BT have just this week installed fibre to my house. While most of the last mile is copper it is wrong to say "Everything is copper" particularly when you consider in a vast majority of cases now the cable from exchange to the cabinet is fibre.
With UE4 you can pay for a single month and retain full access to the tools you've paid for, you just don't get updates. What you could decide on doing is paying every few months when an update comes along that offers something you need / want.
Not only is the shared tier a preview product it also releases itself from memory when inactive which results in a slow warm up after this happens and a visitor lands on your site.
Great for a personal blog but for a business where your customers expect things instantly, it is not so good.
Recently I have been working on a project with a client where we have been using SkyDrive and its online Excel for simple and basic collaboration on a few documents.
The thing that I love about this setup is having the original Excel document sat there on the skydrive ready to be edited in the full Excel when more advanced editing is required and seamlessly updated on the web (although not at the same time, which is something I hope will be possible in the future).
Perhaps you should look into the investment banking divisions who are more algo focussed or those companies who provide services to those firms. That way you will have the best of both worlds
I am a big fan of TFS particularly since it allows for the feedback client to be used to get direct feedback (Video, Audio, Screenshots etc) into it from selected users in a very unintimidating way.
I don't have the full picture here but by moving away from an Excel format you are also potentially taking away a lot of control they have themselves over managing the data and working the data which Excel is extremely good at with little to no programming.
XLSX and the other OpenXML formats are generally speaking very easy to query, particularly as Microsoft provide their OpenXML SDK to do it with as well as other 3rd party tools provide similar functionality.
In my personal experience with working in .NET MVC within VS 2012 it is noticeably slower working with Debug always on as you cannot simply build and refresh the code, each time you need to load the debugger, test drop out of debug, fix, repeat.
I prefer to do as much without debugger and then when I need to inspect variables and step through code drop into debug mode.
With Python this may be different but I doubt it. I expect you will have to wait while the debugger loads up. If you can edit code whilst debugger is running then I can see that being a big plus and a reason to keep it on.
I agree with you, however I like to have my main solution explorer on the left with second solution explorer scoped to my Models or another project I am actively working with within the solution docked on the right.
I wonder if they kept the default layout to keep it as simple and "out of the box" as they can in order not to confuse newcomers to the Visual Studio way of doing things.
I am using Mandrill at the moment and am very happy with them, not do any large volume sends yet but I am using their inbound API which is great. I have dealt with support twice and they have been very responsive and helpful.
I do hope there is another Banjo Kazooie - not the nuts and bolts kind but a classic platformer even if it is not published by Rare I would still love to see it!