"A sedentary lifestyle can be linked to obesity, which in turn *can* be linked to death and illness. The summary is a little too... angry...."
Not really, in the context of your latter point it was quite right, after all, going outside can be linked to illness and death if you catch a cold or get hit by a car but I think you'd agree that it's idiotic to start an advertising campaign about how we should all never leave the house because it could lead to death?
I'd imagine far more people die playing sports than die playing computer games and I doubt there's much difference between people suffering a shortened life because they over exert themselves and people who suffering a shortened life through under exerting themselves.
As you say, balance is key, to suggest you shouldn't sit back and relax- which is effectively the message this ad campaign is in danger of putting across is both ignorant and dangerous in itself. It's not a particularly rare event that people have died the first ever time they've gone to the gym because they over did it and simply haven't worked their way up to the hard stuff over a period of weeks/months.
You're making a lot of assumptions there and missing some important points:
"First of all, ANY console in a closed cupboard will overheat, but leave a PS3 and XBOX360 in the middle of the floor, and there will be a CONSIDERABLE heat difference."
Depends which generation you compare really, when the PS3 came out it was locking up due to overheating problems in the display cabinets in various electronics retailers quite frequently. Sony did a good job of fixing this fairly quickly (hence the early rapid iteration of console versions). The latest versions of the 360 are also fairly cool, they certainly run not hotter than the latest iterations of the PS3. Microsoft certainly took longer to get their systems cooler though that's for sure. If we're comparing early consoles though there was no difference, they both got too hot, if we're comparing the latest hardware iterations, there's also no difference as they both run pretty cool. It was only the mid-way systems for about a 6 months to a year starting around 3 - 6 months after the original PS3 came out where there was a noticable disparity.
"Wii fail less partly because the hardware is not as powerful (less heat), but mostly because you don't get as many hours worth of use out of them."
I guess you don't own a Wii? Even in it's low power standby mode it gets pretty warm so it certainly doesn't get any less hot, this is presumably because it's a smaller system though and has less surface area across which the heat can spread and dissipate.
Regarding failure rates, it's also a pretty irrelevant point now, the 360's RROD problem has long been solved and there are no issues with the PS3 nowadays either, the Wii is solid too. From what I've seen in terms of recent figures, all 3 consoles are within the standard acceptable bounds for electronic goods so there doesn't seem to be anything here worth arguing between each of the consoles anymore. For what it's worth though, I got bored of the Wii too, but I think the reason it failed less early on was simply because it was using last generation hardware that had already been pushed to the point it could be squeezed in a small box with no stability issues (even if it does still get warm of course).
A lot of console fanboyism arguments are based on now obsolete arguments- the 360 has buggy hardware, the PS3 has no games, the Wii gets boring quick. All systems have taken steps to shed these old stereotypes to the point they really are a little ignorant now. I'll admit as an early adopter of consoles, out of the 3, the 360 is my favourite purely because the choice of games are more to my taste (PS3 games are too my taste too, there's simply less of them) and those games that are available across all platforms just integrate much more nicely on the 360 thanks to Live, the Achievements and that sort of thing.
Most people presumably bought their console if they only have one because it's more to their tastes. Buying a PS3 because it can run Linux seems stupid to me because you can just stick it on a PC and have more flexibility but I guess some people like the feature. I'm not sure what the target market for PS3 Linux is when pretty much anyone interested in Linux will have a PC anyway and when you can't make full use of the graphics hardware anyway though.
As an aside, I'm not sure what you meant about the PS3 having standard USB was? Both the Wii and 360 do also. The 360 and Wii also both have flawless image galleries and the 360 similarly has flawless video support including streaming from media player or compatible computers if required too. It's also debatable whether the PS3 is more powerful, Cell potentially is certainly but the graphics card certainly isn't and the memory architecture is not. Regarding Folding@Home I also struggle to see why that's a benefit, just outright turning your system off helps save your power costs and hence the environment so there's an equal feel good (and financial benefit!) to just not having that feature or turning it off too.
I played through it on Veteran on the 360 and never encountered anything like the grenade spam I did on Call of Duty 5 where it literally got as silly as at some points (i.e. taking out the artillery guns on the second last level) ending up with around 10 grenades on you and in the immediate area, that kind of thing made the "throw back grenade" mechanic pointless it seemed.
About the only place on CoD4 I had lots of grenades was on the sniper section where you're fleeing and there are those old buses you can hide in. When I hid in a bus and led down I was getting quite a few grenades, but not so many that I couldn't easily just throw them back out.
I've been to schools where ID cards have been used for toilet access and to monitor where kids are in the school with the aim of making sure kids aren't spending too long in the toilets avoiding lessons or to make sure they're not elsewhere in the school they shouldn't be.
How well does your monitoring work? The schools I covered were all attached to the Yorkshire and Humberside Grid for Learning which is effectively an ISP for all schools connected in that region. They offered filtering which was pretty ineffective because it'd take 24hrs or more to get a site blacklisted. Some schools used their own filtering solutions on top, usually Censornet. There was certainly no problem kids getting round most censorship regardless but certainly many teachers getting wound up about it when the end result of the kids getting where they wanted anyway had questionable negative effect regardless.
The problem is that as with the real world and CCTV cameras, monitoring to stop bullying and such merely just moves the problem elsewhere. It doesn't deal with the core issue, it just hides it away better.
I wouldn't argue kids should have the right to view porn, they should certainly be taught it's not accepted behaviour to browse stuff in public places, but I would question what the actual problem is if they do look at that kind of thing. I mean, how many kids have mobile phones now anyway that can access the internet and browse stuff like that if they really want to? Monitoring seems like a futile band aid that just hides the problem. It does have the side effect of discouraging people from using the internet in case they run into something that may get them in trouble. A lot of kids also just used proxy sites to bypass filtering, if required, using another kids password or even in the odd case, getting hold of the teacher's.
Of course, you can blacklist everything and whitelist what is required but again this just ruins the internet for the kids, there'll be little point to it for the most part. Even Wikipedia has content people might not want kids seeing and you either go through trying to block every questionable page or you let them have full access. You then do that for every site you allow.
Some sections spawn unlimited enemies and the only way to prevent the constant spawn is to move up and push forward so you can't just sit back at a distance picking them off else you simply run out of ammo.
"Some say it is, some say it isn't. Personally I do not care if you define it when you use it. It doesn't make ANY difference if Pluto is a planet or not since it does not change ANYTHING."
Yeah changes nothing, apart from say, how we define what is and isn't categorised as a planet? I mean like, let's re-define the symbol "=" to be the addition operator, I mean that changes nothing right? "=" is the equality operator, does that make you happy?
When we're auditing the skies, do you not think it might be important to be able to figure out what category a space object should fall into? Are you suggesting we should categorise man made satellites as planets because you know, it doesn't matter does it?
Yeah. I vote that Illinois also changes the definition of a mile and shortens it so that their residents can get more miles to the gallon! I also vote that they cut the definition of an hour down to 30mins to shorten my working day.
Consensus and standards be damned, they're just definitions!
To be fair, based on that this system may actually be better than many swipe card systems, as quite a few schools swipe card systems implement RFID and track kids movements around the school (to see if they're not in lesson, spending too long in the toilets etc.).
If this simply stores biometrics for the period a child is at a school and is used for nothing else than sign in/sign out then it's certainly less evil than many other schemes in schools.
There's still a good argument to be had that this is an expensive way of sign in/sign out compared to say, a classic, paper based register or similar though. There is also the danger of feature creep and the biometrics being used for other reasons or simply stored indefinitely and such of course too.
I've been to schools that have had boxes of thousands upon thousands of pounds worth of software sat in not being used because the teachers didn't have time to install it all and couldn't afford to pay for technical time to get it installed (because they'd spent their IT money on the software).
I don't have a problem with the teachers not having time to install it, but I do have a problem with them buying it all in the first place knowing full well they wouldn't have time to install it, or at least not balancing out the software and support time to install what they did buy.
Laptops for teachers is arguably a more frustrating waste of money, one thing that really used to annoy me a little was when teachers would use their tax payer purchased laptop to play games, browse the internet and get infected with viruses so that it took more tax payers money to clean it all up and fix it all. Some of them just can't draw the distinction between something that has been bought for them by tax payers to use for work purposes and something they've paid for themselves to get viruses, install games and browse porn on.
Yeah this sounds like a waste of money, but in the grand scheme of wastes of money in UK schools it's nothing. Politicians have a habit of lying, but when you hear election promises of "We can save £20bn by efficiency improvements" they're not actually lying, technically they could probably save more than that by efficiency improvements across public sector and education. It's just a shame none of them have yet actually managed to put it into practice;)
Quite a lot of schools have CCTV, out of the 171 I used to support I'd say around 95% had some CCTV and around 60% extended it into classrooms rather than just as a security tool. This was a couple of years back and I can't imagine the situation has improved.
There's an argument for CCTV, it's certainly one of the lesser issues in schools- I'd be more concerned about the ID cards some schools force students to have to be able to go to the toilet and that come with RFID tracking capabilites. Fingerprinting is also a bigger deal I'd argue.
It all comes down to the same tired old argument that it helps control the kids but really it doesn't, kids are as they've always been regardless. What would help control the kids is better teachers and that's the biggest issue in the majority of cases but it's not entirely the fault of teachers, it's very much partly down to the politically correct attitude of giving kids the benefit of the doubt and putting teachers at threat of suspension if they dare even do the slightest thing to upset little Timmy who just kicked someone and threw a bunch of books on the floor. This leaves the teachers somewhat powerless unless they just have good kid skills at talking to and calming down the most unruly kids but also by making the kids like them, good teachers with those kinds of qualities aren't overly common though.
Lucky you. You'll note I said "most" headteachers, that means, not all.
I've worked in Education also, albeit not in a single school like you appear to by referring to a single head teacher. I worked in IT support covering 171 schools for a few years so have witnessed first hand the types of people I'm talking about in countless schools and it absolutely was the majority that would fall into this definition.
It is not therefore sensationalist rubbish. Just because you personally haven't experienced or witnessed it does not mean it's not true.
I would however be intrigued to hear why you believe so many schools have implemented student ID cards (often including RFID tracking), fingerprinting, CCTV, or showed strong support for the child DNA databases if you believe there is not a culture of over the top control amongst most British headteachers? Or are you simply trying to deny the fact that most schools have between 1 and all of these measures in place?
I think you're right, some of the AI systems we've seen touted as being the best just seem to the end player to be effectively no different from some of the worst earlier AI. Call of Duty 5 is a good example of AI gone wrong, where enemies do try to flank you, use cover efficiently and so on. They're also good at using grenades, the problem is, they're all too good at using grenades. So when you hide behind cover 5 germans will chuck grenades at you so you have to run for other cover at which point another 5 will throw more meaning you have to run back to where you were assuming those grenades have blown up, all whilst dying repeatedly anyway because enemies kill you in only two or three shots on veteran. The fact they just plaster the area with 5 grenades often left me feeling little difference to the "hard mode" of old in many past games where the enemies were made harder by simply making them automatically aim at you and do rediculously high damage. The additional "intelligence" simply added nothing to the game.
Ironically, Call of Duty 4 which uses the engine that Call of Duty 5 went on to use was slightly better in terms of AI despite coming out a year earlier. I'm not sure if this is just the difference between the two companies that make the CoD games (Infinity Ward and Treyarch) or if it's also a good example of more intelligent enemies leading to a worse experience for the player.
When has a game not claimed it has ultra-realistic AI only to end up having blatantly unrealistic AI?
I don't think you can even have ultra-realistic AI and keep the game fun in most cases anyway, if the AI was in fact ultra-realistic then they'd all just move to the same part of the map, wait until you come along and ambush you from every direction leaving you no chance whatsoever after all.
AI has got better through the years, it's started using cover and that sort of thing and the odd game has managed to have one set of AI put down supressive fire on you whilst another flanks you to an extent, but still not brilliantly. Even this time of AI is meaningless though, because there's few games that are realistic enough for you to die in one shot for example even if someone is laying down supressive fire on you you can still stick your head up and take them out even if you do take a few bullets.
So there's a distinction to make too, I don't think AI needs to be realistic else we get silly scenarios where the player has no chance but it can be a lot better whilst keeping the game fun. So far not much has managed to achieve ultra-intelligent AI whilst keeping the game fun. I guess it begs the question as to whether ultra-intelligent AI and fun AI are mutually exclusive things and you simply can't have both.
Same reason they're making DNA databases of kids, fingerprint databases of kids and so on.
Because most head teachers are power hungry muppets with not a single bit of respect for liberty in their blood.
It's no suprise then that Jacqui Smith was a teacher before coming totalitarian dictator in chief for the Labour party reporting only to comrade Brown and torture master Milliband.
I don't know what the deal is but so many people in the teaching profession in the UK seem to have this power hungry attitude. I don't know if it's years of being in charge of and having power over kids that oddly in their own minds gives them the same feeling as other corrupt dictators running countries over the years or what.
Seriously though there's a bigger point to be made here, regarding this sort of thing and the DNA/fingerprint databases of kids as well as swipe cards and that sort of thing that schools implement and the government supports. I'm concerned the Labour government is pushing and supporting this kind of thing on kids because they can do it at school where many parents are oblivious to it and such that kids become used to it and wont be opposed to it as they grow up because it's all they've ever known. Coupling parental ignorance with "It's to protect your children" seems like Labour are trying damn hard to make the next generation of voters assume it's normal to suffer this kind of surveillance.
The problem is that exams are a retarded way of judging people too.
They very often test crystalised intelligence okay but are crap at testing fluid intelligence.
I've seen countless examples of people who are fantastic at fluid intelligence and not so great with crystalised intelligence and as such fail miserably in exams, yet when given an aid such as a reference book to make up for their weakness in crystalised intelligence they will far outperform any A* student who has great crystalised, but poor fluid intelligence. What's more there's no real bandaid for poor fluid intellignece like there is crystalised intelligence, so we're failing very many otherwise brilliant people.
This is a problem more prominent now than ever because of the prevalance of the internet everywhere we go the situations where crystalised intelligence is of more benefit than fluid intelligence have dissapeared to an absolute minority of situations.
Of course, the real geniuses are strong at both crystalised and fluid intelligence but right now we are writing off so many potentially brilliant people in favour of those who are mediocre at best because whilst they can remember things, their ability to think dynamically and work things out can often be quite poor. There is something very wrong with the system when we're writing off people who are actually better suited to most real life work situations than those who are getting the top grades and it's a fine example of how academia is becoming ever less in touch with the needs of real world employers.
To be fair, it's not even necessarily an inherent fault of exams, just the way nearly all exams are written. If an exam asks someone to write a particular existing well known sorting algorithm then those with good crystalised intelligence will do fine, but those without may have simply forgotten which sorting algorithm is which. If however the exam gave someone a realistic scenario and asked them to write an algorithm to solve the problem then those with better fluid intelligence would shine. Of course, exams aren't written this way because it would require thought and intelligence from the drones that often mark these papers rather than simply comparing against a sheet of pre-written solutions to see if they match and then mark accordingly.
So I feel talk of kids cheating themselves is rather irrelevant when the system is fucked and we're all already cheating ourselves by allowing the continued writing off of potentially more intelligent people than those we're handing the highest of grades to. I'm sure many people have met straight A*, straight distinction students who still seem particularly dense. There are those with high grades who really are bright of course too, but again these are the afformention people that are gifted enough to have strong crystalised and fluid intelligence. A change to the system like that suggested above regarding the example exam questions would continue to let those who are strong in both areas shine whilst not failing those who have strong fluid intelligence if we have a balance of both styles of question with a greater leaning to questions suited to fluid intelligence because they're the type of people we really need in industry. The particular weighting towards each type of intelligence would depend on the subject or the course and what the course was trying to achieve or for which was most important for putting the subject into practice.
On BitTorrent all the copyright holder has to do is join the swarm and see who else is in it, take their IP addresses and ask the court to force the ISP who owns the IP to reveal the details of the user using that IP at that time.
With Usenet the only people who can possibly tell who is downloading are the NNTP hosts, and most wont bother even keeping logs. The copyright holder can't just go up to a newsgroup service provider and say "Give me a list of all your users downloading file x", they have to at least be able to show some evidence that user x was infringing their copyright which is easy with BitTorrent/P2P but impossible with NNTP unless they're working with the NNTP providers which makes no financial sense whatsoever for the NNTP provider.
At the end of the day, the copyright holders can get your personal details anyway if they can prove you're downloading. At least with usenet they can't prove anyone downloaded anything unless they're working with the usenet provider and the first court case against a user of a usenet provider is basically going to mean that usenet provider has written it's own death warrant as all it's customers will leave.
Lots of usenet providers even offer SSL support so it's not like your ISP can easily see what you're downloading either. So to sum up, with BitTorrent you have to worry about the torrent/tracker site, everyone in the swarm and possibly your ISP. With usenet, you only have to worry about your usenet provider.
Nope not at all, the fact I have to wait years between sections of the storyline means I can't even remember what the hell happened last time by the time the next one comes out.
It's bad enough with games that have cliffhanger endings for sequels but at least the story for that particular game sticks together and follows well. With HL2 episodes you're getting even the main story chopped in to pieces.
Do you really believe the HL2 episodes wouldn't have been better if they'd just built them all in 3 years as a complete game and released it all at once so you get the full story in one sitting?
"No, it became less standards-compliant and less secure due to neglect. New standards were released and old standards were clarified, so it became less standards-compliant."
You do realise IE6 was released in 2001 and the HTML4.01 standard and CSS2 standards became recommendations in 1999 and 1998 respectively right? XHTML1.0 in 2000. IE7 came out in 2006, a year before CSS2.1 became a recommendation by which point we can say IE6 was passed it's sell by date. XHTML1.1 hasn't yet reached recommendation stage and is still in draft stage. ECMAScript was finalised in 1999. In other words, no new standards came out during IE6's life time meaning your argument that it became less standards compliant due to changing standards is outright false. It failed to implement standards that were out years before it was released and they did not change, nor were they updated to new finalised standards through it's lifetime.
"New types of security vulnerabilities were uncovered and old ones became better understood, so it became less secure."
True, problem is IE6 was vulnerable to vulnerabilities that have been known about for decades, such as buffer/stack overflows, so it didn't become less secure if those vulnerabilities existed in it from long before they were publicly discovered, they could well have been privately discovered and exploited from long before. Having worked in tech. support during this period and encountered infected machines where there was no other attack vector, this seems an almost certainty.
I suppose you're correct if you say IE6 was the best at it's time, because it was pretty much the only browser at it's time. Saying it was good though is the same as saying a rotten apple is a good piece of fruit if it's the only one left on the market stall, that's subjective I suppose. The argument that no one could do it better is rather ignorant in the context of why and how IE6 obtained market domination, it certainly wasn't through fair competition. I suppose you don't believe MS obtained market domination in the browser world through abuse of their monopoly despite it being ruled that they did? It is only once Microsoft had been ruled against for this that we started to see the likes of Firefox come along and prove that it could be done better from the off.
That doesn't really make sense, Microsoft didn't make it less standards compliant and secure as it's life went on, it was atrociously poor at standards compliance and security from it's very release so it absolutely was poorly executed to begin with. Just because there was not much else around at the time does not mean it was a good product. In fact, it actually got better towards the end due to additional security features, the popup blocker but no real improvements in standards compliance, although of course still not as good as it's competitors at that point.
It was only with IE7 that Microsoft started following standards more closely and taking onboard security concerns somewhat.
IE6 was bad because it was one of the least standards compliant browsers we've ever had to suffer in the mainstream and also one of the least secure.
The issues weren't so much with features but how it contributed to millions of virus and spyware infections worldwide due to being so insecure whilst breaking so many websites so that they had to be hacked to work with it then unhacked whilst providing alternative paths for both as alternatives started to grow that were far more standards compliant - Opera and Firefox.
The code window is only really a small part of what's good about Visual Studio though and even then the Intellisense implemented in VS in recent years is truly quite awesome. As an example, if you start typing in a parameter for a function call it wont just match the letters you've typed but the type that the parameters is taking you pretty much instantly to the variable whose name you wish to type first time every time, if not just keep typing- no time lost, but plenty saved each time it gets it right.
But other small things (and many large things) help a lot, many other IDEs have some of the features, but not IDEs have all of the features. Some miss even the most simple things such as right clicking a statement declaring that a class implements an interface and selecting implement interface to dump the bare bones code in through to generation of class diagrams from code and so on.
I know where you're coming from but even that I have an issue with.
Many of the tracks were available as part of other Guitar Hero games, many could have just as well been bundled with the game.
Sure if they included some of the newest songs out (which to be fair, they do sometimes) it'd be one thing but expecting you to buy again what you've already bought before or sometimes making you pay for 2 shit tracks to get the one good track you want and that sort of thing is a bit annoying. The tracks can also be quite expensive.
That said for the most part DLC for the likes of Guitar Hero still isn't too bad, it's more DLC that finishes off storylines or that should've been part of the original game, or map packs that are basically levels from an old version of the game put in the new version of the game to sell to you for more without even putting much effort in to update the textures or poly count for modern hardware sometimes.
So I mean yeah to be fair as a sweeping statement, not all DLC is crap, unfortunately, most of it is. It's effectively a way of getting you to pay more for what always used to be free or even part of the game in some cases.
I have to agree really, I don't think GTA4 lived up to the hype in all honesty. It was a good game, but only as good as the majority of other games out there but personally I felt, not as good as Saints Row 2.
Saints Row 2's more open world style, it's coop mode and so on made for such a better game. The minigames were just more funny too- seriously, the escort one, driving round at high speed avoiding TV crews and the IRS whilst your mate is in the back performing the "Brown Twister" or whatever on an old granny, hours of amusement! It just had so many semi-hidden elements too from streaking to the suicide guy to the zombie killing section.
But Saints Row 2 wasn't unique in beating GTA4 as an open world game I felt, Mercenairies 2 was rather fantastic, from getting your first chopper through to continuing to play the game after you'd completed it and getting to actually calling nuclear strikes that would whipe out half a city.
I think coop matters as much as anything for these types of games though, Crackdown clearly wasn't as good as GTA4 single player but slap coop mode on and you could have much more fun. Even then coop isn't the be all and end all though because as you say, Fable 2 was more fun, even though it's coop mode was pretty crap. IIRC GTA4 actually has a coop mode but it's just a crappy sub-game.
Whilst we have our Resident Evils, our Rainbow Sixs, our Gears of Wars and that that do have coop modes, there's nothing I look forward to more on release calendars than open world games with good coop modes. One in particular I'm holding out my hopes for is Just Cause 2, I quite enjoyed the first one and if the next one will have coop then it should make for fun times.
You're right that they've made many fuckups but you've only taking a select set of their products that are fuckups and tried to infer from that that all their products are fuckups.
Visual Studio,.NET and most of their other development stuff is excellent and truly top notch arguably beating out everything else on the market that tries to achieve the same goal. You look at something like ASP.NET MVC which started out as a research project and is now nearly at release stage and it puts a lot of longer running open source web frameworks (such as CakePHP) to absolute shame.
A lot of people don't like the Office 2007 interface because it's different and people don't like different, but in terms of ease of use for beginners and the productivity increases it brings it's a major innovation. The previous style toolbars have been running since the 80s and absolutely were not perfect so they deserve some credit for finally doing something to improve the good old toolbar in a way that does produce real, measureable productivity increases. Some common tasks that used to take an hour can be done in 30 seconds now. Sure the OOXML thing was a farce but that doesn't make the whole product bad when the new UI offers real benefits and you can save in other file formats anyway.
Even their server products aren't that bad anymore since they figured out that stability and security were important. 2008 server is particularly decent and 2003 wasn't too bad.
Also, you include forcing silverlight on everybody as being something that makes it a bad product, now I'll admit I don't know what silverlight is really like but businesses practices aside is it really any worse than Flash for example? The Yahoo thing ended up in Microsofts favour, Yahoo reached a point where it wished it had accepted Microsoft's offer whilst Microsoft ended up thanking the gods it didn't pay what it was offering.
Microsoft has indeed produced some shit through the years- the Zune, IE6, ME, Vista, Sourcesafe etc. but to suggest all their products are fucked up at implementation is ignorant of their numerous successes. I do not believe a company even with a monopoly the size of Micrososft's could continue to survive if everything they did was fucked up at implementation. People say companies buy MS OS' because of the monopoly position which is pretty true, but they hold no monopoly on development tools, office software and so on, they don't bundle this software with the OS, they charge for it and yet people buy it primarily because it's really no worse than the other offerings out there and is in many ways, much better.
I do not see Microsoft any different to other companies in this regard- Apple has it's successes like the iPod, iTunes and so on but look how many flops it's had through the years too. Google has it's search engine, web office tools and so on but again look at the flops it's had and the projects it's scrapped. All companies have succeses as well as failures and Microsoft is really no different in this regard, even if it is popular to hate them for their monopoly. Perhaps the biggest difference with MS is that most it's successes are in the business world whilst most it's failures are often more prominent in the consumer world- the Zune, IE6, ME and as such they struggle more for hearts and minds than say Apple and Google whose successes are prominent more in the consumer world- I mean, everyone remembers Apple for the iPod and no one remembers them for the pile of steaming turd that is MacOS Server whilst everyone remembers Microsoft for the likes of the Zune and Windows ME and no one (apart from developers who work with it) remembers them for Visual Studio.
I'd say a possibility is because there are still a shit load of people out there who aren't keen on the idea of playing online and to rack up these kind of hours is likely evidence that online play is becoming something more people feel they can partake in.
I don't play online games much on consoles but Halo 3 is one of the few I have played online along with CoD4, CoD5, GRAW2.
On the PC we have things like WoW which has no doubt racked up far, far more hours of course and probably even Counterstrike did, but we're talking about a market specifically aimed at online play there. I'd say it's a testament of the fact they've developed a game that millions (about 8 million in fact) bought to play through single player but have also implemented a multiplayer mode that many of those otherwise single player or coop only types felt they can have a go at too.
Slashdot Mirror
"A sedentary lifestyle can be linked to obesity, which in turn *can* be linked to death and illness. The summary is a little too... angry...."
Not really, in the context of your latter point it was quite right, after all, going outside can be linked to illness and death if you catch a cold or get hit by a car but I think you'd agree that it's idiotic to start an advertising campaign about how we should all never leave the house because it could lead to death?
I'd imagine far more people die playing sports than die playing computer games and I doubt there's much difference between people suffering a shortened life because they over exert themselves and people who suffering a shortened life through under exerting themselves.
As you say, balance is key, to suggest you shouldn't sit back and relax- which is effectively the message this ad campaign is in danger of putting across is both ignorant and dangerous in itself. It's not a particularly rare event that people have died the first ever time they've gone to the gym because they over did it and simply haven't worked their way up to the hard stuff over a period of weeks/months.
You're making a lot of assumptions there and missing some important points:
"First of all, ANY console in a closed cupboard will overheat, but leave a PS3 and XBOX360 in the middle of the floor, and there will be a CONSIDERABLE heat difference."
Depends which generation you compare really, when the PS3 came out it was locking up due to overheating problems in the display cabinets in various electronics retailers quite frequently. Sony did a good job of fixing this fairly quickly (hence the early rapid iteration of console versions). The latest versions of the 360 are also fairly cool, they certainly run not hotter than the latest iterations of the PS3. Microsoft certainly took longer to get their systems cooler though that's for sure. If we're comparing early consoles though there was no difference, they both got too hot, if we're comparing the latest hardware iterations, there's also no difference as they both run pretty cool. It was only the mid-way systems for about a 6 months to a year starting around 3 - 6 months after the original PS3 came out where there was a noticable disparity.
"Wii fail less partly because the hardware is not as powerful (less heat), but mostly because you don't get as many hours worth of use out of them."
I guess you don't own a Wii? Even in it's low power standby mode it gets pretty warm so it certainly doesn't get any less hot, this is presumably because it's a smaller system though and has less surface area across which the heat can spread and dissipate.
Regarding failure rates, it's also a pretty irrelevant point now, the 360's RROD problem has long been solved and there are no issues with the PS3 nowadays either, the Wii is solid too. From what I've seen in terms of recent figures, all 3 consoles are within the standard acceptable bounds for electronic goods so there doesn't seem to be anything here worth arguing between each of the consoles anymore. For what it's worth though, I got bored of the Wii too, but I think the reason it failed less early on was simply because it was using last generation hardware that had already been pushed to the point it could be squeezed in a small box with no stability issues (even if it does still get warm of course).
A lot of console fanboyism arguments are based on now obsolete arguments- the 360 has buggy hardware, the PS3 has no games, the Wii gets boring quick. All systems have taken steps to shed these old stereotypes to the point they really are a little ignorant now. I'll admit as an early adopter of consoles, out of the 3, the 360 is my favourite purely because the choice of games are more to my taste (PS3 games are too my taste too, there's simply less of them) and those games that are available across all platforms just integrate much more nicely on the 360 thanks to Live, the Achievements and that sort of thing.
Most people presumably bought their console if they only have one because it's more to their tastes. Buying a PS3 because it can run Linux seems stupid to me because you can just stick it on a PC and have more flexibility but I guess some people like the feature. I'm not sure what the target market for PS3 Linux is when pretty much anyone interested in Linux will have a PC anyway and when you can't make full use of the graphics hardware anyway though.
As an aside, I'm not sure what you meant about the PS3 having standard USB was? Both the Wii and 360 do also. The 360 and Wii also both have flawless image galleries and the 360 similarly has flawless video support including streaming from media player or compatible computers if required too. It's also debatable whether the PS3 is more powerful, Cell potentially is certainly but the graphics card certainly isn't and the memory architecture is not. Regarding Folding@Home I also struggle to see why that's a benefit, just outright turning your system off helps save your power costs and hence the environment so there's an equal feel good (and financial benefit!) to just not having that feature or turning it off too.
For what it's worth
I played through it on Veteran on the 360 and never encountered anything like the grenade spam I did on Call of Duty 5 where it literally got as silly as at some points (i.e. taking out the artillery guns on the second last level) ending up with around 10 grenades on you and in the immediate area, that kind of thing made the "throw back grenade" mechanic pointless it seemed.
About the only place on CoD4 I had lots of grenades was on the sniper section where you're fleeing and there are those old buses you can hide in. When I hid in a bus and led down I was getting quite a few grenades, but not so many that I couldn't easily just throw them back out.
I've been to schools where ID cards have been used for toilet access and to monitor where kids are in the school with the aim of making sure kids aren't spending too long in the toilets avoiding lessons or to make sure they're not elsewhere in the school they shouldn't be.
How well does your monitoring work? The schools I covered were all attached to the Yorkshire and Humberside Grid for Learning which is effectively an ISP for all schools connected in that region. They offered filtering which was pretty ineffective because it'd take 24hrs or more to get a site blacklisted. Some schools used their own filtering solutions on top, usually Censornet. There was certainly no problem kids getting round most censorship regardless but certainly many teachers getting wound up about it when the end result of the kids getting where they wanted anyway had questionable negative effect regardless.
The problem is that as with the real world and CCTV cameras, monitoring to stop bullying and such merely just moves the problem elsewhere. It doesn't deal with the core issue, it just hides it away better.
I wouldn't argue kids should have the right to view porn, they should certainly be taught it's not accepted behaviour to browse stuff in public places, but I would question what the actual problem is if they do look at that kind of thing. I mean, how many kids have mobile phones now anyway that can access the internet and browse stuff like that if they really want to? Monitoring seems like a futile band aid that just hides the problem. It does have the side effect of discouraging people from using the internet in case they run into something that may get them in trouble. A lot of kids also just used proxy sites to bypass filtering, if required, using another kids password or even in the odd case, getting hold of the teacher's.
Of course, you can blacklist everything and whitelist what is required but again this just ruins the internet for the kids, there'll be little point to it for the most part. Even Wikipedia has content people might not want kids seeing and you either go through trying to block every questionable page or you let them have full access. You then do that for every site you allow.
Have you played the CoD series?
Some sections spawn unlimited enemies and the only way to prevent the constant spawn is to move up and push forward so you can't just sit back at a distance picking them off else you simply run out of ammo.
"Some say it is, some say it isn't. Personally I do not care if you define it when you use it. It doesn't make ANY difference if Pluto is a planet or not since it does not change ANYTHING."
Yeah changes nothing, apart from say, how we define what is and isn't categorised as a planet? I mean like, let's re-define the symbol "=" to be the addition operator, I mean that changes nothing right? "=" is the equality operator, does that make you happy?
When we're auditing the skies, do you not think it might be important to be able to figure out what category a space object should fall into? Are you suggesting we should categorise man made satellites as planets because you know, it doesn't matter does it?
Yeah. I vote that Illinois also changes the definition of a mile and shortens it so that their residents can get more miles to the gallon! I also vote that they cut the definition of an hour down to 30mins to shorten my working day.
Consensus and standards be damned, they're just definitions!
To be fair, based on that this system may actually be better than many swipe card systems, as quite a few schools swipe card systems implement RFID and track kids movements around the school (to see if they're not in lesson, spending too long in the toilets etc.).
If this simply stores biometrics for the period a child is at a school and is used for nothing else than sign in/sign out then it's certainly less evil than many other schemes in schools.
There's still a good argument to be had that this is an expensive way of sign in/sign out compared to say, a classic, paper based register or similar though. There is also the danger of feature creep and the biometrics being used for other reasons or simply stored indefinitely and such of course too.
I've been to schools that have had boxes of thousands upon thousands of pounds worth of software sat in not being used because the teachers didn't have time to install it all and couldn't afford to pay for technical time to get it installed (because they'd spent their IT money on the software).
I don't have a problem with the teachers not having time to install it, but I do have a problem with them buying it all in the first place knowing full well they wouldn't have time to install it, or at least not balancing out the software and support time to install what they did buy.
Laptops for teachers is arguably a more frustrating waste of money, one thing that really used to annoy me a little was when teachers would use their tax payer purchased laptop to play games, browse the internet and get infected with viruses so that it took more tax payers money to clean it all up and fix it all. Some of them just can't draw the distinction between something that has been bought for them by tax payers to use for work purposes and something they've paid for themselves to get viruses, install games and browse porn on.
Yeah this sounds like a waste of money, but in the grand scheme of wastes of money in UK schools it's nothing. Politicians have a habit of lying, but when you hear election promises of "We can save £20bn by efficiency improvements" they're not actually lying, technically they could probably save more than that by efficiency improvements across public sector and education. It's just a shame none of them have yet actually managed to put it into practice ;)
Quite a lot of schools have CCTV, out of the 171 I used to support I'd say around 95% had some CCTV and around 60% extended it into classrooms rather than just as a security tool. This was a couple of years back and I can't imagine the situation has improved.
There's an argument for CCTV, it's certainly one of the lesser issues in schools- I'd be more concerned about the ID cards some schools force students to have to be able to go to the toilet and that come with RFID tracking capabilites. Fingerprinting is also a bigger deal I'd argue.
It all comes down to the same tired old argument that it helps control the kids but really it doesn't, kids are as they've always been regardless. What would help control the kids is better teachers and that's the biggest issue in the majority of cases but it's not entirely the fault of teachers, it's very much partly down to the politically correct attitude of giving kids the benefit of the doubt and putting teachers at threat of suspension if they dare even do the slightest thing to upset little Timmy who just kicked someone and threw a bunch of books on the floor. This leaves the teachers somewhat powerless unless they just have good kid skills at talking to and calming down the most unruly kids but also by making the kids like them, good teachers with those kinds of qualities aren't overly common though.
Lucky you. You'll note I said "most" headteachers, that means, not all.
I've worked in Education also, albeit not in a single school like you appear to by referring to a single head teacher. I worked in IT support covering 171 schools for a few years so have witnessed first hand the types of people I'm talking about in countless schools and it absolutely was the majority that would fall into this definition.
It is not therefore sensationalist rubbish. Just because you personally haven't experienced or witnessed it does not mean it's not true.
I would however be intrigued to hear why you believe so many schools have implemented student ID cards (often including RFID tracking), fingerprinting, CCTV, or showed strong support for the child DNA databases if you believe there is not a culture of over the top control amongst most British headteachers? Or are you simply trying to deny the fact that most schools have between 1 and all of these measures in place?
I think you're right, some of the AI systems we've seen touted as being the best just seem to the end player to be effectively no different from some of the worst earlier AI. Call of Duty 5 is a good example of AI gone wrong, where enemies do try to flank you, use cover efficiently and so on. They're also good at using grenades, the problem is, they're all too good at using grenades. So when you hide behind cover 5 germans will chuck grenades at you so you have to run for other cover at which point another 5 will throw more meaning you have to run back to where you were assuming those grenades have blown up, all whilst dying repeatedly anyway because enemies kill you in only two or three shots on veteran. The fact they just plaster the area with 5 grenades often left me feeling little difference to the "hard mode" of old in many past games where the enemies were made harder by simply making them automatically aim at you and do rediculously high damage. The additional "intelligence" simply added nothing to the game.
Ironically, Call of Duty 4 which uses the engine that Call of Duty 5 went on to use was slightly better in terms of AI despite coming out a year earlier. I'm not sure if this is just the difference between the two companies that make the CoD games (Infinity Ward and Treyarch) or if it's also a good example of more intelligent enemies leading to a worse experience for the player.
When has a game not claimed it has ultra-realistic AI only to end up having blatantly unrealistic AI?
I don't think you can even have ultra-realistic AI and keep the game fun in most cases anyway, if the AI was in fact ultra-realistic then they'd all just move to the same part of the map, wait until you come along and ambush you from every direction leaving you no chance whatsoever after all.
AI has got better through the years, it's started using cover and that sort of thing and the odd game has managed to have one set of AI put down supressive fire on you whilst another flanks you to an extent, but still not brilliantly. Even this time of AI is meaningless though, because there's few games that are realistic enough for you to die in one shot for example even if someone is laying down supressive fire on you you can still stick your head up and take them out even if you do take a few bullets.
So there's a distinction to make too, I don't think AI needs to be realistic else we get silly scenarios where the player has no chance but it can be a lot better whilst keeping the game fun. So far not much has managed to achieve ultra-intelligent AI whilst keeping the game fun. I guess it begs the question as to whether ultra-intelligent AI and fun AI are mutually exclusive things and you simply can't have both.
Same reason they're making DNA databases of kids, fingerprint databases of kids and so on.
Because most head teachers are power hungry muppets with not a single bit of respect for liberty in their blood.
It's no suprise then that Jacqui Smith was a teacher before coming totalitarian dictator in chief for the Labour party reporting only to comrade Brown and torture master Milliband.
I don't know what the deal is but so many people in the teaching profession in the UK seem to have this power hungry attitude. I don't know if it's years of being in charge of and having power over kids that oddly in their own minds gives them the same feeling as other corrupt dictators running countries over the years or what.
Seriously though there's a bigger point to be made here, regarding this sort of thing and the DNA/fingerprint databases of kids as well as swipe cards and that sort of thing that schools implement and the government supports. I'm concerned the Labour government is pushing and supporting this kind of thing on kids because they can do it at school where many parents are oblivious to it and such that kids become used to it and wont be opposed to it as they grow up because it's all they've ever known. Coupling parental ignorance with "It's to protect your children" seems like Labour are trying damn hard to make the next generation of voters assume it's normal to suffer this kind of surveillance.
The problem is that exams are a retarded way of judging people too.
They very often test crystalised intelligence okay but are crap at testing fluid intelligence.
I've seen countless examples of people who are fantastic at fluid intelligence and not so great with crystalised intelligence and as such fail miserably in exams, yet when given an aid such as a reference book to make up for their weakness in crystalised intelligence they will far outperform any A* student who has great crystalised, but poor fluid intelligence. What's more there's no real bandaid for poor fluid intellignece like there is crystalised intelligence, so we're failing very many otherwise brilliant people.
This is a problem more prominent now than ever because of the prevalance of the internet everywhere we go the situations where crystalised intelligence is of more benefit than fluid intelligence have dissapeared to an absolute minority of situations.
Of course, the real geniuses are strong at both crystalised and fluid intelligence but right now we are writing off so many potentially brilliant people in favour of those who are mediocre at best because whilst they can remember things, their ability to think dynamically and work things out can often be quite poor. There is something very wrong with the system when we're writing off people who are actually better suited to most real life work situations than those who are getting the top grades and it's a fine example of how academia is becoming ever less in touch with the needs of real world employers.
To be fair, it's not even necessarily an inherent fault of exams, just the way nearly all exams are written. If an exam asks someone to write a particular existing well known sorting algorithm then those with good crystalised intelligence will do fine, but those without may have simply forgotten which sorting algorithm is which. If however the exam gave someone a realistic scenario and asked them to write an algorithm to solve the problem then those with better fluid intelligence would shine. Of course, exams aren't written this way because it would require thought and intelligence from the drones that often mark these papers rather than simply comparing against a sheet of pre-written solutions to see if they match and then mark accordingly.
So I feel talk of kids cheating themselves is rather irrelevant when the system is fucked and we're all already cheating ourselves by allowing the continued writing off of potentially more intelligent people than those we're handing the highest of grades to. I'm sure many people have met straight A*, straight distinction students who still seem particularly dense. There are those with high grades who really are bright of course too, but again these are the afformention people that are gifted enough to have strong crystalised and fluid intelligence. A change to the system like that suggested above regarding the example exam questions would continue to let those who are strong in both areas shine whilst not failing those who have strong fluid intelligence if we have a balance of both styles of question with a greater leaning to questions suited to fluid intelligence because they're the type of people we really need in industry. The particular weighting towards each type of intelligence would depend on the subject or the course and what the course was trying to achieve or for which was most important for putting the subject into practice.
Yes it's less traceable.
On BitTorrent all the copyright holder has to do is join the swarm and see who else is in it, take their IP addresses and ask the court to force the ISP who owns the IP to reveal the details of the user using that IP at that time.
With Usenet the only people who can possibly tell who is downloading are the NNTP hosts, and most wont bother even keeping logs. The copyright holder can't just go up to a newsgroup service provider and say "Give me a list of all your users downloading file x", they have to at least be able to show some evidence that user x was infringing their copyright which is easy with BitTorrent/P2P but impossible with NNTP unless they're working with the NNTP providers which makes no financial sense whatsoever for the NNTP provider.
At the end of the day, the copyright holders can get your personal details anyway if they can prove you're downloading. At least with usenet they can't prove anyone downloaded anything unless they're working with the usenet provider and the first court case against a user of a usenet provider is basically going to mean that usenet provider has written it's own death warrant as all it's customers will leave.
Lots of usenet providers even offer SSL support so it's not like your ISP can easily see what you're downloading either. So to sum up, with BitTorrent you have to worry about the torrent/tracker site, everyone in the swarm and possibly your ISP. With usenet, you only have to worry about your usenet provider.
Nope not at all, the fact I have to wait years between sections of the storyline means I can't even remember what the hell happened last time by the time the next one comes out.
It's bad enough with games that have cliffhanger endings for sequels but at least the story for that particular game sticks together and follows well. With HL2 episodes you're getting even the main story chopped in to pieces.
Do you really believe the HL2 episodes wouldn't have been better if they'd just built them all in 3 years as a complete game and released it all at once so you get the full story in one sitting?
"No, it became less standards-compliant and less secure due to neglect. New standards were released and old standards were clarified, so it became less standards-compliant."
You do realise IE6 was released in 2001 and the HTML4.01 standard and CSS2 standards became recommendations in 1999 and 1998 respectively right? XHTML1.0 in 2000. IE7 came out in 2006, a year before CSS2.1 became a recommendation by which point we can say IE6 was passed it's sell by date. XHTML1.1 hasn't yet reached recommendation stage and is still in draft stage. ECMAScript was finalised in 1999. In other words, no new standards came out during IE6's life time meaning your argument that it became less standards compliant due to changing standards is outright false. It failed to implement standards that were out years before it was released and they did not change, nor were they updated to new finalised standards through it's lifetime.
"New types of security vulnerabilities were uncovered and old ones became better understood, so it became less secure."
True, problem is IE6 was vulnerable to vulnerabilities that have been known about for decades, such as buffer/stack overflows, so it didn't become less secure if those vulnerabilities existed in it from long before they were publicly discovered, they could well have been privately discovered and exploited from long before. Having worked in tech. support during this period and encountered infected machines where there was no other attack vector, this seems an almost certainty.
I suppose you're correct if you say IE6 was the best at it's time, because it was pretty much the only browser at it's time. Saying it was good though is the same as saying a rotten apple is a good piece of fruit if it's the only one left on the market stall, that's subjective I suppose. The argument that no one could do it better is rather ignorant in the context of why and how IE6 obtained market domination, it certainly wasn't through fair competition. I suppose you don't believe MS obtained market domination in the browser world through abuse of their monopoly despite it being ruled that they did? It is only once Microsoft had been ruled against for this that we started to see the likes of Firefox come along and prove that it could be done better from the off.
That doesn't really make sense, Microsoft didn't make it less standards compliant and secure as it's life went on, it was atrociously poor at standards compliance and security from it's very release so it absolutely was poorly executed to begin with. Just because there was not much else around at the time does not mean it was a good product. In fact, it actually got better towards the end due to additional security features, the popup blocker but no real improvements in standards compliance, although of course still not as good as it's competitors at that point.
It was only with IE7 that Microsoft started following standards more closely and taking onboard security concerns somewhat.
IE6 was bad because it was one of the least standards compliant browsers we've ever had to suffer in the mainstream and also one of the least secure.
The issues weren't so much with features but how it contributed to millions of virus and spyware infections worldwide due to being so insecure whilst breaking so many websites so that they had to be hacked to work with it then unhacked whilst providing alternative paths for both as alternatives started to grow that were far more standards compliant - Opera and Firefox.
The code window is only really a small part of what's good about Visual Studio though and even then the Intellisense implemented in VS in recent years is truly quite awesome. As an example, if you start typing in a parameter for a function call it wont just match the letters you've typed but the type that the parameters is taking you pretty much instantly to the variable whose name you wish to type first time every time, if not just keep typing- no time lost, but plenty saved each time it gets it right.
But other small things (and many large things) help a lot, many other IDEs have some of the features, but not IDEs have all of the features. Some miss even the most simple things such as right clicking a statement declaring that a class implements an interface and selecting implement interface to dump the bare bones code in through to generation of class diagrams from code and so on.
I know where you're coming from but even that I have an issue with.
Many of the tracks were available as part of other Guitar Hero games, many could have just as well been bundled with the game.
Sure if they included some of the newest songs out (which to be fair, they do sometimes) it'd be one thing but expecting you to buy again what you've already bought before or sometimes making you pay for 2 shit tracks to get the one good track you want and that sort of thing is a bit annoying. The tracks can also be quite expensive.
That said for the most part DLC for the likes of Guitar Hero still isn't too bad, it's more DLC that finishes off storylines or that should've been part of the original game, or map packs that are basically levels from an old version of the game put in the new version of the game to sell to you for more without even putting much effort in to update the textures or poly count for modern hardware sometimes.
So I mean yeah to be fair as a sweeping statement, not all DLC is crap, unfortunately, most of it is. It's effectively a way of getting you to pay more for what always used to be free or even part of the game in some cases.
I have to agree really, I don't think GTA4 lived up to the hype in all honesty. It was a good game, but only as good as the majority of other games out there but personally I felt, not as good as Saints Row 2.
Saints Row 2's more open world style, it's coop mode and so on made for such a better game. The minigames were just more funny too- seriously, the escort one, driving round at high speed avoiding TV crews and the IRS whilst your mate is in the back performing the "Brown Twister" or whatever on an old granny, hours of amusement! It just had so many semi-hidden elements too from streaking to the suicide guy to the zombie killing section.
But Saints Row 2 wasn't unique in beating GTA4 as an open world game I felt, Mercenairies 2 was rather fantastic, from getting your first chopper through to continuing to play the game after you'd completed it and getting to actually calling nuclear strikes that would whipe out half a city.
I think coop matters as much as anything for these types of games though, Crackdown clearly wasn't as good as GTA4 single player but slap coop mode on and you could have much more fun. Even then coop isn't the be all and end all though because as you say, Fable 2 was more fun, even though it's coop mode was pretty crap. IIRC GTA4 actually has a coop mode but it's just a crappy sub-game.
Whilst we have our Resident Evils, our Rainbow Sixs, our Gears of Wars and that that do have coop modes, there's nothing I look forward to more on release calendars than open world games with good coop modes. One in particular I'm holding out my hopes for is Just Cause 2, I quite enjoyed the first one and if the next one will have coop then it should make for fun times.
You're right that they've made many fuckups but you've only taking a select set of their products that are fuckups and tried to infer from that that all their products are fuckups.
Visual Studio, .NET and most of their other development stuff is excellent and truly top notch arguably beating out everything else on the market that tries to achieve the same goal. You look at something like ASP.NET MVC which started out as a research project and is now nearly at release stage and it puts a lot of longer running open source web frameworks (such as CakePHP) to absolute shame.
A lot of people don't like the Office 2007 interface because it's different and people don't like different, but in terms of ease of use for beginners and the productivity increases it brings it's a major innovation. The previous style toolbars have been running since the 80s and absolutely were not perfect so they deserve some credit for finally doing something to improve the good old toolbar in a way that does produce real, measureable productivity increases. Some common tasks that used to take an hour can be done in 30 seconds now. Sure the OOXML thing was a farce but that doesn't make the whole product bad when the new UI offers real benefits and you can save in other file formats anyway.
Even their server products aren't that bad anymore since they figured out that stability and security were important. 2008 server is particularly decent and 2003 wasn't too bad.
Also, you include forcing silverlight on everybody as being something that makes it a bad product, now I'll admit I don't know what silverlight is really like but businesses practices aside is it really any worse than Flash for example? The Yahoo thing ended up in Microsofts favour, Yahoo reached a point where it wished it had accepted Microsoft's offer whilst Microsoft ended up thanking the gods it didn't pay what it was offering.
Microsoft has indeed produced some shit through the years- the Zune, IE6, ME, Vista, Sourcesafe etc. but to suggest all their products are fucked up at implementation is ignorant of their numerous successes. I do not believe a company even with a monopoly the size of Micrososft's could continue to survive if everything they did was fucked up at implementation. People say companies buy MS OS' because of the monopoly position which is pretty true, but they hold no monopoly on development tools, office software and so on, they don't bundle this software with the OS, they charge for it and yet people buy it primarily because it's really no worse than the other offerings out there and is in many ways, much better.
I do not see Microsoft any different to other companies in this regard- Apple has it's successes like the iPod, iTunes and so on but look how many flops it's had through the years too. Google has it's search engine, web office tools and so on but again look at the flops it's had and the projects it's scrapped. All companies have succeses as well as failures and Microsoft is really no different in this regard, even if it is popular to hate them for their monopoly. Perhaps the biggest difference with MS is that most it's successes are in the business world whilst most it's failures are often more prominent in the consumer world- the Zune, IE6, ME and as such they struggle more for hearts and minds than say Apple and Google whose successes are prominent more in the consumer world- I mean, everyone remembers Apple for the iPod and no one remembers them for the pile of steaming turd that is MacOS Server whilst everyone remembers Microsoft for the likes of the Zune and Windows ME and no one (apart from developers who work with it) remembers them for Visual Studio.
I'd say a possibility is because there are still a shit load of people out there who aren't keen on the idea of playing online and to rack up these kind of hours is likely evidence that online play is becoming something more people feel they can partake in.
I don't play online games much on consoles but Halo 3 is one of the few I have played online along with CoD4, CoD5, GRAW2.
On the PC we have things like WoW which has no doubt racked up far, far more hours of course and probably even Counterstrike did, but we're talking about a market specifically aimed at online play there. I'd say it's a testament of the fact they've developed a game that millions (about 8 million in fact) bought to play through single player but have also implemented a multiplayer mode that many of those otherwise single player or coop only types felt they can have a go at too.