Not sure if Linux excels on this globally, but I have an elderly relative doing all their email, web browsing and basic docs on a 2003 IBM Thinkpad running Lubuntu 16.04, with basically zero issues. Everything, including the old ATI X300 graphics card, worked out of the box.
I also have a younger relative using a 2008 Dell d630 for all his schoolwork, running Ubuntu 16.04. Again, the old Nvidia Quadro worked out of the box.
> Which companies were taken over illegally by organized groups in Australia?
That kind of stuff does happen in Australia too, it's not just widely known or reported on.
A good friend - (now-ex) business owner - several years ago had her company taken from her at gun point. With nothing to be done about it ("or else") by people who the police won't fk with.
Quite likely, the US got a few billionaires that are now a bit richer at the taxpayers' expense.
US General Smedley Butler explained it in simple terms in "War is a Racket" [1]:
"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
In the World War a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their income tax returns no one knows.
How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dugout? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried the bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle? "
Totally agree. And he's talking about WWII, a war the US was actually attacked in and defended itself, not a war purely for profit like Afghanistan. So knowing this, and you don't need to be a genius to understand his argument, why are we still honoring and thanking people for their "service," when their service is just to get a few people rich? Maybe we ought to consider that without the millions who are willing to fight and die to make a few people rich are part of the problem themselves, useful idiots. And maybe we need to respond to their actions in a more genuine way: with contempt and disdain. After all, all of our armed forces are volunteer based so no one is conscripted to kill for profit. The simply choose to. For their own little profit (free tuition, salary, pension, etc.) and for the profit of their billionaire masters. It's about time we stop glorifying war and the people that participate in it voluntarily.
Could you expand on why you, if I understood correctly, distrust CyberGhost?
It's getting hard to identify a trustworthy VPN provider, and CyberGhost seems to rate decently on thatoneprivacysite.net; in which, incidentally, I'm unsure whether to trust, although its VPN evaluation vectors do seem pretty appropriate and complete.
> They delivered value to the business. That's the only thing that matters.
Except this is an engineering blog post, so the engineering part actually matters.
And, as demonstrated in the article [1] linked around this discussion, there were better engineering approaches that would have been even "better for business", as being more efficient means lower costs per transaction and/or higher throughput.
It matters for engineers reading the article. It doesn't matter for the business. What they delivered was good enough. Could they have delivered a better solutions? Yes.
Should they have searched for a better solution instead of implementing the one they found? They could have spent some time researching, but you can always miss something. It's better to err on the side of delivering something now with a not-so-good solution than constantly searching for a better one.
I say this as software developer who is obsessed with efficiency. I'm starting to turn around and focus more on just delivering.
>It matters for engineers reading the article. It doesn't matter for the business. What they delivered was good enough. Could they have delivered a better solutions? Yes.
The entire reason they posted the article is to brag about having accomplished intelligently. It's relevant if their approach was actually not so intelligent.
"We encountered a standard problem and applied standard solutions" is like "dog bites man". It's not what they were trying to say with the blog post.
>Should they have searched for a better solution instead of implementing the one they found? They could have spent some time researching, but you can always miss something. [...] I'm starting to turn around and focus more on just delivering.
I think the critics point is that the efficient way was probably also cheaper than what they did, and would take the same time to implement, and have lower recurring costs. It would have just been a matter of using off-the-shelf tools and not reinventing the wheel because that wheel is "complicated" and "obviously our case is special". (Someone did benchmarks, and their case is not special.)
You're right, there is a danger to what-if-ing everything and being stuck in decision paralysis. But the clear subtext is that they merit some kind of admiration for how well they did. If that subtext is wrong, it is worth pointing out.
There is theoretically a scenario in which a company might temporarily lose money on each transaction due to scale, but over the long term manage to lower costs so that each transaction is profitable. Even that, I'd say it's dangerous to count on that, but it's not completely impossible.
I think that's different from dumping, which I consider to be a more deliberate attempt to outlast a competitor.
"ETL developer" was (and still is) the industry term for more than 10 years before this new wave of buzzword spam came along (i.e. when "data science" was "data mining"). Most of these roles focused on using low-code tools like SSIS to build business-focused data transformation workflows faster than with any code intensive approach (e.g. Hadoop ecosystem and derivatives).
Business intelligence consultant/developer was a blanket term used either for 1) people that can model and translate business requirements into data platforms/components; 2) poorly targeted recruiting; 3) more rarely, to describe people that work both in 'frontend' (reporting and dashboarding using tools like PowerBI, who are "data analysts" in newspeak) and 'backend' (ETL developer).
"Data Engineer" today is, sadly, too often synonym with "solving solved problems using an unnecessarily complex approach and toolkit"; and then there are the cases where the volume or complexity of the data actually justifies the cost of using "big data" platforms. Not to sound harsh; the article discussed here illustrates my point using "simple" unix tools: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14401399
I also have a younger relative using a 2008 Dell d630 for all his schoolwork, running Ubuntu 16.04. Again, the old Nvidia Quadro worked out of the box.