As someone who must probably have around a kilometer of various cables and wires lying around the appartment, I am astonished that I haven’t seen (or wished for) something like this before. Now, if someone could make the same for network cables, power cords and USB extension cords…

link
via boingboing

Paul of dataisnature has found a piece of unintentional generative poetry that made it through his spam filter. This is a nice example for how spam can get so elaborately nonsensical, that it’s hard to believe people who’d fall for “online pharmacy” scams would be able to decipher it.

Slashdot and other places inform us that two classical software synth programs are now available for free: Propellerhead have retired their famous ReBirth software and have given it a home at the ReBirth Museum, where not only the software can be downloaded free of charge, but a whole bunch of mods are available as well, including the Sidstation mod for tasty 8-bit sound.
The other package is d-lusion’s RubberDuck TB-303 emulator, which pioneered software synthesis on consumer PCs in the mid 90s.

A while ago, a friend sent me a link to a Flash presentation of a speech by Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig on free culture, given at Oscon 2002 but the issues are still very current. In his beautiful and moving half hour speech, Lessig touches on the history and evolution of copyright law, Mickey Mouse, the brothers Grimm and The Simpsons, the increasing control of a few over common culture, DRM and the Broadcast Flag, software patents, free software and the EFF.
If you want to watch only one presentation on copyleft issues, this one would be a good choice.

link to a flash file of about 8.5MB in size

NetzNetz is an Austrian community of net art groups, -initiatives and technicians, which is working on an interesting and ambitious alternative to the current system of distribution of government grant money for net art projects in Vienna. Instead of relying on the local government to remain up to date on technical developments, able to judge digital art and distribute art funds fairly, an experimental pilot project will put the distribution of grants in Vienna in the hands of the community itself, via the use of a reputation based voting system.
Critics fear that the system could lead to “cannibalism” within the scene, in that everyone would be pitted against everyone else, that it would lead to a system where those who make the loudest thunder receive the most money, at the expense of long-term projects and the participation in international projects. On the other hand, proponents of the idea cite its advantages as being democratic, transparent, non-bureaucratic and based on participation and the rewarding of collaboration.

Jason Cox has spent a lot of time and liebesmüh recording wonderful and funny cover renditions of all music in Super Mario World all by himself, playing dozens of instruments.

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By now you’ll probably have heard about the Generator.x conference and exhibition initiated by Marius Watz that will take place in Oslo from the 23rd of September on. Aside from information about the conference, the Generator.x site features a blog which is rapidly becoming a great resource, spotlighting artists, theory, projects and software, all neatly categorized.

Link

via Future Feeder [edit: and apparently via pixelsumo also :)],
Alison Mealey creates artwork by tracking the movement and death of two dozen AI bots in custom created maps for the game Unreal Tournament. Each image represents about 30 minutes of gameplay in which the computer’s AI plays against itself.

Link

Carlos Katastrofsky has started a weblog listing calls for submission in a variety of fields affiliated with media, art and design. If you find the effort useful (I certainly do), please make sure to give back a little by clicking on some of the Google Ads on the page.
Another similar but a bit more dated resource is the universes in universe categorized calls listing.

Gathering some more information via various forums reveals that:

* As pointed out yesterday, full-screen applications such as most games will not be affected by Vista’s performance hit when running OpenGL software with aero.

* Said performance hit will only take place with the standard OpenGL drivers supplied by Microsoft. Those will indeed be stuck at OpenGL 1.4 with no vendor specific extensions.

* Drivers supplied by graphics card manufacturers (which most gamers will use anyway) will switch off the aero user interface, reverting to an XP style interface.

This last point will be of importance in the long run. On the one hand it softens the issue considerably. If I spend thousands of Euros on software like 3dsmax or Maya and use it daily, I will not mind if it turns off the bells and whistles of my OS while running (in fact if I use my system for performance-heavy applications, I will gladly do so myself).

On the other hand, if we are talking about a small shareware application and a casual user, the sudden disappearance of Vista’s effects-heavy GUI may be as irritating as a browser going full-screen or an application setting your color-depth to 8 bit. The software industry is very competitive and if competing software X targeted at the home user does the same thing as your own software but works with Vista’s GUI, you will be asked why your own software doesn’t. Combine that with the warnings the OS will prompt when installing “drivers that are less suitable than those already installed”, and you will give the average user the impression that OpenGL is “a hassle”.