Way to go HN this is why we can't have fun things.
(C'mon MS don't be jerks, be proud of your history and leave that up!)
Edit: in fact, want to sell Windows' awesome backwards-compatibility? Make 1 edit to that site, detailing how to make the trial of the game run in Windows 8.1. Then leave it as a testament to the OS's huge legacy. Be proud of it. Wear it as a badge of honour.
As a marketer myself, this makes the most business sense. Leverage your legacy. People (lots of people) find it cool for various reasons. Leave it up, and call attention to how it can still be played even on new systems.
This was a PR win before they took it down. They have the ability to turn it around and continue to make it a positive, but they have to do it fast.
That is truly a horrible article. Meant to be nothing but mean about Microsoft.
I am fairly critical of Microsoft myself, but usually for stuff that they actually do wrong. Keeping a webpage about an old game unchanged online, what is wrong with that? It's not like they came out with 3 updates to the game without modernising their webpages.
My list of negative things about the article:
1. There is no author named
2. Picture of Bill Gates is irrelevant
3. Title is misleading
4. Second paragraph is too open to interpretation
- Should be "1 of 9^9^9 pages on microsoft.com remain untouched"
5. Third paragraph uses "such as" to imply there are more titles
6. Calling the hn thread fiery and inaccessible, what exactly is inaccessible about a thread on hn?
7. Second to last paragraph only tried to poke fun at microsoft. Essentially like complaining that a tesla car only runs on electricity.
8. Last paragraph, why not just add another 500 words explaining all the other browsers that the webpage might not work on without doing any testing.
After reading the MS article, I clicked through to an explanation of yesterday's NYC Mayoral election results. Oddly enough, it's a pretty sober look at Bill de Blasio's candidacy and victory. It's pleasantly surprising to find some real journalism tucked in there.
I don't think anyone, anywhere makes a claim that the American media is impartial.
However, there are widespread, strong claims that in American media, everyone is _free_ to share their opinion, leaving it up to the American people to take in the numerous opinions and decide for themselves.
What you see here, a bunch of people freely pointing out that one of these media is utter garbage, is absolutely how the system is supposed to work. We accept a bit of chaff, rather than let vested interests dictate to us.
It's a shame that enough people believe in shit like the NYPost to keep them in business, but it's nothing compared to the hell we'd be in if we accepted the news sources of non-free government sources unflinchingly.
I interpreted the 'inaccessible' comment to mean that it was difficult to follow for someone 'non-technical'. (We forget sometimes that stuff that is completely obvious to us flies miles over some peoples heads.)
We are all worried about durability on the web (after all, that's Archive.org mission), and when somebody does it, there's always someone to spit on them for "being stuck in the 90's". WTF.
Why journalists are so good in putting a negative spin on EVERYTHING they touch?
For example: I made once a Arcade game (cabinet, code, everything). And took it to Campus Party Brazil.
One of the journalists took a photo and put a label on that photo on their site while I was not near the machine.
The label was:
"Some dude brought this illegal counter-strike server disguised as arcade game." (counter-strike was illegal in Brazil for a time, sadly, despite our constitution also having free speech... but the arcade machine I've made had no networking equipment, I still wonder where the journalist got that idea)
And the most flattering report on the cabinet had as headline: "Game addict bring his own arcade game."
Fuck journalists, they cannot be trusted. (also NONE of the ones that interviewed me avoided twisting my words).
I was at a conference in Germany as part of my job at the Free Software Foundation, had my photo taken by a random attendee. Wound up in The Guardian and had my image sold to various stock agencies, and I'm frequently used in a photo about cybercrime.
>I made once a Arcade game (cabinet, code, everything). And took it to Campus Party Brazil.
Sounds like an interesting project, and unusual for a DIY arcade cabinet for having custom code. Do you have a write-up about it or a public repository? I'd like to read more about it.
As for
>"Some dude brought this illegal counter-strike server disguised as arcade game."
that's a pretty absurd claim. Did your machine run any arcade games that vaguely similar to Counter-Strike (like VirtuaCop 2)? That's the only way I can think of a person who knows nothing about video games could come up with that idea without simply lying.
Edit: Are anti-gamer hit pieces common in Brazilian media?
anti-gamer hit pieces are common, yes. I mean, as common as something about a vaguely not popular culture can be (beside people that play windows solitare or facebook stuff, people here rarely game at all, gamers here usually are quite alien to everyone else, maybe because games here are crazy expensive, ie: see PS4 2000 USD)
And my game was a Arkanoid clone of sorts, but I never finished it actually, the version on the arcade cabinet was more of a prototype, also I was writing about it and I was going to put the engine source on github, but I never had time to do it, and the machine with that stuff is not near me (I left it in my parents house to start my own startup in other city).
But the site is http://paddlewars.agfgames.com mind you it is a really ugly site, and the game is quite unfinished, but you can download the desktop version of it and play a bit (also the desktop version is older than the arcade version, back then I had no version control and managed to lose the arcade version source).
Oh, and the cabinet was made for the code, not the code for the cabinet! The cabinet thus has its features designed around the game (for example it has a trackball and eight buttons, to match the game control scheme).
Also I made a mistake on the design of that cabinet: I designed it thinking about the average height of most people here... and forgot kids, it became common to pass by the game and see a couple of chairs around it with kids on top of the chairs playing.
Thanks for the explanation. I thought you were running a emulator cabinet with a your own launcher and/or emulator. This is a lot more DIY and no way you could mistake it for Counter-Strike.
I would have loved to see them leave the page up and add a disclaimer saying that the page is their heritage (and that they are proud of their heritage) - heck, even make the disclaimer as '98-ish as the rest of the page (poorly animated GIF? Marquee element? Comic Sans? Include that picture of Gates? Provide a full version download of the game for free?).
I would be damn proud if I had a page like that still live and available 15 years later.
In Oz (where I'm from) news.com.au is notorious for it's incredibly low standard of journalism, if you can call it that. They blatantly copy and past articles from other news websites. I'd wager it was on NYP first.
The websites, for computer games such as Motocross Madness 2, Midtown Madnessand Monster Truck Madness 2, were rediscovered by readers at software coding website Hacker News, kicking off a fiery yet inaccessible 160-comment thread about backwards compatibility and PC system requirements.
>[...] were rediscovered by readers at software coding website Hacker News, kicking off a fiery yet inaccessible 160-comment thread about backwards compatibility and PC system requirements.
Maybe I misread this but what was inaccessible about that thread?
The opening thread is debating whether open standards cause backwards compatibility or not, the difficulty one may have opening a wordperfect file, and the design aesthetics of using HMTL tables.
If I were Microsoft, I'd take it down primarily for security considerations. It probably used old technology (old IIS version?) and might have been unpatched/exploitable.
The Motocross Madness 2 page linked elsewhere in this discussion is server by IIS 8, which suggests that it's really just content lying around somewhere instead of a rogue server somewhere in the org (which would surprise me anyway).
If you guys get a chance, this is the greatest thing of all time. Get Motocross Madness 2, start a race, and forget about it. Drive straight until you reach the huge wall that marks the edge of the area. Some places it's lower than others, and with a good run-up, you can actually scale the wall. Up top it's clearly not a place for players, but if you drive towards the non-existent horizon you will be fired as if from a cannon (there is literally a cannon noise) into the course again and your guy will curl up and die horribly in the crash before getting back on his bike. My friend and I used to do this for hours, it was the best "open world" we could find!
I remember this too, lots of fun with this! I was never really racing the races, just fooling around in the game and occasinally do the canon trick :D!
Holy shit I just downloaded the trial of Midtown madness (!!) This used to be my jam!
The first website I ever built was dedicated to that game and I got tens of hundreds of thousands of visitors. How I managed to do that when I was like 14 or something I'm not sure.
I had every cheat, trick and hack under the sun, fully documented with photos.
My favorite was also the Motocross Madness throttle bug. If you went to buy a specific joystick and used the throttle hat, it would instantly gas the bike up to like 50,000cc's and you could do jumps so high that it would glitch, like a mile in the air.
Oh my, Midtown Madness! The VW Bug was such bullshit, it had the acceleration of a Ferrari. Loved bombing around town fishtailing in the cadillac though!
I loved MCM2 (motocross madness 2) - I played that game on MSN Gaming Zone for over a year. Now that I think about it, I built my first website and had my first experience programming because I wanted to make a site for my team, named SOAR - MCM2 got me into programming and also prompted my first use of Photoshop to make custom rider skins for my mates!
If you don't get why this is an interesting (and fun!) fact, you probably missed this thread from yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6672029. The web page that is now gone had been up, more or less unchanged, from when the game was released back in 1998.
Supposing we wanted to organize a letter (well, email) writing campaign to try to convince microsoft to change their decision and leave it up as a heritage site....which department/manager would we email?
In particular, I wouldn't want them to go on a purge of old game pages now they're aware they still have some, all because of Hacker News + a NY Post article.
Umm, there's still the Wayback Machine, which is where this belongs. It's kind of ridiculous to expect Microsoft to host completely out-dated content forever.
This isn't bit rot. It's ridiculous to remove a product because it got minor media attention.
They are ashamed of their own history and have no sense for public relations. Many successful companies build museums and archives, support outdated products, sponsor enthusiasts of old crap, etc. In return these companies have dedicated fan bases, enthusiast clubs and whatnot.
But MS doesn't get it, because they are too concerned with their quarterly earnings and the only marketing they understand is paying an agency big bucks for pretty lies.
Outwars is mechanically interesting. Controls sort of like Starsiege: Tribes (there's a jetpack), and you can control the legs and torso separately ala MechWarrior.
And even more interesting the response time for that change was very short. Honestly, I had supposed it will take days for a large company like Microsoft to do so.
A change control request to setup a redirect on a site from 1998 that will have the absolute minimum possible impact to anything else isn't going to take more than a signature or two even in a company as large as Microsoft. It might even be outside of the scope of needing any kind of official change control due to its age. While working at Xerox I had authority to kill off long forgotten public facing sites that had slipped through the cracks over time.
At my bank, any type of change requires a 48 hour cool down from request approval to change. Sure you can put it through as an emergency change but then a committee of SVPs and EVPs has to approve it and they pretty much never approve anything.
Even for something so old and outdated? Because I have done consultancy work for some banks and have seen things (mostly incorrect data to be fair) changed in under half an hour once pointed out.
1. Business users. So unbelievably locked down it's ridiculous. Anytime they ask for access rights it's "can't, because of audit".
2. Application IT users. As locked down as possible while still allowing them to somewhat do their job.
3. Infrastructure IT users. Domain admin rights with their standard user login. Ability to bypass any proxy server restriction by default.
It's basically the worst of all worlds. The business users and application IT people can't do anything in the name of following "security best practices" while the infrastructure IT people (including the business analysts and non-technical people in that group) have carte blanche because "they couldn't do their job without it". They don't even follow basic security practices like using a non-privileged account for everyday use and having an elevated account for when they need to do something. It's a complete mess.
So thinking about it more - the infrastructure IT people make instant changes all the time.
Yup that is pretty much my experience of a dozen blue chips and banks. It is either all or nothing. A lot of this is Microsoft's fault due to how crap things were done back in the XP and earlier days and while we have moved on a lot of places stick to how they used to do things rather than re-evaluate how things can and should be done now. Sucks but that is the way the corporate world is it seems.
Banks should be resistant to change, changes have the potential for million dollar mistakes. It would be expensive for them to have 1 procedure for the important money-touching systems and another for the less important website infrastructure.
In the early 1990s there was a Nintendo game released called Wally Bear and the No! Gang. It was an insipid platformer with graphics from a MECC Apple II game and a thudding "stay off drugs" message. It got some attention in the mid-2000s when the Angry Videogame Nerd reviewed it.
And then in 2006, on some message board, a gamer discovered that the 1-800 number advertised in the game was still running, and you could still call in and hear the voices of Wally Bear, Toby Turtle, and all their friends. As soon as word spread about it, though, the 1-800 number was disconnected. By the time I had discovered it, Wally had already been silenced... forever.
Running an toll free number isn't cheap, especially when you set it up in the 90s and a bunch of random internet people are calling it. Given that the companies behind the game seem to have petered out, I imagine they had given some amount of sales to the people running the 1-800 number in the 90s and the money finally ran out.
I am sure that this nypost flame-post, combined with the increased traffic from HN made a 35+ year old department mananger spill his coffee in the morning. MS has no balls.
More like a PR employee for MS reads HN. Seems like a move by a concerned PR person and not an engineer who most likely would have recognized the significance of the positive feedback on sites like HN.
Let's hope someone with some history at MS rectifies the situation and rel-launches the site with the accompanying HN post announcing it.
(C'mon MS don't be jerks, be proud of your history and leave that up!)
Edit: in fact, want to sell Windows' awesome backwards-compatibility? Make 1 edit to that site, detailing how to make the trial of the game run in Windows 8.1. Then leave it as a testament to the OS's huge legacy. Be proud of it. Wear it as a badge of honour.