HiFi Geek

INNOVATION TIME OFF ON THE GOOGLE

An interesting motivation technique called Innovation Time Off, Google engineers get encouraged to spend 20% of their time on projects that interest them, the examples being Gmail, Google News, Orkut, and Ad Sense.

JOKES CREATION ON GOOGLE

Google has been creating April Fool’s Day jokes eg. the Google MentalPlex featuring use of mental power to search the web. They claimed that pigeons were the secret behind their growing search engine and featured Google Lunar and a fictitious brain-boosting drink, called Google Gulp. They eve launched Google Romance that is a hypothetical online dating service and two joke products: a free wireless Internet service called TiSP (Toilet Internet Service Provider) where you could obtain a connection flushing one end of a fiber-optic cable down their toilet and waiting an hour for a “Plumbing Hardware Dispatcher (PHD)” to connect it to the Internet and the other being Gmail Paper allowing users of their free email service to have email messages printed and shipped to a snail mail address. 

Google’s services contain Easter eggs; like, the Language Tools page offering the search interface in the Swedish Chef’s “Bork Bork Bork,” Pig Latin, “Hacker” , Elmer Fudd, and Klingon. Also, they have a search engine calculator providing the Answer to Life, the Universe, and everything you could imagine. Google’s search box can be used as a unit converter and a calculator. There are also some non-standard units such as the Smoot and routinely modifies its logo in accordance with various holidays or special events throughout the year, such as Christmas, Mother’s Day, etc.

HEADQUARTERS OF GOOGLE

“The Googolplex” is the headquarters of Google in California which means a googolplex being 1010100, or a one followed by a googol of zeros as the HQ is a complex of buildings. The lobby has a piano, lava lamps, old server clusters and projection of search queries on the wall with the hallways full of exercise balls and bicycles. Each employee can access the corporate recreation center. 

Recreational amenities are scattered through the campus including workout room with weights and rowing machines, locker rooms, washers and dryers, a massage room, assorted video games, a baby grand piano, a pool table and ping pong, the recording room, snack rooms with various foods and drinks. Google moved into 311,000 square feet of office space in New York City, at 111 Eighth Ave in Manhattan designed and built for Google housing its largest advertising sales team that was instrumental in securing large partnerships, most recently deals with MySpace and AOL.

 They added an engineering staff in New York City responsible for more than 100 engineering projects including Google Maps, Google Spreadsheets etc. The building costs Google US$10 million per year as rent and has similar design and functionality to its Mountain View headquarters, including foosball, air hockey, and ping-pong tables and video game area. 

The size of search system is undisclosed. The site referred by the media as Project 02, was chosen for the availability of inexpensive hydroelectric power and large surplus of fiber optic cable. The computing center is the size of two football field that has created hundreds of construction jobs, causing local real estate prices to increase 40%. Google is taking steps to ensure that their operations are environmentally sound. The company had announced to install thousands of solar panels to provide upto 1.6 megawatts of electricity, to satisfy approx. 30% of the campus’ energy needs. The system is the largest solar power system constructed on a U.S. corporate campus and the largest on any corporate site in the world.

Related posts

• HEADQUARTERS OF GOOGLE (0)
• REVISED MODELS ACCESSORIES REVIEWS AND AWARDS FOR IPOD (0)
• SOFTWARE ENTERPRISE AND CORPORATE AFFAIRS OF GOOGLE (0)
• ACHEIVEMENTS BUYING AND COLLABORATIONS OF GOOGLE (0)
• THE INTERESTING STORYLINE OF FARCRY 2 (0)

INFLUENCES OF HALO

It was reported that the game was literarily influenced by the Culture and Ring world by Iain M. Banks and Larry Niven respectively. It has also been compared with The Latin Epic Aeneid by the classic Roman poet, Virgil.

SOUNDTRACK OF HALO

The soundtrack of Halo has been composed by Martin O’ Donnell releasing 4 of them. The original Soundtrack of Halo consists of Combat Evolved’s music.

The soundtrack of Halo 2 was produced by both, Nile Rodgers and Martin O’ Donnell and took full advantage of Dolby’s 5.1 Digital Surround Sound.

The soundtrack of Halo 3 was again, produced by Martin O’ Donnell where the music was recorded using a 60-peice orchestra and a 24 voice chorus that was finally recorded by Northwest Sinfonia at Studio X in Seattle, Washington.

NOVELS OF HALO

Larry Niven was initially approached to write the novel but he declined due to his unfamiliarity with the matter.

The very first novel of Halo called the Halo: The Fall Of Reach that was a prequel to the Halo: Combat Evolved was written by Eric Nylund within the time of 7 weeks being published in October 2001.

The second novel was written by William C. Dietz called Halo: The Flood was an adaptation to the Halo: Combat Evolved.

Eric also wrote the third novel called Halo: First Strike that took place in between the Combat Evolved and Halo 2, published in December 2003.

Eric also wrote the fourth novel called Halo: Ghosts of Onxy, published in October 2006.

The fifth novel called the Halo: Contact Harvest was written by Joseph Staten.

The graphic novel format was called the Halo Graphic Novel released in 2006 as a collection of 4 short stories written and illustrated by Lee Hammock, Jay Faerber, Tsutomu Mihei, Brett Lewis, Simon Bisley, Ed Lee and Jean Giraud.

MOVIE ADAPTATION OF HALO

The script for the movie was written by Alex Garland in 2005, rewritten by D.B.Weiss and Josh Olson in 2006 to be released in 2008. The movie had to be developed and released by Universal Studios and 20th Century Fox with the creative oversight of Microsoft and Peter Jackson as the executive producer along with Neill Blomkamp as director. Before Blackdamp signed, Guillermo del Toro was in negotiations to direct. The crew stopped and resumed preproduction of the film several times but Blackdamp declared the project dead. Jackson still is in the favor of making the movie.

REVIEWS OF HALO

The game has been praised for being the best video game and also considered as Microsoft Xbox’s Killer app leading to the term Halo Killer to describe the games that aspire or are considered to be better than Halo.

Meteoritic gave the following scores for the following versions:

Halo: Combat Evolved 

97 out of 100

96%

Halo 2 

95 out of 100

94%

Halo 3 

94 out of 100

The series has been well received by the critics with HALO: COMBAT EVOLVED receiving 

The following awards:

Game of the year.

IGN listed it as the top Xbox game.

Readers ranked it 14th best game on IGN Reader’s Choice 2006 in the Top 100 Games.

It received criticism too by:

Game spy ranked it in the List of 25 Most Overrated Games of all time due to repetitive level design and the lack of online, multiplayer mode.

HALO 2 got the following awards:

IGN listed it the second top Xbox game of all time in March 2007.

It was the most popular game on Xbox live.

HALO 3 got the following awards:

Time Magazine’s Game of the Year.

IGN chose it as the best game on Xbox 360 online multiplayer mode and Innovative Design of 2007.

Halo was recorded in the Guinness World Records in the Gamer’s Edition 2008 in the best selling game on Xbox, most successful machine series for red vs. blue and the highest grossing game.

Related posts

• SOME INBOUND SECRETS OF HALO 4 (15)
• CURTAIN RAISER OF MICROSOFT’S XBOX 360 PREMIUM CONSOLE (1)
• THE TOURNAMENTS AND THE REVIEWS (0)
• INTRODUCTION AND REVIEWS OF MAFIA (2)
• CONTROVERSIES AND COMMENTS FOR RED ALERT 3 (0)