I don't mind this. It's unreasonable to expect them to provide a free service forever without any kind of monetization.

Given how little spotify gives to artists, I can't imagine this being a cost effective way to launder your money at all.

Everything is fine within the scope of a college course or project.

Where C++ breaks down is large, complicated projects where you colaborate with other developers over multiple years.

I worked in C++ for almost a decade, and while there were a few good projects I encountered, most suffered from one or more of the following problems:

• C++ has so many parts, everyone picks a subset they think is "good", but noone seems to fully agree on what that subset is.
• A side effect of the many possibilities C++ offers to compose or abstract your project is that it allows for developers to be "clever". However, this often results in code that is hard to maintain or understand, especially for other developers.
• Good C++ is very hard. Not everyone is a C++ veteran that read dozens of books or has a robust body of knowledge on all its quirks and pitfalls, and those people are also often assigned to your project and contribute to it. I was certainly never an expert, despite a lot of time and effort spent learning and using C++.

It's the only truly free choice for a browser.

I've been using it for 20-ish years and there's never been a major reason to switch, and all the alternatives seem worse.

Also, it's all that stands between Google and the free web at this point.

A hard disk. Not boot from a hard disk, but the hard disk controller is actually made to run Linux: http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=1

I've been using Firefox since it was called Phoenix. Mozilla, for all it's flaws, has been our first and only line of defense for an open web for so long.

Free Software Foundation, Inc. Vs Cisco Systems Inc. disagrees. The FSF sued Linksys for violating the license for GCC, libc etc.

And they were forced in court to release all their WRT stuff under GPL, which is how OpenWRT got its start.

If you really need the scale of 2000 physical machines, you're at a scale and complexity level where it's going to be expensive no matter what.

And I think if you need that kind of resources, you'll still be cheaper of DIY.

Got to agree with @Zushii@feddit.de here, although it depends on the scope of your service or project.

Cloud services are good at getting you up and running quickly, but they are very, very expensive to scale up.

I work for a financial services company, and we are paying 7 digit monthly AWS bills for an amount of work that could realistically be done with one really big dedicated server. And now we're required to support multiple cloud providers by some of our customers, we've spent a TON of effort trying to untangle from SQS/SNS and other AWS specific technologies.

Clouds like to tell you:

• Using the cloud is cheaper than running your own server
• Using cloud services requires less manpower / labour to maintain and manage
• It's easier to get up and running and scale up later using cloud services

The last item is true, but the first two are only true if you are running a small service. Scaling up on a cloud is not cost effective, and maintaining a complicated cloud architecture can be FAR more complicated than managing a similar centralized architecture.

This article is trying to conflate two different things:

• Anti trust regulation of big tech which is trying to reign in the power of these companies. This is happening everywhere - including the US, which is currently starting a big anti trust case against Alphabet. The same is happening in the EU and probably the UK.

• The UK online safety bill trying to ban private and encrypted communication

These are not the same. Portraying them as two branches of the same tree, and the tech companies as upset bullies because someone is standing up to them is disengenious.

Of course they don't particularly like either, but most of them are threatening to leave over the online safety bill and the UK trying to puff its chest and show it can regulate these forces post brexit.

I don't see this going well for the UK honestly.

I'm not convinced. I think a lot more people are susceptible to getting distracted than there are susceptible to extreme acts of violence.

Your stated good use cases can easily be performed after/outside of classes. And I would say in this day and age should be part of assignments/homework/studying in high school level education to guide and educate young people in filtering, identifying and assessing source materials better. But that's asking a lot from teachers, who are not experts at this, either.

I don't see how any of this discussion relates to funding though.

Vote with your wallet. I recently increased my monthly donation to Mozilla.