jamezpolley.com

Oh dear.

I’ve just been busy updating the site (more on that later) with the idiot box on in the background.

A reporter on Channel 9 just reported that the Australian Army’s recruiting figures were “Bad, and getting badder”

Oh. dear.

It wasn’t live either, it was pre-recorded.

Scoble said it, James Kew called me on it.. and it’s true.

The entry I was responding to starts with “Steve Rubel has yet another way you can fire Microsoft.” I missed the entire rest of that paragraph until “Or, except if you play video games.”, concatenated those, and responded to that.

Even after Scoble’s capslock key got stuck in his comment here, I still didn’t understand what I’d done. By this point I’d actually read Steve’s article (I read his blog too), as well as having a quick look at the eplatform site – but I still didn’t get it!

That’s some a-grade stupidity.

Rotten strawberry, indeed.

Robery, I’m sorry.

Just came across some more news.. well no, rumours – I won’t call it news until I’ve verified it, which I haven’t – regarding MS Vista.

First though, the most amusing part of this page:

And Steve Gibson, president of PC consulting firm Gibson Research Corporation, confirmed our findings”).

First, we don’t start sentences with conjunctions! Even I, with my spotty Queensland public school education, know that..

Secondly, the name Steve Gibson rang bells. Took a while to remember why though. Eventually it came to me – he was the nutter who predicted that the release of WinXP would cause the death of the internet.

I had a good chuckle remembering this.. and an even bigger chuckle when I found that although he’s not updated it since 2001, his doom-and-gloom zombie page is still up and still making the same outlandish claims…

However, on to my main point about this article.

According to the article, and the article on CNet it cites as a source:

The big ideas? Background defragmentation

There’s some discussion on the page about whether this will, or won’t, actually make much of a difference for users.

Regardless, it’s amusing to note that Apple have had this feature as standard since Panther was released on October 24th, 2003. There’s some nitty-gritty on what Panther does, and doesn’t, do at kernelthread.com

The below was originally a reply to a comment from Scoble to one of my earlier posts; however, it’s something that’s been irking me in a more general way for a while, so I’m reposting here.

The more typical context in which I come across this kind of thinking is when people ask “Do you understand what I’m saying?”. Well – perhaps. I can’t actually know whether or not I understand what you’re saying. I can know of what you’re saying seems to make sense to me – but I can’t know whether or not my understanding of what you’ve said corresponds with what you’ve said.

Much more useful would be for the communicator to ask the communicatee a question – “So, based on what I’ve just told you, if you encountered what would you do?”. This has two benefits: the communicatee is forced to apply their new knowledge, thus helping them to remember it. Also, the communicator is able to gauge from the communicatee’s response how well the message has been communicated, and if it hasn’t, what needs to be adjusted…

Saying “Do you understand what I’m saying” is just a cop-out, as is what Scoble wrote:

(here commenceth my reproduced comment)

READ WHAT I WRITE, not what you think I write

Sorry Robert, that’s not possible. I exist outside of your head; I don’t have any way of knowing exactly what you intended to say. All I can do is interpret the things that you did say, based on what I know of the world and the language we’re using to communicate.

That said, I’m always willing to admit that my interpretation of what you said was wrong and revise my opinions based on more information from you…

Right now though I’m not sure which of the many things I mentioned above is wrong though, let alone what you actually intended to say.

At a guess, I’m guessing you’re talking about your response to Steve Rubel’s post about eplatform?

But – I didn’t mention the thick vs. thin clients issue at all – I was talking about one of your other comments that you made just after the link – so that can’t be it.

Sorry, I’m really not sure which bit you think I’ve misunderstood – so I have no idea at all what I’m meant to understand by it

Yet again, scoble opens his mouth and nothing much falls out.

It’s almost amusing. Just over a week ago, Scoble was saying:

The past week taught me a lot about how important it is to always keep respect for the truth.

The one difference between me and the other guy, though, is that when the facts show that I’m wrong I’m willing to admit such and correct the post

Now he’s repeating the oft-circulated rumour that if you want to play games, you need a windows machine. This is galling on it’s own – but even more so when even Microsoft release games for the mac!

Oh well, he’s been called on this one. I’m sure he’ll now correct his post, now that he knows he’s wrong.

While we’re on the topic of scoble, he’s also happy that with Vista he can happily surf the web and not have to worry about spyware. I’m pleased for him – that’s something I’ve enjoyed ever since I first switched away from Windows in 2000.

He’s also wrongly blaming his son’s iPod for his woes with DRM. Earth to Scoble, earth to Scoble – that’s not a feature of the iPod, that’a a feature of DRM. I suggest you get used to it – MS is embracing drm that will prevent your DVDs being played in full-quality unless your monitor is “licenced” to view that DVD.

Scoble, of course, loves pointing at anyone who makes a comment that is in the least negative about any competitors product. Scoble loves doing this even more than ID/creationism proponents love to misquote anyone who expresses doubt about one particular suggested evolutionary mechanism. Scoble thus links to this as “The Tao of Mac blog is asking if OS X is becoming crufty.”. It’s a good question, actually, and I think most mac zealots will agree that the answer is yes.

It’s not a question anyone is asking about Windows though – it became clear a decade ago with the launch of Windows95 that windows was, in fact, hopelessly crufty.

Scoble also links to this response from the MSN Virtual Earth team talking about some of the lessons they learned after the release of VE:

International Coverage Most functionality in this Beta release of Virtual Earth, including the map coverage, is for the United States only. Yes, we could have released the beta as Virtual USA, and renamed it in the near future when we begin rolling out coverage in more countries, but getting products renamed here at Microsoft once they are public is a little tricky; the brand police would be on us like a starved pit bull and no one wants that.

I don’t entirely buy this: Google already has high definition coverage for large parts of the world – I still think it would make sense for them to have waited until they had a product that was at least remotely comparable before release… but at least their addressing their critics.

(I’ll note that the mean reason I think of it as Virtual USA has nothing to do with the level of coverage – it’s the fact that their search doesn’t recognise any cities outside the US).

Enough rambling for today..

Today’s wackiness bought to you be the letters D and E and many steins of bier.

(strangely – I knew it was a german project just from the way the english words were used. It’s a bit scary when you can identify nationality based on grammar…)

There’s a shuttle landing tonight..

If all goes well, the shuttle should be landing at Cape Canaveral sometime shortly after 6pm tonight, AEST.

Just as an even more random bit of trivia, Cape Canaveral is quite close to Melbourne, Florida, which is itself almost due east of Sydney, Florida.

If you pay attention to the URLs above, you’ll note that I had to search for “Sydney, Florida” and “Melbourne, Florida” – searching for just “Sydney” or “Melbourne” unadorned finds the more famous cities of the same name in Australia. If this is too difficult for you, don’t dispair – Microsoft have decided that none of the world except the United States of America matter, so just a search for Sydney or Melbourne will work fine on MSN Virtual Earth. You can find the landing strip for the shuttle there as well, but in glorious monochrome only.

More seriously, this Saturday marks one year since the federal government voted in legislation prohibiting marriage between any other than a man and a woman. I’m carefully avoiding using any adjectives at this point, as anything I can say is going to be inflammatory..

To celebrate this re-affirming of our status as second-class citizens, several groups including Australian Marriage Equality and Community Action Against Homophobia have organised a rally for Saturday. The rally starts around 13:00 at Taylor Square with a welcome from Portia Turbo (there was something I was meant to tell her, I’m sure…), followed by some short speeches from speakers such as Senator Kerry Nettle and Professor Kerryn Phelps. Around 1:30 the rally will march down Oxford St to Hyde Park, where there will be more speeches from Tanya Plibisek MHR and Clover Moore M.P, amongst others. The rally will conclude around 2:30pm.

(as an aside: if you’re affiliated with any of these groups, and you’re looking for web/mail/etc hosting, let me know. I’m in the middle of migrating to a new server which has stupid amounts of spare capacity, and I can’t think of many better causes to donate some of it to…)

Recently I updated my gaydar profile to include the following:

Addendum: if you describe yourself in your profile, anywhere, as “cute”,

“good-looking”, “handsome”, anything of that ilk, don`t bother. If you

really were, you wouldn`t have to point it out.

Additonal addendum: Also, you should be more than functionally literate

in at least English – skills in other languages are a bonus. If you can`t

spell and don`t know the difference between a pronoun and a noun – well,

there are courses that can help you, but I don`t teach them.

Predicatably, the very next message I received – within 24 hours – read simply “Hi ”, and was from someone who described himself as fitting “into the cute category”.

I thought these addenda were borderline bitchy/rude, but left them in – my profile isn’t there to help me pick up, so I don’t care how many people I scare away.

However, I’ve been receiving a whole slew of messages since telling me that I “Sound like a nice guy” – which I don’t understand at all.

Even more bizarrely, just a few days ago I unticked the “email/chat” and “friendship” boxes in the “What I’m looking for” section. Overnight, I got no less than *three* messages from people who (a) said that I sould like a nice guy, (b) *and* were looking for “email/chat”!

Unrelatedly, but just as frustratingly, I’ve been unable to check my voicemail for nigh on two weeks. I just now, finally, by pulling my weight with people I know working in the right places, managed to get someone to fix my voicemail. I’ve been able to log in, I’ve checked the messages – and found that one of the messages was from the person who fixed my voicemail – he’d called me on thursday and asked him to call him back!