While I love the electric sheep, a couple of things are good to know before you dive headlong into electric sheep land:
- I used it for awhile and it hammered my workstation in terms of CPU utilization.
- Because it's constantly communicating with the electric sheep network, it also used a lot of bandwidth. Not sure how much, but it was definitely hitting the 'net hard, such that it was noticeable on other workstations in my network.
- It uses something like BitTorrent to transfer sheep around, so if you're nervous about security vulnerabilities (or are ignorant of what ports P2P uses, and how many) you might want to be careful.
- Because it uses P2P all the time while your screensaver is active, you might incur the wrath of your ISP (*cough* Comcast *cough*) and attract unwanted attention. Using P2P once in awhile is safe, but running it 24/7 might be risky.
Like I said, I think it's a brilliant program and the images are quite beautiful. But be aware of what you're really installing before just setting and forgetting. For instance, installing it on every PC in a workgroup might suck up all available bandwidth.
UPDATE: Forgot to mention... if you want to see the animations without actually installing the screensaver, you can download gigabytes of sheep movies from the electricsheep.org website. They'll work in any media player that can handle .mpeg files.
