Nov 24, 2012  The ad only takes up about 4.5% of the landscape, in the least conspicuous possible spot. That ad is like putting a small banner ad in the footer of a website. If you're jumping into the app to play a game of Minesweeper, you'd never even see the ad unless you're using a 4,850 pixel wide display.

That doesn't match my experience at all. Just to check my sanity, I flipped open Minesweeper and played a game on easy. Between the loading time and my 23 second win, I spent about the 30 seconds you mentioned from start to finish entirely. I didn't notice any ads at all, and the only Xbox Live interaction I saw was the non-modal growl-like notice that I was signed into Xbox Live as Encosia.Also, there's nothing about Windows 8 that prevents you from running an older Minesweeper.exe from a USB stick like you mentioned.Speaking of ads, here's a panorama of the entire app:. The ad only takes up about 4.5% of the landscape, in the least conspicuous possible spot. Forza horizon 3 cars. That ad is like putting a small banner ad in the footer of a website.

If you're jumping into the app to play a game of Minesweeper, you'd never even see the ad unless you're using a 4,850 pixel wide display. Speaking of ads, here's a panorama of the entire app:. //I don't get it, which app. It says minesweeper, where are the mines? Is this like the minesweeper starter app, did they feel interstitials were so loved on the web that they wanted to give people more of them?Also, don't they have any designers at MS or is mis-alignment the new grid?

Or perhaps there's some cunning reason other than making it stand out more in the most annoying fashion that the advert should not adhere to the grid of the rest of the content. I find the ad more offensive than obtrusive. This is an operating system I paid for, one where Minesweeper has traditionally been bundled - for free, and without advertising. This also changes the dynamic where now Microsoft has a vested interest in learning everything they can about me to deliver more relevant ads to improve click-through rates. The whole idea of my OS tracking me sends shivers up my spine.Also, there's nothing about Windows 8 that prevents you from running an older Minesweeper.exe from a USB stick like you mentioned.For now. It's clear the direction that MS is taking Windows though, and I don't know how long I can reasonably expect to have such control. And if I want to throw that older exe onto a new WinRT machine, it would not function.

It's an incredible stretch to extrapolate from WinRT and suggest that x86 Windows will disable running arbitrary executables anytime in the foreseeable future. Surely no one actually believes that Microsoft is planning to turn away the huge mass of customers currently doing that with Enterprise apps, random Shareware, etc in Windows 7/8 any time soon.We aren't going to agree about the ad. I literally never saw it in Minesweeper until I went looking for it today, and it's clearly a generic CPM based display ad instead of something invasive based on your activity. Focusing on these nearly-hidden ads in ancillary apps seems like the pinnacle of bikeshedding to me.edit: Not to say that your opinion is wrong or mine is better. I just can't get on board with all of the fuss I've been seeing lately about these ads. Having been using Windows 8 as my primary desktop OS for about a year, I never see the ads.

I have to hunt for them to even verify that they're still there when another blog post pops up about them. So, are you saying it would make you happy if an ad-less Minesweeper were available in the Store for a couple dollars?I prefer buying paid apps when they're available too.

I don't play a ton of games, but I own the paid version of the ones I play that offer both choices (Words with Friends, Letterpress, Drop7).I think we're seeing that pricing model fade away though, particularly in the gaming segment. Developers have discovered that only a tiny minority of paid games will be popular enough to hit the Angry Birds jackpot, driving them toward ads or IAP approaches instead. Even when they do hit that jackpot, some popular paid apps are struggling to subsist in the long term with no mechanism for paid upgrades (e.g.

Minesweeper gameYou are encouraged to according to the task description, using any language you may know.There is an n by m grid that has a random number (between 10% to 20% of the total number of tiles, though older implementations may use 20%.60% instead) of randomly placed mines that need to be found.Positions in the grid are modified by entering their coordinates where the first coordinate is horizontal in the grid and the second vertical. The top left of the grid is position 1,1; the bottom right is at n,m. The total number of mines to be found is shown at the beginning of the game.

Each mine occupies a single grid point, and its position is initially unknown to the player. The grid is shown as a rectangle of characters between moves. You are initially shown all grids as obscured, by a single dot '.' . You may mark what you think is the position of a mine which will show as a '?' .

You can mark what you think is free space by entering its coordinates. If the point is free space then it is cleared, as are any adjacent points that are also free space- this is repeated recursively for subsequent adjacent free points unless that point is marked as a mine or is a mine. Points marked as a mine show as a '?'