Software for Hardware Demonstrations?

raarky asks: "My company will be running a stand at a rather respectable geek conference and I would like to ask the developer and sysadmin crowd what sort of demonstration software would be cool to see running on some of the highend server, workstation and mobility (notebooks, handhelds etc) hardware we have available. Ideally it has to appeal to the intended audience and show off the capabilities of these systems (read: intensive). My first thoughts were something like a renderfarm or some great open source 'end to end solution' that crunches lots of data and has client software to display the results." What software would you use to show off hardware capabilities?

Gentoo

[contrasutra]

Show them how you can install a gentoo system in less than 12 hours! C'mon, we all know GCC output gives linux (gentoo) users a hard-on.

(Im a linux user, humor...)

Re:stress test of a live system...

[AliasTheRoot]

Ideally you want a demo of realtime breasts jiggling, raytraced of course. Maybe texture map them with the output of a linux kernel compile?

run a starfield scroller..

[gl4ss]

..and just claim that it's a realtime simulation of the universe.

two words ....

[lambent]

Not Nethack.

C64 or Amiga demos

[psyconaut]

Demonstrate retro-compatibility! Yeah, baby!!!! ;-)

-psy

Most obvious

[sumirati]

Build a webserver farm connected via a load-balancer to the web with at least a 45 MBit/s line.

On the handhelds (which of course should be having a HiRes display) let the user have a browser which could not access anything beside from your load-balance webserver farm.

On the webserver farm host free (as in beer) pr0n.

Display real time stats and let the user test your setup. They will be happy customer (the sales people being in the front).

Re:stress test of a live system...

[AliasTheRoot]

cd /usr/ports/blackcoot
make sense_of_humor
make: failed at line 3 - libHumor not found.