Long time followers of mine know that I am no stranger to ridiculously overpriced impulse purchases. After all, I did buy that $500 Not-A-Flamethrower from Elon Musks The Boring Company knowing full well that it was merely a glorified blowtorch made to resemble a sci-fi weapon.So what did I buy this time?
One of my favourite games to play is World of Warships (WOWS). Its a free-to-play game with many in-game purchases. Its not as much of a pay-to-win kind of game as World of Tanks is, but there is still a significant chunk of expensive content.
After all, since the game is free, the developers have to find some way to make money. A couple of days ago, WOWS 8. 11 went live, and with the update also came a new ship called the USS Puerto Rico a Tier X American battlecruiser based on the Tier IX American battlecruiser, USS Alaska.
Theres currently a bit of controversy surrounding the USS Puerto Rico. You see, World of Warships provided players with two ways to obtain this ship:Go down a rabbit hole of absolutely hellish grinding that only the most god-like players (better than unicum) in WOWS can possibly achieve, spending more than 8 hours a day, every single day, going through this torturous soul-crushing grind and after one month of this madness, finally obtain the USS Puerto Rico for free. Spend $300 and get the ship right now.
Would you like to guess which path I decided to take?yeah.This ship is hundreds of dollars more expensive than any other premium item in WOWS.
Its at least $200 more expensive than its little sister, the USS Alaska. So how does this ship compare to the Alaska?Well not favourably.
The Puerto Rico has 3 extra guns than the Alaska does, but is also has a shorter maximum range. The Puerto Rico is also a slightly slower, slightly larger target than the Alaska is. So clearly, this ship is NOT worth $300.
Heck, its not even worth $100. So why on Earth would I buy this ship if I knew how overpriced it was?Simple for the same reason that I would spend $500 on a glorified blowtorch, the Puerto Rico is a limited-edition item.
This ship will only be available for a month, and given how many people seem to hate this ship right now, its very likely that one year later, I will be only one of a small handful of players who has a Puerto Rico. Many years down the road, when I lose interest in WOWS (or video games in general), I can sell my account to other people the fact that I have a Puerto Rico will certainly make my account extremely desirable and therefore more valuable.
· Other Questions
How do you remove a resolved collection account off a credit report?
Credit bureaus strive to remove the negative information before the completion of seven years - roughly around six years nine months. However, they often make errors and fail to remove the records. In such a situation, the onus lies upon you to act quickly and get the matter resolved.
Experts from mymoneykarma are here to guide you.Verify and Confirm the Age of the Debt: If you suspect that negative information is on your credit report for longer than it should be, the first step for you would be to pull out your credit report and scrutinize it to verify the exact age of the delinquency. It doesn't matter if your account was written off or sold off to an external collection agency.
The date considered is the date on which you had initially missed or failed to make a payment to the original creditor. If your delinquency date was 1st January 2010, the information must not stay on your credit report for a single day after 1st January 2017. Keep your old credit reports handy - you might have to fish out the date on which the creditor reported your delinquency.
Check with Each Bureau: Each credit bureau need not make identical credit reports. The creditors might not report to all the bureaus, and thus, your credit report from each bureau will differ. The delinquency may not be there in all the reports.
Therefore, it is ideal that you get hold of a copy of your credit report from all three bureaus and inspect them.You are entitled to get a free copy of your credit report once a year from each bureau. However, you can access your credit report at any time by paying a nominal amount to the concerned credit bureau.
You must find out which bureaus are still listing the outdated old debt and contact them to get the record removed. For regular updates, you can check your credit report with mymoneykarma.File a Dispute: Once you have zeroed in on the credit bureaus that haven't removed outdated or inaccurate information from your credit report, you need to contact them and file a dispute to remove delinquent accounts.
The three main credit bureaus - TransUnion, Equifax, and Experian - have their own dispute management system. You could fill up and submit the dispute form online or download the form and send it to the bureau via post. When you register a dispute, you should attach copies of all the documents needed to support your claim.
You must make your plea convincing and foolproof so that the credit bureaus take it seriously. The credit bureau will contact the reporting creditor to verify your claim and settle the dispute accordingly. The issue should ideally be resolved in 45 days.
Additionally, you could also consider approaching the reporting creditor with the issue to ensure quick redressal of the problem. In either case, try to obtain an acknowledgment of receipt of the complaint to keep proof of the date on which you had filed the dispute
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Why does Garbage Collection take a lot of RAM?
There is not just one thing called garbage collection, there are several algorithms and strategies, and the answer depends on both the actual implementation and the memory usage patterns of each application.
That's why some systems actually support multiple algorithms and let the developer decide which one to use. And nearly all systems, even those using just one algorithm, support some kind of GC configuration/management API for special cases. One reason GC uses more memory than other memory management techniques is that memory is not reclaimed immediately when it becomes unused.
The strategy to decide when to start a GC pass varies by system and it may be different for recently allocated objects and for objects that have been in use for some time. In all cases some time passes from when an object becomes "unused" and the moment its memory is actually reclaimed, implying that, in a GC system, at least part of the memory that is currently "allocated" is in fact not used: it's the garbage that will eventually be freed the next time the GC triggers. Another reason is that so called "copying collectors" will effectively copy all objects that are currently "live" to a newly allocated area each time the GC is run.
This means that the application uses at least 2x as much memory as it would otherwise need: each time the GC starts running it must have stashed aside an amount of free memory that is as large as the memory currently in use, including both live and garbage objects (because it still does not know what's live and what's garbage).One may think that such a strategy is absurd: why use twice as much memory? The answer is that for some applications this strategy is extremely effective.
Memory allocation is extremely fast (much much faster than with any other mechanism) and garbage collection may also run relatively fast if the survival rate of objects is low. In fact for an application where an extremely huge number of objects are allocated but their survival is very low (nearly all of them are allocated, immediately used, then abandoned) a copying garbage collector is arguably the fastest solution: it could be much much faster than manual memory management.In most cases (not all, there are always counter examples for every strategy: there is no strategy that is always better than any other) a GC based memory management strategy provides better overall performance than other systems, including manual management.
The drawbacks are that it uses more memory (statistics say approximately 1.6 to 1.8 times more for the average application on a modern GC implementation) and that application execution is not "uniform" in a non predictable way, which can be a big problem in time critical systems and in applications like games that need to guarantee an uniform framerate.
Why does the garbage collection takes a lot of ram ?.