an energy company won't look for more resources? That is what they do."
Regardless, the underlying flaw/feature of the three letter agencies and there peers around the world is that it ultimately comes down to a "them/us" comparison where people need to be lumped into categories and have fundamentally less rights depending on which country, religion, political ideology etc you believe in.
The problem with this is uploading actually costs money and with some/most/all tech is the limited resource. I seem to recall it is fundamental to how phone line based internet works there is more signal noise/lower bandwidth for some reason when the data is coming from the last mile vs the other way around. Regardless there is a cost of doing the switching for the incoming packets/managing the pipes. So not free but a spread in the buy sell could cover the network cost. The problem is the one that benefits (hulu and the like assuming they moved to a peer to peer model, application vendors that need smaller datacentres to roll out software updates etc) are different to the ones that own the wires.
Yeah rather than usage caps it really should be like a utility. Granny gets a $3 a month bill. I get a $150 bill because I average ~500GB a month or so that would be fair. But you are right if they do it like they did it in Canada where I'm living what will happen is granny will need to spend at least $30 a month to get a usable connection, and the power user will pay $100 or so even though they use 100X the bandwidth.
It won't happen but I think torrents are actually a good thing vs things like youtube: when all the cute kitty watchers get home at the same time and start viewing their 1080p streaming content at the same time they drive the peak demand through the roof but I'm quite content firing off a 300GB TV series rip and having it run faster at times and slower at times over several days as long as I'm getting enough data every day to equal what I watch (~4GB or so) I'm happy. Moving people to an asyncronous model is always a win because it allows the system to load balance without effecting a user sitting at a screen waiting for his por... er blog content to load.
My internet connection is like this except I think the government limited the maximum overage changes they can charge. I have a 150Mbps connection. They count both ways so torrents and such cost you essentially double in usage allowance. Anyways I have a 250GB monthly quota which my connection is capable of reaching in about 3h40min. The next ~29.8 days a month are on the house I guess.
Peoples usage changes to accommodate added bandwidth. My internet went from 50 -> 150Mbps all that changed is I download everything as 1080p rather than standard def. People will download that 1080p file if it still takes less time than it takes to watch it. Torrents and the like increase the network load: I'm not very bursty when I'm downloading 300GB of law in order in one go then seeding it back up. If there is no bandwidth cap people will keep seeding well past 1/1 (assuming they can, yeah I know global seed ratio by definition will always be less than one because someone will be the last downloader/junk files will be downloaded but deleted before being seeded back). It becomes the biggest sucker game: who gives the unlimited quota to people with the most upload bandwidth: they get to seed for all the other networks.
Can anyone honestly believe the the US isn't spying or trying to spy on them? Countries will spy to try to get a strategic or tactical advantage... that is what they do, some better than others, the US better than most.
It's a screening tool just like a lot of other things. Drivers license: you managed to drive well for ~30min one time and write a multiple choice test well. But are you a douche that texts while trying to parallel park on a one way street with a no parking sign in the way? Who knows, sometimes you might be sometimes you might not be. Diddo credit rating: are you another wise good credit risk but were unable to work for a few years because of health problems? Did your identity get stolen and the 2 years it takes to get everything sorted out hasn't happened yet?
People's time is limited so they find proxies for the characteristics they want so they can filter quickly: race, education, cultural dress, whether or not you look awake/sharp at the time I run into you etc.
Depends on the scale of the problem. I worked on things that took ~200k CPU hours back in the day when CPUs were single core. You couldn't sacrifice 2-10X the speed for ease of development. Also, professors were under the opinion of unless you coded it yourself you don't really understand it.
What are you talking about? I'm talking hand written sql files not ORM. The test project in the solution targets a specific version of SQL Server so VS should know the semantics of the TSQL we are writing but it seems (at least VS2010) to only consider stuff in the current file and names from other files. Say you have a proc called dumb and another called dumber which takes @cust int as an argument.
If dumb tries to call dumper... declaration/initialization code exec dumber @customer = @bob
You can compile the database project just fine. Until you run a unit test and then you get the runtime errors from SQL saying that the proc expects parameter @cust or whatever.
Sorry I should have been more specific VS 2012 doesn't run on XP as far as I know, you can target the platform but you can't run on it. You also give up features in.Net > 4 when targeting downwards which kind of sucks (async is your friend).
Not saying it is right but in my experience in the scientific programming space unit tests essentially never get written. You stare into space and try to figure out what is long with your logic. You use printf statements. But you are hardly getting paid in the first place so spending a bunch of your time writing unit tests for code that you likely will be the only one that uses for ~1 year before you write your thesis just doesn't happen. There are just too many papers, conferences and beers to take part in. There are exceptions of course like if you are working on a project that is generating tools for the field to use (say image processing tool, n-body simulation framework etc) but those jobs are relatively rare compared to the "get data from this piece of equipment and generate a time series of fourier transforms of the data" type things that are essentially one offs).
Image processing in the biology space at least seems to be a combination of Matlab and applications developed in Java in my experience. Physics was still when I was going through (2004) mainly a C or Fortran land place. A C style language and you won't go wrong. I'd suggest C++ or C# to pull in the object oriented side of things and huge libraries. Computationally extensive data mining: lots of data or lots of post processing required? If it is just lots of data you'll be be limited mainly by disk/network speed and languages will be relatively less important. If it is a lot of crunching you'll probably want a lower level language like C/C++ or a mature VM language Java/.Net as non of the popular scripting languages can touch them for raw performance.
VS2012 doesn't support XP as far as I know since.Net 4.5 doesn't run there and the main thing with VS2012 was support for Metro. So that ship has sailed.
I don't think it is vendor lock in to expect developers to be using a OS that is less than 10 years old.
It seems that the editor changes are mainly a roll in of the powertools (I don't do client side web dev so javascript and ASP side of things don't matter to me). Makes me wonder: what will the next power tools be as it seems to be the only way I'll be getting new editor features?
I can't remember if VS2012 added it or not as my work developes mainly in 2010 but a big one I'd like to see is coding time checks on stored procedures for database projects. It annoys me that I have to migrate my database and run unit tests against my model to find out that one of my stored procs is trying to use a parameter in another proc called @Cust when it really is @Customer. This is something that is obvious if they just did a basic parse on the project contents. Probably "just" need to roll in the TSQL parser/lexer side of things from SQL.
As mentioned this was debunked since Samsung's numbers were for their mobile division which includes their tablet and PC business as well as a lot of the reports comparing Apple's net profit to Samsung's operating profit. At some point Samsung probably will beat Apple since their willing to go a bit further down market than even the Apple 5c.
20% of the market and probably 50% of the profits. They supposedly have a 40% share in the US. You don't need a majority of a market to still be the top dog. Margins matter. So does usage (which supposedly iOS users are by far dominant in the US (not sure elsewhere)) as that is what drives upselling data plans and purchases of apps in terms of profits. Android > Apple argument only works if you consider every manufacturer the same. Same argument of Mac vs PC ~10% of market but generally mid to high range systems and high to riduculous range prices so they again punch above there weight class in terms of profit. In fact according to: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/16/mac_profits_are_high_too_high.html the margins are so rich they make more money that all the rest of the PC industry as a whole.
Smart watches in my opinion are a dumb dumb idea if they require a phone to use for data/offloading processing (which also goes for Glass). If I got a phone in my pocket how about answering the phone rather than dropping another $200 or so on another device that does the same thing but with a smaller screen and more slowly? If they really want a market make a smart watch that needs no phone and is a phone itself. Still might be a pain convincing people to use it as it would likely need to work with bluetooth headset or speaker phone as the only two options but might work for some peoples needs. Bluetooth to car audio would work well for drivers too versus people trying to balance their smart phone in a cup holder or whatever while driving.
Yes. Also what often happens is they cut a lot of the staff because they can't keep them all busy and the few remaining highly skilled "robot babysitters" also become responsible for cleaning up the area around the machine, perhaps running the forklift to get raw materials/completed items around etc. You go to school to be a programmer, or robotic engineer, and you end up crouched under tables trying to figure out why Sally's keyboard doesn't work anymore.
True but unfortunately they have to pay us in real dollars. They can manipulate as much as they want to get their stock bonuses but the money actually has to arrive for them to keep paying us our salary.
Your right about the hierarchy. Sometimes technology focuses on the high end though just because that is where labor is really expensive. So say the very well paid automotive or naval welders. Auto industry has the money and the financial incentive to get people off their pensions and other benefits so they drop the $3M for a robot that someone welding dinky cars would just outsource.
In short you can't even feel safe if you are an A level cook dealing with truffles and such all day. Someone realizes you are wasting 10% of an ingredient that costs $300/lb and comes up with a machine to process it instead. You are now a line cook placing prepped meals onto plates and doing the final saucing.
Programming can become less lucerative for employees over time for example and I suspect our days of great salaries are numbered. Paying $300 for a piece of boxed software every few years is much more profitable for a company than selling an Office Online for ~$5 a month and being required to keep servers up and running and constant updates to compete. These "efficiencies" will be translated down the hierarchy to ultimately being able to spend less money on paying staff well.
Heck if you think tech hasn't hurt peoples jobs prospects just look at the DOW "industrial" average, it is now made up of ~75% non manufacturing jobs a lot of those probably have lots of good jobs but their bottom rung is probably much lower than the bottom rung was for a DOW industrial company back in the day (say Walmart, Visa, Home Depot for example).
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To be fair: us technology dorks aren't really in a position to say whether or not a computer meets someones needs. My sister only cares if she can get email and Facebook if she has to carve into stone tablets for it that is fine. The issue becomes security but functionality wise there are a lot of people like her (including most business use cases).
Sometimes it isn't even that the specs matter it is Apple decides they matter. A few years back working with old Mac hardware G4 systems couldn't be upgraded past Jaguar but G5 could get Tiger or whatever it was. It wasn't a technical limitation it was just Apple arbitrarily decided that computers 3.5 years old don't get the upgrade but ones 3 years old do. Similar to how they limit which iPhone gets which version of iOS. Microsoft will give you a relatively low recommended specs and you are free to try it at that. Apple I think has more of a mentality that they want users to have a certain base experience and refuse to allow you to run it if it would be slower than they deem acceptable (whether or not you want to/technically can).
Except nearly every computer comes with a version of windows installed. Sure you can look around for a model that comes bare, or go to the effort to buy online and untick that box for a $20 savings (if you are lucky and your model provides you with any os choice but you typical computer deals in big box stores, and your Dell/HP etc online stores) come with a flavor of windows. Often annoyingly not the one you want: by a mid range desktop and get home premium or whatever they call it now, want ultimate? There isn't a box for you to check so you have to upgrade on your own later.
If both OS X and Windows goes the way of cell phones and keeps giving you free upgrades for the reasonable life of your computer (say 5 years) the fact that linux is free (in the sense that 99% + of people care, not the rare coders/IT guru that would actually tweak anything that requires greater effort than running an installer) just won't matter.
Interesting. It was my understanding that here in Canada those with the infrastructure monopolies are required to sell to the smaller ISPs at a reasonable per MB rate not bandwidth. Could be wrong but that would match how their usage caps work for residential customers. You get dinged both coming and going. I agree with a symmetric connection you essentially wouldn't care about the upload especially since most offerings are biased towards download anyways (ex. mine is 150/10 and was 50/2 till a year ago or so). Also in a world where every ISP ultimately has a symmetric connection fee they will never match upload/download from the residential prospective. There is always the last one to download something so it is always at worse n downloads and (n-1) uploads (or n/n I suppose if you count the original source of the file). For really popular things it might actually help because seeders and leechers might be closer to each other on the network essentially acting as a content cache saving the ISP on any cross network fees they might have to pay.
As another poster has already replied the difference is the NSA/CIA and other militaristic government entities are by design meant to look out for any potential threats to the US. Since anyone could potentially be a threat you need to spy on everyone to find out if they are smiling to your face while they arm up.
The Enron example would be more like: "Can anyone honestly believe that an energy company won't look for more resources? That is what they do."
Regardless, the underlying flaw/feature of the three letter agencies and there peers around the world is that it ultimately comes down to a "them/us" comparison where people need to be lumped into categories and have fundamentally less rights depending on which country, religion, political ideology etc you believe in.
The problem with this is uploading actually costs money and with some/most/all tech is the limited resource. I seem to recall it is fundamental to how phone line based internet works there is more signal noise/lower bandwidth for some reason when the data is coming from the last mile vs the other way around. Regardless there is a cost of doing the switching for the incoming packets/managing the pipes. So not free but a spread in the buy sell could cover the network cost. The problem is the one that benefits (hulu and the like assuming they moved to a peer to peer model, application vendors that need smaller datacentres to roll out software updates etc) are different to the ones that own the wires.
Yeah rather than usage caps it really should be like a utility. Granny gets a $3 a month bill. I get a $150 bill because I average ~500GB a month or so that would be fair. But you are right if they do it like they did it in Canada where I'm living what will happen is granny will need to spend at least $30 a month to get a usable connection, and the power user will pay $100 or so even though they use 100X the bandwidth.
It won't happen but I think torrents are actually a good thing vs things like youtube: when all the cute kitty watchers get home at the same time and start viewing their 1080p streaming content at the same time they drive the peak demand through the roof but I'm quite content firing off a 300GB TV series rip and having it run faster at times and slower at times over several days as long as I'm getting enough data every day to equal what I watch (~4GB or so) I'm happy. Moving people to an asyncronous model is always a win because it allows the system to load balance without effecting a user sitting at a screen waiting for his por... er blog content to load.
My internet connection is like this except I think the government limited the maximum overage changes they can charge. I have a 150Mbps connection. They count both ways so torrents and such cost you essentially double in usage allowance. Anyways I have a 250GB monthly quota which my connection is capable of reaching in about 3h40min. The next ~29.8 days a month are on the house I guess.
Peoples usage changes to accommodate added bandwidth. My internet went from 50 -> 150Mbps all that changed is I download everything as 1080p rather than standard def. People will download that 1080p file if it still takes less time than it takes to watch it. Torrents and the like increase the network load: I'm not very bursty when I'm downloading 300GB of law in order in one go then seeding it back up. If there is no bandwidth cap people will keep seeding well past 1/1 (assuming they can, yeah I know global seed ratio by definition will always be less than one because someone will be the last downloader/junk files will be downloaded but deleted before being seeded back). It becomes the biggest sucker game: who gives the unlimited quota to people with the most upload bandwidth: they get to seed for all the other networks.
Can anyone honestly believe the the US isn't spying or trying to spy on them? Countries will spy to try to get a strategic or tactical advantage ... that is what they do, some better than others, the US better than most.
It's a screening tool just like a lot of other things. Drivers license: you managed to drive well for ~30min one time and write a multiple choice test well. But are you a douche that texts while trying to parallel park on a one way street with a no parking sign in the way? Who knows, sometimes you might be sometimes you might not be. Diddo credit rating: are you another wise good credit risk but were unable to work for a few years because of health problems? Did your identity get stolen and the 2 years it takes to get everything sorted out hasn't happened yet?
People's time is limited so they find proxies for the characteristics they want so they can filter quickly: race, education, cultural dress, whether or not you look awake/sharp at the time I run into you etc.
Than a modern app with a mouse and a keyboard will be a modern app with a game controller.
Depends on the scale of the problem. I worked on things that took ~200k CPU hours back in the day when CPUs were single core. You couldn't sacrifice 2-10X the speed for ease of development. Also, professors were under the opinion of unless you coded it yourself you don't really understand it.
What are you talking about? I'm talking hand written sql files not ORM. The test project in the solution targets a specific version of SQL Server so VS should know the semantics of the TSQL we are writing but it seems (at least VS2010) to only consider stuff in the current file and names from other files. Say you have a proc called dumb and another called dumber which takes @cust int as an argument.
If dumb tries to call dumper ... declaration/initialization code
exec dumber @customer = @bob
You can compile the database project just fine. Until you run a unit test and then you get the runtime errors from SQL saying that the proc expects parameter @cust or whatever.
Sorry I should have been more specific VS 2012 doesn't run on XP as far as I know, you can target the platform but you can't run on it. You also give up features in .Net > 4 when targeting downwards which kind of sucks (async is your friend).
Not saying it is right but in my experience in the scientific programming space unit tests essentially never get written. You stare into space and try to figure out what is long with your logic. You use printf statements. But you are hardly getting paid in the first place so spending a bunch of your time writing unit tests for code that you likely will be the only one that uses for ~1 year before you write your thesis just doesn't happen. There are just too many papers, conferences and beers to take part in. There are exceptions of course like if you are working on a project that is generating tools for the field to use (say image processing tool, n-body simulation framework etc) but those jobs are relatively rare compared to the "get data from this piece of equipment and generate a time series of fourier transforms of the data" type things that are essentially one offs).
Image processing in the biology space at least seems to be a combination of Matlab and applications developed in Java in my experience. Physics was still when I was going through (2004) mainly a C or Fortran land place. A C style language and you won't go wrong. I'd suggest C++ or C# to pull in the object oriented side of things and huge libraries. Computationally extensive data mining: lots of data or lots of post processing required? If it is just lots of data you'll be be limited mainly by disk/network speed and languages will be relatively less important. If it is a lot of crunching you'll probably want a lower level language like C/C++ or a mature VM language Java/.Net as non of the popular scripting languages can touch them for raw performance.
VS2012 doesn't support XP as far as I know since .Net 4.5 doesn't run there and the main thing with VS2012 was support for Metro. So that ship has sailed.
I don't think it is vendor lock in to expect developers to be using a OS that is less than 10 years old.
It seems that the editor changes are mainly a roll in of the powertools (I don't do client side web dev so javascript and ASP side of things don't matter to me). Makes me wonder: what will the next power tools be as it seems to be the only way I'll be getting new editor features?
I can't remember if VS2012 added it or not as my work developes mainly in 2010 but a big one I'd like to see is coding time checks on stored procedures for database projects. It annoys me that I have to migrate my database and run unit tests against my model to find out that one of my stored procs is trying to use a parameter in another proc called @Cust when it really is @Customer. This is something that is obvious if they just did a basic parse on the project contents. Probably "just" need to roll in the TSQL parser/lexer side of things from SQL.
Well I guess you still have a right to remain silent even when on personal phone calls.
As mentioned this was debunked since Samsung's numbers were for their mobile division which includes their tablet and PC business as well as a lot of the reports comparing Apple's net profit to Samsung's operating profit. At some point Samsung probably will beat Apple since their willing to go a bit further down market than even the Apple 5c.
20% of the market and probably 50% of the profits. They supposedly have a 40% share in the US. You don't need a majority of a market to still be the top dog. Margins matter. So does usage (which supposedly iOS users are by far dominant in the US (not sure elsewhere)) as that is what drives upselling data plans and purchases of apps in terms of profits. Android > Apple argument only works if you consider every manufacturer the same. Same argument of Mac vs PC ~10% of market but generally mid to high range systems and high to riduculous range prices so they again punch above there weight class in terms of profit. In fact according to: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/16/mac_profits_are_high_too_high.html the margins are so rich they make more money that all the rest of the PC industry as a whole.
Smart watches in my opinion are a dumb dumb idea if they require a phone to use for data/offloading processing (which also goes for Glass). If I got a phone in my pocket how about answering the phone rather than dropping another $200 or so on another device that does the same thing but with a smaller screen and more slowly? If they really want a market make a smart watch that needs no phone and is a phone itself. Still might be a pain convincing people to use it as it would likely need to work with bluetooth headset or speaker phone as the only two options but might work for some peoples needs. Bluetooth to car audio would work well for drivers too versus people trying to balance their smart phone in a cup holder or whatever while driving.
Yes. Also what often happens is they cut a lot of the staff because they can't keep them all busy and the few remaining highly skilled "robot babysitters" also become responsible for cleaning up the area around the machine, perhaps running the forklift to get raw materials/completed items around etc. You go to school to be a programmer, or robotic engineer, and you end up crouched under tables trying to figure out why Sally's keyboard doesn't work anymore.
True but unfortunately they have to pay us in real dollars. They can manipulate as much as they want to get their stock bonuses but the money actually has to arrive for them to keep paying us our salary.
Your right about the hierarchy. Sometimes technology focuses on the high end though just because that is where labor is really expensive. So say the very well paid automotive or naval welders. Auto industry has the money and the financial incentive to get people off their pensions and other benefits so they drop the $3M for a robot that someone welding dinky cars would just outsource.
In short you can't even feel safe if you are an A level cook dealing with truffles and such all day. Someone realizes you are wasting 10% of an ingredient that costs $300/lb and comes up with a machine to process it instead. You are now a line cook placing prepped meals onto plates and doing the final saucing.
Programming can become less lucerative for employees over time for example and I suspect our days of great salaries are numbered. Paying $300 for a piece of boxed software every few years is much more profitable for a company than selling an Office Online for ~$5 a month and being required to keep servers up and running and constant updates to compete. These "efficiencies" will be translated down the hierarchy to ultimately being able to spend less money on paying staff well.
Heck if you think tech hasn't hurt peoples jobs prospects just look at the DOW "industrial" average, it is now made up of ~75% non manufacturing jobs a lot of those probably have lots of good jobs but their bottom rung is probably much lower than the bottom rung was for a DOW industrial company back in the day (say Walmart, Visa, Home Depot for example).