Microsoft finally took some type of responsibility for the massive outages on their Live service over the last month or so. One question; Will the service ever be back to where it was in September? The really weird thing, to me at least, is that this type of service outage really affected us over the holidays. CableTV On Demand, DVR’s, and Netflix just can’t replace a rainy afternoon, 1000 microsoft points,10 seasons of South Park, and going prestiege on COD4. After 5 years, I guess we have come to rely on Microsoft’s rock solid performance, and I wonder if this outage is just the begining of more widespread problems.
It reminded me of the Bad Old Days of AOL dialup. AOL Dialup isn’t hard to remember, if anyone cares to. Do you remember the busy signals for hours on end, the non-existant customer support, and the 2 years before they finally got it straight? One may see a parallel here with the bad old days of AOL. They put on more subscribers than they could handle for years. Oh by the way, the message XBox released looks alot like those of the AOL of old. A press release, propaganda letter, and an i’ll gladly give you on tuesday a hamburger you bought today mentality that sent AOL subscribers running away in droves 10 years ago. Either way, this offer is sure to keep the Better Business Bureau at bay, and lets Major Nelson off the hook.
From the XBox Live Team Dear Xbox LIVE Members:
During this past holiday season you helped us break a number of Xbox LIVE records. This included our largest sign-up of new members to Xbox LIVE in our 5 year history and just yesterday you broke the record for the single biggest day of concurrent members ever on the service. As a result of this massive increase in usage we know that some of you experienced intermittent Xbox LIVE issues over the holiday break. While the service was not completely offline at any given time, we are disappointed in our performance. I would like to take this moment to thank you each and every one of you for your patience and understanding as our team has worked around the clock to return the service to a stable state. At the same time we would like to offer a token of our appreciation to all of you in celebration of record success for the service. And as a thank you for your loyalty during this holiday period, we will be offering all of our Xbox LIVE members around the world access to a full Xbox LIVE Arcade game that will be available to download free of charge. In the coming weeks we will be sharing the specific details of this offer with you. Thank you again for helping make Xbox LIVE everything that it is today!
Always a biased information source , National Public Radio interviewed Halo bigwig Joe Staten today. Lisa made a special point to fill me in it when she got home. She thought the interviewer sounded a bit like a noob she needed to mute. By the looks of it, Wu didn’t sound too impressed, either. I stand by my opinion that even the choice of interviewers at NPR is ‘by design’, and like Wu says, they wanted to use the old and tired Dumb Gamers Angle. Either way, the story is the Halo series of novels and Halo’s impact on, well, everything. This must the sixth or seventh Halo piece on NPR since the early fall, not too shabby.’
Without a doubt, the combination of a Clinton defeat in Iowa and polls showing a serious setback in New Hampshire caused great consternation in the Clinton Camp on Monday. Protesters shouting IRON MY SHIRT and holding signs were escorted out of an event on the day before the New Hampshire Primary in 2008. Mrs Clinton, who freely admitted that the stress of the campaign was getting to her, looked like she just got stuck in a 2 hour traffic jam on the Tappan Zee Bridge. Lisa said a hundred times they would elect a man before a woman, even if the man was retarded, and I wonder if Hillary just realized that.
Never one to hold back, rumors are that when she saw the resuts from Dixville Notch in the wee hours of the morning, she promptly called Denise Rich and asked her for a couple of million and Maureen Dowd to arrange for a slamdown in the Times for those assholes with the Iron My Shirt signs. Next, she dispatched Bill the Housefrau to Hollywood to wake Parker & Stone so they could brainstorm a new episode where Cartman dreams about her butt. After that, she was going to blackberry all those skeletons in her closet into shape if it was the last thing she did, but thought better about that and called Grand Rabbi Twerski for permission. After receiving the OK from New Square to beat Obama, she finally took her dose of Ambien and had had her last dream of 2008.
There is a video surfacing on the net from a beauty pageant held sometime in the 80’s (which will become clear when you see the hair and outfit). This woman’s “talent” is blowing the theme from Star Wars on a trumpet, but she sucks so bad, I could blow the Star Wars theme on my husband’s you-know-what better than that. I guess you could say she sucks and blows at once.
I think it’s pretty damn funny kids, so check it out. At 1:34 she even starts dancing!
I’ve played a game or two with Louis Wu before, and he seems like a really nice guy. I am, however, rather pissed off at him and his legions of fanboys today, because they attacked a bunch of Italian shop workers and accused them of possibly “Leaking” Halo 3 information. Dorks. One of the HBO fanboy dorks went net surfing and found this pic on some Italian Gaming forum and immediately reported it to Wu, who put it on his front page and posted this statement:
When Shipping Departments Screw Up
nashhousewares found a thread on an Italian forum with some pictures that, if they’re what they look like, do NOT bode well for keeping Halo 3 secrets until launch day. We’re looking into this – but if it turns out to be what it looks like, I’m thinking we’ll probably close the forum down for 3 weeks. Starting… really soon. Stay tuned.
“We’re looking into this”. Which means he went running to his buddies at Bungie, who then went running to Microsoft Game Studios, who then probably got these poor fucks in a lot of trouble for posing in some innocent picture. Because as it turns out, those are simply the empty boxes they are going to use for display purposes around the store.
I went back to the Italian site where this pic was originally posted, and the pic was removed with this message:
means that these guys not only got falsely accused of being, as one HBO regular called them, “Italian Pirates”, had their faces and gamertags plastered all over the internet, and got investigated by Microsoft, they also had their fucking server crash from all the HBO dorks hitting them up.
