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Comment by AsymetricCom | Hacker News Reader

I remember seeing this run smoothly on a P2 after a very small executable download in late 90's. How far we've come in a big, stupid circle back where we started.

Now instead of a small executable, we need a large executable to sit on top of a large API on top of the CPU before even touching the GPU, and a network connection to download all the dependant APIs and libraries every time the page is loaded.

The only impressive thing about this demo is how many YCombinator readers are impressed with blinkenlights

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Yes. Makes me smile when I hear the word "demo" being thrown around. I always thought the point of a demo was to come up with something impressive with very limited resources. Remember 64k demos? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qv7y3eKyVUo

I'd venture that the differences these day is that there is no install step and it works on many different systems.

>many different systems.

Sure, for varying values of "works" and "different" and "no install step".

I'm going to go out on a limb here and state that a DOS executable from the 90's will run on more machines in the world than this demo, given "platforms" similarly to what this demo takes as a given.

Sure, for varying values of "works" and "different" and "no install step".

You could say the same thing about anything related to web browsers. What's your point?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and state that a DOS executable from the 90's will run on more machines in the world than this demo

Right... except a user has to trust you enough to download and execute your DOS binary rather than just execute a javascript file in a browser sandbox.

I already have a sandbox, it's called a computer.

People value being not having to manually download and install software. You can either take advantage of this, or you can complain about it.

...or come up with a better way to download and install software, oh wait a minute Apple did that and made a billion dollar industry downloading apps.

Requiring & depending upon one corporation to monitor code that is written is not technological progress.

until someone comes up with a way to determine what is bad versus good then that is perhaps the best there is. I use companies to do all sorts of things for me - watching software is just one more thing.

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