520: The number of deaths from car fires in the United States in 2006.

If you keep up with the on-again/off-again torrent of videogame ravings in these pages, you might have noticed that there is a lot of love for the Wii and the DS and the PS2 and the occasional snide comment about the PS3. Mentions of the Xbox are few and far between – little gets said, either good or bad, and you would think that (from my point of view, anyway) the thing didn’t even exist.

There is a reason for this.

Essentially, until now the Xbox 360 has been a work in progress. In fact, up until January of this year the thing was really still in beta – continually evolving hardware specs coupled with what amounts to breadboard construction gave the thing the same sort of reliability that you get from a General Motors product.

For those of you scoring at home, that equates to “none”. Anyone who has suffered through the Red Ring Of Death knows of what I speak.

However, despite all of that (and in the face of a temptation to slough this off as “standard Microsoft operational procedure”) there is a lot to like about the console, and I decided to take the high road and wait until the box made it to some sort of stable condition vis a vis both the design of the silicon and the firmware therein. Today just might be that time.

Later this afternoon the gaming geeks at Microsoft will announce the “Xbox 360 Elite” system which has a bigger hard drive (120GB), actual HDMI output for true 1080p video goodness, and a much improved motherboard that will not feature chips that melt themselves off the solder traces after 18 minutes of continuous use.

Some consumers apparently found that annoying.

There are still some issues to take care of here – the ongoing uptime woes of the Xbox Live service are one the the things that would immediately jump to mind, as well as the fact that you have to pay for getting disconnected on a regular basis – but in the grand scheme of things this is good news. Certainly anyone who wants to move into the next generation of music games has been itching to get into the 360, since the combination of 7-channel surround and the Holy Grail of downloadable songs make for a siren song that is exceptionally difficult to ignore. There will almost certainly be a price drop for the console in the summer, and it is pretty much a given that the Live service will need to go free before much longer. If either (or, hoping against hope, both) of those events happen at a time that coincides with the release of Guitar Hero II on the 360 then the word on the street will be buy, buy, buy.

Added bonus – anyone who bought a PS3 will probably feel even stupider when they wake up tomorrow. Really, it’s like a second Christmas morning.

There have been “complaints” about my descriptions of the upcoming Microsoft-esque array of Creative Suite versions. I still think that distilling it down to nothing more than prices has a certain spartan cachet about it, but the masses appear to be reluctant to share my vision. So – in the spirit of public service (and don’t be expecting this very often) here is a quick look at what the different versions do and what you get for your hard-earned dough:

CS3 Web Standard Edition ($1000): This is pretty much Photoshop CS3 and Acrobat Pro. Photoshop comes out of the box tweaked for web and video – don’t go looking for Pantone swatches or CMYK modes here.

CS3 Web Premium ($1600): The same as web standard with the addition of the web workflow suite and library tools that come with Adobe Bridge. Also adds Camera RAW support for about 140 different digital cameras.

CS3 Design Standard ($1200): Photoshop Extended, InDesign, Acrobat, and Bridge. Heartwarming familiarity for old-school print geeks like me.

CS3 Design Premium ($1800): Adds Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Flash, and Fireworks to the “design standard” package. I have a feeling a lot of shops will buy this just to get Illustrator and end up paying six extra bills for flash and web shit that they don’t want, which is probably Adobe’s whole plan here.

CS3 Production Premium ($1700): This is where the shift in Adobe’s philosiphy starts to hit home – “production” no longer means pre-press, it means video production. This package adds the classic Adobe video tools – Premiere and AfterEffects – to their new Soundbooth audio suite, and tosses in Photoshop and Illustrator. Interestingly, there is no web development stuff in here so if you are doing video for the web, why, step right up and buy two versions. Sneaky bastards.

CS3 Master Collection ($2500): This is pretty much everything. All the print, design, web, and video tools mentioned above in one gigantic release of doom. There is a rumour that it might even include a resurrection of Streamline – something that would make me insanely happy except for the part where it costs a stupid amount of money.

The first thing that you realize here is that InDesign is no longer the star of the show. And yes, I bolded that on purpose – this a huge shift in thinking for Adobe. They obviously feel that electronic media will stomp print media flat during the lifespan of this product and is centering everything around Photoshop Extended, the spiffy new web-n-video-centric version of everyone’s favourite image editing behemoth. InDesign and page layout is now an afterthought – an interesting choice, but perhaps one I wouldn’t have made yet. The last thing Adobe really wants to do is let Quark up off the mat, and if the digital revolution in visual media takes longer than they think … well, that might be the breath of life that the jerks in Denver need.

Stay tuned.

445: The ambient temperature (degrees C) in “hell” according to the physical criteria described in Revelations 21:8.

The premise here is simple. There is a typical workplace meeting in five minutes. Therefore you must find a way to kill yourself within 4 minutes and 59 seconds, or else suffer the horrifying torments of the boardroom. Walk around the office and see if you can do yourself in with everyday objects before time runs out.

We’ve all been there …

If you were to accuse me of taking potshots at Microsoft’s bizarre 12-versions-of-Vista marketing strategy, then I would have to plead guilty. In my defense, however, I might point out that it is both a large and deserving target. Like shooting a rabid barn, as it were.

Sadly, it appears that Adobe has hired the same marketing consultants, because Creative Suite 3 is coming out in at least six versions, all with less-than-enlightening names and all with staggering price tags. I personally think that they should dispense with the goofball names (Design Premium, Web Standard, Production Premium) and just name the things by how much it costs. Using that technique, we would have these products available in Spring 2007 (little whispers say April 20th):

Adobe CS3 1000
Adobe CS3 1200
Adobe CS3 1600
Adobe CS3 1800

and then in the fall of this year, they will add:

Adobe CS3 1700
Adobe CS3 2500

to the mix.

That’s right, twenty-five hundred bucks. They are calling it the “”Master Collection” but I am thinking that “Super Pro Deluxe Gold Enterprise Media Awesome Edition” might make prospective buyers feel at least a little better about the pricing.

If you aren’t turned off by the whole thing at this point, then tune into the launch info webcast tomorrow at noon PDT. I will not be attending … I am boycotting the whole thing because my beta of CS3 expired on March 1 -before they had even announced a release date for the replacement product – a situation that I find inexcusable.

There appears to be a cadre of cooler-than-thou art school snobs who took umbrage with my picks for interesting things to listen to this week … specifically with my choice of Nouvelle Vague.

Fine.

You want esoteric, you get esoteric. Instead of bossa nova arrangements of new wave classics, why not try bossa and two-step versions of classic videogame themes? That is the stock in trade of The OneUps, and it makes my little geek heart go pitter patter.

525: The ambient temperature (degrees C) in “heaven” according to the physical criteria described in Isiah 30:26.

There has been previous discussion on These Very Pages about the eerie accuracy of John Hodgman’s personification of Bill Gates in the “Get A Mac” ads. Most people seem to think that Hodgman is the bomb, and is really the star of the ads … but it appears that there is at least one person who disagrees. There is an audio interview with one Mr. William Gates over on Advertising Age, and it is generally a worthwhile listen, but if you aren’t up for wading through the Gospel According To Bill, the important bit is right at the end where the interviewer asks Big Bill about the ads:

AA: I want to ask you one more thing: Those Mac ads … how do you feel about the John Hodgman character?

GATES: I can’t comment on someone else’s ad.

AA: OK … but he’s you.

GATES: Yeah, I’m not gonna comment on someone else’s ad.

AA: OK, well, Bill Gates, thank you so much for joining us.

*grim silence*

AA: Can I just have a clean goodbye?

*still more grim silence*

AA: OK, can you just say goodbye? Thank you or goodbye or something like that?

GATES: Goodbye.

Ouch. Can you say “testy”?

By now you have probably seen the “Vote Different” video on YouTube. If not, then go look at it now. It is pretty much verging on brilliant, but that hasn’t stopped it from stirring up a complete shitstorm of contoversy. The sticking point is the reference to Barack Obama’s official website at the end of thing – while there is no law or restriction on hyperlinking or listing an URL, the implication here is that the production is an official Obama deal. This has led to denials, backpedalling, finger-pointing, and all sorts of mayhem south of the border. The Obama camp says that they have nothing to do with it, the Clinton camp is crying foul, and the Republicans are mostly just giggling to themselves.

Now – first off, let’s get something straight here: There are no lies or untruths or accusations in the video – BIg Hilary’s words are coming right out of her own mouth. It is the context that some people are freaking out over, nothing more. And quite frankly, I think the thing is great.

However – the shit has finally hit the fan full force, because it turns out that the creator of the “remix” – the mysterious ParkRidge47 – is actually a guy who works for the company that originally put Obama’s web presence together. He claims he did it on his own time and outside of the connections of his job, but it seems to have hit a little too close to home for some people and he got his ass fired. This gets into a really large grey area – what constitues fair comment, what is valid personal expression, and what violates the various and badly outdated campaign laws? No one seems to know – and with the emergence of YouTube as the biggest media outlet in the world, this would seem to lay the foundations for an absolute barrage of “Swift Boat Veteran” types of clips and videos as the U.S. creeps towards the primaries and eventually to the elections.

Stay (heh heh) tuned.

Over to the left in “Pages” section of the toolbar there is a link to an RSS feed of the songs I have been listening to lately. The feed comes from a site called Last.FM that functions as a sort of a social network / record library / CD store where you can find other people with similar musical tastes and hit them up to find new stuff that you might like. It works very well, and is kind of fun to boot.

That said, putting your musical tastes out there in unforgiving pixels means that people can – and will – drop you notes telling you what they think of the things in your playlist. And yeah, for every “Dude, you listen to the best stuff!” there are is a double handful of “Dude, the shit you listen to is fucked.”

So – if you are one of the “you’re fucked” brigade, then you might want to skip the rest of this post. If not, then here is a gander at some of the new (well, new to me) stuff I have found and am playing in heavy rotation on the ol’ MacBook:

Nouvelle Vague: The concept here is simple – “bossa nova” essentially means “new wave” (give or take an idiom) in Portuguese, so the band plays new wave standards with bossa nova arrangements. It sounds simple, and you would be tempted to dismiss the whole thing as a quasi-novelty a la The Recliners or The Mike Flowers Pops … but there is a depth of style and emotion here that sets this particular outfit apart from the masses. Serious bonus points here for reaching into the “original” well of new wave material – a catalog that the less-savvy might label as “punk” – for gems from The Buzzcocks, The Undertones, and The Dead Kennedys.

Old Crow Medicine Show: If a bunch of guys weaned on Weezer and The Violent Femmes decided to move to Nashville, discovered mountain music, and decided to start a jug band … well, then you would have Old Crow Medicine Show. Actually, you can take the “if” out of there … that is the boys in Old Crow Medicine Show. The songs are simple and earthy and real and you can tell these guys believe in what they are playing. This works equally well on the car stereo at dawn on a foggy morning as it does on the patio at sunset with a beer and a bag of chips. This is definitely the real deal.

Mono: I would probably be doing this an injustice by even trying to describe it, but that never stopped me before. If you can get a handle on some odd convergence of alternative rock and roll with classical Japanese musical theatre, then you might be in the right ballpark. Or at least the parking lot. This is definitely one you will either love or hate, but if you have any sort of beatnik / swinging bachelor pad / secret agent genes floating around in your DNA, then you will probably lean towards the love.

Kings Of Leon: Ever shouted along to some old Lynyrd Skynyrd on the radio – well, welcome home. This is southern garage rock at it’s absolute raw finest. Pass the bourbon.

3000: The dollar amount that the Timberland shoe company will pay towards the purchase of a hybrid vehicle by any of their employees for personal use.

A while ago we linked to the online version of You Don’t Know Jack – a daily dose of the “Dis or Dat” segment of the game, free gratis for anyone with a browser. It was tons of fun, but led to the inevitable lamenting about the need for a full online version of the game, with multi-player goodness.

Half of those prayers have been answered – there are now full games online. Sadly, they are still only single player versions, but beggars can’t be choosers. Cookie has never sounded so good … all we need now is someone to screw.

There was something tickling the back of my mind ever since I wrote in November about the dwindling number of World War II veterans. Eventually – and four months later is a pretty long “eventually” – I connected it with this book and the fact that when the last WWII survivors are gone, the last witnesses to an atrocity will be gone too and the whole thing will be hidden away for good.

The atrocity in question is the systematic neglect and subsequent starvation of up to 1.7 million German soldiers and civilians in “prison camps” at the end of the war in the European theatre – if a barbed wire fence around a field of mud and dysentery can be called a “camp”. There were no tents, no food, no latrines … just hunger and disease and slow stinking death. The accusation is that the act was carried out on the direct orders of General Dwight D. Eisenhower and Josef Stalin, both of whom professed a deep and abiding hatred for all Germans – to the point where Winston Churchill was actually disturbed by their outright vehemence. The controversy is that the United States government denies any and all of this, and the entire story is almost completely unknown in the U.S of A.

Other Losses is not an easy read – it is dense in the extreme, mostly due to the weight of the research and citations that support the text. The work on that front is impeccable, and the basis pf one of the enduring conundrums about the book: It is almost universally refuted and reviled south of the border, but never with anything approaching the same quality of research or review to support the refutation. The book is instantly classified as a lie and a sham, but strictly on the basis of “this can’t be true” – it’s like heresy trumps facts, just because we say so.

The point of all of this is that there is one group that tends to support the events documented in the book, and that is the Allied troops that were actually there. When you see this work discussed in the states at all, the rabid nay-sayers are almost always countered by members of the military who are willing to say “hang on there, I saw it, it isn’t pretty but it’s true.” Sadly, that group is getting smaller and smaller, and even though the Russians have come clean and admitted their part in the whole thing – essentially confirming the numbers in the book – the rather insular nature of our friends to the south means that once the last witnesses are gone, this story will probably be buried forever. Certainly this is not anything that is referenced or tackled in the grade 6 history books – Eisenhower remains a golden icon and beacon of freedom in that particular tableau – and a lot of the on-line reference works (cough cough Wikipedia) also seem to have an editorial bent towards downplaying or outright suppressing the tale.

All of which makes this book more important than the average time-waster that finds its way into the Book Of The Month here. If you can work your way through Other Losses, you really should. This is a story that should not be allowed to die.

You may or may not have played with Camfrog yet. If not, then it’s probably worth taking a peek, but be warned – it’s definitely not for everyone. The nutshell description would be a “multi-user video chat client” but the more concise synopsis would be “the same sort of chatroom anarchy that was the hallmark of IRC, but this time with pictures”.

The whole thing is very retro, even to the point of the text part of the interface looking a hell of a lot like the old OS9 “Ircle” client, and you have to be prepared for an onslaught of netspeak and people who probably shouldn’t be on cam – both of which can be rather off-putting. On the plus side, however, the thing runs like a dream, and you can host your own rooms or even your own server, making it a secure alternative to iChat or Talk Google for video conferencing. The basic client is free, you have to upgrade (or know where to get a serial, cough cough) to get advanced features like multiple concurrent video streams.

The other odd thing is the huge number of rooms for and by deaf users. Watching 10 or 11 people signing at once on your screen is a rather unique form of visual overload.

A quick warning to those of you who are lucky (or cool) enough to have a MacBook Pro – there have been some reports of problems booting after installing the 10.4.9 OSX update on those machines. I would assume that if you are awesome enough to have an MBP then you are also awesome enough to backup before you update a system, but hey, you never know. Note that the reports are semi-random, and far more people seem to have had no problem at all with the update, but it doesn’t hurt to be forewarned.

People with other models – desktop Macs, PowerBooks, iBooks, iWhatevers – haven’t had any problems, so if you fall into that group then you are probably golden. And if you think that you must have the update and are on an MBP, the “combined update” that you manually download from Apple appears to have none of the reported issues – it is only the “software update” version that you might want to hold off on.

Your supposedly-cushy geek job, the one that has you sitting in a chair and peering at a monitor all day? It’s trying to kill you.

A log time ago there was a computer game for various and sundry archaic home computers called “Artillery”.

The game was called “Artillery”, not the computers. Just so we are clear.

Ahem. So, anyway, the game was way cool but you usually had to find someone to play against, since there was no one-player mode … and the problem here was that the concept of data communications for the average mope was in its infancy, and playing against someone meant that they had to sit beside you and take turns with you when it came to typing in the firing commands. Not the most ideal of head-to-head gaming situations.

Fortunately for all concerned, we now have this fancy interweb thingie, and “Artillery” has begat something called “Artillery Live”. If you guessed that it is Artillery with live opponents from the ‘net, you would be very much (warning: bad pun coming) on target. Enjoy.

Yesterday, our boy Jim Balsillie went for the high jump as chairman or Research in Motion. Today the stock price went up both before markets opened and during the trading day.

This is the exact opposite of a coincidence.

This game sounds dumb, but is really quite fun. You are a tree, and you only have so many growth “turns” per level (as noted by the numbers in the growth shapes along the bottom of the screen). You have to grow in such a way that you spear the rings on each level.

Hey – I said it sounded dumb. Just try it. It’s a cool little diversion for a stupidly cold day.

There hasn’t been a new Strong Bad email since February 20th.

There needs to be an investigation, or something. Sheesh.

The gang over at Electronic Arts may have their warts on occasion, but when it comes to selecting licensed music for videogames they are pretty much second to none. Which means that you will be glad to know that EA has cut a deal with iTunes to offer up pretty much every song and mix from every title that they have brought to market in the last three years. All of you Need For Speed freaks who have despaired at ever getting a copy of the Snoop Dogg mix of “Riders On The Storm” can now rejoice.

Way back when there was a much-adored / much-reviled (depending on your particular allegiance) home computer called the Commodore 64. While the Apple ][/e was more geek-friendly and the Atari 800 was easier to write code for, the C-64 stood alone in one particular regard: It had the best games.

Don’t laugh – in the infancy of home computing, this was a serious trump card.

One of the most beloved of those games was Impossible Mission – a game that stood with Loderunner as one of the genetic fountainheads of the entire platform/puzzle gaming genre. And in the spirit of “everything old is new again”, Impossible Mission is coming to the Nintendo DS. Anyone who remembers playing the game can see how two screens and stylus input can work particularly well with this title, and there is some palpable anticipation among a certain generation of gamers as we gaze into the future at the December 2007 release date.

This is a good thing.

There will be much wailing and gnashing in the Canadian business media tomorrow morning when the dust settles around this one. That wailing and gnashing will not be echoed in the cubes and hallways at Research In Motion, unless you consider barely-surpressed glee as a kind of wailing or gnashing. The mood there will be more or less the same as the one of the palace staff in Uganda when Idi Amin stepped down, except for the part where Idi wasn’t quite as large of an asshole as Jim Balsillie.

The public message from RIM will be that everything is business as usual and, while he is no longer chairman, Slimy Jim will still be co-CEO … but this is window dressing. Our hero will fade into the background and eventually there will be a quiet buyout and/or backroom handshake of some sort one day Mike Lazaridis (who is a good guy) will be the one and only head honcho, a situation which will bring smiles to the faces of both the employees and the shareholders at RIM. Anything that works out to a final result of more Mike and less Jim is a good deal for everyone.

The only real surprise in all of this is the fact that everyone seems, well, surprised. Anyone who hasn’t harboured lingering suspicions that a certain group of executives at RIM was being creative with the books just hasn’t been paying attention.