Or it is just random chance. Out of 1 million people trying different things, a few are bound to be successful. At least for stock trading that is assumed to be true.
I don't think the quality of your code has anything to do with your ego. You can be a total jerk and yet a brilliant programmer. Not even correlated based on my personal experience.
I use eclipse mainly because of auto complete, it saves me a lot of time, and I see and correct my mistakes immediately (tight feedback loop). If this is a serious project for you, yours should have this one feature for sure.
"You can't outsource your liability"
I have to disagree. You can define any part of your business as a "liability", so in that case you don't have to outsource anything at all. In fact a big reason people outsource tasks is because of liability.
AWS promises physical redundancy, which apparently doesn't mean crap!
Saying it "doesn't mean crap" is an exaggeration. AWS's physical redundancy offers a marginal increase in reliability (roughly 3.5%, according to their stats) at potentially lower cost than providing the same system in-house because of economies of scale. They never promised to be 100% fail-safe (and would be foolish to do so.)
The point is that they are not backing up your data they way they advertise it. The whole point of physical redundancy is to eliminate single point of failure yet from their email it seems that such single point still exist.
Also if adding physical redundancy improves reliability only by 3.5% it means that they have different definition of the term.
AWS promises you physical redundancy, what they don't offer you is an ironclad guarantee that nobody, customer included will ever screw up. So you need backups. It's really simple.
No, there wasn't much user generated material at the beginning. I remember when I discovered youtube, I was shocked that how they were allowed to put so much copyrighted material online without any problem.
If it weren't for the high production value content, I'd argue Youtube would never have gotten as popular as it did.
I'm increasingly dismayed by how in our society we reward this kind of illegal behavior, whether you agree that it is moral, unethical, or whatever, it is against the law and repeatedly, these violations are accepted, promoted, and lead the owners of the sites to $300+ Million exits.
And then I remember where the U.S. got its land. I remember where Goodyear got his rubber. I remember where oil and diamonds and rare metals come from and wonder why we have laws at all. Why we have national borders at all. Why we have jails at all.
Yeah it's tempting to go after Viacom, News Corp etc., and as wrong as I think they are, I can't help feeling all this is just a symptom of a far bigger problem at a completely different level of abstraction. Edit for clarification: I agree with you that if we have laws we should follow them, but law should reflect culture not vice versa.
I'm not sure I'm with you on the production quality video necessity. A lot of youtubes virality has been stupid cat videos. While I'm sure there are people logging on and looking for naruto, I would bet most people don't find youtube for the first time searching for Naruto.
I had a similar experience... I have tried to switch for the last few years, unsuccessfully. Until a month ago which I installed 9.04 and it pretty smooth. The only reason that I boot my laptop on Windows is Photoshop.
