You don't buy a high end sports car to not drive it. You do however buy a chauffeured vehicle for just that purpose. The problem there becomes the ancillary benefits of the chauffeur, parking your car, managing stuff for you, and any other job they might do for you that isn't directly driving you around. And then there's the prestige of having someone open the door for you and so on.
An autonomous vehicle is more likely to be something for the elderly, as an independence support device, or other people with medical problems, where it's better than them driving a lot of the time, and some large outfit would pay for it and insure it.
Most of the rest of what you said, about not looking ahead and so on, is a problem better solved by technology than computer vision, which is why it doesn't get a huge amount of attention. If every car had a short range transmitter indicating it was trying to change lanes, or was braking or the like it would be much easier to solve than trying to scan for blinking lights and that sort of thing. That's certainly a problem you *could* try and solve with computer vision, but it's a lot more expensive and complicated than it needs to be.
It's not that the lights themselves are 'responsible' for accidents, it's the way people respond (or don't respond) to them that causes accidents. Driving is a giant game where everyone agrees to follow the same rules. If you don't follow the conventions and rules you significantly increase the risk of an accident. Speed conventions (which are set relative to speed limits, but not at them) and traffic lights are rules that exist primarily for the benefit of the average person, but on an individual basis you'd always be better to not have to follow them if you're trying to minimize the time you spend driving. People on foot of course are even worse when it comes to traffic lights, I think anyone who's been in any big city (first or 3rd world) is used to people trying to cross streets as soon as they possibly can regardless of whether the 'walk' light is lit up.
If you compare to europe, their entire thinking about travel is different than north america. European cars are designed more for interacting with pedestrians than interacting with cars. To that end, traffic lights in europe, and traffic in europe in general is completely different in pedestrian heavy places. If you take away traffic lights people are actually a great deal more safe, because they're trying to manouvre around pedestrians. Which goes to the second point, that without traffic lights, getting around can be really slow (unless you have a motorcade).
Probably a better way of saying what was said is "the presence of traffic lights makes drivers behave in ways more likely to cause accidents". Which sort of obviously makes sense, any time you ask someone to stop there's a probability that they won't stop, and therefore cause an accident.
But either way, the overall effect is there, it's a matter of which style you want to go with.
You can have interference that shows up on an oscilloscope that doesn't matter to the experience of watching TV.
The article has a fairly interesting breakdown of when and how they think people will have problems. I guess there are 150 base stations for 4G that they figure will cause problems, but only for people with specific setups.
They go so far as to suggest that for the 500 worst affected households the government through this fund they're making carrier etc. pay into should be prepared to spend up to 10 000 (yes thousand) pounds per household to try and fix the problem or provide them free satellite/cable.
If the user is running as admin, which on windows lots of users (probably the vast majority of home users) then being able to gain remote control of the system is problematic at best.
It's unfortunate, because I actually find some of the gadgets really handy (weather monitor, CPU monitor etc), but it's not worth getting your computer remotely seized for.
It's not like there aren't other ways to do just about everything gadgets do anyway, it's just a poor mans live tile for small bits of info that are handy on the desktop.
depends on whether or not there are known causes for such events (deforestation, volcanos that sort of thing), or if they are actually spikes and not just measurement artefacts and sampling error from trying to determine what the temperature was more than 100 years ago.
These guys even say themselves they're only using inland lakeshore data for northern Scandinavia, and it's not consistent with some previous studies in the arctic and some of the data they would like isn't available for the northern hemisphere and so on. That tends to explain the rather noisy data in the main figure picked up by the The Register, well that, and they're particularly interested in summer temperatures, not average temperatures.
what you are doing is saying "it's warm today, thus global warming" what the chart is saying is that historically it's been warmer and relative spikes in average temperature are not uncommon.
This is a wrong interpretation of both global warming, and the data itself. It *is* warm today, and there is some warming effect causing that - so there is a global warming effect happening, what's causing it is a different problem. There are previous periods of warming as well - the roman warming period (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Warm_Period) and the so called medieval warming period (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period) - both of which may have been 'warming' periods only in europe and areas around europe, and not particularly warming anywhere else.
Obvious example for potential cause of the roman warming: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Vesuvius, Which blew up in 79AD (and would have had a local warming effectt), or one that blew up in alaska at about the same time period, which might have had a local effect on uninhabited parts of the americas, and habited parts of europe. The medieval warming period I have no idea, I'm not an expert in the history of weird climate inducing events, but there were certainly a couple of major volcanic eruptions prior to the medieval warming period in the south pacific, which caused all sorts of chaos in the pacific and the americas, and the heating/cooling/current effects could have spilled over to europe.
Because we know there is warming today we should ask what's causing it, and if that's a problem. If it's from a volcano for example then there isn't much we can do about the volcano, but we might have to cut back our own CO2 emissions to compensate, or we might not, depends. Trying to figure out what caused past warming is much much harder, because we weren't around taking relevant data. Human civilization could well have caused past warming trends too, or it might have been some other natural effect. And certainly local heating/cooling like the paper is talking about could have all sorts of causes.
When you're buying thousands of computers at a time as an institution it's a whole other ball game though.
Lets say something breaks on a desktop (power supply maybe). Now I could call up some vendor support. Box it up, ship it back to them etc. Or I could replace it myself. The easier repairs are, the more I can just do myself, especially cheap stuff, and NOT have to worry about various warranties, and not have to waste employee time waiting on a computer (or keeping spare computers around) etc.
On an individual basis you should, at least here, never buy extended warranties, they're a money grab by the company. It's an insurance system, but an insurance system on an item that depreciates in value quickly, so it's on average a losing proposition for you, and your projected outlays will never be crazy high, because the most it could cost is the cost of a new computer.
And if you have to do thousands of repairs* because you have tens of thousands of computers the cost of repairs is very much a big deal.
*that isn't a criticism of apple, stuff breaks, usually due to stupid end users, but if you have enough computers a lot of things will break over the lifetime. That's what keeps half of the/. crowd employed.
But don't worry, this is all the evil Republican's fault. ObamaCare^WTax will fix all these problems.
if only. Medical care can only provide you care if you get it. If you refuse to go to the doctor, or if you refuse to get vaccines or refuse antibiotics TB is going to do bad things to you.
This is compounded by the nature of TB in the west in in general. It's sufficiently rare that most people only get vaccinated for it when they're young, and don't get boosted, the vaccine does make it hard to test for exposure to the actual disease.
I think there's probably some legitimate blame on the US health system, (and the state of florida in particular obviously) closing hospitals and not having universal care does make thing worse than they could have been, but it's not like countries with universal care won't have problems with people who don't get treatment, or who don't follow it.
It defaults to metro, and has a classic mode that full screen programs switch into, but it doesn't really behave well doing that (or at least the preview I played with didn't play nice doing that).
And of course, no start button.
By itself I actually think metro is a good idea. Most users that I encounter don't really understand programs versus data, and they just have everything as an icon on their desktop. Metro goes straight to the heart of that, but it's still a radical shape up with a lot of inconsistent design, so I expect most people will fear change, and hide in a corner until windows 9.
Right, but you have to consider any sales relative to expectations and competition, in the case of vista they're competing with XP. And then windows 7.
How many people do you know that raced to get vista when 7 was on the horizon, how many people are upgrading to vista now that it's 'settled' or whatever term you want to use.
I think every firefox revision in the last year has broken the internal tools we use here.
Now, I grant you, the tools we have are stupid, and should be part of the web service that would be browser independent, but for whatever reason that's not what the people doing the buying asked for.
I started doing web development in 98, but I haven't really done anything meaningful in just shy of 4 years, so I'm not really up on how the market has moved around.
I've found with the custom tools we have here every firefox revision has broken them, because all our stuff are plugins for firefox, which has been a pain, to put it mildly. As I say, if I could just do everything as a web service it would make life much easier but plugin at least seem to have a lot of trouble with version changes.
Obviously I don't have a study to point to, we'll see when it arrives, I'm guessing just as is anyone else here.
Microsoft could pull something truly awesome out of its hat and make windows 8 a must have for a lot of people, rough edges and all.
The thing with tablets, is that microsoft lost that battle already. If you want a consumer tablet you buy an ipad. The great selling point of android was not a walled garden, and runs flash, but now flash is dying. Windows tablets seem more like business devices, but who knows, there's not really anything compelling about them as content consumption devices that you can't do on android or ipad already.
Now again, i admit, I could be completely misreading the market here, but I would expect microsoft to really struggle on tablet traction.
Which takes us back to the desktop, and in that case I don't really see windows 8 taking off. In some ways it's the same problem as vista, but worse. What does windows 8 do for me? I'm not seeing a whole lot I get out of it (and it takes away my ability to watch TV on my PC), it's going to be confusing to use and add very little. So there's no real compelling reason to upgrade unless they pull some new features that are really worth having.
If that's what people actually want what's wrong with that?
All the backend stuff in windows, the x86/ARM stuff, processes, multiprocessor features etc. are mostly irrelevant to the day to day user experience of 'how do I start the program I want to run?'. If customers, because of 20 years of practice want a start menu... why not just give it to them.
No one is obliged to buy windows 8, if it's not what you want, don't buy it, and wait till they have a version that is what you want. (Or change OS's, which of course the big risk, as people don't have any desire to tolerate this sort of success-failure-success cycle MS has had going for a while).
Considering how many revisions firefox has been through this year, I'm more sympathetic to locking to IE if you have to lock to something. Firefox has been averaging two - three months between major releases, chrome isn't far off.
When you do a contract for someone you don't want to have to go back every 3 months because their browser changed how your page is rendered or how your plugin works or the like.
It would be great if you could do everything as a web service properly, where browser choice doesn't matter. Unfortunately that doesn't always get the job done.
It's not just that IE is part of the standard operating environment, it's that they don't seem to be changing things up quite as often as the competition.
That's always the great risk for facebook. As long as they were a small outfit no one really cared what they did. Now that they have billions in revenue and worthwhile valuation and sizable number of customers governments are going to start looking at what exactly they're up to.
Whether facebook can convert their billions into favourable laws remains to be seen, but all it takes is one privacy 'mistake' on their part (think google grabbing wifi data) and the government could land on them like a tonne of bricks. Which is as it should be in the case of facebook, but it doesn't seem like the people running the show at Facebook take this risk seriously yet.
Not that you ever want any company to be ruled by lawyers with an iron fist, demanding products never risk anything. But Facebook is going to get burned sooner or later.
Oh I wasn't suggesting Flame or Stuxnet were something secure boot is for. My point was that just because something doesn't affect you personally doesn't mean it isn't a serious security problem.
And as the other guy said, it doesn't really do any good to secure half the system and not the other half. Secure boot is one piece of the broad puzzle of computer security for the 99.9% of computer users who don't even know what the hell they're doing.
legitimate" is such a disrespectful value judgment. Are you saying that people who do data analysis with Python are illegitimate? Are you calling them bastards?
I'm not sure that's how it's meant, but I agree, it's an odd choice of phrase. If I were to look at it another way, what would make a language 'illegitimate' for data analysis? In that case you look at things like excel and access for financial transactions, or some of the early versions of CUDA that didn't support proper IEEE floating point maths (or at least, not fast IEEE floating point maths). In those cases you can use the language, and it will spit out results, but they might not be right, and there's no obvious way to know. Lets say by default some language doesn't convert in any sort of reasonably obvious way between number types (ints to floats, floats to ints, floats to double precision floats, that sort of thing), or if the math has some bizarre errors in it. A classic example would be division, that's slow to do properly, so if your language takes some shortcuts by default that are faster, but wrong, well that'd be bad.
These of course are all things that can be changed or fixed with appropriate libraries and so on, but you'd need to know those are problems. Which I guess is why you'd ask.
So ya, overall, it's a strange way to phrase the problem. In a broadly theoretical sense there's no reason any decent language couldn't be used for data analysis, obviously, so from there it's a matter of whether or not it's up front about when it does things badly.
Because rootkits are bad mkay? Just because you never bought a Sony CD that had one doesn't mean thousands of other people didn't.
It's not really much more complicated than that.
The situation as it was wasn't fine. Just because you didn't get hit by the 'flame' virus or stuxnet doesn't mean those are not serious problems to be solved (notably with windows update in the one case).
The problem with all of these things is that the vast vast vast majority of users don't even know when they have a virus or rootkit, and their computers just keep spamming along, or having their data stolen etc. So the vast majority of users need to protected from themselves, and, importantly, they know they need to be protected from themselves.
Oh, I was merely suggesting MS is trying to develop a strategy to to take on android. Just because it's probably a bad strategy doesn't mean it isn't a strategy.
They're trying to to provide one microsoft integrated experience across your living room and PC, that integrated your smartphone and part of it goes with you with your smartphone. Now you can already do that more or less, but they figure they can make it possible for normal people to understand. I doubt they'll succeed, but who knows.
Cyanogenmod has it's awesomeness, but when you have to get nightly builds to be able to run ICS without a slew of bugs there's a whole lot wrong with the user experience. And that by the way is not a criticism of the cyanogen guys, without them my phone would still be on 2.3.3 probably, or bug riddled official version of ICS but the main feature of android (not a walled garden!) is far too difficult to benefit from.
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Um... lots of rich people have drivers.
You don't buy a high end sports car to not drive it. You do however buy a chauffeured vehicle for just that purpose. The problem there becomes the ancillary benefits of the chauffeur, parking your car, managing stuff for you, and any other job they might do for you that isn't directly driving you around. And then there's the prestige of having someone open the door for you and so on.
An autonomous vehicle is more likely to be something for the elderly, as an independence support device, or other people with medical problems, where it's better than them driving a lot of the time, and some large outfit would pay for it and insure it.
Most of the rest of what you said, about not looking ahead and so on, is a problem better solved by technology than computer vision, which is why it doesn't get a huge amount of attention. If every car had a short range transmitter indicating it was trying to change lanes, or was braking or the like it would be much easier to solve than trying to scan for blinking lights and that sort of thing. That's certainly a problem you *could* try and solve with computer vision, but it's a lot more expensive and complicated than it needs to be.
When someone tries to run a red light.
It's not that the lights themselves are 'responsible' for accidents, it's the way people respond (or don't respond) to them that causes accidents. Driving is a giant game where everyone agrees to follow the same rules. If you don't follow the conventions and rules you significantly increase the risk of an accident. Speed conventions (which are set relative to speed limits, but not at them) and traffic lights are rules that exist primarily for the benefit of the average person, but on an individual basis you'd always be better to not have to follow them if you're trying to minimize the time you spend driving. People on foot of course are even worse when it comes to traffic lights, I think anyone who's been in any big city (first or 3rd world) is used to people trying to cross streets as soon as they possibly can regardless of whether the 'walk' light is lit up.
If you compare to europe, their entire thinking about travel is different than north america. European cars are designed more for interacting with pedestrians than interacting with cars. To that end, traffic lights in europe, and traffic in europe in general is completely different in pedestrian heavy places. If you take away traffic lights people are actually a great deal more safe, because they're trying to manouvre around pedestrians. Which goes to the second point, that without traffic lights, getting around can be really slow (unless you have a motorcade).
Probably a better way of saying what was said is "the presence of traffic lights makes drivers behave in ways more likely to cause accidents". Which sort of obviously makes sense, any time you ask someone to stop there's a probability that they won't stop, and therefore cause an accident.
But either way, the overall effect is there, it's a matter of which style you want to go with.
I think they mean 'could noticeably interfere'
You can have interference that shows up on an oscilloscope that doesn't matter to the experience of watching TV.
The article has a fairly interesting breakdown of when and how they think people will have problems. I guess there are 150 base stations for 4G that they figure will cause problems, but only for people with specific setups.
They go so far as to suggest that for the 500 worst affected households the government through this fund they're making carrier etc. pay into should be prepared to spend up to 10 000 (yes thousand) pounds per household to try and fix the problem or provide them free satellite/cable.
And I think, to prevent installing them at all.
Seems like it's one of those problems where the entire concept cannot be secured quickly (think I.E. 6).
But we'll know more when the black hat presentation comes.
If the user is running as admin, which on windows lots of users (probably the vast majority of home users) then being able to gain remote control of the system is problematic at best.
It's unfortunate, because I actually find some of the gadgets really handy (weather monitor, CPU monitor etc), but it's not worth getting your computer remotely seized for.
It's not like there aren't other ways to do just about everything gadgets do anyway, it's just a poor mans live tile for small bits of info that are handy on the desktop.
depends on whether or not there are known causes for such events (deforestation, volcanos that sort of thing), or if they are actually spikes and not just measurement artefacts and sampling error from trying to determine what the temperature was more than 100 years ago.
These guys even say themselves they're only using inland lakeshore data for northern Scandinavia, and it's not consistent with some previous studies in the arctic and some of the data they would like isn't available for the northern hemisphere and so on. That tends to explain the rather noisy data in the main figure picked up by the The Register, well that, and they're particularly interested in summer temperatures, not average temperatures.
what you are doing is saying "it's warm today, thus global warming" what the chart is saying is that historically it's been warmer and relative spikes in average temperature are not uncommon.
This is a wrong interpretation of both global warming, and the data itself. It *is* warm today, and there is some warming effect causing that - so there is a global warming effect happening, what's causing it is a different problem. There are previous periods of warming as well - the roman warming period (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Warm_Period) and the so called medieval warming period (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period) - both of which may have been 'warming' periods only in europe and areas around europe, and not particularly warming anywhere else.
Obvious example for potential cause of the roman warming: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Vesuvius, Which blew up in 79AD (and would have had a local warming effectt), or one that blew up in alaska at about the same time period, which might have had a local effect on uninhabited parts of the americas, and habited parts of europe. The medieval warming period I have no idea, I'm not an expert in the history of weird climate inducing events, but there were certainly a couple of major volcanic eruptions prior to the medieval warming period in the south pacific, which caused all sorts of chaos in the pacific and the americas, and the heating/cooling/current effects could have spilled over to europe.
Because we know there is warming today we should ask what's causing it, and if that's a problem. If it's from a volcano for example then there isn't much we can do about the volcano, but we might have to cut back our own CO2 emissions to compensate, or we might not, depends. Trying to figure out what caused past warming is much much harder, because we weren't around taking relevant data. Human civilization could well have caused past warming trends too, or it might have been some other natural effect. And certainly local heating/cooling like the paper is talking about could have all sorts of causes.
When you're buying thousands of computers at a time as an institution it's a whole other ball game though.
Lets say something breaks on a desktop (power supply maybe). Now I could call up some vendor support. Box it up, ship it back to them etc. Or I could replace it myself. The easier repairs are, the more I can just do myself, especially cheap stuff, and NOT have to worry about various warranties, and not have to waste employee time waiting on a computer (or keeping spare computers around) etc.
On an individual basis you should, at least here, never buy extended warranties, they're a money grab by the company. It's an insurance system, but an insurance system on an item that depreciates in value quickly, so it's on average a losing proposition for you, and your projected outlays will never be crazy high, because the most it could cost is the cost of a new computer.
And if you have to do thousands of repairs* because you have tens of thousands of computers the cost of repairs is very much a big deal.
*that isn't a criticism of apple, stuff breaks, usually due to stupid end users, but if you have enough computers a lot of things will break over the lifetime. That's what keeps half of the /. crowd employed.
But don't worry, this is all the evil Republican's fault. ObamaCare^WTax will fix all these problems.
if only. Medical care can only provide you care if you get it. If you refuse to go to the doctor, or if you refuse to get vaccines or refuse antibiotics TB is going to do bad things to you.
This is compounded by the nature of TB in the west in in general. It's sufficiently rare that most people only get vaccinated for it when they're young, and don't get boosted, the vaccine does make it hard to test for exposure to the actual disease.
I think there's probably some legitimate blame on the US health system, (and the state of florida in particular obviously) closing hospitals and not having universal care does make thing worse than they could have been, but it's not like countries with universal care won't have problems with people who don't get treatment, or who don't follow it.
Sort of....
It defaults to metro, and has a classic mode that full screen programs switch into, but it doesn't really behave well doing that (or at least the preview I played with didn't play nice doing that).
And of course, no start button.
By itself I actually think metro is a good idea. Most users that I encounter don't really understand programs versus data, and they just have everything as an icon on their desktop. Metro goes straight to the heart of that, but it's still a radical shape up with a lot of inconsistent design, so I expect most people will fear change, and hide in a corner until windows 9.
Right, but you have to consider any sales relative to expectations and competition, in the case of vista they're competing with XP. And then windows 7.
How many people do you know that raced to get vista when 7 was on the horizon, how many people are upgrading to vista now that it's 'settled' or whatever term you want to use.
I think every firefox revision in the last year has broken the internal tools we use here.
Now, I grant you, the tools we have are stupid, and should be part of the web service that would be browser independent, but for whatever reason that's not what the people doing the buying asked for.
I started doing web development in 98, but I haven't really done anything meaningful in just shy of 4 years, so I'm not really up on how the market has moved around.
I've found with the custom tools we have here every firefox revision has broken them, because all our stuff are plugins for firefox, which has been a pain, to put it mildly. As I say, if I could just do everything as a web service it would make life much easier but plugin at least seem to have a lot of trouble with version changes.
Obviously I don't have a study to point to, we'll see when it arrives, I'm guessing just as is anyone else here.
Microsoft could pull something truly awesome out of its hat and make windows 8 a must have for a lot of people, rough edges and all.
The thing with tablets, is that microsoft lost that battle already. If you want a consumer tablet you buy an ipad. The great selling point of android was not a walled garden, and runs flash, but now flash is dying. Windows tablets seem more like business devices, but who knows, there's not really anything compelling about them as content consumption devices that you can't do on android or ipad already.
Now again, i admit, I could be completely misreading the market here, but I would expect microsoft to really struggle on tablet traction.
Which takes us back to the desktop, and in that case I don't really see windows 8 taking off. In some ways it's the same problem as vista, but worse. What does windows 8 do for me? I'm not seeing a whole lot I get out of it (and it takes away my ability to watch TV on my PC), it's going to be confusing to use and add very little. So there's no real compelling reason to upgrade unless they pull some new features that are really worth having.
I agree, that for phones and slates it will make sense, whether or not those will take off enough for it to matter is harder to say.
How well did that work out for vista?
I suspect that there will be a rush to get computers *without* windows 8 and then a lull until we see windows 9.
If that's what people actually want what's wrong with that?
All the backend stuff in windows, the x86/ARM stuff, processes, multiprocessor features etc. are mostly irrelevant to the day to day user experience of 'how do I start the program I want to run?'. If customers, because of 20 years of practice want a start menu... why not just give it to them.
No one is obliged to buy windows 8, if it's not what you want, don't buy it, and wait till they have a version that is what you want. (Or change OS's, which of course the big risk, as people don't have any desire to tolerate this sort of success-failure-success cycle MS has had going for a while).
Considering how many revisions firefox has been through this year, I'm more sympathetic to locking to IE if you have to lock to something. Firefox has been averaging two - three months between major releases, chrome isn't far off.
When you do a contract for someone you don't want to have to go back every 3 months because their browser changed how your page is rendered or how your plugin works or the like.
It would be great if you could do everything as a web service properly, where browser choice doesn't matter. Unfortunately that doesn't always get the job done.
It's not just that IE is part of the standard operating environment, it's that they don't seem to be changing things up quite as often as the competition.
Windows 8 will be a trainwreck. Too many changes for most users. The issue is windows 9 (whatever that will look like).
That's always the great risk for facebook. As long as they were a small outfit no one really cared what they did. Now that they have billions in revenue and worthwhile valuation and sizable number of customers governments are going to start looking at what exactly they're up to.
Whether facebook can convert their billions into favourable laws remains to be seen, but all it takes is one privacy 'mistake' on their part (think google grabbing wifi data) and the government could land on them like a tonne of bricks. Which is as it should be in the case of facebook, but it doesn't seem like the people running the show at Facebook take this risk seriously yet.
Not that you ever want any company to be ruled by lawyers with an iron fist, demanding products never risk anything. But Facebook is going to get burned sooner or later.
Oh I wasn't suggesting Flame or Stuxnet were something secure boot is for. My point was that just because something doesn't affect you personally doesn't mean it isn't a serious security problem.
And as the other guy said, it doesn't really do any good to secure half the system and not the other half. Secure boot is one piece of the broad puzzle of computer security for the 99.9% of computer users who don't even know what the hell they're doing.
legitimate" is such a disrespectful value judgment. Are you saying that people who do data analysis with Python are illegitimate? Are you calling them bastards?
I'm not sure that's how it's meant, but I agree, it's an odd choice of phrase. If I were to look at it another way, what would make a language 'illegitimate' for data analysis? In that case you look at things like excel and access for financial transactions, or some of the early versions of CUDA that didn't support proper IEEE floating point maths (or at least, not fast IEEE floating point maths). In those cases you can use the language, and it will spit out results, but they might not be right, and there's no obvious way to know. Lets say by default some language doesn't convert in any sort of reasonably obvious way between number types (ints to floats, floats to ints, floats to double precision floats, that sort of thing), or if the math has some bizarre errors in it. A classic example would be division, that's slow to do properly, so if your language takes some shortcuts by default that are faster, but wrong, well that'd be bad.
These of course are all things that can be changed or fixed with appropriate libraries and so on, but you'd need to know those are problems. Which I guess is why you'd ask.
So ya, overall, it's a strange way to phrase the problem. In a broadly theoretical sense there's no reason any decent language couldn't be used for data analysis, obviously, so from there it's a matter of whether or not it's up front about when it does things badly.
Because rootkits are bad mkay? Just because you never bought a Sony CD that had one doesn't mean thousands of other people didn't.
It's not really much more complicated than that.
The situation as it was wasn't fine. Just because you didn't get hit by the 'flame' virus or stuxnet doesn't mean those are not serious problems to be solved (notably with windows update in the one case).
The problem with all of these things is that the vast vast vast majority of users don't even know when they have a virus or rootkit, and their computers just keep spamming along, or having their data stolen etc. So the vast majority of users need to protected from themselves, and, importantly, they know they need to be protected from themselves.
Oh, I was merely suggesting MS is trying to develop a strategy to to take on android. Just because it's probably a bad strategy doesn't mean it isn't a strategy.
They're trying to to provide one microsoft integrated experience across your living room and PC, that integrated your smartphone and part of it goes with you with your smartphone. Now you can already do that more or less, but they figure they can make it possible for normal people to understand. I doubt they'll succeed, but who knows.
Sad but true.
Cyanogenmod has it's awesomeness, but when you have to get nightly builds to be able to run ICS without a slew of bugs there's a whole lot wrong with the user experience. And that by the way is not a criticism of the cyanogen guys, without them my phone would still be on 2.3.3 probably, or bug riddled official version of ICS but the main feature of android (not a walled garden!) is far too difficult to benefit from.