The bar used to be pretty low. My father spent a few years writing and selling a system/360 time sharing system in the 70s or so. He was not a self-identified computer person, just a physics student who found a way to make a few dollars.
In the 70s and 80s and 90s so many operating systems from lisp machines to ITS to the bsds... People used to write an OS like people write frontend frameworks now.
Why are you trying to put words in my mouth about visiting every coffee shops website etc? You look at possible places and choose the one(s) that appeal.
Since all coffee stores are not the same, I look at the website of the coffee shop I am considering visiting, and either I choose it or I don't.
Everything about a cdn is cost per MB, and Netflix has that priced at I don't know, I imagine almost zero, and maybe negative because they host with ISPs, which other cdns can't do. Which means their competitors must spend infinitely more money until they hit a scale where they can start to follow in Netflix's parh. Also, I imagine that buying hardware now, especially DRAM is four or more times as expensive as it was when Netflix paid for a lot of their hardware, so yeah, that.
That is not what I said. I am challenging your dismissal of the cost of bandwidth is material to the success of a cdn
> All that matters is that the CDN is good enough to serve viewer traffic. If your CDN isn't up to snuff, the outcome is that the viewer can't play the video they want. AFAIK, no Netflix competitor is suffering from insufficient CDN resources
My personal experience is that e.g. if your cdn can serve ads, but not video, then you lose subscribers.
Extrapolating from that, if you lose money on every video a subscriber plays because of DTO costs, then you can't stay in business. Netflix and Amazon can afford their cdn. Maybe Disney can stay in business because they have the scale to get to the right COGS to meet their forecast, but for sure in the past they are accused of misleading investors as to their costs and revenue and their future revenue forecasts[1]. Since that's still underway, we may even know what part of their break-even calculations CDN costs are in the future.
You are probably right that it's not the most likely outcome, but it is more likely with net revenue and projections of future revenue being the actual crux of the case isn't it?
> My personal experience is that e.g. if your cdn can serve ads, but not video, then you lose subscribers.
Of course. But none of the major providers is suffering from that problem on a regular basis.
> if you lose money on every video a subscriber plays because of DTO costs, then you can't stay in business
These are public companies, and they have to report material risks (as CDN costs would be, if your claim is accurate) on their SEC filings by law. They're not reporting these as a material risk. They could be lying, I guess, but that seems rather unlikely as they'd be at risk of shareholder lawsuits and government prosecution.
Speaking of which, the Disney suit you referenced doesn't mention CDN costs at all. It mentions the "staggering" cost of content creation, which makes sense to me; content production easily dwarfs CDN costs. (https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cacd.88...)
(Also, as a side note, no large customer like these is paying retail DTO costs. Large or strategic customers get significant discounts on public pricing.)
All your points are valid, but they all assume a fait accompli of all cdns have already built out to Netflix scale with similar contracts for bandwidth at the edge. If they have done so, then that is not a moat or even a difference at all. However these things take time, and amortize over years, and I don't think the big.playets are all there yet, and so it's a moving target.
Also you are saying that the lawsuit speaks to context cost, which is the headline, but that is unlikely to be the full story at the end of the day since it is a fishing expedition at the moment.
> that is unlikely to be the full story at the end of the day since it is a fishing expedition at the moment.
This suit, assuming it's like most shareholder derivative "failure to disclose material information which led to a stock price drop" suits, was filed to wet lawyers' beaks and get the company to settle by compensating shareholders. It's not really intended to get at the whole story, and neither party has any interest in disclosing CDN costs to the public.
I would guess that the casino is a relatively cheap space that can do entertainment and conferences and food, and it's not being chosen for the gambling aspects
I wouldn't call it team building. I just think of it as a reminder that we are all friends that we all have families and struggles. We're all human and doing our best.
It's at a casino because it's near our facility, has conference rooms, event spaces, entertainment, and the weather doesn't matter.
Sometimes some people sit at a table and play while hanging out and that's fine. But it's not really about drinking or gambling. Just having a little fun together and getting to know each other and our +1s on a more personal level.
This is irresponsible on your part. OP has been diagnosed by professionals and is being treated and clearly sees the difference. While high CO2 levels make a measurable difference in some tasks and its effects can be felt in crowded spaces, it seems like you're taking your pet peeve and dismissing the struggle that the OP is going through. Please try to have more sympathy.
I understand it can be difficult or even frightening to think about problems that don't have a trivially described cause, effect and solution like your proposal, but it would be a good idea to ask questions, even as simply as asking if that OP has noticed an effect, before trivializing their struggles this way
the point is sort of both (i've been nerdy and signalling enough in these general and personal trying times, so why stop there)
- Chris Crawford created Balance of Power (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_Power_(video_game)) and had some writings saying games are more important to / have a greater capacity to aid learning than the modern education system at large, citing the little games mother cats play with kittens to teach them how to survive (or something to that effect). that stuck with me but either way, without BoP and WarGames you don't have, say, Twilight Struggle
- Another thing later on that stuck with me are media theorist Marshall McLuhan's concept of hot versus cool media (perhaps more famous for the medium is the message / massage). I am not going to consult AI for this, but I contextualized it as how much work the "recipient" has to do. I.e. baseball or War of the Worlds on the radio is "cooler" than red-hot NFL football or Independence Day on the screen
So then Contagion is hot media, passages from David Quammen's Spillover are cool(er) media, and Plague Inc.'s porridge is just right. or play Augustus while I, Claudius is one while getting ripshit on Ovid and wine
I see it as a pointed observation that the people who focus on a goal will accomplish that goal. There are organizations with administrative-focused people who work in alignment with the mission-focused people, and that also follows this law as well. It's just that the same dynamic can cause organisations to spiral into an extractive, stale, ossifying, change-resistent focus instead.
The premise of the rule is that the second one is the end state.
The essential problem is that if one person spends their time e.g. fixing bugs in the code and another person spends their time weaseling their way onto the budget committee because they want to divert resources to their cronies, it's the second person who ends up on the budget committee. Then the first person gets laid off so their salary can be redirected to the cronies.
There are various ways to try to inhibit this with varying levels of effectiveness, essentially checks and balances. But the kleptocrats will be constantly trying to circumvent, weaken and vilify the things designed to constrain them. It's the sort of thing in the same nature as "the price of freedom is eternal vigilance".
