Microsoft Band • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft Band

#331

Post by lhl » Thu, Oct 30, 2014, 12:34 PM UTC

reboog711 wrote: post #299

ethomson wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To compare Microsoft Band to a FitBit doesn't do the Band justice. FitBit is a toy - counting footsteps isn't "fitness" and a few LEDs isn't feedback. With GPS and an actual display, the Band actually has the ability to compete against Garmin and Suunto and actual fitness watches. My Garmin is bulky, can't lock a signal in a neighborhood with tall buildings and has software reminiscent of an Atari. And it was more ex…

All the 'newer' Fitbit models have displays including the Fitbit Force; the Charge (which appears to have replaced the Force), and the Surge (Which also has a GPS). The big benefit I see to the MS product is that it is available before the Surge, and is a little cheaper.

The fact that Fitbit charges you $50/yr to export your own data is also probably also counts as an advantage to Microsoft as well...

Re: Microsoft Band

#332

Post by lhl » Thu, Oct 30, 2014, 12:38 PM UTC

com2kid wrote: post #191

javert wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I took the person saying "MS is mum on it" as "they are keeping it secret." If they are keeping it secret, that's interesting. But I'm possibly reading into this something that isn't there.

Hi! Dev lead here. Obviously not an official MS response! We are using a single threaded lightweight runtime based around call backs. We are completely non-blocking on all IO (including all sensors), and our CPU spends the majority of its time in a very low power mode. Every microsecond of CPU time is accounted for and justified! I cannot wait until people look at our battery size in mAh.

Any word on an open API/raw data export or is that a policy, not a eng decision?

Re: Microsoft Band

#333

Post by sumedh » Thu, Oct 30, 2014, 12:38 PM UTC

jezfromfuture wrote: post #234

where fit bit and apple tread microsoft will eventually follow.

That is pretty much MS's strategy for all these years. Someone else does the innovation and then they follow.

Re: Microsoft Band

#334

Post by ntakasaki » Thu, Oct 30, 2014, 12:40 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #315

ntakasaki wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great job on completely derailing the topic here with unrelated flamebait by confusing HN with YC. Hint: HN is a message board, YC is a startup accelerator. They are NOT the same. And yes, there are plenty of startups that do quite okay on the MS stack and for many it may not be a good fit. Your post adds nothing new to the discussion. >It means: try to get companies that otherwise would not go for Microsoft products…

Right... https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ntakasaki Every third or so link you posted has 'microsoft' in it. As for me confusing HN and YC, I'm quite aware of the difference between the two and as far as I know I didn't confuse them in the least. Lots of start-up people frequent HN, YC related founder or not they are better off using what is most cost effective for them. This will rarely translate to 'micros…

>As for me confusing HN and YC, I'm quite aware of the difference between the two and as far as I know I didn't confuse them in the least. Lots of start-up people frequent HN

Felix said he's the MS person for YC. You misrepresented it as HN a couple of times. Please read your post again.

>Every third or so link you posted has 'microsoft' in it.

But we do have you to counterbalance me.

>Hosting is almost never the biggest cost for a start-up, but it can be the biggest cost for a larger company, which is what most start-up aim to become.

What? What is the biggest cost for a startup in the initial phase when founders are not taking salaries? Rent for sleeping? Ramen noodles? Which large company has the biggest cost as hosting? Even 50k/yr is like 1/3rd of a Silicon level salary. It's like you got it completely backwards.

Anyway, all this unrelated to the topic at hand and does not belong here. There were numerous HN threads with this discussion and please write your thoughts as a blog post and you'll have my upvote.

Again, got any thoughts on the Microsoft Band? If not, /thread, I am out.

Re: Microsoft Band

#335

Post by lhl » Thu, Oct 30, 2014, 12:45 PM UTC

antjanus wrote: post #302

lhl wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like you'd have the ability to control/turn off all the notifications you don't want. Why would you assume that wouldn't be the case? http://www.microsoft.com/Microsoft-Band/en-us/support/phone-...

i never assumed it wasn't the case.

Then why would you complain about getting alerts if they can be disabled? Or are you complaining about the idea of other people being able to get alerts because you don't approve of the concept?

Re: Microsoft Band

#336

Post by akimc » Thu, Oct 30, 2014, 12:55 PM UTC

I'm not a big Microsoft fan, but I think this device isn't that bad especially for the fact that it is working on Android, iPhone & Windows Phone.

I'm a bit thrilled to see it live in action !

It is fun to see wearable becoming more and more present with big tech firm too.

Re: Microsoft Band

#337

Post by orbifold » Thu, Oct 30, 2014, 12:59 PM UTC

blumkvist wrote: post #295

orbifold wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well western governments are experts in keeping their population docile and politically disinterested. So I'm not surprised a growing percentage of their population is fine with being monitored and spied on. The majority of the population might not really need protection from the state, but the few that do, dissidents, political activists definitely do. By establishing a culture, where people are happy to share their…

>because the government thought they had to keep taps on far left student organisations. That's a perfectly sensible thing to do. I would do the same thing. Any enlightened person would do it.

I agree but there are different ways of going about it. In the particular case I know of, a police officer infiltrated all left leaning student organisations in order to get access to the more radical ones. By infiltrated I mean that he went to their meetings, was invited to parties and reported all their personal information. In any case, I just wanted to defuse the argument that the government is probably not that interested in your data. Its far easier to turn devices such as this against you, I mentioned the case where they recorded the phone numbers of every mobile device at a largely peaceful demonstration. Since there is no reason to ever delete this data, you not only have to trust that the current government is benevolent and reasonable, but also that this form of government is stable, does not crumble and you don't end up on a kill list 20 years later. This might not be an issue in the West, but there are countless cases around the world, where based on much less information political activists / dissidents were murdered.

Re: Microsoft Band

#338

Post by wfjackson » Thu, Oct 30, 2014, 1:00 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #220

rjbwork wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Person scaling with Azure here. It's pretty awesome and easy. But dear god, the XML! They've started making more and more stuff code-configurable though, so that's good.

> Person scaling with Azure here. It's pretty awesome and easy. And it's pretty expensive. Now, if your competitor is on an open stack and on real computers they will eventually run rings around you because they get more control and lower costs. The initial boost you're experiencing will turn into a straightjacket with a hefty pricetag over the longer term.

>Now, if your competitor is on an open stack and on real computers they will eventually run rings around you because they get more control and lower costs. The initial boost you're experiencing will turn into a straightjacket with a hefty pricetag over the longer term.

From another post by you: >Because I have fairly extensive insight into a very large number of companies and can see their license bills as well as their cloud bills if those are applicable.

Since you claim to have a lot of info on this can you give any, even one, real world example of you just said happening?

Otherwise I am going to call BS on it.

Perhaps you're starting something that is going to take down NewEgg.com ? You're clearly missing the forest for trees here. At work we run a large mix of Windows Servers, SQL servers, Linux, Drupal, MySQL, Moodle etc. running fairly traffic heavy and top ranking public health sites and all said our licensing and hosting costs are about 2% of our annual budget.

Re: Microsoft Band

#339

Post by turnip1979 » Thu, Oct 30, 2014, 1:01 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #277

gommm wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly plus at scale AWS doesn't do everything either, a sysadmin or at least consultants are still needed to navigate the gotchas and help with how to better provision the stack. AWS instances don't just scale themselves. There is one specific case when I recommend AWS instead of dedicated servers and it's for customers who have widely varying traffic with predictable peaks. In that case having the flexibility affo…

The only good use-case I know for AWS and it's ilk is if you need a 10,000 node cluster for a few hours to do some heavily compute intensive work which does not require a very large amount of data to be imported and exported afterwards. This is a pretty limited number of use cases but for those situations it absolutely rocks. Anything else I'd run the numbers very carefully.

I don't think that is correct. There are thousands of startups on AWS (an IAAS cloud) that don't run 10K node clusters. While they cost may be high, it is pay as you go. I have a rack full of computers at home and I still have some things served by AWS. The PAAS model (e.g. Heroku, Bluemix) is becoming popular today but those are often hosted in IAAS clouds.

Re: Microsoft Band

#340

Post by CHY872 » Thu, Oct 30, 2014, 1:17 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #323

pdpi wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The main criterium is: use what you know how to use. So if you're comfortable using the MS stack then go for it, otherwise, probably better to avoid it. So, would it be fair to say "So if you're comfortable using the Linux stack then go for it, otherwise, probably better to avoid it", or was that your parting jab against MS?

No, since Linux & FreeBSD are license free they have intrinsic advantages over Microsoft.

This will factor in, but you can't make such sweeping statements - many parts of different stacks have their own intrinsic advantages.

Certainly, a silicon valley company of 10-20 employees will likely have costs of over $1000 a day - any software or hardware licensing will pale in comparison to this until the product is big.