> It would have made more sense to have the mobile GUI run as an application over a desktop system, and just give users the choice.

Given that my mobile phone is more powerful (or at least responsive) than the desktop my company provides, largely due to the SSD, we may not be too far off from seeing a world where your mobile phone is your desktop and having the right UI up will depend on whether or not you're connected to a screen and keyboard or not. The underlying technology you're suggesting would make that seamless and could be autodetected and swapped on the fly. Microsoft could dominate that market.... if they could get their shit together.

I've got a Note3, and while it doesn't quite manage it yet, by the Note5 you could see it being technically possible to move seemlessly from voice input, to pen input, to touch input to keyboard input, outputting to any of the built in screen, a desktop display or a TV or projector (say for netflix) in a way that makes sense. I'm not sure android can rise to that challenge, but the hardware is almost there as is the software.

Indeed, the job of doing serious data analysis is not new, 'data science' is really only a temporarily independent field while we try and sort out some of the technical problems that arise from working with large datasets. Once solutions for large datasets become mainstream, reliable and agreed upon (and inexpensively vendor bought) we'll go back to just having scientists who are specialized in whatever area.

And that's perfectly alright.

First year is free, and if you get a new phone or new phone number your year resets. A bunch of my friends and I have been using over for well, over a year. Anyone who got a new phone or phone number and it reset, in my case I had a phone that died after 14 days, but same phone number, and that reset the counter too.

So at any given time I could see them having less than half of their active users paying (which would be 200 million dollars a year ish) but if they have a factor of 10 growth in a year, which for a free app is not unreasonable at all, that would put the numbers where they are.

That doesn't justify the buyout price, but that's a whole other ballgamae.

John Carmack used to post on /. semi regularly, it would be interesting to see if he chimes in here.

But really, it makes sense, making 1 game VR enabled is different than making VR a reality, and it sounds like Carmak wants to do the latter rather than the former.

If I was zenimax I would be worried about Carmack making his next game too dependent on VR tech, which would lock out a lot of the market who won't have an oculus rift right away, and if Oculus rift wants VR support for their new experimental hardware that needs to prove itself in the market place they should be the ones footing the bill, particularly for the time of someone as expensive as Carmack, who, lets face it, probably gets 10 or 20x what any other engine programmer does. Probably justifiably so, but still, none one us would be very happy if the next Wolfenstein or Doom comes out and looks like crap and then we blame Carmack for spending all his time on the VR version.

That's not really a big deal. His celebrity and age combine to give him tremendous earning power if the US were to welcome him back with open arms.

Obviously yes, any of his assets that have been seized he should get back, but a couple of hundred thousand dollars in lost income would be nothing compared to the book deal he could get and the speaking fees he would get and all of that sort of thing. He could probably make all of his lost income back in a month of speaking fees if he was free to travel anywhere.

You just stop every day on the way home from work and buy what you want for that day and maybe the next.

If you want an add to appear on your page take ownership of it. Host it as an image file on your own website that you control and you are responsible for.

Anything else, we intend to find ways to block it, because we have learned the hard way that you cannot trust advertisers to not infect your system with malware (not always intentionally, but lets face it, that's a big source of failure).

It's not so much normal, I don't there is a 'normal' for major OS releases from microsoft, but 2015 is definitely reasonable.

Microsoft needs a deep pipeline for their products and they need to start taking about them early so developers have time to try stuff out. It's just not realistic to try and write the next Windows mostly in secret and behind NDA's and then land it on everyone's door step a month or two before release.

If they are going to talk about it in April and then maybe release in 2015, well truth be told that's probably not fast enough, but I'm not sure you can be expected to make it work much faster.

Metro is not the official name anywhere, it's just an internal codename that has clung to life.

I was meeting with an Intel Premium partner company a little while ago and they were 'not allowed to discuss' things as 'haswell' or 'broadwell' or the like, even though everyone knows what they mean. They're technically intel codenames and you're supposed to call them '4th generation' and '5th generation' on all the promo materials, same sort of thing. Internal codenames need not be trademarked.

Metro is officially the microsoft design language, and windows store style apps use the design language.

They might have money but they have virtually no chance against British Sky broadcasting, who also offer broadband services and a cloud storage feature as part of that. BSkyB also have about 10 billion US dollars a year in revenue, so they can afford Lawyers too.

It's also a good reminder that you should never take anything you cannot afford to lose through US customs. Electronic equipment is (sometimes understandably) under fairly constant scrutiny, and like hand crafted musical instruments, any sort of custom electronics part could easily get destroyed.

It's worth constant reminders that you cannot ever trust US customs.

Those have been able to build out of much smaller systems over time though.

And lots of them don't work right away... if ever. I wouldn't count delta and their half a million flyers a day (so presumably half a million reservations a day) as a shining example of a successful system. They've had a new system for a year and it still breaks constantly.

Banks yes - but then how much money are we talking about spending on IT. If you spend 500 million dollars to do a project that's going to cost a billion, and then it doesn't work you shouldn't be surprised. That doesn't mean it was easy - to the contrary it was much bigger and more expensive than you anticipated.

JP morgan spends ~ 2 Billion dollars a year on IT (http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/it-business/3342035/jp-morgan-overhauls-global-it-with-agile-development-and-automation/).

Well kinda, they need to interact with many dozens of insurance companies potentially, but ya, that they undershot capacity is a huge problem (and it's possible the there are capacity issues with the databases they need to talk to but don't control). With an MMO you just sell less copies until you have servers, with a website.. you don't really have that option.

Not really at least not that worked at this scale from day one. The closest you're going to get to needing to support millions of unique users on the first day, and hundreds of thousands simultaneously are things like MMO launches and WoW expansion packs or something like google+. And most of those can scale by replication and sectioning people off so it's highly parallel, or are built on already substantial infrastructure. If you crunch the math, there were only 90 days from launch to end date, and you need to enrol about 25 million people or something in that time (the uninsured who don't live in states with their own exchanges), so the daily load is actually quite high, particularly with a large number of people hitting the site to browse and decide. It's also quite likely that they gambled on more states setting up their own exchanges... and lost.

The backend of games and google+ of those is trivial compared to healthcare.gov, which not only needs to talk to databases from federal agencies, but it needs to connect to dozens of insurance companies with multiple sets of rules and regulations. Sure an MMO needs to do math, but one designer with no technical training can decide what equations to use and if they get it wrong no big deal. When you're dealing with money - and we're talking about healthcare that's going to be worth a couple of hundred billion dollars bought through this site, even a 1% error rate is going to cause no end of problems.

Input from the user that needs to be checked against multiple databases that aren't yours, that have private information in them. Then talking to multiple insurance companies in multiple jurisdictions with slightly different rules etc.

I'm not saying that excuses about 2 months of failure, but one should not assume this is a simple project, that they somehow did not realize that this would require probably 10x the server capacity they had is a complete failure. But other projects that are huge and stable have spent a lot more than 500 million dollars to get to that point, over a lot of years. These guys were trying to solve a problem no one else has ever had to solve on this scale. That they didn't recognize that is pathetic, but we shouldn't suppose this is an easy project.

I can't speak to the job sites in the US, but here we have recruiters coming to classrooms, and indeed.com seems to be working quite well as an aggregator.

I think we've got about 35 new engineering positions a month in the city I'm in, of 400k people. It sounds to me like you're searching wrong. At least assuming you have an actual engineering degree, and not a technician diploma or a degree in physics - those guys are screwed.

>A 70k job without benefits in Boston or Silicon Valley is basically equivalent to a minimum wage job in other parts of the USA. You can live on it, but its got no future.

70k starting salary for an undergrad is pretty good anywhere. Even in the valley.

And as I say, we're not even a great school. Good schools you've actually heard of can command much more.

>Cool, temporary worker, I don't have to provide benefits

Good luck trying that in canada.