There is a particular art to a rigged demo. You can't let it run too fast or people realize that you're just putting preprocessed data up on the screen, you can't let it run to slow, or people get bored and don't care.
On Friday I got the lovely last minute task of creating a window for our front end that made it look like someone was interacting with a networked application that was doing interesting things that were quasilegal (this is eye candy for a game, don't go thinking that we're selling this to the government or something). I put in some progress bars and time delays, and the all important scriptable delay statement.
Of course, the first time I put something like that together was for a competition during high school (around 1992) where we were supposed to come up with a way for industry to do something environmentally positive. Our concept was to use game consoles to deliver newspapers, an attached printer would allow for people to print out coupons & save articles thus preventing lots of paper from winding up in the landfill. I think the demo was run on a 386sx laptop and may have been written entirely using for loops (for delays) and print statement in Pascal.
On the board of judges there was a guy who owned a company who made paper making machines.
We didn't win.
The winning entry involved using a fusion powered sex toy[0] to shoot nuclear waste[1] out of the solar system[2].
Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to go check slashdot and cnn.com..
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[0] Ok, it wasn't really a sex toy, it just resembled a smooth black plastic cucumber.
[1] Because nuclear waste is, like, evil, and maybe even fattening.
[2] No, I'm not making this up.
Posted by matt at September 15, 2003 12:49 AM