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 , #### stb #### & Institute for Posttayloristic Studies present:
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/ \ / ___| / ___|_ _|_ _| \ \ / / \/ | |___ \ / _ \ / _ \ / /_
/ _ \ \___ \| | | | | | \ \ /\ / /| |\/| | __) | | | | | | | '_ \
/ ___ \ ___) | |___ | | | | \ V V / | | | | / __/| |_| | |_| | (_) |
/_/ \_\____/ \____|___|___| \_/\_/ |_| |_| |_____|\___/ \___/ \___/
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The FOOTBALL WORLD CUP '06 -
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"The best, most ridiculous, most redundant graphical implementation of ASCII!"
ABOUT - a brief intro
======================
"Clearly this is what the internet was invented for!" (The Inquirer)
The Football World Cup - LIVE ON TELNET!
ASCII-WM - a media prank and (pirate) live broadcast of the FIFA Football
World Cup 2006 from June 9th to July 9th in plain ASCII-text-characters
served via Telnet.
Each of the 64 football matches was transmitted live as high-resolution
stream of 80x24 characters ASCII-Art including machine-translated subtitles
in a wonderful "denglisch" and the up-to-date score information.
Closing the circle - LIVE ON TV!
In addition, the ASCIIfied live-remix and manipulation - of what once had
been a normal Television broadcast - was finally fed back again to Television
on OKTO (Vienna Community Television) for the four final matches in July 06
with a female text-to-speech voice reading the cross-translated subtitles.
Now - the Archive ..
Certainly the World Cup is over now and the live-stream is history. However,
you may download a game from the archive and play it locally or watch a
random game with Telnet or netcast like it would be live (be sure to read
the HOW-TO, if you don't know how to use telnet ..)
$~: telnet ascii-wm.net 2006
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comparison and demonstration:
(img from juber.de)
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STATS
=====
With (nearly no) announcement of ASCII-WM beta - a couple of hours before the
opening match - it spread massively trough mailing lists, blogs, chats and
articels: 20 concurrent users during first match were followed by 200 during
the second match, going upward rapidly and overloading the server quite soon.
Adding an additional mirrow was unable to fulfill the requests at its peak
serving more than 1000 cuncurrent telnet streams (leaving much more connection
attempts aside) and 90.000+ web visits on a single day. People were watching
it in offices, at home and during lectures - be it for fun or sometimes takeing
it (in the lack of real online streams?) as a serious online broadcast service.
Leaving a lot of potential users unsatisfied made this service somehow
exclusive - at least for a while - and led to a lot of screenshots and movies
popping up everywhere to be exchanges and some actually seemed to learn how to
program their first while loop :)
After the first hype and with an additonal mirror in germany it somehow
stabilized at approx. 500 (weekend) to 700 concurrent users during match time.
Final statistics after one month of world cup (ascii-wm.net - servers):
15.000.000 (served) telnet connections
3.200.000 web hits
590.000 web visits
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~ 3,0 TerraByte (text) traffic
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ARCHIVE
=======
Archived Games - in gzipped Blinkenlights-format.
(install or see blinkperl for information on detailed requirements,
then you can use asciiwm-zplay.pl to directly play the zipped file)
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