Mah who knows what they'll do? Windows is already free on anything =8" screen. Win 7 and above is getting win 10 for free. There pretty close to free now. My guess is they'll bundle windows with Office 365: you might pay an extra $10 a year but you'll be able to upgrade your OS too. Yeah they'll save on the support a bit, developers will be able to use new features and hit a larger part of the install base etc. They might be trying to become more of a hardware company convince you that your Surface will be a perfect addition to your XBox and desktop since they'll all play together and be supported by your subscription similar to someone that buys into the full Apple stack + a gaming system too.

Well you can get Office 365 for ~$60 a year with unlimited cloud storage. If they made it say $75 and you got frequent and substantive upgrades once a year or so ... might be worth it to a lot of people especially since you can get all the office apps for all the other platforms for free. I'm single so not really worth it to me but if I had another couple computers/tech users in my house I could easily see dropping the money for the cloud storage. All your data anywhere any time? No more external drives spinning etc. Heck by a computer with a smaller harddrive because I know I can pull things down at 150Mbps should I need them, done.

I think even if FirefoxOS and Ubuntu are failures they could still be important. If they come up with a UI innovation something similar will likely find its way into the more mainstream OSs. I think the problem is they can't likely get a good piece of the rich world market (look at MSs attempts and they were the incumbent), so that leaves the low end. But Android and Win Phone are free for small devices so as far as smartphones are "insperational" devices why would the 3rd world user chose to copy valley snobs but then at the same time go for something different?

May guess is this is one of the ways MS is going the way of Sun: they'll give away WinPhone to cheap devices and get a large market share of free. Actual high margin users will still stick with Android/iOS and MS will have a growing user base paying $0 (not saying they'll get large but even say 15% of the global market would be a huge growth for them). Sure they can sell apps into that larger market share but how big is the apps budget for someone living in Ivory Coast?

There are probably other tools, maybe even better tools but it is what I know. I'd say try adding the whole thing to a C++ Visual Studio project. You can then set things on to give you build errors for all unreferenced junk. Find all references etc. Other IDEs probably can do it too but at least entry level VS is free and I know it will do it so ... Only issue you might have is if it is a *nix app or whatever perhaps you'd get a lot of false errors because it won't conform to VC++. But I'm guessing their close enough to get the bulk of the work done.

You mean crab fishing isn't history?

I'm the same way. I literally can't stand watching TV anymore. First commercial break I pick up my Kindle and start reading. Before I know it I've lost track of the show and just shut it off. I download everything I watch now: no commercials and accelerated playback. A show lasts say 35 min real time, no rewatching the opening sequence every time, no commercials etc. My parents think I'm nuts but I figure my mind works faster than average so why should I watch things at the same speed as chin droolers?

Haha. When I first saw the headline to this I thought women CEO companies have higher profit and I thought yeah all three of them. But I guess 1000+ employees is still a low enough bar that we have a sufficient sample. Cause and effect though: perhaps women lead companies are lead by women because they were already successful and/or had the "culture" to be successful instead of an old boys club running the show. Mah, anyways I don't suspect women lead or male lead companies to have much of a significant difference. Just the type of company that would do so might be more likely to be successful.

Amen. I hate news sites that have article text that insist on loading and running news clips while you read. I'm trying to read damn it shut the f up! Who the hell thought that was good user design? We need to drop them off in Syria.

Yeah and these things are SoC/hobbist devices. Chances are you aren't multitasking with them they are being used to do one thing at a time. You can get a lot done in pretty much any language with 1GB of Ram. You won't spin up a big database system but who the heck would be hosting a database on a cellphone processor anyways (not sqllite but I mean production scale)? Sure you want your code to run well on the hardware but does a 2X bloat really matter even at 900Mhz? I don't know maybe, but maybe the bloat is that it uses less complicated instructions, or has more diagnostics support on a crash etc.

Don't get me wrong I don't think I've used a rails app that I found performant, at best I'd say "it was pretty cool functionality wise and free so I leaved with it", but then again that is true for 90% of java apps too. There is a minimum bar you have to pass for performance on user side stuff (server is a different story but you usually have a revenue stream to afford to pay for something fast if that is what it takes to get it) afterwards sad to say but it becomes how simple is it to get my task done? and does it look pretty while it does it?

Depends what you want. Pricey but I'd argue that the retina iMac and the normal iMac before it are the single best all in one computers money can buy. Better CPU, more ram, more res etc than anything else I've seen from Dell/HP etc. Similarly their laptops when retina and SSDs came in. They had super high res and SSD a bit earlier then every other mainstream line I know of. You probably could find SSD somewhere at the time but they definitely pushed it mainstream. Now they have litte going for them: everyone else has hires and SSD options for the laptops. For towers the Mac Pro is a poor comparison to the typical PC since for the most part you are comparing Xeons to i7s and ECC to normal ram. You'd have to go to the workstation class towers from HP and the like to have a good comparison and yeah there I would say Apple doesn't compare favorably.

So in short: iMac and laptops up till about 1.5 years ago when their features went mainsteam were best in breed IMO. You pay though the nose but you get a nice machine.

Which is why MS is trying to get people to sign up for OneDrive/Office 365: I think they get it now that people don't want to be locked down to a particular system and not have access to things on their phone etc. So they rebrand Hotmail Outlook to get the people moving to the Cloud from their normal app, try to bundle Office online with new PCs and give it away for other platforms (to answer the "but what about my iPad on the train?" question) etc. The problem is the margins aren't there for cloud services versus what they are used to. Apple wins because even if it is a cloud service they can still pawn off a $600 phone to you every couple years versus what $50 MS gets every 3-5 years you replace your PC.

Microsoft got large when the answer for "why do I need a computer?" was "to do work". They were already large when the internet really took off and then personal computing devices like music players, cellphones etc came in. It's the innovators dilemma they where too large to go after the smaller markets because they wouldn't budge the needle on earnings, then they were behind and didn't have any of the cool factor (if they ever did) when they tried to enter. As a developer I like their tech better (C# over objective C, VS over pretty much any other IDE, integration of VS with SQL Server etc). But for a startup would I base my business on making exclusive apps for Windows Phone though? Probably not the market has decided.

Anyways the answer to "why I need a computer" has become more like the argument for a phone + entertainment than work. The market for consumer electronics might very well be larger than the business use and if not it is at least a higher margin market.

Mah IMO git is still pretty broke in 2013, hopefully they fix it for 2015. Lots of common features weren't there: cherry pick, rebase, gated checkins etc. You essentially could use the features you learn with git on day one but you have to throw away your continuous integration system to do it. We use git at my work but we use Jira/Stash for bug tracking/source control, and Jenkins for CI because we found TFS too broke under git and common things (admittedly not necessarily the best git work flow) like cherry picking from a release branch into the current dev branch required jumping over to git extensions/command line anyways.

If they fix Git support, or you can live with the legacy workflow TFS is again probably best in breed: nothing else integrates bug tracking, CI, and reporting so well. Web based solutions like Atlassian supplies just end up being a sea of links to other services you are paying for and you quickly run out of room for new tabs in your browser, FOSS tools I've dealt with each seem to fit a piece of the puzzle but need hours of massaging to get them to talk to each other. TFS: next, next, install, wait 10 minutes and you are 90% there and you get it with MSDN anyways so you might as well try it if you are a MS shop.

I totally agree. Linux devs live on the command line so much that they think if you have syntax highlighting you have an IDE. How about remote debugging? How about well designed UI designers that also have an XML/HTML like codeable component (Java comes close here I suppose), multiple languages sharing the same intermediate language, etc. Then there is the tooling, fairly well supported ORMs, plugin ecosystem, integration with THE major OS, THE major office suite, one of the major DBMSs, one of 2 mainstream cloud providers etc.

If you are coding for Linux that is one thing. But if you are coding business productivity software you usually have a reason to make things work well with MS products. VS just works out of the box for 99% of those scenarios versus lots of late nights figuring out how to do office interop via COM from Ruby using Emacs or whatever. Given that my time in a couple weeks is easily worth the cost of an MSDN license (let alone all the free stuff coming out now) I know what IDE I'm using. Now if I was working for someone making the hardware to run the POS systems on in the first place yeah I might go for a FOSS solution and get the specs of the device as far down as I can but given I'm making business software to either customers already running windows or customers with such high margins that my time is worth more than the cost of spinning up a couple more instances of windows VMs: I'll use whatever is easiest for me.

Just like they released iOS and Android versions of office before Windows? They are releasing things ad hoc now not always for their own platform first. Might buy them some cool factor I suppose but I'm worried they are going the way of Sun: "Everything is free and runs on commodity hardware, wait, what is it people are going to pay us for? I forget."