No, this is what Slashdot has always been. I started regularly reading Slashdot around 2000, and back then there were posts just like yours decrying the state of Slashdot today, pining for some golden age. And yet, looking at the archives, not much had changed.

And neither mentions the CPU architecture, but if you go to the product brochure then you learn that they're Intel Xeon E5s (which doesn't narrow it down much). Interesting that they're using E5s and not E7s, but perhaps most of the compute is supposed to be done on the (unnamed, vaguely referenced) accelerators.

There are also costs associated with taking cash. Having to store large amounts of cash, having to audit tills more often, having to transport it to the bank, increased security needed as a result of being a much more attractive burglary target, and so on. For large stores, these tend to be more than the cost of accepting cards (next time you're in a supermarket, imagine if every transaction was cash. Think about how much they'd have on the premises by the end of the working day.

The difference is that the costs of accepting cash don't scale linearly, whereas credit card fees do. For a small shop with a low turnover, cash is often a better deal, but for a large shop it isn't. I came across a paper a few years ago that compared the two and was quite surprised by how much handling cash costs even small businesses.

They don't hate you, but you're probably not their favourite customer. The most profitable people are the ones that have high income and poor impulse control, who will buy an expensive thing periodically and then take a few months (at 10+% interest) to pay it off.

The people who put through a lot of purchases and pay promptly are the next best - they're charging the merchant 1-3% of the total purchase price to lend you the money for a month, which is a pretty good interest rate for the lender. I put a load of work expenses on my card and so last time I had an issue with a fee that I disputed, my card company immediately and without quibble cancelled the fee and added a good-will payment to my card, because the fee was about 5% of the profit that they make on me in a year.

For some card companies, the people who massively overspend are a good long-term investment. They get a (relatively cheap) court judgement against these people, which requires them to pay back a small amount each month for a very long term. It generally works out to 5-10% annual interest, but pretty much guaranteed over a 10-25 year period. The risk is very low and they're a steady stream of income for an up-front capital investment. This is why you get a lot of card companies advertising to students and other low-income groups.

While technically true, there are some corner cases. In the UK, Jeremy Clarkson discovered this when he tried to prove a point by posting his account number and sort code online. He then discovered that it's possible to set up a direct debit with just this and a signature. Anyone that accepts direct debit payments is bound by the code of conduct that requires them to return anything taken by that mechanism if it's disputed and they're easy to cancel, but he did end up being signed up to donate money to a few charities. You'll get the money back in the end, but there's a lot of inconvenience possible until you do.

I know it's hard to remember the first statement in a post by the time you get to the end, but I'd recommend trying before you write a snide reply.

I remember having a Quake directory that was 500MB, when the original game was about 50MB. 90% of it was user-generated content. This included a load of maps and a load of mods. I don't remember the names of all of the maps, but I do remember that almost all of the time we played was on third-party maps, not on ones that came with the game.

If your system uptime relies on individual nodes having high uptime, then you're doing it wrong.

I don't know why you've been modded troll. The problem isn't binary files, it's complex files. All of your log files are binary, the difference is that you have a load of small tools that can work with the ASCII / UTF-8 text ones easily. As long as there's a small program that can be statically linked and run from a recovery medium to turn the log files into something that other tools can handle (or, ideally, can search them faster) then there's no issue. The problem is systems where you need the entire GUI and a big chunk of the userland applications stack working to be able to read logs.

I'm in the UK, with a pre-pay plan that costs 3p/min for calls, 2p/text, 1p/MB for data. Most of the time that I want to use data, I'm near WiFi, so I very rarely use any of the data.

I'm trying to understand your post. Do you think that almost $20/month it a small amount for a phone bill? I don't have a landline, do have a smartphone, and between SIP calls from it and mobile calls, SMS and data, I spend a little bit more per year than you do per month.

Bennett has been posting these long ramblings since a very long time before Dice bought Slashdot. Unfortunately, I think that your complaints are not likely to be heard because Slashdot seems to have had a policy for a long time of not recruiting editors from people who regularly read the site...

You might want to read some news from the last decade. Microsoft started paying dividends in 2003 and has paid them annually. When they started, investors were unhappy because it showed that they no longer thought that the best thing to do to increase value was to invest the money in the company.

You're a decade out. Microsoft's initial success was Microsoft BASIC, which was actually pretty good, back in the '70s. IBM wanted them to port BASIC to the PC and, when their negotiations for CP/M as the OS fell through, asked MS to write them an OS too. MS bought QDOS and rebranded it (and there was a lawsuit later about this, so it's probably the first instance of interesting business practices by MS). They also sold MS DOS to PC clone makers, which helped cement them in the market. At the time, there were a number of MS DOS clones that were better, but they made their other products depend on their own version to force others out of the market. By the '90s, with Windows 3.0 only running on MS DOS, they were getting pretty good at it...

That's generally how Amazon operates. Lose money to establish a dominant market position, then start working out how to make that profitable. People used to comment that their business was to lose money on each sale, but make up for it in volume. It was a facetious comment, but with a grain of truth: Amazon couldn't afford to sell books the way that they did until they were selling enough that they could own a lot of distribution infrastructure and amortise the costs.

Ballmer isn't in any place to complain. The XBox and Zune followed the same model when he was MS CEO. It didn't work so well for the Zune, but the XBox spent years losing money before it had a sufficiently large market share to be profitable.