Tetris was especially good to me back in the late 1980s when I was at university at Sheffield in the UK. There were a few Tetris Payout machines around the city that could hold up to £60 of cash.
The premise of this version was that you scored more points for lines cleared higher up the screen and you had to get as many points as possible in a fixed time limit. The payout was based on how many points you got on a sliding scale. As I recall the maximum payout was £12.
The engineers who built the machine programmed it to get easier each time you failed to win money in a game and it got harder each time you did win. They made a mistake though because a good enough Tetris player could beat the machine on its hardest setting.
There were about 3 or 4 students in the town that could empty these machines. Amazingly at the Student Union bar they came around once a week and filled the machine with cash. Those of us that could empty the machine would race to get to the machine first in order to empty it!
I kept records of what I made and it was over £1000 which is not a lot of money now but it bought a lot of beer for me when I was 19 years old and skint! And I still managed to find enough time to get a degree!
Eventually these machines disappeared no doubt because the people in charge realised that the only people making money were the people playing them!
Lots of people seem to think that Win32 API is a weakness of Windows when in fact it is its greatest strength. The stability of Win32 allows developers to target a huge range of operating systems with a single codebase (95, 98, ME, NT4, 2000, XP, Vista, 7). These days you only really need to support 2000 or perhaps XP and above, but being able to do that with a single binary API is a huge boon.
People are forever going on about how hard Win32 is to code against. Well, once you take the time to learn it it's not hard. Only if you aren't very talented would it be a problem. In reality most developers don't code directly against Win32, they code against a higher level wrapper (MFC, VCL, Qt, WinForms etc.) which makes it quite simple.
As a developer of commercial closed source software for Windows in a very small software shop I for one an hugely grateful for the stable and reliable development platform that MS has provided it. Without it we wouldn't have the successful business that we currently enjoy.
Whilst there are good and worthy new features here it's going a bit far to call it innovation. Incremental improvement is more like it, and that's no bad thing.
It's also a whole rigmarole for me to watch Youtube videos on Gnewsense, I actually paste URLs into a shell script instead of watching them through my browser.
I'm sure glad things are working out so well for you. It sounds like a really productive system you've got there. I'd sure hate to be stuck with a system where things just worked.
Oh well, I guess I'd better block incoming public Internet traffic on port 139 then. That's a shame because it's been so very useful to have an Internet facing SMB share.
I enjoyed Kennedy's reference to the "mythical MinWin". It's clueless fools like him that are perpetuating this myth. MinWin exists today, it just isn't what the overwhelming majority of journos think and say it is.
Sorry, how are explorer.exe and Netscape related? Are you perhaps thinking of Internet Explorer (iexplore.exe) which admittedly is confusingly similiarly named?
Not profitable to maintain backwards compatibility? On the contrary MS's business model is all about maintaining compatibility and they are very very good at it. If you look at Win32 it's alive and kicking today and shows no signs of going away. The 64 bit native Windows API is Win32. It's 15 years old and looks good for another 15.
VB6 was battered by Delphi in the particular space that those two dev envs inhabited. Now Delphi has that space all to itself and even so Borland/Inprise/CodeGear/Embarcadero manage to screw up (not that I'm bitter!) So MS really had to give up VB6 (i.e. native VB) and reinvent it as a managed language. They would just have been throwing good money after bad to continue developing it.
As far as maintaining backwards compatibility goes Windows is the best platform around (at least as a native developer, things are different in a managed environment like Java). Programs which were developed for Win95 still run today and you can build images today that will run fine on Win95. I know because I do so even though I doubt any of my clients still run Win9x.
Contrast this to the ever changing landscape of Mac or Linux.
Paste special?! It's on the Home page, in the left most section which is titled Paste. You just click the drop down and there it is.
So you just open the program and there's this big button called "Paste". How hard can it possibly be to find it.
Actually I find Office 2003 rather tricky to use now that I've used 2007. It took me around an afternoon to get used to the new interface and I would not want to go back.
Slashdot Mirror
Those running Windows 9x are out in the cold too.
Tetris was especially good to me back in the late 1980s when I was at university at Sheffield in the UK. There were a few Tetris Payout machines around the city that could hold up to £60 of cash.
The premise of this version was that you scored more points for lines cleared higher up the screen and you had to get as many points as possible in a fixed time limit. The payout was based on how many points you got on a sliding scale. As I recall the maximum payout was £12.
The engineers who built the machine programmed it to get easier each time you failed to win money in a game and it got harder each time you did win. They made a mistake though because a good enough Tetris player could beat the machine on its hardest setting.
There were about 3 or 4 students in the town that could empty these machines. Amazingly at the Student Union bar they came around once a week and filled the machine with cash. Those of us that could empty the machine would race to get to the machine first in order to empty it!
I kept records of what I made and it was over £1000 which is not a lot of money now but it bought a lot of beer for me when I was 19 years old and skint! And I still managed to find enough time to get a degree!
Eventually these machines disappeared no doubt because the people in charge realised that the only people making money were the people playing them!
Lots of people seem to think that Win32 API is a weakness of Windows when in fact it is its greatest strength. The stability of Win32 allows developers to target a huge range of operating systems with a single codebase (95, 98, ME, NT4, 2000, XP, Vista, 7). These days you only really need to support 2000 or perhaps XP and above, but being able to do that with a single binary API is a huge boon.
People are forever going on about how hard Win32 is to code against. Well, once you take the time to learn it it's not hard. Only if you aren't very talented would it be a problem. In reality most developers don't code directly against Win32, they code against a higher level wrapper (MFC, VCL, Qt, WinForms etc.) which makes it quite simple.
As a developer of commercial closed source software for Windows in a very small software shop I for one an hugely grateful for the stable and reliable development platform that MS has provided it. Without it we wouldn't have the successful business that we currently enjoy.
Whilst there are good and worthy new features here it's going a bit far to call it innovation. Incremental improvement is more like it, and that's no bad thing.
More direct regex syntax
Perhaps I don't understand what Troll means then. Is it really so incredible that a sane person may actually like Vista? Apparently so.
Well, I could understand it my original post had been modded troll, but the one that did attract the troll mod was an honest genuine opinion.
Only 5 years later than MS and Apple, not bad really
Parent modded as Troll? Gotta love /.!
Actually I have got Vista and I'm delighted with it.
It's also a whole rigmarole for me to watch Youtube videos on Gnewsense, I actually paste URLs into a shell script instead of watching them through my browser.
I'm sure glad things are working out so well for you. It sounds like a really productive system you've got there. I'd sure hate to be stuck with a system where things just worked.
Personally I've no qualms about attempts to clone Neanderthals but I'd be much more concerned if someone suggested cloning kdawson!
Not those markets. I was referring to the sales of Windows. It appears to be the dominant client OS and has growing market share in server space.
people who produce costly products with little value
The market says otherwise.....
If you still want that service just run it over a vpn.
I guess you missed the attempted irony of my original post.....
Hardly anybody still uses Windows, it's dying out.
Oh well, I guess I'd better block incoming public Internet traffic on port 139 then. That's a shame because it's been so very useful to have an Internet facing SMB share.
I enjoyed Kennedy's reference to the "mythical MinWin". It's clueless fools like him that are perpetuating this myth. MinWin exists today, it just isn't what the overwhelming majority of journos think and say it is.
Mark Russinovish explains what MinWin really is on Channel 9: http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Mark-Russinovich-Inside-Windows-7/. The relevant section starts 29 minutes in.
Sorry, how are explorer.exe and Netscape related? Are you perhaps thinking of Internet Explorer (iexplore.exe) which admittedly is confusingly similiarly named?
Not profitable to maintain backwards compatibility? On the contrary MS's business model is all about maintaining compatibility and they are very very good at it. If you look at Win32 it's alive and kicking today and shows no signs of going away. The 64 bit native Windows API is Win32. It's 15 years old and looks good for another 15.
VB6 was battered by Delphi in the particular space that those two dev envs inhabited. Now Delphi has that space all to itself and even so Borland/Inprise/CodeGear/Embarcadero manage to screw up (not that I'm bitter!) So MS really had to give up VB6 (i.e. native VB) and reinvent it as a managed language. They would just have been throwing good money after bad to continue developing it.
As far as maintaining backwards compatibility goes Windows is the best platform around (at least as a native developer, things are different in a managed environment like Java). Programs which were developed for Win95 still run today and you can build images today that will run fine on Win95. I know because I do so even though I doubt any of my clients still run Win9x.
Contrast this to the ever changing landscape of Mac or Linux.
Actually having better code would be a start though.....
MS Office is the best example of a major app that relies on COM. MS can't kill COM because it will kill Office development.
Paste special?! It's on the Home page, in the left most section which is titled Paste. You just click the drop down and there it is.
So you just open the program and there's this big button called "Paste". How hard can it possibly be to find it.
Actually I find Office 2003 rather tricky to use now that I've used 2007. It took me around an afternoon to get used to the new interface and I would not want to go back.
This news is a week old.....