I don't know if it's boredom, that's probably part of it. Sometimes you see a need in an area and are feeling generous, sometimes you need something done and the tools aren't available, or free. And probably sometimes, we're just bored and are looking for something to do. I think most contributors are either trying to fill a gap in their set of applications, or just simply want to contribute to OSS.
A while ago, I gave my number to a removal number and now I am getting more junk faxes than ever.
That reminds me of the time my wife went through her spam mail, opened each one, and clicked the unsubscribe link in each one. That did nothing but tell the spammers, "hey, I actually read these!", and she only got more spam.
Microsoft and Sony are learning something this generation, mostly that throwing the most powerful hardware you can buy at the consumer sells systems, but not at the rate you could be if you lowered your costs. I think we'll see a change in at least one of these juggernauts next round.
As for profiting, good for them, but seriously, just keep delivering good games and people will buy your system. I don't own an Xbox 360 but there's a few games coming out this year (GTA, Halo, Mass Effect, Burnout) that have me considering. I've owned a Wii, and it was great, then the supply of games I was interested in fell off, so I sold it to my brother in law. I'll probably buy another when the games I want to play start coming, mostly just Smash Bros. at the moment.
I wouldn't be surprised if some clever fans of the series started tearing into this tech demo and used it as a basis for a full fledged, community built game.
I also found it odd that the author uses Dojo Toolkit v 0.3.1 as I believe 0.4.1 has been available for months and 0.4.2 is the current release. Though I don't know the differences between the releases so maybe it's no big deal.
I have had an experience very close to the author's. My group at work maintains an internal app served with Websphere, just like the author. We have a tree of nodes that recently ballooned in size to 40,000 nodes and this was causing our CSS/javascript tree to choke as it loaded everything once and used the CSS to handle opening and closing of nodes. It would take about 5-10 seconds to load the tree once, but after that it would perform nicely. We wanted a near instant load at start and then whenever you expanded a node it would grab its children from the database and display them then. My coworker and I didn't have any AJAX experience when we started working on this problem so we turned to frameworks.
First think I looked at was the Google Web Toolkit, and dismissed it as quickly as the author. I suppose if we ever rewrite our app from scratch we'll maybe consider it, but not right now. Then I found dojo, and we started using that to implement a dynamic loading tree. I got it working and plugged into our database fairly quickly, but found out it wouldn't help us much. Clicking on a parent to display its children can take anywhere from 1 to 15 seconds depending on the how many children it has, and also basically freeze your browser while it's doing that. It also either had a memory leak or just managed memory inefficiently because the browser's memory footprint would balloon in size as you clicked more and more nodes.
My coworker eventually took it into his own hands and started hacking the dynamic loading himself. I've been busy with other projects so I don't know how he did it exactly, but it's a combination of our old CSS tree and some dynamic loading to speed up the initial load. Clicking on a massive parent can still cause some slow loading, but it was better than dojo. I think dojo is a great toolkit, but when you just want to pull one specific piece out of it, it can be cumbersome and bloated. Also, the documentation sucks and if I needed help, I mostly just read over old bug fixes and such. I forwarded my coworker this article so maybe we'll look into YUI.
My wife and I use XBMC almost daily. It's such a great piece of software on a pretty nice piece of hardware too (for the price). I haven't updated the hard drive or DVD drive, as I pretty much stream everything off my PC, but it works so great. I don't think I could ever own another media center, but you never know, we got rid of our DVR a few months ago and I do miss recording.
A lot of those issues fall into one of two camps: either the issue was found because the game has been played millions of times and picked apart and hacked to death, that of course bugs are going to crop up; or the issue is with battle.net or the online play in general. The first will always be around because when a game is as popular as StarCraft, people are going to dig into it and find these exploits and bugs. The second will undoubtedly be improved upon as Blizzard has got a lot more experience under their belt with WoW when it comes to delivering an online experience.
I'm not saying you shouldn't complain, I'm just saying that when a game has been out for almost a decade and is played professionally by some people, issues will be found.
The difference between Nintendo and the other two, is that Nintendo is a games only company. They rely solely on their hardware and software sales. On the other hand, Sony and Microsoft's consoles are just one division of a much larger conglomerate. And that conglomerate can support the other gaming divisions until they finally do get out of the red, or the stock holders, whatever, demand that division to be sold off or folded. Microsoft's gaming/Zune divsion might have lost 300 million dollars, but the company as a whole took in over 14 billion dollars in revenue. I know it can't go on forever, but Microsoft at least, is committed to this industry, for better or worse.
How long would it take to burn a 45GB disc? Blu-ray.com says 1x is 36Mbs, so that would be 4.5MB/s. 45GB is approximately 45000MB, so it would take about 10,000 seconds at max speed the whole way. So that's like what, 2 hours and 50 minutes? Not that bad for massive backup if you just start it when you go to bed.
So a few weeks back, everyone finds out that Ohio University leads the country in file sharing. Now instead of taking steps to try to curb this, they just announce they'll cut it off all together. I'm sure they felt pretty embarrassed being on top of the list, but there are other options.
According to this page, they are at about 691 teraflops with the PS3 producing 388 of those. I'm kinda confused on where they get the 250,000 number as that page also says there are about 30,000 active CPUs and about 100,000 total (as in 70,000 CPUs once participated but haven't returned data in five days). I mean, there's barely 250,000 total active CPUs including all platforms.
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, the summary reads like something straight out of digg.
Makes me wish I was a woman and could work under that limitless glass ceiling they're always talking about!
256 kbs, if you need more you're obviously doing something illegal.
In Soviet Russia, I test Hyman's extended memory.
And here I always enjoyed them Canadian versions of movies, all those "aboots" and the additional "eh" here or there always gave me a smile.
Play any of the Metal Gear Solid games and you'll see excellent use of motion blur in video games.
You'll have to bring a friend along to pick up and throw on the spikes.
I don't know if it's boredom, that's probably part of it. Sometimes you see a need in an area and are feeling generous, sometimes you need something done and the tools aren't available, or free. And probably sometimes, we're just bored and are looking for something to do. I think most contributors are either trying to fill a gap in their set of applications, or just simply want to contribute to OSS.
melindaf: So I've got this great idea, it's this little smiley face that helps you manage your tasks and do your work!
...
billg: That's the dumbest-
melindaf: You want some tonight or not?
billg:
melindaf: How about we call it Bob.
Microsoft and Sony are learning something this generation, mostly that throwing the most powerful hardware you can buy at the consumer sells systems, but not at the rate you could be if you lowered your costs. I think we'll see a change in at least one of these juggernauts next round.
As for profiting, good for them, but seriously, just keep delivering good games and people will buy your system. I don't own an Xbox 360 but there's a few games coming out this year (GTA, Halo, Mass Effect, Burnout) that have me considering. I've owned a Wii, and it was great, then the supply of games I was interested in fell off, so I sold it to my brother in law. I'll probably buy another when the games I want to play start coming, mostly just Smash Bros. at the moment.
I wouldn't be surprised if some clever fans of the series started tearing into this tech demo and used it as a basis for a full fledged, community built game.
Read this article then...
http://www.woz.org/letters/general/78.html
I like how in Java, goto is a reserved keyword, but it does absolutely nothing. Same with const.
I also found it odd that the author uses Dojo Toolkit v 0.3.1 as I believe 0.4.1 has been available for months and 0.4.2 is the current release. Though I don't know the differences between the releases so maybe it's no big deal.
I have had an experience very close to the author's. My group at work maintains an internal app served with Websphere, just like the author. We have a tree of nodes that recently ballooned in size to 40,000 nodes and this was causing our CSS/javascript tree to choke as it loaded everything once and used the CSS to handle opening and closing of nodes. It would take about 5-10 seconds to load the tree once, but after that it would perform nicely. We wanted a near instant load at start and then whenever you expanded a node it would grab its children from the database and display them then. My coworker and I didn't have any AJAX experience when we started working on this problem so we turned to frameworks.
First think I looked at was the Google Web Toolkit, and dismissed it as quickly as the author. I suppose if we ever rewrite our app from scratch we'll maybe consider it, but not right now. Then I found dojo, and we started using that to implement a dynamic loading tree. I got it working and plugged into our database fairly quickly, but found out it wouldn't help us much. Clicking on a parent to display its children can take anywhere from 1 to 15 seconds depending on the how many children it has, and also basically freeze your browser while it's doing that. It also either had a memory leak or just managed memory inefficiently because the browser's memory footprint would balloon in size as you clicked more and more nodes.
My coworker eventually took it into his own hands and started hacking the dynamic loading himself. I've been busy with other projects so I don't know how he did it exactly, but it's a combination of our old CSS tree and some dynamic loading to speed up the initial load. Clicking on a massive parent can still cause some slow loading, but it was better than dojo. I think dojo is a great toolkit, but when you just want to pull one specific piece out of it, it can be cumbersome and bloated. Also, the documentation sucks and if I needed help, I mostly just read over old bug fixes and such. I forwarded my coworker this article so maybe we'll look into YUI.
My wife and I use XBMC almost daily. It's such a great piece of software on a pretty nice piece of hardware too (for the price). I haven't updated the hard drive or DVD drive, as I pretty much stream everything off my PC, but it works so great. I don't think I could ever own another media center, but you never know, we got rid of our DVR a few months ago and I do miss recording.
Does that mean that China has a Page Three Girl section now in its newspapers?
A lot of those issues fall into one of two camps: either the issue was found because the game has been played millions of times and picked apart and hacked to death, that of course bugs are going to crop up; or the issue is with battle.net or the online play in general. The first will always be around because when a game is as popular as StarCraft, people are going to dig into it and find these exploits and bugs. The second will undoubtedly be improved upon as Blizzard has got a lot more experience under their belt with WoW when it comes to delivering an online experience.
I'm not saying you shouldn't complain, I'm just saying that when a game has been out for almost a decade and is played professionally by some people, issues will be found.
The difference between Nintendo and the other two, is that Nintendo is a games only company. They rely solely on their hardware and software sales. On the other hand, Sony and Microsoft's consoles are just one division of a much larger conglomerate. And that conglomerate can support the other gaming divisions until they finally do get out of the red, or the stock holders, whatever, demand that division to be sold off or folded. Microsoft's gaming/Zune divsion might have lost 300 million dollars, but the company as a whole took in over 14 billion dollars in revenue. I know it can't go on forever, but Microsoft at least, is committed to this industry, for better or worse.
How long would it take to burn a 45GB disc? Blu-ray.com says 1x is 36Mbs, so that would be 4.5MB/s. 45GB is approximately 45000MB, so it would take about 10,000 seconds at max speed the whole way. So that's like what, 2 hours and 50 minutes? Not that bad for massive backup if you just start it when you go to bed.
So a few weeks back, everyone finds out that Ohio University leads the country in file sharing. Now instead of taking steps to try to curb this, they just announce they'll cut it off all together. I'm sure they felt pretty embarrassed being on top of the list, but there are other options.
According to this page, they are at about 691 teraflops with the PS3 producing 388 of those. I'm kinda confused on where they get the 250,000 number as that page also says there are about 30,000 active CPUs and about 100,000 total (as in 70,000 CPUs once participated but haven't returned data in five days). I mean, there's barely 250,000 total active CPUs including all platforms.
Besides someone sneaking a Goatse pic in on the George W. Bush page, this offline CD hopes to fill the gaping hole in the marketplace.