Bought my first MP3 album from Amazon

I was looking for some new rock to listen to, and ironically I ended up buying Led Zeppelin's Mothership, the remastered greatest hits package released back in November. The buying process from Amazon is very good. About the only negative I could possibly point to was that it wasn't immediately obvious that once the download completed, the songs were going to be automatically added to iTunes.

Why I didn't buy from iTunes
If you look at Mothership on iTunes, which is how I learned about the release in the first place, you can see the album listed for $13.99. Which given the 24 tracks for that price, is $0.58 a track and seems like a good deal. Amazon undercuts by a dollar, $12.99, for $0.54 a track. That might be enough by itself, but I of course knew Amazon is selling a 256 kbps MP3, and unfortunately Apple is only seeing a 128 kbps AAC (really wish this was named MP4) DRMed file. Seems like nearly a no brainer to buy from Amazon, so why am I still questioning my purchase?

I just did exactly what the music labels want
Led Zeppelin's label is Atlantic Recoding Corp, owned by Warner Bros. The labels all want consumers, who in general hate DRM and I am no exception, to get used to buying legal digital downloads from anyplace except iTunes. iTunes, the brand, is synonymous with legal digital downloads, and the labels hate it. They are giving something to iTunes competitors, MP3 DRM-free high quality tracks, they won't give Apple (with the notable exception of EMI, who with Apple got the whole DRM free thing rolling). Apple wants to hold the line on pricing per track, with the only bundling concept, the album, also held low on pricing, all DRM free. If Apple's share of digital downloads (all media types) falls, the labels negotiating position is greatly improved to mandate price increases. This is why I feel bad about following the label's carrot. I know if I take solely my interest into account, I would always choose Amazon over iTunes when tracks are DRMed on iTunes, but DRM free on Amazon. If iTunes and Amazon had the exact same DRM free tracks, I take iTunes every time because iTunes uses AAC/MP4, the files are smaller for the same bit rate, and require less device battery power to decode. But I feel like I must continue to buy DRMed tracks on iTunes and hope for a continued migration path to iTunes Plus tracks when this eventually gets sorted out. I am no lawyer, but a lay interpretation might be that Amazon is in collusion with the labels and studios to unseat Apple as the dominant digital download distributor, then return as much power to the labels/studios as possible through whatever price increases, content bundling, "flexible pricing" they want. What the music labels want most of all is to not have to listen to, in their minds, Apple's crazy, pro-consumer unbundling of all content (songs, episodes) and relatively fixed pricing. They want a return to $16 a CD for one song you want, or even that price point on albums. I don't know how else to reinforce, other than completely not buying, that Apple's model is the one I find acceptable (and even there I think prices are too high by 20%) by sacrificing my short-term self-interest for the greater long term good of a reasonable digital download pricing structure. Since Apple is the only company that has demonstrated a willingness to stand-up to the labels/studios regarding content pricing, I will continue buying from iTunes, even if that means DRMed tracks. Velvet Revoler's Libertad, here I come.

I guess I am not buying HD-DVDs anymore

Happy New Year!

One of the things I was looking forward to that I wasn't surprised with for Christmas was the Blade Runner HD-DVD. I was really looking forward to seeing the film in all its HD glory, but instead received one key HD-DVD from my Christmas list. Hey I am not complaining, but now Warner goes Blu-ray exclusive (via Engadget)

I am really torn on what to do. My first reaction, just stop buying HD-DVDs, which I was admittedly moving slowly into, but now just full stop. Second, sell the HD-DVDs and the HD-DVD add-on for the Xbox 360. I did think about getting Blade Runner on HD-DVD now before supply runs out, but why? If Blu-ray is the winner, then I can always get it there. There is the problem of me not owning a Blu-ray player, but maybe the rumors of Blu-ray for Apple TV will fill the need.

I am overall really disappointed, my favorite HD-DVD is by far Batman Begins, and now I won't be able to get the sequel, The Dark Knight on HD-DVD late in 2008.

This is what happens when your wife doesn't listen to you on technology purchases :-)

Halo 3 Class Action Lawsuit for not really being HD

Joystiq posted that a class action lawsuit is being filed against Bungie for false advertising of Halo 3 because Halo 3 is not really HD, it's just scaled to display in HD. Bungie admitted so in a weekly update post to their site just a few days after Halo 3 was released on September 25, 2007. Halo 3's engine renders to a 1152x640 framebuffer, actually 2 of them due to their lighting schem, making Halo 3 run internally at 640p. That image is then scaled to whatever your Xbox 360 is set to output to, 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, or 1080p. What is the minimum HD resolution? I think it is minimally 720p. Is a lot of fuss being made about 80 pixels? Actually no, we are missing 183,040 pixels, that sounds like quite a number of pixels. When you read Bungie's post, it is clear they thought they made the right decision, and I in no way would dispute their decision, what I am interested in as is the lawsuit is whether people buying Halo 3 have an expectation that the game is in actual HD, not scaled to to HD resolution. Put another way, if I bought an HD-DVD, and it says on the back of the box the movie is in 1080p, should I expect to see a 480p movie scaled to 1080p? The answer is clear cut, no. It would seem to not matter how little the Halo 3 engine "cheats", or how good the 360 can scale to HDTV resolutions, what matters is if I expected Halo 3 to be in HD and I got what I expected. Let's look at some images.

When you go to the Halo 3 game detail page on xbox.com you see the image on the left. You could interpret that a number of ways, but without any preceding text, I would expect that the same runs in 1080p, which is 1920x1080, not scaled to it. That makes Halo 3 1,335,040 pixels shy of a true 1080p HDTV image. That is a huge number. Scaling can only get you so far before it's noticeable, you can't just invent millions of pixels without anyone noticing. Scaling down, no problem there, my equipment isn't up to snuff, but scaling up without consumer knowing about it, I have a huge problem with that. What about when you buy an Xbox 360, is anything said on the marketing that would lead someone to believe High Definition was a feature?

On the Xbox 360 Pro info page, you see the text in the images to the left in different spots on the page, but that's it. Microsoft's language here never explicitly says something like Experience gaming in True HD, but I do think the expectation is created between what you see on the Halo 3 site, and the retail box, and what you see on the Xbox 360 site that you are going to be gaming in true high-definition, the image you see will be native HD, not scaled to that output resolution.

I don't think it's a stretch all, I know that is what I expected with the 360 and absolutely for Halo 3. Apparently it's not just Halo 3 that has this problem, but a decent number of other games also render at less than HD resolutions.

Tip: Signup with Catalog Choice and stop unwanted paper catalogs

I just wanted to pass along a tip I got from Chris Pirillo. Get a lot of catalogs in the snail mail that you don't want? Register with Catalog Choice and opt-out of all that junk. Save some trees and save yourself some time.

Thoughts on Gerstmanngate, or Heightened Consumer Product Expectations

N'Gai Croal at Newsweek's Level Up has written an excellent article on what the Jeff Gertsmann firing from Gamespot (a CNet company) means for game publishers and the video game press. He covers the controversy from a larger publication perspective that he writes from and the shielding editorial receives because of it. He also talks about enthusiast sites like Gamespot where they earn their living primarily from game publisher advertising deals. GameSpot has posted their most definitive commentary to date on Gertsmann's firing earlier today, where they clearly deny that game publisher pressure (Eidos) had anything to do with it. The whole situation stinks. I was a frequent GameSpot reader before this episode, and Gertsmann was my favorite reviewer, the only game reviewer I knew by name and trusted. I have stopped going to the site since the story broke weeks ago now.

While GameSpot continues to deny Eidos was the direct cause of Gertsmann's firing, his review of their game, as N'Gai and numerous commenters on today's GameSpot explanation speculate, Gertsmann's Kane and Lynch review (since publishing heavily edited) may just have been the last straw for GameSpot parent CNet. MTV's Stephen Totilo has a pretty good interview with Gertsmann which to me seems to hint that Jeff nor any previous review bowed to pressure from advertising, but makes clear Gertsmann's strong opinion of how to keep the integrity of a game reviewing operation intact. 

From my perspective, the pressure on game publishers, and in fact producers of all content, has gone up dramatically with the Internet as consumers have become more choosey about what content they will even think about. Rotten Tomatoes (an IGN company), Game Rankings (a CNet company), and MetaCritic (another CNet property) are the tools that consumers user to decide if content in question is worth their precise time. All these rating aggregators are a shorthand for the quality of content. In my experience over the last few years, the bar keeps going higher for consumers to even notice your content. This may be most prevalent for video games because of the time and money involved.

Games are the most expensive up front consumer entertainment you can buy. $60 for a new Xbox 360 or PS3 game, $50 for a Wii game, with PC games sold at a large variety of price points. With the amount of ways to entertain yourself, this is a pretty big cost to first justify and then absorb for a consumer if a video game isn't good. Then there is the time commitment. You waste 2 hours on a movie if its bad, an hour on a music album, 5 minutes on a song, but anywhere from 10-50 hours on a game, and you may not know whether that game is good all the way through into the final hours of gameplay, whether it was worth your time, is a satisfying ride. That is a tremendous amount of time to invest in a piece of entertainment. The risk is too high that you aren't going to be entertained according to the initial investment in the game. This is my theory on why a lot of games don't sell and aren't talked about unless their MetaCritic/GameRankings score is over 90%. Particularly for core gamers, the Xbox 360 owners (primarily now driving the software market) that rush out to buy the hot new title every week. If developers aren't bringing their "A" game, don't even talk to me. We have all played enough mediocre games, why should I bother with them anymore? Sounds snobby as I write it, but I see it happening, and I know I am doing it. Assassin's Creed for 360 has a Game Ranking score of 84%, you couldn't pay me to play it.

With this trend, it's plausible, even probable, that GameSpot is trying to insure continued strong advertising buys for promising softball, powder puff reviews of advertised product. Does this serve consumers, of course not, but it will keep the checks coming at GameSpot as long as their readers don't catch on. And maybe Jeff wasn't fired for these reasons, but these issues aren't going away, unless that is review sites break free of known advertiser revenue and make it all anonymous. Google AdSense?

Tip: Two useful new Quick Look Generators, aka Plugins, for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

Quick Look is absolutely one of the best features in Leopard, and is a huge productivity booster. Click on any file and hit the spacebar, and boom (think John Madden), you see the contents of the file. This works great, except when you are missing a Quick Look Generator to expose the contents of the item. Leopard doesn't ship with very nice plugins for Folders, ZIP files, or DMGs. By nice, I mean it only shows a much larger version of the items' icon and some pretty big text with standard file or folder properties. I want to see inside everything using Quick Look. Fortunately, Apple has a Quick Look Programming Guide and a developer/designer pair have implemented their own ZIP and Folder generators:

• Zip Plugin
• Folder Plugin

I installed both earlier today and so far they work great and provide exactly the functionality you want from a Quick Look Generator.

Troubleshooting SysFader crashes in Windows on Parallels 3.0 for Mac

If you see something like this:


After a lot of googling, there are two likely causes of see crashes like this:

1. Page Transition Animations. Something is wrong with your graphics card driver and is causing fade animations to crash
2. Office 2003 and Office 2007 installed side-by-side. I know, how could this go wrong ;-)

You really have no idea which one is going to solve the problem for you. What was causing this crash every time was trying to open an MS Office document from a Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 site.

Door Number 1
I found number 1 above as a possible cause of my SysFader crashes first, so I did all the workaround steps on Windows Server 2003 (SP2, but it doesn't matter):

1. Go to Display Properties -> Appearance -> Effects -> Uncheck Use the following transition effect for menus and tooltips
2. When that didn't work, in Internet Explorer, goto to Internet Properties -> Advanced -> Browsing -> Uncheck Enable Page Transitions

When this didn't work, and I hadn't found number 2 yet, I started thinking through what it could possibly be. These were the possibilities I came up with:

• Parallels General VM Bug - I am on the latest Leopard compatibility beta, 3.0 5570, so entirely possible. Once I searched through the Parallels Mac Public Beta forum, and no one had reported the SysFader issue, so I weighted the probability of this down.
• Parallels Video Driver Bug - I turned off video driver acceleration, I still had the issue, so I also weighted the probability of this down.
• User Profile Corruption - After I discounted the Parallels probability, I started failing back on standard Windows troubleshooting. An easy way to verify if an issue is profile related is to logon to the same system with a different account. I did that, logging on as local Administrator, and the problem went away. Or at least I thought. After I repeatedly tried to download Office documents from SharePoint, I went and deleted my main user profile. I backed up everything of course first, but still, I wiped it out. Then a few hours later, the Administrator account started doing the same thing. I started to get angry, I actually think the first though was fucking Windows, but I just started googling again.

Door Number 2
Then I found Jeff Widmer's Blog, who linked to Paul Wu's Blog which suggested renaming a DLL that gets installed with Office 2007, that SharePoint attempts to load when opening any Office document. Why rename it? Because I have Office 2003 applications also installed, and there is a bug in this DLL, OWSSUPP.DLL, that got through QA. Sure enough, renamed this file to OWSSUPP.DLLX (name doesn't matter), fixes my problem, but doesn't show a nag dialog like Paul suggests. I would imagine that before you install Office 2007 SP1, whenever that gets released, you should rename the file back to the expected name, and hopefully the fix for this issue is included in the service pack.

Review: BioShock for Xbox 360

** Spoilers **

I know, BioShock was released way back in August, it's November (barely), why am I still talking about this? After the long Thanksgiving weekend, I finally put the nail in the coffin. What took so long? I work a lot, I had a pretty big vacation at the beginning of November, and I had this Halo 3 diversion in between. What more can be said about this game? I think quite a bit.

Perseverance
I nearly quit the game. This is really the inspiration for this post. I talked to another friend last week, a pretty big gamer himself, and it came out that he quit BioShock in the same spot I was close to quitting in. This is the point where you have to save the trees in Arcadia. Saving the trees by itself is a fine goal, but it came in a somewhat confusing level, and it came after a long pre-amble to this actual goal. The level just felt like it went on and on. But I slogged through this level, and I am glad I did...

Confusion
When the game starts, the game is nothing but confusion for the player. You don't know why, from a story perspective, you are doing what you are doing. You land in the middle of the Atlantic and you just happen to crash near a lighthouse of sorts, which just happens to lead to this beautiful underwater city. Always seemed farfetched, but you went with it, and you listened to the radio messages from Atlas telling you what to do and why you should. But you aren't given a choice what to do, you are in effect on rails. You do get the choice to Harvest or Rescue the Little Sisters, which are protected by the Big Daddies, but why? They don't bother you as you move through levels, but you are put in a position to have to do something to these creepy girls or you won't be able to move through the game. The choice comes so early in the game, so you can start upgrading the character, without much explanation, that you just feel bad about doing it, that is if you think about it. The presence of this choice though is what elevates the game over other shooters because you have some sense of this affecting the outcome of the game. But as you will see, you don't really get that payoff. From there, you have nearly too much choice about how to get to goals, but you go from goal one to two to three and a big arrow points you along the way, all the while dealing with Little Sisters to upgrade. I think this is why I nearly quit, the section where you are on rails without truly understanding why, again from the story, goes on to long. That is until you get to Ryan.

Clarity
The whole point of the game until you get to Ryan is to get to Ryan and kill him. When you get to Ryan, you completely understand how on rails you are. This plot point totally explains what is going on, and it's a beautiful way to explain the standard goal-oriented rails of any shooter. It is so beautiful in fact that you in some ways grow disappointed that after this junction in the game you aren't given any actual choices, you have broken free of the mind control that Fontaine had you under, but the game effectively restarts. Instead of Ryan as the bad buy, it's Fontaine, and instead of Atlas as in your ear, it's Tennenbaum. Thankfully, part II is much shorter than part 1, but the gameplay doesn't really change at all. I wish once the character, Jack in case you missed it or didn't remember, is free, gameplay changed to give you multiple paths to get to Fontaine, the final boss in the game. In fact, as you listen to Fontaine and execute Tennenbaum's goals, he mocks you over the radio, escalating your frustration at not having control over really what you are supposed to do.

Confrontation
The final fight between you and Fontaine is, well for me, anticlimactic. He fights just like a Big Daddy. Actually he is easier than the Big Daddy because you get to fight him in such a wide-open space. A lot of the Big Daddy fights are in close quarters, so it was hard to side-step, but not Fontaine. He has a Big Daddy like bull rush, which is easy to dodge, so you can unload on him with whatever weapon you choose. Side note: you can carry too many weapons in the game. Halo has had this right since the first release, you should only be able to carry a limited number of weapons. In BioShock, you can carry I think 6-8 weapons, and they all have multiple ammunition types. Crazy. With this much artillery, in addition to the complement of Plasmids you have (another 5-6), Fontaine is easy to beat, and it requires no thought, just unload your heaviest weapons and your done.

Once you defeat Fontaine, the ending, the movie, is variable based on how you dealt with the Little Sisters throughout the game. You can read up on the variations on Wikipedia, but they aren't nearly enough to care about replaying the game making this one choice in the game differently. It's a letdown again that there aren't whole different branches of the game from the point you kill Ryan to the end.

Score
While BioShock is a very good shooter with RPG elements, I don't think it deserves perfect scores or 95%. If I were going with a review system of something out of 5 anythings, let's just call them Exceptions, I give the game 4.25 exceptions. For the mathematically challenged, that is an 85%. Technically, the game is near perfect, but I don't think the story completely meshes with the gameplay. There is one bit of the technical that was a bit aggravating. You discover the story mainly through radio messages, and they can be hard to hear even when still, there is just so much audio at all times. Not to mention the radio "static" and a lot of heavily purposefully accented speech, it's hard to understand a lot of times.

A Special Note On Achievements
I really have a enjoy/hate relationship with the Xbox 360 Achievement system. Most gamers I know are addicted to them, and I have a bit of this tendency, but my main problem with them is how they ruin the gaming experience. How? They pull you out of the game all the time. It would be like while watching a movie with an onscreen prompt telling you "Act 1", "Act 2", "Act 3", or what chapter of a DVD you were in, or having that old VH-1 style pop-up video on everything you watched. It sucks. The end of BioShock is a perfect example. After you think you might have beat Fontaine, an achievement for it immediately appears, before you are even really sure the game is over, but that achievement sure did ruin the suspense for you. And the achievements turn playing the games into work. If you are playing and you get these bragging rights points for it, you should make sure you are going to get as many achievements as possible right? Wouldn't it be stupid to play and not get the points? Well then, I better google how to play the game to get as many points as possible for it I guess. Listen to this, planning to play a game. It's crazy, but a lot of gamers are doing this with every title they get. I want off the treadmill. But I need help. I want the option, hey maybe it's there and I didn't see it, to turn off achievement notification, I want it to be passive. I also want though, if I do choose to participate, some progress indicator on how the achievement meta-game per title is going. When BioShock has an achievement called Tonic Collector that requires you to get 53 items throughout the course of the game, and I can't see how far off the mark I am when I finish the game, just pisses me off. You aren't giving me enough information for me to decide if I want to keep playing the achievement meta-game for any particular game. I sure hope the next 360 update gives some love to the achievement system.

The most likely reason Apple lowered iTunes Plus track prices

In case you missed it, Apple lowered prices on iTunes Plus tracks (you know the ones encoded DRM-free in 256 kbps AAC) from $1.29 to $.99. Now the simple analysis is that Apple caved to Amazon's MP3 Store priced for non-DRMed tracks of ~ $.99, but there is also another, and I think more likely reason.

Universal is trying to destroy iTunes. They are withholding video content, DRM-free audio content, and have refused to sign a long term contract with the iTunes Store for existing DRMed audio content. They are offering their music catalog to other online music stores, again Amazon, without DRM at $.99 a track retail pricing It seems obvious to me that Apple priced iTunes Plus songs as a huge carrot to the music cartel for giving DRM-free songs a chance to succeed. EMI and Apple were respectively the first major music company and online music store to offer DRM-free music, but a large motivator for EMI must have been not only the additional per track revenue, but making the $9.99 album price more attractive again. At $1.29, buying just a few songs starts to make the album price look more attractive. It has been nearly 5 months since EMI started offering DRM-free tracks on iTunes, and other majors have still not agreed to offer DRM-free tracks on iTunes. Apple has been pretty adamant that track pricing should be $.99, but it seems pretty obvious they sacrificed this principle in order to achieve the even more desirable DRM-free state for all music sold on its store. Since the majors still haven't cooperated with iTunes, Apple finally decided to remove the carrot. Any majors counting on the additional revenue when they decided to finally, inevitably, offer DRM-free tracks on iTunes can say goodbye to that forever. The window of opportunity is closed. I am sure Apple had Universal in mind when making this decision.

On iPhone hacking and iBricks

I have had all I can stand, and I can't stand no more. It is this simple, you are responsible for what happens to your hacked iPhone. You terminated your agreement with Apple and possibly intentionally with AT&T to unlock the phone or run 3rd party apps. Stop complaining if your phone gets bricked. It is ludicrous to suggest that Apple is responsible for continuing to ensure your hacked iPhone continues to work with Apple updates. If you didn't want to use AT&T or the applications that came with the iPhone weren't good enough for you, then you shouldn't have bought the iPhone. Be accountable for your own actions.

We all want 3rd party applications on the iPhone, native apps, not just browser based apps. If it doesn't ever happen, then I might not buy 2.0, but it's also equally possible that native apps won't appear until Leopard drops, or shortly thereafter. But I want those apps to work and not break my phone, it's got to work, I can't go to try and make a call and the phone doesn't work. If it takes time to put together a proper SDK and distribution system, I am totally cool with that. Like I said, I thought the apps already on the phone were worth the purchase, and now I have the iTunes Wi-Fi store for free, but native apps would clearly cement the iPhone as the premier mobile development target. Apple clearly knows this.