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Just scrolled through the list at http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/List_of_ALL_hackerspaces . Took a peak at a couple of the active ones in Norway, and they are operated by university level student societies. See a potential for hackerspace ranges: open-closed/simple-advanced/chaotic-orderly. Would be a nice fit as a "club" type thing in college aswell.

This hackerspace: http://sonen.ifi.uio.no/ in Oslo apparently does "education fair" type work at http://www.gathering.org/ everey year.

We are building a new library with a "Newton room" in my home town, just across the road from the local college. The potential here is huge. Just have to find the time to goad some people into supporting this before my boy turns 15 ;->

Is 20 Mb supposed to be impressive? The Gathering (a norwegian computer party) had a 3 Gbit connection this year. http://www.gathering.org/tg08/TG08Nettverk.html

Yeah, that, and the 1024 computer limit to SMB workgroups (at least at that time). I remember many strange hacks on The Gathering to let us browse shares even if there were well above 5000 computers there, and the LAN consisted of pretty isolated LANs on each switch. But they made it. Incredible program, really.

The Gathering (and really, how hard is it to put the official URL in the summary?) is primarily a demoparty, not a lan party. I'd say that this would better belong in a different section. Its not just about games and it has never been about games!

Instead of just oogling over the gaming competitions, take a look at the compo winners (hell, all of the entries) and see what kind of artwork can be done with computers.

Ignore the games and appreciate the demos. Keep the spirit of the demoscene alive.

The Gathering (and really, how hard is it to put the official URL in the summary?) is primarily a demoparty, not a lan party. I'd say that this would better belong in a different section. Its not just about games and it has never been about games!

Instead of just oogling over the gaming competitions, take a look at the compo winners (hell, all of the entries) and see what kind of artwork can be done with computers.

Ignore the games and appreciate the demos. Keep the spirit of the demoscene alive.

Just took a look at them. I guess they were done in a big hurry. They're not really up to any kind of decent demo standard, Linux or otherwise. Crappier demos have been seen, but not by reliable witnesses.

Are you aware of the rules for these demo-compos? The FastIntro democompo with its content and goals are released AT the party, hence the main purpose is to show that you are able to meet the deadline and bring the content in line with the rules for the compo. Not to show off smooth graphical design skills, and to be honest, there is not really anything worse than a FastIntro-Compo. It's suppose to be Fast. On the other hand, a FastIntro-compo also lay strict limits on how much gui you can expect. Please see guidelines for the FastIntro democompo at TG2003 here. Also read up on what you need to do with a FastIntro democompo here. Hope this helps you to understand :)

Just took a look at them. I guess they were done in a big hurry. They're not really up to any kind of decent demo standard, Linux or otherwise. Crappier demos have been seen, but not by reliable witnesses.

Are you aware of the rules for these demo-compos? The FastIntro democompo with its content and goals are released AT the party, hence the main purpose is to show that you are able to meet the deadline and bring the content in line with the rules for the compo. Not to show off smooth graphical design skills, and to be honest, there is not really anything worse than a FastIntro-Compo. It's suppose to be Fast. On the other hand, a FastIntro-compo also lay strict limits on how much gui you can expect. Please see guidelines for the FastIntro democompo at TG2003 here. Also read up on what you need to do with a FastIntro democompo here. Hope this helps you to understand :)

If you head over to The Gathering wich is one of the top four Demo/Computer-parties in the world, held every easter here in Norway you will see that TG also has Microsoft as a huge sponsor, but that does not mean that there was no Linux-demos at TG04, TG03, TG02.. etc. Actually, the number of Linux/Amiga-based demos keep steadily rising at TG. If you have a peek: here you'll see that there is 3 Linux-FastIntro-demos and Four Win32-Fast-Intro-demos, hence, nearly equal numbers, and at TG2003, Microsoft was a masjor sponsor, as they've been for the past four years or more. Hope this helps you keep hope for Linux-based demos :)

If you head over to The Gathering wich is one of the top four Demo/Computer-parties in the world, held every easter here in Norway you will see that TG also has Microsoft as a huge sponsor, but that does not mean that there was no Linux-demos at TG04, TG03, TG02.. etc. Actually, the number of Linux/Amiga-based demos keep steadily rising at TG. If you have a peek: here you'll see that there is 3 Linux-FastIntro-demos and Four Win32-Fast-Intro-demos, hence, nearly equal numbers, and at TG2003, Microsoft was a masjor sponsor, as they've been for the past four years or more. Hope this helps you keep hope for Linux-based demos :)

I just can't wait to start bluesnarfing on The Gathering 2004

Power is definitely something which needs to be planned for, but it isn't that difficult to provide it either. The Gathering and other computer parties regularly concentrate more (and more power hungry!) computers than what is planned for this event. If necessary, they could power up one third of the machines, then turn off the monitors when everything works, turn the next third on, and so on. But I doubt that's necessary if they have talked to someone who has experience with medium scale LAN parties.

What Radman said.. the third pressing is being manufactured as we speak. What timing! It should be back in our (Fusecon's) hands within a couple of weeks. Other vendors may take a little longer. So sign up on that Reservation List and you'll get an email when it's ready. We'll try to make some discs available at The Gathering and Breakpoint as well. -phx

Demoparties do take place in the USA, but not with the frequency nor large attendance that one would find at such spectacular events as Assembly or The Gathering.

The next North American Demoparty is going to be held in Salt Lake City, Utah on August 5-7. Refer to pilgrimage.scene.org for details.

You mentioned your department gets hundreds of requests a week. At the gathering (huge LAN party held in Hamar, Norway, lasts 4-5 days?) gathering.org, they use a php/mysql (as far as i know) system to manage all the requests. And we are talking of a LAN with 4000-5000 attendants needing help for all kinds of stuff.. The crew at the gathering are splitted into: Tech, tech linux, electricity, vision, scene, logistics, medic, security, PR and Admin (there may have been additions to this since i worked there).. and each crew can assign reported tasks to different parts of the whole crew... The system takes arguments as: seat, row, description, assign to what crew and the status of each case can be: solved, pending, closed or open. Crewleaders can assign different tasks to different people in their crew..
I'm not shure if this is what you're looking for, but it works like a charm at TG

Actually, it is far from the world's largest. It is surpassed by The Gathering in Norway with 5100 people (plus guests, of course) and Dreamhack in Sweden with about 5000 people (including guests, if I remember correctly). If I remember correctly, Assembly has about 4000 people, but it sure is amongst the world's largest :-)

Note that all three events I listed are Computer Parties, not to mistaken as Lan (Parties). What's the difference? At computer parties, the organizers try to encourage lots of other events other than gaming like creative competitions - coding of demos, graphics, music, etc. There are often also lectures/conferences on development, linux/unix, security, etc. For more information: The Gathering Tech:Server Crew - Why TG is not a LAN page.

To conclude, check out this way cool panorama picture of The Gathering 99 (only with about 4200 people then, but.. yeah, cool): Panorama of TG99

Note: I'm not neutral in my writing in this case since I'm the leader of the Tech:Server (former Tech:Linux) crew at The Gathering since 1999. And yes, it's without pay.. just loads of fun and experience :-)

Actually, it is far from the world's largest. It is surpassed by The Gathering in Norway with 5100 people (plus guests, of course) and Dreamhack in Sweden with about 5000 people (including guests, if I remember correctly). If I remember correctly, Assembly has about 4000 people, but it sure is amongst the world's largest :-)

Note that all three events I listed are Computer Parties, not to mistaken as Lan (Parties). What's the difference? At computer parties, the organizers try to encourage lots of other events other than gaming like creative competitions - coding of demos, graphics, music, etc. There are often also lectures/conferences on development, linux/unix, security, etc. For more information: The Gathering Tech:Server Crew - Why TG is not a LAN page.

To conclude, check out this way cool panorama picture of The Gathering 99 (only with about 4200 people then, but.. yeah, cool): Panorama of TG99

Note: I'm not neutral in my writing in this case since I'm the leader of the Tech:Server (former Tech:Linux) crew at The Gathering since 1999. And yes, it's without pay.. just loads of fun and experience :-)

Well - last time I checked, The Gathering in Norway is bigger - over 5000 visitors, while the Assembly had a measly 4500 visitors. Oh well. ;) -- File not found. Fake it? (Y/N) _

Indeed, but also - remember The Gathering, Norway (this year, The Gathering again reclaimed the throne as the world's largest computer gathering with 5100 attendants).

But again, it's a computer party, not a strictly LAN-party. For those of you not into this, check tg.nlc.no/notalan.html for more information regarding competitions not game-oriented.

I have attended a couple of LAN parties. The 4 last years I have been attending The Gathering, with almost 5000 people, but the last LAN party I attended was a local LAN with about 100 participants where I was a crew member.

The first problem occured on the opening day. 70% of the people on the LAN was unable to get a IP address. The problem turned out to be that we were assigned too few IP addresses.

The sysadmins on the school network we were using were however kind enough to give us an extra subnet, since the school was closed :).

Make sure you have enough IP addresses!

Once the network was up and running, everything worked almost smoothly, except for the occational few who had problems with their network card, graphic card, hard disk etc.

Since we didn't have a tech crew to handle these people, most of our spare time was used to help people fix their personal computer problems.

Make sure you have a tech crew to handle such problems!

We had a small kiosk inside the building where we sold food, beverages and soap. After a few days of sitting in front of the computer without sleep, you need to shower. The last couple of days the LAN party smelled like sh*it. It was horrible to enter the building when you had been outside for a while.

Make sure everyone is clean and shower at least twice!

In advance, we were planning on updating our webpage with stuff that was going to happen (competitions, results, general information etc.). It failed. The webpage was too difficult to update, so noone bothered to do it, since there was more important things to do (like downloading stuff and helping people).

Make sure your webpage can be updated in a second (PHP/MySQL solution preferrably).

These were the 4 biggest problems we had. Except for this, things turned out pretty well I think :), and we even made a small amount of money of it because of our 24 hour kiosk!

When I was at The Gathering(olympic hall in Hamar, Norway) in 2001 I saw a live scorpion inside a transparent case. That was awesome.

You didn't manage to slashdot the link, but one of our axis-cameras with integrated http-server got a bit hot...

• The Gathering - 2002 winners
• The Party - 2001 winners
• Assembly - 2002 winners

• Pouet - Has a big list of demos, intros, and lots of comments.
• 256b.com - If the 2-10 meg demos on pouet are too bloated for you, check these out.
• CFXweb - A community web site with forums and a magazine.

• The Gathering - 2002 winners
• The Party - 2001 winners
• Assembly - 2002 winners

• Pouet - Has a big list of demos, intros, and lots of comments.
• 256b.com - If the 2-10 meg demos on pouet are too bloated for you, check these out.
• CFXweb - A community web site with forums and a magazine.

Yep. They're the biggest. Swedish DreamHack is almost as large (and has been bigger previous years), but TG is the biggest ever. They're 5100 people (as stated in this FAQ).

Sales of consumer products containing a defined amount of coffeine is not permitted in Norway g..

While we're at the demoscene, this feels like a good place to link to TG03's invitation intro, for those interested. :-)/* Steinar */

If you are interested in what will happen here in the next few days, take a look here: Schedule.

It's the same here (Norway). The Gathering, Norway's biggest LAN party, is going to have 5100 attendants this year. Last year, about 1/5 of the 4500 attendants were female. Norway is a very small country, with only 4.5 million inhabitants.

1100 guests??? bah!

Around here that's considered a failiure or good for your first try.

This easter the worlds largest lan party will be The Gathering with 5100 guests. Free tickets are still available if you are coming from outside Europe and normally priced tickets are available for people from Europe, but outside Norway.

I know because we sold the first 4300 tickets in 6 hours via PTN and there are over 1000 people on the waiting list for the rest of the tickets.

The worlds second largest party is DreamHack in sweden with around 5000 guests.

Assembly in Finland is also quite large with over 3000 guests.

Due to general anti-piracy hysteria in Denmark The Party (the worlds first large party) had less than 1000 guests this year, down from over 3000 a few years ago.

That's not even close toTG02 try multiplying it by 4 and you're getting somewhere. TG02 had over 4,500 participants. And this is in a tiny little country with a total population of 4.7 million.

I'm surprised these types of LANs aren't held more often in the US. Or in Australia for that matter. I read a post previously wishing something about Australia and Sydney hosting a big LAN like Campzone2. You're telling me that a small country like Norway can have 4,500 participants at a LAN, and you don't think you can locate more than 1,200 gamers in a town like Sydney?

There's gotta be atleast 5 million in that city alone.

So what if it takes an hour of driving? I drive 4.5hrs just go get to TG02, it might take a while but damnit I'm going there!

in scandinavia we have a long tradition of large parties

dreamhack in sweden had 5000 attenders last winter
the gathering usually has about the same amount aswell, taking place in norway

lanparties isn't for nerds at all tho imho.
even if dreamhack and tg has roots in the demoscene
they are looked down upon nowadays as just another commercial event.

there are 2 other alternatives among the bigger events that still has some sort of respect
them being assembly in finland
and theparty in denmark
with stronger roots and better connection to the demoscene still today,
thus being accepted even by most hardcore people

there are a bunch of events all around europe aswell,
but for the really big stuff,

welcome to scandinavia

/jonas

Computer games indirectly spurred a different kind of computer art as well. In the early 80s, when the computer games were starting to become a large industry, some computer interested youngsters started to remove the copy protection (if any) from the games and to spread those cracked games to friends.

Often the crackers changed a few words on the title screen of the game, claiming the credit for having cracked the copy protection. Some guys even linked a special introductory screen with the name of the cracker before the game started.

Over the years, those introductions became more and more advanced with music, graphical logotypes, and scrolling text. The first intros used the title music from the game or from some other game, but soon the crackers started making their own music while at the same time improving their programming skills and graphical capabilities.

After a while, the cracker intros were actually more technically and artistically advanced than the games themselves!

In parallell with the improvements to the intros, the intros forked off into the demo concept. The demos were more technically advanced than the cracker intros, and most commonly all graphics and music was done by the demo creators themselves and not taken from some game. The demos pushed the limits of the computers on which they ran and in turn inspired the games creators.

More information about the intros found on the classical Commodore 64 computer can be found at intros.c64.org and a very good collection of Commodore 64 demos can be found at www.c64.ch. If you don't have access to a Commodore 64 or a Commodore 64 emulator, there is a good DivX encoded video showing one of the best C64 demos around: Deus Ex Machina by Crest.

In a sense, the gaming industry made it possible for the creation of the cracker intros, which in turn led to the demo artform - an artform like no other.

Yes, it's nice.. but check out Planet Potion too. It's the winning 64kb Amiga intro from this years Mekka Symposium. Excellent 3D engine, excellent textures, excellent synch and flow and excellent speech synthesis/vocoder effect :) All in less than 64kb on ancient hardware no less (yes I know it's ppc, but anyway).

For the no-Amiga crowd, there's a divx here.

You should check out Planet Potion from Mekka Symposium 02, Germany. This is the winner 64kb intro for Amiga which has an advanced 3d engine, speech synthesis (vocoder style) and lots of other effects perfectly blended together and synched with the music (the music is awesome considering it's 100% generated with code). All in less than 64kb of course.

This blew everybody's mind at the party and might very well be one of the greatest speed/size optimization feats of the year.

For the Amiga impaired, there's a divx you can enjoy (digital videocam filming the bigscreen, so it flickers a bit). It's ironic that the original is about 0.001% the size of this divx :)

(Ok, so it's a bit offtopic, but it's in tune with amazing feats with ancient hardware :)

The gathering the parent poster was talking about is this The Gathering. It's in norway...

/Mikael Jacobson

hehe, easy to remember the gathering. http://www.gathering.org

But then, The Gathering is much much more than a lan party, most of these parties are Demo partys. And im amazed at how these young video game players dont even know what the demo scene is. People compete with the best demo, not the best frag maniac.

Check out google for more info.
http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Multim ed ia/Demos/Parties/

Also, why arnt you listening to scene music, the music of the demo parties!?!?
http://www.scenemusic.net

Per made a typo ;-P www.gathering.org.

He is one of the main organizers of The Gathering.

Actually both DH and TG has moved past that lable.

They both embrace EVERYONE that enjoys computers.
Be it Coders/GFX/Anims/Gamers, it does NOT MATTER as long as you have fun!

Now some people keeps on ranting about how this sub culture is ruining everything for that sub culture. Bullshit!

To all of you UberCoolHardCoreSceners , please stop!..you are NOT helping the recruitment to the demoscene by slagging someone for liking to play games instead of writing code,Making Grapichs,doing animations or making music..hey wait..ain't there a lot of so called "Game Lamers" that make VERY nice graphics for their clans Web pages, and what about level designers, skinners,Mod coders and so on!..

Also remember that some of the first Demos was actually Intros to cracked games :)..(still remember the long ass scroll text on the intro to Way of the Exploding Fist:)

But back to the issue at hand.
Parties like DH and TG are NOT focus parties, no!
we're parties that want ot include EVERYONE.
At TG I've seen everything from the TotalNewbieJustGotMyComputerForXmas to the Serious42YearOldEngineerWhoIsHereToPlayQuakeWithHi sSon

So PLEASE stop acting like jerks and can the Game Lamahs,Scene Nazi,Leecher Dood,IRC geek or whatever you feel you need to call your fellow Computer Enthusiast to feel superior.

Oh and Greets to all Old Amiga farts out there..
remember CryptoBurners Rule! :)

this picture kinda shows what The Gathering is all about .. It started out as demoparty in '92 and is still running hot. These days all 5k of tickets gets sold out in ~24-48 hours, so there's apparently a huge market for lanparties here in norway, sweden and other close countries :)

Some people has been complaining about "the stench has to be awful" .. well, guess what, since this isnt your average lanparty where people are staying in small, overheated rooms (like most "hey, lets gather over at our house"-lanparties), it works out quite nicely. Most people also shower daily (guess some of you havent heard about that. ;))..

Ok, for those of you that are complaing about things getting too anonymous .. well, it sorta could be. But that would be boring, wouldnt it? What you usually do is that you go to the party together with your demogroup, your clan or your friends, whatever suits your need. You sit together with the people you already know (5-10-50-100) - and guess what, just on the row behind you, someone you know from IRC is sitting .. and you're meeting them for the first time ever! .. and then, suddenly, the coder of that *awesome* demo just suddenly pops by your row to say 'hi' .. you kinda have to be there to get the spirit :)

DreamHack looks really nice this year, hopefully there'll be a few good contributions to the democompos and we'll see some nice showdowns in counter-strike and Q3 ..

.. and to end it all up; go there!

The Gathering is bigger, with 5000 tickets being sold in less than 24 hours. The event lasts for four days and consists of the world largest temporary network. And not to mention the 25% share of girls. The first TG was back in 92 with 1,200 people and then the girls entered for free, but that's not the case anymore.

Why arent't there any LAN parties like this in the US? I wouldn't think it would be a problem to gather the people, the US having the highest percentage of PCs per capita and all.

I attended The Gathering the first time in 1993, and it was actually more fun before there was a large network and a high speed internet connection, although I had a really good time in 1996 too.

I attended The Gathering the first time in 1993, and it was actually more fun before there was a large network and a high speed internet connection, although I had a really good time in 1996 too.

The Gathering isn't meant to be so much a "gamer" party as it is supposed to be for the Demo Scene .

Good examples of what demos are are here if you have a win32 or DOS box around.

More parties like Mekka, Assembly, The Party and others exist.

In the article they site that they will be the largest lan on earth - well not quite :-)

This easter we had a great time at The Gathering in The viking ship on Hamar, Norway as usual. 4500 (!) attendees brought their own computers, and once again it became the biggest temporary lan ever made.

100Mbit ethernet provided by Nortel, it worked mostly flawless, with exception of the normal power outages and bad switches. :)

I can truly say that Gathering is one of the most fun ways to spend easter, i got whupped in the quake3 tournament, but atleast i brought home 85GB of 'stuff' :)

Check out http://www.gathering.org for the lan site, and ftp://ftp.gathering.org has all the great compo-winners and demos.

In the article they site that they will be the largest lan on earth - well not quite :-)

This easter we had a great time at The Gathering in The viking ship on Hamar, Norway as usual. 4500 (!) attendees brought their own computers, and once again it became the biggest temporary lan ever made.

100Mbit ethernet provided by Nortel, it worked mostly flawless, with exception of the normal power outages and bad switches. :)

I can truly say that Gathering is one of the most fun ways to spend easter, i got whupped in the quake3 tournament, but atleast i brought home 85GB of 'stuff' :)

Check out http://www.gathering.org for the lan site, and ftp://ftp.gathering.org has all the great compo-winners and demos.