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Graphics Software

Network Aware Screensavers? 76

Posted by Cliff from the wasting-cycles-for-visual-entertainment dept.
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?"
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Network Aware Screensavers? More

Network Aware Screensavers?

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  • Completely impractical but really cool concept (Score:4)

    by adb ( 31105 ) on Thursday December 12, 2002 @11:45PM (#4877684)
    This is so not what you want to do, but it would still be so cool. Suppose you hacked up Xinerama to span X desktops on different machines and make them into a single giant screen with multiple independent pointers. Hmm. Not just pointers, but keyboards and focus as well. Woah, such a cool idea, my head's going to explode, gotta go.
    • My roomate and I have discussed how damn cool this would be. With way to many computers and monitors in one room next to eachother such a screen saver, well it could get no cooler. Doing it over X seems rather complicated (not too bad for dumb x-terminals though). It would be really nice to do it without a master server, so just a bunch of desktops sitting next to eachother would just always sync up, a person can be sitting at any one of them, and any of them can be down, and it still does its neat looking shit. No matter how you cut it though, it would be pretty hairy. I am crossing my fingers that someone has already found one, and even better, with some hardware accelerated goodness.
    • 12 mid range network servers : $36,000 apiece.
      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 ... more profit.)
      • I don't have to pay their electric bill.
      • 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.
        I've seen a lot of people say this, but I spent some time researching used monitors, and I've found that burn-in is still a problem even on newer monitors. Here is an example [ebay.com].

        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.

        • Our computers on campus are kept running 24/7. The screensaver, which is on about 15 hours of the day on average (I would guess), is a slideshow of various equal sized photos of "historic interest" (colour me cynical). By the time these monitors come to be replaced, they have a glaring burn-in, ironically, from the "screen-saver".
          • Someone needs to invent a new term for "program which puts eye candy on the screen while you're not using it".

            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)?

            • A screen saver that provides the status of various information such as weather, stock prices, etc., will probably display that information in a visual format similar to the CNN Headline News or Bloomberg TV styles, i.e., a bunch of little boxes on the screen, which, if they sit there unmoving long enough, will burn themselves into the screen.

              (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.)

        • Ummm that particular monitor won Editors Choice in MAC World's Nov 1996 issue. That is 6 years old, which goes back to the 'won't burn in before it burns out' part of my litany :)

          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.
      • 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.

        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 don't really get it.. Xinerama is.. some sort of desktop environment? And.. a single giant screen.. like a giant multi display? or a giant clone?

      does someone want to explain?

      • 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)

    by Trusty Penfold ( 615679 ) <jon_edwards@spanners4us.com> on Thursday December 12, 2002 @11:46PM (#4877690) Journal

    Turn the monitors off and save a whale.

    • Re:Environment, (Score:5, Funny)

      by Kaeru the Frog ( 152611 ) on Friday December 13, 2002 @12:34AM (#4877911)
      Here! Here!

      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.
    • Seriously, the number of people I see just get up and walk away from a running computer with monitor on is amazing. Crank up those power saving features and turn off your monitor, or get it to turn itself off.
      • That maybe they are running very important applications in the background? Hmm?

        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.

  • I mean what good is a school network without a network aware screensaver.

    How can they learn!?

  • obviously... (Score:1, Troll)

    by shaitand ( 626655 )
    obviously schools cannot operate without this technology. No seriously, this would be a neat little thing, eventually it would become a neat little trick that tech's would set up just to get ooo's and ahhh's from the slightly technically aware. Another great parlor trick, need lots of those.

  • Killjoys (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Atzanteol ( 99067 ) on Thursday December 12, 2002 @11:59PM (#4877761) Homepage
    Wow, so far most of the posts have been "why would you do this? It's not necessary."

    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' /. crowd...
    • I totally agree with you. People are bitching way too much about repeat posts, lams ask /. Q's, story spelling, etc. When people say that /. has gont to hell in a handbasket, its not because of the editors or the system, its now become the users. By that I don't mean the trolls, either (they get modded down fast enough).

      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 :-(

      • What we need is another slashdot-like site that you can only become a member of by invitation.

        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).

    • In this case I think asking why they would do this is appropriate. This is a public school network admin getting paid by tax money. Somehow I don't think making a screensaver do something cool across the network is a resourceful use of time.

      • Re:Killjoys (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Atzanteol ( 99067 )
        Somehow I don't think making a screensaver do something cool across the network is a resourceful use of time.
        Bah!

        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.

      • Is he looking for advice on how to make his own?
        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)

    by Permission Denied ( 551645 ) on Friday December 13, 2002 @12:09AM (#4877802) Journal
    As usual, my response is to search google for a half hour. If google doesn't turn up anything, do it yourself.

    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)

      by lexarius ( 560925 )
      Use a server machine. The server determines the marquees and contains the ordered list of machines. When a screensaver comes on, it asks the server (broadcast, perhaps? or in the registry) if there are any available things to display. If not, it waits for some marquee or bouncing object to be passed to it, either from a nearby machine or the server. The server should also be periodically notified about the state of any objects in circulation, so that it can start them again if they get lost for some reason. For convenience, the "server" could be the same program configured differently in the screensaver settings, so anyone could set up a server that responds to nearby udp broadcasts. Or something like that.
    • If you use cygwin just for development of native win32 applications consider using Minimalist GNU for Windows [mingw.org]. Its a way more small download that cygwin and I guess less than 1% of the .NET download (wich you say is free now but is the devil you know).

    • Re:DIY - done (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Permission Denied ( 551645 ) on Friday December 13, 2002 @11:09AM (#4880474) Journal
      OK, so I should post this before I go to work. I had some fun with it - it's about three or four hours worth of work. I didn't go with a client-server design as I only have two machines at home that can boot into windows. It should work OK for any reasonably large number of hosts. No point-and-click configuration - I don't have time for dialog design.

      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:

      PDSV - Permission Denied Screensaver

      To install:

      1. copy pdsv.scr to your system32 directory.
      2. Edit pdsv.reg (this must be done separately for each individual machine)
      3. Double-click on pdsv.reg

      You need to define all of the hosts which will be running pdsv in the
      .reg file. The order of the hosts in the file is supposed to match
      physical order, left to right. It's OK if a host is in the .reg file
      but can't be reached or isn't running the screensaver: it will just skip
      over unreachable hosts, and work with them once the host joins in.

      IMPORTANT: Each machine must have a unique value for "thishost."
      "thishost" is used as an index into host0, host1, etc.

      You won't be able to move the mouse to escape the screensaver since I'm
      lazy. Hit a key or button instead.

      To compile, you'll need Visual Studio 6.0. Open up cmd.exe and type
      "nmake" to build. You may also be able to compile this with the MS
      .NET SDK, but I don't have time to download it and try right now.
      You will need to recompile if you want to change the image since the
      .bmp is built into the executable.

      Read the source for all other questions.

      This is a really stupid program, but it was fun. I spent more time
      struggling with MS Paint trying to get the .bmp file to look OK than I
      spent coding. The actual drawing stuff is six lines of code. Have fun
      with it.
      • I could give you a place to post it on my web server, if you'd like. It's a pretty nifty project.

        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!
        • how do I decode base64?

          I tested it like this from a Unix machine:

          base64 -d pdsv.base64 > pdsv.zip

          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)

    by EvilMal ( 562717 ) on Friday December 13, 2002 @12:22AM (#4877856)
    The Sonar screensaver for X allows you to set it up to ping other systems on the network. I believe you can make it ping the whole network. The other systems are shows as blips on a radar. The higher the ping, the further away they are, I believe.
  • is what this sounds like. i have java code that does it, if you're interested. turning the java into somethime like a screen saver is an exercise for the reader ;-)

  • Primordial Life (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pythorlh ( 236755 ) <pythor AT gmail DOT com> on Friday December 13, 2002 @12:36AM (#4877922) Journal
    Primordial Life [io.com] is a great network aware screensaver. It creates little creatures that evolve as the screensaver runs. Using the network, creatures that reach the edge of the screen can be sent to other computers, for a much larger virtual world.

  • Electric Sheep (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Matthias Wiesmann ( 221411 ) on Friday December 13, 2002 @12:37AM (#4877925) Homepage Journal
    I don't know if this project fits your idea of network aware, but there is electric sheep [electricsheep.org]. In this screen saver, computer join a collaborative task to calculate the next fractal to display. I think there are Linux, BSD and Mac OS X ports.

  • "Would, you, like, to, play, a, game?" (Score:5, Interesting)

    by E1v!$ ( 267945 ) on Friday December 13, 2002 @12:39AM (#4877932) Homepage
    It would be neat to setup a game server, and have a small game launch as the screen saver running a bot. The idle computers could compete against each other.

    (people could write bot plugins...)
    • I wish I had some mod points to give you.

      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.

    • GLTron [gltron.org] would make an excellent multi-computer screen saver. Imagine a room full of machines playing on a large virtual areana.
  • Does anybody know a Win95/98/ME screensaver that locks on the NT Domain password? Yes, I've done google-searches; even wrote one for Win311 once but it broke in 95/98. I'm no Win32 guru; I write Unix stuff.

  • Bounce.. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by BigZaphod ( 12942 ) on Friday December 13, 2002 @12:53AM (#4877973) Homepage
    I bounced a few random shapes around an entire lab my last year at college. It was pretty cool and took maybe 4 hours at most to write (I did it in front of the computer club on a projector as a two-meeting presentation series :-)).

    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.
  • why oh why does this not exist yet? I've been scouring the net for years, the Douglas's immovable sofa is nowhere to be found.

    surely someone can provide us with this essential toy.

  • Another idea (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Catskul ( 323619 ) on Friday December 13, 2002 @01:08AM (#4878018) Homepage
    What I think would be neat is if you did some measuring and found the distance and relative angles of a set of monitors and integrated the measurements into views of a (3d)video game. It would be as if you had windows into the game. I.e. the monitors would be displaying geometricly correct views of the same world. It would be an awesome effect and not too difficult.

    • Re:Another idea (Score:2, Interesting)

      by zonix ( 592337 )

      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. :-)

      z
  • I'd just recommend setting the speed of the marquee the same on all of the computers. This way it would give sort of an illusion that they are all scrolling one big marquee. If you wanted to simulate that it is going all the way around the room or something, just make a long ass delay before it scrolls across the screen again. Hell it isn't perfect but it could, kinda, work :)

  • Yet Another Network Screensaver Coding Idea (Score:3, Interesting)

    by i_am_nitrogen ( 524475 ) on Friday December 13, 2002 @03:48AM (#4878632) Homepage Journal
    Here's an idea:

    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)

    by jes5199 ( 70849 )
    this may take a little time with a copiler to make run with windows, but Xscreensaver has a SONAR screensaver

    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)

    by FunkyRat ( 36011 ) <.moc.liamg. .ta. .taryknuf.> on Friday December 13, 2002 @06:29AM (#4879174) Journal

    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.

  • (as linked to in the story)

    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.
  • http://electricsheep.org/

    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.


  • 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)

    by MeerCat ( 5914 ) on Friday December 13, 2002 @11:05AM (#4880444) Homepage
    I wrote (you're going to hate this) a very small VB screensaver that just runs an IE window (no nav bar etc) so that I can have a screen-saver showing a webpage, and point it at a web page that has a META tag to refresh every 60 seconds.

    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

  • DALiWorld (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Hank Reardon ( 534417 ) on Friday December 13, 2002 @11:37AM (#4880754) Homepage Journal
    How about DALiWorld [daliworld.net]

    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:

    At DALi we are not just building software that will allow you to have a localized world and ecology, we are building systems that will engender truly ubiquitous artificial life. We are not targeting any particular platform. Instead, we are targeting all of them. Our universe will be everywhere - bits of DALi scattered across millions of computing devices the world-over. In personal computers, portable devices, automobiles, airplanes, even your television. Our aim is to be the first company to realize the living global digital Gaia: a virtual ocean distributed across machines that span the entire non-virtual world; a community of millions of users all taking part in building this virtual ocean, creating the ecology and the life forms that inhabit it; the life forms seamlessly swimming from one machine to the next... And we want you to be our co-creator.

    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!

  • When I had 150 workstations that ran screen savers for the better part of the day at my disposal, I tried a few different and interesting things.

    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...
  • Years ago there was a vaguly amusing mac virus/toy floating around that involved installing a small piece of software on a bunch of macs, which were all networked via Appletalk, and then on one machine running a separate application to trigger it. When you did, each machine on the network which had the software installed would have the Energizer Bunny run across its screen, one at a time, with the sound of a beating drum of course.

    The professors who taught courses in Mac clusters at CMU used to get real annoyed when the bunny interrupted class.

  • In Soviet Russia, the screen saves YOU!

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