Interesting stuff. I always knew of the different parties involved in a CC transaction, but this explained in a super simple way. Kudos. Weird that there is no about section and wth is the author ?
I am based out of the Asian sub-continent. I cut the cord on my Netflix subscription 5 months ago.
I only have a Prime Video subscription and a Hotstar subscription (for Live football, tennis etc). Netflix started becoming a place which would have content that I absoultely didn't want to watch and there were gazillion such titles.
I felt that a reduced set of options that Hotstar (which has license to HBO-content) and Prime Video was good enough for me. I felt I had too many options on Netflix and didn't want the overhead to select one.
As for some of the content on Netflix that I do like for e.g. Narcos & Mindhunter, Piracy FTW.
MSFT employee here, Teams sucks balls. I have only barely used Slack but when I joined the company everyone was using SfB which blew dead goats.
Teams is much better than that. But the search is bad, I agree on scrolling, its atrocious. But man, I have a big gripe with search. Never do I get the results I want. People search is even worse. Adding a new person to chat with somehow takes more clicks than necessary. It will only show a limited number of people whom you conversed with when you scrolled down.
The higher MAU numbers are just because it comes pre-packaged with O365 subscription. Difficult to discern how much traction it would get if it stood on its own.
People would misconstrue the increased usage of Linux VMs on Azure to assume Windows Server instances are no longer used for Server scenarios, which is not the case.
The Indian Government is extremely inept at assessing at technological needs. Aadhar is a good example of what came out of the Indian Government (technically Nilekani & Co.).
The pathetic Indian Government websites would show you what they are capable of when designing a product that is supposed to work for Millions/Billions of people. They are just going to line up TCS or Wipro's pockets because that's the cheapest and also the crappiest.
Alternate opinion, I work at Microsoft as an Engineer. We (obviously) use Teams for meetings. For one thing, it integrates well with the MS/Office ecosystem (sharing videos is easier etc). But the video conferencing system is really poor. Meetings sometime start with one party not able to hear properly, the other one. Usually, we spend the first 5 minutes saying "Am I audible?", "Can you hear me?" and their variants with that a feeling of deja-vu hits me. Usually, there aren't issues once the meeting starts (not with the software at-least). But the starting a meeting is certainly painful. SfB is a whole different ball of wax.
I have never used Zoom but I understand why someone would be willing to pay for a video-conferencing solution that works. Think about your hundreds of thousands of employees losing 5-10 meetings of all their meetings, everyday. That is the problem Zoom must be solving.
Try ops-class.org from Geoffrey Challen that uses OS/161 for programming assignments, all of the material is free. I'm doing that one now. Highly recommend Operating Systems in Three Easy pieces as well.
Of all the shows you mentioned the only ones I have watched is,
OITB (left it at after watching S04 I think), Master of None (both the seasons), I realise that its a drama that leans toward being a rom-com but I do not watch rom-coms at all. Kudos to Mindhunter, indeed that was entertaining and right in my ballpark. Liked House of cards till the time Spacey was there, S06 disappointed me. Season 1 of Making a Murderer was outstanding, season 2 didn't catch my interest. Also the last comedy I watched end-to-end I think was Entourage (which was produced by HBO), The Office (US) and Parks And Recreation, not surprisingly Netflix doesn't stream any of these in my region, Prime Video does the last two and Hotstar streams Entourage.
These are good shows not great ones like The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men, BB, Six Feet Under you know about the stuff that critics rave about etc. I don't care if Birdbox was watched by all of Netflix's subscribers, thats precisely the sort of thing that I don't watch the majority of the time, you watch that thing once and you forget that you ever watched it again. I'm now on probably my sixth or seventh rewatch of The Wire, that should tell you something about my viewing habits and why Netflix's content just doesn't work for me. I don't expect a network to consistenly churn out shows like that but at least some of the shows should be somewhere close to that level which HBO continues to do with The Deuce, Succession, True Detective(I know they fucked the dog on S02) etc.
Also you have the time to watch ALL of that, I don't. I work in tech too, I have an hour on weekdays and maybe 2-3 on weekends for leisure, so its only natural that I would be picky about what I watch, the absolute best, currently that would mean shows like The Americans, Escape from Dannemora and shows from the past like Halt and Catch Fire(from AMC), Six feet under, Deadwood which not surpisingly were also made by HBO. Netflix doesn't stream any of that.
I also don't understand how you think AMC won't exist, are they going to be insolvent ? Doesn't look like it, they have a cash-cow in The Walking Dead(I only watched till S06 then got bored) They got two of the best TV shows I liked BB and BCS, BCS is gonna kill it in the next season. They also produced The Terror, a brilliant mini-series which Netflix didn't stream as well and again Prime Video did. As a viewer I don't care about Netflix's subscriber numbers or HBO's lack thereof, I want to watch content I like which sadly Netflix doesn't produce on a consistent basis, this is entirely subjective and I realise that I might be one of the edge-cases in all the millenials when I say Netflix don't tickly my fancy.
I'm not biased towards HBO, hell HBO doesn't even stream in my country, I'm incredibly picky about what I watch since I'm short on time, Netflix churns out a LOT of shows, its only natural that some of them turn out to be brilliant and some of them indeed are, but the rest, like 90% of the shows are just average, they don't work for me, I simply do not have the time to watch them.
In that sense, Netflix is like the Y-Combinator of producing original content. You produce(invest in) hundreds of TV shows(startups) and hope one of them makes it big (becomes a unicorn) and the rest of them, well they would be probably cease to exist after some time.
I am not entirely sold on Netflix Originals. The way a network grows, NTFLX is a network, is by creating quality content that stands the test of time. Great works of art that you constantly want to re-watch Mad Men, The Sopranos, The Wire, BB etc.
Name one show on NTFLX that you want to re-watch 5-6 years from now. They produce good content, its good enough for streaming in one day but is it worth revisiting in the long-term, does it get you excited about any other future projects ? Hell ,no.
This is incredibly subjective, I live in India and found that I was using it less and less even though I was keeping the subscription on. I have Prime Video and Hotstar, Hotstar is a shitty streaming service but they have license to content from HBO and FX and they have live streaming for EPL & Bundesliga my main reason for subscribing.
I cancelled my NTFLX subscription a few days ago. I might switch it on for a couple of months, when I its off-season for live sports, but otherwise I intend to use it sparingly until they start producing quality content, which I have a high bar for.
I have been reading through these and find them really unique in a good way. I got a new perspective on a lot of stuff I already studied I have a Bachelors in CS and graduated 1.5 years ago.
It doesn't feel formal like a textbook and yet doesn't sacrifice on the mathematical rigor. I would be trying out the exercise problems which seem equally daunting but fun.
I also submitted an issue request on Github and Jeff I have a few questions for you that I put on Quora, I have A2A'd you.
Lastly, thanks for taking the time out and putting content like this out for free. It helps millions of autodidacts like me.
There is a plethora of Linux based distros out there. I recently bought a Lenovo L480 with DOS. I ended up trying out Elementary since I liked the UX. A day or two after using it, it already started hanging on me and wouldn't boot. There was this super weird bug as well because of which the first time I opened Google Chrome, the close button on top right would freeze and I'd have to close that and reopen Chrome. I hated being part of these "edge cases".
I then ended up using Ubuntu and that has been stable as rock. No surprises, rock solid. I used it back in college.
There are very few Linux based distros that are battle tested, Ubuntu is certainly one of them, on account of being backed by Canonical, which actually gets paid to develop the OS unlike most other linux based distros that have to work on "donations" or "foundation money".
Anyway, I'm happy with Ubuntu for my needs, I don't have super fancy needs and I don't want Arch level of customization. All I want something that works out of box and has a UNIX like CLI (I'm a programmer).
Another thing that sucks about Linux based OS's is that the power management is just repugnant. There are so many OS's out there and so many laptop models that I understand it is a herculean task to get maximum performance on every possible laptop.
Which is why, I decided that my next laptop is going to be an MBP, the Retina display is mind blowing, has a UNIX like interface, great battery life, a bit pricey but when it comes to being more productive as a programmer, I'm willing to pay more.