Re e-sheep:
The story as I know it, is that each machine running it uses it’s spare cycles during idle times to make calculations to generate a single frame of a fractal, and once it’s done creating a frame, it sends it back up to the server, which compiles all the frames for a single “sheep” and propagates those sheep as video recordings, effectively, down to the clients as eyecandy.
When you see it being all blinky, if it seems to be looping back on itself, that means you probably have a partial sheep, which keeps cycling over it’s partial length. You should leave the machine on and connected overnight or something so you can pick up additional sheep for it to play. OR it’s possible that, yeah, your video adapter sucks.
Each end system only receives and sends data to the central server, so it’s not any gnarly security risk to you: server sends you instructions, you send the server a computed frame, server drops you a sheep whenever enough independent systems have generated frame to complete a sheep.
QUOTE=JoeSki]A few questions about the Electric sheep. I’ve downloaded it and it’s everything I want in a screensaver, but:
- It makes my moniter “blink” as it were, every few seconds. What I mean by this is that my moniter image goes black for a split second, and then goes back to the animation. It also causes my tower to make a lot of noise when it comes on. If I were to buy a new graphics card (which I will soon enough) will these problems remain?
And
- Some online friends have expressed some wareness in the direction of this program, saying that allowing my computer to communicate with many others could leave my computer open to viruses, spyware, and other problems. Assuming you know more about the manner in which my computer is connecting to others, what are the chances of this happening? Is my PC being open to viruses?
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