82.8: The elapsed time in seconds for a 2007 AMD Dual Core to boot, load the operating system, launch Microsoft Work, open a 175,000 word file, perform a word count, perform a 25-item search and replace, and save the modified file.

I have spent more than a few moments filling These Very Pages with the reasons that Guitar Hero is so awesome, and one of the recurring themes there is that you are truly immersed in the experience – the game is so good that halfway through your first song you are mentally on that stage, rocking large and tossing hair.

This is good.

But being physically on that stage, rocking out in front of a screaming crowd? That would be better than good.

The gang at Red Octane are obviously thinking along the same lines, and to that end they have teamed up with the Download Festival to put some lucky Guitar Hero aficionados onto the third stage at the festival, rocking their little hearts out in front of a mostly-drunken live audience. Better yet, each night’s best player goes home with a honest-to-goshen Les Paul guitar. With strings and everything.

About an hour ago a curious deal was dusted off and rubber stamped in the bowels of the dingy building that Hamilton calls City Hall. The municipal council, in a move that smacks of three parts naiveté and one part pure desperation, brought back to life an agreement to give Slippery Jim Balsillie what amounts to complete control of the convention and entertainment infrastructure in the city of Hamilton. In a bizarre and misguided attempt to convince themselves that the Nashville Predators are coming to Hamilton, our civic mandarins are willing to give Jim complete and exclusive operating rights to Copps Colosseum, The Hamilton Convention Centre, and Hamilton Place. In return, the city of Hamilton gets … squat.

The interesting point here is that the deal doesn’t take effect if and when Jimbo relocates the team to Hamilton – it takes effect if and when he buys the team. The discerning taxpayer will immediately discern the difference here, but this is something that has apparently escaped the notice of the city council. There is no provision to move the team within so many years, to promise to try and move the team, nothing.

Now, some of the more gullible types out there will say that this is picking at nits, and the Predators will be moving north Any Day Now. I have discussed this in the past, but some people have short memories so a refresher might be in order. The salient points, in no particular order:

The possibility of the NHL board approving Skanky Jim’s purchase of the Predators remains slim. Our boy made a number of key enemies on the board when he attempted to buy the Penguins. Old men with lots of money have few pleasures in life – holding grudges is one of them. Added bonus: Gary Bettman hates the very sight of the man.

If Jim buys the team, there will be no relocation of the team to Canada. He can move them to Kansas City, or Oklahoma, or even Las Vegas. Canada? Not a chance – the current NHL business plan specifically forbids it. There are 22 existing owners who will veto that idea, and in this case it only takes one. The Predators might move somewhere, but they are not moving here.

Copps Collosseum is unable to host an NHL team. This may seem odd for a mostly new arena, but times change fast and Copps is already sadly out of date. Copps fails to meet the league’s minimum standards for number of seats, the number of private boxes, the size of private boxes, and the percentage of space for in-house retail and hospitality. Copps was built at exactly the wrong time – when it was brand new it was “state of the art” and less than 5 years later it was “quaint”.

The Toronto Maple Leafs are not run by financial idiots. People with move enthusiasm than brains keep talking about there being a “100 million dollar” payout to the Leafs to infringe on their territorial rights. This is a laughable figure – at best it is less than a thousandth of a reasonable price. Billions and billions might be more apropos, and even that is barely scraping the surface. The Leafs may be completely and utterly inept on the ice, but in the boardroom they definitely know what they are doing. You don’t sell the golden goose at any price, period.

Jim may get a team. But they are not coming to Hamilton, not now, not ever. But Jim doesn’t need to bring them here to get a nice little consolation prize – all he has to do is own them to get free and gratis control of Hamilton’s entertainment facilities. He saw a bunch of suckers who were just waiting to be fleeced and used the spectre of his sorta-maybe-kinda hockey team to take them all for a ride. Sweet deal, that.

Way back when, in These Very Pages, there was discussion about Steve Jobs’ challenge to the record labels to knock it off with attempting to apply DRM to legally downloaded music. Some people were skeptical, saying that Jobs only claimed to want restriction-free music because he knew the labels would never go for it, and that if push came to shove the iTunes Music Store would remain the sole province of locked down media.

Shows what they know.

Steve started off today’s big Wall Street Journal wankfest by announcing that DRM-free songs are now indeed available from the iTMS, and that the new update of iTunes (version 7.2) would bring the goodies home to you and I. Among the more interesting points of discussion:

The labels themselves will determine what kind of songs they want to sell – locked, unlocked, or a mix. It’s all about the market forces. EMI is on board now, and if they sell a lot of unlocked music, you can bet the other labels will be scrambling to get into line.

Songs that you have already downloaded from the iTMS with “FairPlay” DRM restrictions can be unlocked after the fact.

The “premium” that EMI is charging for restriction-free music is set by the label and not iTMS … meaning that indie artists can sell their music free and clear for the same 99 cents that they are charging now.

The DRM-free songs are also of a much higher audio quality – something that indie distributers and iTMS customers have been jonesing for. And songs you already have that you unlock will see this higher quality as well – the unlocked tunes are replacement downloads, not the stuff you already have with a bit switched here and there.

All of this is good news. Certainly EMI will not be the only label to see the light, and eventually market forces should remove the “premium” that those labels charge for open files. When one label takes a flyer and rolls back to 99 cents, the rest of the sheep will follow. Good job, Steve: Big talk, big actions. Gotta like that.

18.6: The elapsed time in seconds for a 1986 Mac Plus to boot, load the operating system, launch Microsoft Word, open a 175,000 word file, perform a word count, perform a 25-item search and replace, and save the modified file.

It is less than two hours since our friends at Microsoft trotted out the Milan, and already the mainstream media is fucking up on the reporting. Three different outlets that i have been exposed to in the last 120 minutes – CNN, CBC Newsworld, and 680 News – have called the table the “new Microsoft Surface”. The table is called the Milan, you dumbasses … the underlying technology is called “Surface”. Get it right.

Well, That was actually a surprise, and for the most part worth staying up for. There was no attempt to save the Zune, no doomed-from-the-start handheld gaming platform … Microsoft actually trotted out a very cool technology demo.

There are a few caveats to keep in mind here – mostly ones that the mainstream media will either completely miss – and as cool as this product is, you probably shouldn’t be getting overly excited about it. The most important thing to remember is that this is not a physical product that you will be able to go out and buy now. Or next year. Or during any of the 7 years following that. This was a proof of concept, and something to get people thinking and talking – but as a consumer device (assuming that it does eventually come to market) – the Milan as you saw it is at least a decade away. It is also ruinously expensive – when (or if) this sort of thing does make it into the Real World the first generation or two will be strictly the plaything of the Steven Speilbergs and Shaquille O’Neils of the world. Even past that date, I would expect that casinos and upscale bars and clubs would be a much more likely place to find these things unless something changes drastically in the way that the bits and pieces inside the Milan are manufactured.

The underlying technology, however – the “Surface” interface – is pretty much ready to go now, and you can expect to see it showing up in Windows-based smartphones before the end of the year in an attempt to ape the iPhone. But the table? Years. And then some.

Finally, I find myself puzzled at the things they chose to demo on the table. I assume that the photo manipulation was a direct attempt to take some of the shine off the more showy functions of the iPhone … but they could have done so much more. Or, more to the point, used a hell of a lot more imagination. The Nintendo DS is the hottest gaming platform on the planet – it outsells everything else combined – and one of the reasons is the direct interaction of the gamer and the software via the touch screen. It doesn’t take a huge leap of logic to see that four people sitting around the Milan playing a killer multiplayer touch-contolled game would have the potential to change again the way people are thinking about the interactive entertainment industry. As it is now they seemed to position the “Surface” interface as nothing more than a really big PDA, which – given both the cost and the potential of the thing – seems a bit limiting.

Well, That was actually a surprise, and for the most part worth staying up for. There was no attempt to save the Zune, no doomed-from-the-start handheld gaming platform … Microsoft actually trotted out a very cool technology demo.

There are a few caveats to keep in mind here – mostly ones that the mainstream media will either completely miss – and as cool as this product is, you probably shouldn’t be getting overly excited about it. The most important thing to remember is that this is not a physical product that you will be able to go out and buy now. Or next year. Or during any of the 7 years following that. This was a proof of concept, and something to get people thinking and talking – but as a consumer device (assuming that it does eventually come to market) – the Milan as you saw it is at least a decade away. It is also ruinously expensive – when (or if) this sort of thing does make it into the Real World the first generation or two will be strictly the plaything of the Steven Speilbergs and Shaquille O’Neils of the world. Even past that date, I would expect that casinos and upscale bars and clubs would be a much more likely place to find these things unless something changes drastically in the way that the bits and pieces inside the Milan are manufactured.

The underlying technology, however – the “Surface” interface – is pretty much ready to go now, and you can expect to see it showing up in Windows-based smartphones before the end of the year in an attempt to ape the iPhone. But the table? Years. And then some.

Finally, I find myself puzzled at the things they chose to demo on the table. I assume that the photo manipulation was a direct attempt to take some of the shine off the more showy functions of the iPhone … but they could have done so much more. Or, more to the point, used a hell of a lot more imagination. The Nintendo DS is the hottest gaming platform on the planet – it outsells everything else combined – and one of the reasons is the direct interaction of the gamer and the software via the touch screen. It doesn’t take a huge leap of logic to see that four people sitting around the Milan playing a killer multiplayer touch-contolled game would have the potential to change again the way people are thinking about the interactive entertainment industry. As it is now they seemed to position the “Surface” interface as nothing more than a really big PDA, which – given both the cost and the potential of the thing – seems a bit limiting.

According to the press release, one William Gates will be appearing with Steve Jobs tomorrow at WSJ technology hoo-haw. I couldn’t understand what possible benefit Bill would get out of this – beyond a living demonstration of the “Hi, I’m a PC” commercials – until I saw that our friends at Microsoft have a Big Honking Announcement planned for one minute after midnight tonight. There are rumours that it is either a better Zune (hard to be worse!) or some sort of handheld gaming system. In just about 12 hours we will know either way – but the timing is perfect to give Bill some sort of ammo to help stave off the onslaught of iPhone goodness that Steve is probably ready to beat him over the head with.

The game, as they say, is afoot!

You may have noticed two new tabs on your Google maps. One is fun, one is useful, and both are kind of cool.

The useful one is the “My Maps” tab that lets you notate and customize maps either for your own use later, or to share with friends and strangers online. You can write on them, draw on them, drop icons and landmarks on them – great for sending people directions, planning out a trip, or being a stalker.

The fun one is “Street View” which you may or may not have seen yet, depending on what sort of neighbourhoods you zoom in on. Anytime you see a street outlined in blue the “Street View” button appears and you can click on it to poke around the neighbourhood. Drag and drop your little iconic avatar to move around – you can take walking tours of places you have never been or just randomly look at fun pictures of various streetscapes.

Enjoy.

There has been remarkably little hype for the iPhone since the initial mass wetting of geek pants at Macworld. The “Oscars” commercial popped up, but beyond that … deafening silence. Well, deafening silence from Apple. Certainly some of the erstwhile competitors have been busy telling anyone who would listen that the thing is overpriced, underpowered, a toy, causes cancer, and may even generate kiddie porn when the user thinks it’s turned off.

Cough cough RIM cough.

That is all about to change tomorrow. The esteemed Mr. Jobs is going to be front and centre at a Wall Street Journal technology wankfest in sunny California, and it is absolutely certain that there the inevitable torrent of iPhone love is going start then and there. Everyone is tight-lipped about what is going to be said, but reading between the lines of this article might be a hint as to one of the revelations: Google apps tweaked for the iPhone, possibly even running as local code. The article is sort of hard to work through – being mostly cheerleading for the tattered remnants of the Seattle tech community – but there are some worthy nuggets to be pried loose if you want to work for them.

Melle pointed out that the Senators logo has a touch of gold in it, so I have endeavoured to reflect that in the style sheet.

1: The number of Canadian teams in the NHL that have not been to the Stanley Cup final at least once in the last 40 years.

In case there was any ambiguity about who I am cheering on in the Stanely Cup final, the colours of this page should clear it right up. I am pulling for the Senators because they play a fun brand of hockey, they are carrying the flag for Canada, and – best of all – it makes Leafs fans mental to think about Ottawa winning the cup.

Also, Maggie picked them, and it’s pretty hard to argue with the monkey.

65: The percentage of the oxygen on our planet that is generated by algae in the oceans.

And so there are two teams left to fight for the most storied of all sports trophies – neither of them, sadly, is my chosen group of warriors. When I was younger, there would have been much bitterness here, since there are only two possible outcomes to the NHL season for any given team: Winning the Stanley Cup, or complete and utter failure. While this fact remains undeniably true, the bitterness is much tempered by the fact that the last month of playoff action was a lot of fun and I got to watch my team play deep into May – an experience that the mindless robots that cheer for the Toronto Maple Leafs haven’t known for 15 years now, and will probably never know again in the history of the franchise.

They are writing a book, you know … a fucking coffee table tome celebrating 1993, the last time that the Leafs almost sort of came close to nearly winning a series that was almost for the Cup.

Anyway – I am still looking forward to the final series. It should be a pretty good tilt, and – unlike some recent years past when I had no clear rooting interest – I will be able to cheer wholeheartedly for one team to win, something that makes any sporting event a lot more fun. Not only is Ottawa the Canadian team here, but they are also a bucket of fun to watch. As a complete bonus, Ottawa skill and talent really pisses off Leaf fans, who hate the Sens for daring to be so much better than their beloved talentless bums in Blue and White.

On top of all that, I have been a Ray Emery fan since he was drafted by the Soo out of the Major Junior A team in Cayuga. Why he gets no props for the Sens success is beyond me – he came out on top of battles with the starting goalies of both the Canadian and United States olympic teams in the last two rounds, which should pretty much cement his status, but the media seems to think that is not the case.

Whatever.

I can hardly wait for Monday. Go Sens Go!

Yesterday I cast doubts on the ability of Neversoft to get the next version of Guitar Hero to market without completely fucking it up. Those doubts are just as strong 24 hours later, because Neversoft can fuck up anything, but at least the guys at Red Octane are doing their part to try and save this project from the gutter – check out the partial list of songs that they have come up with for GH3:

Sabotage
Rock And Roll All Nite
School’s Out
Slow Ride
Barracuda

Oh my yes.

Better, while we have known all along that the guitar controllers for the Wii and the Xbox 360 would be wireless … mmmm, wireless … it looks like Sony has finally given up on their “only Sony makes wireless controllers, all others are fakes” stance and the PS3 version (for those feebs who would buy a PS3) will also have wireless goodness out of the box.

What this will eventually boil down to is a battle of wills: Can Red Octane be awesome enough to counteract the pervasive lameness that is Neversoft? Sadly, my money usually bets on “lame” winning out. I take no shame in admitting that I to end up being completely and utterly wrong. Please.

If you have been following along at home, you know that I have expressed doubts about the future of the Guitar Hero franchise now that the braintrust of Harmoinix and Red Octane has been sundered. Red Octane is bravely soldiering on, but their new running mates at Neversoft have shown time and time again that they have an uncanny ability to drop the ball on formerly bulletproof franchises.

Guitar Hero Project 8 is not a concept that would fill my heart with joy,

There has been less discussion here about the future of Harmonix – partly because we are all pretty sure that the talented crew there will do just fine, and partly because their next project was still wrapped in layers of “unsure” and topped with a creamy layer of “speculation”. But the wraps are more of less off, because not only is “Rock Band” now 100% official, but there are also details that both make a geekboy quiver with joy and weep with regret.

The joy comes from the gigantic boost in creativity that is about to be slathered onto the core music game awesomeness. There will still be the basic outrageous fun that comes from indulging in the same mechanics that made Guitar Hero such damn fun – but that has been boosted with both the ability of your friends to join in on the other cliche rock instruments (drums, vocals, bic lighter) and the holy grail of re-arrangement and “jamming” on the musical framework to create your own collaborative sonic goo. Rehearse them, work them out, prefect them, and then release your performance to the world via your game console’s internet services. The potential here is staggering.

The trade-off – and the cause of the weeping – is the expected price of the damn thing. You are looking at 200 bucks or so for the required gear – maybe not a staggering sum when you consider the price of “real” instruments, but still a lot of fucking money for a videogame regardless of how groundbreaking and ridiculously awesome it actually is.

The pain …

It had to happen eventually – the code was essentially abandoned and rotting for four years – but there are legions of retro-grouchy designers who will wail and gnash over the fact that FreeHand is now officially dead. The product was circling the drain for almost 2 years before Adobe bought Macromedia and had been completely ignored since the buyout so this is not any sort of a surprise, but I personally know people who held onto some sort of grim belief that Adobe would see the light, trash “fucking Illustrator”, and go back to the product they know and blindly loved.

Sorry, not going to happen.

There is a bargoon upgrade path to Illustrator for all of the die-hards and hangers-on, which is nice but will probably not stop the moaning and grousing by the newly disenfranchised. Stop by your local art department tomorrow morning for an entertaining dose of moaning and self-flagellation.

One of the reasons that Google gained so much love so early in life was the ultra-simple way that search results were returned – one column of plain text, no fuss, no muss. However, things have changed in a lot of ways since 1999, not the least of which is the width of the average user’s screen real estate. 640×480 has long gone the way of the floppy and most users have at least 1600 pixels of width to play with, leaving a great gob of unused space on a typical Google search results screen.

Which brings us to Two Column Google – an awesome little Firefox script that reformats the search results into two newspaper-like columns and numbers them to keep the relevance order intact. It’s small and quick and just about perfect. Enjoy.

NOTE: After I linked to this the author “superseded” his work with “GoogleMonkeyR” which adds more columns as well as a user interface and the ability to return the columns by result type. It is pretty slick, and you might want to give it a look, but I think i prefer the outright simplicity of the original. Just saying.

If you already use Google Analytics then this is not news to you – you got an email about it just like I did. But for those of you who haven’t yet found the statistical joy that is G.A., it’s time to jump on the bandwagon. The “new” Google Analytics is up and running and adds a fabulous new suite of features and a spiffy new interface to the already excellent package. It’s free and it’s fun and you really should get with the program if you aren’t already.

The long-awaited integration of Google’s various search engines – text, images, maps, news, DNA, whatever – has opened its eyes and taken its first tottering steps outside of the lab. It seems to work more or less as advertised, and if it wasn’t for the addition of the new menu that organizes the results along the top of the page you might not even realize that anything has changed. Subtle or not, this is an extremely welcome update and should serve to pound yet another rusty nail into the barely-beating heart of Microsoft’s “Live” service.

120,000: The number of golf balls (to the nearest thousand) shot into the water on the 17th hole at TPC Sawgrass each year.

This is kind of cool – a multi-device USB charging unit that you can configure to feed go juice to a half-dozen of your gadgets, regardless of the brand or proprietary connector. It just sort of grows arms as needed, and in a nice touch regulates different amounts of power to the various devices all at the same time. It isn’t cheap – the base unit and 6 connectors will set you back 110 bucks – but it is kind of handy for the space-challenged or people who are seriously wired.

The internets are all a-twitter even as we speak … er, type. The reason? A purported internal memo to all Apple employees claiming huge – nay, catastrophic – delays in both the iPhone and OSX Leopard. A wiseacre pal of mine forwarded it to me a couple of hours ago, wondering if I was going to comment on it with as much glee as I did all of the Longhorn/Windows 04/Windows 05/Vista delays. The answer, of course, is no, because the thing was quite obviously bogus for two fairly obvious reasons. One, in the wake of the whole Enron fiasco, no publicly-traded company would ever release this type of information to the rank and file – especially the stock-vested rank and file – before advising the share-buying public. And two, Apple never ever ever tells all of their employees anything. Period. Usually big news is known only to Steve and three or four people who “need to know” – and then those three or four are taken out into a dark alley in Oakland and summarily dispatched.

These fairly obvious and rather miniscule leaps of logic appeared to be beyond certain major-market blogs (*cough cough Engadget cough*) and the email/memo was published with much fanfare. It was retracted very quickly, and Engadget issued a half-assed apology, but the fallout – in the form of a four fucking billion dollars of lost market cap – had already hit the fan. The gang at Engadget are clinging to the excuse that the mail came from someone in the Apple hierarchy that they trust, and that they had confirmation that the mail went to all of the other mopes in Cupertino, so it had to be legit, right? Well, no, because the content was so obviously and transparently phony … all it would have taken was a moment’s thought by someone with the IQ of a carrot to realize that everyone was being had.

Engadget could have run with an awesome story about how Apple’s internal email had been spoofed, and everyone would have been talking about the story for all the right reasons, but instead they come off looking like morons. The lesson here? If you write for an influential blog, perhaps it would be wise to use your brain once in a while.

48,000: The number of rounds of golf (to the nearest thousand) played at TPC Sawgrass each year.

Barbarian Software has released the first official version – 0.1 beta, which is about as “first” as you can get – of Magentosphere, which is quite simply the Most Insanely Awesome visualizer ever for iTunes. While some people have had their mitts on this for a few weeks (I’m talking to you, Smartie Red) today marks the actual date when you are supposed to be snagging this download.

And snag you should. There is visual goodness aplenty to be had here. Enjoy.

It’s not hard to see the writing on the wall for the Guitar Hero franchise. The guys at Red Octane who did such an awesome job of bringing the franchise to live are slowly but surely losing control of their own creation to their corporate masters at Activision. Harmonix is already moving on to something even more awesome (more about that next week). And Neversoft – the new keepers of the Guitar Hero flame – cocked up the Xbox 360 release so badly that they turned bona fide fanboys away from the game – people who already bought the game on the PS2 and were willing to buy it again on the Xbox were so disgusted by the whole thing that they threw up their hands and walked away.

This is not how you treat a golden goose.

In the midst of all of this gloom and doom, however, there is a small and bright ray of hope. As previously mentioned in These Very Pages, the gangs at Harmonix and Red Octane are teaming up one last time to bring forth the desperately anticipated Guitar Hero : Rocks The 80s. This will be the final release on the PS2, the last collaboration with the original developers, and quite possibly – given the incredible ineptitude of Neversoft – the last Guitar Hero game period.

If this is a swan song, however, it is at least shaping up to be a winner. Harmonix released a partial track list today – check out the first confirmed tunes:

Metal Health – Quiet Riot
I Want Candy – Bow Wow Wow
Round And Round – Ratt
I Ran – Flock Of Seagulls
I Wanna Rock – Twisted Sister
Heat Of The Moment – Asia

Really, it almost brings a tear to the eye. There must indeed be a god, because Ratt is on the list and you can’t ask for much more from life than that.

Bang your head, indeed.

There is a much-loved genre of video games known as “2D Fighters” … these are essentially all variants of a basic “two players face each other in front of a pretty backdrop and kick the snot out of each other” theme, and they are a staple in any arcade you might happen to stumble into. Whether the title in question is Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat or SNK .vs. Capcom, there are a host of features that tend to be common in every game: Special attacks, fatality moves, character specific animations, that sort of thing.

Bible Fight has all of these swell features and just happens to add famous figures from the traditional Judeo-Christian mythos – you can play as Moses or Jesus or whoever and then kick the shit out of the rest of the holy types. There is even (in the true spirit of the arcade classics) a special unlockable character who has pretty awesome attacks. I’ll let you figure out on your own just who that might be. Hint: You shouldn’t have to think very hard.

It’s silly and fun and tournament mode will help you while away a slow Friday afternoon. And as an extra bonus, Eve is totally hot.

Another series, another thousand words. Halfway there.