Aerosmith locked into Guitar Hero exclusivity, no Rock Band DLC, and these music games need to rethink their lock-in

Joystiq posted Aerosmith locked into Guitar Hero exclusivity, no Rock Band DLC

As an Aerosmith fan, this completely sucks. I understand the prisoner's dilemma both Harmonix and Activision face, but as a consumer, and out of pure practicality, I am upset. How many toy plastic guitars can I have around the living room before my wife, as geeky as she is and as eager to drum in Rock Band as she is, says thats enough? You can't hang any more guitars on the wall, hide two drum kits on the porch, and manage two collections of track packs from different versions of Guitar Hero and Rock Band. I mean, I am saying this to myself. Both companies need to think this through. I don't believe in the Prisoner's Dilemma, that the size of the market for these kinds of songs is the same size if the both games can't play, within reason, the other's tracks. I say within reasons because there could be technical reasons why older tracks can't play with newer versions of either game, but I think you can work around that. We just went through this with HD DVD and Blu-Ray.

For anyone thinking along these lines, this is not the same as iTunes and the iPod. No matter what you buy in iTunes, even if its DRMed instead of DRM free, you can still get it out to CD and reimport to MP3 or AAC without FairPlay. With buying tracks in Rock Band or Guitar Hero, not only are the tracks locked to that game, they are locked to the console as well. I bought a bunch of stuff for Rock Band on Xbox 360, what if I want to move to PS3? My tracks are stuck, but there is no reason they should be, surely the game uses the exact same data between consoles.

Mainstream Media's Election Math Problem: Obama won NC by 14.81%, Clinton won IN by 1.46%

Update
With 100% of North Carolina precincts reporting, here are the results (provided courtesy of CNN):

And CNN's updated, but still not complete, results from Indiana:

And the real math:

Here is my source worksheet in Microsoft Excel format.

So compound rounding for IN now looks ridiculous. If you round each % Won number individually, Clinton's margin of victory is still 2%, but in reality it's just 1.11%. This is just about the best case to prove how silly rounding these results are. The rounding in North Carolina now doesn't matter, rounding each % Won percent before subtracting now doesn't affect the accuracy of the reported 14% difference.

Original Post

I am no math wiz, I could have this totally wrong, but here goes. Here are the results for Barack Obama vs. Hillary Clinton in North Carolina (provided courtesy of CNN):

And CNN's results from Indiana:

After Pennsylvania, when the Huffington Post pointed out that Clinton did not win by 10% like the MSM reported, but something under that, I wondered if they would commit the same crime again for North Carolina and Indiana, and it sure looks like they have:

Here is my source worksheet in Microsoft Excel format.

How are the MSM getting this wrong? They are rounding the % Won column before doing the subtraction, which results in a pretty significant misrepresentation of the results. Remember, according to math rounding rules, you round down any fractional amount of a number that begins with 1,2,3,4, and round up any fractional amount ending in 5,6,7,8,9. In IN, you can make the case through compound rounding that the margin was 2%, but interestingly neither Excel or Numbers will round up to 2% if you tell it to hide all decimal places. If compound rounding is used in NC, the margin is 15%. CNNs Vote % in NC doesn't make any sense, if Obama won 56.68%, you can't round him down to 56%, but round Clinton up to 42% from 41.87%. I don't know what to conclude, but here are the possibilities I see:

• I am not correctly counting the NC No Preference percentage (I don't think this is the case)
• A bug in their web site math
• Intentional distorting of the math

Is it so much to ask that the MSM uses fractional percents? I mean if the american people are smart enough to handle dollars and cents (aka fractional dollars), surely in the 21st century we can manage fractional percents.

(click for full screen install image)

After following the Safari 3.1 on Windows installation controversy here, here. and here, I can't help but wonder why anyone that has to go to Microsoft.com on a regular basis hasn't cried out in agony at the unavoidable prompt to install Silverlight. Here's how this is a horrendous user experience:

It is unavoidable. Think Emperor Palpatine's voice from Return of the Jedi. No matter where on Microsoft's site you go to, MSDN, Mactopia, Sysinternals, you are going to get prompted to install Silverlight.

You can't ignore it. No matter how many times you click the X on the prompt, go back to the Microsoft site later, you are going to get prompted again. Over and over and over again.

It's a roadblock to whatever you are trying to do. Instead of the prompt being unobtrusive and just happens to show to anyone without Silverlight installed in a corner somewhere, no, it is a modal prompt for Microsoft.com. click here to see the full "experience"

Update
Ed Bott posted a comment on this post which included a link to a post of his own. His comment seemed like he was trying to help, but confusing because as I clearly show in the screenshot above, there is no "No Thanks" next to the X. I went to his post, where I was greeted with the unfriendly title Generating fake outrage over Silverlight. Clearly, Ed thought I was trying to counter the posts about the bad Safari on Windows install prompt experience (which again I think is bad), which is not the case. I thought it strange that no one, either Windows or Mac focused, had said anything about the poor user experience I was seeing with Silverlight install prompts on *.microsoft.com (the star is very important) with all the talk of Safari on Windows floating around. In Ed's post, he provides one piece of invaluable information, the screenshot of Firefox with the Silverlight install prompt cookie name, to solving this tech mystery. I could have done without the condescension (Side note: of course I have heard of cookies Ed, but it shouldn't have to be my job to figure out the *.microsoft.com cookie strategy to not be prompted to install Silverlight), but a tip of the hat to Ed for at least providing the screenshot. This is what is going on:

Ed is absolutely right that if you go to www.microsoft.com, you see these prompts (click for larger versions):

Internet Explorer 7	Firefox 2.0.0.14	Safari 3.1.1

When you click on No Thanks (X) on any of these, a cookie is put on your machine that expires in 1 month (click each image for larger version):

Internet Explorer 7	Firefox 2.0.0.14	Safari 3.1.1

How am I seeing a continual prompt to install Silverlight then? You have to understand how I have been using the microsoft site. I hadn't gone directly to www.microsoft.com until yesterday. I only go directly to other dedicated hosts, these are the two I have been using most, and I was testing with yesterday:

• msdn2.microsoft.com
• The Sysinternals section of technet.microsoft.com

If you visit either of these sites in Internet Explorer only without the www.microsoft.com cookie, you get the original prompt I show at the top of this post (Firefox and Safari do not offer this prompt even without the cookie). If you click the X on this prompt, no cookie is ever set to record your choice of not wanting Silverlight. Here is the state of my IE cookies before going to MSDN, after MSDN loads but before hitting X on the Silverlight prompt, and after hitting X on the Silverlight prompt (click for larger images):

Internet Explorer Cookies Before Going to MSDN

Internet Explorer Cookies After Going to MSDN, but before clicking X on the Silverlight install prompt

Internet Explorer Cookies After Going to MSDN, and after clicking X on the Silverlight install prompt. Notice no change (other than my slightly different cropping of the window)

There is also some kind of session timeout involved in seeing the prompt in IE. If you haven't been to either of the above sites I list in some time, then you will get the prompt to install, and you can get them to display back to back. I have been seeing this for well over a month. Ed posted another comment saying that Silverlight devs/support techs know about this and it's a rare bug. That said, if you have the cookie from www.microsoft.com in your browser, you won't see the prompt on sub-sites, well at least for a month, so unless on the other hosts this gets fixed/changed or the cookie expires, you can use that as a workaround

One final point, I have nothing directly against Silverlight (I have concerns about it, but I talked about those last year). I am just trying to keep a development VM clean from unwanted software, to get as close as possible to a known deployment target, and Silverlight is not on the manifest. Obviously, just installing it is the most permanent workaround, and I have had the beta's installed on OS X for a long time. Read my other Silverlight posts

Apple changes Software Update for Windows to mark Safari 3.1 as New

cnet reports (click on link for screenshot) that Apple changed Software Update for Windows to mark Safari, and presumably anything else not installed, as New Software. This is pretty close to what I originally suggested, but Software Update still leaves new software checked by default for installation. Much better than the original, but I think they should go the whole way and not check the box next to New Software by default.

PayPal: Wait, we didn't mean Safari was unsafe...

MacDailyNews links to Wall Street Journal blog report which says PayPal will not block Safari, as previously reported. I can't imagine this is the end of the story...

Hulk Smash!

April 19, 2008 from NY ComicCon

PayPal Plans to Ban Browsers Which Lack Anti-Phishing Features

Daring Fireball posted PayPal Plans to Ban Browsers Which Lack Anti-Phishing Features. Looks like PayPal listened to the feedback on their assertion that phishing feature-less browsers were unsafe by ratcheting up the rhetoric a notch and planning a full on ban. Article says the only browsers on the unsafe list are old Internet Explorer versions, but Safari is in it's sites because of the lack of anti-phising and EV certificates. So PayPal, if you are going forward with this ban, why don't you share all your internal data about how effective the measures you are touting are? I love this section heading from the eWeek article:

EV Certificates Unproven, but Best Solution Yet

Finally bought a new image editing tool for Mac OS X

Last year, I went looking for a decent, reasonably priced alternative to image editing on OS X. I settled on Seashore, which had the right price of free. I have been using that anytime I wanted to push some pixels around, but also Preview in Leopard because it has the right amount of image editing tools (rotate, crop, and annotation) for a lot of jobs. I recommend adding the icons shown here to your Preview toolbar in Leopard.

That said, more in-depth image editing needs keep coming up. From icons, to image compositing, or what I think of as image surgery. With Seashore I can usually get these things done, but it feels like it takes longer than it should. That may be my lack or misunderstanding of the tool, but I started looking at new tools, since there has been a lot of movement in the OS X image editor space in the last last yet.

Back in February, John Gruber @ Daring Fireball linkedto Lukas Mathis extensive comparison of Pixelmator, Acorn, and DrawIt. The review is huge, and I don't have the same needs that Lukas does. He recommended Pixelmator, so I gave that a look at the time, but I wasn't sold on it, and eventually trashed it, leaving Acorn on my system with Seashore. Yesterday I had another image surgery task, and I fired up Acorn to try it on this task, and I got what I needed to do done in like 4 minutes. I think that is just under the time until you get the watermark overlaid on your image, but then I got distracted and the watermark got added, so I either had to buy Acorn or do my stuff over again. Not a huge deal, but I decided I should just settle on image editor and buy something already. So I googled, meaning to find Lukas extensive review, and instead found Jon Whipple's exhaustive comparison of the same three tools that Lukas compared. I actually didn't realize this until I wrote this paragraph to give Gruber credit for linked to the original review. Anyway, Jon recommended DrawIt, so I downloaded DrawIt Lite, which is free, to see if I liked the tool. I didn't pay enough attention in Lukas's review to realize that DrawIt has and iWork style interface, and that was very appealing since I have been spending more time lately in iWork 08.

I started trying to do in DrawIt Lite what had taken me 4 minutes in Acorn, and I couldn't figure out the flood fill tool. In Acorn this worked exactly as I expected. In DrawIt, I keep getting partial fills and weird color artifacts, so I probably didn't understand the tool well enough to make it work. When I tried undoing all the changes to the image I was working on it DrawIt, it crashed on me. I gave up, trashed it, and bought Acorn. I find it amusing that I ended up purchasing an image editing tool that neither extensive shootout recommended, but then again I am not an image editing pro or even semi-pro.

Definitely getting Star Wars: The Force Unleashed on Wii for duel mode

Joystiq posted Hands-on: Star Wars: The Force Unleashed duel mode (Wii). I have been looking forward to this game since the Wii shipped, but I have been torn about whether I was going to pick it up for the Xbox 360 or the Wii. Better graphics (which look amazing), or more immersive gameplay. Tough choice. Not anymore though, getting the Wii version is a done deal. With exclusive duel mode, it's not even a contest. As a friend of mine said though, why not get both?

Very good Objective-C tutorial

Scott Stevenson posted an updated Objective-C Tutorial. Good starting place for new Mac or iPhone developers. Also, if you haven't seen C in a while, or ever, then you should probably check out Stevenson's C Tutorial.