Halo 4

My schedule this semester is tough to describe, but on Monday through Wednesday I have about an hour to myself until 10PM. So in that hour there’s a forty percent chance that I’m playing Halo 3 on Xbox live. I’m hoping I can stop anytime I want, but I think it’s getting me hooked again. The last time I played this game would have been junior year of high school. After two years of not playing, as one can imagine, I was quite rusty. Was I specifically bad? No, but compared to how good I was one could say there was a lot of room for improvement.

I used to be amazing, the record on my old account was winning 881 out of 1009 games. Online you play against people that have the same "skill rank" on a scale from 1-50, 50 being the highest. The way you rank up is by continuously and consecutively winning games. Consequently if you lose, you rank down. To become a 50 you need to win roughly sixty games in a row. I would play with my best friend from home and I had a 50 in Team Doubles. In other playlists I had 48, 46, 42, 38 and 20 in a playlist I did not play much. So I enjoyed being able to not do homework in high school and constantly win games a majority of the time I played.  

So now the year is 2012, the year the world is supposedly going to end. And even though Halo 4 is coming out I feel as though the Halo franchise is officially over. A gameplay trailer of Halo 4 came out and it is no longer Halo. It lost many aspects of it that made Halo, well Halo. Throughout all of its life there was no ability to sprint in Halo, but they added it to this edition. On top of that they added gravity to sniper shots, to make it more realistic, but the thing about Halo was that there was nothing realistic about it in the first place. The main character is a six/seven foot tall man that can jump at least ten feet in the air. There are aliens, lasers, flying ships, you can get shot over fourteen times and still live, regenerate health quickly and you can flip tanks over with your bare hands.

On the release of Halo 3 they grossed over $300 million and millions of people played on Xbox live in the first few days. It had a lot to live up to the Legends of Halo, and Halo 2’s Xbox live experience, but they did deliver. My concern is if Halo 4 will be able to live up to the greatness of its predecessors. This is the first “Halo” game being made by a company other than Bungie. This will be made by 343 Industries. I hope that this franchise will continue to be great, but I am quite skeptical of if they have it in them to deliver a solid product.

Viral marketing or deadly indigestion?

With its usual lack of understanding of user needs or wants Microsoft has come up with probably one of the worst product launch campaigns in the annals of advertising.

In consonance with their overbloated, indigestible and socially irresponsible practices, Microsoft launches Windows 7 by partnering with Burger King and offering a "Windows 7 Whopper"!

With over 2500 calories, this obesity and artery clogging, hormone-laden, environmentally devastating promotional campaign will probably (and hopefully) do as much harm to Microsoft and its shareholders as they have inflicted upon users for over 3 decades.

The vomitive offer features 7 greasy patties for only $8.55. What a bargain. Check with your insurance company before buying Windows 7 to see if they cover software-induced triple bypass surgery. But hurry, this offer is good only for 7 days and after that the price goes up to$ 15.86.

What's up with the 7's? do they just want to up-one the famous 666 you know who? That would be bestial.

Think before you click

Google's data center, from Harper's magazine, March 2008

This blueprint depicts Google's data center, code named "02 PROJECT" at The Dalles, Oregon.

Google and its nemesis, Microsoft, Yahoo and Ask.com went there lured by the cheapest electricity in North America. And they need it. They are building gigantic server farms on the banks of the Columbia River.

We tend to think of the internet, the virtual worlds, our email and the "paperless society" as somehow a 'cleaner' option than the legacy of our ancestors. We talk of information and the exchange of ideas, as if these concepts reside on the sphere of intangibles that lead us to a gentler, greener world.

People are slowly realizing that driving their cars and SUV's leave a carbon "footprint" for which we will be hold accountable by generations to come. So we telecommute, we email instead of writing a letter or a note (would we write so much dribble if we had to use pen and ink?) and we search or, using the new verb, we google for information, sometimes for its own sake, the new addiction.

Little do we realize that this new industry is as heavy as they come, and like the article in Harper's 1 mentions: "...an energy glutton that is only growing hungrier." Currently Google is estimated to have in the order of a million servers. According to the article: "...the servers require a half-watt in cooling for every watt they use in processing". Some simple math will yield in the order of 103 megawatts for the Dalles plant alone. As a curious note, the Northwest Aluminum smelter across the street form the data center once used 85 megawatts before falling under soaring energy costs.

If you examine the blueprint above, you will see that 18,800 sq. ft. are devoted to the "cooling towers". Perhaps it will become fashionable again to wear the Top Hats of the 1920's to celebrate the new Information Chimneys of the New Millenium?

Can you identify the gentleman in the picture?
C'mon, I'll buy pizza for the first to name him!

And the winner is...Takumi! Choose your toppings (**>

While you are at it, look at the building on the upper right corner and you will see a suggestive label: "Transient Employee Dormitory Building". As with all things digital, employees are simply bits and blips in the flow of the new oil. And the "carbon footprint" is not pretty.

The article mentions that in 2006 American data centers "consumed more power than American televisions" and that in all locations currently active or in planning, both in America and Siberia, Shanghai and Dublin where AT&T, Microsoft and Google are heading in search (pun intended) of even cheaper electricity, most of this energy is produced by the burning of fossil fuels. I gives new meaning to the term "cloud computing"


1 The Harper's article "KEYWORD:EVIL, Google's addiction to cheap electricity", which inspired this post, was written by Ginger Strand, author of Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power and Lies, to be published this spring by Simon & Schuster