Doesn't the computer version have a more near sighted camera? You probably don't want a deep a field of focus for something you are going to use sitting at your desktop so it would likely be a different device you'd want anyways.
Yeah I don't get why the latest refresh didn't bring Retina to the air line. The pro line has it and you are essentially paying the pro price in exchange for the ultra portable form factor. Would be nice if they threw in or at least offered for $200 an upgrade to Retina.
This is so common. I worked with a bunch of physicists in a hospital setting. We'd have a separate budget from the main hospital and decide we want say 24" monitors. It would hit purchasing. A couple weeks would go by then an nasty email from IT saying we can't order Samsung monitors or whatever they all have to be HP. Oh and then we find out that you need director level approval to purchase anything larger than a 20". Since we don't want to waste or directors time on trivial things we ended up with 20" monitors. They also had a nasty habit of assigning computers to specific areas/tasks. Which meant that a quad i7 box could be sitting idle all day because it was bought in anticipation of a few new hires a year from now (say a new radiation therapist) while someone else grips about their 5 year old machine with a 17" monitor (say a shall remain nameless software developer;)).
Didn't really make me hate them but would have been nice if they had a bit of forethought: I worked at a research lab. People would wait till the week they were left to say "wait what do I need to do to take my data with me?". They'd invariably show up on Wednesday with a brand new 1TB drive and say "I can't download this in time before I leave can you do it and my lab will mail it to me?" I'd then find out that they have about 800GB of data that is archived on tape and my day is spent hunting down 3 year old archives restoring them and babysitting rsync. All this could have been avoided if they just bought a external drive when they started and kept their own backup copies all along. Or at least when they months ago were applying for postdocs or whatever said hey I'm going to need my data.
Or Iff in VB. That is the beauty of.Net built in support for a variety of languages. I've had at times used C# FOSS controls in VB projects and vs versa. You're knowledge of the platform transfers ridiculously quickly. We still don't get cross language projects but it is just a matter of picking the pieces to put in which libraries well and a old VB hack can work alongside someone using C# or whatever.
To be fair async still uses threadpools and you have to be careful how you use it so you don't starve it but yeah Linq, async and dynamic are all big deals. I'd also add how maintained it is. Thinking of the recent java volunerablity they new about it for something like 8 months I think before patching it. As bad as MSs rep is I don't think they would do that. Their ecosystem revolves on tools and platforms to keep the windows and Office (and SQL and sharepoint) the platform of choice for IT/devs. What does Oracle really gain with Java? Its a nice to have thing but not critical.
Exactly. The only thing is these heavier duty tablets could be desktop replacements if you didn't care about slightly weaker performance. Have a docking station at home and work then use the tablet functionality in between. That would be cheaper if you work for yourself or a company that would opt for that.
If you just want a tablet interface long enough to get your music/movie playing. Doesn't have to be metro but presumably at this point you don't have ready access to your full keyboard you've left at work so playing around with touch trying to manipulate the desktop would suck.
A lot. These were medical physicists so not really hardcore physics (kind of a blend between medicine and nuclear). They for the most part don't program so had no need to delve into commandline unix land. They have apps that run in Solaris but they just use the GUI. Then when it comes time to analyze the data they move it to a samba share, open it in windows and then play with Excel or whatever. These are $80k single purpose computers essentially they don't get used for anything else other than running that one app so users don't really have any incentive to learn the OS.
That is exactly the reason why I discount the portability of laptops: if I had it and used it I'd be docked. If I wasn't docked I'd feel very handicapped and just feel like I'm wasting my time fighting with a crappy interface rather than just waiting till I got to the office/home and using my 27" iMac setup or dual 24"s at work. Tablets are the same way for me. I have an iPad and just use it to watch TV on my ride into work. I don't ever use it to create anything.
I meant for the price of a quad i7 laptop you'd be in really decent (ie maybe not a hardcore gamers rig but close) desktop. Quad i7 on a laptop would still be pretty good if it wasn't for generally screen resolution, lower powered HDD, RAM frequency at least in the past everything seems stuck at 16000 for the moment, and video card performance vs a desktop for say 1/2 the price. In short you'd pay the price for a top of the line CPU but be very restricted in everything else.
Anyways I meant more of trying to get a quad cpu on a laptop will put it in such I high price point that you'd get probably a dual monitor setup, very best of the quad i7s and either multiple disks/video cards are a serious amount of SSD on the desktop. You always pay a premium for portability I guess but I don't really need to pay that penalty for 10hrs a day so that the 2hrs a day I commute I have a slight nicer reader/movie player on the train. It is the data I need to be portable which higher speed wireless and a tablet smartphone does better for the mobile part of my day vs the work part of my day (though I realize some peoples jobs require them to move around regularly the vast majority of people are cube/store dwellers not traveling sales people).
It isn't the metro I'm talking about though. I talking people with windows only apps that will buy a intel based tablet with win 8 to run their desktop apps. They might play in metro during their train ride to work but when they actually get there will likely dock it and use it just like a desktop user would. iPad and the like at least for the vast majority of people just wouldn't cut it even if it was full screen and keyboard because their would be some corporate stuff they just couldn't do on a mac and/or iOS.
I have quad i7 on my desktop and somethings think it is time to upgrade. Lots of stuff out there are just dual i7 you can get quad but then you are into the really decent desktop territory.
Well I'd count Windows tablets. The whole point of the surface pro and the like is you can run real Windows apps and get real work done. iPads and androids I won't because they really are just large screen cellphones, useful but generally never going to see a real keyboard or get docked and used as the office work computer. Surface Pro definitely could.
About a 2.4X improvement actually (http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7+860+%40+2.80GHz) at the same clock newer i7s are much faster. That said I think the thing is most people are disk I/O limited they feel the lag between clicking open to when the app pops up the rest of things (other than say transcoding and other niche users like developers) the delay in their thought/typing is more of the slow down than the speed of response of the app. The problem is SSDs are expensive so most people don't want to buy them. They'll turn you $500 walmart special into a $2000 beast by the time you get 1.5TB or so of SSD into it. Sadly most users are used to fairly powerful desktop computers costing the price of a decent tablet so getting them to cough up 4X in order to fix the IO issue and have the storage they are used to (and probably have filled already on their old box) is a hard sell.
True but I'll never give up my PC/Desktop. Laptops are still underpowered for what you pay and no where near as upgradable. Plus the keyboards are crap generally with most smaller than standard (and I could actually use larger than standard if it was readily available).I end up docking the thing, attaching an external monitor, and external keyboard and mouse. They have their uses but when I'm sitting at a desk, ie ~9hrs a day at work and another couple at home I'd rather have something that wasn't specifically designed for portability over functionality.
It's not just the client side apps it is AD, centralized deployment, "windows authorization" into email, databases, custom office extensions, VBA scripts, logon batch scripts etc. Linux probably can do all that but if there is even a hint that it might not corps will keep things the same and buy some more windows gear. Heck I worked with a bunch of MSc and PhDs in physics and they still didn't know or care to know enough unix to be able to move files. Their solution was to expose a folder using samba so they could use their PC to move things around rather than figure out things on the UNIX side instead. Users really really don't care about computers as much as we do even when they really are nuclear physicists. If they don't know how to do it already they almost always will just look for someone that can do it for them.
A good case for binaries only is this scenario. Want the binaries the price doubles. Just write something into the contract that says "should support for product X be discontinued you will be notified X months in advance and supplied with the source" or something so that they know you aren't going to leave them high and dry but at the same time they can't take your idea and run away and start a F500 company with it.
I was referring more to win 7 vs xp. Search is necessary once your list of stuff doesn't fit into a single screen as in start->Programs. Search in Win 7 was a huge improvement in that it actually worked fast enough that you could use it from the command line and not get impatient and start hunting around with the mouse instead. It is very rare that I leave my keyboard now to launch a program (only when I can't remember the name for it or there are dozens of similar things which would require a lot of typing to get it narrowed down (like visual studio tools)).
Aero snap: at least to me it solves more problems than it creates: all you have to do is start to move away from the top of the screen and the thing will snap back to its normal size (even before moving a pixel away from the top so ram that sucker to the top then a touch down no big deal. But when you want to compare things side by side is where it shines drag right drag left done (or even better win + left, win + right). I found myself in XP constantly fiddling with windows trying to get them exactly equal sized so that lines lined up when comparing code or whatever. Win 7 + it just works.
I totally agree with metro it sucks. It broke search a lot in my opinion since it separates settings, files and apps when you search. If you aren't sure if something is a setting or a separate app you don't know until you look in all of one then go to the next list. In win 7 it was all shown at once with just separators for the regions which makes more sense to me: when I search for something I want to see it I really don't care what you categorize it as it just should damn well be on the screen when I'm done typing.
I don't know very basic things like Aero snap and start = search are huge usability improvements that even basic users can appreciate. In terms of will it run though for most people XP is good enough. That is starting to change though as things have started to drop support for XP.
The customer will know about the process pretty quickly when you just start coding without listening/attending to 3mths worth of requirements analysis planning meetings.
I think it is easier if you phrase it about adaptability. We don't require you to know upfront exactly what you want give us a general idea and we'll give you working code to play with regularly. That way you can decide maybe something isn't really needed, maybe something you thought wasn't important becomes important etc and we aren't stuck with a lot of wasted time building something you wanted last year rather than the thing you really need today.
Is getting the customer/boss to agree to "done is done". When developing iteratively every time a sprint ends I find the user sitting around in deep thought trying to think up something else that might be useful... sometime... to someone. Projects never end, people keep coming up with what if this happens I might want scenarios.
Maybe not so much of a problem in contract/software development shops but I think the majority of people that develop are in house as I was at the time and there is no direct cost for these endless "projects". Rather than saying there is nothing to do and give you more vacation as a perk (yeah right) or find other problems to work on it is easier to keep bumping the version number on the corporate dashboard every other week. It is easier for your manager than for him to actually have to come up with know ideas or admit that perhaps he doesn't have enough work for a full time dev.
As well as a large part of the IT department: Exchange, Acitve Directory, SQL etc. It would hurt them not to dominate on the consumer market but realistically corporate customers are much more likely to actually pay for both licenses and support. Where as the consumer gets an upgrade whenever they happen to buy new hardware corps pay for ongoing subscriptions keeping the money flowing between releases/upgrade cycles.
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Doesn't the computer version have a more near sighted camera? You probably don't want a deep a field of focus for something you are going to use sitting at your desktop so it would likely be a different device you'd want anyways.
Yeah I don't get why the latest refresh didn't bring Retina to the air line. The pro line has it and you are essentially paying the pro price in exchange for the ultra portable form factor. Would be nice if they threw in or at least offered for $200 an upgrade to Retina.
Not company academic research. Genetics essentially how to make antibiotic bacteria :)
This is so common. I worked with a bunch of physicists in a hospital setting. We'd have a separate budget from the main hospital and decide we want say 24" monitors. It would hit purchasing. A couple weeks would go by then an nasty email from IT saying we can't order Samsung monitors or whatever they all have to be HP. Oh and then we find out that you need director level approval to purchase anything larger than a 20". Since we don't want to waste or directors time on trivial things we ended up with 20" monitors. They also had a nasty habit of assigning computers to specific areas/tasks. Which meant that a quad i7 box could be sitting idle all day because it was bought in anticipation of a few new hires a year from now (say a new radiation therapist) while someone else grips about their 5 year old machine with a 17" monitor (say a shall remain nameless software developer ;)).
Didn't really make me hate them but would have been nice if they had a bit of forethought: I worked at a research lab. People would wait till the week they were left to say "wait what do I need to do to take my data with me?". They'd invariably show up on Wednesday with a brand new 1TB drive and say "I can't download this in time before I leave can you do it and my lab will mail it to me?" I'd then find out that they have about 800GB of data that is archived on tape and my day is spent hunting down 3 year old archives restoring them and babysitting rsync. All this could have been avoided if they just bought a external drive when they started and kept their own backup copies all along. Or at least when they months ago were applying for postdocs or whatever said hey I'm going to need my data.
Or Iff in VB. That is the beauty of .Net built in support for a variety of languages. I've had at times used C# FOSS controls in VB projects and vs versa. You're knowledge of the platform transfers ridiculously quickly. We still don't get cross language projects but it is just a matter of picking the pieces to put in which libraries well and a old VB hack can work alongside someone using C# or whatever.
To be fair async still uses threadpools and you have to be careful how you use it so you don't starve it but yeah Linq, async and dynamic are all big deals. I'd also add how maintained it is. Thinking of the recent java volunerablity they new about it for something like 8 months I think before patching it. As bad as MSs rep is I don't think they would do that. Their ecosystem revolves on tools and platforms to keep the windows and Office (and SQL and sharepoint) the platform of choice for IT/devs. What does Oracle really gain with Java? Its a nice to have thing but not critical.
What injecting more plant scales?
Exactly. The only thing is these heavier duty tablets could be desktop replacements if you didn't care about slightly weaker performance. Have a docking station at home and work then use the tablet functionality in between. That would be cheaper if you work for yourself or a company that would opt for that.
If you just want a tablet interface long enough to get your music/movie playing. Doesn't have to be metro but presumably at this point you don't have ready access to your full keyboard you've left at work so playing around with touch trying to manipulate the desktop would suck.
A lot. These were medical physicists so not really hardcore physics (kind of a blend between medicine and nuclear). They for the most part don't program so had no need to delve into commandline unix land. They have apps that run in Solaris but they just use the GUI. Then when it comes time to analyze the data they move it to a samba share, open it in windows and then play with Excel or whatever. These are $80k single purpose computers essentially they don't get used for anything else other than running that one app so users don't really have any incentive to learn the OS.
That is exactly the reason why I discount the portability of laptops: if I had it and used it I'd be docked. If I wasn't docked I'd feel very handicapped and just feel like I'm wasting my time fighting with a crappy interface rather than just waiting till I got to the office/home and using my 27" iMac setup or dual 24"s at work. Tablets are the same way for me. I have an iPad and just use it to watch TV on my ride into work. I don't ever use it to create anything.
I meant for the price of a quad i7 laptop you'd be in really decent (ie maybe not a hardcore gamers rig but close) desktop. Quad i7 on a laptop would still be pretty good if it wasn't for generally screen resolution, lower powered HDD, RAM frequency at least in the past everything seems stuck at 16000 for the moment, and video card performance vs a desktop for say 1/2 the price. In short you'd pay the price for a top of the line CPU but be very restricted in everything else.
Anyways I meant more of trying to get a quad cpu on a laptop will put it in such I high price point that you'd get probably a dual monitor setup, very best of the quad i7s and either multiple disks/video cards are a serious amount of SSD on the desktop. You always pay a premium for portability I guess but I don't really need to pay that penalty for 10hrs a day so that the 2hrs a day I commute I have a slight nicer reader/movie player on the train. It is the data I need to be portable which higher speed wireless and a tablet smartphone does better for the mobile part of my day vs the work part of my day (though I realize some peoples jobs require them to move around regularly the vast majority of people are cube/store dwellers not traveling sales people).
It isn't the metro I'm talking about though. I talking people with windows only apps that will buy a intel based tablet with win 8 to run their desktop apps. They might play in metro during their train ride to work but when they actually get there will likely dock it and use it just like a desktop user would. iPad and the like at least for the vast majority of people just wouldn't cut it even if it was full screen and keyboard because their would be some corporate stuff they just couldn't do on a mac and/or iOS.
I have quad i7 on my desktop and somethings think it is time to upgrade. Lots of stuff out there are just dual i7 you can get quad but then you are into the really decent desktop territory.
Well I'd count Windows tablets. The whole point of the surface pro and the like is you can run real Windows apps and get real work done. iPads and androids I won't because they really are just large screen cellphones, useful but generally never going to see a real keyboard or get docked and used as the office work computer. Surface Pro definitely could.
About a 2.4X improvement actually (http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7+860+%40+2.80GHz) at the same clock newer i7s are much faster. That said I think the thing is most people are disk I/O limited they feel the lag between clicking open to when the app pops up the rest of things (other than say transcoding and other niche users like developers) the delay in their thought/typing is more of the slow down than the speed of response of the app. The problem is SSDs are expensive so most people don't want to buy them. They'll turn you $500 walmart special into a $2000 beast by the time you get 1.5TB or so of SSD into it. Sadly most users are used to fairly powerful desktop computers costing the price of a decent tablet so getting them to cough up 4X in order to fix the IO issue and have the storage they are used to (and probably have filled already on their old box) is a hard sell.
True but I'll never give up my PC/Desktop. Laptops are still underpowered for what you pay and no where near as upgradable. Plus the keyboards are crap generally with most smaller than standard (and I could actually use larger than standard if it was readily available).I end up docking the thing, attaching an external monitor, and external keyboard and mouse. They have their uses but when I'm sitting at a desk, ie ~9hrs a day at work and another couple at home I'd rather have something that wasn't specifically designed for portability over functionality.
It's not just the client side apps it is AD, centralized deployment, "windows authorization" into email, databases, custom office extensions, VBA scripts, logon batch scripts etc. Linux probably can do all that but if there is even a hint that it might not corps will keep things the same and buy some more windows gear. Heck I worked with a bunch of MSc and PhDs in physics and they still didn't know or care to know enough unix to be able to move files. Their solution was to expose a folder using samba so they could use their PC to move things around rather than figure out things on the UNIX side instead. Users really really don't care about computers as much as we do even when they really are nuclear physicists. If they don't know how to do it already they almost always will just look for someone that can do it for them.
A good case for binaries only is this scenario. Want the binaries the price doubles. Just write something into the contract that says "should support for product X be discontinued you will be notified X months in advance and supplied with the source" or something so that they know you aren't going to leave them high and dry but at the same time they can't take your idea and run away and start a F500 company with it.
I was referring more to win 7 vs xp. Search is necessary once your list of stuff doesn't fit into a single screen as in start->Programs. Search in Win 7 was a huge improvement in that it actually worked fast enough that you could use it from the command line and not get impatient and start hunting around with the mouse instead. It is very rare that I leave my keyboard now to launch a program (only when I can't remember the name for it or there are dozens of similar things which would require a lot of typing to get it narrowed down (like visual studio tools)).
Aero snap: at least to me it solves more problems than it creates: all you have to do is start to move away from the top of the screen and the thing will snap back to its normal size (even before moving a pixel away from the top so ram that sucker to the top then a touch down no big deal. But when you want to compare things side by side is where it shines drag right drag left done (or even better win + left, win + right). I found myself in XP constantly fiddling with windows trying to get them exactly equal sized so that lines lined up when comparing code or whatever. Win 7 + it just works.
I totally agree with metro it sucks. It broke search a lot in my opinion since it separates settings, files and apps when you search. If you aren't sure if something is a setting or a separate app you don't know until you look in all of one then go to the next list. In win 7 it was all shown at once with just separators for the regions which makes more sense to me: when I search for something I want to see it I really don't care what you categorize it as it just should damn well be on the screen when I'm done typing.
I don't know very basic things like Aero snap and start = search are huge usability improvements that even basic users can appreciate. In terms of will it run though for most people XP is good enough. That is starting to change though as things have started to drop support for XP.
The customer will know about the process pretty quickly when you just start coding without listening/attending to 3mths worth of requirements analysis planning meetings.
I think it is easier if you phrase it about adaptability. We don't require you to know upfront exactly what you want give us a general idea and we'll give you working code to play with regularly. That way you can decide maybe something isn't really needed, maybe something you thought wasn't important becomes important etc and we aren't stuck with a lot of wasted time building something you wanted last year rather than the thing you really need today.
Is getting the customer/boss to agree to "done is done". When developing iteratively every time a sprint ends I find the user sitting around in deep thought trying to think up something else that might be useful ... sometime ... to someone. Projects never end, people keep coming up with what if this happens I might want scenarios.
Maybe not so much of a problem in contract/software development shops but I think the majority of people that develop are in house as I was at the time and there is no direct cost for these endless "projects". Rather than saying there is nothing to do and give you more vacation as a perk (yeah right) or find other problems to work on it is easier to keep bumping the version number on the corporate dashboard every other week. It is easier for your manager than for him to actually have to come up with know ideas or admit that perhaps he doesn't have enough work for a full time dev.
As well as a large part of the IT department: Exchange, Acitve Directory, SQL etc. It would hurt them not to dominate on the consumer market but realistically corporate customers are much more likely to actually pay for both licenses and support. Where as the consumer gets an upgrade whenever they happen to buy new hardware corps pay for ongoing subscriptions keeping the money flowing between releases/upgrade cycles.