I remember when gasoline was under a dollar a gallon in
the US! And penny candy was only a penny! And a pound
sterling could buy you a decent dinner, not just a few
ounces of meat product! And the euro! Let me tell you about the euro!!
I mean, um. Yeah. Things have changed, and it seems lately
all our consumer goods and services have become suddenly
more expensive,
or smaller, or inferior in some other way. Have you priced
airplane flights, even in middle seats with no luggage or
food?
The lead submission this week isn't really a software Error'd.
It's not even a wacky product offering from Amazon. But despite
what seems an unconscionable price, the manufacturer has
discovered a revolutionary method to deliver extra
value by (apparently) literally altering the properties of
the universe.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... MEAT!
Finally free from those awful EU restrictions, Michael R. now has access to 85% over-clocked pork sausages. "Not bad to get 185g meat out of 100g product.", he grunts gluttonously. "I will take 2."
Mac user (maybe? Correct me if I'm wrong) Lily might need some of that over-clocked sausage sustenance while trying to make something like full use of her Core i5 heater. "I've never realized my 4 core CPU has such performance! Thank you, Intel!" It really makes you wonder why Apple bothered with new chips at all.
Jonathan Holmes , on the other hand, needs some over-clocked memory. Even in these inflated days, a half-terabyte of RAM is a considerable investment. "To be fair to Samsung, I can rent a 512GB Amazon instance for under $5 an hour if I want to backup my mobile..." Gramps here recalls a product called "RAM Doubler" that might help a bit, especially if you could exploit some of Lily's massive CPU for some really fancy compression algorithms.
Peter C. highlights a pernicious variant on inflation that the mass media are now calling "shrinkflation". If you don't want to raise prices, just reduce your product quantity instead. Seems like FedEx's web supplier has been selling them a bunch of diminished text boxes. "I thought this form gave me 120 characters to work with, but then it cut me off after 35," he raged. "You can hardly say BOO in only 35 characters!!11!"
In another reminiscence on bygone days, unrelated to inflation, Unsightly P. regales us with a heroic tale. "I was thrilled to log in to my plural sight account, and see a real live NaN! Such sightings were common when the web was young, but civilization has largely relegated them to forgotten myths. The search is on though, for NaN's older brother, the great (K?)null." Ah, me, Mr. P. I assure you the mythical NaN is anything but. We here at Error'd see scores of NaNs with every mailbag. It's only the shocking ubiquity of their existence that discourages more than a fortnightly feature. Next week, perhaps, we'll see a Pnull.
This post originally appeared on The Daily WTF.