Yes people are evil and these people manifest themselves in the form of corporations, governments and agencies. There is the second system effect as well where one of the mechanisms above manifests itself as something evil when the components are thoroughly innocent. An example of the latter is your typical defence contractor. Also reference the film "The Cube" which discusses this as part of the theme.
People are definitely evil when they shrug off the moral implications of what they're doing for a pile of cash or turn a blind eye to the consequences of doing something. There are a lot of evil people on here and each little action adds a paper cut to society.
I haven't built my own PC for a number of years and probably wouldn't consider it any more to be honest (MacBook FTW). I will however recommend this to anyone who does ask me about self-builds :)
> Sounds like the Master Programmer has never worked at a company that crunched you for 80 hour weeks, for weeks.
Nor has the master programmer worked for a company populated by utter morons who leave a large minefield in every task where all one-day estimates turn into one week ones the moment you start sharpening your tools...
(that's reality in corporate land)
Too bad I'm sitting here reading HN and playing my piano for a bit between emails...
Fixed it myself after 3 years of hell from doctors who quite clearly were a) short of any realistic knowledge on the matter and b) quite clearly using me as an experimental subject for everything the drug company was pushing at the time.
Worked out how to reset it myself: just drank water for the best part of two weeks and low end carbs (bran flakes with water on) and nothing else. Felt like crap for about 4 days then started to improve. After my butt stopped wrenching daily, I introduced normal foods back one at a time over the space of 3 months, ending with meat and heavy carbs.
I got these steps from a microbiologist rather than a doctor.
Fuck all extra value. 395 seats for nothing. Not only that, it's a pile of crap. It's slow, unreliable and requires so much configuration to bend it into an acceptable shape that it has cost probably 20 days' work on top of that and requires someone to spend 2-3 days a month on it. It has also gone down twice due to workflow failures and indexing bugs which have taken a day to resolve bouncing back and forth to support (they are actually quite good). We also integrate with Crucible which barely works on a good day and we've resorted to restarting it twice a day to stop it leaking memory and hanging. Plus it takes 9 whole days to index our repository after an upgrade!!!
And we can't go hosted because X isn't available and Y isn't available. Also hosted LOST a load of people's data a year or so ago.
Believe it or not, including the pricing strategy and administrative overhead we could have wrote our own tailored software for less after 3 years.
Bad product selection on our part, but despite the marketing and general buzz around Atlassian being the opposite, it stinks as a platform. Nothing but pain.
As someone in the UK, I'm quite happy for amazon to provide me with low cost items on this basis. The tax is fixed rate VAT here in the UK so everything I buy from a tax dodge means I'm effectively getting a small rebate against my nearly £3375 a month (including income tax, NI and VAT) contribution to the state every month versus spinning another 20% into VAT.
If you want quality try bytemark/bigv or Colo with exonetric.
Edit: I tried linode and was pretty happy but I don't trust something so far from home. Also tried digital ocean but the lagging kernels shot it for me.