Agreed, make a baby, support the critter, its not just a good idea, its the law... enforce the heck out of it. Moreover, make such a public stink about being a Dad who won't do his duty that the shear weight of being a pariah makes him do the right thing.
How many men are paying child support right now because they were falsely named on a birth certificate and not given a proper chance to demand a paternity test?
Indeed. According to the Retardicans, my aunt would have had to die right now (her first pregancy was aborted because my unborn cousin was severely deformed, missing half his brain and most of his skull, and likely to die and go septic in utero which would have resulted in her death along with him).
Without a "one or both" exception - e.g. to save the life of the mother - in place, the Retardicans will never get me to so much as admit they have some good-faith reason to get between a woman and her doctor regarding medical procedures.
So far with Java I have seen Ask Toolbar, Bing Toolbar, and one other (I forget what). Adobe tends to push Ask Toolbar and Google Toolbar.
What really gets me about the Bing Toolbar is that on any computer with IE8 or IE9, Bing is already the fucking default search engine for the search box anyways. So why the fuck does MS have to push a goddamn toolbar everywhere?
Hell, even reputable companies are doing this. I see it all the time. We wind up cleaning off "Ask Toolbar" and other sorts of shitty crapware all the time, and it wandered in as a tagalong with Adobe Reader and Java updates!
Not really. The US used to have much better manufacturing plants than Taiwan, South Korea, China... what happened is that companies decided to outsource for slave-labor wages.
What is killing US manufacturing now is both slave-labor wages in other countries and the fact that the fab plants have moved there. This wouldn't have happened in the first place if the dickfaced politicians on the take from an elitist multibillionaire class hadn't been so gung-ho on "global free trade", aka Slavery Exported.
I'm more than a little tired of newbies who think the attacks are coming from the outside in the form of script kiddies and port scans. The attacks are coming from the INSIDE, by fully authorized users who face little if any opposition. The absolute HIGHEST RISK is the disgruntled worker who fears being outsourced and keeps a nifty supply of sensitive material on a USB drive. Ironically, the IT workers who build these "secure enterprise networks" are among the biggest security threats.
And when someone implements this at the request of the CEO/CIO because a disgruntled employee or outright spy just walked off with trade secrets on a USB thumb drive, who gets blamed? Not the CEO/CIO. Not the spy. No, it's "those mean draconian IT guys."
Have you ever heard of Gmail with a POP3 client? Sheesh.
And that Gmail account is one keylogger on an infected machine somewhere (perhaps on, say, the courtesy desktops in a hotel's "business office"), or some intelligent, slow-running dictionary attack, or idiot who can't be bothered to keep a secure password, away from being wide open.
Speaking of hotels: I never, ever, ever use those fucking "courtesy desktops." I've seen what gets onto them.
This may come as a surprise to you, but my 2 kids and 498 of their colleagues have the same number of computers as your "enterprise network of 500 desktops". They accomplish more of what they set out to do than the average corporate employee -- with a lot less BS.
I hope they aren't carrying sensitive data on those desktops. Oh, btw, your kids' credit card info (or yours if you let them buy something online), social security number, and everything else about him that someone might need to steal his/her identity is right fucking there out in the open. As is the info of your kids' 498 friends, because they don't fucking pay attention before clicking on "free puppy screensaver" and all that other shit.
Don't forget: why do R&D when you can just constantly buy out (or undercut) smaller businesses?
One of my uncles has gone through 5 workplaces in the last decade. Essentially, he gets hired somewhere that's a small firm, and some larger entity either shows up to buy the company out (takes the patents and then shuts down development within a year) or does much what GPP suggested, rips off the design, undercuts the pricing, and then buries the company lawyers in paperwork when they try to assert their patents.
IBM, Microsoft, Apple... they don't do shit for R&D anymore, they just rip off other people's ideas and ruin the smaller businesses.
If you do some math, I can give you three ways to make a far more efficient system than the tree without using the power required for a sun-tracking motor.
#1 - arrange them in a dome structure or pipe structure cross-section. For the pipe structure, use perhaps a 15-20 degree arc, or a similar arc for the dome. A main portion will have direct sun through the day, the rest will get at least oblique sun.
#2 - Put your flat photovoltaic cells below an appropriately shaped lens that will redirect the "indirect" sunlight into a direct pattern for most of the hours of the day. No mechanical motion needed.
#3 - Make, as I said before, a "corkscrew" of the really large panels (like you often see someone set up out on a farm these days).
Any of these three will be far more efficient than the "tree" arrangement this kid cooked up. And that's why the tree arrangement is just silly to try to replicate, unless you're more interested in an art deco statement than power efficiency.
The reason nobody patented it before is that it is NOT actually more efficient and the production setup is overly complex for the job. Read my analysis above.
His "power gain" is due to using crappy PV cells that maxed out overly fast in direct sun. Rerun the experiment with PV cells that didn't max out ("clipping") and abandon potential power and you'd have a different result.
Now, the fact that he had a longer power arrangement isn't that hard to do either. Want to make something to function in a similar way? You could easily make a corkscrew arrangement of traditional long-panel cells to track from morning to evening, with one cell of several being more-or-less on the direct sun line and the rest still collecting off-angle power (which is all that the "tree" arrangement does).
If you look at his methodology, it's fundamentally flawed. RTFA and do your own analysis if you want.
During the "peak times" for his model, the flat arrangement was maxed out on production. Lots of lost energy. His "extended time of collection" is the sole basis for his supposed power-collection increases on the tree-like setup.
If you were to do the same experiment with PV cells that didn't max out, you'd find far superior collection from that arrangement. His "power gain" is an artifact of clipping, nothing more.
Again, FTFA: When a PV array is shaded by another object, like a tree or a house, the solar panels get backed up with electrons like cars in a traffic jam, and the current drops - UNDERSTANDING ELECTRICITY FAIL. Also, this is why people don't put their solar panels in the shade path of trees and houses.
Shade and bad weather like snow don't hurt it because the panels are not flat. - Somebody has never lived anywhere that has a real winter and seen snow-covered trees, be they deciduous or conifer or gynosperm. Deciduous trees don't gather sunlight during the winter, they DROP their leaves and enter a state similar to hibernation. That's why we have this word "deciduous" to describe them.
He sounds like a bright enough kid. But he's a kid. And it's sad that he's been given an award for some really shoddily conducted "research" by an organization that has no idea what the fuck they are talking about when it comes to power production, and were just happy someone photogenic published something cutesy about trees.
Gimme an algorithm or any other job and I'll implement it in 'C' - I don't need no pussy language that makes parsing text easier (Perl) or web back ends easier (Python) or worry about the mythical write once run everywhere languages like Java.
And back in the day of the old PS2, every goddamn game development house started out their dev cycle by reimplementing mip-maps because it wasn't supported directly by the hardware. Fucking insanity. If there's a tool that has been developed for text parsing, and 99% of your program's functionality is text parsing, then use something that was DESIGNED FOR TEXT PARSING instead of having to reinvent the goddamn wheel.
Tools are made because they make life, or at least a specific task, easier. They should be used for that purpose. They should not be used for things they are not designed for. C++ was designed for low-level access to the hardware, which is fine if your program needs low-level access to the hardware, but it shouldn't be used for every task just as Java, or Perl, or Python, or any other tool shouldn't be used for things they weren't designed for.
The larger picture is fucking use the right tool for the job already.
Java has its purposes. Write-once, Run-Almost-Anywhere is a good concept. Likewise, some of the other tools in other managed frameworks make certain things really simple.
And when you need power and speed at the expense of having to do things a lot more exact yourself, then go to a language that'll work that way.
Played the game once. Got the first ending. Now I have to play it through again in "Game+" mode to get the second ending. And the third ending. And the fourth ending. And the Super-Fucking-Secret-Real-Ending that you only get on 100% completion...
They call this episodic gaming. You get one episode a month (or something like that). Sam&Max, Wallace and Gromit, Back to the Future, Monkey Island... Telltale Games does a lot of it.
Most people wait for the full game and then buy the full damn game anyways.
Borderlands doesn't do that, but it DOES have some pretty juicy flavor text for each mission, such that I can pick back up even on missions I've ignored in favor of other missions and get back into it with little to no trouble. I can take a month's break from Borderlands, come back into the game, and not have to wonder "now where the fuck was I and what the fuck was I doing?" With most RPG's, I can't do that. Even with games like Infamous or Prototype, doing that is difficult.
The one thing I'd wish for with Borderlands would be a "replay cutscenes and audio clips" that I didn't have to hunt through with byzantine, bizarre names and no rhyme nor reason to where they are on the list. The replay-audio feature is nice, but finding the one I want to replay after I get interrupted by a phone call or the neighbor's retarded-ass dog barking at a squirrel, that's just hell.
I played all the way through Arx Fatalis. It was obviously an RPG. It had a pretty good story. It also had NO reason to fucking level grind, ever, and so I had no problem keeping going in it.
You don't need "dungeon level grinding" to make a fun RPG. Sure, give the player occasional item drops. Let them level up the character, but level the associated monsters alongside to keep it a challenge. Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas had the right idea that way - the higher level I got, the more nasty enemies I started seeing, such that I couldn't just run around the wilderness like an idiot at any level.
Like I said, the key is not the length of the game, the key is not doing the things that make the game fucking boring to gamers.
If I put the game down for a weekend or a week or two due to Real Life, and then come back and there's no way to get back into the character and remember what was going on in the story, then I'm done with the game.
If I play the game for 15 hours and hit a Celda-style "Hey Link, go waste 60 hours sailing around the goddamn ocean looking for the 8 pieces of the Crappy Macguffin before we'll let you back to the main story" setup, then fuck that, I'm done. Likewise for games like the Final Fantasy series, where I have to spend 30 hours or more running around the side-areas level grinding before taking on one of the bosses.
I'm fine with a short game like Super Mario Bros that has almost infinite replayability and remains fun. Or the old-school arcade games that are the same way. I'm not fine with games that have inflated, worthless "X hours of gameplay" listed right there on the goddamn box, like being proud of forcing the players to go through 100 hours of level grind is something to be fucking proud of.
If the game designers would stop giving a shit about how "long" the game was, and instead start making sure the game was fun from start to finish, then they'd be doing a hell of a lot better. It's not that multiplayer is the holy grail, it's not that people actually fucking enjoy level grinding (let's face it, most gamers don't play Call of Duty more than a month because by the time you play that long, you're SO done with the immature fucking hyperleveled kids who play all day long and shout "fag" into their headsets whenever they score a kill), it's that people want to have FUN when they play.
Sandbox games are the worst type of boring-ass grinding crap. They make Final Fantasy grinding look positively FUN by comparison.
Sandbox translates into "great, you've finished the 4 fucking hours of crapass story we decided to make. Now go shoot some people, fuck some hookers, beat them up after, kill all the cops you can find, and generally make an ass of yourself in GTA 4 till we make GTA 5."
NO. That is boring-ass lazy crap from designers who wouldn't know a real game if someone slapped them right in the face with it.
Sure, you can "play" RDR. It has a halfway decent story. But it gets lost because of all the damn grinding, and getting lost, and generally farting around in the wilderness shooting birds and wolves. Or you take a weekend off and even with the mission hint system, you can't remember where the fuck you were in the storyline. It's even worse for all the goddamn JRPG's in the world. Or you have Celda Syndrome, where you play for a good 15 hours, and then spend 60 hours on "Hey Link, go sail a boat around the world looking for the 8 pieces of trash so you can make a goddamn macguffin and get back to the fucking story already."
Borderlands does a lot better about it. I can put that down for a month, come back, read the mission descriptions that actually carry some fucking backstory, and get back into my character easier.
Now, do we like shorter games if done well? Of course. Super Mario Bros. can be beaten in a few hours. The Megaman games, originals, had no save points but could be finished in a few hours. The key there is that they can be played over and over and over again, even after you've beaten them, and they are still goddamn fun to play. Just like how arcade games that generally only played for a few minutes - Joust, Galaga, Gyruss and more - were so fun and addictive that they could be played over and over and over again.
But the key is not making the game shorter. The key is not doing the things that make people bored with the fucking game. Avoid grinding. Avoid needless "now you need to run back and forth around the map 50 times for quest X" garbage. And that means a few changes to game design, like making your enemies scale somewhat so that they remain a challenge to a high "level" character while not being unbeatable for someone who hasn't spent 50 hours grinding in the side areas of the game (looking right at you, Final Fantasy series).
Slashdot Mirror
regulations more akin to common sense/1960s US than current US conditions
Yes, we know about all you corporate shitheads destroying the environment anywhere you can pay off a bunch of tin-pot fuckhead dictators to let you.
So, you can pay 39.6% corporate income tax in the US on all your profit, or pay 0% corporate income tax in HK or China on all your profit.
A great reason for the US to fix its tax laws to eliminate this loophole on any goods brought into the US. Or just tax accordingly.
full right-to-work, and corporate approval required for any union
Also known as "wage suppression"
100% write-off of capital expenses in the year of purchase
Known to the modern world as "accounting fraud"...
I could go on, but you've pretty much shown yourself for what you are and why anyone with a soul should not do business with people like you.
Agreed, make a baby, support the critter, its not just a good idea, its the law... enforce the heck out of it. Moreover, make such a public stink about being a Dad who won't do his duty that the shear weight of being a pariah makes him do the right thing.
Unfortunately, then we get into cases like this.
How many men are paying child support right now because they were falsely named on a birth certificate and not given a proper chance to demand a paternity test?
Indeed. According to the Retardicans, my aunt would have had to die right now (her first pregancy was aborted because my unborn cousin was severely deformed, missing half his brain and most of his skull, and likely to die and go septic in utero which would have resulted in her death along with him).
Without a "one or both" exception - e.g. to save the life of the mother - in place, the Retardicans will never get me to so much as admit they have some good-faith reason to get between a woman and her doctor regarding medical procedures.
So far with Java I have seen Ask Toolbar, Bing Toolbar, and one other (I forget what). Adobe tends to push Ask Toolbar and Google Toolbar.
What really gets me about the Bing Toolbar is that on any computer with IE8 or IE9, Bing is already the fucking default search engine for the search box anyways. So why the fuck does MS have to push a goddamn toolbar everywhere?
They "choose" to live in a dorm style environment"? Are "free" to look for other work?
Yeah right. And Marie Antoinette's peasants were free to eat cake.
Also, you're free to go fuck yourself. Moron.
More and more download sites are doing this.
Hell, even reputable companies are doing this. I see it all the time. We wind up cleaning off "Ask Toolbar" and other sorts of shitty crapware all the time, and it wandered in as a tagalong with Adobe Reader and Java updates!
Not really. The US used to have much better manufacturing plants than Taiwan, South Korea, China... what happened is that companies decided to outsource for slave-labor wages.
What is killing US manufacturing now is both slave-labor wages in other countries and the fact that the fab plants have moved there. This wouldn't have happened in the first place if the dickfaced politicians on the take from an elitist multibillionaire class hadn't been so gung-ho on "global free trade", aka Slavery Exported.
I'm more than a little tired of newbies who think the attacks are coming from the outside in the form of script kiddies and port scans. The attacks are coming from the INSIDE, by fully authorized users who face little if any opposition. The absolute HIGHEST RISK is the disgruntled worker who fears being outsourced and keeps a nifty supply of sensitive material on a USB drive. Ironically, the IT workers who build these "secure enterprise networks" are among the biggest security threats.
And when someone implements this at the request of the CEO/CIO because a disgruntled employee or outright spy just walked off with trade secrets on a USB thumb drive, who gets blamed? Not the CEO/CIO. Not the spy. No, it's "those mean draconian IT guys."
Have you ever heard of Gmail with a POP3 client? Sheesh.
And that Gmail account is one keylogger on an infected machine somewhere (perhaps on, say, the courtesy desktops in a hotel's "business office"), or some intelligent, slow-running dictionary attack, or idiot who can't be bothered to keep a secure password, away from being wide open.
Speaking of hotels: I never, ever, ever use those fucking "courtesy desktops." I've seen what gets onto them.
This may come as a surprise to you, but my 2 kids and 498 of their colleagues have the same number of computers as your "enterprise network of 500 desktops". They accomplish more of what they set out to do than the average corporate employee -- with a lot less BS.
I hope they aren't carrying sensitive data on those desktops. Oh, btw, your kids' credit card info (or yours if you let them buy something online), social security number, and everything else about him that someone might need to steal his/her identity is right fucking there out in the open. As is the info of your kids' 498 friends, because they don't fucking pay attention before clicking on "free puppy screensaver" and all that other shit.
Don't forget: why do R&D when you can just constantly buy out (or undercut) smaller businesses?
One of my uncles has gone through 5 workplaces in the last decade. Essentially, he gets hired somewhere that's a small firm, and some larger entity either shows up to buy the company out (takes the patents and then shuts down development within a year) or does much what GPP suggested, rips off the design, undercuts the pricing, and then buries the company lawyers in paperwork when they try to assert their patents.
IBM, Microsoft, Apple... they don't do shit for R&D anymore, they just rip off other people's ideas and ruin the smaller businesses.
If you do some math, I can give you three ways to make a far more efficient system than the tree without using the power required for a sun-tracking motor.
#1 - arrange them in a dome structure or pipe structure cross-section. For the pipe structure, use perhaps a 15-20 degree arc, or a similar arc for the dome. A main portion will have direct sun through the day, the rest will get at least oblique sun.
#2 - Put your flat photovoltaic cells below an appropriately shaped lens that will redirect the "indirect" sunlight into a direct pattern for most of the hours of the day. No mechanical motion needed.
#3 - Make, as I said before, a "corkscrew" of the really large panels (like you often see someone set up out on a farm these days).
Any of these three will be far more efficient than the "tree" arrangement this kid cooked up. And that's why the tree arrangement is just silly to try to replicate, unless you're more interested in an art deco statement than power efficiency.
In the real world, dumbasses who think Pi=3 (or 3.2) get elected to their state legislatures...
Someone else also pointed out something below that I missed because the image didn't load on my first read-through:
18 cells on the tree. Only 10 on his supposed "control" set.
SCIENCE FAIL.
The reason nobody patented it before is that it is NOT actually more efficient and the production setup is overly complex for the job. Read my analysis above.
His "power gain" is due to using crappy PV cells that maxed out overly fast in direct sun. Rerun the experiment with PV cells that didn't max out ("clipping") and abandon potential power and you'd have a different result.
Now, the fact that he had a longer power arrangement isn't that hard to do either. Want to make something to function in a similar way? You could easily make a corkscrew arrangement of traditional long-panel cells to track from morning to evening, with one cell of several being more-or-less on the direct sun line and the rest still collecting off-angle power (which is all that the "tree" arrangement does).
Bloody obvious.
Sigh.
If you look at his methodology, it's fundamentally flawed. RTFA and do your own analysis if you want.
During the "peak times" for his model, the flat arrangement was maxed out on production. Lots of lost energy. His "extended time of collection" is the sole basis for his supposed power-collection increases on the tree-like setup.
If you were to do the same experiment with PV cells that didn't max out, you'd find far superior collection from that arrangement. His "power gain" is an artifact of clipping, nothing more.
Again, FTFA: When a PV array is shaded by another object, like a tree or a house, the solar panels get backed up with electrons like cars in a traffic jam, and the current drops - UNDERSTANDING ELECTRICITY FAIL. Also, this is why people don't put their solar panels in the shade path of trees and houses.
Shade and bad weather like snow don't hurt it because the panels are not flat. - Somebody has never lived anywhere that has a real winter and seen snow-covered trees, be they deciduous or conifer or gynosperm. Deciduous trees don't gather sunlight during the winter, they DROP their leaves and enter a state similar to hibernation. That's why we have this word "deciduous" to describe them.
He sounds like a bright enough kid. But he's a kid. And it's sad that he's been given an award for some really shoddily conducted "research" by an organization that has no idea what the fuck they are talking about when it comes to power production, and were just happy someone photogenic published something cutesy about trees.
Python is good for shell scripting and basic website operations.
Then why were you using it for a heavy-duty, huge-config operation?
Gimme an algorithm or any other job and I'll implement it in 'C' - I don't need no pussy language that makes parsing text easier (Perl) or web back ends easier (Python) or worry about the mythical write once run everywhere languages like Java.
And back in the day of the old PS2, every goddamn game development house started out their dev cycle by reimplementing mip-maps because it wasn't supported directly by the hardware. Fucking insanity. If there's a tool that has been developed for text parsing, and 99% of your program's functionality is text parsing, then use something that was DESIGNED FOR TEXT PARSING instead of having to reinvent the goddamn wheel.
Tools are made because they make life, or at least a specific task, easier. They should be used for that purpose. They should not be used for things they are not designed for. C++ was designed for low-level access to the hardware, which is fine if your program needs low-level access to the hardware, but it shouldn't be used for every task just as Java, or Perl, or Python, or any other tool shouldn't be used for things they weren't designed for.
The larger picture is fucking use the right tool for the job already.
Java has its purposes. Write-once, Run-Almost-Anywhere is a good concept. Likewise, some of the other tools in other managed frameworks make certain things really simple.
And when you need power and speed at the expense of having to do things a lot more exact yourself, then go to a language that'll work that way.
The problem is not that one or the other is "bad." The problem is that too many programmers are golden-hammer morons who think their favorite tool is the only correct way to do everything on the goddamn planet, which is why you get Java applications running a chip on little mini kids games to do something that could have been done with a 5-cent microchip.
The other thing I hate is forced "replay."
Played the game once. Got the first ending. Now I have to play it through again in "Game+" mode to get the second ending. And the third ending. And the fourth ending. And the Super-Fucking-Secret-Real-Ending that you only get on 100% completion...
The reason most people hated FF8 had nothing to do with the level scaling, and everything to do with other crappy gameplay/design choices.
They call this episodic gaming. You get one episode a month (or something like that). Sam&Max, Wallace and Gromit, Back to the Future, Monkey Island... Telltale Games does a lot of it.
Most people wait for the full game and then buy the full damn game anyways.
Borderlands doesn't do that, but it DOES have some pretty juicy flavor text for each mission, such that I can pick back up even on missions I've ignored in favor of other missions and get back into it with little to no trouble. I can take a month's break from Borderlands, come back into the game, and not have to wonder "now where the fuck was I and what the fuck was I doing?" With most RPG's, I can't do that. Even with games like Infamous or Prototype, doing that is difficult.
The one thing I'd wish for with Borderlands would be a "replay cutscenes and audio clips" that I didn't have to hunt through with byzantine, bizarre names and no rhyme nor reason to where they are on the list. The replay-audio feature is nice, but finding the one I want to replay after I get interrupted by a phone call or the neighbor's retarded-ass dog barking at a squirrel, that's just hell.
We've been conditioned to grind in RPG's,
I played all the way through Arx Fatalis. It was obviously an RPG. It had a pretty good story. It also had NO reason to fucking level grind, ever, and so I had no problem keeping going in it.
You don't need "dungeon level grinding" to make a fun RPG. Sure, give the player occasional item drops. Let them level up the character, but level the associated monsters alongside to keep it a challenge. Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas had the right idea that way - the higher level I got, the more nasty enemies I started seeing, such that I couldn't just run around the wilderness like an idiot at any level.
Like I said, the key is not the length of the game, the key is not doing the things that make the game fucking boring to gamers.
If I put the game down for a weekend or a week or two due to Real Life, and then come back and there's no way to get back into the character and remember what was going on in the story, then I'm done with the game.
If I play the game for 15 hours and hit a Celda-style "Hey Link, go waste 60 hours sailing around the goddamn ocean looking for the 8 pieces of the Crappy Macguffin before we'll let you back to the main story" setup, then fuck that, I'm done. Likewise for games like the Final Fantasy series, where I have to spend 30 hours or more running around the side-areas level grinding before taking on one of the bosses.
I'm fine with a short game like Super Mario Bros that has almost infinite replayability and remains fun. Or the old-school arcade games that are the same way. I'm not fine with games that have inflated, worthless "X hours of gameplay" listed right there on the goddamn box, like being proud of forcing the players to go through 100 hours of level grind is something to be fucking proud of.
If the game designers would stop giving a shit about how "long" the game was, and instead start making sure the game was fun from start to finish, then they'd be doing a hell of a lot better. It's not that multiplayer is the holy grail, it's not that people actually fucking enjoy level grinding (let's face it, most gamers don't play Call of Duty more than a month because by the time you play that long, you're SO done with the immature fucking hyperleveled kids who play all day long and shout "fag" into their headsets whenever they score a kill), it's that people want to have FUN when they play.
Oh for fuck's sake.
NO. NO NO NO NO HELL FUCKING NO AND NO.
Sandbox games are the worst type of boring-ass grinding crap. They make Final Fantasy grinding look positively FUN by comparison.
Sandbox translates into "great, you've finished the 4 fucking hours of crapass story we decided to make. Now go shoot some people, fuck some hookers, beat them up after, kill all the cops you can find, and generally make an ass of yourself in GTA 4 till we make GTA 5."
NO. That is boring-ass lazy crap from designers who wouldn't know a real game if someone slapped them right in the face with it.
It's the quality of the game.
Sure, you can "play" RDR. It has a halfway decent story. But it gets lost because of all the damn grinding, and getting lost, and generally farting around in the wilderness shooting birds and wolves. Or you take a weekend off and even with the mission hint system, you can't remember where the fuck you were in the storyline. It's even worse for all the goddamn JRPG's in the world. Or you have Celda Syndrome, where you play for a good 15 hours, and then spend 60 hours on "Hey Link, go sail a boat around the world looking for the 8 pieces of trash so you can make a goddamn macguffin and get back to the fucking story already."
Borderlands does a lot better about it. I can put that down for a month, come back, read the mission descriptions that actually carry some fucking backstory, and get back into my character easier.
Now, do we like shorter games if done well? Of course. Super Mario Bros. can be beaten in a few hours. The Megaman games, originals, had no save points but could be finished in a few hours. The key there is that they can be played over and over and over again, even after you've beaten them, and they are still goddamn fun to play. Just like how arcade games that generally only played for a few minutes - Joust, Galaga, Gyruss and more - were so fun and addictive that they could be played over and over and over again.
But the key is not making the game shorter. The key is not doing the things that make people bored with the fucking game. Avoid grinding. Avoid needless "now you need to run back and forth around the map 50 times for quest X" garbage. And that means a few changes to game design, like making your enemies scale somewhat so that they remain a challenge to a high "level" character while not being unbeatable for someone who hasn't spent 50 hours grinding in the side areas of the game (looking right at you, Final Fantasy series).