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Color Ascii Art Library
thedj_sd writes "As the true slashdot reader you just love ascii art of course. You have toyed around with aalib or maybe you use it all the time to watch your pr0n :) Well VLC media player's senior developer sam was bored some time ago and created libcaca. The Colour AsCii Art library of which he himself says: 'I am perfectly aware that libcaca is the waste of time it looks to be. No need to tell me about that.' But you just can't help looking at that beautiful picture of Stitch, and Doom in coloured ascii is da bomb. It works on dos/windows, Linux and Mac OS X and there is a VLC plugin and SDL backend available."
So we have now Big Mouth Billy Bass linux support . We have color Ascii Art Library. Wow. I really needed those two.
But when we're talking about it more seriously: I've heard once from CTO of some medium-business company, when I was suggesting him to use some Open Source solution instead of MS SQL based system: Yes. I know that they do lots of useful things, but how can I trust to people who release stuff like aalib.
So the bottom line is they will never consider us geeks as serious conversation partner. OS movement needs some white collar guys, that can speak to all those marketing infested CTO's CEOs and other wiseasses. The ones that speak marketingish.
I can't view this now - big brother's proxy and all - but it sounds like the good old days of the C64 BBSs that used PETSCII graphics. Full color, and many graphical characters - however ALL CAPS TEXT ONLY! But the days of the good old animated prompts and colorful message boards are still in my memories, yet I have no desire to go back to them and wait for a cursor to jump all around the screen at 1200 baud!
It merely converts the picture to lower resolution image by replacing each pixel with a symbol like * or @ with different colour. This is cheating. Anyone can write a program that does this conversion.
The real ascii art uses only black text. And by using different ascii symbol, it can create the black and white and different shade of gray to protray an image.
For instance, Simpsons ASCII ART
Every time there is a story about someone doing something just for the hell of it some tool comes along and says that it's a bad idea because it doesn't directly enrich Linux/Open Source/The Roman Empire/Whatever in the manner that said poster wants it to.
Dude, and all of your close-minded brethren, chill the hell out. People do these things because they are having fun. They do them because they WANT to.
Not everyoine gives a damn about Fighting The Big Fight. Get over yourself.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.