Well, that was quick ....

Windows Vista is not even fully out the door, but Redmond is already laying the groundwork for its first service pack release of bug fixes and other enhancements for the operating system.

Bungie on Halo 2: "We screwed up."

Bungie engineer Chris Butcher was blunter in his assessment.  "We had about four to five weeks to polish Halo at the end...[but] we had none of that for Halo 2," he told the magazine.  "We miscalculated, we screwed up, we came down to the wire and we just lost all of that.  So Halo 2 is far less than it could and should be in many ways because of that.  It kills me to think of it."

I'm inclined to wonder, why is it that Halo 2 had to be finished up in such a rush?  Is it because Microsoft, not Bungie, was driving the schedule?

Butcher was even critical of Halo 2's multiplayer element.  "Even the multiplayer experience for Halo 2 is a pale shadow of what it could and should have been if we had gotten the timing of our schedule right," he said.  "I ****ing cannot play Halo 2 multiplayer.  I cannot do it."

Quite the admission.  Kudos to Bungie.  It takes a good company to voluntarily stand up and tell the world, "We screwed up this one."

Best laid plans

Bought two 18GB Hitachi Ultrastar 36LPs (68-pin, 7200rpm) recently from CompuVest Corp. in Renton, Washington.  First one went into babylon5, and it's fine.  I started rebuilding the machine formerly known as llioness today around the other one, with a newer and faster SCSI controller and video card.  Only problem is, the second disk is DOA — the first DOA Ultrastar I've ever had.

Unfortunately they're now out of stock of the Ultrastar 36LP.  But they're issuing an RMA and sending a prepaid return call tag without any argument.  The next 68-pin SCSI disk they have is a reconditioned Quantum for $80, and I'll be damned if I'll spend $80 on a reconditioned disk.

I think I'm going to take this opportunity to consider whether to rebuild the machine around its existing core, or drop in a new motherboard ... the existing board sports an AMD K6-III/450 that's almost ten years old.  It surely can't cost much to drop in something several times faster than that.

(Update:  Yeah, looks like the biggest expense of a complete rebuld will be either memory or CPU, depending which options I go with.  I can get a Biostar PCI-E motherboard with SATA300 for $55, and a Seagate 80GB SATA300 disk for $45.  The smart move CPU-wise would probably be to drop more RAM an Athlon64 X2 into vorlon while Socket 939 CPUs are still available, and push vorlon's Athlon64 and RAM down to the rebuilt box.)