Comment FTP Losing Data? (Score 1) 536
Change the FTP transfer mode to binary for the transfers and you won't have a problem. The command is "bin" once you have the FTP client open (assuming you're in interactive mode).
It's not illegal to make Gold. It's not illegal to Give Gold. It's not illegal to Give real Money to someone else.
But somewhere along the way, selling Gold online becomes illegal.
Since you're focusing on Blizzard rather than on China let me correct you -- It's not illegal. You will not get arrested for doing it. It's against the terms of service, the rules you abide by to be able to play the game. If you come over to my house you must take off your shoes before using the hot tub. Those are my terms of service and if you break them I have the right to kick you out of my hot-tub or off of my property. But you won't get arrested.
If Blizzard was smart - they'd offer Gold at a price matching the market and get a cut on this. They've already ruined WoW four times over. Anyone who's played since the beginning can tell you how much more enjoyable it used to be.
Grinding gold to pay for repairs isn't fun. For casual gamers that wanted to see "end-game" they often bought gold to pay for their repairs. Certain aspects were certainly more fun, but the gold-centric aspects of the game were not.
Blizz did address it somewhat in the first x-pac. No more buying Golden Pearls to make that epic cloth item -- now you can simply run an instance and get the crafting material you need (as a drop) to craft your item. Now that those drops are no longer BoP the items have become much more of a commodity and the prices are reasonable due to sellers having competition in the auction house.
The change from making the crafting materials for epic items BoE also means that you don't have to grind instances for materials. Making gold is very easy (doing dailies nets about 400g per day) allowing you to obtain the item any way you want.
Now there are probably a few reasons Blizzard doesn't want gold selling:
1. Gold farmers were always quite annoying. Killing/camping quest mobs and such. Often they would cooperate on differing factions so that one would always be close to harass you (train mobs onto you, use a scroll (or whatever tricks they have to put you into combat also) then vanish.
2. They want you to play the game. To have gold allow you to buy something that it might take months to "earn" in-game is frustrating to those abiding by the ToS. A hint that perhaps the game should be more fun and less of a grind, but Blizz has an interest in keeping things balanced for those following the rules.
3. There are probably legal considerations for brokering (laundering) real money relatively anonymously.
4. People are giving out their account information to get powerleveled and to buy gold. Yes, to buy gold that could be sent in-game. People are getting hacked, messages posted on the forums (often pointing to malicious sites) to hack innocent people, etc.
There are plenty of boring parts of WoW that feel like a grind, which was the reason I stopped playing. However gold has lost its value. From Blizzard's perspective there simply is not a good reason for allowing it, and plenty of good reasons for not allowing it.
There's nothing wrong with making your own patch cables, and it could potentially save you big bucks (compared with buying a $35 patch cable at a local store). However if it's not done right you will kick yourself down the road -- or more likely blame the network electronics, server, network cards, or whatever you normally blame.
For those of us who are not so familiar with the data loss issues surrounding EXT4, can someone please explain this? The first question that came to mind when I read that is "why would the average application need to concern itself with filesystem details?" I.e. if I ask OpenOffice to save a file, it should do that the exact same way whether I ask it to save that file to an ext2 partition, an ext3 partition, a reiserfs partition, etc. What would make ext4 an exception? Isn't abstraction of lower-level filesystem details a good thing?
If you're old enough to remember back to how RAM above 640k was used in the DOS days, it was usually a RAM disk or disk cache (SmartDrv.exe). If you enabled write caching on SmartDrv.exe performance went way up, but of course you could lose data if you hit the RESET button before it had flushed.
... skip ahead a few years
Modern operating systems automatically cache data because it increases performance. Specifics of the size of the write cache and length of time before it's written to disk may vary, and each filesystem will have its own defaults.
EXT3 defaulted to committing data to disk after a maximum of 5 seconds. EXT4 increases that time to 150 seconds. (The exact numbers vary a bit, but you get the idea). Bottom line: When there is a system crash with EXT4 you notice losing data more often because there is a larger window of when data can get lost.
This is a very basic overview, but there are two groups weighing in on this:
Group 1: Things break under EXT4 that worked under EXT3!
Group 2: Look pal, it works fine. If you want your data committed right away so that you don't lose data maybe you should be calling fsync() so that the OS knows to commit your data? Because you know what, even with EXT3 you have data loss. It becomes more noticable with EXT4 because of the longer cache times, but the problem always existed!
Group 1: It worked before! And if commit our data immediately peformance drops!
Group 2: It didn't really work before, in laptop mode the EXT3 write time increases to 30 seconds. The problem has always existed! If you don't like taking the performance hit of committing data immediately, perhaps you shouldn't be writing so many tiny files so often!
Group 1: But it worked before! EXT4 is broken!
Group 2: Okay, look. You're obviously not listening. Why don't we make EXT4 behave more like EXT3 and do some auto-commits. Poorly coded applications will not lose data as often, and properly coded applications will not perform as well as they could.
Group 1: I'm taking this to Slashdot. EXT4 is teh suxx0rz!
Group 2: *sigh*
So having addressed the FUD, look at your main point. "Windows OS's become less compatible with other OS's and do not reap the benefit..." Windows has never tried to be compatible with other OS. When it comes to Windows compatability I would go so far as to say they've done a damn good job (possibly *too* good) considering the mess with which they're keeping backward compatibility and the crud that keeps getting carried forward.
Microsoft may have many faults, but you seem to have missed the mark.
FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed -- it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer. -- A.J. Perlis