Their post said that load growth had a mitigating effect on prices. Not letting the data centers come online would, presumably, result in higher prices.
That seems slightly weird, but that sounds like there's some large fixed costs that they can spread over the entire subscriber base, so the extra data centers are picking up some of those fixed costs.
> Let's not pretend Microsoft has a monopoly on idiocy in the software world.
Entirely fair, but let's not pretend the situation is symmetrical. Canonical doesn't have monopoly on the linux or broader *nix world the same way that Microsoft has on the Windows world.
You'd have to prove that the CEO knew that it would hurt the company and still did it or that it's so ridiculously negligent that any sane person should have known.
This is BS. A shareholder lawsuit against the CEO/board/executives for investing in the employees in the hope of long term profits would never succeed. The idea of a fiduciary duty doesn't mean that. It means the CEO can't take actions that intentionally hurt the company.
And there are very few large public companies with active enough investors to oust a CEO over this, and even fewer that have both active and activist investors that would be interested in such a thing.
> My "actual job" isn't to write code, but to solve problems.
Yes, and there's often a benefit to having a human have an understanding of the concrete details of the system when you're trying to solve problems.
> That has increasingly shifted to "just" reviewing code
It takes longer to read code than to write code if you're trying to get the same level of understanding. You're gaining time by building up an understanding deficit. That works for a while, but at some point you have to go burn the time to understand it.
Oh come on. They're obviously using the word "science" in this context as a shorthand for the institutions and processes we've set up to do research. Mostly because that's too many words for a title and nobody has come up with a catchy name that's not politically coded. It's also pretty normal usage of the word out in the wild.
If you're going to do that, you're going to need to get universities to treat computers as an actual applied discipline. Physical engineers at least get some practice working with numbers around real materials.
I've met too many recent university graduates that don't even know you need to sanitize database inputs. Which, not their fault, but the university system as it currently exists in relation to software is not set up do do the thing you're asking.
The alternative is to have a really long exam (or a series of them like actuaries do?). Here are 10 random architectures. Describe the security flaws of each and what you would change to mitigate them.
The other change that needs to be made, is that engineers need to be able to describe the bounds of their software. This happens in the other engineering disciplines. A civil engineer can design a bridge with weight capacity X, maybe a pedestrian bridge. If someone builds it and drives semi-trucks over it, that's kinda their problem (and liability).
We would need some sort of way to say "this code is rated for use on an internal network or local only" and, given that rating, hooking it up to the open internet would be legally hazardous.
> If we're being VERY generous, we've consistently lived past 40 for the last 2,000 years.
That's not... that's not how statistics work work at all.
Life expectancy was 30 because half of all babies died, and on top of that childhood diseases took out a bunch more. Eliminating this has been the vast majority of life expectancy increase.
If you made it to puberty in antiquity, you were pretty likely to make it to 60 or so. Y'know... assuming you didn't live in an area the Romans or Mongols wanted.
That seems slightly weird, but that sounds like there's some large fixed costs that they can spread over the entire subscriber base, so the extra data centers are picking up some of those fixed costs.