I think I'll revisit my theory on the collective human intelligence.
When humans first evolved (or were created, for you religious wackos), there were pretty smart. They used their big brains to find ways to work around the fact that they were scrawny hairless apes whose tiny little teeth and pathtic fragile claws couldn't harm a rubber baloon animal. Because of their success, their population grew.
After a time, they started forming permenant communities where they could sustain their power and influence over nature, and now humans are the dominant species on the planet.
I maintain that the number of actual neurons in the human species has not increased. Where we originally had a set of neurons shared amongst a few hundred thousands humans, once we hit around a million, we stopped producing new neurons.
As the population continues to grow, those same neurons get spread thinner and thinner, until the internet was created -- at which point many of them started to die off. By 2010, the Chinese will have captured all available working neurons and they will be the sum total of human intelligence, until the internet takes over in 2015 and we become simple batteries.
I'm gonna love seeing my insurance rates go down when they see that my car spends 99.99% of its time sitting in my garage. Now, all I need to do is rig up an AC adapter to power that new GPS chip I yanked from the car and the savings will start rolling in!
Scientists make use of extensive surplus budget to create the new threadless screw.
"We think this new screw will help the industry by providing a less complex fastening device for the end users, and it should be more economical for manufacturers as well."
The new threadless screw serves the same function as a traditional screw, but doesn't require a complex torque-riddled installaton process. Simple repeated impacts will drive the new screw home with far less effort.
"The average consumer is often frustrated with traditional screw technology. Do you need flat heads, phillips, star-point? Will sheet metal screw threads work, or do you need the heftier wood threads? Self-threading points, or rounded? It's mind-boggling! These new screws are great. They only have one head type, and you just pick the length and heft you need. That's all!"
Scientists expect the threadless screw to be a big hit in 2006, and look forward to tackling the next problem at hand.
"We're thinking of developing a shorter lever next year... One that doesn't require so much space to operate. It will have less leverage, but most people don't really use the leverage their current levers provide."
I remember when we built the first student-run computer to be placed on WMU's network. We put together a 486/133 with 16Megs of RAM and installed Slackware running the 1.0 kernel and X windows.
We spend a whole afternoon of testing, trying to get it to swap. The only way we could get it to was to have gnuchess play against itself. When you do that, it forks itself, and thus has two active 9Meg processes.
These days, you get swap death with 64Meg of RAM because of all the bloat that has crept into the newer kernels (and everything else).
The point isn't to assign blame, but rather to improve the mental condition of the patient.
By this, you mean to cause the patient's state of mind to conform more closely to the accepted normal behavioural patterns of the masses, yes?
Consider this. Let's suppose someone is addicted to work. They have no close friends or family. They socialize with their co-workers, but feel compelled to work extra hours. They don't do much at home other than eat and sleep. Yet, they are HAPPY as a result.
Now, let's suppose someone else lives a more or less normal life. They work hard enough to do their job and not lose it. They watch 4-5 hours of TV every night. They go out with friends on the weekends, and eat dinner with the spouse and kids. They are not terribly happy with this life, but are not terribly unhappy either.
Which of these two individuals has a better, more fulfilling life for themselves? Which is more beneficial to their community? Which one supposedly has a "problem" that psychologists would feel compelled to treat?
"Yep, I was diagnosed with that thar AIDS thang after I was attacked in deer camp by Bigfoot last year,", says a second man who was also cured of AIDS.
"I was purty depressed, an my cornhold hurt somethin' fierce for weeks. Then this spaceship came down and I got abducted by them bug-eyed little fellers! When I came to, I was cured... so I guess I gotta thank 'em."
"Course, my cornhole hurts again now... an' I got no deer this year neither."....
Sorry guys, saw this article on google news yesterday, with the word "TABLOID" right there in the header. I'm sure slashdot readers and editors know the value of tabloid stories.
Monks in Europe being brought in for questioning. It turns out the copyright holder on materials believed lost during the "Dark Ages" wants compensation for the potential profit their order *might* have made, if other monastic orders hadn't duplicated all those books and scrolls.
"DRM should work to prevent any such violations in the future, but we want our fair share.", said an RIAA spokesperson. "I mean, just look at all the things we use, every day, that use arabic numbers. Those would have been ours to sell, if the monks hadn't copied them."
Asked about the prospect of another "Dark Age", the spokesperson replied, "Well, in the event of a world-wide return to barbarism, I think it's safe to say that the RIAA will be seen as the new Guardians of Knowledge... and once the world economy starts to stabilize, I'm sure we can return that knowledge to the people for a price they'll be happy to pay."
For me, I have faith in the Bible because (by faith) I have chosen to believe it is God's literal word.
Two points here. I assume you mean that you read passages from the Old Testament in their original Hebrew, and that you read passages from the New Testament in their original Greek? Any other language will impose imperfections of translation, even assuming none of the many hands they passed through in the copying process ever re-interpreted any phrases to account for changes in vocabulary over the centuries.
There's a reason the King James version is called that. It was a re-written interpretation of the Bible into modern English, and specifically in such a way as to grant the maximum political benefit to the authority of the King of England, and the Church of Rome (as the most powerful political entitiy of the time, and the accepted literal voice of God on Earth).
Point number two. Accepting any human crafted work as the literal Word of God is nonsense. Those who were inspired by God to write the Bible put down the best textual description of what they Saw. NO written language can adequately describe a divine experience, just as no mortal mind can fully understand the infinite Will of God.
You, reading the Bible, are seeing the many-time re-interpreted and translated text of an account written by many hands (not all of which were selected to become part of the Bible, by the way) of a divine revelation, which itself was the shadow left from a brief communion with God.
You are, of course, free to disagree... but that's my take.
As many people here on/. has said - keep science in science class and religion in a theology class. Teach students boths sides then let them decide what to believe in.
This is highly amusing to me. You do realize that it's only been in recent times that the two were ever considered seperate? A great deal of what we call science was done by logical men who were trying to find ways to understand God by understanding His creation.
The division of science and religion came about only a few centuries ago, and it happened for political reasons. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Church emerged as the most powerful uniting force in Europe. That unity splintered with the formation of the Church of England, and the gradual trend towards industrial growth and nationalism.
As men like Galileo began putting forth ideas that described a new way to look at God's creation, the Church singled them out as heretics -- not so much because what they said couldn't be a valid way to view the scriptures, as because it removed authority from the Church. As the Quakers would say later, if everyone can personally commune with God, what need they a Church? Likewise, if everyone can think for themselves, the Church isn't required to explain how things work.
Again, you're free to believe what you will. The above is simply what I take from my studies of the evolution of language, and the history of Europe some years ago.
VHS macrovision... evil. DVD region coding... evil. HD-DVD small capacity... evil. Blu-Ray Super-DRM... Evil. Hard Drive distribution failure rates, cost... Evil! Download network saturation... EVIL! Streaming-only content lack of persistancy... EEEEVIL!
Yeah, hail is a good discrepancy. As the tube stretches up through the atmosphere, it's going to have to survive not just high winds and enormous temperature differentials (it might be 90F on the ground, but it's probably a lot colder at 40,000ft), it's also going to have to deal with storms that pass around it.
I'm wondering how this thing will hold up when it gets battered by hailstones, or even better... it acts as a ground wire for lightning strikes.
If they video game industry had paid better attention to what was going on around them, they could've policed themselves, and the government wouldn't have gotten involved.
Why does anyone need to "police" them? Why can't parents control their own children and allow or prevent games from entering their homes based on their own beliefs?
Most parents don't want the Playstation, the TV, or the internet to raise their kids. They don't want the government to do it either. But they certainly wouldn't mind a little help now and then, and restricting the sale of content deemed mature seems like a pretty reasonable way to help.
True, but I'd rather the restrictions come from the parents themselves. You're seriously saying that you can't tell your own children that they have to check with you BEFORE buying a game and bringing it home to play?
We're not talking about alcohol or cigarettes, where the kids can buy them, use them, and dispose of them totally outside your influence... and MY parents didn't seem to have that much trouble knowing when I was doing something of that sort *ahem*. You might argue that they can go to their friend's house and play -- yeah, they can. But if you take the trouble to call their friend's parents and ask about what kinds of games they're playing, you can police them as you like.
Personally, I think all this coddling and "protection" is raising a nation of perpetual infants that have trouble wiping their own noses as they sit in their board rooms. Teach your kids, don't hide them away and hope they never see anything bad. Otherwise, how will they ever learn how to cope with the crap life DOES throw at them?
So... if someone buys a portable MP3 player and takes it work with them, plugs it in (which, yeah, they shouldn't do.. but it happens) and the built-in virus moves onto the hospital network... are you SURE nobody dies?
You can make the argument that a hospital network should be secure against virii... and I can counter that a gas tank should be secure from sugar.
I know, sugar isn't designed to be installed in gas tanks... but most portable MP3 players ARE designed to connect to computers, and thus to networks.
*shrug*
Of course, if we just got rid of all the lawyers and spent all the energy we use to sue each other on fixing things, we probably wouldn't care.
"You agree that Macromedia may audit your use of the Software... In the event that such audit reveals any use of the Software by you other than in full compliance with the terms of this Agreement, you shall reimburse Macromedia for all reasonable expenses related to such audit."
Tell people they have to pay for nebulous audit.
Outsource auditing cheaply to India.
Tell people trained audit professional costs $250/hour.
When I was in school, I loved the old corewars game, and was facinated by the C-Robots game. Both of these games involve coding artifical intelligence agents and pitting them against each other. Now it seems the opportunity is there to do the same thing with online poker games!
Why gripe about this WinPokerBot thing? Code your own that's smarter and reap the rewards! Sure, it will annoy the human players, but they'll just have to move to a secure server that verifies you in some way (via a custom client perhaps).
It might just be the increasingly stressful environment that today's youth are subject to, where they can look forward to having to find work in a depressed economy, dealing with inflation as gas prices continue to soar (and thus drive transportation costs up, which increases the cost of ALL goods), or having the next 10 to 20 years to enjoy a war which we didn't need and can't afford to enjoy?
Add onto that the fact that today's youth have very few role models to look up to, and lots of people telling them they can't state their opinions because it isn't politically correct.
And let's not forget that one of the new non-destructive outlets they have, playing video games, is now under seige as well.
Answer me this... if kids can't kill things in video games to work off their aggression, do you honestly believe they'll become placid, malleable little zombies that society can mold into productive worker drones? I doubt it.
Kids don't form gangs to beat people up... they form gangs to relieve boredom and give themselves a sense of self-worth. Right now, many of them are in online gangs (called guilds) in MMORPG's... if you stop that, they'll switch to real-life gangs. Then instead of raiding the elf n00b zone and killing people, they'll hang around town and break stuff, or bully people.
So now my tax dollars will go to help pay OTHER people to sit around all day and read the SPAM I get? Cool, can they please delete it when they're done so I don't have to see it?
"A parent can, however, choose to buy an AO rated game for their kids."
A parent can, however, choose to buy an NC-17 rated movie on DVD and give it to their kids.
Kids are a hell of a lot smarter than most adults give them credit for. If they want to see something, they'll find a way around whatever obstacles you try to put in their path. If you make a big fuss over it, it makes it that much more desirable.
Giving GTA an AO rating is great free advertising for Rockstar. Yeah, it means their retail sales might slump a bit... but suddenly the online sales go through the roof. And if they backpedal and restore the M rating, so much the better!
This just further convinces me that someone out there needs to make a game with an actual closed economy, instead of this faucet/drain BS that has to be jiggly-poked every time a group of players finds a way to abuse it (not always through exploits, sometimes just by being more clever than the designers).
Make it a closed economy where the mobs also collect raw materials to build their own weapons/armour/etc. If an area gets deforested or overmined, no more production there... move somewhere else. Put a cap on the number of players that can be a server and open new servers before the cap gets reached.
When stuff breaks and gets discarded, it goes back into the raw material pool. Items start out being valuable due to rarity, then materials become more valuable as they get used up, and eventually high-end items are even more valuable since they are both hard to make AND hard to gather materials for.
If you did it that way, you'd always be able to have checks on every transaction. There would be an amount of "stuff" in the world, and an amount of stuff on each player. If the player somehow duped an item, he'd have more stuff than was accounted for... both on the running total of his stuff, and in the discrepency against the amount that should be in the world.
Windows/PC users fix problems by rebooting until it goes away.
Mainframe users fix problems by going away.
*grin*
Seriously, imagine a one-player game on a console, where you turn it on, play a while, turn it off, and when you come back you start over, or perhaps start at the last level you finished. That's a PC.
Now imagine a multi-user game where lots of people connect and disconnect all the time, some of them keep playing while they're offline, others don't. The world itself is always there, and there are very few "resets". That's a mainframe.
On a PC, programming tends to be sloppy because it's generally assumed (at least in the world of application development) that it won't run for more than 8 hours a day, and that the PC itself will probably reboot every day. So, a small memory leak, or a resource that gets "lost" is not going to be a major disaster. Even data corruption is likely to only affect a handful of workers and their local files.
On a mainframe, if memory somehow gets lost, it stays lost for months or years at a time. A faulty driver can destroy the entire company data-store (hope you make backups!). But because of this, most software is checked with a bit more care.
I hated the VAX/VMS cluster we had when I was in college.. but after 10 years of dealing with the hardware annoyances of PC's, and the software incompatibilities of linux, and general unreliability of windows... I think I'd rather be back typing those big long DCL commands. At least that thing never crashed, and was totally predictable (more users == slower; in a nice linear fashion).
Slashdot Mirror
I think I'll revisit my theory on the collective human intelligence.
When humans first evolved (or were created, for you religious wackos), there were pretty smart. They used their big brains to find ways to work around the fact that they were scrawny hairless apes whose tiny little teeth and pathtic fragile claws couldn't harm a rubber baloon animal. Because of their success, their population grew.
After a time, they started forming permenant communities where they could sustain their power and influence over nature, and now humans are the dominant species on the planet.
I maintain that the number of actual neurons in the human species has not increased. Where we originally had a set of neurons shared amongst a few hundred thousands humans, once we hit around a million, we stopped producing new neurons.
As the population continues to grow, those same neurons get spread thinner and thinner, until the internet was created -- at which point many of them started to die off. By 2010, the Chinese will have captured all available working neurons and they will be the sum total of human intelligence, until the internet takes over in 2015 and we become simple batteries.
All your RAM are belong to us!
Your ctrl-shift-meta-alt key are on the way to destruction!
You have no chance to type make your save.
Ha Ha Ha.
I'm gonna love seeing my insurance rates go down when they see that my car spends 99.99% of its time sitting in my garage. Now, all I need to do is rig up an AC adapter to power that new GPS chip I yanked from the car and the savings will start rolling in!
Scientists make use of extensive surplus budget to create the new threadless screw.
"We think this new screw will help the industry by providing a less complex fastening device for the end users, and it should be more economical for manufacturers as well."
The new threadless screw serves the same function as a traditional screw, but doesn't require a complex torque-riddled installaton process. Simple repeated impacts will drive the new screw home with far less effort.
"The average consumer is often frustrated with traditional screw technology. Do you need flat heads, phillips, star-point? Will sheet metal screw threads work, or do you need the heftier wood threads? Self-threading points, or rounded? It's mind-boggling! These new screws are great. They only have one head type, and you just pick the length and heft you need. That's all!"
Scientists expect the threadless screw to be a big hit in 2006, and look forward to tackling the next problem at hand.
"We're thinking of developing a shorter lever next year... One that doesn't require so much space to operate. It will have less leverage, but most people don't really use the leverage their current levers provide."
I remember when we built the first student-run computer to be placed on WMU's network. We put together a 486/133 with 16Megs of RAM and installed Slackware running the 1.0 kernel and X windows.
We spend a whole afternoon of testing, trying to get it to swap. The only way we could get it to was to have gnuchess play against itself. When you do that, it forks itself, and thus has two active 9Meg processes.
These days, you get swap death with 64Meg of RAM because of all the bloat that has crept into the newer kernels (and everything else).
Consider this. Let's suppose someone is addicted to work. They have no close friends or family. They socialize with their co-workers, but feel compelled to work extra hours. They don't do much at home other than eat and sleep. Yet, they are HAPPY as a result.
Now, let's suppose someone else lives a more or less normal life. They work hard enough to do their job and not lose it. They watch 4-5 hours of TV every night. They go out with friends on the weekends, and eat dinner with the spouse and kids. They are not terribly happy with this life, but are not terribly unhappy either.
Which of these two individuals has a better, more fulfilling life for themselves? Which is more beneficial to their community? Which one supposedly has a "problem" that psychologists would feel compelled to treat?
"Yep, I was diagnosed with that thar AIDS thang after I was attacked in deer camp by Bigfoot last year,", says a second man who was also cured of AIDS.
....
"I was purty depressed, an my cornhold hurt somethin' fierce for weeks. Then this spaceship came down and I got abducted by them bug-eyed little fellers! When I came to, I was cured... so I guess I gotta thank 'em."
"Course, my cornhole hurts again now... an' I got no deer this year neither."
Sorry guys, saw this article on google news yesterday, with the word "TABLOID" right there in the header. I'm sure slashdot readers and editors know the value of tabloid stories.
Monks in Europe being brought in for questioning. It turns out the copyright holder on materials believed lost during the "Dark Ages" wants compensation for the potential profit their order *might* have made, if other monastic orders hadn't duplicated all those books and scrolls.
"DRM should work to prevent any such violations in the future, but we want our fair share.", said an RIAA spokesperson. "I mean, just look at all the things we use, every day, that use arabic numbers. Those would have been ours to sell, if the monks hadn't copied them."
Asked about the prospect of another "Dark Age", the spokesperson replied, "Well, in the event of a world-wide return to barbarism, I think it's safe to say that the RIAA will be seen as the new Guardians of Knowledge... and once the world economy starts to stabilize, I'm sure we can return that knowledge to the people for a price they'll be happy to pay."
There's a reason the King James version is called that. It was a re-written interpretation of the Bible into modern English, and specifically in such a way as to grant the maximum political benefit to the authority of the King of England, and the Church of Rome (as the most powerful political entitiy of the time, and the accepted literal voice of God on Earth).
Point number two. Accepting any human crafted work as the literal Word of God is nonsense. Those who were inspired by God to write the Bible put down the best textual description of what they Saw. NO written language can adequately describe a divine experience, just as no mortal mind can fully understand the infinite Will of God.
You, reading the Bible, are seeing the many-time re-interpreted and translated text of an account written by many hands (not all of which were selected to become part of the Bible, by the way) of a divine revelation, which itself was the shadow left from a brief communion with God.
You are, of course, free to disagree... but that's my take.
This is highly amusing to me. You do realize that it's only been in recent times that the two were ever considered seperate? A great deal of what we call science was done by logical men who were trying to find ways to understand God by understanding His creation.The division of science and religion came about only a few centuries ago, and it happened for political reasons. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Church emerged as the most powerful uniting force in Europe. That unity splintered with the formation of the Church of England, and the gradual trend towards industrial growth and nationalism.
As men like Galileo began putting forth ideas that described a new way to look at God's creation, the Church singled them out as heretics -- not so much because what they said couldn't be a valid way to view the scriptures, as because it removed authority from the Church. As the Quakers would say later, if everyone can personally commune with God, what need they a Church? Likewise, if everyone can think for themselves, the Church isn't required to explain how things work.
Again, you're free to believe what you will. The above is simply what I take from my studies of the evolution of language, and the history of Europe some years ago.
VHS macrovision... evil.
DVD region coding... evil.
HD-DVD small capacity... evil.
Blu-Ray Super-DRM... Evil.
Hard Drive distribution failure rates, cost... Evil!
Download network saturation... EVIL!
Streaming-only content lack of persistancy... EEEEVIL!
Wherefore art thou Crystal Storage?
Yeah, I remember life before the internet. I used to read books, watch TV, and even occasionally go outside under that big yellow face.
*shiver*
Yeah, hail is a good discrepancy. As the tube stretches up through the atmosphere, it's going to have to survive not just high winds and enormous temperature differentials (it might be 90F on the ground, but it's probably a lot colder at 40,000ft), it's also going to have to deal with storms that pass around it.
I'm wondering how this thing will hold up when it gets battered by hailstones, or even better... it acts as a ground wire for lightning strikes.
Why does anyone need to "police" them? Why can't parents control their own children and allow or prevent games from entering their homes based on their own beliefs?
Most parents don't want the Playstation, the TV, or the internet to raise their kids. They don't want the government to do it either. But they certainly wouldn't mind a little help now and then, and restricting the sale of content deemed mature seems like a pretty reasonable way to help.
True, but I'd rather the restrictions come from the parents themselves. You're seriously saying that you can't tell your own children that they have to check with you BEFORE buying a game and bringing it home to play?
We're not talking about alcohol or cigarettes, where the kids can buy them, use them, and dispose of them totally outside your influence... and MY parents didn't seem to have that much trouble knowing when I was doing something of that sort *ahem*. You might argue that they can go to their friend's house and play -- yeah, they can. But if you take the trouble to call their friend's parents and ask about what kinds of games they're playing, you can police them as you like.
Personally, I think all this coddling and "protection" is raising a nation of perpetual infants that have trouble wiping their own noses as they sit in their board rooms. Teach your kids, don't hide them away and hope they never see anything bad. Otherwise, how will they ever learn how to cope with the crap life DOES throw at them?
Thot thare Untarwob es cuul!
So... if someone buys a portable MP3 player and takes it work with them, plugs it in (which, yeah, they shouldn't do.. but it happens) and the built-in virus moves onto the hospital network... are you SURE nobody dies?
You can make the argument that a hospital network should be secure against virii... and I can counter that a gas tank should be secure from sugar.
I know, sugar isn't designed to be installed in gas tanks... but most portable MP3 players ARE designed to connect to computers, and thus to networks.
*shrug*
Of course, if we just got rid of all the lawyers and spent all the energy we use to sue each other on fixing things, we probably wouldn't care.
When I was in school, I loved the old corewars game, and was facinated by the C-Robots game. Both of these games involve coding artifical intelligence agents and pitting them against each other. Now it seems the opportunity is there to do the same thing with online poker games!
Why gripe about this WinPokerBot thing? Code your own that's smarter and reap the rewards! Sure, it will annoy the human players, but they'll just have to move to a secure server that verifies you in some way (via a custom client perhaps).
It might just be the increasingly stressful environment that today's youth are subject to, where they can look forward to having to find work in a depressed economy, dealing with inflation as gas prices continue to soar (and thus drive transportation costs up, which increases the cost of ALL goods), or having the next 10 to 20 years to enjoy a war which we didn't need and can't afford to enjoy?
Add onto that the fact that today's youth have very few role models to look up to, and lots of people telling them they can't state their opinions because it isn't politically correct.
And let's not forget that one of the new non-destructive outlets they have, playing video games, is now under seige as well.
Answer me this... if kids can't kill things in video games to work off their aggression, do you honestly believe they'll become placid, malleable little zombies that society can mold into productive worker drones? I doubt it.
Kids don't form gangs to beat people up... they form gangs to relieve boredom and give themselves a sense of self-worth. Right now, many of them are in online gangs (called guilds) in MMORPG's... if you stop that, they'll switch to real-life gangs. Then instead of raiding the elf n00b zone and killing people, they'll hang around town and break stuff, or bully people.
So even dead people will have a flat screen monitor before I get one.
So now my tax dollars will go to help pay OTHER people to sit around all day and read the SPAM I get? Cool, can they please delete it when they're done so I don't have to see it?
Finally, an unlimited food source for the populous East!
"A parent can, however, choose to buy an AO rated game for their kids."
A parent can, however, choose to buy an NC-17 rated movie on DVD and give it to their kids.
Kids are a hell of a lot smarter than most adults give them credit for. If they want to see something, they'll find a way around whatever obstacles you try to put in their path. If you make a big fuss over it, it makes it that much more desirable.
Giving GTA an AO rating is great free advertising for Rockstar. Yeah, it means their retail sales might slump a bit... but suddenly the online sales go through the roof. And if they backpedal and restore the M rating, so much the better!
This just further convinces me that someone out there needs to make a game with an actual closed economy, instead of this faucet/drain BS that has to be jiggly-poked every time a group of players finds a way to abuse it (not always through exploits, sometimes just by being more clever than the designers).
Make it a closed economy where the mobs also collect raw materials to build their own weapons/armour/etc. If an area gets deforested or overmined, no more production there... move somewhere else. Put a cap on the number of players that can be a server and open new servers before the cap gets reached.
When stuff breaks and gets discarded, it goes back into the raw material pool. Items start out being valuable due to rarity, then materials become more valuable as they get used up, and eventually high-end items are even more valuable since they are both hard to make AND hard to gather materials for.
If you did it that way, you'd always be able to have checks on every transaction. There would be an amount of "stuff" in the world, and an amount of stuff on each player. If the player somehow duped an item, he'd have more stuff than was accounted for... both on the running total of his stuff, and in the discrepency against the amount that should be in the world.
Windows/PC users fix problems by rebooting until it goes away.
Mainframe users fix problems by going away.
*grin*
Seriously, imagine a one-player game on a console, where you turn it on, play a while, turn it off, and when you come back you start over, or perhaps start at the last level you finished. That's a PC.
Now imagine a multi-user game where lots of people connect and disconnect all the time, some of them keep playing while they're offline, others don't. The world itself is always there, and there are very few "resets". That's a mainframe.
On a PC, programming tends to be sloppy because it's generally assumed (at least in the world of application development) that it won't run for more than 8 hours a day, and that the PC itself will probably reboot every day. So, a small memory leak, or a resource that gets "lost" is not going to be a major disaster. Even data corruption is likely to only affect a handful of workers and their local files.
On a mainframe, if memory somehow gets lost, it stays lost for months or years at a time. A faulty driver can destroy the entire company data-store (hope you make backups!). But because of this, most software is checked with a bit more care.
I hated the VAX/VMS cluster we had when I was in college.. but after 10 years of dealing with the hardware annoyances of PC's, and the software incompatibilities of linux, and general unreliability of windows... I think I'd rather be back typing those big long DCL commands. At least that thing never crashed, and was totally predictable (more users == slower; in a nice linear fashion).