By "we", I mean my house. It will be within the month, I think.
And you may be right about the high-def content, but I don't think so. YouTube may allow it at some point, but that's not really their target audience.
Also, if I throttle someone on 100 mbit back to 99 mbit, it'll be like having my current connection to myself, and they won't notice at all.
Exactly what costs were you thinking of saving by consolidating? If it's just the cost of building and maintaining those physical servers, then here is the cold, hard truth: You are paying less for less service. Put servers at each branch office if you'd rather pay more for more service.
You get what you pay for.
Now, if it's other problems that are keeping you from setting up those dedicated boxes, realize that these are other problems. Identify them, and bring them back to Ask Slashdot. We're Slashdot, we're not psychic.
If it's your outsourcing partner gouging prices, dump them for an outsourcing partner which doesn't gouge prices, or do it in-house.
If it's the inability to manage all those servers, get them to talk to each other, etc, that's a more interesting technical problem that Slashdot might be able to help solve.
There are a few exceptions -- you might be able to get away with something like Coda or AFS, though I don't know how well that scales to crappy bandwidth. But if so, that would imply that your only problem is managing strictly filesystem data -- it doesn't help at all if the problem is access to, say, an intranet webapp. So again, we need details, if we are to find the clever exceptions.
Otherwise, upgrade your bandwidth, and/or outsource your actual application servers to someone who can scale. If it's just web/email/docs, Google can do that. Otherwise, find someone who specializes in what you're doing (our SVN is run by cvsdude.com), or bite the bullet and buy some virtual servers.
For those who didn't RTFA, here's the relevant quote:
Were focusing on pirated content over BitTorrent, [not BitTorrent per se.]
Hey, hint, to anyone who thinks this is a legitimate position: That is like saying you're focusing on stopping pornography, not web traffic per se. It doesn't work that way; even when you know what you want to block by domain (myspace.com), you'll be foiled by high school students (and proxies).
And that said, most ISPs are having a hard enough time blocking BitTorrent at all, much less trying to filter specific uses. The sooner you give up trying to filter stuff that your users don't want filtered, the sooner you can focus on a long-term solution that will actually work, like upgrading your network.
On DSL, it bothers me when my housemates use YouTube, and I occasionally try to throttle them, for that reason. When we get 100 mbit fiber, it won't matter.
Let me count the limitations of the DOS commandline:
No history functions. Not even the up arrow to get the previous command.
The verb (command name) is limited to 8 characters, probably less.
It's intrinsically tied to a filesystem which is constrained by 8.3 names.
No multitasking.
No way to control GUI programs. Can be used to run them, but only if they bring their own video drivers.
Anything in the current working directory might be a command, so not safe to cd into directories you don't control.
No mouse support, for simple things like copy/paste. Cannot be run alongside a web browser from which to copy/paste examples, anyway.
Now, maybe you meant the DOS box in Windows 9x, which is another animal entirely. There's still plenty to say about that one, though. Not very scriptable -- the only real way to make a function, if I remember, is to wrap it up in another batchfile. I'm not sure simple aliases were possible.
I realize most of this is lost on you, but the original DOS commandline was a major step back from Unix, and it has improved since then -- Windows CMD.exe is an improvement, and PowerShell is probably a larger improvement (though I haven't used it).
But there is more to UI than just what you see and touch directly. Example: tab-completion. I can now name directories and commands more verbosely, so that they are more readable, knowing that tab-completion means they're not really any harder to type.
Better example: On my Linux shell, I can hit ctrl+z to suspend the current process, "bg" to background it, or ever "disown" it to detach it from the current shell entirely. If I don't disown, I can type "fg" to bring it back to the foreground. With the "jobs" command, and a little special syntax, I can actually multitask from a single commandline environment.
If you don't think multitasking is a major UI difference, you need your head examined.
By the same token, though, they're not exactly going to take over the world. I work with three guys who are about my age. I use vim and bash, they use Eclipse and MS Visual Studio, even though we're pretty much doing the same thing.
Still, even in the darkest of MS-trampled workflows, we had a couple of batch files -- which implies a certain knowledge of the shell, albeit a horribly crippled one. And even in the most exciting of the bleeding-edge stuff we do (like Ruby on Rails), I find myself having to do Bash for them (although wrapped in Capistrano)
Im proud of this little project in a sort of mortified way; it just writes out a C file that wraps a tiny exectuable header around the PBC file and calls a couple of functions in libparrot to run that code, much like the parrot executable does (but without all of the latters command-line options).
Maybe it will eventually be as fast as C, or faster, but that seems unlikely.
What's interesting about this perl6 binary isn't that it's actually fast, but that it's as usable as a perl5 binary in that you don't have to mess around with the VM itself.
I do agree with sibling posters about the main question being not whether skills are being taught, but whether you're likely to use them.
That said, there's one more point I don't see mentioned here:
The medic stuff was explicitly training. As in, from the description, it very much sounds like the only thing he took away from this is trivia (lift their arms, etc), not actual practice (do America's Army medics have to actually simulate the motion of dressing a wound by moving their mouse in a certain way?)
While I've never worked for a particularly large company, I do have to ask -- how many configurations can there possibly be? If you really would rather have Firefox, can't they make a disk image with Firefox pre-installed? (If they don't have a disk image of anything, are they really a competent IT dept?)
There's nothing to believe or disbelieve; it's pretty clearly a fact. (Let me guess -- you don't believe in evolution?)
But let's pretend that not believing in global warming is a valid perspective, and not just something you were spoon-fed by the Global Climate Coalition (a group formed by oil companies)...
Pollution genuinely does fuck up the planet. Acid rain, polluted rivers, trash, etc... There's more to environmentalism than just the very real concern of global warming.
As other physicists will tell you, there are all kinds of ways in which you can define a death. I would strongly encourage you to mess with Conway's Game of life, because that is exactly how it works for us humans. In fact, the page I just linked to loads with a perfect example -- a glider. You'll probably want to download a bigger version of this, drop the scale down to one pixel, maybe, but the essential result is the same: A glider can be observed as an entity which moves across the screen, wiggling as it goes, where, in fact, it is a bunch of tiny organisms (think of them as bacteria) living and dying every step of the way. Nothing in the Game of life moves, but new things are born and old ones die.
The glider is also very cool for other reasons, too -- it's an emergent phenomenon. Grab any Game of Life simulator, set the resolution to one pixel per bacterium, scribble a nonsensical pattern on it with your mouse, and let it run -- it's almost a certainty that more than a few gliders will spin off of it and go sliding off towards the edge of the screen. It is an example of how patterns arise from chaos, and a very visual demonstration of why evolution works.
But back to the subject at hand... Various parts of your body live and die at different rates. I'm not sure how long it takes to replace everything, but I think it's only a month or so.
You can approach this two ways: Either get over your fear of death, or start to identify yourself as a pattern -- a meme, a program, a chunk of data. Even cloning doesn't diminish you -- if anything, it makes you stronger.
However, if you insist on the depressing/disturbing interpretation, watch The Prestige. I'll say no more, just watch it.
GPL is about taking freedom away from developers, and giving it to users.
It is, and has always been: You may do whatever you want with this software, so long as you never remove that ability from anyone else.
GPLv3 just closes some loopholes in GPLv2, where people could distribute source code, but that source code wasn't enough to let users do whatever they want with the software. Examples are TiVo, software patents, etc. It's really not that complicated, or intimidating, once you understand the core principle.
If you want a license which gives freedom to developers (taking it away from users), check out BSD or public domain. That says: You may do whatever you want with this software, including remove that ability from anyone else. Example: the BSD network stack was ripped off wholesale and included with Windows, as the Windows network stack. But as a user, I cannot modify the Windows network stack, because I don't have the source code to Windows. Had Microsoft chosen a GPL'd network stack, they would've had to GPL Windows, thus giving me more freedom.
If you put a lot of emphasis in controlling inflation in your game then you can keep a game going with the ability to bring new players in cold and they have a better chance of staying.
Or, when you (inevitably) lose control, you bring the newbies up to match the inflation, by tweaking what's possible for a newbie enough to make it easier for them to enter the game, but not enough that the hardcore gamers will all go make newbies solely for the money.
the fact that the developers of each game don't bother to put in enough money sinks to keep the flow of money in game vs. out of game in check is astounding, especially in the case of WoW with n million players.
I play a game where I find that there are plenty of money sinks, but they're mostly one-shot. Eventually, certain players have an absurd amount of money, and nothing to spend it on -- but for the rest of us, the economy seems relatively stable.
I don't play WoW, I play Nexus TK. It's a small enough community (roughly 500) that there is actually one, unthreaded, in-game board called the "Community Board". This is where people go to bitch and whine about everything, including the economy.
And the economy is not entirely stable, but it is interesting to watch.
Prices are usually relatively stable. Money enters the economy through crafting, mostly -- I can make weapons which are useless to players, but which sell to NPCs. So, over time, the overall amount of money in the economy would tend to go up -- except that money also leaves the economy through NPCs. Example: Most items can be repaired by an NPC, for a fee. NPCs will also sell you various items (which they will only buy back for half-price).
That's going to be the basis of just about any in-game economy -- it enters the game through NPCs, and leaves the game through NPCs. But it's obvious that they've had problems with inflation, as there continue to be quests added which are designed to take money out of the game. Also, as the community generally starts to have more and more items, money, and power, they have to adjust all of these things for the newbie in order to make the game still playable early on.
One way this has been done is, there is a class of weapons available at level 95. These used to cost 100k or so (from players), and they were break-on-death. Level 95 also used to be quite an accomplishment, so this made sense -- a person who made it that high should have money.
In fact, they probably started out costing quite a bit more, as they were originally only dropped by various bosses. When I started playing, they were also available as prizes in Carnage (player-vs-player games). Carnages don't happen every day, and each one is for a specific range of levels or stats, so you might go a week or more without seeing a carnage you could get into. They also cost money to enter, at least 10-20k. The winning team (usually half or a third of those who went to play) got their choice of level 95 weapons. They still sold for 80k or so.
Now, the Foxhunts have been revamped. Instead of being a two-round tournament (you have to beat two teams, so 1/4th of the Foxhunts result in a win), they are now one-round, and have the same prizes. But they still only cost 1k to enter, and happen almost every day, sometimes several times a day. So now there are tons of 95 weapons, and they cost 40k or so.
What generally happens in these games is, the most active 5% players -- people who have no life -- have 95% of the gold and power. (Political power, too -- for example, most in-game crimes are handled by in-game courts and judges.) If a huge amount of money enters the economy, the lower-level or average people like me are still not going to see very much -- and what we do see, we'll immediately want to spend on stuff, usually buying it from these have-no-life players. So, in a sense, the amount of money that's actually in the economy stays about the same, while the amount of money that various bastards have goes up exponentially.
So, considering what I just told you -- I've played the game for over a year, and right now, I have roughly 500,000 gold. Now look at this page. I'm honestly not sure what you would spend 83 million gold on in the game. There are a number of unique items, but still, the most expensive single item I know of is maybe 20 million, if you can get anyone to sell it. (I'm honestly not sure why anyone would; it is the best armor in the game, and there are a limited number of them in the game (less than 50), so I really don't see why you would want the money -- what would you buy with it?)
So, the short answer is, it's complicated. And it doesn't necessarily fit any real model, because if the economy completely explodes, someone can throw a switch and reset it. Example: The Cataclysm was an event in which a bug allowed two people to cooperate and literally double the amount of money they had.
If they've written code to prevent it from rolling over backwards (spend too much money and you end up with a negative amount, spend too much more and you roll over to huge amounts of positive gold), it would seem logical that they'd do it the other way around at the same time.
Unless, of course, they were morons and simply used integers, instead of classes, to manage the Gold.
Side note: I play a game which has had its share of absurd bugs like this... but we actually run into the limitations of an unsigned int (not a signed int) with things like experience. The total amount of experience needed to get to level 99 is not going to be more than about 3 billion, but past that, you start trading experience for stats (20 million exp = 100 vitality or 50 mana). At about 4.29 billion experience, you have to stop hunting and go trade it in for stats.
No one's gotten above a few million vitality, that I know of, but I have to wonder if there's bugs in which vitality can roll over. I can just imagine some absurdly buff character getting that last 100 vita and ending up at 5.
Of course, there are other things which, it's painfully obvious, are chars. I wonder why no one uses bigint libraries for this sort of thing?
Slashdot and Steam have very different throughput requirements.
True. I suppose I play Steam games rarely enough that it doesn't bother me. After all, if you don't have it running in the background all the time, it won't patch itself until you need it. (Mine doesn't seem to patch the games, even if it's running, until I want to play that particular game.)
Yes, if your stereo happens to have a line input.
I guess I've never seen one without one of those. When you say "line input", I assumed you meant the 3.5 mm connection, as that's what "line input" looks like on the back of a computer.
If that's what was meant, it's not accurate. The T in that TSR stands for "Terminate", which GTalk doesn't. (Or, when it does, it is no longer "Staying Resident".)
What you've just described is exactly what any modern distro worth its salt does.
Any changes in kernel are immediately reflected in userland utilities -- check. Not "immediately" as in "the day they're released" -- more like, by the time they hit your distro's repository, they generally work together. Any "guesswork" at that point is a bug.
Consistency is also a feature of the distribution, not the OS. Gentoo might have stuff in a different place than Ubuntu, but Ubuntu has everything in the same place as Ubuntu. Your comment would mean more if you said that FreeBSD had everything the same as OpenBSD and NetBSD, but in any case, I find any BSD (including OS X) to have a number of quirks in the commandline utilities that are unique to *BSD, and do not show up on Linux.
So, another way of looking at it is that FreeBSD is as consistent as, say, Ubuntu, with regards to itself. But Ubuntu is more consistent with the majority of *nix distros, by user or by kind, mostly because Linux has more users and distros than anything else.
Your example of having to hunt for config files in/var/www/httpd is a bit disingenuous -- or at least, I've never used a good distro that had Apache's configuration anywhere other than/etc/httpd or/etc/apache, or some variant thereof (like/etc/apache2) -- in any case, easily something I'd expect to find with tab-completion. Same with dhcp servers -- unless I installed a really strange one, it's going to be somewhere in/etc/dhcpd, or it's going to be named after the particular dhcp server (like/etc/dnsmasq).
That is -- I use a statistical filter, and I don't much care how long it takes to run, as emails are intermittent, and don't have to be delivered instantly. It's still pretty damned fast, especially for small messages...
But consider things like SPF, greylisting, and all kinds of other tricks people use for mail filtering. There are a LOT of email spam filters out there right now which simply could not work well on Jabber.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, that wasn't clear:
By "we", I mean my house. It will be within the month, I think.
And you may be right about the high-def content, but I don't think so. YouTube may allow it at some point, but that's not really their target audience.
Also, if I throttle someone on 100 mbit back to 99 mbit, it'll be like having my current connection to myself, and they won't notice at all.
Either consolidate your servers, or don't.
Exactly what costs were you thinking of saving by consolidating? If it's just the cost of building and maintaining those physical servers, then here is the cold, hard truth: You are paying less for less service. Put servers at each branch office if you'd rather pay more for more service.
You get what you pay for.
Now, if it's other problems that are keeping you from setting up those dedicated boxes, realize that these are other problems. Identify them, and bring them back to Ask Slashdot. We're Slashdot, we're not psychic.
If it's your outsourcing partner gouging prices, dump them for an outsourcing partner which doesn't gouge prices, or do it in-house.
If it's the inability to manage all those servers, get them to talk to each other, etc, that's a more interesting technical problem that Slashdot might be able to help solve.
There are a few exceptions -- you might be able to get away with something like Coda or AFS, though I don't know how well that scales to crappy bandwidth. But if so, that would imply that your only problem is managing strictly filesystem data -- it doesn't help at all if the problem is access to, say, an intranet webapp. So again, we need details, if we are to find the clever exceptions.
Otherwise, upgrade your bandwidth, and/or outsource your actual application servers to someone who can scale. If it's just web/email/docs, Google can do that. Otherwise, find someone who specializes in what you're doing (our SVN is run by cvsdude.com), or bite the bullet and buy some virtual servers.
For those who didn't RTFA, here's the relevant quote:
Hey, hint, to anyone who thinks this is a legitimate position: That is like saying you're focusing on stopping pornography, not web traffic per se. It doesn't work that way; even when you know what you want to block by domain (myspace.com), you'll be foiled by high school students (and proxies).
And that said, most ISPs are having a hard enough time blocking BitTorrent at all, much less trying to filter specific uses. The sooner you give up trying to filter stuff that your users don't want filtered, the sooner you can focus on a long-term solution that will actually work, like upgrading your network.
On DSL, it bothers me when my housemates use YouTube, and I occasionally try to throttle them, for that reason. When we get 100 mbit fiber, it won't matter.
Let me count the limitations of the DOS commandline:
Now, maybe you meant the DOS box in Windows 9x, which is another animal entirely. There's still plenty to say about that one, though. Not very scriptable -- the only real way to make a function, if I remember, is to wrap it up in another batchfile. I'm not sure simple aliases were possible.
I realize most of this is lost on you, but the original DOS commandline was a major step back from Unix, and it has improved since then -- Windows CMD.exe is an improvement, and PowerShell is probably a larger improvement (though I haven't used it).
But there is more to UI than just what you see and touch directly. Example: tab-completion. I can now name directories and commands more verbosely, so that they are more readable, knowing that tab-completion means they're not really any harder to type.
Better example: On my Linux shell, I can hit ctrl+z to suspend the current process, "bg" to background it, or ever "disown" it to detach it from the current shell entirely. If I don't disown, I can type "fg" to bring it back to the foreground. With the "jobs" command, and a little special syntax, I can actually multitask from a single commandline environment.
If you don't think multitasking is a major UI difference, you need your head examined.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil. Code for threesomes when there's a chance in hell of getting one!
That's what the && is. False means false, positive error code means stop... Of course, at more && yes; yes; you're not going to stop.
It's not a race. Take your time...
I'm barely 21. Shells aren't going away.
By the same token, though, they're not exactly going to take over the world. I work with three guys who are about my age. I use vim and bash, they use Eclipse and MS Visual Studio, even though we're pretty much doing the same thing.
Still, even in the darkest of MS-trampled workflows, we had a couple of batch files -- which implies a certain knowledge of the shell, albeit a horribly crippled one. And even in the most exciting of the bleeding-edge stuff we do (like Ruby on Rails), I find myself having to do Bash for them (although wrapped in Capistrano)
Maybe it will eventually be as fast as C, or faster, but that seems unlikely.
What's interesting about this perl6 binary isn't that it's actually fast, but that it's as usable as a perl5 binary in that you don't have to mess around with the VM itself.
I do agree with sibling posters about the main question being not whether skills are being taught, but whether you're likely to use them.
That said, there's one more point I don't see mentioned here:
The medic stuff was explicitly training. As in, from the description, it very much sounds like the only thing he took away from this is trivia (lift their arms, etc), not actual practice (do America's Army medics have to actually simulate the motion of dressing a wound by moving their mouse in a certain way?)
Your BIOS can't log you in, and that's when all that system-tray crap starts happening.
(You do have a password, right? Or a corporate Active Directory login?)
Nice conspiracy theory.
While I've never worked for a particularly large company, I do have to ask -- how many configurations can there possibly be? If you really would rather have Firefox, can't they make a disk image with Firefox pre-installed? (If they don't have a disk image of anything, are they really a competent IT dept?)
There's nothing to believe or disbelieve; it's pretty clearly a fact. (Let me guess -- you don't believe in evolution?)
But let's pretend that not believing in global warming is a valid perspective, and not just something you were spoon-fed by the Global Climate Coalition (a group formed by oil companies)...
Pollution genuinely does fuck up the planet. Acid rain, polluted rivers, trash, etc... There's more to environmentalism than just the very real concern of global warming.
Another creepy exploration: The Prestige.
As other physicists will tell you, there are all kinds of ways in which you can define a death. I would strongly encourage you to mess with Conway's Game of life, because that is exactly how it works for us humans. In fact, the page I just linked to loads with a perfect example -- a glider. You'll probably want to download a bigger version of this, drop the scale down to one pixel, maybe, but the essential result is the same: A glider can be observed as an entity which moves across the screen, wiggling as it goes, where, in fact, it is a bunch of tiny organisms (think of them as bacteria) living and dying every step of the way. Nothing in the Game of life moves, but new things are born and old ones die.
The glider is also very cool for other reasons, too -- it's an emergent phenomenon. Grab any Game of Life simulator, set the resolution to one pixel per bacterium, scribble a nonsensical pattern on it with your mouse, and let it run -- it's almost a certainty that more than a few gliders will spin off of it and go sliding off towards the edge of the screen. It is an example of how patterns arise from chaos, and a very visual demonstration of why evolution works.
But back to the subject at hand... Various parts of your body live and die at different rates. I'm not sure how long it takes to replace everything, but I think it's only a month or so.
You can approach this two ways: Either get over your fear of death, or start to identify yourself as a pattern -- a meme, a program, a chunk of data. Even cloning doesn't diminish you -- if anything, it makes you stronger.
However, if you insist on the depressing/disturbing interpretation, watch The Prestige. I'll say no more, just watch it.
GPL is about taking freedom away from developers, and giving it to users.
It is, and has always been: You may do whatever you want with this software, so long as you never remove that ability from anyone else.
GPLv3 just closes some loopholes in GPLv2, where people could distribute source code, but that source code wasn't enough to let users do whatever they want with the software. Examples are TiVo, software patents, etc. It's really not that complicated, or intimidating, once you understand the core principle.
If you want a license which gives freedom to developers (taking it away from users), check out BSD or public domain. That says: You may do whatever you want with this software, including remove that ability from anyone else. Example: the BSD network stack was ripped off wholesale and included with Windows, as the Windows network stack. But as a user, I cannot modify the Windows network stack, because I don't have the source code to Windows. Had Microsoft chosen a GPL'd network stack, they would've had to GPL Windows, thus giving me more freedom.
Or, when you (inevitably) lose control, you bring the newbies up to match the inflation, by tweaking what's possible for a newbie enough to make it easier for them to enter the game, but not enough that the hardcore gamers will all go make newbies solely for the money.
I play a game where I find that there are plenty of money sinks, but they're mostly one-shot. Eventually, certain players have an absurd amount of money, and nothing to spend it on -- but for the rest of us, the economy seems relatively stable.
...Why would an unsigned int be less efficient than a signed int, for something which can only have a positive value?
I don't play WoW, I play Nexus TK. It's a small enough community (roughly 500) that there is actually one, unthreaded, in-game board called the "Community Board". This is where people go to bitch and whine about everything, including the economy.
And the economy is not entirely stable, but it is interesting to watch.
Prices are usually relatively stable. Money enters the economy through crafting, mostly -- I can make weapons which are useless to players, but which sell to NPCs. So, over time, the overall amount of money in the economy would tend to go up -- except that money also leaves the economy through NPCs. Example: Most items can be repaired by an NPC, for a fee. NPCs will also sell you various items (which they will only buy back for half-price).
That's going to be the basis of just about any in-game economy -- it enters the game through NPCs, and leaves the game through NPCs. But it's obvious that they've had problems with inflation, as there continue to be quests added which are designed to take money out of the game. Also, as the community generally starts to have more and more items, money, and power, they have to adjust all of these things for the newbie in order to make the game still playable early on.
One way this has been done is, there is a class of weapons available at level 95. These used to cost 100k or so (from players), and they were break-on-death. Level 95 also used to be quite an accomplishment, so this made sense -- a person who made it that high should have money.
In fact, they probably started out costing quite a bit more, as they were originally only dropped by various bosses. When I started playing, they were also available as prizes in Carnage (player-vs-player games). Carnages don't happen every day, and each one is for a specific range of levels or stats, so you might go a week or more without seeing a carnage you could get into. They also cost money to enter, at least 10-20k. The winning team (usually half or a third of those who went to play) got their choice of level 95 weapons. They still sold for 80k or so.
Now, the Foxhunts have been revamped. Instead of being a two-round tournament (you have to beat two teams, so 1/4th of the Foxhunts result in a win), they are now one-round, and have the same prizes. But they still only cost 1k to enter, and happen almost every day, sometimes several times a day. So now there are tons of 95 weapons, and they cost 40k or so.
What generally happens in these games is, the most active 5% players -- people who have no life -- have 95% of the gold and power. (Political power, too -- for example, most in-game crimes are handled by in-game courts and judges.) If a huge amount of money enters the economy, the lower-level or average people like me are still not going to see very much -- and what we do see, we'll immediately want to spend on stuff, usually buying it from these have-no-life players. So, in a sense, the amount of money that's actually in the economy stays about the same, while the amount of money that various bastards have goes up exponentially.
So, considering what I just told you -- I've played the game for over a year, and right now, I have roughly 500,000 gold. Now look at this page. I'm honestly not sure what you would spend 83 million gold on in the game. There are a number of unique items, but still, the most expensive single item I know of is maybe 20 million, if you can get anyone to sell it. (I'm honestly not sure why anyone would; it is the best armor in the game, and there are a limited number of them in the game (less than 50), so I really don't see why you would want the money -- what would you buy with it?)
So, the short answer is, it's complicated. And it doesn't necessarily fit any real model, because if the economy completely explodes, someone can throw a switch and reset it. Example: The Cataclysm was an event in which a bug allowed two people to cooperate and literally double the amount of money they had.
If they've written code to prevent it from rolling over backwards (spend too much money and you end up with a negative amount, spend too much more and you roll over to huge amounts of positive gold), it would seem logical that they'd do it the other way around at the same time.
Unless, of course, they were morons and simply used integers, instead of classes, to manage the Gold.
Side note: I play a game which has had its share of absurd bugs like this... but we actually run into the limitations of an unsigned int (not a signed int) with things like experience. The total amount of experience needed to get to level 99 is not going to be more than about 3 billion, but past that, you start trading experience for stats (20 million exp = 100 vitality or 50 mana). At about 4.29 billion experience, you have to stop hunting and go trade it in for stats.
No one's gotten above a few million vitality, that I know of, but I have to wonder if there's bugs in which vitality can roll over. I can just imagine some absurdly buff character getting that last 100 vita and ending up at 5.
Of course, there are other things which, it's painfully obvious, are chars. I wonder why no one uses bigint libraries for this sort of thing?
True. I suppose I play Steam games rarely enough that it doesn't bother me. After all, if you don't have it running in the background all the time, it won't patch itself until you need it. (Mine doesn't seem to patch the games, even if it's running, until I want to play that particular game.)
I guess I've never seen one without one of those. When you say "line input", I assumed you meant the 3.5 mm connection, as that's what "line input" looks like on the back of a computer.
If that's what was meant, it's not accurate. The T in that TSR stands for "Terminate", which GTalk doesn't. (Or, when it does, it is no longer "Staying Resident".)
Thus my confusion, when Googling for that term...
If you can call this a feature, then sure. (Be sure to read the alternate text, too.)
What you've just described is exactly what any modern distro worth its salt does.
/var/www/httpd is a bit disingenuous -- or at least, I've never used a good distro that had Apache's configuration anywhere other than /etc/httpd or /etc/apache, or some variant thereof (like /etc/apache2) -- in any case, easily something I'd expect to find with tab-completion. Same with dhcp servers -- unless I installed a really strange one, it's going to be somewhere in /etc/dhcpd, or it's going to be named after the particular dhcp server (like /etc/dnsmasq).
Any changes in kernel are immediately reflected in userland utilities -- check. Not "immediately" as in "the day they're released" -- more like, by the time they hit your distro's repository, they generally work together. Any "guesswork" at that point is a bug.
Consistency is also a feature of the distribution, not the OS. Gentoo might have stuff in a different place than Ubuntu, but Ubuntu has everything in the same place as Ubuntu. Your comment would mean more if you said that FreeBSD had everything the same as OpenBSD and NetBSD, but in any case, I find any BSD (including OS X) to have a number of quirks in the commandline utilities that are unique to *BSD, and do not show up on Linux.
So, another way of looking at it is that FreeBSD is as consistent as, say, Ubuntu, with regards to itself. But Ubuntu is more consistent with the majority of *nix distros, by user or by kind, mostly because Linux has more users and distros than anything else.
Your example of having to hunt for config files in
Note how their blog represents the post as having a single author, when, in fact, it has multiple authors?
That does not sound at all like a database expert to me. It's a simple many-to-many relationship!
Paradigm.
Does that mean Paradigm is a Fnord? As in, I can now say stuff you won't be able to consciously read, because it has the Fnord Paradigm in it?
They will have to be realtime now, though.
That is -- I use a statistical filter, and I don't much care how long it takes to run, as emails are intermittent, and don't have to be delivered instantly. It's still pretty damned fast, especially for small messages...
But consider things like SPF, greylisting, and all kinds of other tricks people use for mail filtering. There are a LOT of email spam filters out there right now which simply could not work well on Jabber.