True.

Why do you need so beefy hardware? One could think that a normal Mac Pro would be enough to do even extremely sophisticated flow simulations.

Hmmm. I wonder if you are just confirming what the parent comment said. The sheer linearity of that graph indeed hints that the improvements have mostly happened by just throwing more and more raw CPU power into the task, without breakthroughs in making the algorithms more accurate or efficient.

They have the proof of burden, not me.

Man, I'm sad to see this go. Even the Extended Support will end in January 2020 which comes sooner than we know. Yes, Windows 10 is bringing the classic desktop back, but it seems that it is becoming a unelegant mishmash of Modern UI widgets and classic Windows widgets. I guess it's back to Linux-land, the place where I camped during the whole Windows XP era.

Many scripts directly read configuration files, create lists of filenames and deal with various environment variables. Those are all input. Also there are lots of scripts which do not call just one "startup program" but acquire data from tens of helper processes. For an example, see the bind9 script, which was featured in another comment in this discussion. I have also seen weird "Invalid argument" breakage when the interface of one of those accessories changes slightly.

Yep, that is exactly the reason. There is no tedious-looking CAD-like program to learn, one can instead start right away messing around with blocks in a natural environment. It is also surprising how large architectural things people wind up building in the game, even when one might think that the most complex stuff would already be much more efficient to design inside a dedicated software for the purpose. I guess the game also gives the illusionary feeling that you are building something concrete instead of just drawing some lines on engineering paper.

Shills?

It will give you more robustness, though. Scripts are a huge minefield and require very careful input validation.

Maybe. Currently we have every app maintaining its own configuration file(s) in miscellaneous directories under the user's home directory in non-standard format and each application implementing its own configuration parser.

Agree. Over here, we are constantly whining how crappy SystemD is, even though most of people have no idea what they are even talking about. The discussion is much more relaxed at /r/linux. Over there, they are already taking advantage of the new system and putting together little projects like SystemD computer wake-up alarm and analyzing how it works.