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"EnTerr" wrote:"RokuJoel" wrote:
Yes I have, its one of my frequent daydreams, but when I get home from work I'm too tired to actually work on the project.
We need to talk to your boss about overworking you - and about instituting 20% side-project program at RokuCo, like the one in Google which brought us Gmail/Maps/AdSense/Google Now.
I got reminded about the idea of doing distributedly something useful as a screen-saver. I imagine Roku as a company won't be interested working on that, that corner is intersection of many limits and "but"s:
- permanent storage - none to speak of, other than a small "registry" to keep track of progress; but any large inputs will have to be re-downloaded every time and outputs uploaded; USB media is read-only, so only cloud storage is a possibility
- no interrupt signal - when screen saver is interrupted, code does not receive event to save progress, so should be ready to be killed any minute; work should be chopped to smaller pieces
- connectivity - each Roku is typically behind a different NAT firewall, so they cannot talk directly to each other - will need mediator in the cloud
- low computing performance - neither the CPU nor interpreter were made for number crunching
- questions about trust (what are you doing with my player? how do i know i am not participating in a DDoS? etc)
Still, there are millions of these boxes powered 24x7 and doing nothing over 90% of the time. Tempting to invent something about it. So Joel - if you think you have good idea on doing something and it can be open sourced, maybe you can start a project and try to recruit volunteer help in the forum (presumably under non-Roku user ID to distance from impression of company involvement). Can't promise my participation (i have a good half-dozen channel projects in different state of tenderness and about as much on idea-level, should try shipping some) but i like challenges and considering complications above, this will be a tempting challenge. And there are other helpful people around.
PS. My musings brought to you today by the letters X, K, C and 😧
I think it's genius comparing protein folding to origami - it is so true: a polypeptide in its primary, linear structure is like a blank sheet and has no use until getting its secondary and tertiary structures - sometimes needing the help of "chaperone" proteins. The end about protease would be hilarious to a biologist. Anyway i linked the image to ExplainXKCD, which um, explains the comics. But the connection to this is Folding@home.
