And the Red Forman Award of the Day goes to… Microsoft and/or Xbox!
I wasn’t pleased to see buried within all my emails a nasty little message from Microsoft that they were trimming the storage fat on their “cloud” servers. Yep OneDrive was reducing my space from like 30GB to 5GB. That’s right…FUCKING 5 GIGS. That’s the equivalent of my PC back in 95-96. That included discontinuing the 15 GB camera roll bonus that I had for automatically storing photos & vids from my Windows Phone. As if that wasn’t heartbreaking enough. My Windows 8 device was starting to suck a little bit more as the tech monster company rolled out another version of their phone OS, Windows 10 to keep up the PC rollout version of Windows 10 not too long ago, which has come with nothing but headaches.
ME as I read, “The Email”
As a result of these changes, you will be over your storage limit (visit the Storage page to check your account). If you don’t bring your OneDrive content under the new limits in the next 14 days, your account will become read only – you’ll be able to access your content, but not upload files. If you do not take action in one year, your content may be deleted. You can learn more at our FAQ.
As for the rollout for my PC, after a few months I found out that my apps on my primary administrative profile stopped working. I tried numerous, useless fixes but after awhile, the store, calendar, calculator, email, picture viewer, music, & movies player were unable to be opened. Well I found a way around it by adding another Outlook account to my PC & making that the admin. But it wasn’t without learning that all of the other accounts on my PC would suffer from minor glitches after trying to Google & YouTube any type of fix I could find. Eventually I settled on having 2 admin accounts to serve me as one.
ARRRGGG!!!
Oh and regarding my phone, turns out that when they pushed Windows phone 10, they pushed developers to move all the cool apps there & as of yet failed to update all the other devices (even the ones just released right before the new software) I am guessing that both Windows 8 & 10 required double the work to support or something techy. Not to mention they barely integrated the use of SD cards in the newer phones, although they now require them, so my phone crashes nearly everyday. To add injury to insult, several apps refused to update to the new platform whilst others simply decided to pull out from the Microsoft store altogether. So while my phone of barely a year runs shitty apps like Instagram BETA, (yes BETA) I now run the risk of losing all of my precious vids & pics by moving them to my PC because my SD card & phone have inner turmoil… It’s either that or have the MS OS douchebags liquidate my account for I am assuming I will be violating terms by not removing nearly 15 gigs of what I have stored now??
So normally what I do in times of stress since I can’t reach for a pack of Marlboros anymore, I workout! It’s healthy & good for me when I have the writer’s block. So a few weeks ago I turn on the good ol’ Xbox One & find out about 2 weeks ago that Xbox was terminating Xbox Fitness. In order to keep up with Sony PS4, they previously started selling the console & Kinect separately instead of in a bundle (this too unbeknownst to me) because apparently this happened right around the time I bought this expensive shit! Looking back, I was soooo happy & impressed with my weight loss from the 360 intertwined with my other workouts, that I decided as a gamer & fitness freak, I would get the ever so awesome & hyped up Xbox One. I played it Best Buy & Game stop and so my mind was set! Forget the PS4… I was going for the Xbox to try out the new fitness stuff.
Xbox Fitness debuted with Microsoft’s Xbox One & allowed gamers to download workouts so they can exercise from the comfort of their living room. Since arriving in 2013, you were able to make a one-time purchase of the various workouts like Beachbody, Jillian Michaels, Sean T, P90X, Tai CHi, & Yoga and have access to the content indefinitely. No gym needed! An added bonus for paid Live members was that you could get free workouts. But to my dismay, I found out that the Kinect sitting right above would be as good as a paperweight.
All workout content will officially be discontinued on July 1st, 2017. Those who have already paid will have access until then you won’t be able to make any fitness purchases from here on out.
According to Microsoft’s Marketing Coordinator and Community Manager for Xbox Fitness, Erica Bell, wrote, “Given the service relies on providing you with new and exciting content regularly, Microsoft has given much consideration to the reality updating the service regularly in order to sustain it. Therefore, the decision has been made to scale back our support for Xbox Fitness over the next year.”
Apparently, it’s too fucking complicated to keep up with the fitness needs of their consumers. This DUMBASS must not know how booming the fitness industry is. I still have DVDs I workout to & it’s faired great for me.. I don’t do the same workout anyway, so leaving a few fitness apps around until some revives the Kinect is the least they can do. Although I gained some weight back being a desk jockey, I originally lost over 50lbs. This below was me on diet & Xbox workouts alone on my 360, which I will be turning back to obviously. As you can see, I shed 15 lbs. in less than 2 months!
Just goes as a harsh reminder that you don’t actually “own” any fucking digital content bought from the Xbox store that’s not in your fucking hand. Case in point, songs I bought from Microsoft prior to change to Xbox Music to Groove or whatever the fuck, got lost in the madness. Claiming they no longer had access to those “albums” & they needed to be repurchased if not previously downloaded.
Fuck that shit! I got mp3skull! I am not paying for anything twice over!
Nonetheless, I recently saw that Xbox tried to put Band-Aids on their bullet wounds, as they released new workouts for free to use until next year. They even intend to offer so-called exchange-like refunds to us, “the sheep” in the form of Microsoft & Xbox store credit… good for about a year!
WHAT THE FUCK!!!!!!
It’s no wonder Bill Gates originally hated the idea of a gaming console when they pitched the Xbox idea a few years back. However given the success of the gaming industry, he caved & offered full support.
Can you say ca-Ching? What’s even more insane is that Mr. Gates gave Xbox some autonomy from Microsoft as it’s own little entity. Yeah equipped with CEOs & the whole nine. I guess giving them room to make Xbox cheaper than PS4… with it’s fairly ok game selection.
So now what?
What would have been better is to just make one OS to take on both desktop and gaming at the same time. They should’ve fully fused their phones & tables to create an unstoppable force of nature. Leave third party members to building hardware for desktop, workstations, living room and of course allow the nerds to do they’re own custom techy tech. Microsoft has all the tools to dominate Apple and Sony, but they don’t know what they’re doing and Bill Gates got duped from the giddy-yup. Instead dominating fucking Skynet-style, we got all these stupid entities within an entity. If Xbox and Windows unified Microsoft would be a lot stronger and a lot the non-sense could be easily avoided.
Well I guess I shouldn’t be too upset. Machines will never take over the world & exterminate us Terminator-style nor will they imprison us Matrix-style. Especially if we gotta wait for someone to be smart enough to be dumb enough to create an self-aware/self-sustaining A.I.
Bill Gates you seriously need to get your subordinates & affiliates in order!!! This is why Android, Google, Apple & Sony to name a few are winning!
Until Next Time Kiddies…Shalom!
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