Developers don't have a culture of being economical with resources.

That's because in say, the 60s and 70s, computer time was expensive. It behooved you to make your code as efficient as possible - like today's cloud services, they often billed by the CPU cycle. And the run-debug cycle was on the order of a day, so you didn't want to make a stupid error because it meant your job got delayed a day at the least.

Sometime around the 80s and 90s, this flipped - human time was expensive. Computers were cheap and getting cheaper, RAM was plummeting as was hard drive space. The math started to work the other way - you don't want developers wasting time debugging code so libraries were popular - because it was more efficient (cheaper) to utilize the fact one person presents a well-debugged library that other developers could use and that means developers don't have to write that code, and they don't have to debug that code either.

That's why we have bloat - because it's cheaper that way. You could have a developer write nice and tight code, but how much are you willing to pay for it? If it takes them an extra week to make their library run 10% faster, was it work say, the $5-10,000 it cost? ($5000 a week is around $250K/year including benefits, or around $150K take home pay plus benefits, while $10,000 is $500,000K/year including benefits, or around $250,000-300,000 without benefits). Will that improvement let the company make back that investment?

You have to realize that if you want to charge $150K/year salary, spending a week optimizing costs the company $5000, so unless they can save that $5000 elsewhere (e.g., in reduced cloud compute fees, or customers will pay extra), there is no incentive to do it.

And that's really a valuable consideration. Also, compilers are really good these days. Like, really good. They will often so very strange things to save a few cycles. Some, like Clang, can be "too smart" and apply closed-form mathematical transforms to your computation (E.g., if you attempt to sum integers from 1 to n, and you do the "stupid way" with a loop, Clang will recognize it and actually generate the code to calculate n(n+1)/2 and eliminate the loop).

So it's a mix between the cost of a developer to optimize their code, the increasing intelligence of compilers to optimize code, and other things.

If you want to learn more about how compilers generate code, including being able to add in 0 cycles (hint: it uses the CPU's address calculation unit instead of the ALU to do simple addition and subtraction and even multiplication when it can, so the actual execution time is zero since the computation was done as part of operand calculation), Matt Godbolt of Compiler Explorer fame runs through a whole series in his Advant of Compiler Optimization series. (Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playli... ). Trust me, it doesn't pay to outsmart the compiler.

It depends on the audience who will read the articles that s/he writes.

If it is clickbait chasing nonsense about pop singers or film stars latest affair or wardrobe 'malfunction' then the readers are unlikely to be too critical unless you do not have enough pictures of naked flesh. Your editor & publisher will be happiest if you write lots of articles and care little if it is slop.

If you are writing about something supposed to be factual, eg: science; finance; politics; ... then the articles should be well researched & checked and any uncertainties noted in the article. You will be rewarded and applauded by your readers for insight, good context & few errors. Your editor/publisher will like many articles but accept that quality takes time. This is not quite true: if your publisher has a strong political bias then you will be expected to follow that bias and invent facts support that bias - ie lie and produce fake news. So as long as AI slop has the correct bias many will just publish it. Journalists of integrity will not want to work at such a publisher ... however journalists do have mortgages & kids so some 'bend' their professionalism.

Yes, a fair voicing of "opinions" on labor conditions between one human and one globe-spanning immortal megacorporation. Very fair.

Only true for goods and services where there is perfectly inelastic demand, which kind of doesn't exist. Even demand for fuel is somewhat elastic. Health care has about the least elastic demand. Junk from Amazon has highly elastic demand.

This would certainly happen to a large degree, otherwise Amazon could price themselves out of competitiveness fairly easily.

If you make your money by owning rather than by working, that's true. Higher wages reduce business owners' income, at least in the short term. So next time someone has that opinion, find out what they do for a living. They'll probably say they "run" something.

I remember XP days when our Conference rooms had a moratorium on the day after Patch Tuesday. Something was always broken. If someone really really needed to have a meeting on "Dead computer Wednesday" , I had a special computer that was isolated from Patch Tuesday. IT didn't want to do that, but I told them they had a choice. Let me have that computer, or I'd have them come up and fix the one in the conference room. They were deathly afraid of Mahogany Row.

Hold on a second Tony. You used a security flaw in Linux as proof it was as insecure as Windows. Now you say it isn't a large enough share to care about.

Which is it - dnd why haven't this equally insecure OS been exploited with Apache servers, or Chrome, or Android, or Mac.

Once you have all of the Unix and Unix variants, the bad guys would be fools not to exploit that - especially since the meme is that Mac Users are stupid. I know a little bit about Linux and Unix, and they strike me as more secure in general. What is it in the OS that makes them equally vulnerable? Keeping in mind that there is no such thing as a totally secure OS.

I love how people defend Windows by pointing out a flaw in Linux as proof.

Sir, there is no such thing as a completely secure Operating system. But Is the plethora of Windows exploits because it is more secure?

Finally, I don't care - I prefer to use an OS with less exploits because I'm ore about fewer exploits, not the most "popular" OS. I want to get work done.

I agree in principle, but there are other issues at play, at least in my personal approach. Some are a personal issue, some are an organizational. issue.

I attempted to mentor people, Accounting said it didn't have the overhead. My supervisor didn't fight that. Even after I was called back as an emergency hire - seems the idea was just for me to carry on and magic would happen.

I'm considered a perfectionist - being considered perfectionist has become a negative trait in the mid 2020's. Frankly, I find that not impressive. I get an endorphin buzz when doing excellent work and on time. But let's just assume it is a personality flaw.

I'm competitive and driven. Also considered a flaw in the mid 2020's.

What is worse, my analysis of those who believe it is a flaw may be correct, but I know a lot of people who hide behind that as a covert expression of their inadequacies. But whatever let's just say a lot of people believe that success is doing as little as possible

Another thing is that I will not lower my standards. So I retired from there. All isn't bad though - My new position pays a lot more, I'm highly respected, and the perks are great. A lotta swag, an office with floor to ceiling glass and a million dollar view, all high quality meals, all part of the compensation package.

Oh no, there is no victory. Your summary is pretty good here. But the idea that Linux is provably less secure because old bugs were found is flatly wrong. They were found late, but they were indeed found. How many ancient bugs are lurking in proprietary software that nobody has found for positive reasons and made full disclosures of so affected parties know they need to mitigate? Nobody knows!

Server OSes are more likely to have older versions of software and then backport fixes. Desktop OSes are more likely to default to doing automatic updates, or at least hassling the user to do them.

The only difference is that servers are more likely to have more outdated software.

Love of convenience, I guess. I often find it astonishing myself. The software might do 100 times more but it takes 1000 times as much memory...

Linux underpins the internet. It's the primary server OS on the planet. High-value data is held on Linux systems. The idea that it's not profitable to attack those targets is silly. They're harder to attack. People still do it. That's why there are still ssh port scans for example.

The first Unix machine that I used had 1MB of RAM and it supported about 10 simultaneous users. OK: this was the 1980s and it was a PDP-11 (16 bit machine), but how times have changed!

BTW: Mb means megabit, MB means megabyte.