You obviously skipped a bunch of posts from a day or few ago, plus same data in posts way longer ago than that.

Each "round" is 4000 "blocks", and the mining tries, by adjusting "difficulty", to target an average time between "blocks" of ten minutes.

Thus a "round" - 4000 blocks - should on average tend to be vaguely around about a month or so of "real time".

It is a hard limit, as 4000 blocks is the definition of a "round", and since each block is a share, there are only ever at most 4000 shares.

This is why eventually we will likely end up with only 4000 projects getting a share each, or up to 20,000 getting a fifth of a share each, then each project will divvy up its coins among its participants/workers itself after it receives them.

-MarkM-

Each line is one block, each block is called a share, and the software supports having 1/5ths of a share (by placing five addresses on one line).

Try receiver_1.csv, receiver_2.csv etc. The number is the "round" number. (Each 4000 blocks is one "round" of payouts. We are paying out "round" 30 now I believe.)

-MarkM-

Each line is one block, each block is called a share, and the software supports having 1/5ths of a share (by placing five addresses on one line).

-MarkM-

Those coins are sent directly to authors' wallets, not to "devtome".

Devtome admins have the authors' addresses put into the "receiver files" that the DeVCoin clients and daemons consult to figure out who to send 90% of the mined coins to each block.

-MarkM-

I don't know, I already threw money at the problem by leasing three dedicated servers, two being 16 gigs one being 24 gigs, for a year paid in advance.

They paid for themselves and more by CPU mining primecoin and protoshares, not even thinking about the massive number of BBQcoins they picked up during BBQcoin's under the radar mine it with CPUs year (last year), so I just split up all the daemons I need for merged mining among those three servers look around for insteresting things to do with all the spare RAM they have still left over.

Its like $30 or so a month for a 16 gig dedicated machine with unlimited bandwidth on a gigabit-per-second ethernet and heck running the same machine at home would cost me more than that just in electricity so it seems a good deal to me.

-MarkM-

Basically you probably want a gigabyte per coin for long-established coins,...

Unix-type operating-systems use all available RAM for file buffers and such, so don't look at total RAM in use, look at the resident set and whether the swap partition is getting used up.

I0Coin used to need about four gigs though and GeistGeld would crash from lack of RAM on an 8 gig machine even no other coins running so I moved it to 16+ gig machines.

The new halfway-fixed GeistGeld (the quick-and-dirty fix) uses way the heck less RAM and the properly fixed I0Coin even less.

Bitcoin you can still run in a gig I think, but maybe not in half a gig or not run it well in half a gig anyway.

Most other coins, if not merged mined, seem to fit into half a gig or so.

-MarkM-

Even the ancient devcoin code has yet to display the kind of massive RAM-usage that that GeistGeld and I0Coin did, because we only have one block per ten minutes on average whereas I0Coin is much faster thus has way the heck more blocks to deal with and GeistGeld is maybe even too darn fast to be practical so has even way the heck more than I0Coin.

In a way, kind of.

First off, an illustrator of some kind maybe, that can, given a novel, try to illustrate it.

That way eventually maybe instead of spending millions of devcoins hiring human actors to act out a plot, each person will be free to let their own computer illustrate/animate it for them using their own preferences as to what goblins look like, how a dark and storm night looks, whether a dark and stormy night seems to them to be better illustrated with a musical score or just storm sound-effects or both, and so on and so on.

Right now when we get an animated illustration of a famous novel or book (e.g. the Bible, or a Dickens novel, or Lord of the Rings etc) we get just a particular artists' or director's or film production crew's interpretation of the novel or book as cast in moving images or enacted as one particlar play or screenplay more or less "true to the original".

There is massive need for the ability to automatically illustrate things; nowadays millions of devcoins worth of wealth goes into making just one visual representation of what happens to happen in a game someone plays, and this acts as a massive "moat" or barrier standing in the way of game development.

The plot and mechanics of a play or game or event or performance are in many cases the important part. People still read novels even though movies have been made of them. Partly this might even be due to the failure of many movie versions of a novel to faithfully represent the actual novel. They tend not to actually enact the novel graphically but in fact to chop up the plot, change it around even, alter the gender of some characters maybe, all kinds of changes. They seldom actually just directly display what the actual events described in the novel, in the order they are described, might actually look like.

There are lots of games out there that only use text to describe events and characters and settings and objects, and part of why is that that is the most basic and inexpensive way of representing the situations and events and settings. To create a graphical client that would illustrate such games would be hard, but it would save billions of cost compared to hiring a movie director and crew of actors to enact each and every possible permutation of states such a game could be in.

It is also hard to go in reverse: to have actual 3D models of which you only get to see a 2D view, and from what you see on the 2D screen figure out what objects are supposedly there, how much damage which weapon did to what and stuff like that.

It is two very different approaches, in one approach you have a state of affairs and it can be depicted in various ways, in text or with various artists' graphical impressions or with various attempts at 3D clients that attempt to put together some kind of illustration that accurately and concisely and conveniently represents to players what the actual state of affairs happens to be. In another approach you just get to see images of what some artist thought such a state of affairs might look like, which can make it very hard to actually compute exactly what state of affairs it is that the artist is trying to convey.

Ultimately yes it would be nice to have a narrator program that can look at the actions of 3D models and deduce what they are doing what is happening what state of affairs they are depicting and thus be able to describe in words what is visible and what it means in terms of a state of affairs.

But when we post to the English-language devtome typically most of the words we use are available in dictionaries, those that are not are often true nouns; the point is all those words are free open source words, not copyright photographs of words so that other people cannot use the same words in their compositions; and furthermore the words are font-independent.  We don't have to buy a library of letter-sequences or a patented word-sequencer to use them.

I agree that right now it is hard to find a free open source model of each and every object depicted in arbitrary photographs or a free open source model of each and every instrument that a musical score calls for.

But we should bear that in mind at all times, so as to try to avoid using photographs featuring objects we lack free open source models of for example, instead trying to first get free open source photos (eventually actual models) of each of the objects that are included in the photo so that eventually we can compose the photo.

Devcoin is supposed to be about development, about developing things, free open source things.

So it should focus more on how to develop music or images than on merely trying to fill storage space with some tiny sample of all the possible images and music that can be constructed given the components from which music and images are developed.

Yes initially we need to "cheat", for example by having 2D images of goblins orcs motorcars ships shells sealing-wax or any other objects that the composer or designer of a scenario or situation or plotline or holonovel might want or need to incorporate into their creation. But we should try to keep in mind at all times that that is a cheat, that ultimately we want 3D (or more: incuding dimensions of range of actions and reactions would be nice too for example) models of everything so that we can construct new 2D images on-the-fly depicting things from any angle of view, and de-construct 2D images into what are they an image of and from what angle so instead of trillions upon trillions of 2D images covering every possible angle and situation we can compress it down to it is these things situated thus and so, as seen from this angle under this type of lighting.

There is still massive scope for artists, and a lot of their work can be made much easier and more efficient. Instead of having to spend all day drawing or painting one frame at a time of a cartoon they will be able to simply describe what it is that the cartoon is to depict and have 2D-view frames of those things and/or characters performing those activities at thus and such a frame-rate.

I do understand the concerns about artistic creativity but please try to also understand that a lot of artists do a lot of drudge-work / gruntwork that seems to them horribly un-creative, full time jobs creating "creative" (visuals etc), work that does not seem "creative" at all to them. Sometimes they even complain that such work dulls their creativity. (Citation needed?)

Often some lead artist or director or game-designer for example dictates exactly how everything is to look, the lead artist even sketches, maybe even fully fleshes out, one or more samples so the drudge-work guys see what style/mood/feel/theme they are to imitate, and the bulk of the "artists" then get to spend day after day churning out all the different view angles of the objects, all the different lighting conditions the characters might be seen in and on and on like that, total drudgery.

Just recently I saw a tool to help artists with that drudge-work, it let you automatically generate pretty good "under different lighting conditions" tiles for a 2D platform-type game from just a few renders, instead of having to manually render all the combinations / permutations. It was amazing, give it a flat 2D image and a few other 2D things and presto it generates for you a whole range of "it looks textured aka not 2D" versions for different lighting-situations. Amazing.

Too much of what artists do (in 9-5 jobs, for example) is very far from creative in their own eyes, and having artists do it is very expensive. So if we can make a tool that will illustrate a novel or plot or in-game situation without having to force artists to spend endless hours doing drudge-work that would be awesome.

It would still leave tons of room for creative art though. Just because your "make a movie of any novel any time you like" software comes with a bunch of off the shelf models of objects-found-in-novels with which to illustrate novels in no way means that an arist who makes a different set of objects the same software can use will not be able to find buyers; quite likely many people will be willing to buy object-sets that they find more pleasing to their eyes than any one set of objects already out there.

Look at Second Life, in Second Life you can edit your avatar, but people still hire artists to manually and painstakingly make a whole new different avatar or skin depicting the player.

So I think this kind of automation might even increase the market for custom hand-made artwork, since once anyone can have a model representing them or their house or whatever just by telling the computer various instructions like "give me bigger ears... darker skin... quiver over my left shoulder... gold ring on my left ring-finger..." etc, there will probably be people who will still want hand-crafted ones if even just to be able to say "ha ha my avatar is better than yours because good luck describing mine and having the default avatar-building software duplicate it without outright copying the hand-crafted skin that I am wearing".

But y'see for free open source we wouldn't want them to be wearing a hand-crafted skin that isn't free open source, because we want to be able to depict their character freely on other servers, take a copy home and modify it as we wish and so on and so on.

The big thing I suspect is the thinking in terms of composing from components. The actual skin and the actual frame over which to put the skin is better than just a bunch of 2D images of the avatar as seen from various angles.

So we should try to have models of all the things shown in a photograph in preference to the photograph itself, the models and skins for the creatures instead of just single views of creatures as seen from various angles and so on.

-MarkM-

I saw a site just recently where a youth orchestra (landphilharmonic, I think) uses intruments built from scrap found in landfills.

Duplicating all those instruments would indeed be hard. But you seem to jump from that to it being impossible or improbable to 3-D print a violin or to code a violin-sounds-synthesiser. To me that landphilharmonic showed much the opposite from it being hard to emulate instruments, to the contrary it seemed to indicate that you don't even need a 3-D printer, perfectly use-able instruments can be created even out of crap found in landfills, no need for special and possibly expensive 3D-printer-ink!

But nonetheless 3D printer code for creating all standard and umpteen non-standard instruments is something we should try to have.

And robotic arms for bending metal and working wood etc should be able eventually to use landfill materials too, they just would need a feedback process of some kind letting them try the tone, adjust the object, try the tone etc, "tuning" it until it sounds as good or almost as good as the ones the landphilharmonic uses.

Also plans and instructions and guides for humans on how to find suitable things in landfills and how best to adapt them for musical use would also be good to have.

-MarkM-

So include with the score a hint saying "many people find it sounds best when played on a harpsichord; in particular using a piano is deprecated by some (reference provided, of course... )

-MarkM-

Supposedly a lot of "real musicans" could "hear" a piece by reading the score.

So it might be more effective use of people's time to have such musicians check the scores first before even bothering to impose some particular performance of a score using some particular voices and/or instruments and/or sound-effects upon the ears of people who cannot random-access the thing but must instead proceed serially through it, and maybe are not even able to listen to it in fast-forward to get a quick grok of it before delving down into nanosecond by nanosecond or second by second or minute by minute laborious executions of the score.

If the piece is good, but could be played in a way that would not sound so good, maybe the reviewers could also provide helpful hints such as approximately what range of instruments it should not sound too awful on, what kinds of speeds one could execute it at without losing its "artistic flavour" or "emotional appeal" and so on.

Like for example "assuming you'd normally play it on a 33-RPM turntable, this piece would make reasonable elevator music, but at 45-RPM it is much more stimulating, possibly not useful as background music, and at 78-RPM it would probably be more useful for cartoon soundtracks than for romantic background music for a candlelight dinner; By the way if you turn up the drum track and use this type of drum, you might find it affects more people in thus and such a way, whereas if you substitute piccolos for the oboes you might find it tends rather to suit X type of game-scenario" and so on.

Or "best suited for playing using husky female vocalist-instrument, if you go with a bass male voice you might also want to adjust this and that instrument in that and that way".

Or "recommended to be played in a minor key, however it also sounds very nice when played in the key of E flat" etc.

-MarkM-

Maybe I'm just being sensitive, but this discussion seems to be escalating and I don't know if that's productive. This is just a discussion on a forum thread-- brainstorming, opinions, et cetera. What's actually implemented is a system that pays creators for creating, currently limited to writing. Personally I'd look at how the project has actually manifested as opposed to unmanifested ideas.

The limitations and challenges of expanding the system to include other content such as music have already been outlined. They will take time and people-power to implement, and that's just a logistical reality at this point.

Supposedly a lot of "real musicans" could "hear" a piece by reading the score.

The equivalent of what you're describing for writing would be an AI that can output readable and uniquely stylistic prose, but that's not what Devtome asks for.

It relies on human generated content and the ability to share and remix that content. How are people going to crawl into my closed source brain to see how I think of topics, conceptualize storylines, and string sentences together? Would there be a category that said, "I want a low-sci-fi voice tagged first-person and dark humor vs an academic voice tagged archaic english lexicon?" (Definitely an interesting concept that I wouldn't have thought of without this discussion). It seems more practical to put the writing up, and also put explain the writing process if there's enough interest for it.

I think the CC BY-SA license and opensource are highly compatible concepts, but they're not strictly the same thing. There might be a demand for open-source voice synthesizers and that is a very different project than human generated content that is not locked away by copyright. Both are valid, and the degree of their implementation will depend on the demand.

markm was one of the original developers of devcoin, I believe, so his opinion carries a lot of weight.

The means to create the music should be open to everyone is what it means to be open source.