You know, it kinda reminds me of the joke about the programmer who finds a talking frog. The frog says, "Please, if you kiss me I'll turn back into a beautiful princess and I'll be your girlfriend and do whatever you wish." The programmer thinks for a bit, puts the frog in the pocket and says, "You know, I don't think I have the time for a girlfriend, but a talking frog is way cool."
Kinda the same reaction I'm getting here. I can't say I much care about the "date" part, or even if it's a girl or a guy, but if they're even marginally good at Star Trek Online, I could have some use fir someone to watch my back and have a chat with. Especially if they have a Science Ship, but I'm not fussy. A Cruiser is good too. Some of those battleships can hurt a lot if you're in a lone Escort, lemme tell ya;)
Actually IMHO those light cues are exactly why we have a problem nowadays. We're a species which, true, evolved in the context of such periodic cues and to rely on them. But it's become trivial to mess with those. We're nowadays one flick of the switch away from having (a reasonable approximation of) daylight until 6 am, and enough mental stimulation to help stay awake that some ancestor sleeping in a cave wouldn't have. (Heck, when my parents didn't let me stay at the computer all night, I'd just read a book until 7 AM.) And we're one pull of the cord on the blinds away from having night until 14 pm.
As far as those external hints are concerned, it's only up to you whether you want to rely on them or fake any kind of artificial day/night cycle that you wish.
So basically we're just back to where we started. If you let people turn off the light one hour later, and open their blinds one hour later to send them to school, well, you just moved those light hints by one hour. Whatever problem there was with adapting to the old cycle, now it just moved one hour forward. It might still work if other factors still anchor their bed time, but if you move everyone one hour forward, those disappear too.
Basically think about moving one timezone to the left or right. Does it ever solve anything?
Never said it automatically means no illness either. Just that you can't automatically wave the syndrome as being basically equivalent to "look, it's a real disease!!" either. Which is how that particular syndrome tends to be used on Slashdot.
Except for the fact that syndrome means a symptom or group of behaviours, not a cause or explanation. Just because you can group a set of behaviours and call it a syndrome, it doesn't mean you have an objective disease, much less something where you can just throw your hands up and pretend there's nothing you can possibly do about it.
To put it otherwise, you could equally call laziness a syndrome. You could call procrastination a syndrome. You could call smoking pot and then getting the munchies a syndrome. (They do happen together, right?) And yes you could call going to sleep later until some other factor puts an upper limit on it a syndrome.
Sometimes a syndrome is indicative of an objective disease. E.g., AIDS is the syndrome for HIV infection. But it's not the same thing as the disease itself. (And that distinction, or rather failure to understand it, caused a whole idiotic conspiracy theory in the case of AIDS.)
I don't know... my experience has been that it's all a feedback loop. Sure, sleeping one hour later is going to make you happier for a month or a trimester or a year, but then you just become used to going to bed one hour later, and the cycle repeats. Now instead of going to bed at 10 PM and maybe pushing it to 11 PM now and then, the normal go to bed hour becomes 11 PM and you start pushing towards midnight on those days when you think "nah, one less hour of sleep won't kill me." Except eventually it accumulates and now you'd be happy to have one _more_ hour.
I remember reading about a study waay back, where some people were put in a house with no windows and no time to tell the time. It turned out that the natural cycle for humans is 26 hour days. Makes sense from a design stand point too. It's easier to have a margin of error as a longer cycle and reset it each day, than to try to prolong one which due to genetic variations is too short for a day. We're pretty much by design prone to shift forward over time, in the absence of that forcing it to reset at the same time. So basically you shifted one hour forward, now what? You've just created the setup to want to shift one more hour later. Then what?
Plus, think of it this way. The best hour they wake up is based on when they go to sleep, which in turn depends on other factors like what's on TV or whether their guild mates are still in a WoW raid or just if some friend is still awake and reachable by phone. Sure, if we could shift just one group of kids one hour forwards while all those factors stay the same, yeah, it should work. But if we actually shifted every single teenager an hour forward, then TV programs which have them as a target audience would start shifting one hour forward too. Because that's the nature of the free market. You don't pack your wares and leave while it's still prime time for your customers. Their friends too have been shifted one hour forward, and can plan those raids to end one hour later. Your friends are available on the phone one hour later. Etc.
The feedback loop is pretty much built in.
All those factors anchoring the bed time just shifted forward too. Soon we're back to square one: kids who hadn't had enough sleep, being barely fit to go to school at the new starting time. Soon you'll need another hour shift to get the same results as in TFA. And in a few months another. What then? Eventually end up with school shifted forward all the way to starting at 1 AM? Then what?
Well, the UPS part was more like satire. But I've seen the attitude I've described about everything else. Hard drive space, database configuration, MQ queues, you name it. There are some departments out there who'll let you drive against the wall without even knowing, because they monitor nothing, do nothing except what you explicitly request so they can bill you (e.g., DBAs who require that the _programmers_ tell _them_ what tuning parameters to set for the database), created a lot of unneeded bureaucracy, and occasionally yes need to be coaxed to even bloody do their job at all.
And those aren't even the biggest WTF's I've seen so far.
And for some of those there are no easy failsafes. Or none that would actually help.
If they're like some of the IT departments I've seen, they might be working by some rule from upper management that they need to justify their existence by writing internal invoices for everything they do. It tends to result in them doing nothing until you tell them to, so they can bill you for it. The UPS could have not only the error lights on, but a binking "RED ALLERT" sign and the accompanying acoustic blare, and verily be on fire and billowing smoke, and nobody would touch it until you fill the proper form requesting them to put it out.
Because, yes, that's another thing I've noticed that a lot of departments love, IT including: inventing bureaucracy and paperwork to discourage and delay actually having anything to do. You may need to fill in a 5 page form and draw powerpoint diagrams as to why you want the UPS doused and what are the architecture implications of that. And if you're unlucky a few meetings too, to convince some Mordac The Information Services Preventer why he should move his ass and turn that UPS off, and why his suggested workarounds (in which he'd not have to do anything) aren't quite solving the problem.
But that's not the point. People were buying them anyway, and buying more boxes each year. There was no point at which the buyers rejected them.
There was a point where the _publishers_ rejected them, because bang per buck another genre offered comparable sales for a lot less buck. But that's not nearly the same issue.
Basically blaming their supposed loss of popularity on anything (low IQ, bad format, gameplay, etc) before establishing if such a loss of popularity actually existed (and, again, check out Sierra's own statements: it didn't exist) is simply what's called "tooth fairy science." You know, the kind where you build a whole theory about the tooth fairy, and which teeth are in higher demand, and whatnot, before you have any support or evidence for the existence of a tooth fairy at all.
Anno 1404? That's the one with the 3-install limit DRM, yes? No thanks.
But that's a different issue. "It exists but has has a too oppressive DRM" is a completely different issue than the "they don't make them any more at all" slant of the message I was answering too. The market exist and the games exist. The DRM... well, that's a good issue, don't get me wrong. I could even join in the lament. But it's a differnet issue from asking "where did the games go." They didn't really go anywhere.
PS: Dunno about the one on the expansion pack, I'm sure the original game worked for me more than thrice. But I digress.
Umm, I dunno, did business games actually go anywhere? The expansion pack for Anno 1404 just got released, and that's mainly a late medieval trading and economic game, with some city building thrown in.
1. The notions that adventure games disappeared because people are dumb, was false all the time. The adventure games market was actually a growing market when it got dumped by the publishers. There never was as much as a dip in sales, it went up each year... then nearly went extinct.
I'm serious. Read some interviews with the Sierra people. Their last adventure game actually sold a lot more units than any of their previous adventure games.
What nearly killed adventures was... 3D. In the 90's, when the tools were in their infancy, the complex scripting and animation that adventure games needed, cost a lot more to do in 3D than 2D. An adventure game suddenly became 10 times more expensive to make. And it sold more units than last year's 2D adventure game... but not 10 times more.
2. Why the FPS nearly killed them is the opposite: early FPS were mindless affairs and dirt-cheap to make. You just needed to license a 3D engine, make some random maps and a couple of models, and you were all set.
Probably most FPS actually sold less units than some adventure games from the same age. But, think of it this way: if it sold half as many units, but cost 4 times less to make, you'd actually make more profit with a FPS. (Or just you'd make a profit at all with a FPS.)
People getting dumber simply wasn't the issue. Bang per buck, FPS in the 90's was simply the better investment of a publisher's money. (Somewhat like why nowadays every publisher wants a slice of the MMO market.)
3. The adventure genre has been actually making a comeback in force. Which kinda disputes the claim that people got dumber.
4. I dunno, economic games don't seem to me quite that dead either. There have been a lot of "tycoon" wannabe games released in the last decade, hotel simulators, restaurant simulators, mall simulators, etc. Including the occasional major title like The Guild 2.
So on the whole, while I won't mod you "flamebait" (and just blew my mod points for this thread by answering instead), I have to wonder if you're seriously into the genres you mourn. I find it hard that someone would be apparently so hard at decrying their loss... but somehow miss all the titles that have been released lately. Are you really a fan of those genres, or, no offense, just wanted to whine about other people's IQ?
But unfortunately that's what RL "evil" _is_: not giving a fuck about morals or others' rights, as long as you get what you want.
Virtually nobody has it as their goal in life simply to spend pain and misfortune. They just want to gain something. Be it money, power, attention, or just a quick amusement.
Even if you take a serial killer like Ted Bundy, probably his ultimate goal wasn't just murder for murder sake. He just wanted to amuse himself, get a bit of thrill, etc. The fact that someone had to die for that amusement wasn't goal per se, but just a case of "who the fuck cares?"
Stalin, the guy who caused millions to be killed and millions more to be deported to Siberia, wasn't in it just for the sake of killing people. He just wanted to protect his throne at all cost, and sadly saw conspiracies against him everywhere. But there is no indication that he took pleasure in the actual killings or torture. The more brutal reality is that he didn't give a damn. He just didn't care how many innoncents have to suffer, just in the end result that he gets his goal: staying in power.
Now I'm not comparing a bit of copyright infringement at Google with serial murder, but the principle of the matter is the same: just not giving a flying fuck about those pesky other people.
If you want other examples, take your choice of guy who scammed some investors with a Ponzi scheme. There have been a couple since the '90's. They were not some comic-book Super-Villain, whose goal is to destroy some people's savings and make them miserable. They just wanted the money, the spotlight, the adrenaline rush maybe, the feeling of power and importance, or whatever other tangible personal goal. Scamming other people was a tool to an end. The misery caused was simply a case of "who cares about that?"
It's just that willingness to put oneself above laws and redefine morals on the fly (which you call redefining "evil") that _is_ what RL evil is all about.
Actually, the way I remember it, it never was Klingon tech as such. The Klingons managed to buy the technology from the Romulans, in exchange for a heck of a lot of D-7 battlecruisers.
(Or in RL terms when they first needed a Romulan Bird Of Prey, the model wasn't ready on time, so they used a Klingon Battlecruiser and slapped on a makeshift explanation of why the Romulans are flying Klingon vessels.)
Actually, call me a jaded old cynic, but what makes anyone think it would be different from the other levies?
When the main medium of sharing were cassettes or CDs, did introducing those levies actually cause copying a cassette or CD to be decriminalized? Or I'm pretty sure I'm paying such an extra already both for DVD blanks and for any DVD burner I've ever bought. Does that cause them to even stop stop wasting my time with that "you wouldn't steal a car" anti-piracy warning on DVD's.
Essentially I pay the levy _and_ get to be treated like a pirate, whether I actually pirate anything or not. And TBH it's the "or not" part that bothers me the most, but either is fundamentally wrong. We're basically taxed to pay those guys to make up for piracy, but don't actually get anything in return.
It's essentially like, say, as if everyone in town gets to pay 5 bucks to Joe Landlord, owner of a nice orchard, for the fact that (supposedly) some people trespass on it and misuse it as a picnick ground. But basically nobody gets anything in exchange for those 5 bucks. It's still forbidden to trespass there, and Joe Landlord still gets to sue anyone he catches there. Then what are we paying for? And why is the town essentially subsidizing Joe's orchard?
Actually, it seems to me like a pretty good solution existed for a long time. Just because some developers are too stupid to figure it out, doesn't mean they need to be given twice the money.
If you look for example at the texts in some games (e.g., Bioware games, but also, say, in Vampire Bloodlines), you'll notice that they include a lot of hints to the voice actors that aren't displayed. You as the player might only see, a text like "But that's not what I meant! geesh!" but the actual text in the resource files would be something more like "{irritated voice}But that's not what I meant!{with emphasis on "meant"}{sighs}{more silently to himself}geesh!". The game just filters out the parts between curly braces, but the voice actors would have right there what emotions they have to put in that voice acting.
So it seems to me like all that TFA says is that some devs/publishers simply haven't figured out that a text that says "But that's not what I meant! geesh!" doesn't have to be delivered exactly like that to the actors too.
Well, the number of stories I have of _this_ calibre is rather finite and small. Most of the stuff I run into is more mundane stuff like telling them that the performance problem is because they make 100 remote RMI/IIOP calls, and they can stop inlining the loops by hand because it'll make no difference. In a way, thank goodness. If every team and project I ran into involved this kind of stuff, I'd probably be in a nice padded room by now, wearing a nice jacket with long sleeves;)
1. Well, I didn't mean random as in actually generated by SecureRandom, but more like in, "they had nowhere near the control over their contents to guarantee they can hash to a 31 bit value without collisions." For the purpose of that custom brewed hash method that was supposed (in their imagination) to never create collisions in a HashMap, the strings were as good as random, and there was mathematically no way to guarantee the lack of collisions.
There are plenty of Strings which are as good as random in that aspect. User names for example. Car registration numbers. Whatever, really. Above some 5-6 alphanumeric characters that are out of your control, even if you ignore case, hashing it to 31 bits will necessarily always result in different hash codes.
Because that was the "problem" they were trying to solve. They thought in all honesty that a hash collision causes the wrong value to be changed, so they tried to write a hash method which would never cause collisions. But on the actual Strings they used, that was impossible.
2. There are cases where generating cryptographically-secure random keys is actually the right design. The trivial example is: browser session ids. Having a predictable sequence of session IDs is actually considered exploitable. If a user can predict the next or previous key, conceivably they could hijack someone else's session.
Well it IS done with jump instructions, but as few as possible because the branch penalty is usually high (especially on an x86). If you don't use the goto statement then your program is more abstract, and structures like loops can be more easily optimised by the compiler to use as few branches as possible. Not to mention things architecture-specific like ARM's condition codes which can turn a loop with multiple if-else statements into a block of code with only one branch instruction.
Point taken, but in my experience people who have even marginal idea of what happens under the covers, tend to write better code than those for whom the underlying machine is a complete mystery. I'm not talking premature optimization, but merely knowing in the back of your head what a pointer is, or _why_ this operation is O(log n) and better thus than O(n), can save one from a lot of awfully wrong guesses and writing awful code.
My canonical example is a team whose architect (!) finally read somewhere that when passing an object to a Java method, only the pointer is passed on the string. So he actually decreed -- and none of the lemmings knew better -- that they should use parameters like the wrapper object Integer instead of the primitive int. (We're also talking Java 1.3 times, so no automatic boxing/unboxing either.) Because, I quote, "If you use Integer Java copies only a pointer to it, not the whole int."
Maybe knowing how much space an int takes under the covers would have helped.
Another time I hear my now ex-coleague Wally (not the real name, but pretty accurate;)) repeatedly going, "That can't be true!" and the like. Curiosity gets the better of me and I ask what's the problem.
"Java has a bug!" he goes, "I put a new key/value with the same hash code in a HashMap and it just replaced my old value!"
"Oh, yeah, we've had the same bug at the old company, " Wally 2 chimes in. "We had to manually set the capacity so it goes in another bucket."
(I clench my teeth to avoid screaming at the notion that there's any way to the right capacity to avoid collisions for keys that are random strings.)
I go and look at what he's doing, and sure enough he's got the debugger open and is looking at the bucket array of a HashMap. "Look! There! I had a different value and it replaced it!"
"Aha, " I try to be diplomatic, "can you please expand that 'next' variable there?"
"No, you don't understand! My value was there and now it replaced it!"
"Yes, I get it. But I want to see what's in that 'next' variable."
He clicks and goes, "Oh... there it is."
The whole concept of a linked list was new to him, obviously.
And if you think that's an isolated case, in the meantime I've run into two different teams whose "architect" actually made it mandatory to plaster his broken replacement for the hash-code method everywhere, because of that supposed "bug in Java." Supposedly they can hash a long-ish random String into a 32 bit int without ever having collisions. (Ok, 31 since Java doesn't use the sign.) Consulting can be depressing business, you know?
I could go on with more such WTF examples, but basically let's just say I wish more people would know exactly what happens behind those high level constructs and libraries. Because otherwise I see them take their own guesses anyway, and guessing wrong. I wish they'd know what a pointer really means, and why a LinkedList does _not_ use less memory than an ArrayList, and, yes, what kind of things will cause jumps. Or what kind of things will be optimized into a tail recursion instead of a plain recursion, as a trivial example of where it pays to know the difference between a JUMP and a bunch of PUSHes and CALL generated by the compiler.
I've read TFA, actually, and it still smells like bullshit to me. Sorry.
For a start, efficiency is not the same as unburnt fuel. I hope you don't think that your car actually dumps 80% of the gasoline unburnt out the back.
Not wasting energy by heating up the chamber walls, well, it's a noble goal but too bad it's impossible. Regardless of how you time the ignition and how it burns, you still have an expanding chamber full of hot gas. That's mostly why it's higher pressure than before the ignition. That's why it pushes at that piston. That's why that engine works. And if you really believe that hot gas in contact with metal won't transfer heat to that metal, just because of some magical way of heating up that gas... I have some logging rights in Sahara to sell;)
Even if you managed to work that engine by supersonic detonation instead of deflagration, heck, even if you did it in zero time, the fact is that the same amount of heat per gallon has been released in that chamber, heating up the gas. How do you think that prevents that gas from transferring energy to the metal?
Really, any given piece of that cylinder is in touch with the same hot gas for the exact same percentage of the total time. How do you propose to make the same metal surface absorb less heat in the same amount of time from the same gas? Short of making the gas cooler, that is. But just burning the fuel in a fancy different way isn't going to cut it.
So, yes, maybe I should have picked that claim instead. It's a better BS flag than anything else.
That's how a Common Rail diesel engine works. The fuel is already under extreme pressure in the fuel line, before even being sprayed into the engine.
As for the best moment for injection, well, that's what everyone is trying to do. It's not like everyone else was deliberately injecting the fuel at the wrong moment or anything.
Plus basically you can just look up the Otto or Diesel cycles. The efficiency is in the theoretical case limited by the compression ratio, and in the more practical case by temperature too. Whether you inject fuel in advance and compress it, or spray it just at the ignition moment, or even just using a laser to heat the air without any actual fuel, it doesn't change a damned thing.
Actually, that's exactly why one should be skeptical: at heart it's just a Diesel engine. Using a Diesel engine with gasoline isn't even a new idea, such engines already exist. So exactly what is the magic bullet there?
And improving oxidation doesn't do much, unless your engine ejects a large quantity of fuel unburned. What limits the efficiency of either the Otto or Diesel cycles (either theoretical or in actual cars) isn't their failing to burn most of the gasoline. So pre-oxidizing and catalysts to improve oxidation can't even begin to account for the claimed efficiency improvement.
The age where the country rube was the only mark of the snake oil salesmen... well, probably never even existed. A lot of snake oil is sold to the investor who wants to pay for that manufacturing, or subsidize the research or whatever. See the Phantom console, or several cars supposed to run on water or even urine, etc. And it's not even a new thing. If you go back as far as the middle ages or even antiquity, you'll find the likes of the alchemist who sold the promise of endless gold or eternal youth to whoever just invests in his research, or mis-haps like the South Sea Bubble where you were supposed to get endless riches if you just invest in someone's expedition there.
Basically "but they plan to built it" is no reassurance and never was. It can simply mean they have a rube with deeper pockets in mind.
Actually, by the end of TFA (which I'll assume _you_ have read before making a RTFA demand of others) they get even more generous with the claims, and say it gets 98 MPG at 50 mph. (I.e., in a range where, sorry, but it's not _that_ aerodynamic.) I.e., basically 2.4l per 100 km on the highway.
I'm sceptical of anything which proposes to simply double the amount of energy extracted from that gasoline, because, well, physics is physics. The efficiency of the cycle is capped the hard way by the max and ambient temperature difference, and short of inventing an engine which runs at thousands of degrees, the alternative would be that conventional engines were spewing out half the gas unburned. Which just isn't the case.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, it kinda reminds me of the joke about the programmer who finds a talking frog. The frog says, "Please, if you kiss me I'll turn back into a beautiful princess and I'll be your girlfriend and do whatever you wish." The programmer thinks for a bit, puts the frog in the pocket and says, "You know, I don't think I have the time for a girlfriend, but a talking frog is way cool."
Kinda the same reaction I'm getting here. I can't say I much care about the "date" part, or even if it's a girl or a guy, but if they're even marginally good at Star Trek Online, I could have some use fir someone to watch my back and have a chat with. Especially if they have a Science Ship, but I'm not fussy. A Cruiser is good too. Some of those battleships can hurt a lot if you're in a lone Escort, lemme tell ya ;)
Actually IMHO those light cues are exactly why we have a problem nowadays. We're a species which, true, evolved in the context of such periodic cues and to rely on them. But it's become trivial to mess with those. We're nowadays one flick of the switch away from having (a reasonable approximation of) daylight until 6 am, and enough mental stimulation to help stay awake that some ancestor sleeping in a cave wouldn't have. (Heck, when my parents didn't let me stay at the computer all night, I'd just read a book until 7 AM.) And we're one pull of the cord on the blinds away from having night until 14 pm.
As far as those external hints are concerned, it's only up to you whether you want to rely on them or fake any kind of artificial day/night cycle that you wish.
So basically we're just back to where we started. If you let people turn off the light one hour later, and open their blinds one hour later to send them to school, well, you just moved those light hints by one hour. Whatever problem there was with adapting to the old cycle, now it just moved one hour forward. It might still work if other factors still anchor their bed time, but if you move everyone one hour forward, those disappear too.
Basically think about moving one timezone to the left or right. Does it ever solve anything?
Never said it automatically means no illness either. Just that you can't automatically wave the syndrome as being basically equivalent to "look, it's a real disease!!" either. Which is how that particular syndrome tends to be used on Slashdot.
Meh, I mangled both links in that message beyond belief. Maybe I should call that, in combination with failing to use the preview button, a syndrome ;)
Except for the fact that syndrome means a symptom or group of behaviours, not a cause or explanation. Just because you can group a set of behaviours and call it a syndrome, it doesn't mean you have an objective disease, much less something where you can just throw your hands up and pretend there's nothing you can possibly do about it.
To put it otherwise, you could equally call laziness a syndrome. You could call procrastination a syndrome. You could call smoking pot and then getting the munchies a syndrome. (They do happen together, right?) And yes you could call going to sleep later until some other factor puts an upper limit on it a syndrome.
Sometimes a syndrome is indicative of an objective disease. E.g., AIDS is the syndrome for HIV infection. But it's not the same thing as the disease itself. (And that distinction, or rather failure to understand it, caused a whole idiotic conspiracy theory in the case of AIDS.)
And sometimes it's just a fancy name.
You can even take a "condition" basically boiling down to "oh, shit, now I'll have my husband at home all the time" and call it the Retired husband syndrome. Literally, Japanese women seem to get stressed for cultural reasons as their husbands approach retirement. So they called it a syndrome. It doesn't mean there's an actual biological condition that develops in that woman. It's just a fancy name for a cultural cause of stress.
So basically: just because you can put a medical sounding name on going to sleep late doesn't necessarily make it an objective medical condition.
I don't know... my experience has been that it's all a feedback loop. Sure, sleeping one hour later is going to make you happier for a month or a trimester or a year, but then you just become used to going to bed one hour later, and the cycle repeats. Now instead of going to bed at 10 PM and maybe pushing it to 11 PM now and then, the normal go to bed hour becomes 11 PM and you start pushing towards midnight on those days when you think "nah, one less hour of sleep won't kill me." Except eventually it accumulates and now you'd be happy to have one _more_ hour.
I remember reading about a study waay back, where some people were put in a house with no windows and no time to tell the time. It turned out that the natural cycle for humans is 26 hour days. Makes sense from a design stand point too. It's easier to have a margin of error as a longer cycle and reset it each day, than to try to prolong one which due to genetic variations is too short for a day. We're pretty much by design prone to shift forward over time, in the absence of that forcing it to reset at the same time. So basically you shifted one hour forward, now what? You've just created the setup to want to shift one more hour later. Then what?
Plus, think of it this way. The best hour they wake up is based on when they go to sleep, which in turn depends on other factors like what's on TV or whether their guild mates are still in a WoW raid or just if some friend is still awake and reachable by phone. Sure, if we could shift just one group of kids one hour forwards while all those factors stay the same, yeah, it should work. But if we actually shifted every single teenager an hour forward, then TV programs which have them as a target audience would start shifting one hour forward too. Because that's the nature of the free market. You don't pack your wares and leave while it's still prime time for your customers. Their friends too have been shifted one hour forward, and can plan those raids to end one hour later. Your friends are available on the phone one hour later. Etc.
The feedback loop is pretty much built in.
All those factors anchoring the bed time just shifted forward too. Soon we're back to square one: kids who hadn't had enough sleep, being barely fit to go to school at the new starting time. Soon you'll need another hour shift to get the same results as in TFA. And in a few months another. What then? Eventually end up with school shifted forward all the way to starting at 1 AM? Then what?
Well, the UPS part was more like satire. But I've seen the attitude I've described about everything else. Hard drive space, database configuration, MQ queues, you name it. There are some departments out there who'll let you drive against the wall without even knowing, because they monitor nothing, do nothing except what you explicitly request so they can bill you (e.g., DBAs who require that the _programmers_ tell _them_ what tuning parameters to set for the database), created a lot of unneeded bureaucracy, and occasionally yes need to be coaxed to even bloody do their job at all.
And those aren't even the biggest WTF's I've seen so far.
And for some of those there are no easy failsafes. Or none that would actually help.
If they're like some of the IT departments I've seen, they might be working by some rule from upper management that they need to justify their existence by writing internal invoices for everything they do. It tends to result in them doing nothing until you tell them to, so they can bill you for it. The UPS could have not only the error lights on, but a binking "RED ALLERT" sign and the accompanying acoustic blare, and verily be on fire and billowing smoke, and nobody would touch it until you fill the proper form requesting them to put it out.
Because, yes, that's another thing I've noticed that a lot of departments love, IT including: inventing bureaucracy and paperwork to discourage and delay actually having anything to do. You may need to fill in a 5 page form and draw powerpoint diagrams as to why you want the UPS doused and what are the architecture implications of that. And if you're unlucky a few meetings too, to convince some Mordac The Information Services Preventer why he should move his ass and turn that UPS off, and why his suggested workarounds (in which he'd not have to do anything) aren't quite solving the problem.
But that's not the point. People were buying them anyway, and buying more boxes each year. There was no point at which the buyers rejected them.
There was a point where the _publishers_ rejected them, because bang per buck another genre offered comparable sales for a lot less buck. But that's not nearly the same issue.
Basically blaming their supposed loss of popularity on anything (low IQ, bad format, gameplay, etc) before establishing if such a loss of popularity actually existed (and, again, check out Sierra's own statements: it didn't exist) is simply what's called "tooth fairy science." You know, the kind where you build a whole theory about the tooth fairy, and which teeth are in higher demand, and whatnot, before you have any support or evidence for the existence of a tooth fairy at all.
But that's a different issue. "It exists but has has a too oppressive DRM" is a completely different issue than the "they don't make them any more at all" slant of the message I was answering too. The market exist and the games exist. The DRM... well, that's a good issue, don't get me wrong. I could even join in the lament. But it's a differnet issue from asking "where did the games go." They didn't really go anywhere.
PS: Dunno about the one on the expansion pack, I'm sure the original game worked for me more than thrice. But I digress.
Umm, I dunno, did business games actually go anywhere? The expansion pack for Anno 1404 just got released, and that's mainly a late medieval trading and economic game, with some city building thrown in.
Actually, I would disagree.
1. The notions that adventure games disappeared because people are dumb, was false all the time. The adventure games market was actually a growing market when it got dumped by the publishers. There never was as much as a dip in sales, it went up each year... then nearly went extinct.
I'm serious. Read some interviews with the Sierra people. Their last adventure game actually sold a lot more units than any of their previous adventure games.
What nearly killed adventures was... 3D. In the 90's, when the tools were in their infancy, the complex scripting and animation that adventure games needed, cost a lot more to do in 3D than 2D. An adventure game suddenly became 10 times more expensive to make. And it sold more units than last year's 2D adventure game... but not 10 times more.
2. Why the FPS nearly killed them is the opposite: early FPS were mindless affairs and dirt-cheap to make. You just needed to license a 3D engine, make some random maps and a couple of models, and you were all set.
Probably most FPS actually sold less units than some adventure games from the same age. But, think of it this way: if it sold half as many units, but cost 4 times less to make, you'd actually make more profit with a FPS. (Or just you'd make a profit at all with a FPS.)
People getting dumber simply wasn't the issue. Bang per buck, FPS in the 90's was simply the better investment of a publisher's money. (Somewhat like why nowadays every publisher wants a slice of the MMO market.)
3. The adventure genre has been actually making a comeback in force. Which kinda disputes the claim that people got dumber.
4. I dunno, economic games don't seem to me quite that dead either. There have been a lot of "tycoon" wannabe games released in the last decade, hotel simulators, restaurant simulators, mall simulators, etc. Including the occasional major title like The Guild 2.
So on the whole, while I won't mod you "flamebait" (and just blew my mod points for this thread by answering instead), I have to wonder if you're seriously into the genres you mourn. I find it hard that someone would be apparently so hard at decrying their loss... but somehow miss all the titles that have been released lately. Are you really a fan of those genres, or, no offense, just wanted to whine about other people's IQ?
But unfortunately that's what RL "evil" _is_: not giving a fuck about morals or others' rights, as long as you get what you want.
Virtually nobody has it as their goal in life simply to spend pain and misfortune. They just want to gain something. Be it money, power, attention, or just a quick amusement.
Even if you take a serial killer like Ted Bundy, probably his ultimate goal wasn't just murder for murder sake. He just wanted to amuse himself, get a bit of thrill, etc. The fact that someone had to die for that amusement wasn't goal per se, but just a case of "who the fuck cares?"
Stalin, the guy who caused millions to be killed and millions more to be deported to Siberia, wasn't in it just for the sake of killing people. He just wanted to protect his throne at all cost, and sadly saw conspiracies against him everywhere. But there is no indication that he took pleasure in the actual killings or torture. The more brutal reality is that he didn't give a damn. He just didn't care how many innoncents have to suffer, just in the end result that he gets his goal: staying in power.
Now I'm not comparing a bit of copyright infringement at Google with serial murder, but the principle of the matter is the same: just not giving a flying fuck about those pesky other people.
If you want other examples, take your choice of guy who scammed some investors with a Ponzi scheme. There have been a couple since the '90's. They were not some comic-book Super-Villain, whose goal is to destroy some people's savings and make them miserable. They just wanted the money, the spotlight, the adrenaline rush maybe, the feeling of power and importance, or whatever other tangible personal goal. Scamming other people was a tool to an end. The misery caused was simply a case of "who cares about that?"
It's just that willingness to put oneself above laws and redefine morals on the fly (which you call redefining "evil") that _is_ what RL evil is all about.
Actually, the way I remember it, it never was Klingon tech as such. The Klingons managed to buy the technology from the Romulans, in exchange for a heck of a lot of D-7 battlecruisers.
(Or in RL terms when they first needed a Romulan Bird Of Prey, the model wasn't ready on time, so they used a Klingon Battlecruiser and slapped on a makeshift explanation of why the Romulans are flying Klingon vessels.)
Actually, call me a jaded old cynic, but what makes anyone think it would be different from the other levies?
When the main medium of sharing were cassettes or CDs, did introducing those levies actually cause copying a cassette or CD to be decriminalized? Or I'm pretty sure I'm paying such an extra already both for DVD blanks and for any DVD burner I've ever bought. Does that cause them to even stop stop wasting my time with that "you wouldn't steal a car" anti-piracy warning on DVD's.
Essentially I pay the levy _and_ get to be treated like a pirate, whether I actually pirate anything or not. And TBH it's the "or not" part that bothers me the most, but either is fundamentally wrong. We're basically taxed to pay those guys to make up for piracy, but don't actually get anything in return.
It's essentially like, say, as if everyone in town gets to pay 5 bucks to Joe Landlord, owner of a nice orchard, for the fact that (supposedly) some people trespass on it and misuse it as a picnick ground. But basically nobody gets anything in exchange for those 5 bucks. It's still forbidden to trespass there, and Joe Landlord still gets to sue anyone he catches there. Then what are we paying for? And why is the town essentially subsidizing Joe's orchard?
Actually, it seems to me like a pretty good solution existed for a long time. Just because some developers are too stupid to figure it out, doesn't mean they need to be given twice the money.
If you look for example at the texts in some games (e.g., Bioware games, but also, say, in Vampire Bloodlines), you'll notice that they include a lot of hints to the voice actors that aren't displayed. You as the player might only see, a text like "But that's not what I meant! geesh!" but the actual text in the resource files would be something more like "{irritated voice}But that's not what I meant!{with emphasis on "meant"}{sighs}{more silently to himself}geesh!". The game just filters out the parts between curly braces, but the voice actors would have right there what emotions they have to put in that voice acting.
So it seems to me like all that TFA says is that some devs/publishers simply haven't figured out that a text that says "But that's not what I meant! geesh!" doesn't have to be delivered exactly like that to the actors too.
Well, the number of stories I have of _this_ calibre is rather finite and small. Most of the stuff I run into is more mundane stuff like telling them that the performance problem is because they make 100 remote RMI/IIOP calls, and they can stop inlining the loops by hand because it'll make no difference. In a way, thank goodness. If every team and project I ran into involved this kind of stuff, I'd probably be in a nice padded room by now, wearing a nice jacket with long sleeves ;)
So, yeah, they get reused :P
1. Well, I didn't mean random as in actually generated by SecureRandom, but more like in, "they had nowhere near the control over their contents to guarantee they can hash to a 31 bit value without collisions." For the purpose of that custom brewed hash method that was supposed (in their imagination) to never create collisions in a HashMap, the strings were as good as random, and there was mathematically no way to guarantee the lack of collisions.
There are plenty of Strings which are as good as random in that aspect. User names for example. Car registration numbers. Whatever, really. Above some 5-6 alphanumeric characters that are out of your control, even if you ignore case, hashing it to 31 bits will necessarily always result in different hash codes.
Because that was the "problem" they were trying to solve. They thought in all honesty that a hash collision causes the wrong value to be changed, so they tried to write a hash method which would never cause collisions. But on the actual Strings they used, that was impossible.
2. There are cases where generating cryptographically-secure random keys is actually the right design. The trivial example is: browser session ids. Having a predictable sequence of session IDs is actually considered exploitable. If a user can predict the next or previous key, conceivably they could hijack someone else's session.
Yeah, I've posted it before.
Point taken, but in my experience people who have even marginal idea of what happens under the covers, tend to write better code than those for whom the underlying machine is a complete mystery. I'm not talking premature optimization, but merely knowing in the back of your head what a pointer is, or _why_ this operation is O(log n) and better thus than O(n), can save one from a lot of awfully wrong guesses and writing awful code.
My canonical example is a team whose architect (!) finally read somewhere that when passing an object to a Java method, only the pointer is passed on the string. So he actually decreed -- and none of the lemmings knew better -- that they should use parameters like the wrapper object Integer instead of the primitive int. (We're also talking Java 1.3 times, so no automatic boxing/unboxing either.) Because, I quote, "If you use Integer Java copies only a pointer to it, not the whole int."
Maybe knowing how much space an int takes under the covers would have helped.
Another time I hear my now ex-coleague Wally (not the real name, but pretty accurate;)) repeatedly going, "That can't be true!" and the like. Curiosity gets the better of me and I ask what's the problem.
"Java has a bug!" he goes, "I put a new key/value with the same hash code in a HashMap and it just replaced my old value!"
"Oh, yeah, we've had the same bug at the old company, " Wally 2 chimes in. "We had to manually set the capacity so it goes in another bucket."
(I clench my teeth to avoid screaming at the notion that there's any way to the right capacity to avoid collisions for keys that are random strings.)
I go and look at what he's doing, and sure enough he's got the debugger open and is looking at the bucket array of a HashMap. "Look! There! I had a different value and it replaced it!"
"Aha, " I try to be diplomatic, "can you please expand that 'next' variable there?"
"No, you don't understand! My value was there and now it replaced it!"
"Yes, I get it. But I want to see what's in that 'next' variable."
He clicks and goes, "Oh... there it is."
The whole concept of a linked list was new to him, obviously.
And if you think that's an isolated case, in the meantime I've run into two different teams whose "architect" actually made it mandatory to plaster his broken replacement for the hash-code method everywhere, because of that supposed "bug in Java." Supposedly they can hash a long-ish random String into a 32 bit int without ever having collisions. (Ok, 31 since Java doesn't use the sign.) Consulting can be depressing business, you know?
I could go on with more such WTF examples, but basically let's just say I wish more people would know exactly what happens behind those high level constructs and libraries. Because otherwise I see them take their own guesses anyway, and guessing wrong. I wish they'd know what a pointer really means, and why a LinkedList does _not_ use less memory than an ArrayList, and, yes, what kind of things will cause jumps. Or what kind of things will be optimized into a tail recursion instead of a plain recursion, as a trivial example of where it pays to know the difference between a JUMP and a bunch of PUSHes and CALL generated by the compiler.
I've read TFA, actually, and it still smells like bullshit to me. Sorry.
For a start, efficiency is not the same as unburnt fuel. I hope you don't think that your car actually dumps 80% of the gasoline unburnt out the back.
Not wasting energy by heating up the chamber walls, well, it's a noble goal but too bad it's impossible. Regardless of how you time the ignition and how it burns, you still have an expanding chamber full of hot gas. That's mostly why it's higher pressure than before the ignition. That's why it pushes at that piston. That's why that engine works. And if you really believe that hot gas in contact with metal won't transfer heat to that metal, just because of some magical way of heating up that gas... I have some logging rights in Sahara to sell ;)
Even if you managed to work that engine by supersonic detonation instead of deflagration, heck, even if you did it in zero time, the fact is that the same amount of heat per gallon has been released in that chamber, heating up the gas. How do you think that prevents that gas from transferring energy to the metal?
Really, any given piece of that cylinder is in touch with the same hot gas for the exact same percentage of the total time. How do you propose to make the same metal surface absorb less heat in the same amount of time from the same gas? Short of making the gas cooler, that is. But just burning the fuel in a fancy different way isn't going to cut it.
So, yes, maybe I should have picked that claim instead. It's a better BS flag than anything else.
That's how a Common Rail diesel engine works. The fuel is already under extreme pressure in the fuel line, before even being sprayed into the engine.
As for the best moment for injection, well, that's what everyone is trying to do. It's not like everyone else was deliberately injecting the fuel at the wrong moment or anything.
Plus basically you can just look up the Otto or Diesel cycles. The efficiency is in the theoretical case limited by the compression ratio, and in the more practical case by temperature too. Whether you inject fuel in advance and compress it, or spray it just at the ignition moment, or even just using a laser to heat the air without any actual fuel, it doesn't change a damned thing.
Actually, that's exactly why one should be skeptical: at heart it's just a Diesel engine. Using a Diesel engine with gasoline isn't even a new idea, such engines already exist. So exactly what is the magic bullet there?
And improving oxidation doesn't do much, unless your engine ejects a large quantity of fuel unburned. What limits the efficiency of either the Otto or Diesel cycles (either theoretical or in actual cars) isn't their failing to burn most of the gasoline. So pre-oxidizing and catalysts to improve oxidation can't even begin to account for the claimed efficiency improvement.
The age where the country rube was the only mark of the snake oil salesmen... well, probably never even existed. A lot of snake oil is sold to the investor who wants to pay for that manufacturing, or subsidize the research or whatever. See the Phantom console, or several cars supposed to run on water or even urine, etc. And it's not even a new thing. If you go back as far as the middle ages or even antiquity, you'll find the likes of the alchemist who sold the promise of endless gold or eternal youth to whoever just invests in his research, or mis-haps like the South Sea Bubble where you were supposed to get endless riches if you just invest in someone's expedition there.
Basically "but they plan to built it" is no reassurance and never was. It can simply mean they have a rube with deeper pockets in mind.
Actually, by the end of TFA (which I'll assume _you_ have read before making a RTFA demand of others) they get even more generous with the claims, and say it gets 98 MPG at 50 mph. (I.e., in a range where, sorry, but it's not _that_ aerodynamic.) I.e., basically 2.4l per 100 km on the highway.
I'm sceptical of anything which proposes to simply double the amount of energy extracted from that gasoline, because, well, physics is physics. The efficiency of the cycle is capped the hard way by the max and ambient temperature difference, and short of inventing an engine which runs at thousands of degrees, the alternative would be that conventional engines were spewing out half the gas unburned. Which just isn't the case.