Let me begin with an apology for being a huge geek, or nerd, or whatever you want to call it.
Whenever someone says that something has “More than X” I always always always immediately wonder “How many more?” For example if a reporter says “More than 200 people gathered…” I want to know was that 201 or 250 or 2,000? Same goes for “fewer than” or “less than.”
Marketing people must know what they are doing, because stuff still gets sold for $X99 instead of rounding it off, including gas, which still gets sold with 9/10th of a penny tacked on at the end.
So when I saw Leopard as being touted as having 300+ New Features I started my little OCD obsession.
“More than 300? How many more? 301? Nah, they wouldn’t do that. 350? No, if it was 350 they’d say 350. So there must be less than than 350. Probably less than 325.”
I went to the page and realized, “Apple must be used to dealing with other number nerds” because right there at the top of the page it says “Browse all 316”
Of course being a Jesus geek too, I immediately laughed at the fact that there were “three sixteen” new features, and thought to myself:
For Jobs so loved the world….
which, if you happen to be a Jesus geek too, you might know is a reference to John 3:16 from the New Testament.
I started reading through the list and thought to myself “I wonder how many of these will actually be useful to me on a daily basis?” So I saved a copy of the web page locally and set about to make a list.
I wanted to start with the whole list, but nothing else, so I removed all the extra HTML except the parts which describe the new features. (For the HTML literate among us: the page is actually formatted with <li> but they aren’t showing the numbers or bullets.)
At first I found more than 316, which I quickly figured out was because there are a few <li> where they don’t belong. So I deleted the extra ones.
And ended up with 315.
I knew I hadn’t deleted any that should be there, and I knew that each one listed had the proper <li> next to it.
Hrm.
So I went back again and went to the top of the 300+ New Features page (click image to see full version of image in new window):
I made a list of all the numbers is parenthesis, ran them through ‘expr’ in Terminal.app (1)
$ expr 2 + 8 + 7 + 7 + 3 + 7 + 6 + 5 + 10 + 8 + 6 + 5 + 5 + 12 + 24 + 3 + 4 + 11 + 15 + 2 + 7 + 8 + 14 + 8 + 3 + 13 + 6 + 11 + 5 + 8 + 9 + 7 + 9 + 7 + 12 + 17 + 12 + 10
316
Ok, so that was right.
Then it was time to do some manual comparisons. So I compared the parenthetical numbers at the top with the features listed under each section.
I was more than half-way through (22 out of 38) when I found the mistake:
There are 8 features listed for Photobooth, however, only 7 are listed:
- Photo Booth effects
- Backdrop effects
- Screen Sharing
- New Message Views
- Custom Buddy List Order
- Disable Alerts
- AppleScript Alert
Mystery solved.
I double-checked the original HTML to make sure that something wasn’t just accidentally not showing up, but it’s just not there. So either something didn’t make the final version or there was just a simple math error.
Still, while Jobs 3:16 would have been better, 3:15 isn’t bad:
…that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.
Hrm, is that about Jesus or Jobs?
I did report this to Apple, so it may change soon, but you can click here for a 1040x19882 (yes really) screenshot via Paparazzi. Warning: the image is 2.8 MB.
