As someone who's also done a lot of DV and DV tools, I love to see it. This gap was something I took away from attending DVCon last year and seeing all the papers from folks reinventing in the same verif tools.
Feeling inspired after DVCon, I was sick of how annoying our test infrastructure was to interact with so I built a vscode extension as a front end to the existing mature infrastructure. Handles running tests, regressions, opening logs of all kinds, launching vendor tools, jumping to definitions, hover over documentation on all our custom config files, even breakpoints that export to verdi. I've got about 30 people using it now which is pretty neat.
My main learnings are 1) boy it would be tough to make this generic enough to my existing infra without making it lose all the benefits 2) Switching away from my editor is a huge context loss, having tools directly inside my editor keeps everything moving faster.The thought of adding yet another important web page to my browser isn't pleasant. I specifically added features to my extension so I could avoid going to our internal regression results webpage.
Hey, that sounds really cool, and also sounds like it was a lot of work! As for point 2, we are planning at some point on making everything accessible via API and releasing a CLI, so a VSCode extension should definitely be possible.
Honestly, way less work than you'd think. A couple of months of a few hours per week tinkering. Copilot taught me the typescript and the vscode api is very powerful and well documented. Being able to leverage other extensions already doing the heavy work is a huge benefit (such as DVT for identifying symbol definitions).
Exactly. They got early support because of a strong brand they worked hard to create over the last decade. They backed their idea with market research and created something which could be enjoyed from the very beginning. These are important ingredients in their success.
If I remember correctly, the XBox was operating at a loss at the beginning. I think it was more than expected that it would take a few years to break into the market.
There's a major difference between operating at a loss while selling 1.3 million units in 3 months (more than the PS2, PS3, Wii) as the XBOX did and having a product that absolutely nobody is buying as the Surface.
There's a major difference between "a product that absolutely nobody is buying" and the revenue reported in the eight most recent quarters: $672MM (Q1-2016), $888MM (Q4-2015), $713MM (Q3-2015), $1100MM (Q2-2015), $908MM (Q1-2015), $409MM (Q4-2014), $500MM (Q3-2014), $893MM (Q2-2014).
(to note, Q2 is their oct-nov-dec quarter)
~$6Billion in revenue means absolutely someone is buying Surface products.
The year (2016) refers to the calendar year in which Microsoft's fiscal year ends (Jun 2016). Many, but not all, companies use a standard fiscal year of Jul-Jun rather than a calendar year of Jan-Dec for financial reporting and tax purposes.
Thus, Q1 2016 means the quarter ending Sep 30, 2015, for Microsoft's fiscal year ending Jun 30, 2016 (which began Jul 1, 2015).
I travel on a train for a medium length journey 2-4 times a week. In the last 12 months I've noticed that the transition from never seeing a Surface (Pro) to seeing 5-10% of tablets being a Surface (Pro). The vast majority are iPads still but its interesting that Surface has made such inroads. Based on what I see the main reason is the combination of the keyboard and Outlook.
A lot of people forget that IT departments in medium to large companies need to be able to remotely manage equipment, Macs are "annoying" and iPads are damn near un-manage-able.
So while a lot of middle managers outside of IT think that iPads are "cool" and push for them, they get a lot of push back from IT due to their impracticality and the amount of time/resources it would take to manage.
A Surface Pro has none of these issues. It is a standard Windows 10 PC which can be managed via System Center/AD/GPO/etc, so they're non-effort machines for enterprise/IT.
So that, I suspect, is why you're seeing so many so quickly. Internally non-IT management wants a "tablet" and the IT department is deflecting from iPads onto Surface Pros because it is in their best interests to do so.
The executives completely renounced the whole dress code thing though. It was some middle manager who though it would be a great idea for his unit and got slammed after it hit public media.
In my personal use situation, if I want to see a movie from this year I go see it in a movie theater. If I'm just looking for something to watch, I pull up Netflix. Typically I can find something interesting and decent. I don't need popcorn time, because it isn't worth the effort/risk/moral grey area when I have legal paid options. As long as there are no commercials in my Netflix, I'm happy.
In my experience, it is always worth showing up, but not always worth paying attention as far as a cost-gain analysis from a student perspective. Showing up ensures that if there is an announcement or hints about labs/homework then you can take advantage of it. Lecture material is often availible elsewhere such as class website or the textbook
