Network Aware Screensavers? 76
borgquite asks: "Does anyone know of any network aware screensavers? I am running a school network and would love to be able to have a screensaver where the other computers communicate with each other in some way - for example, if you could have a marquee where the message gets passed from screen to screen. The best I can find is n 0 time, but is there anything else a bit more exciting?"
Completely impractical but really cool concept (Score:4)
Re:Completely impractical but really cool concept (Score:1)
I hate to be a nay-sayer ... (Score:1, Interesting)
Network infrastructure : $20,000.
100 end user workstations : $125,000
Clueless Network Admin : $24,000 / year.
Bringing the network to its knees by running screen savers on the servers : Priceless.
Take a few seconds, open your Task Manager and go to the graph page (last tab.) Let it settle down until the CPU graph has calmed down and bottomed out. Start up your Screen Saver (3d Flowerbox seems to be popular in offices) and let it run for 20 seconds. Ditch the screen saver, look at TaskMan - the entire time the screen saver was up your CPU utilization was pegged at 100%.
It doesn't matter if your server is crunching numbers, cracking RSA, or running a screen saver - if your server is running a program that is taking every available CPU cycle it is going to run like a dog. Might as well be running Unreal Tournament 2003 on all the servers - if you are going to use all the available CPU cycles at least have a good time doing it.
Understand that these 'screen savers' really don't save your screen, current monitors die before any real burn in happens, but that is a different story.
1. Log off of your servers.
2. Turn off their monitors.
3. ???
4. Profit (*)
(*) This will extend the monitor lifespan, reduce your energy consumption, reduce the heat given off by each system, reducing your cooling needs. Also, your network will run a LOT faster than a network with all the servers running screen savers, giving you a faster network for free (or increasing the interval between needing to upgrade your servers, thus
You're missing the all-important "oo,shiny" factor (Score:2)
Re:I hate to be a nay-sayer ... (Score:3, Informative)
Or read the last FAQ on this page [monitorsdirect.com].
I'll admit the problem has mostly (but not entirely) gone away with newer technology, but it is still worth running a screen saver/blanker and/or enabling the power saver mode to keep your monitor working it's best.
Re:I hate to be a nay-sayer ... (Score:1)
Re:I hate to be a nay-sayer ... (Score:2)
I've seen a lot of "screen savers" like that, the most popular of which is the SETI@Home "screen saver".
Then there are others which do have elements which move around the screen, but don't use the color phosphors in a fairly uniform way.
Actually, IIRC, isn't it true that the different colored phosphors in a monitor fade/age at a different rate? How about inventing a screen saver which counteracts that?
Another useful utility would be something which provides useful information, which I'm sure some do exist. Does anyone know of a useful screen saver which can provide "at a glimpse" view of the status of various information (weather, stocks, network activity, etc)?
Re:I hate to be a nay-sayer ... (Score:2)
(I used to DJ at a bar where they left a big screen on every night after closing. You can still see the CNN logo in the bottom right hand corner of the screen.)
Re:I hate to be a nay-sayer ... (Score:1)
I would be hesitant to leave a 6 year old monitor on overnight in a room with no adult supervision. I have watched older monitors (ok it was a IBM 5153 CGA monitor 8 years ago, but still) start smoldering, and actually catch fire with no outside help.
Power saver mode is something else altogether - it actually semi-shuts down the power to a bunch of the components - that will save on heat, electricity, and screen burn.
Re:I hate to be a nay-sayer ... (Score:1)
Even Windows 95 ran the screensaver at its lowest priority, so that pretty much every other service the system was offering would get CPU cycles before the screen saver.
Running a screen saver on a server might chew up the _spare_ CPU cycles it has (which would be most of them on most file/print servers running on somewhat recent hardware), but on any decent OS it shouldn't have any noticable impact on performance. If your screensaver is affecting your server performance, you need a new OS.
The same reasoning applies to having a GUI on your server. Unless your OS sucks or your hardware rolled off the ark with Noah, it shouldn't have any measurable effect whatsoever, if said GUI is just sitting idle.
I know I"m stupid but... (Score:1)
does someone want to explain?
Xinerama is a bunch of X displays glued together (Score:3, Interesting)
Currently it works in a way that means it can span multiple video cards in a single machine, but not multiple machines. X itself lets you have many pointers, but only one window can have the keyboard focus.
The way I use these things is to have a big desktop that spans a couple of monitors along with both a mouse and a trackball for different kinds of work. But I was envisioning a giant shared desktop with many people working in it: not only could you get nitfy screen-saver effects, you could do things like passing windows or icons around between people's desktops directly. "Here are my changes to the code. Look them over before I commit them." The seamless collaboration part of the idea really floors me, and after some thought I really think Someone Should Do It (i.e., I should get off my lazy ass and code it unless someone else kindly decides to do it for me).
Environment, (Score:3, Insightful)
Turn the monitors off and save a whale.
Re:Environment, (Score:5, Funny)
My house is right next to the local whale based power plant and every time they throw another whale in the fire it creates a really awful smell. I suggest we get rid of all of the power plants that burn whales and use only ones that burn dolphins and baby seals. They are much easier on the air.
Re:Environment, (Score:2)
Did you ever stop to think? (Score:2)
I cannot stand to sit there for hours while my 40,000 Ween bootlegs download. I can only have my spyware collect so much surfing information before I have to walk around a bit.
Seriously though, a lot of people only know how to shut them off by whizzing on them.
Of course... (Score:1)
How can they learn!?
obviously... (Score:1, Troll)
Killjoys (Score:5, Insightful)
Gawd, have things gotten sooo bad that coding useless but nifty apps is a lost art? Doesn't anybody tinker anymore?
I'm *soooo* sick of seeing post after post of "but why would I need this?" If you're asking this question, click the frigging back button already. You don't. Fuck off. Let the rest of us who would like a nifty-but-useless little app be merry.
I'm so worked up now I may write something like this just to piss off the 'practical'
Re:Killjoys (Score:2)
More and more of the comments are being filled up (and moderated up) with the same repetative ...3. ??? 4. Profit like comments. Its getting harder and harder to enjoy slashdot. Its really a shame, but I am noticing myself participating in discussion threads a lot less. What we need is another slashdot-like site that you can only become a member of by invitation. Anybody would be able to read the stuff, but to post and participate, you'd need to be reffered to and generally be a non-bonehead. However, I don't see anything like that happening :-(
Re:Killjoys (Score:1)
That's interesting. Some sort of responsibility dependency chain would probably work well, where you are at least partially responsible for the people who you have vouched for. You would need some limited abilities to punish them if they act up, since the moderator's reaction to what they say will reflect your rating as well (to a smaller degree).
Re:Killjoys (Score:2)
Re:Killjoys (Score:3, Insightful)
Mebbe students could do it as a project for a networking class? Perhaps it could be done to stress-test the network?
Once the code is opened, others may bring it further! It may not be incredibly useful, but no less useful than a normal screen saver!
Personally I'd like to see a screen-saver that bounces a ball between multiple machines. It would just be nifty. Like all the other screen-savers in the world.
Re:Killjoys (Score:4, Funny)
>=]
Re:Killjoys (Score:1)
No, he's looking for something that ALREADY EXISTS. And he's probably doing his searching for this item on HIS OWN TIME, and if he finds it I can guarantee you he would install and configure it on HIS OWN TIME as well.
So why were you judging this poor fellow in the first place? Just to be an asshole or is there more to it?
DIY (Score:5, Interesting)
I did this a few years ago. I wrote a screensaver that bounced a logo around. The whole reason for the screen saver was that it sent a UDP packet to a central logging server noting the time that the screen saver came on and went off. This allowed us to log each machine's idle time, and I had various awk scripts that made nice little reports (win32 screen saver, but server stuff is kept on Unix of course).
This was a really trivial program - one C file, took me maybe an hour or two to write. It would be extremely easy to extend it so that it sent a UDP packet to the "next" machine (where each machine has an ordered list of machines, saved in the registry), and waited for a reply. If no reply, send the packet to the machine after that, and so on. Once you get a reply, turn off the marquee; if no reply, wrap marquee around. The screen saver also listens for UDP packets when it's running. If it receives a packet when it doesn't have a marquee, it sends a reply, and scrolls in the marquee from the left. The only tough part is some sort of synchronization mechanism to ensure the marquee doesn't skip around; this synchronization would happen when the machine starts up the screen saver (this part is cloudy, the rest of the design is clear in my head).
I can't find my old code - this is a while ago, like five or six disk crashes - and the code was so trivial, I didn't put it in CVS (I only back up my CVS repositories, everything else I lose whenever a disk fails).
I might write this after dinner, since it sounds kind of cool. If I do, I'll base64 encode it and put it in my journal, so check my journal tomorrow morning (can't post directly to slashdot because of lameness filter, but it seems lameness filter doesn't apply to journal entries). I try to write my win32 stuff using gcc (cygwin environment for development, avoid cygwin libraries in final product) - if cygwin is missing the screensaver headers or something, I might use the MS .NET SDK (which is free and comes with fully-functional C and C++ compilers, nmake, and everything you really need to write win32 programs, just no lame IDE). If that won't work, I'll use VS 6.0.
I challenge anyone else on slashdot to write a better version, from scratch, by tommorow (2002-12-13). Should get interesting if anyone takes me up on this. I have to go to work tomorrow (which limits the time I can put into it), but you college kids should have plenty of free time since you should be on winter break by now.
Re:DIY (Score:2, Interesting)
Use MingW (Score:1)
Re:DIY - done (Score:4, Interesting)
Yet again, slashcode is pissing me off. I have this 100K base64 file I want to post, and it won't let me do it, not even in my journal. It lets me do it if I split it up into tiny chunks, but I don't have time for this. This has happened a few times before. Great thing is, you don't get an error message or anything when your journal entry is too big - you just get dropped into some other page with no explanation.
OK, it works if I make it smaller by removing the built executable and split it in two. You'll need to compile yourself, and you'll need MS VS 6.0 to do it. Still pisses me off. I guess I'm not encouraged to share code on slashdot, eh?
Below are the contents of the README:
Re:DIY - done (Score:2)
Question... how do I decode base64?
I may wind up re-implementing the graphics part in SDL so it'll run on pretty much anything... think about it; roaming across a Windows PC, a SPARC, a Linux box, and a PlayStation2.... that would kick some major ass!
Re:DIY - done (Score:1)
http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/base64/ [fourmilab.ch]
Re:DIY - done (Score:2)
I tested it like this from a Unix machine:
I guess I didn't mention that it's supposed to be zip file, which would save people time. Base64 is nice in that it should ignore all extraneous whitespace and whatnot that slashcode puts in it.
As for hosting it - do whatever you want with it. I'm only throwing it on slashdot and not putting it on a server because I prefer to remain somewhat anonymous on slashdot.
Have fun with it - the graphics part is just a big bitblt as I've never really done any graphics stuff.
Sonar on X (Score:5, Informative)
token passing for distributed mutual exclusion... (Score:2)
Primordial Life (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Primordial Life (Score:1)
Yeah, MS,
Re:Primordial Life (Score:2)
Very Microsoftish.
Electric Sheep (Score:3, Interesting)
"Would, you, like, to, play, a, game?" (Score:5, Interesting)
(people could write bot plugins...)
Re:"Would, you, like, to, play, a, game?" (Score:3, Interesting)
Every time id comes out with a new version of Quake, I wonder why they don't offer a screensaver mode. It should take one of them maybe two hours of keyboard time... maybe a day if they do network-bot-autoplay (they'd need some kind of autodiscovery, fairly trivial). On slower PCs the load/shutdown times would suck until the average gamer's PC caught up with the high-end of the target platforms (and now, god-knows-how-many-years-later, something like Q1 ought to load up pretty damned fast).
Of course, Carmack reads /. sometimes... let's keep our fingers crossed for Doom III... :)
Heck, I'd probably pay a little extra, now that I think about it.
Re:"Would, you, like, to, play, a, game?" (Score:1)
On the same subject... (Score:2)
Re: AC troll (Score:1)
Church office: old Pentium 200's and the like with 32 or 64meg RAM. No discernable IT budget. Even if I WERE willing to pirate the software, Win2k/XP won't run at acceptable speed on older hardware; Win9x will.
Bounce.. (Score:4, Interesting)
I used OpenGL, SDL, and SDL_net to make things easy. If you're at all a programmer, it shouldn't take much to pull those tools together and do something simple. In my case, I actually had a file that would load informing the program which computer was to its left and right so the shape could move properly. But for an actual screensaver, I imagine something more random would be fine. Maybe using some broadcast packets to discover each other.
Fun stuff. Too bad I can't find the code anymore.
I have truly wonderful source for this... (Score:4, Funny)
-malakai
rotating couch in stairway?? (Score:2, Insightful)
surely someone can provide us with this essential toy.
Re:rotating couch in stairway?? (Score:2)
Another idea (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Another idea (Score:2, Interesting)
The original Doom game actually had a feature similar to this, only it was fixed to your 1st person viewpoint.
You could set up two other network clients with a special command line switch, and they would show you your left and right 90 degree angle views respectively - really neat too!
Being a 4 player network game you could still frag one of you friends at the same time, and they'd have a hard time sneaking up on you. :-)
zSet the time on the marquee the same (Score:1)
Yet Another Network Screensaver Coding Idea (Score:3, Interesting)
In the initial setup process (and also in a configuration tool or file somewhere), each system's screensaver would ask for its physical position. Either absolute coordinates in a lab, or relative positioning to other machines could be used. In the case of relative positioning, you could either have each computer check those computers next to it if they're running the screensaver, and if those computers are currently displaying an object. If not, that screensaver would spawn an object. It would probably be easier to have a master server that knows which machines are currently idle and where they're at, and have each node send a message to the server/next node whenever an object is about to leave the screen, and in which direction it's going (forward, back, left, right, maybe up and down if there are monitors in a rack). For example, in a scrolling banner, as soon as the text touches the right side of the screen, it would send a message to the next node containing the text itself, the text velocity, and which side of the screen to begin it on. Since they're at the same velocity, the second node should have the text fully appear at the same time the text fully disappears from the first node. You could also have the server keep a pool of objects, and when a node's screensaver is deactivated, the object is sent back to the pool and displayed somewhere else. If only one computer in the lab is running the screensaver, it could have all the objects bouncing around, and as soon as other computers turn on, the objects would be distributed or sent to them as the server desires. You could even add manual control for objects, too.
Sonar (Score:2, Interesting)
part of a screenshot [jwz.org] / description of entire package [jwz.org]
there's not much to it, but it can render network ping times of other computers as if they were boats on the sonar display.
simple but cute
Blinkeneye (Score:5, Funny)
This reminds me of the old computer folklore story. I've heard two versions of it, one occurring at MIT, and one occurring at Georgia Tech. If anybody out there knows the true origin of this story I'd appreciate knowing.
The story associated with MIT goes that an unknown prankster programmed the mainframe to pick a random unused terminal in one of the computer labs, display a large eye on the screen, look left and right, wink and then disappear only to reappear on yet another unused terminal in the room. Apparently this caused quite a panic among the janitors at the time who thought the computer was watching them.
The story associated with Georgia Tech goes that late one night (or early one morning depending on how you look at it), a sleepy eyed operator was running the nightly backups. As he watched the status lines scroll by, a large (CBS logo style) eye appears on screen, winks and then disappears leaving only the status messages scrolling.
N 0 time seems interesting (Score:2)
It's more concept art that evolves over time than a screeensaver, but unfortunatly it seems like everyone running it seems to create their own creation, rather than contribute to another. (there is a selection list of other users - you can hook into someone elses creation and contribute)
It uses a client-server though, and might not be what some people want for security/paranoia reasons.
electric sheep - a distributed screen-saver (Score:1)
When the screen-saver is activated, the screen goes black and an animated 'sheep' appears. Behind the scenes, the screen-saver contacts an internet server and joins the parallel computation of new sheep.
Every fifteen minutes 24/7 a new sheep is produced and distributed to all clients for display. Each sheep is an animated fractal flame. The coordinates are chosen by the server with some simple heuristics.
Sysadmins with too much time on their hands. (Score:1)
Make one yourself.
Can make it in SDL where a 3d world is synched between all computers, only the cameras in the 3d world depend on where the actual screen is physically located. Measure the coordinates of the monitors, and use the coordinates as arguments to the screen saver.
How about a racetrack of rc cars racing from screen to screen. Maybe with sound too.
WebPage as screensaver (Score:3, Interesting)
We run this on a machine plugged into a plasma screen so that our "latest build status" web page is always on display in the corner of the room, but the machine it's running on is locked against casual prying eyes.
I don't know why IE doesn't have a screen-saver mode built-in itself, and as far as I know Mozilla or similar don't do this...
Anyway, it's about 300 lines of VB which you're welcome to (contact me via schmerg.com), and then you can just write webpages to co-ordinate any action between machines.... get each client to request a page and add it's local machine name as a CGI parameter and you're away...
--
T
Re:WebPage as screensaver (Score:1)
DALiWorld (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a giant, multiple machine aquarium. You'll not only get fish swimming across machines in your network, but across the Internet. Here's a blurb from their site:
The only drawback for me is that it's written in Java, so getting it to run on the FreeBSD servers in the data center didn't work.
Have fun!
On a similar note... (Score:1)
Seti and Distributed.net were fun to watch my ranking shoot through the roof, but in the end all those 486 workstations would tend to check out blocks more than they checked them in.
Then I stumbled across PointCast, and set that as the screensaver. This was nice, as their proxy was free at the time. So, all the machines displayed news headlines and custom channels (network announcements, upcoming local events, etc). That was nice, but PointCast was BIG - I'd love to find somthing like that which is a bit more network friendly (multicast?) today...
Anyone remember the Energizer Bunny? (Score:1)
The professors who taught courses in Mac clusters at CMU used to get real annoyed when the bunny interrupted class.
Obligatory ISR Reference (Score:1)