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I downloaded and installed Whitecap, just because I had never heard of it, (I usually use the old Geiss 4.29.)

Nice plugin, and the installer prompted me for which media players I wanted to add it to; but, unfortunately, you're right, no Audacious support. Long list of other players, tho.

Then you just write it in fancy sounding bullshit, and pass it off as a unique invention -- and the morons at the patent office, whose only real criteria is if the checks clear, will rubber stamp it and suddenly you have a patent.

To a great degree this is actually true. The patent officers don't care about the checks that much, though. It just creates a lot of work for them when they reject a patent claim and the lawyers of the people applying for the patent, i.e. prosecuting (that's the technical term) it prove them wrong and get their rejections overturned. It also shows badly on the record of the patent officer if their rejections tend to not hold up. The lawyers usually have more resources and motivation to make the patent pass through. So, the patent clerks tend to take the path of least resistance, i.e. approving the patents after doing their due diligence. Patent officers have a pre defined set of databases(including scientific journals, previous patents, etc) that they look through for prior art, and they don't look outside of that set (for example on Google) to find out if an idea is original. There is a fair amount of screening that goes into granting a patent for sure, and they don't just stamp anything. But they will stamp anything as long as their asses are covered. And they are really tiny asses that don't need a whole lot of cover.

Now when you bring up a case in court to invalidate somebody else's patent, that's when your lawyers will do all the google searches and thorough research to show that the invention was publicly known before the patent was granted. This research would go in front of a judge who will most likely rule in favor of whoever hired the bigger guns.

The problem with ideas in software (as opposed to, say, chemistry) is that they are generated far too quickly and anonymously to be included in formal databases and journals, even though they may be publicly known. I'll give you a rough example. Around the year 1998, you could use a plugin in Winamp called Geiss that showed trippy visualizations of music. Before that plugin (correct me if I'm wrong), music visualization was mostly just fancy waveforms. Apple lifted this idea wholesale and made it part of iTunes in 2001. Sony patented this idea in 2009. Poor Mr. Geiss got diddly squat for his invention, even though millions or even billions have probably used it till date, and his idea got patented more than a decade after conception. Such is the state of affairs: big tech companies go out and patent ideas that they learn from the general public. If the idea's implementation takes off, the patent provides them security, and if it doesn't, it's a bargaining chip to gouge money from anyone that tries to use the idea.

Regarding the patenting of ideas versus inventions, in theory you can only patent inventions, but the definition of what constitutes an invention is very lax, especially for software, and you don't have to go and show a working proof of concept to a patent officer. If the patent application describes the software in enough detail so as to allow an average programmer to develop it based on just the description, it's good enough to qualify. In other words, you can pretty much patent a piece of software at the requirements and architecture stage.

http://www.geisswerks.com/about_milkdrop.html. You will find the link to Milkdrop II (2.25c) source. Ryan Geiss is a genius IMHO based off his works alone. He's worked for Microsoft (Kinect development), nVidia, and Google. That's pretty impressive all on its own. Hands down, Milkdrop II is *the* visual to display at parties or in the club.

Obviously you say April Fools however the best jokes are based on some fact and the fact is I know of at least 2 senior and talented devs that worked on MS Kinect project and around release time jumped ship to Google.

eg My old friend Ryan Geiss is one who co-wrote the skeletal tracking for Kinect is now at google.
http://www.geisswerks.com/about_natal.html

Far more interesting is Lee Krasnow's 'Barcode Burr' puzzle. 6 crazy-looking shard-like pieces fit together to form a solid cube, and it takes 127 moves to unlock it... but it's not mind-numbingly boring to solve. :)

Here is the puzzle's home page:
http://pwdbp.com/?action=5386.showDesign

A few pictures of it:
http://www.geisswerks.com/ryan/barcode_burr/219_19 42.JPG
http://www.geisswerks.com/ryan/barcode_burr/219_19 44.JPG
http://www.geisswerks.com/ryan/barcode_burr/219_19 51.JPG

Far more interesting is Lee Krasnow's 'Barcode Burr' puzzle. 6 crazy-looking shard-like pieces fit together to form a solid cube, and it takes 127 moves to unlock it... but it's not mind-numbingly boring to solve. :)

Here is the puzzle's home page:
http://pwdbp.com/?action=5386.showDesign

A few pictures of it:
http://www.geisswerks.com/ryan/barcode_burr/219_19 42.JPG
http://www.geisswerks.com/ryan/barcode_burr/219_19 44.JPG
http://www.geisswerks.com/ryan/barcode_burr/219_19 51.JPG

Far more interesting is Lee Krasnow's 'Barcode Burr' puzzle. 6 crazy-looking shard-like pieces fit together to form a solid cube, and it takes 127 moves to unlock it... but it's not mind-numbingly boring to solve. :)

Here is the puzzle's home page:
http://pwdbp.com/?action=5386.showDesign

A few pictures of it:
http://www.geisswerks.com/ryan/barcode_burr/219_19 42.JPG
http://www.geisswerks.com/ryan/barcode_burr/219_19 44.JPG
http://www.geisswerks.com/ryan/barcode_burr/219_19 51.JPG

Since July of 2003 -- http://www.nullsoft.com/free/milkdrop/. The author of the plugin is Ryan Geiss. His plugins are the best I have ever seen.

Oh HELL YA! Milkdrop has got to be THE best plug-in developed. Geiss is genius. How he is able to program the AI to do the things Milkdrop does just blows me away. And now, it's open source! Sweet mother of holy bliss!

http://www.geisswerks.com/

Everything old is new again.

That, or some people are very much out of touch. For example, have you seen the Pontiac TV ad which, for most of the ad, is just a screen from what looks to be the Geiss Winamp plugin? I mean, it's probably meant to look hip but it made me think of 1998, the last time anyone thought those were cool.

Back in the days of Winamp 2.91 there was a bug that meant when Winamp started on shuffle it would always play the first track. I think the behaviour of shuffle was also tweaked by the legendary Ryan Geess to not repeat a track until 50% of the other songs had been played. This may well have had statistical side effects.

Besides, until there's a version of Ryan Geiss' kick ass winamp plugins, for another player (let's not pretend that iTunes visualizations are even in the same league) I'll stay with the old stuff, thank you. How up to date do you have to be with MP3 software anyway?

Drempels - a really psychedelic "wallpaper" ('doze only, sorry).
Nope, not optical illusion. Just LSD effects fully animated.

One thing I miss from windows is drempels. It's not abstract art like this, but just weird swirly patterns and stuff. You can set it to handle any overlay color, so for a while I had the backgrounds of a lot of windows set to rgb(1,1,1), which I set drempels to overlay. This way black things didn't get messed up if they were meant to be black. A great majority of the time it didn't choose certain bright colors, so use those for text.

Anyone know of anything similar for my GNU/Linux/XFree86(Soon to be X.Org)/KDE machine? :)

However, Winamp has pretty much always been free as in beer. Even when they had registration, there was a distinction between the Lite version and the Pro version. At one point I think they were even planning to do "adware" though I'm not sure if a release with that was ever done.

Over here is a complete archive of Winamp releases, except the none of the frelling links work. But you can see the release history at least. At a certain point, Nullsoft was bought by AOL and thus didn't need to do the shareware/registration thing anymore.

As for Open Source, Nullsoft has released a lot of OpenSource stuff, pretty much all for Windows. The most useful being their installer program, I've seen a lot of freeware packages use NSIS. Here's all the programs Nullsoft has released recently. I've always liked Nullsoft's naming approach...

(Historical note: One of the most popular plugins for Winamp has been Geiss, developed by Mr. Ryan Geiss. He originally wrote it independently. Then he got a job with Creative Labs working on Oozic, Creative's own idea for a media player with nifty visuals. Oozic started life as Lava but had to change names, probably for trademark reasons. Sadly, Creative Tech turned asswipe with Oozic, declaring it only available for those who bought their hardware and had it on the driver CD. Anyways, Mr. Geiss left Creative to go work for Nullsoft! Where he developed some more nifty visualization tools such as Milkdrop and Geiss II.)

(BONUS Historical note: Before Winamp, before multi-media players with visualization plugins, there was Cthugha by Kevin "Zaph" Burfitt. Cthugha started life as a DOS freeware program that did pretty VGA animations in synch with music from an audio CD. Eventually a version was developed for Windows 95, and 3D support was even added providing you used a 3DFX card. Sadly the project has languished for years now but not before Kevin released source and a number of folks ported Cthugha to MacOS, Linux, Java and yes, even a Winamp plugin!)

Ryan Geiss makes some of the best winamp plugins available, including Geiss, Milkdrop, and Smoke. Geiss is a little dated and runs too fast on my computer at maximum settings(the framerate isn't restricted making it look too fast), but Smoke and Milkdrop run smoothly. Milkdrop is one of the best Winamp plugins available, so check it out if you have Winamp, or now, XMMS.

Ryan Geiss makes some of the best winamp plugins available, including Geiss, Milkdrop, and Smoke. Geiss is a little dated and runs too fast on my computer at maximum settings(the framerate isn't restricted making it look too fast), but Smoke and Milkdrop run smoothly. Milkdrop is one of the best Winamp plugins available, so check it out if you have Winamp, or now, XMMS.

alot of vis plugins are badly coded and run slow on any system.

check out geisswerks. I can run all their plugins at max detail at 1024 x 768 on my xp 1800 system. I have run them on slower computers and the fps is ussually good.

This test image was displayed in the same video mode as before (VESA 640 x 480@85Hz).

I'd be interested in seeing the results from the same experiment, except with a framed Despair, Inc. poster hanging on an old-skool-Mac beige or old-skool-iMac blue wall, with funky Star Trek red alert lighting (or disco lights too), and two 17" monitors at 1600 x 1200 side by side, with a third 15" montior running some spiffy Winamp visualization at 1024 x 768 to the left ome, and a funky Sharper Image thing glowing on the desk.

Or you can just do the experiment at 1280 x 1024.

Turbyne
"Guys cry over cars; men cry over boats, but real men cry over guns." - unknown

sweet
with the proper tweaking, you can get your pr0n to talk to you...

I think I need to try this out with drempels too (win only)

Someone mods their case with the Drempels look. :)

I wondered why this looked so familar then I realized Wired also had a story not too long ago about the dude as well.Geiss is also another great WinAMP visualization plugin as well.

Backyard Boxing online?That's unpossible!
ICQ:47685501

I remember see something about that in an article, I think the vis plugin was Geiss
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My roommate works at Panasonic and brought home one of their Plasma Displays. There's nothing quite as cool as playing Quake 3 Arena on a 42" 16x9 aspect screen. :)
For our Y2K party we set it up to use Ryan Geiss' Winamp Plugin as a nice conversion piece.

Of course it costs around $13999.95... :)

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In my last living situation we set up a LAN exclusively for the purpose of playing mp3's from the shared directory on the computer in my roomate's room on the laptop sitting right on top of the stereo equipment stack. This was so the laptop could be running Geiss fullscreen so everyone in the living room could enjoy it. There were no latency problems unless my roomate started doing things on his computer in the other room (a P-125).

just a couple things, thanks for the discussion also. (here's a quick hello to everyone lurking,."Hello!")

I had a conversation about this last night with friends, some of which have high-speed connections.

Me too. We were listening to some of this (KVHW) using this. Them someone mentioned these guys. So I used this. And everyone heard what we were talking about. Which opened the door to summarize this discussion for them. :-) Later, I pointed out how we were all felons, pirates, and all that was evil in the world. Then, we went to this show, and made a night of it.

There is no philosophical connection between the Free Software/Open Source movement (if you merge them together for simplicity) and piracy of intellectual property.

Except that some folks in the FS/OM movement don't believe in piracy of intellectual property as a concept. I fall short of that extreme, but believe our current situation regarding IP, is, flawed.

Therefore, those who don't pay for such content are parasites relying on the "rubes" who do pay for it.

Then I guess I'm some sort of pararube, eh?

Basically, we'll be down to hobby content.

If Linux is an example of hobby content, then I'm all for this scenario. I like to think of Free Software (and hopefully someday Free Music) as the baseline for measuring software. If your commercial software isn't as good as the stuff I can get for free...your stuff sucks and isn't worth my money. As we raise the bar for what you can get for free, you have to raise even higher the bar of what you sell. This provides the necessary motivation to succeed, that other forms of communism (i.e. in the real world) lacked. Just so I can be honest with both you and myself on what I'm really talking about. Eliminating scarcity changes value fundamentally, it's time to deal with it.

If you want to continue this, may I suggest e-mail?

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