Why was Pinball removed from Windows Vista? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why was Pinball removed from Windows Vista?

#81

Post by ww520 » Tue, Dec 18, 2012, 10:52 PM UTC

cjensen wrote: post #72

wvenable wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows unicode support predates the existence of UTF-8 -- so that's great API design for Windows if you possess a time machine. The ANSI functions merely map to the unicode functions. In addition, the Windows Kernel is probably similar in API size to the Linux kernel. Of course, that's not nearly enough API for a complete Windowing operating system in either case.

The point is both Unix and Windows faced the exact same problem: needing to support larger characters. MS thought little and unleashed their army of coders to do something foolish. The Unix guys thought hard and did something elegant and sensible.

NT was started around 88 and released in mid 93. UTF-8 wasn't ready until early 93. It's too bad they couldn't go back in time to retrofit everything.

Programming is a series of tradeoffs. Unless you are in the middle of doing it, you don't understand the pressure the programmers were facing and the tradeoffs needed to be made. The Windows and Unix guys didn't face the same problem since they were different problems with different tools available in different time periods. Hindsight is 20/20 and is easy to be dickish to laugh at their mistakes afterward.

Re: Why was Pinball removed from Windows Vista?

#82

Post by ww520 » Tue, Dec 18, 2012, 11:03 PM UTC

cjensen wrote: post #38

To me, the lesson is: Do not duplicate code! and keep it simple stupid When implementing Unicode, MS said "hey let's copy all of our API functions to new names". Now they have two problems. When implementing 64-bit, MS said "hey let's have a completely different OS for 64-bit." Now they have four problems. Compare this to Unix/Linux/MacOS where Unicode is just implemented as a standard way (UTF-8) of encoding charact…

Confusing the Linux kernel service API and the OS API is pretty misleading.

Re: Why was Pinball removed from Windows Vista?

#83

Post by ww520 » Tue, Dec 18, 2012, 11:15 PM UTC

crpatino wrote: post #77

streptomycin wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elaborate on what? It seems rather obvious that a popular game with a minor bug rendering it unplayable would have that bug fixed by someone for free if it was open source. Or do you want me to elaborate on why it's too bad? Well, pinball is the best game that was ever included with Windows, so it's unfortunate that it's not still there.

First, it was not a minor bug, it is a major bug that made the whole product unusable. Second, the whole code base was one big, nasty, uncommented mud-ball. From the article: "... we simply couldn't figure out why the collision detector was not working. Heck, we couldn't even find the collision detector!" I was genuinely curious to hear how you think sprinkling fairy dust open source on top of the mess is going to ma…

People not in the middle of working on the program don't understand the magnitude of the problem and it's way easier to be an internet warrior shooting off their mouth. GP's comments made it appear to be trolling.

In fact the problem was way worse, the program used floating point for movement computation and could accumulate floating point errors along the way and moved too much. The floating point size was changed in 64-bit and exacerbate the problem. That's probably why the collision detection didn't work.

It's better to rewrite from ground up than fix it.

Re: Why was Pinball removed from Windows Vista?

#84

Post by ww520 » Tue, Dec 18, 2012, 11:15 PM UTC

streptomycin wrote: post #3

Too bad it wasn't open source, then someone would have fixed it for free.

There are plenty of open source pinball games. Why can't people just download them?

Re: Why was Pinball removed from Windows Vista?

#85

Post by daeken » Tue, Dec 18, 2012, 11:17 PM UTC

yuhong wrote: post #78

bcoates wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the reason the Brownian motion stopped working was a shift from 80-bit x87 intermediaries to 64-bit SSE in x64, and the removal of long double support from MSVC.

And I think ia64 has yet another different 82-bit floating point architecture that is supposed to be compatible with x87.

Bear in mind, IA64 is not x86-64, but rather the ISA for Itanium chips.

Re: Why was Pinball removed from Windows Vista?

#86

Post by transpostmeta » Tue, Dec 18, 2012, 11:19 PM UTC

crpatino wrote: post #77

streptomycin wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elaborate on what? It seems rather obvious that a popular game with a minor bug rendering it unplayable would have that bug fixed by someone for free if it was open source. Or do you want me to elaborate on why it's too bad? Well, pinball is the best game that was ever included with Windows, so it's unfortunate that it's not still there.

First, it was not a minor bug, it is a major bug that made the whole product unusable. Second, the whole code base was one big, nasty, uncommented mud-ball. From the article: "... we simply couldn't figure out why the collision detector was not working. Heck, we couldn't even find the collision detector!" I was genuinely curious to hear how you think sprinkling fairy dust open source on top of the mess is going to ma…

Windows has millions of users. If Microsoft went out and said: "Hey, this game you all like has a bug in 64-bit versions, here's the source, any ideas?", I bet tons of people would have invested a couple of days. As you see in the blog post, it was not even possible to invest that amount of time into the problem within Microsoft.

Open source is not magic in the least. It just enables other people to try and help out if your project means anything to them.

Re: Why was Pinball removed from Windows Vista?

#87

Post by amorphid » Tue, Dec 18, 2012, 11:31 PM UTC

ww520 wrote: post #84

streptomycin wrote: post #3

Too bad it wasn't open source, then someone would have fixed it for free.

There are plenty of open source pinball games. Why can't people just download them?

Nostalgia.

Re: Why was Pinball removed from Windows Vista?

#88

Post by gizmo686 » Tue, Dec 18, 2012, 11:31 PM UTC

transpostmeta wrote: post #86

crpatino wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, it was not a minor bug, it is a major bug that made the whole product unusable. Second, the whole code base was one big, nasty, uncommented mud-ball. From the article: "... we simply couldn't figure out why the collision detector was not working. Heck, we couldn't even find the collision detector!" I was genuinely curious to hear how you think sprinkling fairy dust open source on top of the mess is going to ma…

Windows has millions of users. If Microsoft went out and said: "Hey, this game you all like has a bug in 64-bit versions, here's the source, any ideas?", I bet tons of people would have invested a couple of days. As you see in the blog post, it was not even possible to invest that amount of time into the problem within Microsoft. Open source is not magic in the least. It just enables other people to try and help out…

If the game had been open source from the beggining, it probably would not be an undocumented mess right now. Sure, open source is no guarentee for quality, but open source and popular means that many eyes will look at the code, and it will naturally develop documentation.

Re: Why was Pinball removed from Windows Vista?

#89

Post by shabble » Tue, Dec 18, 2012, 11:36 PM UTC

randomdrake wrote: post #4

This is an excellent example of why comments in code are so very useful, helpful and in my opinion, necessary. ... nobody at Microsoft ever understood how the code worked (much less still understood it), and that most of the code was completely uncommented, we simply couldn't figure out why the collision detector was not working. Heck, we couldn't even find the collision detector! To all those folks out there who kee…

I'm pretty sure I saw a library somewhere that could be purchased in both "raw code" and "commented, documented code" forms.

Which I can only assume meant they had the comments/documents and were intentionally stripping them out for the cheaper version. The difference in price was also actually quite significant as well, as I recall.

That, along with the fact that the person doing the purchasing is not necessarily the person who would be using the product, makes this IMO a particularly nasty sales tactic.

I've also heard war stories from Big Company folks about contracting out for a large software project, and per contract receiving the full source for the app, but none of the (particularly convoluted) build scripts or Makefiles.

Lessons Learned are why BigCo has a 900 page specification document including glossary of what the word "means" means.

Re: Why was Pinball removed from Windows Vista?

#90

Post by bonch » Tue, Dec 18, 2012, 11:45 PM UTC

RegEx wrote: post #70

h2s wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't agree with you emphatically enough about this. Cargo cult commenting is one of the easiest ways to damage the readability of a codebase. Comments should be an edge-case solution for explaining unusual quirks, not the go-to approach for explaining the entire codebase. Using comments to explain what the code is up to is like using exceptions for flow of control. A large proportion of the comments I see should a…

This point gets brought up a lot, but I'm not going to complain at all. In fact, just 5-6 months ago I used to be one of those programmers who would do # gets the xml def get_xml(): It took comments like this to help me realize just how silly the whole thing was. Now I write as much self-documenting code as I can, but comment as needed.

It's all subjective, but that comment could be expanded to, for example, explain where the XML is assumed to be coming from or what kind of XML is expected. If the code makes no assumptions about those things, that is also something to write a comment about.