It may simply be the case that Wilsonville's capacity can't meet the demand. You can't even buy a Hub on the Microsoft store right now, and Ars wrote that MS was caught off guard by the popularity.
Yeah, you probably should have just left it at that instead of trying to explain the optimal answer... Interviews are often performed by junior level guys who are out to prove are smart they are (open-minded senior devs are too busy and valuable to do the the initial screening pass). To get past the first tier, sometimes you just have to swallow your pride, pat them on the head, and congratulate them on how clever their "fastest possible" solutions are.
This is a hyperbolic title, driven home by the fact that the author concedes in the last paragraph that: "What Microsoft appears to be aiming for with GE isn't head-on competition with those projects."
I get the sense the author doesn't understand this space or is trying to create drama where none exists... Graph Engine is a very different animal than Neo4J. You don't want to use GE as a system of record like you would with Neo4J--it's a pure *in-memory* computation platform. For example, TFA states: "Data can be inserted into GE and retrieved at high speed since it's kept in-memory and only written back to disk as needed," but fails to mention that it's up to the client app to handle that disk IO--Graph Engine doesn't do read-through or write-through to disk for you. (Yes, it can dump all of its memory contents to disk if you need to bounce your machine, but that's a far cry from making it a full-blown persistent data store like Neo4J).
Sure, HTC makes nice, shiny devices, but their support for anything more than 1 year old absolutely sucks. Hopefully this behavior won't be repeated for their Nexus devices since it's Google who's driving software updates, not HTC.
Sinofsky happened, that's why. I'm sure there were people who raised red flags internally prior to Windows8's release, but Sinofsky was so hellbent on making MS a "devices & services" company that he ignored any feedback that didn't mesh with his vision.
Now he's gone, and MS has to undo his mess and spin it as innovation... So now we see MS shills writing things like this FTFA:
In order to do this, Microsoft is working on including in Threshold lots of new features specifically aimed at "desktop" users, meaning those who interact primarily with their Windows computing device from a desktop or laptop PC with mouse/keyboard and optional touch.
Note how "desktop" is in quotes as if this group is a fringe subset of its users instead of the 95% of its users who were completely alienated.
I use both, and I find that.NET really shines when you're in unfamiliar territory and working with a part of the framework that you don't touch every day. Features are more easily discovered and idioms tend to be more consistently applied in.NET, whereas it feels like Java suffers from implementers applying the pattern du jour, forcing you to wade through more docs.
I attribute much of.NET's success in this regard to the absolutely awesome book "Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable.NET Libraries," which includes a lot of direct insights from the designers of the framework. Microsoft has been really good about sticking to those guidelines, and it shows.
Thank god, I thought I was the only one with this perspective. Talk about a first world problem: "Waah, I'm 30 and my toys don't behave the way I want them to behave!" Now go whine about this to your grandpa who fought for civil rights, your suffragette grandma, your war vet down the street, or basically anyone who's fought and sacrificed for a worthwhile cause, and prepare to get your ass kicked.
Small Basic is a simple QBasic-inspired language that runs in the.NET CLR that's designed with kids in mind, right down to the non-threatening IDE. The site points you to a decent curriculum and community, too. It's very friendly and has a low barrier to entry--he can start making his programs do interesting things almost immediately.
it is normal scientific work to test simulators by feeding them with true data up to some date in the past and look if their simulation up to current date is accurate. i have not RTFA, but there is nothing odd in the (short) summary here to me...
Great point--I wish they had more details about the methodology. I wonder if they're backtesting against the same historical news data that they used to create the model. That would be a big mistake--the model would perform terrifically well against the same data used to create it, causing overconfidence.
I upgraded today on my Windows 7 work machine. The overall email experience is unchanged--I use it to access my work account on Rackspace email via IMAP, and the new version continues to work fine. But overall I'm underwhelmed to the point that I wish I hadn't upgraded.
At first the new Windows 7 theme struck me as a nice improvement with all its pretty glassy transparency up top, but a few hours of hard use it's just annoying... the menu bar is partially transparent now, so if there's clutter or a dark background under the Tbird window then the top-level menu items lose some contrast and become harder to read (for my crappy eyes, at least). The whole UI lost some of its snappiness, too--I'm not sure if it's the new theme's fault, but resizing the Thunderbird window isn't nearly as smooth as it used to be and the menus feel sluggish when I click on them.
But here's the part about the theme that's driving me batshit insane: Moving the Thunderbird window is broken (it's an advanced feature, I know, but hear me out). There's this big transparent glass area up top with all kinds of empty space that's just begging for you to click on it so you can drag the window around. But the click only registers if you hit it on the very top part of the window. Every other Windows program with a big transparent glass area (including Firefox) lets you click anywhere on the glass to move the window. But not Thunderbird. Most of that glass is a useless no-man's land. (This is so contrary to my deep Win7 usage reflexes that I thought that my mouse was broken for a while.)
The highly-touted improvements to the tab management doesn't do much for me either. Sure, it's neat that I can detach tabs and move them around now, but if I compose a new message then it has to be in a separate window. I can't dock the composition as a tab anywhere, so I have to mess around in the Windows taskbar or Alt-Tab to switch between the messages I'm composing. I'm not sure how this oversight slipped through the cracks.
Oh, and half of my extensions are incompatible after the upgrade. This should annoy much more than it does, but I've grown numb to it over the years.
I'll support this recommendation, too. I bought a T410 for home use and my wife loves it. It's fast, solid, and it doesn't have any silly features. And, when the AC adapter died, the Lenovo support line (in Atlanta!) had a new one on my doorstep the next day.
In general, my suggestion is to buy a business-class laptop instead of a consumer-oriented model, even for home use. The components and overall system design tend to be better tested and more reliable. So, opt for a ThinkPad over an IdeaPad, or, if you're going with Dell, opt for a Latitude over an Inspiron.
Yeah, it's nice that mainstream media is giving Bruce some attention, but ugh, did you see the comments from CNN readers below his piece? Avoid them if possible, it'll just make you sad. A long, well-argued opinion piece won't make a dent in that forum.
That MX620 style of mouse is pretty nice, but don't get one if you have big hands--I tried one and it felt really cramped. Go with the MX1100 or MX Revolution if you need something bigger.
Did the writing improve, or were the cutscenes really that bad? I like a good story, but Penny Arcade led me to believe that the first one was seriously lacking in that department: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/1/30/
Mod parent up. I have a nice, feature rich BlackBerry, but the Verizon crippled the coolest features: Bluetooth will only communicate with a wireless headset, and the GPS is disabled until you fork over an additional $10/month (even 3rd party apps like Google Maps can't use the GPS until you pay Verizon).
Evidently Verizon is notorious for this kind of thing, but I didn't do my homework before buying the phone.
How much force is required for a keystroke on the Das? I've tried both a Unicomp Model M clone and a CVT Avant Prime. The buckling springs in the Unicomp are a little too stiff for my delicate little hands, whereas the ALPS switches in the Avant feel a little too loose. Overall the CVT Avant Prime is the best keyboard I've ever used, but I'd love to find a key switch with resistance somewhere between the buckling spring and the ALPS.
Some MS shareholders tried a similar resolution a little while ago, right after that China blogging scandal, but the initiative didn't get a lot of press. There was an article in the Seattle Times back then that talked about why these things always fail:
The board of directors and the large investors never go for stuff like this. A company does not exist to make the world a better place, to live ethically, or for any of the other reasons that we attribute to people; it exists to increase shareholder value.
Slashdot Mirror
Or maybe they're just too young to have experienced the nightmare of the Atari 400: https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...
The should have just changed it to "Do no evil (unless there's a massive market opportunity)"
It may simply be the case that Wilsonville's capacity can't meet the demand. You can't even buy a Hub on the Microsoft store right now, and Ars wrote that MS was caught off guard by the popularity.
Great commentary. Thanks for sharing.
Yeah, you probably should have just left it at that instead of trying to explain the optimal answer... Interviews are often performed by junior level guys who are out to prove are smart they are (open-minded senior devs are too busy and valuable to do the the initial screening pass). To get past the first tier, sometimes you just have to swallow your pride, pat them on the head, and congratulate them on how clever their "fastest possible" solutions are.
By the way, Intel supports a POPCNT instruction now (starting with Nehalem). Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and https://software.intel.com/en-...
This is a hyperbolic title, driven home by the fact that the author concedes in the last paragraph that: "What Microsoft appears to be aiming for with GE isn't head-on competition with those projects."
I get the sense the author doesn't understand this space or is trying to create drama where none exists... Graph Engine is a very different animal than Neo4J. You don't want to use GE as a system of record like you would with Neo4J--it's a pure *in-memory* computation platform. For example, TFA states: "Data can be inserted into GE and retrieved at high speed since it's kept in-memory and only written back to disk as needed," but fails to mention that it's up to the client app to handle that disk IO--Graph Engine doesn't do read-through or write-through to disk for you. (Yes, it can dump all of its memory contents to disk if you need to bounce your machine, but that's a far cry from making it a full-blown persistent data store like Neo4J).
This a terrific, concise explanation. Thank you.
I do not think it means what you think it means.
I went to program in Java and all I got was this Ask Toolbar instead.
Sure, HTC makes nice, shiny devices, but their support for anything more than 1 year old absolutely sucks. Hopefully this behavior won't be repeated for their Nexus devices since it's Google who's driving software updates, not HTC.
Sinofsky happened, that's why. I'm sure there were people who raised red flags internally prior to Windows8's release, but Sinofsky was so hellbent on making MS a "devices & services" company that he ignored any feedback that didn't mesh with his vision.
Now he's gone, and MS has to undo his mess and spin it as innovation... So now we see MS shills writing things like this FTFA:
In order to do this, Microsoft is working on including in Threshold lots of new features specifically aimed at "desktop" users, meaning those who interact primarily with their Windows computing device from a desktop or laptop PC with mouse/keyboard and optional touch.
Note how "desktop" is in quotes as if this group is a fringe subset of its users instead of the 95% of its users who were completely alienated.
Prosecutor: "You laundered millions of dollars for violent drug cartels."
HSBC Bank: "Yup, sure did. Here's $2 billion. We're good now, right?"
Prosecutor: "You're free to go."
It's called Godwin's Law. It sucks, but it's inevitable in discussions like this. I gave up fighting it years ago.
I use both, and I find that .NET really shines when you're in unfamiliar territory and working with a part of the framework that you don't touch every day. Features are more easily discovered and idioms tend to be more consistently applied in .NET, whereas it feels like Java suffers from implementers applying the pattern du jour, forcing you to wade through more docs.
I attribute much of .NET's success in this regard to the absolutely awesome book "Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries," which includes a lot of direct insights from the designers of the framework. Microsoft has been really good about sticking to those guidelines, and it shows.
http://www.amazon.com/Framework-Design-Guidelines-Conventions-Libraries/dp/0321545613 ...or maybe I just understand the .NET Framework better because I read that book. I'm not aware of a Java corollary that would give me the same insights, though.
Thank god, I thought I was the only one with this perspective. Talk about a first world problem: "Waah, I'm 30 and my toys don't behave the way I want them to behave!" Now go whine about this to your grandpa who fought for civil rights, your suffragette grandma, your war vet down the street, or basically anyone who's fought and sacrificed for a worthwhile cause, and prepare to get your ass kicked.
If you go the MS route, I'd suggest that he gets his feet wet in Microsoft's Small Basic rather than dive into C#:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/beginner/ff384126.aspx
Small Basic is a simple QBasic-inspired language that runs in the .NET CLR that's designed with kids in mind, right down to the non-threatening IDE. The site points you to a decent curriculum and community, too. It's very friendly and has a low barrier to entry--he can start making his programs do interesting things almost immediately.
it is normal scientific work to test simulators by feeding them with true data up to some date in the past and look if their simulation up to current date is accurate. i have not RTFA, but there is nothing odd in the (short) summary here to me...
Great point--I wish they had more details about the methodology. I wonder if they're backtesting against the same historical news data that they used to create the model. That would be a big mistake--the model would perform terrifically well against the same data used to create it, causing overconfidence.
I upgraded today on my Windows 7 work machine. The overall email experience is unchanged--I use it to access my work account on Rackspace email via IMAP, and the new version continues to work fine. But overall I'm underwhelmed to the point that I wish I hadn't upgraded.
At first the new Windows 7 theme struck me as a nice improvement with all its pretty glassy transparency up top, but a few hours of hard use it's just annoying... the menu bar is partially transparent now, so if there's clutter or a dark background under the Tbird window then the top-level menu items lose some contrast and become harder to read (for my crappy eyes, at least). The whole UI lost some of its snappiness, too--I'm not sure if it's the new theme's fault, but resizing the Thunderbird window isn't nearly as smooth as it used to be and the menus feel sluggish when I click on them.
But here's the part about the theme that's driving me batshit insane: Moving the Thunderbird window is broken (it's an advanced feature, I know, but hear me out). There's this big transparent glass area up top with all kinds of empty space that's just begging for you to click on it so you can drag the window around. But the click only registers if you hit it on the very top part of the window. Every other Windows program with a big transparent glass area (including Firefox) lets you click anywhere on the glass to move the window. But not Thunderbird. Most of that glass is a useless no-man's land. (This is so contrary to my deep Win7 usage reflexes that I thought that my mouse was broken for a while.)
The highly-touted improvements to the tab management doesn't do much for me either. Sure, it's neat that I can detach tabs and move them around now, but if I compose a new message then it has to be in a separate window. I can't dock the composition as a tab anywhere, so I have to mess around in the Windows taskbar or Alt-Tab to switch between the messages I'm composing. I'm not sure how this oversight slipped through the cracks.
Oh, and half of my extensions are incompatible after the upgrade. This should annoy much more than it does, but I've grown numb to it over the years.
I'll support this recommendation, too. I bought a T410 for home use and my wife loves it. It's fast, solid, and it doesn't have any silly features. And, when the AC adapter died, the Lenovo support line (in Atlanta!) had a new one on my doorstep the next day. In general, my suggestion is to buy a business-class laptop instead of a consumer-oriented model, even for home use. The components and overall system design tend to be better tested and more reliable. So, opt for a ThinkPad over an IdeaPad, or, if you're going with Dell, opt for a Latitude over an Inspiron.
Yeah, it's nice that mainstream media is giving Bruce some attention, but ugh, did you see the comments from CNN readers below his piece? Avoid them if possible, it'll just make you sad. A long, well-argued opinion piece won't make a dent in that forum.
That MX620 style of mouse is pretty nice, but don't get one if you have big hands--I tried one and it felt really cramped. Go with the MX1100 or MX Revolution if you need something bigger.
Did the writing improve, or were the cutscenes really that bad? I like a good story, but Penny Arcade led me to believe that the first one was seriously lacking in that department: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/1/30/
Mod parent up. I have a nice, feature rich BlackBerry, but the Verizon crippled the coolest features: Bluetooth will only communicate with a wireless headset, and the GPS is disabled until you fork over an additional $10/month (even 3rd party apps like Google Maps can't use the GPS until you pay Verizon).
Evidently Verizon is notorious for this kind of thing, but I didn't do my homework before buying the phone.
How much force is required for a keystroke on the Das? I've tried both a Unicomp Model M clone and a CVT Avant Prime. The buckling springs in the Unicomp are a little too stiff for my delicate little hands, whereas the ALPS switches in the Avant feel a little too loose. Overall the CVT Avant Prime is the best keyboard I've ever used, but I'd love to find a key switch with resistance somewhere between the buckling spring and the ALPS.
Some MS shareholders tried a similar resolution a little while ago, right after that China blogging scandal, but the initiative didn't get a lot of press. There was an article in the Seattle Times back then that talked about why these things always fail:
0 03289541_microsoftholders05.html
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/microsoft/2
The board of directors and the large investors never go for stuff like this. A company does not exist to make the world a better place, to live ethically, or for any of the other reasons that we attribute to people; it exists to increase shareholder value.