More often than not, digging through archives of mailing lists for the product you're seeking help on produce an excellent answer. I find that almost any problem you encounter has always been encountered previously by somebody else, and probably a solution produced (unless it's obscure, then maybe you just find another unanswered question).
I guess people just don't want to spend the time reading through mailing lists that most probably aren't indexed by a search engine like google, and just want an answer immediately so they can go back to playing Freecell.
Although the article does bring up a valid point about non-obvious barriers to entry for linux, it also fails to mention that Linux (or any *nix) system has an inherently steeper learning curve than other operating systems like Windows or OSX.
Add to that the fact that almost anybody you talk to that uses Linux would have had to, themselves, learn it on their own through reading docs, figuring stuff out through trial and error, or digging deeper into how things work etc. It's not to hard to see that self education as part of a well earned level of status.
Often times, I feel that when you're forced to learn something on your own, you gain more than enough knowledge to be comfortable using that knowledge, as well as improving on that on a regular basis. Not limited only to computers, but to any field.
If you teach somebody only the minimum required to do something, then you have to keep teaching them over and over (basically watching over them) if anything changes down the road. Whereas, if they're forced to learn it on their own, and then most probably have to learn the fundamentals and digg deeper into how to use those fundamentals to get what they want done, then when something changes, they will be able to figure out what to do without having to bother other people. Effectively teaching them how to fish instead of giving them a fish. Except that, with Linux, you get so many options on how to fish, what to fish, where to fish, with what to fish with, techniques of fishing, etc, that even trivial activities require more base knowledge to accomplish compared to something like Windows, because half the time, new users won't even know what they want.
It seems so often these days, that many many people expect others to take the time to hold their hand through things that may or may not be trivial. Expecting quick answers to mundane questions that may have their answers easily available. People may find themselves bombarded with questions, and as a result start putting up personal barriers such as 'RTFM' to quickly get people off their back whether or not they're valid questions.
Everybody likes exploring or making stuff but nobody likes offering free support. It's just unintersting and, at times, frustrating.
If you're going to blame anything as a barrier to entry, it'd probably be safer to blame the fact that there will always be a clash between the culture of people spending extra effort learning things on their own, and the ones that aren't bothered to put in that effort themselves.
And then you have the poor souls in the middle, that want to put in the time to learn, but can't seem to find the little help needed to get them on their way to self gratification. And either they get lucky and ask the right person in a generously helpful mood, or they get lucky and ask the wrong person in the grumpy morning getting a kick from 'reading the/. article on Linux Snobs, The Real Barriers to Entry' attitude because they woke up 3 hours earlier than normal this morning and couldn't go back to sleep, and just answer question after question with short simple answers that may contain a lot of information but don't really seem nice to a newbie.
"I want to change some setting to this program."
"Is there documentation that says how to do what you want?"
"No."
"Did you look?"
"I can't find anything."
"Do you know where to look?"
"No."
"That's why you can't find anything. Look for a README, or a/doc directory or INSTALL or something."
"I think I found it."
"Ok what does it say?"
"I don't know how to read it."
"Use a text editor, or 'cat' it, or 'more' it or something."
"What text editor can I use?"
"Try vim or emacs or pico or joe or something."
"Ok I loaded vim. It didn't answer my question and now I don't know how to quit. How do I quit?"
"colon q enter"
"what? ahhh the file is going crazy. What's going on? I only did what you told me to do."
"what did you do exactly?"
"I t
Example of a script, automatically look for characters raking in huge amounts of loot/cash. Then automatically narrow those down to the ones who are inexplicably giving away most of it for no aparent reason, or if they're getting something in return, the item(s) are disproportionately cheap for the value of the exchange.
Actions like this just encourage more devious methods of money laundering. In FFXI, it is not uncommon for players to walk around with very very little gil, and have almost all their savings on a mule so as to prevent potential unecessary spending etc. In these situations, almost all your mules will be flagged for giving away gil (legitimately) for trades or purchases or whatnot. Mules designated as storage for entire linkshell treasuries may be removed innadvertently.
Also, you run into the logistical problem of determining what the 'disproportionately cheap' values are for items are. For most items, you could go to the auction house to determine the current going rate of an item, but the really rare items that don't sell often, the auction house isn't a proper place to determine the market value (which might be 10s of times higher). Selling an Axe for 40 million gil on the AH means you lose 4 million gil to AH Tax. So almost all high priced sales are private sales only through the use of search comments and bazaaring in known server bazaar hotspots (on Gilgamesh, it was not uncommon to see 50+ mules at the Port San d'Oria mog house entrance bazaaring).
People make a lot of gil buying items at low prices (because the seller didn't know the going market value) and then reselling into the same market at the current price, or slight discount to move inventory. I've done it on numerous occasions, buying items at their current Auction House price from bazaars (usually from players that just did a KSBCNM and got a ton of rare drops but didn't know that the market demand was so high).
Flagging players because of playtime in an MMO is absurd. When the name of the game is 'who can spend the most time online?', flagging people for 24/7 gameplay (which in FFXI is not uncommon) is almost futile in itself. People in FFXI have separate accounts for the sole purpose of bazaaring (just so you can bazaar your wares while you're actually playing on your real character in another zone), and it's not uncommon for players to leave their clients connected to servers 24/7 for any multitude of reasons. Maybe they're camping and only come back during the 30 second pop window every 15 or 30 minutes, or shadow camping, or just idling in a zone to get the time of death for a certain NM, or just don't feel like logging off so they can read the linkshell chat when they wake up. Or they want to remain in the game world to be able to receive/tell's. Or they consistently fall asleep while playing and don't log off.
Flagging players because of power leveling doesn't really work in FFXI. Power leveling in FFXI is limited to about level 50 give or take a few levels. After that point, extra outside healing won't make xp'ing any faster. If you look at experience point charts for FFXI, level 50 isn't even close to halfway to level 75. In fact, even after the xp nerf, level 60 is about halfway to level 75. And no amount of power leveling is going to make your xp party better at those stages.
When it comes down to it, it's a losing situation for companies to spend money policing their MMO's. It's a better solution to put that money into developing long term solutions that will eventually negate or reduce the impact certain problems have on the world. That is the path that Square-Enix has taken with FFXI. Fish botting is probably the single largest problem they have had, and not only did they nerf fishing, the resulting change was that they IMPROVED the fishing experience by adding more player interaction (fighting the fish with left/right motion) and put in fatigue systems to limit the number of fish players could catch a day to render the advant
I think the point that most people are missing, is that the economy of FFXI has components similar to many of the solutions suggested by posters above. You can't just assume that the inflation of all the items is due to the fact that gilfarmers are 'farming' gil. In actuality, gilfarmers in FFXI don't really contribute as much gil to the system as the fishbotting problem did. The rapid inflation of rare items (like Haubergeon+1, Juggernaught, Nobles/Aristocrat's Tunics. etc etc) are due to both the massive RMT that takes place, and the declining server populations.
When somebody quits, they don't quit with all their gil. They give it to their friends, in hopes that their friends can use the gil to jump ahead and get those items they truly wanted (Astral Earring, Juggernaught etc). This leads to less people in general holding the same total amount of gil. Obviously the prices of items will go up in this situation.
Solutions like taxes have been implemented in FFXI for a long time now. Large (10%) taxes on bazaar sales, on all auction house sales in Jeuno/Tavnazian Safehold, increasingly demanding chocobo fees (5k/chocobo for a 3 minute ride is normal), Dynamis, Limbus etc are all money sinks that are implemented with the sole purpose of sucking gil out of the system to try to control the average gil holdings of all the people left on the server. As with all solutions, people get away with tax evasion (bazaaring in starting nations or in open fields), direct trading, etc, but the solutions are still implemented with varying success.
The problem with gil farmers in FFXI lies in the fact that they monopolize NM/HNM's and become the sole source of rare items deemed fundamental for normal play or crafting synthesis, and then abuse the discrepencies in supply and demand to make huge profits of gil that they later RMT back to players. Somebody suggested making crafting require absurd amounts of materials as a solution. Some recipes in FFXI require 8 ingredients (that may or may not be stacked, requiring intense travelling) of varying rareness or origin, multiple craft sub-skills, etc.
It's not like WoW where gilfarmers just sit there killing monsters and collect the gold that they drop. No mob in FFXI (goblins dropping 5gil/kill) is worth farming like that (better to farm beehive chips in giddeus and HQ beeswax for hundreds of k worth of gil on the auction house). And, almost all mobs worth killing require at least 6+ people to do it (either for experience points, or camping HNM).
To counter this, Square-Enix started to move away from HNM centric loot distribution, and towards instanced battles, with participation rates determined by how many beastman seals you could collect (not so common), and then later with more fights with participation rates determined by how many Kindred Seals (even less common) you could collect. These were the right direction in the end, and they implemented fixed interval fights ENM's that proved rewarding and fun. These are really good changes and any FFXI gamer that has experienced the effects of these will tell you they add to the enjoyment of the game.
The problem almost all FFXI->WoW converts complain about is that it takes too much effort to get items in FFXI with little gain. Almost all the items in the game worth getting are the results of huge collaborations of team effort (and organizational nightmares). This is the part that seems to separate the average WoW gamer and a true FFXI junkie. The WoW convert detests investing insane amounts of time/effort into the game without quick rewards/satisfaction, while the FFXI junkie will not have it any other way.
In FFXI you camp kings for 3-9 hours/day (rotating times so it might be 3pm - midnight today, and in 3 days the spawn windows could be 3am to 9am) for the 'chance' to be able to fight (150+ people in a tiny zone trying to claim a mob that pops every 21-24 hours at 30 minute intervals and 12-18'ish people get to fight it for 15 minutes to an hour) and out of that chance, the 1/11 chance that t
Put them in a bucket according to some hash values (*ahem* months?), and then sort each bucket seperately. Lather, rinse, repeat. Wow, it's so brilliant I think it's already called a Bucket Sort. AND if you're careful with your piles, it's stable too!
I think he intended for the question to be "how does the O(1) work?", and not "what's O(1)?". The article mentionned the two priority queues but nothing more.
He may have been killed in an ambush or a sneak attack. Or perhaps he was surrounded by enemies, shot from behind while focusing his attention on a threat in front of him.
If you were in a battle, then wouldn't there be other dead people near you? And if you were alone, wouldn't your killer take your stuff? You'd think that cavemen would know about looting and such. At least take the poor guy's arrows that so fittingly matched the one you used to shoot him with (It's not like you can't use them with your own bow or something).
If you were going to die like that, with all your stuff, it most probably had to be an accident you yourself caused alone. Either that, or your killer shot you and they didn't chase you, letting you die somewhere else.
even if they didn't complete it in one continous run, you have to give these guys credit. Try finishing e1m1 in like 26 seconds or less and you'll notice that the tricks they use are so well performed and timed. i haven't seen the QdQ with a Vengeance demo but the 16 minute Qdq was a blast to watch. They do wierd things you'd never think of just playing it like a regular joe schmoe. Like using a monster to keep a door open so they can use a teleporter instead of waiting for the lift. In the many times (probably like 30 or so) I've tried to do that after seeing it, I've only been able to accomplish that nicely once. It's the ingenuity that the Qdq team has that makes them unique.
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More often than not, digging through archives of mailing lists for the product you're seeking help on produce an excellent answer. I find that almost any problem you encounter has always been encountered previously by somebody else, and probably a solution produced (unless it's obscure, then maybe you just find another unanswered question).
I guess people just don't want to spend the time reading through mailing lists that most probably aren't indexed by a search engine like google, and just want an answer immediately so they can go back to playing Freecell.
Although the article does bring up a valid point about non-obvious barriers to entry for linux, it also fails to mention that Linux (or any *nix) system has an inherently steeper learning curve than other operating systems like Windows or OSX.
Add to that the fact that almost anybody you talk to that uses Linux would have had to, themselves, learn it on their own through reading docs, figuring stuff out through trial and error, or digging deeper into how things work etc. It's not to hard to see that self education as part of a well earned level of status.
Often times, I feel that when you're forced to learn something on your own, you gain more than enough knowledge to be comfortable using that knowledge, as well as improving on that on a regular basis. Not limited only to computers, but to any field.
If you teach somebody only the minimum required to do something, then you have to keep teaching them over and over (basically watching over them) if anything changes down the road. Whereas, if they're forced to learn it on their own, and then most probably have to learn the fundamentals and digg deeper into how to use those fundamentals to get what they want done, then when something changes, they will be able to figure out what to do without having to bother other people. Effectively teaching them how to fish instead of giving them a fish. Except that, with Linux, you get so many options on how to fish, what to fish, where to fish, with what to fish with, techniques of fishing, etc, that even trivial activities require more base knowledge to accomplish compared to something like Windows, because half the time, new users won't even know what they want.
It seems so often these days, that many many people expect others to take the time to hold their hand through things that may or may not be trivial. Expecting quick answers to mundane questions that may have their answers easily available. People may find themselves bombarded with questions, and as a result start putting up personal barriers such as 'RTFM' to quickly get people off their back whether or not they're valid questions.
Everybody likes exploring or making stuff but nobody likes offering free support. It's just unintersting and, at times, frustrating.
If you're going to blame anything as a barrier to entry, it'd probably be safer to blame the fact that there will always be a clash between the culture of people spending extra effort learning things on their own, and the ones that aren't bothered to put in that effort themselves.
And then you have the poor souls in the middle, that want to put in the time to learn, but can't seem to find the little help needed to get them on their way to self gratification. And either they get lucky and ask the right person in a generously helpful mood, or they get lucky and ask the wrong person in the grumpy morning getting a kick from 'reading the /. article on Linux Snobs, The Real Barriers to Entry' attitude because they woke up 3 hours earlier than normal this morning and couldn't go back to sleep, and just answer question after question with short simple answers that may contain a lot of information but don't really seem nice to a newbie.
"I want to change some setting to this program." /doc directory or INSTALL or something."
"Is there documentation that says how to do what you want?"
"No."
"Did you look?"
"I can't find anything."
"Do you know where to look?"
"No."
"That's why you can't find anything. Look for a README, or a
"I think I found it."
"Ok what does it say?"
"I don't know how to read it."
"Use a text editor, or 'cat' it, or 'more' it or something."
"What text editor can I use?"
"Try vim or emacs or pico or joe or something."
"Ok I loaded vim. It didn't answer my question and now I don't know how to quit. How do I quit?"
"colon q enter"
"what? ahhh the file is going crazy. What's going on? I only did what you told me to do."
"what did you do exactly?"
"I t
Actions like this just encourage more devious methods of money laundering. In FFXI, it is not uncommon for players to walk around with very very little gil, and have almost all their savings on a mule so as to prevent potential unecessary spending etc. In these situations, almost all your mules will be flagged for giving away gil (legitimately) for trades or purchases or whatnot. Mules designated as storage for entire linkshell treasuries may be removed innadvertently.
Also, you run into the logistical problem of determining what the 'disproportionately cheap' values are for items are. For most items, you could go to the auction house to determine the current going rate of an item, but the really rare items that don't sell often, the auction house isn't a proper place to determine the market value (which might be 10s of times higher). Selling an Axe for 40 million gil on the AH means you lose 4 million gil to AH Tax. So almost all high priced sales are private sales only through the use of search comments and bazaaring in known server bazaar hotspots (on Gilgamesh, it was not uncommon to see 50+ mules at the Port San d'Oria mog house entrance bazaaring).
People make a lot of gil buying items at low prices (because the seller didn't know the going market value) and then reselling into the same market at the current price, or slight discount to move inventory. I've done it on numerous occasions, buying items at their current Auction House price from bazaars (usually from players that just did a KSBCNM and got a ton of rare drops but didn't know that the market demand was so high).
Flagging players because of playtime in an MMO is absurd. When the name of the game is 'who can spend the most time online?', flagging people for 24/7 gameplay (which in FFXI is not uncommon) is almost futile in itself. People in FFXI have separate accounts for the sole purpose of bazaaring (just so you can bazaar your wares while you're actually playing on your real character in another zone), and it's not uncommon for players to leave their clients connected to servers 24/7 for any multitude of reasons. Maybe they're camping and only come back during the 30 second pop window every 15 or 30 minutes, or shadow camping, or just idling in a zone to get the time of death for a certain NM, or just don't feel like logging off so they can read the linkshell chat when they wake up. Or they want to remain in the game world to be able to receive /tell's. Or they consistently fall asleep while playing and don't log off.
Flagging players because of power leveling doesn't really work in FFXI. Power leveling in FFXI is limited to about level 50 give or take a few levels. After that point, extra outside healing won't make xp'ing any faster. If you look at experience point charts for FFXI, level 50 isn't even close to halfway to level 75. In fact, even after the xp nerf, level 60 is about halfway to level 75. And no amount of power leveling is going to make your xp party better at those stages.
When it comes down to it, it's a losing situation for companies to spend money policing their MMO's. It's a better solution to put that money into developing long term solutions that will eventually negate or reduce the impact certain problems have on the world. That is the path that Square-Enix has taken with FFXI. Fish botting is probably the single largest problem they have had, and not only did they nerf fishing, the resulting change was that they IMPROVED the fishing experience by adding more player interaction (fighting the fish with left/right motion) and put in fatigue systems to limit the number of fish players could catch a day to render the advant
I think the point that most people are missing, is that the economy of FFXI has components similar to many of the solutions suggested by posters above. You can't just assume that the inflation of all the items is due to the fact that gilfarmers are 'farming' gil. In actuality, gilfarmers in FFXI don't really contribute as much gil to the system as the fishbotting problem did. The rapid inflation of rare items (like Haubergeon+1, Juggernaught, Nobles/Aristocrat's Tunics. etc etc) are due to both the massive RMT that takes place, and the declining server populations.
When somebody quits, they don't quit with all their gil. They give it to their friends, in hopes that their friends can use the gil to jump ahead and get those items they truly wanted (Astral Earring, Juggernaught etc). This leads to less people in general holding the same total amount of gil. Obviously the prices of items will go up in this situation.
Solutions like taxes have been implemented in FFXI for a long time now. Large (10%) taxes on bazaar sales, on all auction house sales in Jeuno/Tavnazian Safehold, increasingly demanding chocobo fees (5k/chocobo for a 3 minute ride is normal), Dynamis, Limbus etc are all money sinks that are implemented with the sole purpose of sucking gil out of the system to try to control the average gil holdings of all the people left on the server. As with all solutions, people get away with tax evasion (bazaaring in starting nations or in open fields), direct trading, etc, but the solutions are still implemented with varying success.
The problem with gil farmers in FFXI lies in the fact that they monopolize NM/HNM's and become the sole source of rare items deemed fundamental for normal play or crafting synthesis, and then abuse the discrepencies in supply and demand to make huge profits of gil that they later RMT back to players. Somebody suggested making crafting require absurd amounts of materials as a solution. Some recipes in FFXI require 8 ingredients (that may or may not be stacked, requiring intense travelling) of varying rareness or origin, multiple craft sub-skills, etc.
It's not like WoW where gilfarmers just sit there killing monsters and collect the gold that they drop. No mob in FFXI (goblins dropping 5gil/kill) is worth farming like that (better to farm beehive chips in giddeus and HQ beeswax for hundreds of k worth of gil on the auction house). And, almost all mobs worth killing require at least 6+ people to do it (either for experience points, or camping HNM).
To counter this, Square-Enix started to move away from HNM centric loot distribution, and towards instanced battles, with participation rates determined by how many beastman seals you could collect (not so common), and then later with more fights with participation rates determined by how many Kindred Seals (even less common) you could collect. These were the right direction in the end, and they implemented fixed interval fights ENM's that proved rewarding and fun. These are really good changes and any FFXI gamer that has experienced the effects of these will tell you they add to the enjoyment of the game.
The problem almost all FFXI->WoW converts complain about is that it takes too much effort to get items in FFXI with little gain. Almost all the items in the game worth getting are the results of huge collaborations of team effort (and organizational nightmares). This is the part that seems to separate the average WoW gamer and a true FFXI junkie. The WoW convert detests investing insane amounts of time/effort into the game without quick rewards/satisfaction, while the FFXI junkie will not have it any other way.
In FFXI you camp kings for 3-9 hours/day (rotating times so it might be 3pm - midnight today, and in 3 days the spawn windows could be 3am to 9am) for the 'chance' to be able to fight (150+ people in a tiny zone trying to claim a mob that pops every 21-24 hours at 30 minute intervals and 12-18'ish people get to fight it for 15 minutes to an hour) and out of that chance, the 1/11 chance that t
Not every so often, if he was using an AVL tree, on average, only O(log(n)) rotations would be required on each insert!
Put them in a bucket according to some hash values (*ahem* months?), and then sort each bucket seperately. Lather, rinse, repeat. Wow, it's so brilliant I think it's already called a Bucket Sort. AND if you're careful with your piles, it's stable too!
I think he intended for the question to be "how does the O(1) work?", and not "what's O(1)?". The article mentionned the two priority queues but nothing more.
1 .0/0810.html
There's a nice description about how it works here:
http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/020
Just scroll down to the "Design" section (quarter of the way down the page).
If you were going to die like that, with all your stuff, it most probably had to be an accident you yourself caused alone. Either that, or your killer shot you and they didn't chase you, letting you die somewhere else.
even if they didn't complete it in one continous run, you have to give these guys credit. Try finishing e1m1 in like 26 seconds or less and you'll notice that the tricks they use are so well performed and timed. i haven't seen the QdQ with a Vengeance demo but the 16 minute Qdq was a blast to watch. They do wierd things you'd never think of just playing it like a regular joe schmoe. Like using a monster to keep a door open so they can use a teleporter instead of waiting for the lift. In the many times (probably like 30 or so) I've tried to do that after seeing it, I've only been able to accomplish that nicely once. It's the ingenuity that the Qdq team has that makes them unique.