You have a pretty sharp tongue and a harsh attitude for an AC.
You seem like one of those trolls who expects perfection and is uncomfortable living in a world where nothing is perfect. Data breaches will happen to anybody. It is not a matter of if your systems are breached, but when.
Your future where things move back to private ownership are overlooking the increased scarcity of resources. Getting into, or staying in, the co-location business is only going to increase in cost.
Meltdown allowed you to dump the contents of memory of other VMs on the same nodes as you...
I know of at least one other critical Azure vulnerability that would have let tenants in separate VMs on the same hyper visor futz with each other's memory addresses. That one never made it public though, because the researcher responsibly disclosed. The only reason I know about it is because a guy I grew up with was in the Incident response chain at Microsoft and helped to coordinate the patching.
I got Azure patches for the Meltdown flaw a good couple of days before Cisco had the UCS patches available. MS even initially allowed us to schedule VMs in patches to mitigate the application impact. Though when we were about half way through, MS forced the reboots because the vulnerabilities were disclosed at that point.
What's your plan for preventing that in the future and for dealing with it if it's happened?
The future plan is the same as the current plan. Detect the breach. Verify the accessibility and integrity of the data. Notify the client.
Similarly, people are more likely to try to DDoS Azure or AWS than they are your in-house server.
Nobody can DDoS all of Azure. Have you seen how many regions they have? Plus, lots of luck DDoSing those ExpressRoute circuits. Totally different infrastructure and paths into the data center than the stuff that they front out via Azure to clients. Besides, haven't you heard of local caching? How long is the DDoS going to last? The business impact will be minimal. The drives in our laptops are 250GB of SSD. They can cache plenty of recently accessed files, and thanks to OneDrive, do so just fine. (Of course there are plenty of other places to get file services in the cloud, Box, etc.)
MS also offers geo-redundant storage for ridiculously affordable rates. All you need is a like set of VMs in another region and you can be back up and running in minutes, if that. Besides, the web tier for all of the major apps is already redundantly load balanced across regions. How long do you think it takes to play the transaction logs into a recovery database? That is assuming that you aren't already replicating the changes at the DB layer.
The danger of the cloud is that it's a single point of failure
A cloud failure is no more scary than an on-prem failure. Downtime is downtime. At the end of the day, who is going to give you the most resources to get your job done? The cloud is just another stack of hardware in a building somewhere. Or multiple stacks of similar hardware all over the global, depending how much you want to pay for redundancy. Who is going to recover from the failure faster?
Not only is it unlikely that he works for one of the biggest companies in the world, even if he does, they are blowing it big time.
We are only a mid-sized enterprise with ~5000 licenses from Microsoft. They have a whole squad of employees dedicated to our account. We have dedicated engineers and support escalation matrixes for the major technologies that we use (Skype for Business, O365 / Exchange and Azure). Anything I need a resource for, I can just email our account rep and he gets me connected with someone who actually knows what they are talking about. If we open a support ticket and are not happy with engineer assigned to it, we contact our support rep and she starts rattling cages.
When we did our O365 / Exchange migration, we had weekly meetings with Microsoft engineers and account reps to make sure that things were going well. It was all included "for free" as part of our enterprise agreement. I do not know how MS treats other clients, but they want us to succeed. Maybe it is the markets we are in, or the clients we work with, but they really treat us like a showcase for their technology. We have also been in a couple of Azure "Preview" programs for various technologies (mostly around backup and SQL), and their product managers are extremely receptive to feedback and product enhancement ideas.
What is your problem with O365? We moved ~5000 global users out of Exchange and into Exchange Online over a year ago at this point and it works great. We have a pretty complex Active Directory forest, with multiple domains.
Sounds like you guys borked your transition. The technology itself is solid. Way better than managing the Exchange infrastructure ourselves.
We did a phased rollout over the course of 18 months.
We are starting to use Azure. We have an E5 license for ~5000 seats of Office 365, including OneDrive and Skype for Business. Given all of that, I am a bit biased. Also for full disclosure, we are building out a hybrid cloud with Azure to augment our four data centers (2 in the US, 1 in the UK, 1 in Dubai). I have also been doing IT for 20 years, so I have seen some trends come and go.
This whole FUD about "don't trust the cloud with your data" is getting REALLY old. Microsoft (and AWS) have more redundancy and security built into their infrastructure that you could ever hope to build into a private setup. I say this as someone who is managing close to 4 PB of data being remote replicated via SRDF (for our EMC gear) and array based replication (for the Pure stuff).
By the end of next year, we will have moved the majority of our remote office file server data into OneDrive and MS Teams. We are going to be able to save huge amounts of money by not having to buy Data Domain hardware to replicate back to our core data centers, and we are going to get better reliability, versioning and recovery options.
I trust Microsoft's security team of hundreds of engineers, analysts and support staff more than I trust the half dozen guys in house. And I say this as someone who has been interested in, and responsible for computer security since the mid-90s. There is no way that a small SOC at a mid-sized corporation can hold a candle to a 24x7 global operation like Microsoft (or Amazon). It just is not going to happen.
While we still run a lot of our applications in house, we are using Azure for development and proof of concept work. When you look at the costs of enterprise class storage with all of the compliance boxes checked (at rest encryption, remote replication, etc.) there is no way that we can provide storage in a cost competitive way to the business.
Our clients are slowly coming around to trusting the cloud as well. We work with heavy regulated industries including financial services and healthcare. We have a lot of sensitive data on our networks. But as our clients shift their own workloads to the cloud (I hate that term), they are becoming more permissive of allowing us to move the data that we host for them there as well.
I think that in 10 years from now, the only companies that are going to still be hosting their own infrastructure are going to be big banks, tech and manufacturing firms that are still building things and need strict controls over their IP. Other than that, the costs of paying other people to run infrastructure for you are just too compelling. There is no way to stay competitive with that.
Verizon pushes OTA Android update to Samsung Galaxy owners. Man decides new update makes phone too slow. Sues Google for $600 million or bone stock Android ROM? Justifies law suit because he does not trust Samsung and therefore the problem is with Google?
How does nonsense like this even gain traction in the first place?
I spend 30% of my Net pay on my mortgage. I also work from home.
Maybe my perception of "normal" is skewed from growing up in Southern California. I now live in Oregon, and the fact that I can even afford a house in a good school district seems like a godsend to me. I do not feel like I am being taken to the cleaners spending 30% of my income on a mortgage. There is still plenty left over for bills, food and savings.
I stopped played GTAO before heists came out (nearly 3 years ago at this point). Even then, it was hard to find people to do certain races with. For example, everyone wanted to do the Supercar races. Nobody wanted to race sedans.
I am sure that it has just gotten worse since then.
I had thought about picking the game back up again, but I missed the opportunity to port my PS3 character to the PC version. I almost bought it anyway, but I was concerned about exactly what the article is talking about. Not being able to do anything except the latest content, and then getting kicked out of groups for being under geared / having no clue what I was doing.
What about the patrol routes? The bases themselves show up fairly brightly as either white or yellow levels of activity. But right around the bases, you can see the lower intensity purple trails. I am guessing that those are the routes taken by the soldiers when they leave the FOB.
What's great about a movie like Bright is that it went full-bore into its world-building and that's going to have lasting appeal to fantasy fans, as opposed to being watered down.
This right here is why I enjoyed it. The editing was pretty bad, especially a couple of the cuts between scenes. But the world building and premise was great. I am a big fan of Shadowrun, and IMO the world that they created for Bright is the closest to Shadowrun I am ever going to see in my life time.
Batman vs Superman was HORRIBLE. I am not a huge comic fan or even really all that interested in movies based on comic books in general, so I did not go into the movie with any of that usual baggage. I still thought it was a horrible, "messy turd" of a movie.
It has improved. It is not perfect, but it is improving. I have been playing for a little over 30 days and I don't feel like I want quit. The kill cam has made it pretty easy to spot the cheaters, and BlueHole has been doing an okay job of banning them. I say okay because it takes a while. They seem to enforce the bans in waves.
The game needs something along the lines of a CS:GO style validated account, where players have to play for a large number of hours before they get access to servers dedicated to long term players. That way if the cheaters lose their long term accounts, they have to grind away again. After a while, it becomes a losing proposition for them.
There was a pretty good thread on reddit a week or two ago that fostered some discussion about potentially effective ways to deal with cheating in PUBG.
It has gotten a lot better since 1.0 came out. It is not perfect, but the kill cam has helped a lot. And BlueHole does seem to be doing a decent job of banning cheaters. They ban in waves though, so it might take a while.
There are so many coincidences. I mean the fact that NORAD was hosting an exercise that included hijacked airplanes over the eastern seaboard on the exact same day that 4 airplanes were hijacked over the eastern seaboard is just too coincidental to be coincidental. Or the fact that WTC 7, the building where the emergency command center was setup which had all of the records of all of the coordination taking place that day, just happened to collapse right into its own footprint, after being hit by some debris.
The only people who do not want to believe that 9/11 was setup are those who do not want to see it.
Ask yourself this. Why isn't there any footage of the plane hitting the Pentagon? One of the FIRST things that the Feds did after the Pentagon got hit was to go around and collect all of the surveillance camera footage that could have shown what happened. It was never released. It's been almost 20 years at this point. Why can't we see the footage?
"At what point is it just trying to one up things and at/what point is it to thwart law enforcement?/"
This is super ironic given that Congress just passed an extension of the law that allows the NSA to collect everyone's email and online communications WITHOUT A WARRANT.
I would ask Mr. FBI, "At what point are you guys going to admit that you don't give two shits about the 4th amendment, and you operate like you're above the law?"
Once the Feds come clean on being assholes and building a surveillance state that has 0.2% to do with fighting terrorism and 98.8% to do with averting civil unrest and regime change here at home, then they can start complaining about how evil tech companies are for allowing people to protect their communications from unwarranted search and seizure.
While not exactly the same thing, in one of William Gibson's recent trilogies the characters wore clothing with specific patterns that were designed to render them invisible to surveillance cameras. The basic premise was that the even though the cameras recorded them, the computers monitoring the cameras did not realize that there were people in the images.
Thanks for the responses and conversation. I appreciate the points that you made.
For me, I would rather own an actual physical asset. But I do understand how that risk averse mentality might be costing me a few percentage points in the long run.
What kind of dividends are you making on your index funds investments?
Once the house is paid for, it becomes a cash machine less property tax and the occasional maintenance.
Keep in mind, a house is not an either / or proposition. It is not, buy a house or invest in the market. I am paying a mortgage, and I also have a 401K, an employee stock purchase program through the company, and separate investments managed by an advisor.
It is insane to pay someone else's mortgage.
Granted, my perspective on real estate is skewed. I moved from southern California to Oregon. For only a little bit more than I was paying for rent on a 2 bedroom apartment, I have a four bedroom house on a quarter acre in a great school district.
This advice does not make any sense. If you can afford property, it is a great investment.
Who do you think people are going to be renting from? Hint, it is not other renters.
You might want to take this with a grain of salt, because I am a sample size of one here. But growing up, I watched (and helped my parents) buy, fix up and flip the occasional home. (Buy the least expensive home in the most expensive neighborhood you can afford.) They did a pretty good job of timing the market (with a few misses) and ended up with one primary home and two rental homes. They recently sold the rental homes and now own a couple of small (4 unit) apartments, plus their primary residence.
They are set for retirement, and have property to pass along to the family. Over the course of a generation, they have firmly cemented our family as upper middle class. We will never be rich, but unless someone picks up a massive drug habit or makes some extremely stupid investments, our family is going to be okay. That never would have happened with index funds.
Given the rise of the yuan and the inevitable decline of the dollar, it seems insane to trust the stock market with your "wealth". Real wealth is physical. Everything else is just imaginary and subject to the whims of powers far beyond what an individual can control. As soon as the BRIC nations knock out the dollar peg to oil, the US economy is going to be in some serious shit that not even our military can "fix".
My wife does not like the 'difficulties' of dealing with torrents, so we have a subscription to HBO. That comes with HBO Go, their online content portal.
I wanted to watch one of their new shows (The Deuce. If you liked the Wire, check it out. It's pretty good.) I was able to watch the first couple episodes online just fine. Then one night, I had a glitch with my USB port and I pulled my headphones out in the middle of watching an episode. After I reconnected them, the sound didn't work.
I worked with HBO tech support. They pointed the finger at Frontier, my ISP. They pointed the finger at Adobe (who makes the Flash Player plug-in required to watch their stream). They pointed the finger at Microsoft (I was using IE because Chrome doesn't support Flash). I tried Firefox as well, but the problem persisted. (Sound worked just fine everywhere else. Windows. Browsers. Games. Applications. Just not the HBO Go website / Flash Player on the site.)
After spending the better part of 3 hours over the course of a week troubleshooting the problem, I gave up and torrented the show. I am only going to jump through so many hoops to watch content, that I am PAYING FOR, on my computer. I pay the monthly fee to HBO. If they can't deliver the content to me on the device I want to watch it on, I will do it myself.
The thing with piracy is that it is the best technical option. Computers want to play the media. The content companies try to lock it behind layers of DRM and other hurdles. Those layers are flakey and cause problems. In the end, the content becomes more difficult to consume legally. And that is a problem. People want simple. As human beings we will always take the path of least resistance.
It does not seem like the article addresses the fact that Netflix content can be pirated as well. As far as I can see, the only way that Netflix or another online streaming service would cut into piracy is if their DRM was so strong, and their content so compelling, that the pirates were forced to pay to access it.
For example, Game of Thrones seems pretty popular among people who are tech savvy enough to pirate content. If there were a way to lock down Game of Thrones, some subset of pirates would choose to pay for it because they want it THAT badly. (I know that GoT is on HBO not Netflix, I'm just using an example of popular content).
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You have a pretty sharp tongue and a harsh attitude for an AC.
You seem like one of those trolls who expects perfection and is uncomfortable living in a world where nothing is perfect. Data breaches will happen to anybody. It is not a matter of if your systems are breached, but when.
Your future where things move back to private ownership are overlooking the increased scarcity of resources. Getting into, or staying in, the co-location business is only going to increase in cost.
Meltdown allowed you to dump the contents of memory of other VMs on the same nodes as you...
I know of at least one other critical Azure vulnerability that would have let tenants in separate VMs on the same hyper visor futz with each other's memory addresses. That one never made it public though, because the researcher responsibly disclosed. The only reason I know about it is because a guy I grew up with was in the Incident response chain at Microsoft and helped to coordinate the patching.
I got Azure patches for the Meltdown flaw a good couple of days before Cisco had the UCS patches available. MS even initially allowed us to schedule VMs in patches to mitigate the application impact. Though when we were about half way through, MS forced the reboots because the vulnerabilities were disclosed at that point.
What's your plan for preventing that in the future and for dealing with it if it's happened?
The future plan is the same as the current plan. Detect the breach. Verify the accessibility and integrity of the data. Notify the client.
Similarly, people are more likely to try to DDoS Azure or AWS than they are your in-house server.
Nobody can DDoS all of Azure. Have you seen how many regions they have? Plus, lots of luck DDoSing those ExpressRoute circuits. Totally different infrastructure and paths into the data center than the stuff that they front out via Azure to clients. Besides, haven't you heard of local caching? How long is the DDoS going to last? The business impact will be minimal. The drives in our laptops are 250GB of SSD. They can cache plenty of recently accessed files, and thanks to OneDrive, do so just fine. (Of course there are plenty of other places to get file services in the cloud, Box, etc.)
MS also offers geo-redundant storage for ridiculously affordable rates. All you need is a like set of VMs in another region and you can be back up and running in minutes, if that. Besides, the web tier for all of the major apps is already redundantly load balanced across regions. How long do you think it takes to play the transaction logs into a recovery database? That is assuming that you aren't already replicating the changes at the DB layer.
The danger of the cloud is that it's a single point of failure
A cloud failure is no more scary than an on-prem failure. Downtime is downtime. At the end of the day, who is going to give you the most resources to get your job done? The cloud is just another stack of hardware in a building somewhere. Or multiple stacks of similar hardware all over the global, depending how much you want to pay for redundancy. Who is going to recover from the failure faster?
Not only is it unlikely that he works for one of the biggest companies in the world, even if he does, they are blowing it big time.
We are only a mid-sized enterprise with ~5000 licenses from Microsoft. They have a whole squad of employees dedicated to our account. We have dedicated engineers and support escalation matrixes for the major technologies that we use (Skype for Business, O365 / Exchange and Azure). Anything I need a resource for, I can just email our account rep and he gets me connected with someone who actually knows what they are talking about. If we open a support ticket and are not happy with engineer assigned to it, we contact our support rep and she starts rattling cages.
When we did our O365 / Exchange migration, we had weekly meetings with Microsoft engineers and account reps to make sure that things were going well. It was all included "for free" as part of our enterprise agreement. I do not know how MS treats other clients, but they want us to succeed. Maybe it is the markets we are in, or the clients we work with, but they really treat us like a showcase for their technology. We have also been in a couple of Azure "Preview" programs for various technologies (mostly around backup and SQL), and their product managers are extremely receptive to feedback and product enhancement ideas.
What is your problem with O365? We moved ~5000 global users out of Exchange and into Exchange Online over a year ago at this point and it works great. We have a pretty complex Active Directory forest, with multiple domains.
Sounds like you guys borked your transition. The technology itself is solid. Way better than managing the Exchange infrastructure ourselves.
We did a phased rollout over the course of 18 months.
We are starting to use Azure. We have an E5 license for ~5000 seats of Office 365, including OneDrive and Skype for Business. Given all of that, I am a bit biased. Also for full disclosure, we are building out a hybrid cloud with Azure to augment our four data centers (2 in the US, 1 in the UK, 1 in Dubai). I have also been doing IT for 20 years, so I have seen some trends come and go.
This whole FUD about "don't trust the cloud with your data" is getting REALLY old. Microsoft (and AWS) have more redundancy and security built into their infrastructure that you could ever hope to build into a private setup. I say this as someone who is managing close to 4 PB of data being remote replicated via SRDF (for our EMC gear) and array based replication (for the Pure stuff).
By the end of next year, we will have moved the majority of our remote office file server data into OneDrive and MS Teams. We are going to be able to save huge amounts of money by not having to buy Data Domain hardware to replicate back to our core data centers, and we are going to get better reliability, versioning and recovery options.
I trust Microsoft's security team of hundreds of engineers, analysts and support staff more than I trust the half dozen guys in house. And I say this as someone who has been interested in, and responsible for computer security since the mid-90s. There is no way that a small SOC at a mid-sized corporation can hold a candle to a 24x7 global operation like Microsoft (or Amazon). It just is not going to happen.
While we still run a lot of our applications in house, we are using Azure for development and proof of concept work. When you look at the costs of enterprise class storage with all of the compliance boxes checked (at rest encryption, remote replication, etc.) there is no way that we can provide storage in a cost competitive way to the business.
Our clients are slowly coming around to trusting the cloud as well. We work with heavy regulated industries including financial services and healthcare. We have a lot of sensitive data on our networks. But as our clients shift their own workloads to the cloud (I hate that term), they are becoming more permissive of allowing us to move the data that we host for them there as well.
I think that in 10 years from now, the only companies that are going to still be hosting their own infrastructure are going to be big banks, tech and manufacturing firms that are still building things and need strict controls over their IP. Other than that, the costs of paying other people to run infrastructure for you are just too compelling. There is no way to stay competitive with that.
Verizon pushes OTA Android update to Samsung Galaxy owners. Man decides new update makes phone too slow. Sues Google for $600 million or bone stock Android ROM? Justifies law suit because he does not trust Samsung and therefore the problem is with Google?
How does nonsense like this even gain traction in the first place?
Is the percentage based on Net or Gross pay?
I spend 30% of my Net pay on my mortgage. I also work from home.
Maybe my perception of "normal" is skewed from growing up in Southern California. I now live in Oregon, and the fact that I can even afford a house in a good school district seems like a godsend to me. I do not feel like I am being taken to the cleaners spending 30% of my income on a mortgage. There is still plenty left over for bills, food and savings.
10 is bad in a totally different way -- removing user choice...
What do you want to do in Win10 that you cannot do?
I stopped played GTAO before heists came out (nearly 3 years ago at this point). Even then, it was hard to find people to do certain races with. For example, everyone wanted to do the Supercar races. Nobody wanted to race sedans.
I am sure that it has just gotten worse since then.
I had thought about picking the game back up again, but I missed the opportunity to port my PS3 character to the PC version. I almost bought it anyway, but I was concerned about exactly what the article is talking about. Not being able to do anything except the latest content, and then getting kicked out of groups for being under geared / having no clue what I was doing.
What about the patrol routes? The bases themselves show up fairly brightly as either white or yellow levels of activity. But right around the bases, you can see the lower intensity purple trails. I am guessing that those are the routes taken by the soldiers when they leave the FOB.
What's great about a movie like Bright is that it went full-bore into its world-building and that's going to have lasting appeal to fantasy fans, as opposed to being watered down.
This right here is why I enjoyed it. The editing was pretty bad, especially a couple of the cuts between scenes. But the world building and premise was great. I am a big fan of Shadowrun, and IMO the world that they created for Bright is the closest to Shadowrun I am ever going to see in my life time.
Batman vs Superman was HORRIBLE. I am not a huge comic fan or even really all that interested in movies based on comic books in general, so I did not go into the movie with any of that usual baggage. I still thought it was a horrible, "messy turd" of a movie.
It has improved. It is not perfect, but it is improving. I have been playing for a little over 30 days and I don't feel like I want quit. The kill cam has made it pretty easy to spot the cheaters, and BlueHole has been doing an okay job of banning them. I say okay because it takes a while. They seem to enforce the bans in waves.
The game needs something along the lines of a CS:GO style validated account, where players have to play for a large number of hours before they get access to servers dedicated to long term players. That way if the cheaters lose their long term accounts, they have to grind away again. After a while, it becomes a losing proposition for them.
There was a pretty good thread on reddit a week or two ago that fostered some discussion about potentially effective ways to deal with cheating in PUBG.
It has gotten a lot better since 1.0 came out. It is not perfect, but the kill cam has helped a lot. And BlueHole does seem to be doing a decent job of banning cheaters. They ban in waves though, so it might take a while.
There are so many coincidences. I mean the fact that NORAD was hosting an exercise that included hijacked airplanes over the eastern seaboard on the exact same day that 4 airplanes were hijacked over the eastern seaboard is just too coincidental to be coincidental. Or the fact that WTC 7, the building where the emergency command center was setup which had all of the records of all of the coordination taking place that day, just happened to collapse right into its own footprint, after being hit by some debris.
The only people who do not want to believe that 9/11 was setup are those who do not want to see it.
Ask yourself this. Why isn't there any footage of the plane hitting the Pentagon? One of the FIRST things that the Feds did after the Pentagon got hit was to go around and collect all of the surveillance camera footage that could have shown what happened. It was never released. It's been almost 20 years at this point. Why can't we see the footage?
To quote the article
"At what point is it just trying to one up things and at /what point is it to thwart law enforcement?/"
This is super ironic given that Congress just passed an extension of the law that allows the NSA to collect everyone's email and online communications WITHOUT A WARRANT.
I would ask Mr. FBI, "At what point are you guys going to admit that you don't give two shits about the 4th amendment, and you operate like you're above the law?"
Once the Feds come clean on being assholes and building a surveillance state that has 0.2% to do with fighting terrorism and 98.8% to do with averting civil unrest and regime change here at home, then they can start complaining about how evil tech companies are for allowing people to protect their communications from unwarranted search and seizure.
While not exactly the same thing, in one of William Gibson's recent trilogies the characters wore clothing with specific patterns that were designed to render them invisible to surveillance cameras. The basic premise was that the even though the cameras recorded them, the computers monitoring the cameras did not realize that there were people in the images.
Thanks for the responses and conversation. I appreciate the points that you made.
For me, I would rather own an actual physical asset. But I do understand how that risk averse mentality might be costing me a few percentage points in the long run.
What kind of dividends are you making on your index funds investments?
Once the house is paid for, it becomes a cash machine less property tax and the occasional maintenance.
Keep in mind, a house is not an either / or proposition. It is not, buy a house or invest in the market. I am paying a mortgage, and I also have a 401K, an employee stock purchase program through the company, and separate investments managed by an advisor.
It is insane to pay someone else's mortgage.
Granted, my perspective on real estate is skewed. I moved from southern California to Oregon. For only a little bit more than I was paying for rent on a 2 bedroom apartment, I have a four bedroom house on a quarter acre in a great school district.
This advice does not make any sense. If you can afford property, it is a great investment.
Who do you think people are going to be renting from? Hint, it is not other renters.
You might want to take this with a grain of salt, because I am a sample size of one here. But growing up, I watched (and helped my parents) buy, fix up and flip the occasional home. (Buy the least expensive home in the most expensive neighborhood you can afford.) They did a pretty good job of timing the market (with a few misses) and ended up with one primary home and two rental homes. They recently sold the rental homes and now own a couple of small (4 unit) apartments, plus their primary residence.
They are set for retirement, and have property to pass along to the family. Over the course of a generation, they have firmly cemented our family as upper middle class. We will never be rich, but unless someone picks up a massive drug habit or makes some extremely stupid investments, our family is going to be okay. That never would have happened with index funds.
Given the rise of the yuan and the inevitable decline of the dollar, it seems insane to trust the stock market with your "wealth". Real wealth is physical. Everything else is just imaginary and subject to the whims of powers far beyond what an individual can control. As soon as the BRIC nations knock out the dollar peg to oil, the US economy is going to be in some serious shit that not even our military can "fix".
How long until it pays for itself?
I just use Plex. It gets the job done.
The wife doesn't like the delay, having to wait for me to download them. The occasional transcode issues. Flakey wifi.
My wife does not like the 'difficulties' of dealing with torrents, so we have a subscription to HBO. That comes with HBO Go, their online content portal.
I wanted to watch one of their new shows (The Deuce. If you liked the Wire, check it out. It's pretty good.) I was able to watch the first couple episodes online just fine. Then one night, I had a glitch with my USB port and I pulled my headphones out in the middle of watching an episode. After I reconnected them, the sound didn't work.
I worked with HBO tech support. They pointed the finger at Frontier, my ISP. They pointed the finger at Adobe (who makes the Flash Player plug-in required to watch their stream). They pointed the finger at Microsoft (I was using IE because Chrome doesn't support Flash). I tried Firefox as well, but the problem persisted. (Sound worked just fine everywhere else. Windows. Browsers. Games. Applications. Just not the HBO Go website / Flash Player on the site.)
After spending the better part of 3 hours over the course of a week troubleshooting the problem, I gave up and torrented the show. I am only going to jump through so many hoops to watch content, that I am PAYING FOR, on my computer. I pay the monthly fee to HBO. If they can't deliver the content to me on the device I want to watch it on, I will do it myself.
The thing with piracy is that it is the best technical option. Computers want to play the media. The content companies try to lock it behind layers of DRM and other hurdles. Those layers are flakey and cause problems. In the end, the content becomes more difficult to consume legally. And that is a problem. People want simple. As human beings we will always take the path of least resistance.
It does not seem like the article addresses the fact that Netflix content can be pirated as well. As far as I can see, the only way that Netflix or another online streaming service would cut into piracy is if their DRM was so strong, and their content so compelling, that the pirates were forced to pay to access it.
For example, Game of Thrones seems pretty popular among people who are tech savvy enough to pirate content. If there were a way to lock down Game of Thrones, some subset of pirates would choose to pay for it because they want it THAT badly. (I know that GoT is on HBO not Netflix, I'm just using an example of popular content).
Like regular VMs, GPU users will also receive sustained-use discounts, though most users probably don't keep their GPUs running for a full month.
Challenge accepted!
Hold my beer...