Huh, cool. When I'm away from wifi I'm generally on a train. There I just watch TV (downloaded already) or read till I get home/work so not a factor. All comes down to what you want to do I guess. My cellphone has a 200MB plan and I've never came close. I'm around a computer ~14hrs a day though so have very little need to get my internet fix on a small screen.

Not to mention a lot of people don't need nav systems. They either don't travel much or when they do they are flying somewhere. They know their local streets so never have needed one. My parents are that way. They just got a nav system 4 years ago when I moved way out of town so they wouldn't get lost on the way to my place. After 10 trips or so they knew the side streets well enough that they started leaving the nav at home again. I'm essentially the same way: I commute using public transit so I always plan how I'm getting somewhere before leaving. I've used my phone's gps once (one time with my parents since they aren't bringing theirs anymore and we got detoured for 10km out of the normal route to my house because of construction on country roads). Maybe not a typical user: but we do exist.

Also, probably not most of the /. crowd but about 10% of people don't have cell phones. Those likely are the same people that aren't into/can't afford other computer gadgets. My parents don't have a cellphone, nor my grandmother. One of my aunt's owns a cellphone but it is a dumb one, no gps. She doesn't ever us it, it is a pay as you go in case of emergency I can call someone in the car phone. As far as I know it is the same one she got 5+ years ago and has never made a call with. Not everyone is so obsessed with gadgets they have to horde them.

Maybe non-iPad tablets have a lot of GPSs I don't know. But (I think just anadocacoly) by far the wifi only iPad is the most popular iPad (if not tablet period): and it doesn't have a GPS.

I guess a question then becomes: why have a pile of old phones? Seems to be a common answer on this thread. I have my last phone mainly because I have to pay to dispose of it + take it to the middle of no where where the electronics recycling depo is and don't drive. I never got the idea of people having a 90's vintage blackberry or whatever that they never power on but hang on to forever.

Of course I also don't get people's fascination with getting a new phone every year. I use my phone for it's whole contract and then if they offer me a new one I'll take it. But only on my second cell now (previously out of country/living with Skype, then before that work supplied phone). I guess things accumulate if you have a spouse/kids all adding stuff to the pile too.

Doesn't only the cellular version of the iPad have a GPS? If so good for you I guess if you got the money to burn but I don't really see the use for a cellular equipped iPad and a cell phone (assuming the phone is a smart(ish) one). My telco robs me enough with one data plan :)

A bricklayer might find themselves fired and or sued too. Non-compete/"not a loyal employee". If you are a bricklayer and someone you know is looking for some work done you are supposed to recommend your employer's business like a good little doggy.

All or most of these posts assume US laws (or US like laws). Your neighbour to the north for example as exactly the opposite policy: employees own their work unless it was explicitly assigned. Your employer has a right to use your software they don't own the copyright or can control how you chose to license/sell it.

In my experience even if your boss doesn't care often they aren't willing to put any effort/burn political capital to get the higher ups to approve it. Your mileage might vary.

For example my last job I made a utility that talked to a vendors software and collected some data we needed to comply with government regulations. That vendor knew of another site that needed the same software and wanted to buy a copy from us. Anyways, the employer (a hospital) even had an IP consultant come through to see different projects that might be commercializable come through. After a week or so of onsite interviews, filling out the invonvation paperwork (forget what the proper term was for it), having a customer already lined up etc etc. Still couldn't convince my boss to chat with his boss to get it to go forward. He didn't seem to mind the idea, but also no one wanted to own the liablity if something went wrong, wanted the hassle of figuring out who gets paid what (unlike the US in my country the employee owns the IP of the stuff they create unless explicitly assigned in their employee contract (I wasn't hired as a software developer/had no ownship transfer in my contract)). Anyways, I could of just tried doing it on the side but would have all the hassles of a business including significant liablity exposure should something break. Also wanted to keep it internal since I'd already been paid to make the code/didn't want to piss of my employer. Still: can be an upward battle: pretty much by definition anyone working at a government job/for someone else doesn't want the hassle of dealing with all the business processes themselves (you might like sales but hate legal, might like product development but be antisocial, etc, few people enjoy the whole process).

Male prostitute, your boss won't mind if you lay down on the job.

Yeah usually the boring ones. I'd work on an assembly line before I'd spend my day crawling under desks fishing out ethernet cables.

Agreed on the ram. When DDR4 hits the mainstream product lines that is going to be a nice bump.

We have "build" machines too. They get hijacked to run CI workloads. Typically 8-16 jobs running concurrently 24-7. They build -> then trigger smoke, other, security, migration etc testing.

Often we compile several times locally in the process of getting things working. Sadly highly coupled code between C# and tsql/db code. You need to migrate and build/run tests locally to have any hope of pushing something to a CI/build server that has a hope in hell of not breaking everything.

Anyways, I like having a high end local desktop, but then again I'm running webserver, db, and client workloads simulatanously on my local machine. 32GB ram, typically > 16GB in use at any given time. Without it we'd need to have dedicated dbs on servers we could migrate ourselves without any conflicts with any other users as we muck with stored procs and such.

These huge number of core server CPUs other than for big stuff like non-scale out db workloads and such are kind of silly. For the last 15 years at least they've been trying to sell us on the idea that everyone wants to go back to having thin clients with VMs hosted on fat dense servers. The only one that wants that are the accountants. Then if you take into account productivity it might be a wash. Especially since clock for clock server hardware is probably ~4X more expensive.

No it isn't tramatic just a waste of time. Especially when a couple people come over to your desk and want you to check something on another branch. Checkout, deploy database. Then build. Then when switching back need to build again. So 3 people sitting around waiting for a progress bar.

I've lived the HPC game too. In those days for me at least it was 5% dev and 95% reading/writing journal articles, books, either triggering or automating compute job configurations etc. Very little code but running for 200k+ cpu hours.

Sun back in the day, not sure if they still do it, used to offer servers with say half of the cores disabled. You could buy licenses and they'd turn on the extra cores without even needing a reboot. They offer different price points even if it means they waste some good cores disabling them to make an artificial performance different its still better for them than to have to make a different design/fab for each step in the process. The lifetime of a chip architecture/manufacturing process is so short that building n lines to make n products would be crazy expensive.

Exactly. Not that it would likely be worth it for my employer, even with salary accounted for, but my work project has 25 subprojects that need to be built but a max depth of 5 I think in the dependency graph. So could reduce my full builds from ~1min 5-10 times a day to say 10s 5-10 times a day. But usually I can multitask: do another once over the pending changes, etc. So the time isn't usually wasted anyways.

I agree with you for ultra light trade off. I guess maybe I'm not the target market but it seems like Apple for the last 5 years or so has pushed "thinnest X ever": I'm not really sure who's been asking for it. Weight I can see, battery life to some extent (basically has to last me between chances to plug it in, doesn't need to last 12hrs because other than a couple flights a year I'm never travelling non-stop for that long) but thinness makes no sense to me. "We dropped every useful port and replaced it with this one usb 3c port so we could shave 3mm off the laptop": thanks Apple.

I really hope this doesn't become the new standard. The Macbook and similar devices I think are suited for people with decent machines on either end of their commute (or hardly use a computer (Facebook dorks) at home). You use the thing while you are commuting and then "throw it away" for a real machine when you get there vs having a good laptop and then just docking the laptop to your ethernet/external monitors/keyboard etc on either end. IMO a good laptop with oddles of ports is a better deal over all unless you are the type to not do too much with a computer at home and not care on the other end because it is your employers hardware budget.