Nowadays you can easily write the parts of an application that requires high performance in C and the rest of the program, including the interface, in an interpreted language.
The problem Javascript has to face, though, is that it has very few libraries available for desktop or web applications. And the existing libraries are specifically written for one or the other task. CommonJS would be a common library for all environments and would allow porting code from one to another a lot more easily than it is today.
Recession isn't an excuse to go rape someone dry. Depression is a serious dysfunction, and they aggravated it with their stupid behavior. It may sound weird but I think people's health is more important than money.
A netbook with Chrome OS is the perfect solution for companies with employees that need to access their company's intra/extranet while working in the field. Most of the security is already done, all IT has to do is restrict them to a set of the company's URLs and they're good to go.
I don't see it as anything other than a novelty toy for other consumers, though. But then I don't see the point of netbooks, and people buy them, so I'm probably wrong.
Does it *download* pages fast? Because so far, on phones, the main issue I have is the network speed and latency.
Isn't that a function of the network or device and not the browser?
It is, but it can also be solved by the browser to a certain extent. For example the Opera mobile and mini browsers include the Opera Turbo technology. It connects directly to Opera servers, compress pages, images, etc. and send you the result. Size is usually reduced by 2 or more, which can be quite significant depending on the website you visit.
The points compared are mostly irrelevant for today's handeld devices.
What I really would like to know is not if it'll take my phone a few more milliseconds to render the page, but rather:
Is it power-efficient showing pages? Using it?
Does it *download* pages fast? Because so far, on phones, the main issue I have is the network speed and latency.
Can I access my bookmarks etc. from everywhere, easily? A web-based bookmark syncing service is fine, but something directly integrated like Opera Link is better IMHO.
Is it easy to use on the device I am using? Because every device is controlled differently.
Rendering speed will become an issue only after network and power related issues are resolved.
Of note, from the video, at 2:30, we see the actual order to remove the poster. The man giving the order is french, possibly a french representative of the UN. I can't remember his name, but my memory is failing me. The man he's talking to appears to be egyptian. My guess seeing this is that the UN removed it to prevent diplomatic issues with Egypt. It just wasn't the right place to advertise that kind of book.
Many applications do not need 30 fps, though. For example, an house architect software would be able to use this for rendering various shots of the designed house.
An alternative is to setup Windows in a VirtualBox VM that has 3D acceleration enabled, install WineD3D in it, and then install and run your game.
The results vary depending on the game and on your system, but it's worth a try. Some games definitely work better this way than through Wine, and you don't have to reboot.
Of course they started to develop it a long time ago. The question is why release it *now*. Would they really benefit more from many eyes looking at a "broad, well-tested, modular, and cross-browser JavaScript library" or from more applications that Chrome already knows how to run fast?
Of course we can only guess. But Google is a company, not a charity. They don't release software that give them an advantage over the competition without a good reason.
I'm also interested in the UI Widgets like an Autocomplete text field. I've been waiting for the jQuery UI team to finish that one widget for months, but for some reason their development is so slow!
I've been using the original autocomplete plugin for a long time now, it works great. This is the plugin that is used as a basis for the UI autocomplete component. Anything preventing you from using it in the meanwhile?
Looking at the library's source code, I don't find many new things that I can't already find in another library. I'm sure there's interesting components, but this looks more like another case of NIH than anything. If their code really is faster I'd rather have them work on existing libraries and try to speed things up for everyone rather than creating more of the same thing.
Of course, if everyone uses Google's tools and libraries, it makes things easier for them to optimize Chrome, which is probably the whole point.
I can't agree more. Let's take an example with Half Life 2. I don't mind the story, it's pretty cool especially if you have done the first, and I enjoyed my first play of it. And I really love the gameplay.
I started it again a few months later and immediately got stuck in hours of story elements right at the start. It became so boring I stopped playing. Waiting while various characters are talking just isn't fun. I already know the story, why should I have to go through it again? Now if I could just SKIP the story parts I would enjoy playing the game over and over. But I'm instead forced to watch pointless story events scattered throughout the game.
Because everyone has to start from the starting area. And it's kind of hard for a server to handle 100K+ players. Even if the server technically could, the game wouldn't be playable because it would be too crowded.
I can suggest two solutions, both with their flaws. They all allow single worlds to happen though.
* Make the world big. Really big. Big enough to have dozens of starting areas (and as much end-game areas, as the problem will move to those areas after a while). Problem is it costs more to develop and it's fragmenting the community in various areas. * Let the servers dynamically add instances to crowded areas with an easy way for people to switch to join their friends. For example a party invite to someone on a different instance will "magically" move the players on a single instance (one that isn't already full). Here there is also a fragmentation happening but everyone will experience more or less the same game.
Alright I post this as someone who wasn't really interested in the DC or most of SEGA until fairly recently. But I can probably provide some insight into what SEGA has become in the recent years, which pretty much match the thoughts of this man.
Two years ago I started playing Phantasy Star Universe, the successor to Phantasy Star Online. Many people know about PSO which was one of the first MMO so I don't feel the need to explain that many people had huge expectations for the game. But management killed its potential and the lifetime of the game is just a flow of bad decisions.
First error was to build hype around the game (as they do with all their games, and they do it pretty well) only to release it with next to nothing to do online. A couple missions, that's it. You could play everything from the beginning and be done in a day. Then you could replay them over and over to reach the cap. Pretty poor for an online game. Why did they do that? Because they didn't have much content and they wanted to make it last as long as possible. Every two weeks or so they release maybe a new mission (or a new difficulty of an existing mission) that includes "new items" that were available on the original disc. 3 years after the release they still have a handful of items from the original disc they never released. Frustration and quitting ensue.
What does that tells us? That they made as little investment as possible with the hope to make it last long enough to collect many monthly fees. They also got a substantial amount of money by selling the discs (original game and expansion).
Now I won't bore you with more of the many details about this game and will go on to one of the last chapter. Recently they added a cash shop (in addition of the monthly fee and the price of the game). This cash shop doesn't give your usual items like EXP or drop boosts though. Through the cash shop you can obtain many exclusivity including: the best weapons in the game for almost each category (account bound, can't be traded), cool clothes available on the original disc, a service to upgrade your weapons and armors in a way that gives a huge advantage to those who do, etc. In other words, they went and made playing the game almost pointless because you can just buy everything you need. It's also expensive. Frustration and people quitting ensue.
This feature gives them an additional revenue stream that gives them money "right now" despite being immensely negative on the game later on. Because the end-game at this point was still to improve your character. Now there's no more end-game, therefore no reason to play after you buy what you need.
Those two points show that they don't have a long term goal. They're only trying to find cheap ways to get the maximum money without investing much. Instead of using the old method of building a great game and making your customers happy.
They can do that because of their old reputation and their extensive hype-building skills. Old fans always look forward to the next game even if the previous wasn't all that good.
So yes, the indie developer feeling isn't there. The management and marketing feeling is very strong though.
All images look like crap because of the recompression. I can only assume that they will fine-tune the compression during the beta stage based on people's input. I didn't try it on flash but it's understandable that there might be a few problems there. While the technology has been widely tested for mobile browsers (Opera Mini), it hasn't for desktop usage yet. For everything that doesn't work on Opera Mini (like Flash) problems are to be expected.
Now here's the interesting part, and I really wish they will allow this. Take your favorite heavy website (Slashdot for example). Enable Turbo and it'll load pages 2 to 3 times faster. That's pretty nice considering how long it can take to load some of the pages sometimes. You don't really lose anything from the compression, Slashdot is 99% text. So having Turbo enabled on that kind of site would be a big improvement, even on a desktop with DSL. Unfortunately they don't allow per-site settings yet, so you can't enable Turbo only on Slashdot. But if they add per-site configuration, then all those and only those annoyingly slow and heavy websites would take 2 to 3 times less time to load for Opera users. I certainly hope they will.
My only ritual is that if I find a bug or a problem that I can't resolve in less than 5 minutes I take a few hours off. After a while I get back to it and am usually able to resolve it without much trouble.
The interesting part of Touhou, related to this story, is that the lore isn't really created by the author. As you said, he only makes a basic framework, and then the community builds upon it in the fanworks (which aren't restricted at all and can be sold freely, as opposed to other IP). The community creates various meme about the characters and the world itself which are sometimes taken back into the following games. The fans are contributing to the canon story.
The IP from TFS are usually entirely controlled by their owners and such a dynamic cannot exist. Fans don't have any choice than hope the production won't butcher their favorite show/game. Also note that ZUN (the author) can avoid putting details because the games are mostly gameplay oriented. Other games or stories don't have this chance.
What's interesting is the amount of fanwork coming from the Touhou franchise, compared to others. There is literally thousands of fanmade CDs released and sold containing remixes of the original music. Some of the most popular tracks of the games have thousands of remixes themselves. All of this in a span of 6 years. All thanks to a healthy doujin community that can exist because the IP owner doesn't try to control everything.
Instead, the IP owner actually take back some things from the community and add them to the canon lore, as we saw with a few characters in recent games.
Imagine an MMO where healing becomes obsolete because items became so powerful that nothing (short of a player wielded weapon) can harm a tank. Dedicated healer classes would certainly feel unbalanced and "useless". Now, instead of making healers important again, they're giving a boost to their damage spell lines and are told to behave like offensive casters. That's not what I made. I made a healer. If I wanted a damage caster, I would have made one.
That's basically what happened on Phantasy Star Universe (one of the worst balanced game I ever saw, by the way). The healer class became completely obsolete because healing items were cheap, the missions short and it's fairly easy to avoid getting damage. Then they reduced the price of the healing items. With such a cheap price and the fact that the items are instantaneous compared to the delay caused by the reaction time + the healing animation, healing spells became useless. Their buffs are only slightly better than buff items, making having one of these in your party a waste of place. To compensate they boosted a bit the attacks of this class, but even with that they're far from being as efficient as melee or ranged. And few people wants one in their party. The GMs had to go as far as requiring a healer in each party for their events, to make things "fair" for everyone.
And well, I'm not even talking about how much they broke the game with the melee changes...
It is indeed funny but that's quite possibly one of the reasons that makes it be faster. The more you support, the slower it gets and the more you have to optimize to get the same speed as a less complete implementation.
Their claims won't have much value until they get to the same level of standard support as the other browsers.
Slashdot Mirror
Javascript is already used for building desktop applications, the most popular probably being Firefox.
Many desktop applications already use scripting languages. For example see the following list of python gtk applications.
Nowadays you can easily write the parts of an application that requires high performance in C and the rest of the program, including the interface, in an interpreted language.
The problem Javascript has to face, though, is that it has very few libraries available for desktop or web applications. And the existing libraries are specifically written for one or the other task. CommonJS would be a common library for all environments and would allow porting code from one to another a lot more easily than it is today.
Recession isn't an excuse to go rape someone dry. Depression is a serious dysfunction, and they aggravated it with their stupid behavior. It may sound weird but I think people's health is more important than money.
A netbook with Chrome OS is the perfect solution for companies with employees that need to access their company's intra/extranet while working in the field. Most of the security is already done, all IT has to do is restrict them to a set of the company's URLs and they're good to go.
I don't see it as anything other than a novelty toy for other consumers, though. But then I don't see the point of netbooks, and people buy them, so I'm probably wrong.
You don't need to, dropbox already uses encryption for both transfer and storage.
https://www.dropbox.com/help/27
Isn't that a function of the network or device and not the browser?
It is, but it can also be solved by the browser to a certain extent. For example the Opera mobile and mini browsers include the Opera Turbo technology. It connects directly to Opera servers, compress pages, images, etc. and send you the result. Size is usually reduced by 2 or more, which can be quite significant depending on the website you visit.
The points compared are mostly irrelevant for today's handeld devices.
What I really would like to know is not if it'll take my phone a few more milliseconds to render the page, but rather:
Rendering speed will become an issue only after network and power related issues are resolved.
Of note, from the video, at 2:30, we see the actual order to remove the poster. The man giving the order is french, possibly a french representative of the UN. I can't remember his name, but my memory is failing me. The man he's talking to appears to be egyptian. My guess seeing this is that the UN removed it to prevent diplomatic issues with Egypt. It just wasn't the right place to advertise that kind of book.
Many applications do not need 30 fps, though. For example, an house architect software would be able to use this for rendering various shots of the designed house.
An alternative is to setup Windows in a VirtualBox VM that has 3D acceleration enabled, install WineD3D in it, and then install and run your game.
The results vary depending on the game and on your system, but it's worth a try. Some games definitely work better this way than through Wine, and you don't have to reboot.
Of course they started to develop it a long time ago. The question is why release it *now*. Would they really benefit more from many eyes looking at a "broad, well-tested, modular, and cross-browser JavaScript library" or from more applications that Chrome already knows how to run fast?
Of course we can only guess. But Google is a company, not a charity. They don't release software that give them an advantage over the competition without a good reason.
I'm also interested in the UI Widgets like an Autocomplete text field. I've been waiting for the jQuery UI team to finish that one widget for months, but for some reason their development is so slow!
I've been using the original autocomplete plugin for a long time now, it works great. This is the plugin that is used as a basis for the UI autocomplete component. Anything preventing you from using it in the meanwhile?
Looking at the library's source code, I don't find many new things that I can't already find in another library. I'm sure there's interesting components, but this looks more like another case of NIH than anything. If their code really is faster I'd rather have them work on existing libraries and try to speed things up for everyone rather than creating more of the same thing.
Of course, if everyone uses Google's tools and libraries, it makes things easier for them to optimize Chrome, which is probably the whole point.
He did say a 486 CPU in the original submission. The "MHz" part was added by the editor, who should probably forfeit his geek badge.
Internet just wants to get more presents every year.
I can't agree more. Let's take an example with Half Life 2. I don't mind the story, it's pretty cool especially if you have done the first, and I enjoyed my first play of it. And I really love the gameplay.
I started it again a few months later and immediately got stuck in hours of story elements right at the start. It became so boring I stopped playing. Waiting while various characters are talking just isn't fun. I already know the story, why should I have to go through it again? Now if I could just SKIP the story parts I would enjoy playing the game over and over. But I'm instead forced to watch pointless story events scattered throughout the game.
Because everyone has to start from the starting area. And it's kind of hard for a server to handle 100K+ players. Even if the server technically could, the game wouldn't be playable because it would be too crowded.
I can suggest two solutions, both with their flaws. They all allow single worlds to happen though.
* Make the world big. Really big. Big enough to have dozens of starting areas (and as much end-game areas, as the problem will move to those areas after a while). Problem is it costs more to develop and it's fragmenting the community in various areas.
* Let the servers dynamically add instances to crowded areas with an easy way for people to switch to join their friends. For example a party invite to someone on a different instance will "magically" move the players on a single instance (one that isn't already full). Here there is also a fragmentation happening but everyone will experience more or less the same game.
Alright I post this as someone who wasn't really interested in the DC or most of SEGA until fairly recently. But I can probably provide some insight into what SEGA has become in the recent years, which pretty much match the thoughts of this man.
Two years ago I started playing Phantasy Star Universe, the successor to Phantasy Star Online. Many people know about PSO which was one of the first MMO so I don't feel the need to explain that many people had huge expectations for the game. But management killed its potential and the lifetime of the game is just a flow of bad decisions.
First error was to build hype around the game (as they do with all their games, and they do it pretty well) only to release it with next to nothing to do online. A couple missions, that's it. You could play everything from the beginning and be done in a day. Then you could replay them over and over to reach the cap. Pretty poor for an online game. Why did they do that? Because they didn't have much content and they wanted to make it last as long as possible. Every two weeks or so they release maybe a new mission (or a new difficulty of an existing mission) that includes "new items" that were available on the original disc. 3 years after the release they still have a handful of items from the original disc they never released. Frustration and quitting ensue.
What does that tells us? That they made as little investment as possible with the hope to make it last long enough to collect many monthly fees. They also got a substantial amount of money by selling the discs (original game and expansion).
Now I won't bore you with more of the many details about this game and will go on to one of the last chapter. Recently they added a cash shop (in addition of the monthly fee and the price of the game). This cash shop doesn't give your usual items like EXP or drop boosts though. Through the cash shop you can obtain many exclusivity including: the best weapons in the game for almost each category (account bound, can't be traded), cool clothes available on the original disc, a service to upgrade your weapons and armors in a way that gives a huge advantage to those who do, etc. In other words, they went and made playing the game almost pointless because you can just buy everything you need. It's also expensive. Frustration and people quitting ensue.
This feature gives them an additional revenue stream that gives them money "right now" despite being immensely negative on the game later on. Because the end-game at this point was still to improve your character. Now there's no more end-game, therefore no reason to play after you buy what you need.
Those two points show that they don't have a long term goal. They're only trying to find cheap ways to get the maximum money without investing much. Instead of using the old method of building a great game and making your customers happy.
They can do that because of their old reputation and their extensive hype-building skills. Old fans always look forward to the next game even if the previous wasn't all that good.
So yes, the indie developer feeling isn't there. The management and marketing feeling is very strong though.
All images look like crap because of the recompression. I can only assume that they will fine-tune the compression during the beta stage based on people's input. I didn't try it on flash but it's understandable that there might be a few problems there. While the technology has been widely tested for mobile browsers (Opera Mini), it hasn't for desktop usage yet. For everything that doesn't work on Opera Mini (like Flash) problems are to be expected.
Now here's the interesting part, and I really wish they will allow this. Take your favorite heavy website (Slashdot for example). Enable Turbo and it'll load pages 2 to 3 times faster. That's pretty nice considering how long it can take to load some of the pages sometimes. You don't really lose anything from the compression, Slashdot is 99% text. So having Turbo enabled on that kind of site would be a big improvement, even on a desktop with DSL. Unfortunately they don't allow per-site settings yet, so you can't enable Turbo only on Slashdot. But if they add per-site configuration, then all those and only those annoyingly slow and heavy websites would take 2 to 3 times less time to load for Opera users. I certainly hope they will.
I assume you refer to this: http://www.fanboy.co.nz/adblock/opera/
(mods: no need to mod up here I've already posted this link in a post above)
I use this: http://www.fanboy.co.nz/adblock/opera/
It took one minute to copy the file, and I didn't see any ad since then.
My only ritual is that if I find a bug or a problem that I can't resolve in less than 5 minutes I take a few hours off. After a while I get back to it and am usually able to resolve it without much trouble.
The interesting part of Touhou, related to this story, is that the lore isn't really created by the author. As you said, he only makes a basic framework, and then the community builds upon it in the fanworks (which aren't restricted at all and can be sold freely, as opposed to other IP). The community creates various meme about the characters and the world itself which are sometimes taken back into the following games. The fans are contributing to the canon story.
The IP from TFS are usually entirely controlled by their owners and such a dynamic cannot exist. Fans don't have any choice than hope the production won't butcher their favorite show/game. Also note that ZUN (the author) can avoid putting details because the games are mostly gameplay oriented. Other games or stories don't have this chance.
What's interesting is the amount of fanwork coming from the Touhou franchise, compared to others. There is literally thousands of fanmade CDs released and sold containing remixes of the original music. Some of the most popular tracks of the games have thousands of remixes themselves. All of this in a span of 6 years. All thanks to a healthy doujin community that can exist because the IP owner doesn't try to control everything.
Instead, the IP owner actually take back some things from the community and add them to the canon lore, as we saw with a few characters in recent games.
NetBSD is often used for research. See http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/research.html for the most important ones.
Imagine an MMO where healing becomes obsolete because items became so powerful that nothing (short of a player wielded weapon) can harm a tank. Dedicated healer classes would certainly feel unbalanced and "useless". Now, instead of making healers important again, they're giving a boost to their damage spell lines and are told to behave like offensive casters. That's not what I made. I made a healer. If I wanted a damage caster, I would have made one.
That's basically what happened on Phantasy Star Universe (one of the worst balanced game I ever saw, by the way). The healer class became completely obsolete because healing items were cheap, the missions short and it's fairly easy to avoid getting damage. Then they reduced the price of the healing items. With such a cheap price and the fact that the items are instantaneous compared to the delay caused by the reaction time + the healing animation, healing spells became useless. Their buffs are only slightly better than buff items, making having one of these in your party a waste of place. To compensate they boosted a bit the attacks of this class, but even with that they're far from being as efficient as melee or ranged. And few people wants one in their party. The GMs had to go as far as requiring a healer in each party for their events, to make things "fair" for everyone.
And well, I'm not even talking about how much they broke the game with the melee changes...
It is indeed funny but that's quite possibly one of the reasons that makes it be faster. The more you support, the slower it gets and the more you have to optimize to get the same speed as a less complete implementation.
Their claims won't have much value until they get to the same level of standard support as the other browsers.