Kaspersky Labs: How scary can an old school programmer be? | Hacker News Reader

Kaspersky Labs: How scary can an old school programmer be?

blog.kaspersky.com

19 pointsdsl6 comments

Pretty, but no demo will ever touch the Dec 9, 1968 demo by Engelbart.

See http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/12/dayint... for a description. In one demo they introduced the computer mouse, video conferencing, teleconferencing, hypertext, word processing, hypermedia, object addressing and dynamic file linking, bootstrapping, AND a collaborative real-time editor. This was running on a SDS 940 which apparently supported up to 12 simultaneous users in their lab.

On what kind of hardware? According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDS_940, it could have stored no more than 200k of memory on drum memory. (It may have had additional storage attached - hard drives were available for 2 MB.)

It took decades for these technologies to become commonplace. But once they did, the nickname "mother of all demos" was completely appropriate.

Now, this is not to disparage the scene in any way... I mean, what they did and do is awesome, and Scream Tracker 3 (and later Impulse Tracker) was a large part of my teenage years.

But ultimately, graphics routines are a completely different beast than finding weaknesses in a security system that you don't own. Many programmers on here, given a bit of guidance and some gfx/sound guys, could put together a respectable demo. I don't think the same about something like Stuxnet.

it depends, graphics systems have some pretty hard real time constraints for latency. The best gfx coders are required to find unique implementations/approximations for extremely difficult problems. Think about doom and carmack and what you would have to do to reproduce that given a 486.

Stuxnet imho wasn't that ridiculously impressive, though it was impressive, because the evidence is that "somebody" made sure the people writing it had appropriate sources.

I often upvote stories using the metric "Would I add this to my 'saved stories' if it was a stand alone feature?". Very often the answer is yes even though I disagree with large portions of an article/don't think it's a good fit for HN.

What is a good heuristic for upvoting articles?

A conclusion that if they create good graphics with 64kb then they could be able to steal your money from the bank is pretty huge slippery slope logical fallacy.

Wow. Kaspersky's alarmist PR has reached a new low.

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