One of the most important pieces of career advice I've received is to make sure that people who cause pain feel the pain. It is not my job to be a whipping boy who suffers for every bad decision I tried to warn someone about. If management insists that I do something really goofy, then they should not be spared from the consequences of their plans. Insulating them only enables them to keep making bad choices and inflicting them on codependent organizations.

You say "rubbing their nose in it". I say "making sure decision makers understand the results of those decisions".

And having succeeded, they continue to use those same computers to this day.

From a review of the Samsung 840 EVO 1TB SSD I just stuck in my MacBook Pro:

From the same site reviewing a WD Black 4TB HDD:

So assuming IOPS scales linearly with heads (they don't), you'd need about 1,000 heads to get similar random access performance out of HDDs as one SSD.

There's a reason everyone's migrating to SSDs for anything remotely IO related.

You are obviously unqualified to answer for sandytaru. You are utterly oblivious to the history of asymmetric warfare.

And I'd recommend a sit-stand desk to anyone at all. Even if you don't stand all the time (I don't), being able to spend part of your day standing will make you feel better without discomfort, in fact being able to switch back and forth is more comfortable than sitting.

Obviously not, but you may not realize how open the company is internally. Larry Page stands up in front of the entire company every week, for example, and takes -- and answers -- live questions. There are no negative consequences for asking hard questions, and hard questions do get asked. Sometimes the executives duck or dance around them, but not very often, and questions that aren't really answered continue getting asked until they do get answered.

In addition to that, other than things like acquisitions there are very few "top-level executive decisions" at Google. Most decisionmaking is driven from the bottom up.

You're probably still not impressed. Whatever. I'm just giving you my perspective and opinion. I would think that an intelligent insider's viewpoint would be of use to you; you're certainly free to dismiss it, whether or not that makes any sense. Time will tell, and I'm quite confident that the future will bear out my statements.

Not according to YouTube employees who made the transition.

This is why it's not a "standing desk" but a "sit-stand desk". The idea is that you alternate between sitting and standing, changing position every hour or two.

Then it's not the same as mine. I've also followed the company from the beginning... and I have the benefit of the insider view.

YouTube was a very obvious acquisition. What YouTube needed to survive and grow was low-cost scalability and a way to monetize the views it was getting. What Google had was massive data centers and network connectivity, plus a proven revenue model. YouTube also needed a better search engine, and Google was interested in finding ways to index and search non-textual content. It was an ideal match, technologically.

Actually, the total tax burden for the working and middle classes in the USA is not that different from much of Europe. If you deduct the amount that the US citizen pays for health insurance from the amount that the EU citizen pays in taxes (while receiving socialised medical coverage), it's often quite a lot more. Part of the reason that the US has what appears from the outside to be an irrational distrust of government is that they get such poor value for money from their taxes. This leads to a nasty feedback loop (population expects the government to be incompetent, so it's hard to get competent people to want to work for the government, so the government becomes more incompetent, so the population expects...).

The basis for your claim is?

The basis for my claim is three years of seeing how the company operates and what decisions it makes, and how, from the inside.

Please elaborate. On the face of it your response is unconvincing. In a domestic conflict there are going to be a substantial number of the standing military's ranks that will be sympathetic to the Constitution -- the lack of honor by many in the military notwithstanding. How many of them would it take to so debilitate the treasonous government's military that it would be no more effective on US soil than it was on middle eastern soil?

Though both are hedging as you say, I think both desperately want the other to overwhelmingly succeed. MS on ARM is not competitive due to a complete lack of support for legacy x86 applications and an otherwise uninspired design, so MS wants the world to run on x86 where they have home court advantage. Similarly, while Intel still has mostly better offerings, they cannot extract the desired margins out of such a highly competitive market like ARM where people will go without the very latest semiconductor process and gobs of performance. They want a software ecosystem that demands x86, which only Microsoft really has.

So yes, each has some 'worst case' contingency intended to keep them in the market. Those contingencies are both such long shots and will forever reduce margins even if they are 'successful'. That's why Intel has double downed on engineering with MS about platform sleep states and such without giving Android nearly as much attention (basically just token attention).

Microsoft and Intel should be best friends. They are each others main hope for relevance. Intel competing against the horde of ARM vendors on even ground is not going to end well for Intel's margins no matter how much share they hypothetically get. In much the same way that MS is nothing without the momentum of decades of x86-only applications, Intel isn't much without MS applications. Well, Intel's products are a bit respectable in their own right, but the primary driver of their large margin is the x86 ecosystem where MS is ubiquitous.

Intel may be hedging their bets to try to assure they aren't completely left behind in an Android-centric world, but I wager they are strongly hoping for MS to provide a software platform experience on x86 that is too compelling to overlook. I will say that even the 'best' Android apps I deal with are pretty crappy ( having to mysteriously be killed because it hangs, sometimes needing their persistent storage wiped because it has no idea how to work back to working state from whatever state it stored persistently). Even chrome randomly decides 'I'm just going to stop being able to render certain pages altogether'. It's bizarre, since on Windows and Linux desktops I don't see nearly as much wonkiness from many of the exact same application vendors doing about as equivalent a product as can be imagined. For a given price, I'd honestly prefer an x86 tablet so long as secureboot can be disabled to run platforms I have a great deal of familiarity with.

At least, won't everyone who's paid a middle to upper middle class wage, buys a house and saves for retirement eventually be a millionaire?

If you want to retire at 65 and have enough money to live a decent life for 30 years after that, you need pretty close to a million dollars plus a paid-off house. And, frankly, it's not that hard to accumulate a million dollars of net worth over a ~40-year career, assuming reasonable returns on your retirement account and modest appreciation on your home. I'm actually targeting net assets of two million for retirement, given that it's still 20 years away and I expect that inflation will roughly halve the value of the dollar between now and then.