I love the comments that are put in there as easter eggs, though. Deep within the original source of EQDKP was a comment above a bit of code that set the maximum year as 2010 for any entry. "Ambitious, aren't we?" it said, when it was written in 2000. Yeah, turns out that come 2010, people were still using modifications to the original and everyone had a conniption when their database broke on January 1, 2011.
Brief comments are good. Jokes are fine. Explanations of why you did it this way and not some other, obviously easier way are the best.
I don't have to drive to the library or reserve a copy of the bestseller off the "new arrivals" list. That's kind of nice. I have a whole month to read it, too, instead of the 2 weeks the library will give me.
Actually, there is a hole in the wall PC parts store tucked away in the local mall. I don't think they have HDMI cables, but I did get some much needed motherboard mounts for 50 cents one time.
What happened was that Amazon expected more people to take advantage of the other Prime features besides free shipping. Instead, free shipping was by far the only thing people really used it for. Their streaming services don't have any of the things I want to watch, unfortunately, since the streaming rights to those shows were all gobbled up by the competitors.
Well, no, it's more like "being lent a copy of a bestselling novel each month at no extra cost." That's $10/month in value right there. I don't get to keep it, because it was borrowed, but I didn't pay for it to begin with. If I wanted it permanently I'd get a dead tree format instead.
I had that attitude, but so many of the local sellers are just gouging. I needed a 12 foot HDMI cable a while back. It was going to cost me $10 on Amazon, but I wanted it right now. I went to Best Buy, half a mile down the road. They wanted $40 for the same cable.
Instant gratification is not worth a $30 surcharge.
There are people who do study this very thing, but they're not well liked within even the education colleges because they come up with the same conclusion you did - the education system as-is isn't that great and requires radical change to be fixed. And money. Much, much more money to shrink classroom sizes and to provide proper materials for kids. Younger children learn best in groups of no more than a dozen. Older kids actually benefit from even smaller groups for some subjects (math), but larger groups for others (music.) Few school systems have the resources to try such an experimental approach, but those that do have pretty good results.
Teaching to the test isn't a bad thing as long as the tests themselves are actually well written. I've seen some of the standardized test questions today's high school students are expected to answer, not just in the SAT but in their graduation requirements, and they're just awful. Poorly worded questions with poorly worded answers.
If you're hitting your maximum deductible every single year, you're probably using up far more medical care than you're paying in premiums AND out of pocket. The average healthy adult won't see any bills beyond their premium each month. Then your three year old falls off the monkey bars and breaks both legs and an arm, and $6700 to get everything fixed up becomes a bargain.
The absolute maximum yearly out of pocket allowed under the ACA is $6700 iirc. So your insurance company is required to cover 100% of any bills once you've hit that cap.
Anyone who was in the US military or was a dependent of the US military can tell you they did a pretty good job with Tricare. Healthcare was an invisible cost to me when I was a kid. If I was sick, I went to the doctor, no questions asked (and got a visit to my father who worked civil service in the Army hospital after he retired.)
They've been messing with the model due to budget cuts over the last few years, and I hear it's not as rosy as it used to be. But for the first 18 years of my life, I never realized that being sick could cost so much.
When that happens in the US you try to fill the prescription anyway and the pharmacy calls the doctor's office to get a "pre-authorization" - usually within two days. They don't do that in pharmacies in Canada?
Depending on where you go, a "routine" doctor's visit can range from $50 to $200. Still, it's much cheaper for both you and an insurance company to cover a once a year "wellness" visit and catch anything early on than it is for you to skip the yearly visit since it costs an extra $50, and then suddenly learn you've had a slow growing tumor in your ear and now you're going deaf.
$6K/year is about right for real health insurance. What you had previously was "junk insurance" - them paying for and covering the bare minimum. If you were diagnosed with leukemia, your HSA would have been wiped out in the first week and your insurance company would have dropped you as soon as it could legally get away with it. A course of leukemia is going to set them back a cool million bucks, so they'd do ANYTHING they could to retroactively decide you lied on your insurance application and they didn't have to do anything.
A Nintendo DS with a library of used games would have prevented all these problems.
Kids are not supposed to touch cell phones, according to the phone insurance people I used to work for. Handing your kid a cell phone completely absolves your insurance company of any liability if the kid breaks it. (Now, it's another story if your child steals it from your purse or whatever.)
At least 100,000 players of the original game didn't have to buy the new version. They got a copy of the client handed to them for free. Are they counted among the "sale" numbers? I'm pretty sure the source quoted below uses the phrase "accounts" which is not the same as sold copies of the game. (Whether those accounts are active or not is up for debate.)
Yeah, that was my first take as well. This telephone number called that telephone number. Big whoop. Unless we have the name of the person who owns that first telephone number it's still just a number. Granted, matching a name to a phone number is trivially easy, except more and more people are not putting their cell phones into the phone book so it at least requires an Internet connection.
Yep, they took EVE's model, as a means of trying to keep out RMT. I'm sure there are still some entrepreneurial gold farmers that are going to try it, anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like they hired the same team that did the latest PC Magazine.com overhaul.
I love the comments that are put in there as easter eggs, though. Deep within the original source of EQDKP was a comment above a bit of code that set the maximum year as 2010 for any entry. "Ambitious, aren't we?" it said, when it was written in 2000. Yeah, turns out that come 2010, people were still using modifications to the original and everyone had a conniption when their database broke on January 1, 2011.
Brief comments are good. Jokes are fine. Explanations of why you did it this way and not some other, obviously easier way are the best.
* Changing X will have absolutely no effect on Y since I don't know any place where Y references X.
* I'll just take care of all the small bugs first before tackling this monster deliverable.
* Pulling this code out of the client and putting it into a store procedure won't break anything.
I don't have to drive to the library or reserve a copy of the bestseller off the "new arrivals" list. That's kind of nice. I have a whole month to read it, too, instead of the 2 weeks the library will give me.
Actually, there is a hole in the wall PC parts store tucked away in the local mall. I don't think they have HDMI cables, but I did get some much needed motherboard mounts for 50 cents one time.
What happened was that Amazon expected more people to take advantage of the other Prime features besides free shipping. Instead, free shipping was by far the only thing people really used it for. Their streaming services don't have any of the things I want to watch, unfortunately, since the streaming rights to those shows were all gobbled up by the competitors.
Well, no, it's more like "being lent a copy of a bestselling novel each month at no extra cost." That's $10/month in value right there. I don't get to keep it, because it was borrowed, but I didn't pay for it to begin with. If I wanted it permanently I'd get a dead tree format instead.
I had that attitude, but so many of the local sellers are just gouging. I needed a 12 foot HDMI cable a while back. It was going to cost me $10 on Amazon, but I wanted it right now. I went to Best Buy, half a mile down the road. They wanted $40 for the same cable.
Instant gratification is not worth a $30 surcharge.
Oh heck, I have that problem as an adult too. Strict Workflow (formerly known as Strict Pomodoro) works wonders.
There are people who do study this very thing, but they're not well liked within even the education colleges because they come up with the same conclusion you did - the education system as-is isn't that great and requires radical change to be fixed. And money. Much, much more money to shrink classroom sizes and to provide proper materials for kids. Younger children learn best in groups of no more than a dozen. Older kids actually benefit from even smaller groups for some subjects (math), but larger groups for others (music.) Few school systems have the resources to try such an experimental approach, but those that do have pretty good results.
Teaching to the test isn't a bad thing as long as the tests themselves are actually well written. I've seen some of the standardized test questions today's high school students are expected to answer, not just in the SAT but in their graduation requirements, and they're just awful. Poorly worded questions with poorly worded answers.
Uh, no, I don't think I implied it at all since I followed up with "so you at least need an Internet connection." I also said it was trivially easy.
If you're hitting your maximum deductible every single year, you're probably using up far more medical care than you're paying in premiums AND out of pocket. The average healthy adult won't see any bills beyond their premium each month. Then your three year old falls off the monkey bars and breaks both legs and an arm, and $6700 to get everything fixed up becomes a bargain.
The absolute maximum yearly out of pocket allowed under the ACA is $6700 iirc. So your insurance company is required to cover 100% of any bills once you've hit that cap.
Anyone who was in the US military or was a dependent of the US military can tell you they did a pretty good job with Tricare. Healthcare was an invisible cost to me when I was a kid. If I was sick, I went to the doctor, no questions asked (and got a visit to my father who worked civil service in the Army hospital after he retired.)
They've been messing with the model due to budget cuts over the last few years, and I hear it's not as rosy as it used to be. But for the first 18 years of my life, I never realized that being sick could cost so much.
When that happens in the US you try to fill the prescription anyway and the pharmacy calls the doctor's office to get a "pre-authorization" - usually within two days. They don't do that in pharmacies in Canada?
The vast majority of bankruptcies in America were related to medical bills as recently as last year, even with people who had insurance.
Depending on where you go, a "routine" doctor's visit can range from $50 to $200. Still, it's much cheaper for both you and an insurance company to cover a once a year "wellness" visit and catch anything early on than it is for you to skip the yearly visit since it costs an extra $50, and then suddenly learn you've had a slow growing tumor in your ear and now you're going deaf.
$6K/year is about right for real health insurance. What you had previously was "junk insurance" - them paying for and covering the bare minimum. If you were diagnosed with leukemia, your HSA would have been wiped out in the first week and your insurance company would have dropped you as soon as it could legally get away with it. A course of leukemia is going to set them back a cool million bucks, so they'd do ANYTHING they could to retroactively decide you lied on your insurance application and they didn't have to do anything.
A Nintendo DS with a library of used games would have prevented all these problems.
Kids are not supposed to touch cell phones, according to the phone insurance people I used to work for. Handing your kid a cell phone completely absolves your insurance company of any liability if the kid breaks it. (Now, it's another story if your child steals it from your purse or whatever.)
See, that requires forethought and good parenting, two things that in-app developers depend on you not having.
At least 100,000 players of the original game didn't have to buy the new version. They got a copy of the client handed to them for free. Are they counted among the "sale" numbers? I'm pretty sure the source quoted below uses the phrase "accounts" which is not the same as sold copies of the game. (Whether those accounts are active or not is up for debate.)
Yeah, that was my first take as well. This telephone number called that telephone number. Big whoop. Unless we have the name of the person who owns that first telephone number it's still just a number. Granted, matching a name to a phone number is trivially easy, except more and more people are not putting their cell phones into the phone book so it at least requires an Internet connection.
Naw, it's made for people who liked WoW's art style but are getting tired of WoW's out dated graphical engine.
TESO is also a pay to play. XIV:ARR is pay to play and they're approaching a population of two million since launch last fall, which is kind of crazy.
F2P games have their place, but so do P2P games. If Wildstar thinks it can compete with the big boys, then more power to it.
Yep, they took EVE's model, as a means of trying to keep out RMT. I'm sure there are still some entrepreneurial gold farmers that are going to try it, anyway.