Slashdot Mirror
Creator Of Solitaire For Windows Interviewed
Thanks to B3ta for its interview with Wes Cherry, creator of Solitaire for Windows, as installed on "hundreds of millions of machines worldwide." Cherry discusses an 'Easter egg' left out of the final version ("There was a 'boss-key' which when pressed would display some random .C code. Microsoft made me remove that"), the all-important card back designs ("My fave is the dealer with the Ace crawling up and down his sleeve, which is a reference to a Grateful Dead song, 'Doin' that Rag'"), and bizarre benchmarking concepts using Solitaire ("At one point, a computer magazine proposed a SolMark computer speed test: The faster the cascade, the faster your computer.")
daniel parsons has no wang.
I wonder what my old 486 would make on that test. I think I could have played a game of 52 card pickup (perhaps several) before the cascade finished.
"When God kisses Satan and the Incarnations applaud." "Death is dead. Long live Death!"
I guess that Solitaire for Windows is the only game that outsells Nintendo' Super Mario Bros. 3!
It is so unfair! SMB3 is a MUCH better game!
this is one of the most useful windows applications, not to mention one of the most stable ones!
the guy deserves more attention than this!
cheers for Wes!
and this interview puts an end to the legend that says you can't win twice in a row when playing Solitaire, those who say so just suck in the game.
The IT section color scheme sucks.
X-Ray girl "sees" broken bones
By LUCY HAGAN
THE SUN has brought the incredible X-ray eyes girl to Britain and seen her amazing powers at first hand.
Russian Natasha Demkina, 17, has stunned doctors in her home country with her ability to see medical conditions inside people.
We flew her 1,500 miles to London to demonstrate her extraordinary powers on Sun reporter Briony Warden, who suffered multiple injuries when she was knocked down by a car in October last year.
She is still recovering from the hit-and-run and uses crutches or a wheelchair to get around.
Before Natasha arrived at Briony's North London home, our reporter removed a leg brace and hid all clues to her injuries.
Then the petite blonde teenager, who looks years younger than her age, began her examination.
Briony, 36, said: "I stood up and let her eyes scan over my fully-clothed body.
"Her pupils dilated and she seemed to go into a trance for a couple of minutes.
"Straight away she began identifying a pain site at the base of my spine which she called a 'blockage'.
"In fact I have four healing spinal fractures and some nerve damage.
"She described my pelvic area as being asymmetrical and pointed to the right side -- where I suffered several fractures.
"Pointing to my jaw, she reported seeing a 'hard, alien part' - it was exactly the spot where a titanium plate holds my bones together.
"The most astonishing moment was when she saw the injuries to my left leg.
"Both the tibia and fibula bones -- the two below the knee -- are broken. I was amazed as she identified the two separate breaks and told me I had problems bending my knee joint.
"Then she said she saw 'traces of several metal pins and screws' which had left their mark on the bone.
"She could not possibly know, without seeing the scars, that until two weeks ago my leg was held together by half-a-dozen pins and screws.
"She even said the scars where the screws had been were covered over with new tissue -- which is exactly what my last X-ray showed."
Stunned Briony added: "Natasha is amazing. I was very sceptical at first but after just a few minutes she focused on my major fractures.
"I was very impressed. It was as though she was looking at X-rays of me. Only my orthopaedic consultant could have known more."
After the examination we told Natasha about Briony's accident.
She said: "I can see she is healing very well."
Natasha first demonstrated her extraordinary ability at the age of ten, when she told her stunned mum Tatyana she could see "two beans", "a tomato" and a "vacuum cleaner" inside her.
The child was referring to Tatyana's kidneys, heart and intestines but did not know their names. Doctors at first refused to accept that her astonishingly-accurate descriptions were genuine. But exhaustive tests have failed to discover any trickery at work.
The teenager is famous in her home town of Saransk, the capital of Mordovia -- a Russian republic 400 miles east of Moscow.
People queue down the stairs outside the family's flat, waiting to be assessed by Natasha. She calls her power "medical vision" and believes it is a divine gift.
Speaking through a translator, she said: "The only way I can explain it is that my brain sees before my eyes. I seem to have two visions -- one is normal, the other I call medical vision. I can see inside the human body but not through it. If someone held something behind their back I wouldn't see it."
Natasha summons her "medical vision" by focusing on her subject for around two minutes.
Recalling the first time it happened, she said: "At first I was disgusted, then I became used to it. It seems normal now and if I don't see anyone for a while I miss the experience."
Natasha's family believe her powers were triggered when she suffered complications from a childho
("There was a 'boss-key' which when pressed would display some random .C code. Microsoft made me remove that")
In Windows, due to the presence of frequent and random occurances of blue screens with crpytic messages, having a boss key is redundant.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
The article has the question "Is it true that there is an 'Easter egg' embedded in Solitaire that pops up a picture of Bill Gates caught in flagrante delicto with a marine mammal?" answered yes.
What I want to know is, what is this easter egg? It's for... uuh... personal reasons.
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
Just imagine how many thousands of hours the workforce might have had to spend actually working if it wasn't for Wes
Got a copy of Windows 2000 (maybe other versions do this too)?
Run Solitaire and click both mouse buttons simultaneously on a card for a few seconds as fast as you can.
What sort of scores do people get on Solitaire when running in timed game mode with standard scoring? About five years ago (during one of my Linux holidays before I saw sense again and switched back to Redhat!) I was running Windows 98 and used to play Sol a lot, and got pretty fast. However I have no idea how fast I was compared to other people, because I couldn't find people posting their scores anywhere on the Internet at the time...
My best score ever was just over 11000, and I could generally get between 6000 and 10000 if I really concentrated.
I found that interview a complete waste of time.
I remember when Microsoft was doing the run-up to release of NT4 (the upgrade from 3.51) way back in, umm, 1995 or 1996. One of their arguments for moving video drivers into the kernel space was that it gave much better performance (which is true).
To demonstrate this, a MS rep at a conference I was attending showed how to trigger the card cascade on demand in Solitaire and showed it on an NT 3.51 machine and a similar-hardware NT4 machine - the NT4 machine spewed cards a LOT faster.
Unfortunately I don't remember the key combo that triggered the card spew.
The first true MCSE! Microsoft Certified Solitare Engineer!
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
on a winnt based machine, press: alt + shift + 2 to be a winnar!!!!111
Natural-Selection Be
Only this one is relevant. SolMark *did* work as a benchmark! Well... once. Back in the day when I was selling computers at Computer City, running solitaire and showing how fast the cards were dealt was the best way to get folks to buy that newfangled Pentium 66 that was all the rage. We had a 486/66 installed right next to the Pentium 66. There was a huge difference, and it often got me the sale.
:)
Nowadays there's very little visible difference. But once.... it was the best computer benchmark on the market.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
At one point, a computer magazine proposed a SolMark computer speed test: The faster the cascade, the faster your computer.
:-)
Solitaire _was_ my benchmark. After each gfx or cpu upgrade the first thing after booting was to fire up Solitaire.
I can't tell you how disappointed I was when they included timing code in W2k and later releases, so the cards always fall with a fixed speed. But, I guess it was inevitable once times went under a couple of seconds...
The next antitrust case, the way things are going I can see it happening.
My big time waster was the Hover! game that came with Windows 95. It was definitely addictive, and I wish they would have updated it as well. I've always wondered if anyone has managed to create new levels for it?
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Next to browsing on ESPN.com, Solitaire is the only thing my father uses the computer for. A 1.2Ghz Athlon rig, that only does MSIE and Solitaire....
But when will they interview the author of SubSeven?
If you're interested in facts I'll tell you what they are and I'll give you sources - Chomsky on The Big Idea
the person who gets more people fired for playing games on their computers... DARN HIM! Why did he have to meake that game! It's too darn addictive, I was fired from my last job for playing it on the job and have had a heck of a lot of trouble getting a new jab...
Worldwide I'm fairly sure Pokemon beats the lot of them, but it depends on whether you split them into versions or not (which is a debate in and of itself, since there are people who own both the near identical red and blue versions).
I cracked up reading this thing. I wouldn't have imagined the creator of solitaire to be a complete jokester, seeing as there's barely any humor involved.
Look it's a joke about my sig IN MY SIG! LOL!
Know how after you win, it asks if you want to deal again? I always wondered why it doesn't just close if you click no. Surely, if you did not want to deal again, you must be done playing, so why not save you the extra click and close the damn thing?
Bad interface design, tsk tsk.
... I'm the only person who always plays it in Vegas mode with a one card draw? That's the only way to play if you ask me. I actually won three games in a row a couple of weeks back.