At Last: 10x better Electric Sheep client for Mac
community.electricsheep.org
community.electricsheep.org
It seems like you're planning on getting more communal involvement in the project besides free compute time, and I approve.
Initially i refused to make any of my work available under anything but open source licenses. Alas, that turned out not to pay so well. since then i've tried various compromises between my philosophy, and engaging with society in order to change it (and to make the electric sheep self sustaining). Pulling a handful of genomes out of the many thousands was one. Making limited edition works like hifidreams.com and the just-finished Blu Ray is another.
The next big step is a subscription/freemium model for the screensaver. You can read some about it here: http://community.electricsheep.org/node/492
I guess now that you're employed by Google you won't have to make such compromises for funding.
You really need to be extremely careful about profiting directly from the users' work -- not just their CPU time, but the design of and selection pressure on the sheep themselves. It's especially awful to curate the work of users for private / limited edition works, especially if reserve that privilege for yourself.
2) My work at Google has nothing to do with it. If anything my time is worth more now because I am so much more busy.
3) You are right I have to be extremely careful. And I have been, and my user base is quite happy as a result, both voters and designers. My big problem is server overload. We just did a survey and of the 836 respondents, 98% would recommend Electric Sheep to their friends, and only a fraction of a percent objected to me making money from it ("making" is a dream, for now I just want to recoup my investment). Nearly everyone recognizes that I have and continue to put an inordinate amount of time effort and money into this. Donations have spiked with the traffic I have received from this announcement. Because people love it and they support me.
I hope you will reconsider.
Thank you, -sp0t
He saw a picture of an awesome sheep on your site featured as a print, but with no prices. He emailed you about the prints, you referred him to your art dealer, and she quoted him outrageous prices that were totally out of scale with costs. When he went later to download its 'genome', it had been just removed for that sheep specifically. The capriciousness of the whole exchange really pissed us off, and we later ended up ceasing to use electricsheep in the school's CS labs because of it.
I saw the survey, and the whole thing seemed really weird. Of course you're going to get an extremely favorable response when sampling from your hardcore fanbase.
The point about your job at Google was that you don't need to extract a paycheck from electricsheep to get by. Your constant focus on art-world monetization is extremely off-putting -- it's one thing to take the money on the table from patrons, and another to artificially limit the audience for your work. All the 'limited edition' shit seems all the more ridiculous when there's zero opportunity cost.
then i started poking around in the config settings, and discovered that it was saving tens of megabytes of mpeg movies to disk. i resent it taking up that much disk space for a screen saver. so i fiddled with the config settings, trying to get it to not save them. after that, it didn't make fractal screen images anymore, just a static image that's primarily an ad for the website. so i deleted the screen saver and all its mpg files.
perhaps there's some bigger purpose to this thing that i'm not getting, but whatever it is, it's not worth tens of megabytes of disk space to me.
Often, I'll catch myself on the couch watching the screensaver instead of commercials. Really beautiful stuff.