The problem is in measurability of a change. If I improve a developer or analyst workflow that makes 100 people 1% more successful, that's likely both more beneficial and also harder to measure than a change that makes 5 people 10% more successful.
That's the bit where the GGP's "optimising for the right factors", or something adjacent to it comes in. Many things can't be objectively measured, and upon realising that, many techies give up. But there is subjective truth, which for sure is a lesser truth than the objective sort, but truth none the less. How did you come to believe that you've made 100 people 1% more successful? If you can convince yourself that you've done good, important work, you can probably convince other people too -- but you have to do it, they're not going to convince themselves. Collect the evidence, such as it is, and articulate your case.
Oh sorry i actually confused S3 for aws ec2 for some reason >_< Didnt really think about it to be honest, but will give it a look. Long as it can be connected to my pipeline!
I believe they aren't allowed to change the hardware spec, so at some point they will not be able to get supplies anymore. As far as SimpleDB, yeah, believe it or not, on AWS bill, it still exist and most support engineers from Amazon don't really have a clue why it's there. I still don't know which service we use is using SimpleDB. Only a few cents, so nobody really care.
Well, they advertised m1 as such and such hardware spec. I don't know if in their ToS they state they would be allowed to change the spec without notifying customer. Maybe.
You could also be missing out on incentives from the manufacturer for not using their financing. It's definitely a good idea to have money or financing already lined up, but some manufacturers will give thousands of dollars in incentives to use their financing.
There are probably cases where the current incentives are rolled up in the financing, e.g. 0% interest. But there are also often other fees and, frankly, the available (effectively) risk-free investment options these days have such low rates of return as to be almost indistinguishable from 0%.
They're not giving you deals on the financing because they like you.
If I were buying a car my very strong default is to just pay cash and be done with it.
Those incentives come with costs. In their case, it was better to know they didn't have to worry about making a loan payment every month for years when their overall financial future was a little iffy at the time - prudent when the main income earner's health was failing. It wound up being the correct decision, as my father died a couple years later.
My last vehicle I had cash to pay for it. Manufacturer offered a $2k incentive to finance through their own financing arm. I asked, and there was no early payoff penalty. So I financed the car, and sent a check a week later, paying it off completely well before the first payment was due.
Last time I tried protocol buffers it was dog slow, json was pretty fast, and msgpack was insane fast. This was on a heavily nested dict of dicts structure.
