If you're talking about the past-past (say up until the mid-nineties) IMHO you're wrong. Pre-mass-internet there wasn't really anywhere to share code. People were swapping floppies, or dialing bulletin boards. The competetiveness was absolutely real.
Also, pride.. If you wanted to figure out how an effect was done, either you reverse engineered the binary, or you figured it out on your own, based on your own experience and the occasional hint.
You have to remember that the demoscene largely grew out of the cracking scene (well, that + Compunet) in the mid-eighties, where _being first_ to release a cracked version of a game was of great importance. Likewise, being first to create a new effect for a demo.
I remember reading Howard Rheingold's book "Virtual Reality" when it came out almost 30 years ago, and seeing the Alvy Ray Smith (co-founder of Pixar) quote where he claimed that "Reality is 80 million polygons per second"
80 million is nothing nowadays, and we still have 20 years to go. How could he be so far off?
It always confuses the hell out of me when I see this. Back when I grew up, a polyfiller was a polygon filler, i.e. a polygon rasterizer for computer graphics.
This gives me severe flashbacks to clueless clients/PMs. We had projects we had to run through Black Duck -- "No open source code."
The reference implementation of the Mersenne Twister was once GPL, although it wasn't anymore at that time. Still, there are only so many ways you can implement a Mersenne Twister. So my implementation got flagged.
Words used in patent claims are always defined by how they are used in the context of the patent description.
You can't read the claims and think you understand what they cover, without reading the description. A thesaurus doesn't matter, wikipedia doesn't matter, the opinion of an math professor doesn't matter. Patent description.
Open the SVG file. The characters are all there, you just have to sort them into the right order. Not much of an improvement. Or maybe not... * Are trivial to crack by a computer. * Are trivial to solve for a human.
Am I the only one who doesn't see what's so innovative about Spritz? About ten years ago or so, when people didn't create startups for every little side-project they had, there were speed reading java applets that did just about the exact same thing as Spritz.
I really haven't done auctions in years, but with the way ebay works, with the current price one bid increment above the previous bidders maximum price, what's there to gain from sniping? You wait until the last minute or so, and then _hope_ that the leading bidder has set a lower maximum price than yours? Or hope that they don't understand how ebay works, more likely.
Personally, I would put in a bid whenever I found something I was looking for, and then wait for the email telling me I'd won, if ever. No emotional investment, no getting caught up. I'd just figure out what's the most I'd pay for something, and then go.