Posts by Andrew Johns

The fake CEO is more interesting than the real one

Microsoft's Chief Envisioning Officer, Dave Coplin who "interviewed" Satya, often jokes in his talks that his job is the closest he would get to being CEO. Having sat through a number of talks by Coplin over the years, I felt sorry that it would fall to him to be part of this charade.

I walked out before the end. If you want someone to talk about Microsoft's vision of the future, have Coplin speak, he'll do it with far more humour and engagement. If you want to be bored senseless by someone repeatedly talking about the importance of the cloud, get Nadella.

Still he wasn't the worst of the Monday/Wednesday keynotes. The Yo Founder on Wednesday trying to find as many ways to say that Yo was a notification system, that businesses could use to notify their users, and that the future of Yo was more people using it. Great. Really insightful. Be honest, it was an April fools joke that you've spent 6 months trying to convince people is a legitimate service.

@HonkingAntelope Coincidence? of course!

I've never installed or been tagged with fancheck, and had exactly the same random status update problems that you mention. that was an issue with facebook, not fancheck, so yes, it was just a coincidence.

Graham and others are attempting to educate people and reduce the amount of scaremongering going on with this app, but some people just don't want to believe experts and would rather spread unfounded rumours without really knowing what the real problem being reported is.

Well if the FA don't want it...

then Sports Interactive might want it for their Football Manager game?

other last.fm "rivals"?

I've been using finetune lately, which has a reasonable catalogue of tunes, but the catch there is that you need to "playlist" at least 45 tunes (no more than 3 per artist) and then it randomly plays through them. I started using it as I was able to provide new years eve backing music for my house party via their wii interface (www.finetune.com/wii) without having to leave the PC on, just the Wii hooked up to the stereo. :)

What with all the tagging, public playlists, and the ability to be a fan of an artist/album or playlist (you might even be able to be a fan of another user's selections?) and the radio stations based on an artist, keyword or similar users, etc...it's a little like last.fm.

now we know what JJ Abrams'esesses secret new movie is about..

ZOMG IT'S ALIVE! IT'S HUGE! IT'S A FLYING SPAGHETTI MONSTER !!!!111!1ONEONEONE

gadspot has a live chat box thing

someone please ask to speak to rufus and then talk in broken english for teh lolz

Hang on..

I'd like to make a few points in defence of SL...

1) It's not a game, it's an environment for building/scripting and designing and performing for a worldwide audience, which also happens to allow some residents to make money and also, yes, socialise/chat.

2) Socialising in SL is no different to having a chat via IRC, or a yahoo chat room, and I'll assume, that given that most of us have a background in IT, we've all done one or the other, or even both, at some point in our lifetimes.

3) Yes, some people actually do use it to socialise in virtual sense, rather than in their real life, because some people have a disability that stops them from having a "life" in the real world. You'd be surprised how much power they can regain from having the freedom and control that they don't have in their real lives.

3) er, yeah, I can't really think of anything else, but there is more to it than just sad people having cybersex. Ignorance