You see what you're looking for, most of the time. This sounds like a subtle bug that you're not going to find until you go looking for it; it's hard to invoke under normal usage patterns. Nobody stared at that code looking for this problem until now. But if it was closed source, the guy who fixed it wouldn't have been able to look at it and find the problem.
A quick googling of "many eyes make all bugs shallow" brings me the more complete statement that adage is simplified from: "Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix will be obvious to someone." (Linus via ESR). Clearly this 25-year-old bug is one of the exceptions that calls for the 'almost'.
Or why I want to play with homebrewing one. These things aren't that much more than a big piece of acrylic plus a projector and an IR camera. And a big slab of acrylic with a light beneath it is handy for ANY artist!
Maybe the problems it can solve are just not ones you ever have?
I'm an artist. When I do art in the real world I'm working on a big surface. When I do art in the computer I'm squinting at it through the lens of my laptop screen. I would much rather spend about $1000 for a table-size display I could draw directly onto than the $2500 a 21" Cintiq tablet would cost.
If your main use for the computer is "writing" - whether it be code, text, mail, irc, or whatever - then yes, a keyboard is your best choice.
Funerals are fucking expensive. Last weekend I was involved with making one happen; I think it cost > US$10000. Luckily this one was covered entirely by a couple insurance policies on the 96-year-old guest of honor, with no question about the cause of death.
Financial skills are certainly helpful in eradicating poverty and changing the environment; navigating the ever-more-complex world of money is a skill of its own. Got anyone in the area who's working towards something on those lines and needs some help with the money part of it?
And hell, you're raising a kid. If you sat there watching the TV five hours a day then you'd be setting an example of that being a good thing to do; he, too, might grow up to be a cog in some business who comes home to completely vegetate in front of the tube. But instead you spent a half hour solving the problem of building a crane with him, helping to give him some basic engineering skills. Maybe he'll do something cool with them a few decades down the line, maybe he won't - everything you expose him to is something he might end up with a world-changing level of passion for doing.
I used to work in animation so I can understand. I've seen how things get watered down and focus-grouped into oblivion. It's part of why I drifted away from that industry to be a freelance artist who's making time for her own work. I may not be making much money but I'm tied up in projects that mean something to me.
Does this work for you now? I dunno. Will it work for you once you've done your time in the mines and saved enough to get out? I dunno. I managed but it was hard, it still is. I'm not part of the small army it takes to make a cartoon any more - so I can consider far bigger creative risks.
The hungry maw of endless channels and endless airtime always needs more. Best of luck in finding ways to fill it, ever so briefly, with things that matter to you.
I'm actually torn about this situation, because I make my living producing entertainment products that I hope people will mindlessly consume... but if we actually DO move beyond the old-fashioned paradigm, the hours I produce may have a harder time fitting into the "free time" the rest of the world has.
So how can you help make the entertainment products you create the kind of products that a selective consumer would choose to put in their one hour of $MINDLESS_ENTERTAINMENT a day? What distinguishes the shows you choose to watch in that one hour of nightly TV from the shows you decided you could live without?
Think about this in the hour you're not spending tranquilized in front of the boob tube; bring it up at work when you're in casual conversation. Maybe some of the other people at work will have some ideas, maybe you'll end up in a project you'll feel better about in the long run.
My boyfriend and I have had a lot of fun with Cortex Command. It's a really entertainingly adolescent wargame that supports splitscreen play and joystick controllers.
It's not actually finished but its active mod community makes it not matter - if one of you skims the forums now and then, you'll find all kinds of giggle-inducingly overpowered toys to play with. It's ultraviolent but it's on the border between 'obscene' and 'slapstick'...
That's a pretty big if; I don't think I've ever seen my boyfriend run something on his Windows box that was designed for simultaneous or hot-seat multiplayer (stuff he ran via emulators doesn't count). Sure, there's lots of games on Windows that support multiplayer - over the net, with each person using their own machine.
And most PC games have mediocre support, at best, for a controller. "Use Key2Joy," people say. Ugh.
Re:Other Media of Related Interest
on
Donkey Kong and Me
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Donkey Kong consists of 4 boards that repeat in a sequence, with increasing difficulty. And then there's a wraparound bug on the timer that makes a level unplayable.
Anyone with a decent amount of reflexes can make it through several cycles of the boards, enough to document the way things work and change well enough to clone it. If they never make it as far as the timer-glitched level, it won't matter; what they create will still be quite recognizable as "Donkey Kong".
"How do I use this infernal widgetizer program? Bob told me a while back but he's long gone. Hey, I'll search the IM logs, I'm pretty sure he told me there. Yay! He did."
Cider: because you're already way over budget and schedule on this game, and don't have time to rewrite half the damn thing in another language for a totally different API.
When they installed those checkout ad spigots at the Ralph's I used to go to when I lived in LA, I quit going there. Drove me nuts. As it so happened I was able to walk just a couple more blocks to a Trader Joe's, so my grocery bill went down, as did my ad input, and I started eating a bit healthier, too.
Ultimately I was pretty glad they installed those vile things. I never did write to Ralph's and thank them for making me leave the path of least resistance.
Hooray, now Microsoft's site will be just as much of an unusable, sluggish mess as Adobe's site has been ever since they rebuilt it with tons of Flash!
Back when I was living in California, the supermarket chain Ralph's installed flat-screen televisions in the checkout lines. They were, of course, ad spigots. They drove me nuts.
They also drove me away. I started walking three blocks further to Trader Joe's for pretty much all my groceries, and ended up paying less to eat better food in the long run.
The next gas station down the road may or may not be as much of a better deal as this was - but if they don't have ads on the pumps, that's worth a little more time. Vote with your patronage, and let the station with the pump ads know why you quit patronizing them.
Kids like it when their toys model some of their behavior, including having toys - just last month a friend of mine had to make a tiny, tiny owl plushie for her son's owl plushie!
IMHO a lot of them are "stupid" because they've been trained to be stupid by the schools and culture - when kids are taught to sit down, shut up, do endless repetitive work, and not ask any questions, they stop learning. Kids are learning machines, but the schools are anti-learning.
We raise people to be meat robots, and it's only a small percentage that refuse. We keep treating them as meat robots in their jobs. When they stop having to be a meat robot all the time... some will sink into indolence, but how many will start to get bored, and start doing more interesting things?
Yeah, the forever-editable text layers are one of those things I don't even think about any more. Me, I mostly use AI for actual image creation so I don't really care about how Photoshop handles vector shape data; PS is mostly a scanner host and occasional place to dabble for me.
I suspect this move towards a Flash UI in PS is the first step, in part, towards some kind of web-accessed Photoshop.
At one point I could honestly say I was one of the ten best Flash animators in the world - this was back around 2000, when I was at Spümcø, pushing the boundaries of Flash 4 with 'Weekend Pussy Hunt'. Flash 5, once they released the.0.1 version that fixed the 'constantly crashing on the Mac' bugs, KICKED ASS. Everything you needed was right there. Always. It had its issues, it was kinda unstable, but once you knew how to dodge its worst glitches you could get a lot done quickly.
MX took this great interface and completely fucked it up with that 'context sensitive inspector' bullshit. Fundamental routine operations like swapping a symbol's frame for lipsynch have taken 3-4 times as long as they used to ever since. And like idiots, everyone went out and "upgraded".
MX's interface was so shitty that I basically abandoned an entire career path because of it. I am a freelance illustrator in Boston, rather than an animator/director on a show in LA, in no small part because of Flash MX.
If you dig a little, it sounds like they're planning to rewrite most of the UI in Flash. Say goodbye to performance and to looking like a native citizen of your machine. Flash itself went down this route and its CPU requirements have increased astronomically.
I am really, really keeping an eye on the emerging world of OSX-only lightweight image editors that leverage Core Image. The first one to merge a decent UI (which rules out Pixelmator and its fetish for illegibly-transparent palettes) with something akin to PS's adjustment layers will get my $30-75.
Slashdot Mirror
You see what you're looking for, most of the time. This sounds like a subtle bug that you're not going to find until you go looking for it; it's hard to invoke under normal usage patterns. Nobody stared at that code looking for this problem until now. But if it was closed source, the guy who fixed it wouldn't have been able to look at it and find the problem.
A quick googling of "many eyes make all bugs shallow" brings me the more complete statement that adage is simplified from: "Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix will be obvious to someone." (Linus via ESR). Clearly this 25-year-old bug is one of the exceptions that calls for the 'almost'.
I use Privoxy, myself - it catches most obnoxious Flash ads. Helps the CPU usage tremendously on my little 1.25Ghz Powerbook.
Or why I want to play with homebrewing one. These things aren't that much more than a big piece of acrylic plus a projector and an IR camera. And a big slab of acrylic with a light beneath it is handy for ANY artist!
Maybe the problems it can solve are just not ones you ever have?
I'm an artist. When I do art in the real world I'm working on a big surface. When I do art in the computer I'm squinting at it through the lens of my laptop screen. I would much rather spend about $1000 for a table-size display I could draw directly onto than the $2500 a 21" Cintiq tablet would cost.
If your main use for the computer is "writing" - whether it be code, text, mail, irc, or whatever - then yes, a keyboard is your best choice.
Funerals are fucking expensive. Last weekend I was involved with making one happen; I think it cost > US$10000. Luckily this one was covered entirely by a couple insurance policies on the 96-year-old guest of honor, with no question about the cause of death.
Financial skills are certainly helpful in eradicating poverty and changing the environment; navigating the ever-more-complex world of money is a skill of its own. Got anyone in the area who's working towards something on those lines and needs some help with the money part of it?
And hell, you're raising a kid. If you sat there watching the TV five hours a day then you'd be setting an example of that being a good thing to do; he, too, might grow up to be a cog in some business who comes home to completely vegetate in front of the tube. But instead you spent a half hour solving the problem of building a crane with him, helping to give him some basic engineering skills. Maybe he'll do something cool with them a few decades down the line, maybe he won't - everything you expose him to is something he might end up with a world-changing level of passion for doing.
I used to work in animation so I can understand. I've seen how things get watered down and focus-grouped into oblivion. It's part of why I drifted away from that industry to be a freelance artist who's making time for her own work. I may not be making much money but I'm tied up in projects that mean something to me.
Does this work for you now? I dunno. Will it work for you once you've done your time in the mines and saved enough to get out? I dunno. I managed but it was hard, it still is. I'm not part of the small army it takes to make a cartoon any more - so I can consider far bigger creative risks.
The hungry maw of endless channels and endless airtime always needs more. Best of luck in finding ways to fill it, ever so briefly, with things that matter to you.
Nothing constructive to do?
write
draw
code
compose
sing
for its own sake. Make the world a little more interesting than it was five minutes ago, even if you're the only one who ever sees the results.
I'm actually torn about this situation, because I make my living producing entertainment products that I hope people will mindlessly consume... but if we actually DO move beyond the old-fashioned paradigm, the hours I produce may have a harder time fitting into the "free time" the rest of the world has.
So how can you help make the entertainment products you create the kind of products that a selective consumer would choose to put in their one hour of $MINDLESS_ENTERTAINMENT a day? What distinguishes the shows you choose to watch in that one hour of nightly TV from the shows you decided you could live without?
Think about this in the hour you're not spending tranquilized in front of the boob tube; bring it up at work when you're in casual conversation. Maybe some of the other people at work will have some ideas, maybe you'll end up in a project you'll feel better about in the long run.
My boyfriend and I have had a lot of fun with Cortex Command. It's a really entertainingly adolescent wargame that supports splitscreen play and joystick controllers.
It's not actually finished but its active mod community makes it not matter - if one of you skims the forums now and then, you'll find all kinds of giggle-inducingly overpowered toys to play with. It's ultraviolent but it's on the border between 'obscene' and 'slapstick'...
Except presumably the original Softpedia article doesn't have black images with 'Stolen from Softpedia' instead of actual screenshots.
if the game is designed for it
That's a pretty big if; I don't think I've ever seen my boyfriend run something on his Windows box that was designed for simultaneous or hot-seat multiplayer (stuff he ran via emulators doesn't count). Sure, there's lots of games on Windows that support multiplayer - over the net, with each person using their own machine.
And most PC games have mediocre support, at best, for a controller. "Use Key2Joy," people say. Ugh.
Donkey Kong consists of 4 boards that repeat in a sequence, with increasing difficulty. And then there's a wraparound bug on the timer that makes a level unplayable.
Anyone with a decent amount of reflexes can make it through several cycles of the boards, enough to document the way things work and change well enough to clone it. If they never make it as far as the timer-glitched level, it won't matter; what they create will still be quite recognizable as "Donkey Kong".
logs = external memory
"How do I use this infernal widgetizer program? Bob told me a while back but he's long gone. Hey, I'll search the IM logs, I'm pretty sure he told me there. Yay! He did."
Cider: because you're already way over budget and schedule on this game, and don't have time to rewrite half the damn thing in another language for a totally different API.
When they installed those checkout ad spigots at the Ralph's I used to go to when I lived in LA, I quit going there. Drove me nuts. As it so happened I was able to walk just a couple more blocks to a Trader Joe's, so my grocery bill went down, as did my ad input, and I started eating a bit healthier, too.
Ultimately I was pretty glad they installed those vile things. I never did write to Ralph's and thank them for making me leave the path of least resistance.
Hooray, now Microsoft's site will be just as much of an unusable, sluggish mess as Adobe's site has been ever since they rebuilt it with tons of Flash!
You're too late, someone already filled this niche. Seriously.
Back when I was living in California, the supermarket chain Ralph's installed flat-screen televisions in the checkout lines. They were, of course, ad spigots. They drove me nuts.
They also drove me away. I started walking three blocks further to Trader Joe's for pretty much all my groceries, and ended up paying less to eat better food in the long run.
The next gas station down the road may or may not be as much of a better deal as this was - but if they don't have ads on the pumps, that's worth a little more time. Vote with your patronage, and let the station with the pump ads know why you quit patronizing them.
Kids like it when their toys model some of their behavior, including having toys - just last month a friend of mine had to make a tiny, tiny owl plushie for her son's owl plushie!
I saw "Loading" in the middle of the elevator a lot while playing Portal. You are aggressively wrong, sorry.
IMHO a lot of them are "stupid" because they've been trained to be stupid by the schools and culture - when kids are taught to sit down, shut up, do endless repetitive work, and not ask any questions, they stop learning. Kids are learning machines, but the schools are anti-learning.
We raise people to be meat robots, and it's only a small percentage that refuse. We keep treating them as meat robots in their jobs. When they stop having to be a meat robot all the time... some will sink into indolence, but how many will start to get bored, and start doing more interesting things?
Yeah, the forever-editable text layers are one of those things I don't even think about any more. Me, I mostly use AI for actual image creation so I don't really care about how Photoshop handles vector shape data; PS is mostly a scanner host and occasional place to dabble for me.
I suspect this move towards a Flash UI in PS is the first step, in part, towards some kind of web-accessed Photoshop.
TOTAL AGREEMENT. You are not alone.
.0.1 version that fixed the 'constantly crashing on the Mac' bugs, KICKED ASS. Everything you needed was right there. Always. It had its issues, it was kinda unstable, but once you knew how to dodge its worst glitches you could get a lot done quickly.
At one point I could honestly say I was one of the ten best Flash animators in the world - this was back around 2000, when I was at Spümcø, pushing the boundaries of Flash 4 with 'Weekend Pussy Hunt'. Flash 5, once they released the
MX took this great interface and completely fucked it up with that 'context sensitive inspector' bullshit. Fundamental routine operations like swapping a symbol's frame for lipsynch have taken 3-4 times as long as they used to ever since. And like idiots, everyone went out and "upgraded".
MX's interface was so shitty that I basically abandoned an entire career path because of it. I am a freelance illustrator in Boston, rather than an animator/director on a show in LA, in no small part because of Flash MX.
If you dig a little, it sounds like they're planning to rewrite most of the UI in Flash. Say goodbye to performance and to looking like a native citizen of your machine. Flash itself went down this route and its CPU requirements have increased astronomically.
I am really, really keeping an eye on the emerging world of OSX-only lightweight image editors that leverage Core Image. The first one to merge a decent UI (which rules out Pixelmator and its fetish for illegibly-transparent palettes) with something akin to PS's adjustment layers will get my $30-75.