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Man Spends 2,200 Hours Defeating Bejeweled 2
An anonymous reader writes "A California steel contractor spent 2,200 total hours over the last three years racking up a high score in Bejeweled 2. He exceeded the 2^31-1 maximum score programmed for the score display, proving that there is, in fact, an end to the game. I suppose congratulations or condolences are in order."
Ah well, 2,147,483,647 points ought to be enough for anyone.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
THE reason to upgrade to x64
(Also, I thought my 5 days continuous freelancer game at university was extreme)
So, who wants to bet that most of the time he spent playing Bejeweled he was also billing someone for contract work?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
There are a LOT of WoW players who average more than 2 hours a day. When I played I averaged 3 hours a day. This guy enjoyed bejeweled and came home and played Bejeweled after work. A lot of americans watch about that much TV per day and they're not even posting a high score. Healthy? No. Worse than a typical high end raider in WoW? No. Worse than a typical American watching TV? No.
Conversely, he may have a bright future as a stockboy at Walmart (or if you will, Target), which requires speed, precision, and the ability to organize matching products in rows of three, five, up to infinity. Clearly, he is a credit to the species.
Oh, so what...
Really. Yes, plenty of people watch 2 hours of TV a day. Frankly, that's not all that excessive. Figure one 1-hour newscast and one 1-hour length drama/show. Does that put it more in perspective?
I'm not a gamer, so personally, I wouldn't spend 2 hours, let alone 2 minutes, playing a computer game, but the guy hasn't caused anyone any harm, so who cares, really?
It's not sad, it's just the way he chooses to spend his free time. Just as I might choose to spend my free time trying to learn another language - something that many other people would find boring and/or a waste of time.
I, for one, don't consider time playing video games as "wasted." If it made this guy happy, why does it matter so long as he isn't killing and eating your goats or something?
Thank you for sticking up for people like me who talk to trees. I should caveat that I USED talk to trees until some of the trees started calling me crazy and laughing at me behind my back. Now I am just kind of sad.
An honest, practical answer:
Because most people who develop software link to other libraries, and many of those libraries don't have overloaded functions that take unsigned ints as parameters.
For example, C#'s String.Substring function takes Int32s as parameters. So if you're using an UInt32 called x to hold some kind of index that you want to use in that function, you have to 1) check to see if x is less than zero (or better yet, less than UInt32.MinValue), and if so, throw an exception, then 2) cast x to an Int32, which takes a miniscule amount of time and resources.
It's much easier just to define x as an Int32, even if you never intend for it to be negative.
In the case of Bejewelled, I can only guess as to what dependencies might exist. Maybe the graphics routine to display the score on the screen is some kind of DisplayNumber(Int32 number,...) function that is generic enough so that they can write the function to display any number, positive or negative, and not have to build and maintain (and risk breaking when the code is updated) yet another function to do the same thing with uints because some weird bizarre edge cases exist where people use numbers > 2^31 but for whatever reason can't just use an Int64 instead.
Figure 40-minute newscast, 40-minute drama/show, 40 minutes advertising
FTFY
(Your point still stands. I agree with you.)