Just to illustrate that no good deed goes unpunished, The Register has picked up on the story of our own Cannibal Harry's woes with Earthlink. Earlier this month CH was whacked with truly massive ISP bills as a result of his hosting the Nvidia/Halo promo movie.
From the Register:
There's a new Halo preview at IntelGamer. There's not much in the way of new information, but the second to last paragraph does make an interesting statement:
I've got a bit of a rough situation to relate to you all tonight. I'm sure that nearly all of you now know about the lost MacWorld nVidia/Halo movie which Cannibal Harry happened to record and post up at his site. The nVidia advertisement was a bit of a sensation in July when it came out, but it received much more attention during this last month when several large gaming news sites posted direct links to his file. The original movie had been misplaced for awhile, and so his copies (one at 45 megabytes, one at 32) were for a few months the only ones available to the public. Now you know the background.
Well, a few days ago CH received a $6,000 bill from Earthlink for 62 gigabytes of bandwidth in July. (This was when interest in the files was pretty much limited to the Bungie fan community) He was, needless to say, a bit shocked.
It wasn't until the following day that Cannibal Harry thought to check up on the movies' download statistics in the time since July. He was under the 500 megabyte bandwidth limit for the month of August, but will be receiving a whopping $24,000 bill for 4.5 terabytes (4,500 gigabytes) of bandwidth done in September. *blink-blink!... gulp!*
The obvious questions are: why didn't Earthlink at the very least inform him that he was sucking down THAT much bandwidth... and why didn't they have a cap on the amount of bandwidth or file requests that can be taken for any given file? From what another sysadmin has told me, the fees that Earthlink is charging for the amount of bandwidth are completely rediculous. Draw your own conclusions.
Cannibal Harry is still talking to Earthlink, and may be contacting the various megasites that linked to his file, but in the mean time we thought it would be a good idea to put a spotlight on the matter. A few people have also discussed setting up a contributory fund at some point to help out. However, we'd better shave those figures down to something reasonable at the very least.
Apparently it might be, despite recent suggestions that the games will be uncomparable with Halo's altered destiny. In PC Gamer's October issue, an anticipation poll titled Waiting is the Hardest Part gives Halo five times the interest that Tribes 2 receives. Here's a listing of the top ten games in the lineup (totaling 79% of the vote):
Red Hot Ryan writes to tell us that Halo-World is now online and accepting visitors. Weilding the trademarked Halo blue-grey colors, it's a very appealing site to look at, and appears ready to load up on useful content... definitely one to check out.
Thanks go out to mad.max who laid his hands on some info from MacFormat (UK) magazine about Peter Tamte's new gaming company, which will be focusing on porting Microsoft games to the Mac.
In an exclusive to MacFormat, Tamte said the plan is to start with Age of Empires 2, and that they will be striving for simultaneous releases of new titles.
Because he doesn't work directly for Microsoft or Bungie, Tamte doesn't seem to be officially connected with Halo anymore, but he did say that it should ship simultaneously with the PC version .
Kudos to the fellows at Halowar, who passed along an interesting tidbit regarding a Halo mod for the HalfLife engine (strange as that may seem). The details, for your reading delight: