My girlfriend participates in something a little more structured than this, but similar. Sito has a number of projects such as (descriptions taken from Sito) -
Hygrid: "This collaborative art project has been evolving since December 1995. The idea behind this project is to create a "hyperlinked grid of visually interlocked images". Each square on the grid is a small image created by a participating artist. Each square is adjacent to another artist's square in the structure, appearing on the top, right, bottom or left side."
Gridcosm: "Gridcosm is a collaborative art project in which artists from around the world contribute images to a compounding series of graphical squares."
Those are the two most active and interesting ones. For those that enjoy recursive acronyms, you'll definitely like Gridcosm (like a recursive acronym.. FOR YOUR MIND). Some of the levels can be outright beautiful, some are crappy.
The way it works is this: after having an account, you "reserve" a piece to work on. You have a set time limit to turn your piece in before somebody else gets it. As an example -- and since she reads Slashdot, she's gonna kill my ass -- you can also view individual pieces and jump from there.
The most interesting behavior I've seen, though, is that work breeds work -- when one or a few people decide to bounce in, the entire community picks up, contributing to an almost organic growth and decline of the various levels and sub-projects.
I remember reading in 3001: The Final Odyssey (the last installment in the 2001 series) that they had devised 15 petabyte (? exabyte? I forget) blocks which they used to store everything because they had never found a need for any more data, and I suppose, getting a better space:storage ratio wasn't worth it.
This spawns an interesting question, of course, which is, how much data will we need after that? Obviously the qualitative "an entire person's life" has been used for a while to describe the ultimate in personal data storage. But why wouldn't we want to store two? Or perhaps a room filled with records of everyone in a group? (Scary, anyone?) So somebody goes off to the lab and gets it even smaller.
I think the issue is that at some point, it becomes data-greed. (To a certain extent, I see that today with filesharing: people have vast collections of music they don't listen to, because it was sometimes about the music but always about collecting as much of it as possible. How many times have you boasted the size of your music collection in public? 10 gigs? 20 gigs? 50 gigs?)
Even better, it brings up the issue of having everybody's existence catalogued. If you're data-greedy, then being out of touch with the past experiences of other, long-dead humans isn't an issue you can discuss. Could that help someone in the future? Yah. Could it hurt? Probably. Future office conversation:
1: I got the new iPod today. 120 exabytes. 2: That's weak, my Human Experience collection is 200 ex's strong. 1: You watch all those experiences? 2: Some of them.. not really. 1: When I got it the first thing I did was go to the Apple iExperience Store and buy Morgan Freeman's life. I'd share, but it's DRM'd. 2: You are such a tool! Hey, I'm going to watch MTV5372, the 5,372nd independent music channel. It rocks so much more than MTV5371, which totally blows. They have a half-life of 12 hours, want to join me before the sell out by the end of the day?
I for one say the future can suck it. Let them solve their own damn problems, I have enough to deal with myself without getting brought back to life and retroactively sued for letting the notion get into some kid's head that icy hot was a good idea for that sort of thing because he can't skip forward fifteen minutes and see the consequences.
Yes, Apple has certainly never provided any free, major updates via Software Update. (And I do mean 'major' for previous owners of OS X. New features and all. If somebody knows which versions it was -- since OS X updates tend to go free/pay/free/pay, etc., help me out.)
As for games, you'd have been right a few years ago. Not any more. Macs feature faster bus speeds and graphics cards on out-of-the-box than most PCs, so it can't really be argued that it's "not a gaming platform". UT2004, America's Army, etc., all on my Mac.
Absolutely not. In fact, the mental image on my end is Tux, Clippy, and Daemon fighting it out.
Tux is gone; he's cute, but has no defensive weaponry. Furthermore, he can't even fly, all he can do is repeat the Futurama quote to himself --
Penguin: Full of fish? Bender: Not entirely. Penguin: Then let's fish.
So it's down to Clippy and BSD Daemon, and maybe that Apple and his friend Darwin the platypus in the corner who're both giving moral support, but they're setting off fireworks because they like eyecandy and have a short attention span.
Pretty much, the Daemon unwinds Clippy and uses him to open a stuck CD-ROM drive.
I like FreeBSD for the speed; additionally, OpenBSD has some usability "quirks" here and there, but nothing you can't get rid of with a little work. For the BSD vs. BSD showdown, remember that FreeBSD's fast IPsec stack (hardware accelerated) was taken from OpenBSD. I don't have data on how much else is from OpenBSD.
Here is IPsec setup on FreeBSD: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/h andbook/ipsec.html
The following has been brought to you by IANAT (I Am Not a Troll).
I've been using FreeBSD since long before it was apparently dying, since maybe the 2.x branch. I never tried Linux until this past year, because I live under a rock on the dark side of the moon.
I tried SuSE, and it was great and all -- the setup was really nice -- but it's not there yet. In fact, I backed over it with 5.2 immediately afterwards. Why? Well, for day-to-day use, I didn't see any difference between Linux and BSD -- except the cluttered/etc, the fact that YaST didn't like me seeing the cluttered/etc, and this nagging feeling that it was a system of patched together parts, rather than a well-tested, stable "distribution" (note: I'm knocking the distro, not the kernel, and only slightly).
When it came down to it, FreeBSD and a daily-updated ports tree seemed to "click together" better than Linux. For most other day-to-day use, there wasn't a huge difference, though I will say BSD was a tad 'snappier'.
I urge those who haven't tried FreeBSD before to give it a chance. It's not that hard, and it is not, contrary to popular opinion, "better for servers". I play UT2004 and America's Army daily on my BSD box with no problems (thank you native nvidia drivers). What causes most people to gawk after seeing Linux is the text-mode installation -- which is just text menus, but still menus. (I've seen some installation programs that can make you wonder.. OpenBSD, I'm talking to you.)
Last month I introduced FreeBSD to someone who had never, ever used *nix in any form before. After about an hour explaining different concepts (slices, ports and packages, rc.conf), she was off and running and actually, almost sadly, hasn't asked for my help once since then. She had X and KDE up and running within the day.
So give it a try. We have no evil plan. (Except that, yanno, our mascot is related to Satan)
My mother is blind. She had failed cataract surgery in 1996, and unfortunately, her and my brother have had a combined total of 13 surgeries. (Whereas I got off easy with one detached retina in 1989.)
We can muse all we want about how Linux needs a screenreader, but I don't care if Microsoft and SCO made a screenreader made out of DRM'd GPL source dipped in goatblood.
My mother needs something better than Zoomtext. She needs a screenreader. And all politics aside, I'll buy her a fucking iMac if she gets a free screenreader because of it. I love her more than politics.
Open source is not just about free-as-in-beer, it's not just about free-as-in-speech, it's about free-as-in-people. Too often as open source developers we think, "this is what's good for the GPL" or "this is what's good for a feature list," not "this is what's good for some guy's mother."
Thar's what opensource is about; not feature lists, not the efficiency of inetd, it's about users. We are their servants. May we serve them honorably, so they may have sight -- may we give them gifts, that we may be invisible.
If you boil a frog, it doesn't know that it's in trouble until its legs are paralyzed and can't escape. Yup.
This is probably more for the "VoIP" segment of the universe than "XBox Live", this is a perfect reason to enable IPSEC over VoIP.
Too often the open source community thinks of the unreasonable approaches before the reasonable, and that's only because you have to fight fire with fire. In this case, you have to have as much reason as a politician will -- and yes, that sometimes means being as evil as they can be -- that is to say, with transparent encryption, it makes it unreasonable for a state agency to tap because it would mean confiscating servers and disrupting business (the state, in the US, must have a compelling state interest to do just about anything). This can have two effects: (1) Hosts increasingly require unreasonable agreements (CYA). (2) The disruption of business is so much that is becomes a burden for politicians to support.
My point being: look guys, we're Slashdotters, and we administrate public networks, and we're smarter than them, and with no disrespect, we can make prior art out of whatever aged notions of data security they have. That's what open source is about; the gathering of the people above those with green and power.
We should assume our data is being intercepted in the first place -- that's why you provide data security. Thou shalt encrypt.
Reading through the posts citing communist states and national IDs, I can't help but think there's a significant amount of misunderstanding.
The facts of the case will not be argued over whether someone must carry ID at all times, nor will it set precedent to that effect.
Yes, the charge of "delaying an officer" is stupid. I'm also quite aware of the fact that denying ID should not be made probable cause. But..
Remember, the guy was in a car. While a car parked off the side of the road isn't all that suspicious, you do require a license to drive -- and to carry that license with you at all times while driving -- and it's unlikely the guy will argue, "yeah, I walked over to my car and sat in it".
I, for one, welcome our new origami motorcycle gang overlords.. oh screw it, I shouldn't have expected to get modded as 'funny' at five in the morning anyway.
Here at Virginia Tech most, if not all, of the Unix labs are Linux. While this works well for classes, here in the multimedia lab (yes, really) we've had good experiences with FreeBSD. I'll be modded down endlessly for this, but the robustness of the operating system has proved itself far above Linux, where on some systems with oddish hardware basic functionality (like ps and ifconfig) crashes out of the box -- without ever touching the network, so a big fat "no" to those who will claim it was h4xored.
The ports system is really what I wanna talk about here. It makes system installation and maintenance super-easy for those with fingers and maybe a stick to type "make install clean" to install just about anything in our 9000-and-strong ports tree.
Also, the way that BSD is a "whole system" makes the issue that Linux is *technically* only a Kernel a non-issue; that is to say, you don't have to worry about say, gcc not being on a system, and if it's in the release, it'll play nice with everything else in the release.
As for straight facts:
1. People come in with their Student IDs which have a standard magstripe on the back. We have a little USB reader that acts as a keyboard device, so when you scan it in, it just types the student number, no special hardware required.
2. Our signin database (to keep track of which computers are being used) is just a PHP page linked into a MySql database that keeps tracks of what people are using stuff for -- more funding for great justice.
3. When we've checked them in, the page gives us an OPIE password that we give to them (these are regenerated weekly by the lab admin). OPIE keeps our systems secure (i.e., without one universal password) and allows us to control who gets to what, and when.
Doing creative video production can be a lot like creating a game, and in this particular instance, what you're searching for is pre-made foley.
A lot of effects can be made simply by rubbing/banging objects together and then tweaking them, e.g., a grandfather clock is a piece of thick, taught cable hit lightly by a tire iron, slowed down 300%, and repeated. A sizeable personal effects library can be made by going around with even so much as a tape/MD recorder and a good mic just getting sounds from anywhere and everywhere. I'd recommend a boom mic if at all possible to prevent picking up background noise. But you might look a little weird doing it.
For "artificial" effects and maybe a little music, Korg's Electribe series of synths (EA-1 Analog Synth, ES-1 Sampler, ER-1 Rhythym Synth, EM[X]-1 "Music Production Stations" -- does all of the above to a limited extent) can provide endless resources, when properly played with, at least. I remember being in a crunch for a project and synthing out a perfect submarine "ping" in ten minutes on the ER-1. Obviously, more expensive synths will do more.
If you're really going for pre-made (despite my lectures to the contrary), try Opsounds -- Copyleft for audio. Make sure and contribute back, mmmk?
And of course, Sounddogs. The sounds (and even short-length compositions) are incredibly cheap -- we're talking $0.30-2.00 or so depending on length and license, high-quality, downloadable OR they can burn a CD and send it to you, and it's royalty-free forever at purchase. Considering they merely resell licensed effects, you'll probably find more than a few effects that you're trying to imitate in the first place.
The older demoscene stuff never conveyed a message but sure was cool looking. The music wasn't bad either--Necros is still one of the best musicians I've ever listened to.
Try Komplex and then do a search for the old-school demos like Second Reality.. it gives perspective as to what was possible with a little creativity and design, not to mention a few math books and a talent for hand-coded assembler.
Now if only our beloved Hornet was around.. [snif]
Slashdot Mirror
My girlfriend participates in something a little more structured than this, but similar. Sito has a number of projects such as (descriptions taken from Sito) -
Hygrid: "This collaborative art project has been evolving since December 1995. The idea behind this project is to create a "hyperlinked grid of visually interlocked images". Each square on the grid is a small image created by a participating artist. Each square is adjacent to another artist's square in the structure, appearing on the top, right, bottom or left side."
Gridcosm: "Gridcosm is a collaborative art project in which artists from around the world contribute images to a compounding series of graphical squares."
Those are the two most active and interesting ones. For those that enjoy recursive acronyms, you'll definitely like Gridcosm (like a recursive acronym.. FOR YOUR MIND). Some of the levels can be outright beautiful, some are crappy.
The way it works is this: after having an account, you "reserve" a piece to work on. You have a set time limit to turn your piece in before somebody else gets it. As an example -- and since she reads Slashdot, she's gonna kill my ass -- you can also view individual pieces and jump from there.
The most interesting behavior I've seen, though, is that work breeds work -- when one or a few people decide to bounce in, the entire community picks up, contributing to an almost organic growth and decline of the various levels and sub-projects.
I remember reading in 3001: The Final Odyssey (the last installment in the 2001 series) that they had devised 15 petabyte (? exabyte? I forget) blocks which they used to store everything because they had never found a need for any more data, and I suppose, getting a better space:storage ratio wasn't worth it.
This spawns an interesting question, of course, which is, how much data will we need after that? Obviously the qualitative "an entire person's life" has been used for a while to describe the ultimate in personal data storage. But why wouldn't we want to store two? Or perhaps a room filled with records of everyone in a group? (Scary, anyone?) So somebody goes off to the lab and gets it even smaller.
I think the issue is that at some point, it becomes data-greed. (To a certain extent, I see that today with filesharing: people have vast collections of music they don't listen to, because it was sometimes about the music but always about collecting as much of it as possible. How many times have you boasted the size of your music collection in public? 10 gigs? 20 gigs? 50 gigs?)
Even better, it brings up the issue of having everybody's existence catalogued. If you're data-greedy, then being out of touch with the past experiences of other, long-dead humans isn't an issue you can discuss. Could that help someone in the future? Yah. Could it hurt? Probably. Future office conversation:
1: I got the new iPod today. 120 exabytes.
2: That's weak, my Human Experience collection is 200 ex's strong.
1: You watch all those experiences?
2: Some of them.. not really.
1: When I got it the first thing I did was go to the Apple iExperience Store and buy Morgan Freeman's life. I'd share, but it's DRM'd.
2: You are such a tool! Hey, I'm going to watch MTV5372, the 5,372nd independent music channel. It rocks so much more than MTV5371, which totally blows. They have a half-life of 12 hours, want to join me before the sell out by the end of the day?
I for one say the future can suck it. Let them solve their own damn problems, I have enough to deal with myself without getting brought back to life and retroactively sued for letting the notion get into some kid's head that icy hot was a good idea for that sort of thing because he can't skip forward fifteen minutes and see the consequences.
Poster should be marked as Funny. And uninformed.
Yes, Apple has certainly never provided any free, major updates via Software Update. (And I do mean 'major' for previous owners of OS X. New features and all. If somebody knows which versions it was -- since OS X updates tend to go free/pay/free/pay, etc., help me out.)
As for games, you'd have been right a few years ago. Not any more. Macs feature faster bus speeds and graphics cards on out-of-the-box than most PCs, so it can't really be argued that it's "not a gaming platform". UT2004, America's Army, etc., all on my Mac.
Absolutely not. In fact, the mental image on my end is Tux, Clippy, and Daemon fighting it out.
Tux is gone; he's cute, but has no defensive weaponry. Furthermore, he can't even fly, all he can do is repeat the Futurama quote to himself --
Penguin: Full of fish?
Bender: Not entirely.
Penguin: Then let's fish.
So it's down to Clippy and BSD Daemon, and maybe that Apple and his friend Darwin the platypus in the corner who're both giving moral support, but they're setting off fireworks because they like eyecandy and have a short attention span.
Pretty much, the Daemon unwinds Clippy and uses him to open a stuck CD-ROM drive.
I like FreeBSD for the speed; additionally, OpenBSD has some usability "quirks" here and there, but nothing you can't get rid of with a little work. For the BSD vs. BSD showdown, remember that FreeBSD's fast IPsec stack (hardware accelerated) was taken from OpenBSD. I don't have data on how much else is from OpenBSD.
h andbook/ipsec.html
Here is IPsec setup on FreeBSD: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/
The following has been brought to you by IANAT (I Am Not a Troll).
/etc, the fact that YaST didn't like me seeing the cluttered /etc, and this nagging feeling that it was a system of patched together parts, rather than a well-tested, stable "distribution" (note: I'm knocking the distro, not the kernel, and only slightly).
I've been using FreeBSD since long before it was apparently dying, since maybe the 2.x branch. I never tried Linux until this past year, because I live under a rock on the dark side of the moon.
I tried SuSE, and it was great and all -- the setup was really nice -- but it's not there yet. In fact, I backed over it with 5.2 immediately afterwards. Why? Well, for day-to-day use, I didn't see any difference between Linux and BSD -- except the cluttered
When it came down to it, FreeBSD and a daily-updated ports tree seemed to "click together" better than Linux. For most other day-to-day use, there wasn't a huge difference, though I will say BSD was a tad 'snappier'.
I urge those who haven't tried FreeBSD before to give it a chance. It's not that hard, and it is not, contrary to popular opinion, "better for servers". I play UT2004 and America's Army daily on my BSD box with no problems (thank you native nvidia drivers). What causes most people to gawk after seeing Linux is the text-mode installation -- which is just text menus, but still menus. (I've seen some installation programs that can make you wonder.. OpenBSD, I'm talking to you.)
Last month I introduced FreeBSD to someone who had never, ever used *nix in any form before. After about an hour explaining different concepts (slices, ports and packages, rc.conf), she was off and running and actually, almost sadly, hasn't asked for my help once since then. She had X and KDE up and running within the day.
So give it a try. We have no evil plan. (Except that, yanno, our mascot is related to Satan)
If I had unhealthy prions injected into me, I'd be pretty pissed too.
Posted on Yahoo! news.
My mother is blind. She had failed cataract surgery in 1996, and unfortunately, her and my brother have had a combined total of 13 surgeries. (Whereas I got off easy with one detached retina in 1989.)
We can muse all we want about how Linux needs a screenreader, but I don't care if Microsoft and SCO made a screenreader made out of DRM'd GPL source dipped in goatblood.
My mother needs something better than Zoomtext. She needs a screenreader. And all politics aside, I'll buy her a fucking iMac if she gets a free screenreader because of it. I love her more than politics.
Open source is not just about free-as-in-beer, it's not just about free-as-in-speech, it's about free-as-in-people. Too often as open source developers we think, "this is what's good for the GPL" or "this is what's good for a feature list," not "this is what's good for some guy's mother."
Thar's what opensource is about; not feature lists, not the efficiency of inetd, it's about users. We are their servants. May we serve them honorably, so they may have sight -- may we give them gifts, that we may be invisible.
If you boil a frog, it doesn't know that it's in trouble until its legs are paralyzed and can't escape. Yup.
This is probably more for the "VoIP" segment of the universe than "XBox Live", this is a perfect reason to enable IPSEC over VoIP.
Too often the open source community thinks of the unreasonable approaches before the reasonable, and that's only because you have to fight fire with fire. In this case, you have to have as much reason as a politician will -- and yes, that sometimes means being as evil as they can be -- that is to say, with transparent encryption, it makes it unreasonable for a state agency to tap because it would mean confiscating servers and disrupting business (the state, in the US, must have a compelling state interest to do just about anything). This can have two effects: (1) Hosts increasingly require unreasonable agreements (CYA). (2) The disruption of business is so much that is becomes a burden for politicians to support.
My point being: look guys, we're Slashdotters, and we administrate public networks, and we're smarter than them, and with no disrespect, we can make prior art out of whatever aged notions of data security they have. That's what open source is about; the gathering of the people above those with green and power.
We should assume our data is being intercepted in the first place -- that's why you provide data security. Thou shalt encrypt.
ALSO SEE: Due Process, Fourth Amendment.
Reading through the posts citing communist states and national IDs, I can't help but think there's a significant amount of misunderstanding.
The facts of the case will not be argued over whether someone must carry ID at all times, nor will it set precedent to that effect.
Yes, the charge of "delaying an officer" is stupid. I'm also quite aware of the fact that denying ID should not be made probable cause. But..
Remember, the guy was in a car. While a car parked off the side of the road isn't all that suspicious, you do require a license to drive -- and to carry that license with you at all times while driving -- and it's unlikely the guy will argue, "yeah, I walked over to my car and sat in it".
I, for one, welcome our new origami motorcycle gang overlords.. oh screw it, I shouldn't have expected to get modded as 'funny' at five in the morning anyway.
Here at Virginia Tech most, if not all, of the Unix labs are Linux. While this works well for classes, here in the multimedia lab (yes, really) we've had good experiences with FreeBSD. I'll be modded down endlessly for this, but the robustness of the operating system has proved itself far above Linux, where on some systems with oddish hardware basic functionality (like ps and ifconfig) crashes out of the box -- without ever touching the network, so a big fat "no" to those who will claim it was h4xored.
The ports system is really what I wanna talk about here. It makes system installation and maintenance super-easy for those with fingers and maybe a stick to type "make install clean" to install just about anything in our 9000-and-strong ports tree.
Also, the way that BSD is a "whole system" makes the issue that Linux is *technically* only a Kernel a non-issue; that is to say, you don't have to worry about say, gcc not being on a system, and if it's in the release, it'll play nice with everything else in the release.
As for straight facts:
1. People come in with their Student IDs which have a standard magstripe on the back. We have a little USB reader that acts as a keyboard device, so when you scan it in, it just types the student number, no special hardware required.
2. Our signin database (to keep track of which computers are being used) is just a PHP page linked into a MySql database that keeps tracks of what people are using stuff for -- more funding for great justice.
3. When we've checked them in, the page gives us an OPIE password that we give to them (these are regenerated weekly by the lab admin). OPIE keeps our systems secure (i.e., without one universal password) and allows us to control who gets to what, and when.
Doing creative video production can be a lot like creating a game, and in this particular instance, what you're searching for is pre-made foley.
A lot of effects can be made simply by rubbing/banging objects together and then tweaking them, e.g., a grandfather clock is a piece of thick, taught cable hit lightly by a tire iron, slowed down 300%, and repeated. A sizeable personal effects library can be made by going around with even so much as a tape/MD recorder and a good mic just getting sounds from anywhere and everywhere. I'd recommend a boom mic if at all possible to prevent picking up background noise. But you might look a little weird doing it.
For "artificial" effects and maybe a little music, Korg's Electribe series of synths (EA-1 Analog Synth, ES-1 Sampler, ER-1 Rhythym Synth, EM[X]-1 "Music Production Stations" -- does all of the above to a limited extent) can provide endless resources, when properly played with, at least. I remember being in a crunch for a project and synthing out a perfect submarine "ping" in ten minutes on the ER-1. Obviously, more expensive synths will do more.
If you're really going for pre-made (despite my lectures to the contrary), try Opsounds -- Copyleft for audio. Make sure and contribute back, mmmk?
And of course, Sounddogs. The sounds (and even short-length compositions) are incredibly cheap -- we're talking $0.30-2.00 or so depending on length and license, high-quality, downloadable OR they can burn a CD and send it to you, and it's royalty-free forever at purchase. Considering they merely resell licensed effects, you'll probably find more than a few effects that you're trying to imitate in the first place.
The best show in the history of man. Enough said.
Try Komplex and then do a search for the old-school demos like Second Reality.. it gives perspective as to what was possible with a little creativity and design, not to mention a few math books and a talent for hand-coded assembler.
Now if only our beloved Hornet was around.. [snif]