Perhaps a better question ... how long is your situation going to last? Academia offers stability to an extent .. say post tenure. Industry does not imho.
Statistically, most PhDs will work in industry because academia is a pyramid. Do PhDs get higher paid jobs in industry than academia? Unsure.
Entry postdoc salaries in the UK are on par with industry outside London (£30-40k). Over time industry will probably pay more, but professors earn £60k minimum so they're hardly underpaid.
Being a postdoc is something of a sweet spot. You get paid enough (finally) to enjoy life a bit, you have immense working flexiblity and you aren't lumbered (yet) with the bureaucracy of the university system. The only way to advance is usually to take on teaching loads and more admin.
But.. postdocs are almost always contractual, lasting 1-3 years. This has benefits: most people do a couple of postdocs before getting tenure and it allows you to move around the world if you like. Academia is only permanent if you get tenure, and even then it's still dependent on your research output and teaching performance. If you got a job in a grad scheme, you'd have a more stable job after finishing your PhD.
Getting tenure is hard. This is absolutely not the normal route for PhDs, as much as they think it is. There are far fewer permanent positions than there are postdocs, so it's not uncommon for people to move abroad just to get a stable job.
Speaking from experience as a postdoc, we earn less for sure, but from what I can see a postdoc in the US earns about the same. In the rest of Europe things are a bit different. At the extreme end, in Zurich you might earn 100k CHF as a postdoc if you're lucky (but you pay 30EUR for a pizza). Even at really top-tier places like TUM, you're going to be on 35-40k EUR.
A typical professorial scale in the UK (most universities publish this information publicly) ranges from £60-120k.
You have to realise two things. First, that FAANG are crazy outliers. Second, that UK universities are publicly funded and with few exceptions, justifying six figure salaries from the taxpayer is difficult. A lot of professors make good money on the side by doing consulting.
I believe this is different in the US, as a lot of universities (like Stanford) have huge private endowments. I'm not sure how it works at places like Oxford where the university owns half the centre of town.
A senior engineer in London or a tech hub like Cambridge might make six figures, but that's after several years probably. For engineers, there are much higher salaries to be found elsewhere in Europe in places like Munich.
I don't believe my situation is rare: this position was considerably easier to attain than a faculty position.
Stability is better and worse. It is better in terms of resources (I don't have to apply for grants, I can get summer students, and not for grad student descent! ) but it certainly has less job security than tenure.
The purchase of github doesn't make immediate financial sense to me. This article posted a reason - to stave off Windows decline. While it is plausible, I still don't see it.
The reason? Simple. Developer mindshare. Microsoft lost it with Ballmer, and is getting it back under Satya. Ultimately Microsoft's success has always stemmed from providing platforms that support developers, and in turn they build great products people will pay for. And that drives Microsoft revenues, be it the OS, or nowadays, SaaS PaaS and IaaS (and OS).
Just have to point out how fucking expensive develope mindshare is then :)
But seriously, from a business perspective buy GitHub (a company which gobbled up lots of VS money without a good business model) the acquisition doesn't makes any sense.
Oh, they understood it, top tier mobile devs, they just thought it was trash. Drastically preferred to do native. I went to bat for them, and we shipped a beautiful app on time.
In my view it's a longer term proposition to gain more customers for Azure/Microsoft Cloud. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon all see the future of computing as being in the cloud.
If Microsoft can integrate Azure and GitHub to make it easier for developers to deploy and run their code in the cloud, then that means more Azure customers.
This likely means that GCP and AWS integrations will take second place.
Maybe you know next year it will by coincidence get harder to integrate with Heroku. If they would buy it, somehow it could get harder to integrate with Azure.
To be fair though, that sort of thing has already been very possible for anyone with the desire and engineering resources. The only thing those types of demonstrations and announcements tend to actually do is announce/release a tool that does most of the legwork for you.
Cultural reasons maybe. The Ruby/Rails community Github is also part of fits into the overall strategy of cultural change towards a more design and UX centric brand, that is recognized and respected by other designers beyond being just a tool for CAD modeling.
Here is what I don't get. It is far easier for github's dev community to move to an alternate than Facebook users. Unless there is revenue to back it up, I don't understand the 7.5 Billion price tag. Heck .. Docker for 10 Billion might have been plausible. What are the barriers to another entrant?
This acquisition reminds me of the Minecraft acquisition. It did not make financial sense to me either. If Nadella keeps this up, he will eventually have issues with shareholders.
This time, really, the profits don’t matter: Microsoft is paying by issuing about 73 million new shares of stock, which cost it nothing. (It’s a tiny dilution, given the company’s 7.7 billion shares outstanding; what’s more, the share price rose on the news, which means that existing shareholders are happy to be diluted.)
Using overvalued stock could make the acquisition “cheaper” than the sticker price (not really free). However, they’ve said they’ll do extraordinary buybacks to cancel the dilution in six months following the transaction. So unless the price of MSFT shares has a large correction during that period they are really going to spend over $7bn in cash.
Just to add to your response and making assumptions about how you came up with the $7 billion....
The new stock is about 1% of the total number of shares outstanding. Thier total market cap is around. $785 billion. If they did a stock buyback to cancel the dilution it would be 7.85 billion.
My numbers are rounded - the new stock is actually less than 1% and the market cap as of right now is a little less than 785 billion so around 7 billion is more accurate.
I just rounded down (to give a conservative estimate) the $7.5bn I've seen everywhere. If they are giving them new MSFT shares worth $7.5bn, buying those shares back would cost around $7.5bn assuming the price doesn't move. Of course it may be significantly more or less that depending on the evolution of the stock price.
By the way, I said they will buy back stock in the next six months but it will be in the six months following the closing of the transaction (which is expected to take place by the end of the year). I've edited my previous comment slightly.
That seems like spurious logic, especially given that Microsoft has spent many, many billions of their cash hoard on a stock buyback program (as does Apple, etc). By the broken logic of that Slate article, they're throwing money down a well foolishly because shares outstanding are "free".
Further, noting the current day price change is always the basis for countless nonsense articles. The shares haven't been diluted yet -- not until the deal closes later in the year -- and a temporary blip one way or another is close to meaningless.
Whether a share price is inflated or not is always a point of contention -- if it's so obvious we can all buy our put options and retire on our riches. However Microsoft could literally have sold $7.5B worth of new shares and given that money to charity (which, in turn, would have been a nice tax benefit).
That money is very real, and there is nothing free about it.
Whether a share price is inflated or not is always a point of contention -- if it's so obvious we can all buy our put options and retire on our riches.
"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent".
Brutus said eventually, and that's an entirely reasonable statement. Microsoft has burned many, many billions on foolish ventures to try to regain namespace, while at the same time the entirety of their revenue is still based on the coasting remains of the empire they built a decade ago. Microsoft's revenue has stagnated, despite endlessly acquiring and adding new verticals to the stack.
To put it another way, simply doing the SAP and squeezing Windows + Office would have netted a much more profitable business than everything Microsoft has been doing.
Azure has negligible profit (if any), and it's profoundly telling that Microsoft always hogties Azure numbers with Windows Server sales. The press remarkably buys this hook line and sinker, repeats this Intelligent Cloud prattle as if it's true.
[As an aside, Microsoft's continuing tendency to group success with losers, shuffling them around to opaque the numbers, is something that sees far less skepticism than it should. We saw this with Windows Mobile cum Phone where they tried to put on the face of success for as long as possible]
Microsoft was traditionally a very high profit margin company, and their software offerings still are. Azure might sound good to make them seem like they're still with it, but it is deadly long term (massive capital expenses, fast depreciation, and very low margins).
15ms is correct (or even wildly optimistic) for VR on account of hardware buffering for GPU throughput / input filtering for stability, etc., LCD reaction times, and other local software and hardware stuff.
The part that's not correct is 15ms ~ 15,000 feet @ c:
15ns ~ 15 ft
15us ~ 15,000 ft
15ms ~ 15,000,000 ft
Light travel time t in vacuum from t = x/c: | 134 ms (milliseconds)
Light travel time t in an optical fiber t = 1.48x/c: | 198 ms (milliseconds)
You wouldn't want to wait for a camera to turn in response to head movement at these distances, but we're already warping buffers in VR to reduce apparent latency - to hide it better for head rotations. You wouldn't want to try and directly control twitchy aircraft or race cars with this kind of latency, but this is still under e.g. throttle response times on a modern car, and you've probably dealt with worse round trip ping times for online gaming.
Err ... not according to Econ 101. A rational producer in a perfectly competitive market supplies just enough to clear the market. When people distort markets with subsidies, etc. the amount produced is more. This can also be in industries with barriers to entry as a large producer might supply more on purpose to drive existing competitors out of business.
Always gotta be careful applying 101 knowledge to a real world problem.
Also, this is an unfortunate misinterpretation of even econ 101. Econ 101 says that there is not a fixed demand for most goods. Demand (and supply) have elasticity, which is a measure of their responsiveness to price changes. A rational producer with perfect information does not "clear the market" if that means "supply enough to meet all demand for the good." (If that's not what it means, I really don't know what it does mean.) They supply just to the point where marginal cost of production is equal to the price the next consumer is willing to pay.
And, subsidies are not definitionally distortionary. Sometimes they can be used to correct uncaptured positive externalities.
I looked into sgx recently and have a question related to your comment. It seems an enclave doesn't make system calls. I was wondering how any io gets done? You mention untrusted ... is that the only way??? Trust zone seems to do it better then?
An enclave does not make any system calls directly like the rest of the process would, but a system call can definitely be made through the use of a shim layer. In SGX parlance, calls to the outside of the enclave are known as OCALLs. The danger with relying on values returned by a syscall is that the OS could be lying. As an exercise, you could implement a simple "hello, world" filesystem driver that hides the presence of certain files. So, as long as the enclave has no trusted path to I/O, it must rely on the operating system, which is assumed compromised. If the enclave decrypts protected content for the sake of having those be written to the display by the OS, then you can see that the contents are not secure. SGX support for PAVP means that the chipset is involved in shuttling the data into and out of the enclave, with no one being able to interject. Not sure TrustZone solves this.
