Serious freelancers who try to make a decent living out of it don't use those sites, for several reasons, some of which I'll go through.

1: Overall(note the word, overall), they cater to simple projects in oversaturated fields.

2: They get flooded by unscrupulous or simply cheap people who offer pay way below what is decent.

3: You get no way of building up a decent reputation.

4: As a combination of the above factors, you have to churn through lots of contracts constantly, increasing risk of burnout, failed contracts etc.

On the other hand, to make a decent living, both in pay and in the way of hours you work, you want to work in specialist niches, one contract at a time, maybe two overlapping at a pinch, if they don't interfere with each other(Starting the design phase of a new project as you're working on the testing/debugging/deployment phase of your previous one works ok usually, while starting a new project while in the development/coding phase of the previous one is usually not so good...)

You want to establish a good reputation and a wide contact network. And always make sure that you have a lawyer of your own go through the contracts, and the help of a good accountant. In fact, the more familiarity you get with your clients, the better, since you will get more leeway in case of sickness/family issues/issues beyond your control etc.

Avoiding the use of those websites, and working via agents instead, also gives you better options for negotiation(especially if you have the advise of a lawyer and/or an accountant, depending on the issues you need advise on), and can better structure your life. It also allows you to check out potential clients much more easily. Some of your contacts, or your contacts contacts, may know about some issues that have not made it into public records for example. Point in case, a contract was offered to my agent once, which he immediately blacklisted. Why? Because he checked up on some of the people running the company, and found major financial discrepancies, such as the company nominally running at a loss, CEO supposedly earning only 20k euro per year from that post and a total yearly income of 40k euro per year yet still owning a yacht worth about 2M euro etc.

I have freelanced for about 15 years now, and while I initially had to take risks with many contracts, I can now be far more careful, and choose the contract offers that will benefit me not just financially, but also what best suits my health and family.

Now, by no means do I earn any extreme amounts. Last fiscal year, I earned about 50k euro after taxes, which may not seem like much, but in terms of swedish living costs, that's well above average. However, as a freelancer, I do have to set money aside for courses, seminars etc.

(OK, I'll take that question from the clueless nerd in the peanut gallery)

Why do I set aside money for courses, seminars etc, when I could just use google and study on my own?

Well, as I pointed out above, contacts and reputation are everything if you want to be successful, and don't want to be screwed over. To the intelligent AND wise people, it also means exchange of experiences, those things you can't teach via text tutorials etc. It means getting in touch with new people who can forward things your way, as you forward things to them. In terms of reputation, one of the way it helps is that participating in courses etc lets you be seen as still keeping in touch, still able to learn, that you are not stagnating and too heavily wedged inside a niche.

It only partially helps people. You also have to find out other factors in someones daily life that contribute to malnutrition of any kind. As one of the other posters mentioned, if you blindly follow your simplistic notion, there are no compensations made for stress, illness, symptoms of lack of nutrition etc. As an example, during a hospital treatment I was in for, a dietician had me on a strict calorie plan, ignoring that I was doing physical therapy, and was healing injuries, and thus almost caused me serious complications. I did begin to suffer starvation hallucinations, bouts of depression etc.

Since we're in the EU, as is Hungary, in fact, yes, we do!

Not that Akamai's State of the Internet is worth a damn anyway, with the throttled shit we have to deal with in the nordic countries. Seriously, Akamai is crap here. Steam, Limelight Networks etc etc, I can max out my 100/100 connection. If it's Akamai, it slows down to like 20Mbit/s.

Personally, I like the quieter cars, both in everyday traffic and in racing. Unlike many others, I enjoy the new turbo V6's in Formula One for example, and it would be interesting to see how much faster the turbo V6's would be than the previous eras if they were allowed to use the aerodynamics regs of those eras(That's what actually slowed down the 2014 F1 cars, the greater restrictions on aero).

I also enjoy the LMP1 hybrids that are much quieter than their spiritual ancestors, the Group C prototypes.

For me, within a given engine type, more noise=less impressive, since it shows that it's badly engineered and wasting energy.

There is a way to work around that. Create a VHD on your network drive, mount that VHD as a drive via disk manager, point backup to that drive.

6 WD Red 2TB disks split over 3 VDEVs, sector size is set correctly etc. No encryption, no compression. And it makes no difference whether I use NFS or Samba.

ZFS is something with which I have yet to familiarize myself with the internals so I can only guess, but my initial impression is that it's similar to older unix filesystems(and why Silicon Graphics developed XFS) in that it is not that good at handling many large files simultaneously. So I have the original video clip, then I have individual folders with the RBG channel images, the alpha channel images, the shadow maps, etc etc etc, meaning that for each second of 3D animation there's hundreds of images.

I've recently gone back to my roots and started dabbling with 3D animation and compositing again. My fileserver is a FreeBSD machine running on a decent 64-bit CPU with 16GiB RAM, with ZFS. And let me tell you, ZFS is dog slow for some uses, without it being anywhere near full. In my case, lossless-encoded video, and directories with thousands of 4MiB+ images, and working against that in realtime(or trying to), the filesystem stalled out at 80MiB/s, while my old fileserver running Linux and XFS easily saturated the gigabit link

The mainframe people I know, when they rarely refer to transactions, have a slightly different meaning from when windows or unix people do it. The mainframe people more often rever to messages, which is a whole discrete task, which can often require multiple database transactions, some computational passes etc. They usually talk about hundreds of thousands of messages per hour, so if it's 2.5 billion mainframe-style "transactions"(messages), it's pretty damn impressive.

Let's not forget something as simple as debugging. Someone who understands the hardware and knows Assembler will always have an advantage when it comes to debugging.

Hardware should always be a concern, because hardware is the reality that implements the abstraction of a program. No matter how efficient something is in purely mathematical terms, it's the hardware that determines the actual performance, complexity and problems. ISA, I/O capabilities, amount of RAM etc all matter in deciding what will be the best way to implement something.

No matter how many layers of abstraction you put in to provide the illusion of being able to ignore the hardware, the reality of hardware will always matter.

Nono, like other big IT projects in the UK, it will be using "the very latest in Agile know-how", and cost 3 times as much as any clusterfuck that involves Oracle, take 50% longer, and spread 300% more blame on "old fossiles"....

Disclaimer: Had to interface with a EU project under UK IT auspices last year.... Painful....

While your faith in the religion of liberretardianism sounds fun, history empirically proves you 100% wrong.

Except that the Xbox One runs Shadows of Mordor at 720p and 30FPS. An el-cheapo PC built now can run Shadows of Mordor in 1080p and above 60 FPS stable, and with better details etc.

Something I wish I could have in a workstation again is a full-fledged crossbar switch like the Octane and Octane 2 had.