On the plus side!

[greenreaper]

The Wednesday that I got my prescription, I went to a Windows 8 Hackathon, where I spent about eight hours mocking up an app based around displaying recent/popular submissions to Inkbunny. Yes, I played the furry card, explaining the potential of 100,000 users to the voting audience . . . and I won!

Specifically, I won a Samsung Series 7 tablet,

Comments

[sorcererdale]

Way to go!!! That sounds like a good haul for winning.

[greenreaper]

They are really keen for people to develop apps for Windows 8. (Preferably ones which they can make money on as well.)

I think they were expecting more people to show up or try for it. They had three to give away, for maybe thirty people; maybe fifteen of us actually presented. At training, the day before, there'd been over 150 - they ran out of seats. I guess that's the gap between people who go to training for the free food and those who actually want to do something with it.

Still, attendance was free and open to all, the winners were popularly voted (by the developers), and I won almost unanimously in my category, so I figure I got mine fair and square. :-)

[harvardheinous]

Congrats! I didn't even know Samsung had a Windows tablet like that. (So what's so great about the Microsoft Surface Pro?)

[greenreaper]

Well, it will have USB 3.0 rather than 2.0. Also, those clippy keyboards and an integrated stand. It seems to be based on a newer chipset and may be somewhat more power efficient. Basically, another year of evolution.

You probably didn't know because it's so very expensive. You really need a reason to get one - or you're a developer, and MS wants to give you something to build apps on. (Perhaps "give" is the wrong word - //BUILD/, the event where they gave these out last year, was quite expensive to get into - though it was still classified as a gift for which you had to pay taxes.)

[austin_dern]

Oh, wow. Well, congratulations, and I hope the gadget and card turn out to be useful or at least fun.

[greenreaper]

I'm hoping the slate is both! If not, well, I plan to pick up a monitor, keyboard, and some games with the gift card, and I'm sure I can make good use of all of those.