Software for Hardware Demonstrations? 45
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 (Score:3, Funny)
(Im a linux user, humor...)
Re:Gentoo (Score:2)
Re:Gentoo (Score:2)
renderfarms too slow (Score:4, Insightful)
The same applies for most 'data crunching' applications - unless your audience is intimately familiar with how long ( protein folding | SETI searches | whatever you're doing ) takes, it's not going to be that impressive. Even if they do know how long something takes, a speed gain of two over whatever they use is just going to be lost in the hurly burly of the presentation atmosphere, unless you can compare them side-by-side.
That said, it's going to depend on your audience - if they are ALL real 3DSMAX heads, then show one of the default benchmarks running, with nice big printed charts showing the gains over your competition. But if they're a mix of 3DSMAX users and Maya users (for example), then you're going to lose half of them.
Hooray for unfinished comments!
Re:renderfarms too slow (Score:3, Interesting)
Welllll it kind of depends on the target audience. If they're talking about Siggraph, which is coming next month, the people there would get it.
Essentially, I agree, though. I saw an Itanium demo where was rendering a pretty detailed engine. Whoop-de-do, my workstation could top that. I
A Different Approach... (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was in the Air Force, we had an old IBM mainframe with a huge tape silo (like 8 or 10 feet in diameter, 8 feet tall, etc.), and for the main room that got toured by the top brass, we opted for a large window-panel instead of one to store tapes in the six sides. This, of course, took quite a bit of tape storage away. However, the benifit was that those on tour could see the robotic arm moving around at 60 miles an hour inside the silo. We had a program that did nothing but run the arm around, grab random tapes, and swap them in and out of the drives for a minute or two. Completely useless, but it never failed to impress the hell out of them.
Re:A Different Approach... (Score:2)
Re:A Different Approach... (Score:1)
Re:A Different Approach... (Score:1)
though I think i have trained my subconscious to look at it since in directory i spend alot of time in (eg my home dir) i do tend to notice if things don't "look right" (wrong # of columns) indicating i probably dumped a temporary file there intending to do something with it and haven't done it yet or haven't deleted it.
Re:A Different Approach... (Score:1)
While it was probably attached to an IBM mainframe, it was a StorageTek tape silo.
-Peter
Ray Traced Quake? (Score:4, Interesting)
stress test of a live system... (Score:5, Interesting)
other, very sexy demos include: real-time anything, but particularly real-time multi-media. eyecandy is always a good thing. for example, real time recording, transforming, encoding, and writing of video (plus sound) data at high res and framerates, etc.
just my 0.02 euro (which right now is worth more than your $0.02
Re:stress test of a live system... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:stress test of a live system... (Score:2)
Re:stress test of a live system... (Score:3, Funny)
make sense_of_humor
make: failed at line 3 - libHumor not found.
Something fake (Score:4, Insightful)
Flashy and without substance is what a demo should be.
run a starfield scroller.. (Score:5, Funny)
two words .... (Score:4, Funny)
C64 or Amiga demos (Score:3, Funny)
-psy
a decent demo ... (Score:2)
At my university a few months ago we had an opening for this new ATAC building. I was working at it (I work there and take Computer Science there) and afterwords I wandered around to look at what other people were doing (our display was exceptionally boring). The computer science people were showing off thier rack mounted supercomputer by rendering a fish.
What was interesting is that the bits that were rendered were displayed in real time. And it wasn't all synchronys. So one block would complete while the
Geek audience? (Score:2)
I remember building Linux back on a 486/66 - set the options, start the compile, go to sleep, and HOPE it builds over night rather than erroring out.
One of my co-workers tells me of building X on an HP workstation back in the day - it took 4 days to compile.
Now we can build Linux in tens of seconds on the right hardware (and THAT is with the kernel being over twice as many lines of code as before!)
Re:Geek audience? (Score:2)
Do not demo software unless you sell software. (Score:3, Insightful)
The only software that you will need is operating systems. Sysadmins will want to know if the hardware runs their operating system of choice. If you only support Windows, only demo Windows. If your company is OS agnostic have several OSes installed, possibly in multiboot configurations.
Re:"Show the guts" (Score:1)
ooh, yes! lots of neon-lit cables, fans coated with UV-sensitive paint, and window-panels (laser-etched with silhouettes of dragons and babes).
And liquid-nitrogen cooling!
And lots of blinkenlights! w00t!!
Re:"Show the guts" (Score:1)
Geeks are pureist. They like to see the elegant clean lines of the hardware itself.
while(1) (Score:2)
Most obvious (Score:2, Funny)
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).
The greatest demo of all (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Emulators & virtualization (Score:2)
Plus you should have SNES9x or something of the sort in the corner!
How about... (Score:1)
Compile the Linux kernel (Score:2)
A small idea... (Score:2)
Load it on YOUR machine, and on another "typical" machine. If yours looks smooth and the comparison is jerky, you win.
On the other hand, if you can't do better than the comparison machine, then you probably won't get any sales -- and you probably shouldn't be there in the first place.
Any Password Security Tool (Score:2)
vmware (Score:2)
Hope you have enough RAM, CPU and disk.
Another alternative is Citrix. Let 100 different users use different applications all off one server. But the trouble with this is, the suits may thi
Re:vmware (Score:2)
Or erm, run a "beowulf" cluster in one machine.
Make a cluster (Score:1)
if it's a PC, and 3d graphics... (Score:2)