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A comment on VS Code uses 13% CPU when idle due to blinking cursor rendering. Parent comment

Re:VS Code uses 13% CPU when idle due to blinking cursor ren... by Zenst on Thursday March 23, 2017 @01:45PM (#13942117)
IBM spent a humongous amount of man hours upon the running man in smit under AIX, many of those consumed with making sure it ran correctly on all systems of various speeds without the animations going crazy. Alas I don't have exact man hours, but that was what one of the engineers told me a nearly 2 decades ago now. Hopefully somebody else has more detail upon this as one of the earliest examples of progress animations that still runs today that I'm aware of.

I still hark back to the days of the C64 and the likes in which had tape storage and was common to have a game as a loading screen to play. Was a small program and used to give the user something to do whilst they waited 20 minutes for the program to load. Many also rewrote the cassette storage code for faster storage/loading and would often be a case of loading that program with the small game like space invaders that you could play whilst the main game loaded utilising the quicker tape handling code.

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Re:VS Code uses 13% CPU when idle due to blinking cursor ren... by eltoozero on Thursday March 23, 2017 @03:01PM (#13943025)
SMIT running man example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMWSD69BWqI

If anyone knows where I can get those animation frames, I'd like them for a personal project as a "running" indicator.

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Re:VS Code uses 13% CPU when idle due to blinking cursor ren... by _sh on Friday March 24, 2017 @12:46AM (#13946669)
Dr Racket has something similar.

http://soegaard.github.io/blog/2013/06/21/running-man/

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Re:VS Code uses 13% CPU when idle due to blinking cursor ren... by krylon on Thursday March 23, 2017 @02:20PM (#13942532)
Broken Sword let you play Breakout during the installation; it was such fun (I had not played Breakout in a long time at the point) I was almost sad when the installation was finished. ;-)

I have often wondered since why this was not a more popular way to deal with long running installers.

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Re:VS Code uses 13% CPU when idle due to blinking cursor ren... by aerique on Thursday March 23, 2017 @02:55PM (#13942939)
I think it's because Namco had a patent on games in loading screens from 1995 to 2015: http://kotaku.com/the-patent-on-loading-screen-mini-games-is...
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Re:VS Code uses 13% CPU when idle due to blinking cursor ren... by reitanqild on Thursday March 23, 2017 @07:34PM (#13945333)
Ghostbusters game on c64 had it when I bought it used in 1991 or 92 I think.
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Re:VS Code uses 13% CPU when idle due to blinking cursor ren... by yoklov on Friday March 24, 2017 @11:42AM (#13949652)
It's a common example for a patent that had a lot of prior art but was granted anyway.

I don't know enough about patents to say if there was a reason the prior art didn't apply, but I know that Namco was fairly protective of it and it was somewhat limiting for people working in the game industry.

Although, loading screens are less common now than they were back then, and I think that would still be case even if such a thing were never patented.

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Re:VS Code uses 13% CPU when idle due to blinking cursor ren... by royjacobs on Thursday March 23, 2017 @02:45PM (#13942817)
Having minigames during loading or installation was actually patented by Namco for Ridge Racer, I believe. I'm not quite sure about the details since I seem to recall things like invade-a-load on my Commodore 64 at least a decade earlier, but there you go.
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Re:VS Code uses 13% CPU when idle due to blinking cursor ren... by Cpoll on Thursday March 23, 2017 @02:51PM (#13942902)
Expired in 2015 :)

When I was younger, it seemed so obvious to add a minigame to a long loading screen, I had assumed that there were technical reasons for not doing it.

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Re:VS Code uses 13% CPU when idle due to blinking cursor ren... by dEnigma on Sunday March 26, 2017 @01:39PM (#13961936)
Not quite the same thing, but DVDFlick lets you play Tetris while your DVD is being authored and burned, which was a nice suprise.
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Re:VS Code uses 13% CPU when idle due to blinking cursor ren... by michel-slm on Thursday March 23, 2017 @04:14PM (#13943803)
One Linux distribution used to let you play Breakout during installation, but I forgot which one. Caldera, maybe?
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Re:VS Code uses 13% CPU when idle due to blinking cursor ren... by eru on Sunday March 26, 2017 @04:25PM (#13963051)
Don't most Linux installation just let you use your computer normally during installation?

(And by normally I mean, as booted from a LiveCD.)

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