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).
