Slashdot Mirror
DreamHack Winter 2002
JJC writes "DreamHack, a huge LAN party, is taking place this weekend in Sweden. Here's some information in English and a daily report from sponsors ASUS. This and this ought to give you an idea of the scale of the thing. Here's the obligatory webcam and their Internet bandwidth graph. It's a massively impressive event, wish I was there! :-)"
must be weeping with joy
Anybody care to imagine the B.O. that's gotta be emanating from this place?
No? Me neither.
On the plus side, there can't be any shortage of munchies lying about this place.
This is the biggest fragfest outside of Afghanistan!
ByteMyCode.com: A Web 2.0 code sharing community.
I feel sorry for the guy who kicks over the wrong plug in that place. :-)
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
You bet. I hear these LAN parties usually have a decent internet connection. Since @Home is gonna leave me in the dark any minute now, I'd love to be anywhere else but here.
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
Jason.
Let me know when they have one in July...
The cake is a pie
All 7 women in the room have strategically placed laptops right next to the door, for quick exits.
The town that it is hosted in is flooded by melting snow from around the building.
'Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson...'
dreamhack is a DEMO party. For art, not for playing retarded videogames all night. It's
for hacking out that great 4k intro with the full
first level from decent. Or faking that multiple light source "phong" with a picture of your mate holding a coke can. Not for playing videogames.
I wish people would grab a clue. Gamerlamers used to get chastized or beat up for going to demoparties, sadly this isn't the case anymore.
I doubt i'll even bother ever going to asm if this is what they have become. There's no thrill in watching some dorks play videogames. There *is* a thrill in seeing the latest wizzbang effects on the screen and figuring out for yourself just how they worked so you can do that plus more in your next demo.
Hi all, I'm sitting in the picture that's linked in the little article.. and it's cool. I recently moved to sweden from the UK (where we have nothing on this scale). A little info:
/. effect.. we've got a 1Gbit uplink here (although how they got that to an exhibition center is beyond me).
:-).
:] These people know who they are dealing with it seems - very popular. There's also a smattering of hamburger/hot dog/sandwich places around the halls.
1. We haven't noticed any
2. Wintertime is a GOOD TIME for this sort of thing - it's 27C (80F) here just now. The other big swedish LAN (Remedy) is held in the summer, and it's a real sweatfest by comparison.
3. Yes, there is a bit of a discrepancy in gender... there are about 20 girls here, out of the 4500 people here (luckily I happen to be going out with one of them
4. The most popular game here is Counterstrike, the half-life mod. the main tourney is 5v5, 128(!) teams. Q3 is also popular. There's also a history of demos here, and we've seen (and heard)some very cool stuff on the big screen. Microsoft is also here with some Xboxes - and a competition to win them (played on the machines themselves).
5. You can buy Jolt Cola by the 24 pack slab
All in all, I'm having a fine time - and so are most other people. Apart from some horror stories with DOA machines, it's all going splendidly.
You're all welcome to come say hi on IRC - irc.quakenet.org #dreamhack has about 700 of us.
iolaire (Qnet oper, gamer, blah blah)
And the brethren went away edified.
40 km ethernet cable.
15 km electical wiring.
6 000 chairs.
2 km tables.
1.5 Megawatts of power.
40 000 cans of Jolt cola.
And I though my 8 person Lan Party was hard to put together...
Thats seriously a lot of fucking jolt. Dear god. I mean really, holy fucking shit. Damn.
.. and I thought there was a lot of pr0n & cola when only 20 of us get together. That thing is a pornography and caffiene industry executives wet dream.
"a huge LAN party, is taking place this weekend in Sweden."
"The goal is to create a cool Flash Demo highlighting ASUS component products and "jazz up" company image. The demo is to be use on ASUS company website. The theme of the demo will be "ASUS, at the heart of your technology.""
I guess the Swedes have a lot of time on their hands... to be able to host a 4 day slumberparty/advertisement for ASUS...
Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.
Any prizes for beating the 86 hour mark for gaming?
;)
Can't let Korea hold that forever
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
ASUS "Heart of Technology" FLASH DEMO COMPETITION The goal is to create a cool Flash Demo highlighting ASUS component products and "jazz up" company image. The demo is to be use on ASUS company website. The theme of the demo will be "ASUS, at the heart of your technology." My God... Asus has a seriously dorky marketing department.
I think its something like pallet but can't remember the spelling and a quick look didn't turn up the spelling.
but more importantly what are they for? are they the tables? the legs or what? a bonfire? how does a warehouse of them make me think of a lan party? jolt i get. wood i don't.
100% Pure Evil With The Look And Feel Of Wholesome Goodness
For the curious, there's also a similar event once a year (easter) in Norway. The event is called The Gathering, and had almost 5000 participants last year (not including the massive stab etc etc). For more information visit http://www.gathering.org
--
\ Christian A Strømmen
A few hundred geeks, thousands of cans of Jolt, no sleep and fragging. What happens when one of them goes crazy and starts some real life carnage? I can't wait.
*Goes to watch the webcam shot*
Do you think any of the thousands of geeks bother to shower?
Me Want
Let's hope we don't see a repeat of the guy who died after playing a game for 84 hours straight.
News at 11:
5000 people at a gaming conference died today after everyone forgot to go to the bathroom. Toxic waste officials said that the stench alone would be enough to keep all of Sweden's grass fertilized until 2022. The scene, as described by one passerby remarked, "It could only be described as disgustingly gross, yet strangely hilarious".
--
"we live in a post-ideological world..." - Billy Bragg.
If the roof fell in there wouldn't be a single broken hearted sweetheart back home.
Sex - Find It
All Real Programmers (TM) know Dr. Pepper is the shit when it comes down to separating the men from the boys.
Definitely integral to surviving those 35-hour debugging bugfest sprees armed with nothing more than a butter knife, some scotch tape and an MP3 player.
Those who emerge from that hell with six functional brain cells (or more) are theretofore respectfully acknowledged as members of the Order Of The Pepper Willies, bless our tender hearts.
Question is, when will events like this become real complace. I mean most of us that game online, have held our own little lan party's. Anywhere from 8 (your standard cheap ether-hub, and still okie on a 512k adsl modem) and 24, when you can manage a guild or clan meeting (which takes an age to organize). Games such as half-life and its many skins, probably wont be able to set them up. But with the likes of "Dark age of Camelot" Europe / US . Seeing so many users now, and ever expanding, with more and more servers, it can only be a matter of time till events become common place. Esp, if they offer prizes for either code or storyline.
--+> Life, is there any?
With 5000+ people, and the twilight of CRTs, a warehouse of jolt won't even make it through the night.
---
Better living through solipsistic philanthropy.
If anyone at the DreamHack LAN party is reading this, I dare you to degauss your monitor in the middle of a huge game. A guaranteed good time!
did anyone else just see the cam pic with the entire bottom half of the monitors off? almost like when part of a power grid in a city is out, you can see which grid which buildings are on.
get some 220v, some serious regulators, and some upses in there man!
I'm here, and everything rocks,execept that the whole thing is over in about 4 hours :/
Ring brother, ring for me | Ring the bells of hope and faith
Ring for my damnation | I am at the gallows end
...that their network guys are better than their photographers. If not they'll be better off playing nethack over a 28K modem.
BFL
There's one thing computing teaches you, and that's that there's no point to remembering everything.
--Doug Copland
and I thought th 20-30 person lan I went to at k-sate last tuesday was big.....wonder if I could get Asus to sponser one of my lans or get any jolt since you can't get it here, just goes to show though I can't do anything right I mean for crying out loud my lan this sunday will probably have 12 people at the most
I wanna move to Sweden hot girls...huge lan parties, big bank accounts from people in other countries whats not to like??
Might as well post this here because there won't be any Comdex news on /. because nobody cares anymore.
I was in a cab in Vegas the week before Comdex. The cabbie said everyone in town hates Comdex. "They all come here with one shirt and $20 and a week later they leave with the same shirt and the same $20."
Makes sense. If that town loved Comdex, you can be sure it'd still be growing even if the technology industry wasn't (which it is).
I'm one of the 5000 participants here on Dreamhack and it's a blast. There have been lots of tournaments, and some events that you perhaps wouldn't have expected. For example there has been a Mr Paperbag competition, where participants have been dressing up in nothing more then small paper bags. ATM there's a stand up comedy competition and for a couple of hours ago there was a snowball war arranged outside. There's been all kinds of companies giving away free stuff like t-shirts and games. M$ has even given away a couple of Windows XP cd-roms. =D
It seems like some of the readers here believe its main goal is to make a flash demo for ASUS, and well, I can tell you that that's far from the truth. I would estimate that there are 80%-90% gamers here, and I would be surprised if it turns out that even 1% participates in creating a flash demo for ASUS.
If you take a look around you would probably guess that M$ has a big part in financing this event. There's a game corner where you can try different X-box games for free and M$ has dragged a bid Unisys server down here. There's even been an attempt to make an unofficial world record in max CS gamers hosted by the Unisys server.
A pic of the server can be found here.
O well, back to the fun, there's something going on at the scene again.
Gamers coming to a compo is bad enough, but actually inviting them is completely out of line. These are sad, sad times indeed.
One non-hygenic nerd is bad enough...but what happens when you fill an aircraft hanger full of them?
You'd need at least a biohazard suit to clean up the mess...
RIP Mekka. We will miss you. Apparently the organizers had some disputes they couldn't resolve. However, if you missed Dreamhack, Breakpoint looks like it's going to be the party to go to, with many of the organizers from mekka and other demoparties. (Note: FPS people need not apply - no gaming allowed, no warez allowed. sorry.) Hope to see you there!
--joshua
Yeah, right. More like a cheap translation to english spit out from some language converter.
So...many...casemods...Neon...Lights... *seizure*
Is anyone wearing their lead lined thermal underwear???
So for those who don't know what a Swedish Krona is (SEK), the full price ticket of 600 SEK is a bit over $55. There's a visitor price ticket which is a fourth of the price, valid for a day, unless you're a girl, which makes it valid for the full event. Furthermore, they provide a WLAN, so if you park your car just outside the building, you can probably join in for free with a laptop. Someone correct me if I'm mistaken.
Yeah people, just open few of those webcam shots and show them what we're made of.
BTW it's Jolt based on this picture
I must say... super duper...
I hate the fact that you people don't salute me
in the report for the 28th it says: blinking lights
/. stand above the rest.
Obviously this should be blinken lights.
Not to be anal or anything, but I think the lack of these type of errors is exactly what makes
They should be careful, considering the event is sponsored by M$.
Yes, a Flash demo on a commercial web site IS advertising, and I'd find offensive if the 1st motherboard maker in the world did offer me only $1,000 to make one. ..rats! I'd expect from a big company like Asus much more money for a demo thay'll use to promote the company image!
Ok, Flash isn't neither asm nor C but a crappy pseudo language that no real coder would want to use, but
Maybe all they want is to hire for cheap some poor young enthusiast developers, and decent prizes like $10,000, $8,000, $5,000 would help those poor young enthusiast developers start their own business.
Nothing against Asus here, they make good motherboards and very good laptops (going to purchase one in the next months). I just felt offended from a developer point of view when I read about the competition "prizes".
I thought that the biggest LAN party in europe is Shrimpwars?(anyone know more?)
:)
And that the biggest championship is World Cybergames I mean look at the prizes!
Total Players : 63
Participating Countries : 33
Purse :
Gold US$ 20,000
Silver US$ 10,000
Bronze US$ 5,000
Though the webcam view was cool
Live for the present, learn from the past, and dream of the future!
Almost everyday I play UT (and others) with my cable modem w/ pings under 100. What do they have that I don't? The whole world of broadbanders is my lan party!
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
how much did you pay to go to this?
:) (ok you're reading /.)
:)
do you live there or did you travel to go to it?
I'm pretty sure it is BYOC.. is there a limit on how many computers one can take? (you'd think there'd be that guy who brings 10) It also looks like it would be a real "hot rod" show.
whats the most popular game being played there?
what are you all doing?
were there any technical problems throughout the party?
whats on the big screen?
I can't even imagine 5000 people online in the same room. sorry for the bombardment of questions.. i think I'll just post this anon
Yep... computer camp rocked (and it was exactly as you describe).
We had ours at a nearby major university, and got to play with all their big iron. The older geeks were very cool, and injected some computer-hacker evil into a group of young computer afficionados (none of us were even in puberty yet). I also think they enjoyed showing off their 31337 H4X0r cred (they didn't realize we were soaking up everything like little tape-recorders). We even got to live in the dorms while we were there (it was summer, so everybody was gone).
Big fun indeed, and let me tell you, we were an intimidating group walking to the computer lab... short, pale, skinny, glasses (with tape). I was amazed that nobody messed with us, and this was waaay before it was cool to be a geek.
We were incredulous... The differences between our various schools and the university environment were huge. None of us particularly wanted to go back to regular school... it really made college-bound believers out of all of us.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
This really brings to mind the first battle Ender has with the Buggers.
You know- the one where they are all clustered together and they bop 'em with Dr. Device and get the whole steeking fleet?
Sadly it is true, but they have strong points in common ie: no more than over-priced-tarted-up-recycled-packaging...
There is an online report made by Sweclockers.com, Sweden's biggest computer site. The text is in Swedish, but there are tons of photos on case mods etc. Did you ever want to see a wooden case?
Is this a new corporate trend? I mean... they get together some of todays best demo artists to create great flash ads for them. All Asus & co have to do is to pay a couple of peanuts for the whole thing.
Just wonder if companies like IBM, Intel and Cisco will jump on to this trend of getting cheaper-than-shit quality ads to "jazz up" their company image...
Normally a lanparty webcam runs on the internet connection present at the site - and now that URL has been slashdotted.. geez that's nasty, now there will be almost no connectivity for the participants.. unless they use a seperate connection of course.
To slashdot a 4 day lanparty connection is an evil thing to do!
This used to be a demoparty, like Assembly, but it seems to have degenerated into a simple game even...sad. It is not too nice, however, that people seem to often mistake demo events for lanparties ("Yeah, it was a great party, but all those competitions interrupting our games really sucked") Why come to a demoparty if you don't like demos? Anyone else have similar experiences?
Np. The Unix.se crew is there. Look for yourself .
M$ dont sponsor this thing to make enemys. They yust wount to show there stupid xbox.
I'm sure they are!
Unforunately the TPL site appears to be down though :-/ It was a 500 person lan event in portland oregon on may 22nd 2002.
a large hall with only braindead gaymers. what's so special about that? bah, i miss mekka&symposium!!
Sorry people, neither Dreamhack Winter or The Gathering is a "LAN-Party" (Dreamhack Summer is). Both parties were started as demoparties, and have evolved to computer parties. The focus was in the beginning 100% on demoscene - coding, graphics, music, drinking beer, having fun and getting to know people. Now, both events have become an in-between mix, called a Computer Party. See here for an in-detail comparison. The main idea is NOT to bring your computer and play computer games. The main idea is to come, meet people from all over Europe (especially at The Gathering), get new friends, etc. Hopefully you will also learn something new - programming, graphics, music, etc.. and relax. Many people live very far apart (this is Norway and Sweden...), and only see eachother at these events.
No, it's just a bunch of kids playing games, trading warez and showing off their mad caze modding skillz. "Dream Hack" my ass.
Why is this on Slashdot?
DreamHack's own security and the swedish police
I can only welcome the idea, it seems the demoscene is once again on the edge of a major change in the public they are reaching.
There was a time when scene-ing was a BBS-only thing, and parties were small obscure events happening in garages and local youth centers. Since the internet, demo parties have, together with LAN parties (and usually it's the same event anyway), grown to visitor numbers beyond the domestic range. For organisers it's getting more and more difficult to support such a load without sacrificing some of the I-know-you atmosphere that used to be present on these cosy events. Since a few years, demos (and lan parties) have been striving to entertain the general public, not just the underground scene. I think this is a good thing, but I also miss the sense of obscurity that stemmed from the hack and crack era, of which it was initially a subculture.
For more news and references on these parties and the content they put out, see Scene.org
ciao,
a0a
With great power comes great electricity bills.
Lamers!
Greetings go to (in no particular order) Spaceballs, Virtual Dreams of Fairlight, CNCD, Complex, Silents DK, Lemon., Melon Dezign, Sanity, TRSI, Kangaroo, Bomb!, Andromeda, Rebels, Scoopex, Crionics, Stellar, Phenomena, Abyss, Cryptoburners, Mahoney & Kaktus, Pygmy Project, Artwork, Contraz, The Black Lotus, Potion and all we have forgotten
Pics from unix.se I found "interesting".. ;-)
:-)
Too much Jolt
Fun with Jolt #1
Fun with Jolt #2
Crazy about Jolt
Crazy about GTA
As the comment says... busted!
Nerd heaven
Oh god...
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Why don't we have ANYTHING like this in the United States?
Vortran out
Knowledge is like ignorance.. too much can be just as bad as not enough.
check out Slengpung.
Lot's of handsome geeks.
A hand gun or a Rifel maybe!
Thear are a lot of hunters in Sweden. But Realy! Geting a gun is hard and all gun owners most have a gowerment aproved steal locker and must be a member of a hunting party.
A bunch of geeks getting together to play games on their computers. The can do the same fucking thing at home, so what's the big deal if they get together at one place and do it there. It's not like they are going to meet women there that don't look like ugly guys. Like me, pissing in a toilet is the only thing their dicks are good for, so what's the point of all of this? To congregate and show the world what a bunch of fucking losers we are in hopes there will be some sympathy and a govt program to get geeks laid? Forget it.
I guess stating the truth now days means being a troll.Looks like it could also be a sting operation for the RIAA, MPAA and Microsoft.
"Sure guys, come on in and have a seat. Play some games, share some movies, music, pr0n, etc. Don't mind the SWAT team members at the exits, they are merely promoting the newest Tom Clancy game. Enjoy!"
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
damn. at our computer camp, we took many breaks from programming etc (breaks? horrors!) and went *outside* and did *physical activity*.
well, some people did anyway, there were those that couldn't be dragged away from the computer room with wild horses. but not everyone was a pale weak supernerd.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
In my experiance, I think its more fun to have lans with a smaller number of people. 5 to 8 seems to work out well. At that level, gaming just seems more personal and overall more fun. Try talking trash to an opponent on the other side of 5000 people, heh.
Sorry mods, that's not a -1 Troll, it's -1 Off Topic. And so is this post.
Nerdvana
I think this is fucking stupid, if the don't meant to accomplish something. Bunch of kids are there playing LAN games.
A friend of mine is into Voodoo Acupuncture. You don't have to go.
You'll just be walking down the street and... Ooohh, that's much better.
-- Steven Wright
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...