Had our local bean-to-bar chocolate maker not passed away, I'd be happy to pay that much for his. They were amazingly good. Then again I've paid $100/(std-size) bottle for ice wine (we had a taste on a vineyard tour and knew we had to take a bottle home). My dad mocked me until he tried it and decided he must have done right as a parent, since he raised a very wise son.

Some things are costly to make, rare, or both. Some things are also worth paying for because they are costly to make, rare, or both. These sets make a nice Venn diagram. The key is finding the overlap and buying that stuff.

I don't want a self-taught developer writing flight control, banking systems, or medical embedded systems code. I'd rather have someone formally trained doing that work. On the other hand, there's plenty of places where if the code doesn't quite work right I don't really care that much. From everything of the once-thriving online text based gaming community (the MUSH, MUCK, MOO, MUX, MUD, etcs) to simple web pages or even stupid phone apps, there's a place for "non-professional" programmers.

Similarly, there is a place for non-professional carpenters -- my trained-programmer father has made every bookshelf in my folks house, a couple tables, has redone the 2nd story deck multiple times, and redone the roof (structural and laying shingles) on the horse barn on the back of the garage, and a bunch of brio-compatible track for me when I was ~4. He doesn't redo the main house roof (45 deg slope or more -- too steep), nor does he repoint the structural brick exterior (1920s house) or do plumbing when it involves sweating copper.

He also taught me enough of it (I helped him on most of what I listed above as a teen) that I've done plenty myself; four bookshelves, two desks (one used bookshelves for legs, the other is just an oak plywood surface for a geekdesk base, but stained and varnished a nice deep brown), and one storage cabinet with removable shelves that just happen to be 60x90 LEGO studs in size. Oh and an exterior door on my own 1960s-era house -- that was worlds of fun since while you can order a door and frame to the right opening size, the way houses set doors into the house's wooden structure has changed since my place was built. That was a learning experience (doors are a pain in the ass) and I let professionals have the fun of the next exterior door that needed to be replaced -- who, by the way, cracked the trim worse than I did when they replaced it.

Its about knowing what you know, what you don't, and what you should (or want to) call in a professional for.

The motto of people playing their MMOs has ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS been "exploit early, exploit often." That was true in 99/2000 with Asheron's Call just months out the gate, and it was(/is?) true two months ago as it got put out to pasture (one-time-fee-to-play, no new dev work).

Turbine will patch the hole but only once in a blue moon will they even consider taking action against paying customers, and usually even then only a slap on the wrist 1-3 day ban. The macros, duping hacks, speed altering programs (gear).

So... you didn't test... and you have only yourself to blame?

Especially with VMs, it is so easy to snapshot and test things.

That's a failure to test* your code-as-infrastructure, not a puppet failure.

*: Exempting a small subset of physical device issues, though even those can be ignored if you're talking about a VM, so that the physical hardware is never actually in a not-live state.

Sorry you don't love Civ, but its your loss. I wrapped up a couple rounds of it two weeks ago on windows.

Then again I occasionally go back to Master of Magic or Master of Orion (1 or 2) so YMMV.

I'm going to go with something on the theory that after being put on a PC (single chip, with a large L2 cache) it got a free pass to do what it damn well pleased, since it'd been designed to run on a much slower multi-chip PPC solution, which gave up L2 cache entirely in order to have the second processor.

There's actually significant upside.

Ever debugged a memory error in C? Ever done it when it is timing dependent? How about on 1024 nodes at once? Good luck opening that many gdb windows.

I TA'd the parallel programming class. I told the students (largely engineers & science, not CS) -- use fortran. Lack of pointers is actually a feature here.

If it means the end of GameSpy Voice "chat" -- aka some people are silent and some people HAVE THE VOICE OF GOD -- I am okay with any other ripple effects.

Even though I'm in town I'm not sure I buy cell over POTS. I have this thing called a basement (actually, under the front porch, concrete coverage 90-95% on all 6 sides -- small wooden ceiling/floor at one end), and I live in the midwest, where hiding in it from tornadoes is a thing that we do. I also have a buried landline (won't get snapped by falling trees). As soon as the cell companies can get me signal in the bunker, then we can being the conversation about removal of the POTS line.

Barring that we can talk about other technologies that would substitute and fill a similar feature set. Buried FTTP would be an acceptable substitute. Sure, there's the power loss issue for signaling in a disaster event from my end (though that's a signal in and of itself), but I'm willing to take that burden and USPes aren't really that complex a technology nor that high a cost. For the sort of trouble expected here (tornado/wind damage), FTTP should be about as reliable as POTS.

Even if it wasn't 78k (and it isn't, they listed it at 3k if you RTFA) that is a steal if your compute load can actually extract the 8 Tflop from it -- assuming that's the 64-bit flop, not the 32-bit flop.

I mean, slightly under 10 years ago I know a big-10 university that paid 3000k for a cluster with less Tflops (around 7, but not all in one computation/network).

I guess I shouldn't be surprised, another few years that should be in laptops or phones.

Projects like municipal broadband. Comcast and co are terrified and buy state legislators in order to shut it down. Hopefully we'll get a few of them out of the gates quickly enough that are fantastically wild successes that comcast and co get shot down.

You must be talking about this random charity, since many child's play dontaions go straight to the hospital?

Or maybe you're too RTFA to catch FAQ #1 which says historically under 6% overhead? A couple quick web searches, hitting both the Washington Sec of State and one of the various charity rating places both point to similarly good numbers.

I actually had it on my phone back in Feb. It wasn't awful. The lack of 3G data was all that got it removed and android put back on... for now, but I'll probably go back to it once I can get 3G data. I might miss my exchange calendar support, but I doubt that'll be long in appearing (who knows, I might even do that).

But I'm not a big app'er. I need a phone dialer, a tiny bit of sms, a web browser, gchat client, and preferably my corp exchange calendar (email optional). Gmail would be nice too but the browser version would fake it.

Those who froget the past are doomed to repeat it: Asheron's call had a similar issue back in 99-2000 era.