Emergencies are inevitable, you should have an envelope labeled ‘Emergencies’ to deal with them. Take note of how often you are dipping into that envelope, though. People who are financially responsible rarely need their emergency fund because increased financial planning naturally decreases financial emergencies. The same is true for time.

As for bonuses, money is not a motivator. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

Sprints (to use the agile definition) are when everything suddenly gets OMGBUSY. Suddenly you need tasks R-Z done by tomorrow. And you can’t delay any of them. (Example: we need you to deal with these two fringe cases before the new iPhone comes out tomorrow. That literally happened to me on Thursday).

You end up having to work extra, because of you don’t, and you go into production without those issues fixed, you’ll look bad and probably get fired. If you bust your ass, your boss will probably reward you with comp time (you CAN put time back in a different envelope) and hopefully a bonus.

If you sacrifice when necessary, any company that awards bonuses will make note of that and dole out the cash as merited.

Sorry the software is so brittle, I wrote it back for windows 2000 and I’m so glad it still works as good as it does all these years later because I lost the source code.

Is there any way to play that still? I’m a Java Programmer myself (BS in Computer Science, Information Systems) and I would be more than happy to set up a private server for myself and friends to play in our free time. Something for work breaks that I could toss up on our server to kill some time and release some stress. Maybe keep the interns from shooting up the place.

I don’t want to impose, or poke around but I am very curious where it went and if there is any possible way to play it, or get the files needed to play it.

However, the Oracle guy (RobertD) is right. The feature DOES do something. It disables write cache flushing. This will especially show up on databases. In a benchmark, it would be reflected in a higher IOPS count.

Daniel Vogel is probably also right, for the reason this feature is evil. Disabling all write flushing also means that when NTFS needs to make sure something is written to disk or else, it can’t. That can lead to corruption.

If you need the speed, buy a RAID controller with on-board battery.

This is going to seem irrelevant but if you hear me out I think you will find that it isn’t. When going through the tutorial, you are encouraged to roll and then choose from the options that pop up. For example “Two 5s: 100 Points”. At first I thought you could only ever choose exactly one of the popped up options and were then required to roll again or bank. As I played more I found that I could choose multiple popped up options if I wanted to, as long as they didn’t “overlap” dice. For me it was an “Oh I’m just an idiot” moment.

Anyway I think it’s natural not to watch the computer like a hawk, but I noticed that the computer did, in fact, seem to have overall better luck than me, despite my having good confidence in my strategy. Then I started watching very carefully and I noticed that the computer would frequently roll “Two 1s: 200″ or “Two 5s: 100″, yet only one of the two dice would become “locked” in place.

I flipped out. I started noticing it happening all the time and filed a bug report. It turns out that it is not a bug because the player can do so as well by individually clicking on the dice along the left. Something that was NOT addressed — let alone clearly explained — anywhere in the tutorial nor the rules.

Furthermore it is, as I see it, a huge advantage to be aware of this option, as choosing one five instead of two fives can vastly improve your chances of avoiding a zilch.

So if I did have constructive criticism to give, I would say that the tutorial and the instructions need to be clearer. Something that would be VERY easy to do and wouldn’t change the game at all.

Without having the advantage of making the best choices (and probably never noticing that the computer players are exercising options that we aren’t), it would explain why the game seems unfair, or favoring the computer.

My second point that I want to make is that I never received a response to my bug report, so I started looking around the sites more. I found the explanation about “Why the computer player sometimes only chooses one die.” This note by the game author explained everything in what I viewed to be a tone that implied we should have known all along, ending with “Please stop sending bug reports about it.”

Obviously if so many reports are being sent, all of these complainers did not understand the rules of the game, so I think the appropriate response would be to explain the rules better in the game instead of making an otherwise unnoticeable link to an explanation somewhere at the bottom of the game description.

The developer’s reaction left a bad enough taste in my mouth to write this long post about it. So, there you have it — perhaps the game just seems so unfair because we’re not informed enough to play with a good strategy!