< Content&Services > - Part 4

During the 7th hour of a 10 hour flight to Miami, Florida, the fasten seatbelt sign had been turned on, shining brightly in the ancient, dark, cramped, yet cosy, BA economy class of a Boeing 747. My sister and I are fighting passively over the limited foot and armrest space, staring at a screen no more than 4.5" big, writing this post after having watched one film, 2 TV shows, a documentary on renewable energy and sped through 4 chapters of "Great Expectations". Try doing all that in 7 hours! (Actually, It is quite easy...).

So, as one expects, we have an airplane post here, as most of the other posts in this series are (parts 1, 2 and 3). For those of you who do no know, this series consists of several rants about how content and service providers are, generally, evil twits, idiots and narrow-minded. To sum up in one word: money grabbing.

Oh look, a kid who has been kicking my chair for the past 7 hours has thrown up. Lovely. Time to get up and let the pros deal with it. Oh wait, I cannot get up, the fasten seatbelt sign is on; well then screw this, I am getting up anyway.

The Next Swipe

A Friday evening. A great, yet interesting week behind me, several challenges ahead of me, but ignoring all that, I am sitting on a plane destined for Vienna so I can attend a family gathering.

The regular readers will know what that means. Yes, through the sole fact that I am sitting on a plane in seat 9A, we have an airplane post here! However, this post, unlike all the others, will actually be positive and make good points about the future of the mobile system, rather than rant about problems! Yeh, sounds good, doesn't it? Well, it sounds good to me, and I hope it does for you to.

Just a quick update on things: the Wordpress migration will happen shortly after Christmas, once I get my hosting sorted out. I also may find it harder to post regularly for a few weeks, as I, like I said, have many challenges ahead, including the Toyota technology challenge and my bronze Duke of Edinburgh Award! The next few weeks are going to be very interesting...

Moving on to the topic at hand, my great vision! As I have said before, I like Windows Phone 7 (WP7). "Shock, horror, how could he!". It has a nice and intuitive UI along with a promising partnership with the largest mobile manufacturer worldwide, Nokia. Now, don't get me wrong, there is a reason why I said promising. WP7 has the obvious disadvantage of being a new platform, late into the game, so there are clearly not going to be any decent apps on it for a while. It's not going to take over the mobile phone market any time soon and it certainly will not be the first platform people think about when they are contemplating on which smartphone to buy. What I like specifically about the system is the improvement.

The Code of Blogging

For me to be writing a post on a Thursday evening is the strangest thing that has happened to me in a while, mostly because tonight is possibly the only night since the start of the new school year where I have no homework. This, however, is a special post, being a rare tangential post, of which I only have 2 currently, but before we get into the post, I have an update.

After careful deliberation, I have finally decided that I will migrate my blog to Wordpress and manage my own hosting. The biggest, and possibly most important reason is that I am able to manage the nitty-gritty details of the blog without using incomprehensible HTML editors. There are however, a few points I would like to make about Tubmblr. Firstly, I see now that it is not a blogging service, but a micro-blogging service, which is all about small and frequent posts. Although that might prove useful, the available time I have is nowhere near enough to do such a thing. Secondly, Tumblr is idiot proof. Yes, that is a good thing, for some people. For me, however, I like a challenge, something to aim for, something that makes me think, but being not outrageously improbable to accomplish, like coding the next great operating system in 24 hours, although some may be able to do so.

That is exactly what this post is going to look at and attempt to explain, from my perspective, the story of the code of blogging.

Sorry for the Mess!

I truly am.

The migration has been called off, again, for the time being.

Sitting in my bed at 10pm, I have a lot to worry about, a piece of coursework, some long overdue homework and, possibly most prominently, the many, many, suggestions I got for my new blogging service.

They all agree Blogger sucks, except one.

Two say Tumblr is great.

And the rest, including the highly persuasive Henry Dyer, shout (and occasionally threaten me[!]) with Wordpress.

So, the migration has been called off until I can clear my head about what to do. I am that temperamental with my decisions: i can never make my mind up! I shall most likely have decided by this weekend, with a migration before or on Christmas, depending whether I get hosting.

Just to be clear, we are DEFIANTLY moving away from blogger. There is no question about it. It was nice, but slightly annoying!

Wordpress or Tumblr: that is the question. Do I want 404 error customisation or free and idiot proof? Do I want bother managing hosting or just let the pros do it? Which one is the more sustainable service?

We shall see my friends, we shall see...

Pickture This: On A Venture

It’s a Friday evening, and as most often is the case, I am at home, working on a post, carefully crafting the metaphors, similes, paradoxes and forming a good, balanced argument about the forthcoming topic.

“Sorry?” I imagine you are saying. “A balanced argument?”.

The truth is that I have just come out of an intense English lesson, so my mind is full of useless poetry and non-fiction analytical skills, for which I shall have very little use for later in life. My writing is ok, right?

Moving swiftly on from what I imagine my parents are going to talk and painstakingly lay out why poetry analysis is useful to me about after reading this, I would like to introduce a new topic on this hallowed blog (bit of an overkill there? Thought so).

I have decided to follow, advise (where advice is requested) and cover the ventures the many pupils do at my school. Before you click away from this, please note this. The kids at my school are a bunch of “interesting ones”. May I present you with Henry Dyer, who calls himself speshul. He, as well as many others, like to make stuff: I make articles, others build CNC machines and Henry makes the Crystal Palace exchange and the school servers overheat with the constant OnLive streaming. See, technically we are all speshul. To define “ventures”, I am going to say it is anything that any pupil or member of staff makes and invests effort into, like the aforementioned CNC machine or the following, all with close collaboration and permission.

< Content&Services > - Part 3

Oh, why don't you look at that, it's another aviationally written post, in the words of Henry Dyer, written, as usual, on the way to London on a cramped, full to the brim airbus A320. And lookie here, why yes, it's yet another title longing for a good old rant. I have written two similarly titled posts before, part 1 and part 2. Compared to what I shall discuss [yes, we all know my definition of discuss] in this post, those were merely trivial and mundane topics.

Have I peaked your interest yet? No? How about if I told you that the Internet as we know it could possibly come to an end depending on the decisions of a few people, bent on helping industries and not consumers? No? Really? Well, then you are stubborn person [coming from me, that's rich], enjoy your little encapsulated bubble that us your life.

You've Got a Friend In Me

Image from TechCrunch

Before I begin, I would like to tell all those reading on RSS feeds or receiving this post by email that this post will be very media rich, and so I would recommend that all the aforementioned people read this on the actual blog site (thecompblog.com,  for all those who don't know) to see all the embedded videos, links and photos. To add to that, this is not a post to be read in haste just before bed, or while half conscious at school or work. Take time with this post, watch the videos and read the linked articles to fully enjoy it! Make sure you CTRL + click (PC) or CMD + click (mac) to open the links in new tabs.

I had previously written a post detailing my deepest sympathy for Steve Jobs. I kept it simple, not listing everything that was going through my head as, firstly, I did not know how to place them in and secondly, because I knew that is not what Steve would have liked, I imagine.

But this is a post on everything else. Over the past 2 weeks, I have been inundated with articles about Steve Jobs. This was not a bad thing, to be clear! It was very interesting to see the outpour of strong feelings for this man, and as I have said before, it is still hard for me to fathom the loss. This is a curation of articles, photos and videos that I have found recently, which state exactly what kind of man I believe Steve was.

I would like to start with Steve's 30th birthday present from Apple: a video containing a multitude of things, from apple adverts to clips of Steve's keynotes, played with Bob Dylan's "My Back Pages". It starts off with the quote:

To Steven Jobs on his thirtieth birthday.

For the first thirty years of your life, you make your habits.

For the last thirty years, your habits make you. 

Tragically, Steve never lived to see out the next thirty years. He had died at 56.

Yes. Technically, it will.

Oh look, what do we have here? Yes, it's another airplane post with yet another ambiguous title providing no help whatsoever on the content and/or meaning of this post, but as I like to say, all in good spirit. So let's get crack'n!

Before I continue, let me update you on the happenings of me. iOS 5. Great, but there is a much more interesting story. You know about MobileMe, right? The failed syncing service from Apple that I actually kinda liked... But anyway, Apple totally screwed up the transition to iCloud. What I wanted was one Apple ID for everything, iCloud, iTunes, AppStore, everything, but Apple, being stubborn, made me either use my useless MobileMe ID or work something out on my own (as Apple do not allow the merging of multiple IDs, which the world desperately needs!). So, I was up until about 12pm sorting out this catastrophe! To add to the stress, my iPhone and iPad were refusing to update, as Apple’s servers rejected the verification! Very "it just works", Apple, it was one of the easiest transitions ever!

Now onto the bulk of this post. Back in the day, year 7 to be precise, I had a great history teacher. I could never understand her instructions, but that was because I hardly listened as history was not an interesting subject for me, but regardless, she was one of the best teachers I ever had. During one lesson, we were studying the industrial revolution, where the advancement in technology was unprecedented; she said something that really stuck with me:

"we are also living in a revolution, the technological revolution, but you don't realize it, just like the people during the industrial revolution. You don't wake up and think 'oh, another day in the technological revolution' right?".

Highs of Lows and Lows of Highs.

Waking up at 6:40 in the morning before one of the worst Thursdays at school in the year is never a nice experience. As usual, I always check my Twitter feed on my iPhone for the most recent updates around the world until the snooze forces me to wake up to the same routine we all complete every day, but this time, this time was different. Besides being a special Thursday at school, the one we all resent, something on my Twitter feed took me by surprise.

TechCrunch TechCrunch 

Steve Jobs Has Passed Away tcrn.ch/pc2zGK by @parislemon

At first, I immediately thought what the date was. October 6th. Ok, so there are no joking traditions on October 6th, right? Then I thought that this was some sick twisted joke some hackers managed to post on TechCrunch, until I realized that it was even on the apple website.

Follow the Crazy Ones

Yes, it's finally time again for a 1000 word post on a topic where the title, being without a doubt ambiguous, can give you no help on the actual content. All shall be explained later, but for now, let's update you on my doings and happenings.

School.

And there we have it: an update on my doings and happenings. No, that's just a very large proportion of them. I actually got hooked on this Shrine of Apple website, listing every single apple product ever made. During my time browsing their limited, but ever expanding, catalogue, I thought about how much this stuff actually costs. I went onto eBay, and before I knew it, I had bought an Apple II, a Macintosh plus and a Newton MessagePad 110! They are really, really, really awesome! I know, I know, only a huge geek would get excited about legacy gear, but there is something about them that I enjoy. It is possibly because I am fascinated about how I cannot even fit a small JPEG onto a floppy disk, the fact that I am astounded how far technology has come, or just maybe because I am flabbergasted what people thought was the best thing ever made.

To Fly. To Serve.

A few days ago, I came across a UK television advertising premier, namely, the new British Airways "To Fly. To Serve." campaign. Now, BA used to be a great airline, no question, but may I direct you to the use of the word "was".

Just in case you missed it: WAS

Nowadays, BA is, in my very strong opinion, one of the most incompetent, inefficient, incapable airlines flying. The whole thing started with Terminal 5 at Heathrow, with lost baggage and crappy computer systems that was unable to track my baggage for a week! After that incident, the whole thing went downhill: have you recently flown on BA? I few it to Geneva and let me tell you, a Boeing 737, while an old model, does not have crumbling seats with less than a few centimeters (or inches, for those still stuck on the imperial system) of leg room.

Negatives aside, BA sure do know how to spend thousands on an advertisement,, granted a very good one, that will do very little to the quality of the airline and planes. Spend the money on actually paying your staff!

The Following Fortnight: Still Nothing

Yes, yes. I know you all want a new post filled with many unbelievably strong opinions, as custom with TheCompBlog, but it becomes very hard to write a 1000 word post when you have brand new teachers who give you an unholy amount of homework! Imagine sitting down from 5:30 to 8:30 (with dinner) doing homework due in the next day, non stop. Homework, homework, and guess what? MORE DAMN HOMEWORK! 

Every. Single. Day.

So, I ask of my readers to, as I always ask of them, to check out some of the older posts. Look at the patent disputes, Microsoft rants, Sony rants and all other posts with the label "opinions" (that guarantees a typical rant post).

Now, to all those in the education industry out there. What the hell is wrong with you? Are you trying to destroy my childhood? I have school until 4:15pm, then I get set two and a half hours of homework? (By the way, the new series of Two and a Half Men has started!) May I divert your attention to Austria, France, Germany and every single european country. When does school end for them? 2:30pm. 

Just to reiterate: 2:30pm, with 1 hour of homework max. 

How do I know this? Well, I have family in Austria and I know for a fact that my cousins are not sitting at a desk until 8:30pm (or 20:30 over there) doing homework. What happened to learning for the sake of learning and not the exam? Please, cut the amount of homework so we can at least have more than half an hour of free time, and you will see, productivity will go through the roof!

Moving on, I know I have a loyal user base worldwide, who avidly read and ponder, but, since I like seeing big numbers, can you spread the word a bit? My efforts have been fruitless! Also, to my loyal readers, give me a bit of feedback! Comment, tweet, email, whatever, just do not be afraid! Go ahed, start an argument, lets see who wins! doing a bit of sharing on top of that might be a good idea also.

One further matter. Since I am now doing a compulsory philosophy course instead of an actually useful ICT one, I am finding it slightly harder to gather ideas for then next post. Please, please, please give me any suggestions and ideas. I promise that every single one will be looked at and considered, I just need some ideas. Feel free to go crazy!

So, until next time.

Research in Rusty Motion

An edited version of this post, a joint effort of Henry Dyer and Nicolas Weninger, might hopefully make its way into my school student magazine.

Now, it is no unknown fact that many people, mostly students, in the UK have Blackberrys. This is possibly due to their “superior” email client, their “fantastic” Internet browser, their “wonderful” plastic keyboards with tiny keys, their “sturdy” design of plastic, or possibly, and we may be clutching at straws here, possibly, it is Blackberry Messenger. Alternatively we’ve gone mad (or in Henry’s case, madder...)

Before we go into a vaguely typical debunking (especially for Nic) of all the points above, plus a few more, lets diverge into more positives of RIM, Research in Motion, the makers of the Blackberry phone, as well as some other things. like thin air (check the product list of RIM. Yep. Blackberrys And crap (the Playbook. More about that later).

WHAT? A positive! Yes indeed, for the first time in Nic’s writing history, he is listing all the positives of a company he resents.

A New Template - Blog - Adjustment - Tag-Line?

After adding a few changes to the blog and a desperate attempt at changing the template to bring it in to line with the modern styles of Fecund Musings and Jack Usher, I realised I don't like change! Yes, this is a bad habit of mine, but changing the whole template seemed, and turned out to be, a challenging feat, especially with all me minor HTML tweaks, like adding the AddThis button and the Facebook Comments box. It works when you are just starting out, but migrating after a full years worth of tweaks and posts is near to impossible; however, not quite. Henry Dyer migrated to Wordpress, but as I said, I don't like change. Henry can code, I cannot, and no matter how hard I try, I just end up playing around with a the simplest bits of Javascript and Liner Basic.

So, I ended up deciding to stick with Blogger and use the default templates. Wordpress was too unintuitive for me, a not coder, and even though Blogger is unintuitive, I have learned to play around a bit with the HTML, evident with the title in the centre, and just enjoy the experience of blogging for the world, whatever your world may be!

Just as a question to my readers, do you like the "Expect Everything" tag-line, because I have come up with something more original than that, but you will never know what it is unless you want me to change it.

Please, fill out the feedback form and tell me what you want to see. The Fecund Muser did it, and I headed his advice almost immediately by removing two very stupid questions that had no point to their existence whatsoever and removing those wind turbines from the background, which I liked, but now I like the new one even more.

See, change is good. I just don't like it.

< Content&Services > - Part 2

You are currently reading another aviationally written post, but this time, I am sitting on an Austrian Airlines plane, not BMI! Wow! Clear skies, a sleeping father, an annoying man with a pillow and the prospect of starting my GCSE course in a week’s time, are a few things going through my mind. To be honest, I had not planned to write a part two of the previous post, and I don't want to really waste time explaining the whole HTML tag title thing, so just read the original post, where all is revealed.

The last post of this topic concentrated mainly on mobile phone networks and such. Today, I want to elaborate on that a bit, plus bring in another industry, namely, TV and film.

Let's start off with an issue dear to our heart and not in anyway related to Apple, which the next part will be. I live in the UK, but from the stories and articles I read, I too have developed a hatred for AT&T, an American mobile carrier. There are several reasons why I hate them, including the fact that their customer service is apparently complete dog-excrements and their coverage is terrible for what they expect you to pay, but the real thing that ticked me off was their recent "streamlining" of their texting plans.

Copyright, Infringement and Stupidity: Update 9

Yay! Were back to this old topic again!

Previously, back in the early days when Nic’s CompBlog still existed, I had posted a series with this title, relating to copyright; however, I decided to expand the definition of that title to not only include petty copyright cases, but also big boy patents, which opened me up to write a whole lot on very juicy subjects.

Patents, patents, patents.

Recently, especially over this summer, things have been heating up in the patent world, starting with the Nortel Patent auction. For those of you who are either tech illiterate, don’t like the news or just don’t care about tech (even though you are reading this tech orientated blog…), let me indulge you in the joys of patents.

Nortel have a big patent portfolio of about 6,000. There was an auction for them, as I am sure the observant readers will have picked up by now. Google started off, placing a $900m bid. Now, that’s pretty high for a first bid, actually, that’s pretty high, period. The competitors (Apple, RIM, Microsoft, Sony, etc.), who all hate the success of android, saw that Google was serious. As Google is a new company, they don’t own that many patents when compared to Apple and Microsoft. Patents are vital to defend products, as I will show later, so it was vital for Google to get these patents, especially as they include 4G LTE technologies.

So, after a while, Apple joined up with some other minor companies and the bidding was reaching ridiculously high numbers, like $2b ridiculous. Come to think of it, the numbers were ridiculous, regardless of the letter preceding them! Google were starting to bet $πb ($3.141b) and other mathematical constants! This was either a genius move or a death sentence. They were confusing people as to why they were bidding these numbers, which might have played to their advantage, but at the same time, they were also portraying themselves as not caring. It was then when things really got interesting.

Apple & Co. started teaming up with RIM (the blackberry makers), Sony and Microsoft.

What? Did you just say Apple and Microsoft?

Yes, indeed I did.

The Dell Experience

I am currently sitting on a very turbulent BMI flight to Vienna, as usual, for the penultimate leg of my summer holidays. As I am flying unaccompanied, I get to cut the lines, board first and get general priority over everyone else! Unfortunately, the airline screwed up the seating plan, so a family of 4, who just HAD to sit together, also booked my seat. Being a kind of nice adolescent, I moved willingly, only to find that wherever I sat, people were telling me to leave, so I am now grumpy and as a result, you are going to get a grumpy post!

This post is about Dell, as I am sure you can tell by the title. I was inspired to write this by a recent follower of my twitter account, namely, @DellCares! I had been tweeting about Dell and adding my opinion, in the customary way. As a result, they tweeted this:

DellCares DellCares 

@ 

@nicolasweninger Regret any trouble. Pls follow/DM service tag, issue specifics. Will look into any unresolved issue you may have. Thanks.MA

Microsoft, Again - Part III

Welcome to the last post in this 3 part series. Some of you may already know I loath Microsoft to the core, for a few distinct reasons found in a previous post. For those interested in the other parts in this series, they are found here and here.

Now we have a very formal introduction over, unusual for these types of posts, let me introduce to you the subject of this post: Steve Ballmer. Many know him as the current CEO of Microsoft, others know him as a salesperson, I know him as a twat who has no damn clue.

Don’t believe me? Look at this video.

HA! What an ignorant fool! Look where Windows Phone (WP) is now compared to iPhone! The lowest of the low, behind RIM (who are not doing too well either)! At the iPhone launch, every tech company and blog were complaining that it did not have a physical keyboard, including this excuse for a CEO! Most popular android phones don't have keyboards, that being the reason why they are so popular! Those crappy, plastic keyboards were, and are, a pain to use, and one can type much faster on the iPhone keyboard. What about the $500 argument? Well, how much do the current WP7 phones cost? You guessed it! $500. Let us not forget how great WP 6.3 was: I myself had the pleasure of owning one (notice extreme use of irony).

Microsoft, Again - Part II

The last post was written on a BMI flight from Vienna. Now, at 10AM on the following day, I am sitting on an old, smelly BA Boeing 737 (which my uncle flies for Austrian Airlines) on route to Geneva. I am tired, grumpy and have my whiny sister sitting next to me, reading Michael McIntyre's autobiography (apparently very funny, noticed through her annoyingly loud giggles), with her elbow taking up the whole damn armrest.

Moving swiftly on, this post will be based on Windows 8, Microsoft's recently previewed operating system. Now, this is interesting, as they are attempting to merge the PC with the tablet into one system. Just take a look at this video.

Feed Me Feedback

As you may know, There has been a recent change to the pages on the top of this blog. The new Partnership Program allows you to fill out a form and send it to me to consider you as a possible partner. The thing I want you, the reader to do, is go to the top of the blog and click on "Contact Us" and on that page, you will see a feedback form link. On that form, you will be able to tell me what your opinion is on the blog. Its good for me to see what you think, and not just what I think!

So, go ahed! Be as brutal as you want!

Microsoft, Again - Part I

Welcome to another aviationally-written post, as Henry Dyer describes it, filled with many subordinate clauses and rhetorical questions! If you read my past few Microsoft posts (here and here), you will know that I dislike Microsoft for a variety of different reasons, but I also have praise for them when it comes to the Xbox and Windows Phone 7 (although it never really, and will never really, catch on). There have been a few interesting developments recently, Windows 8, Microsoft+Android and my recent realization that Steve Ballmer, current CEO of Microsoft, does not understand crap.

So, without further ado, let us begin this 3 part series on Microsoft that I hope you find entertaining and interesting. The first thing I want to talk about is Microsoft+Android. A recent TechCrunch article was talking about Android and Microsoft, as you can imagine, but how, you may be asking, does Google Android (a phone OS) relate to Microsoft? Turns out, Microsoft earns more money annually from Android than their own WP7 (Windows Phone 7) software! How is that even possible?

< Content&Services >

Yes, there is a reason that the title is written as a HTML tag (although its not a real on) to be explained later in this post all about, you guessed it, content and services. The main point in this post, based on a wide topic, will be the providers of the content and services in question: how they all hold us at ransom, all screw us in payment, all ridiculously priced and are all evil, with a few exceptions. By now, you will know that this post will be yet another fully fledged rant, and with good reason: my family are tech illiterate and what is understood as technical common sense, they lack, to the extent that my grandmother does not understand the concept of highlighting. So, as you may imagine, I have my work cut out with them, meaning I have a lot of stuff to vent.

So, with another introduction done with, lets progress to the good stuff.

Telecommunications.

By that, I mean all phone based stuff. Mobiles, landlines, mobile Internet and whatever else one can do with the “micro-cancer” air waves [oh damn, I am going to pay for that comment]. As said previously, mobile operators, and landline operators, screw us (not in that sense!). They make you pay for services you do not use, they over charge you and changing providers is not exactly easy! A mobile telephone is a necessity today, and the operators know it, so they can charge ridiculous amounts for the service, PLUS charging us loads for going over our allocated internet usage, when it should be unlimited. Here in the UK, they have capped our service as their lines are overcrowded! THAT’S NOT MY DAMN PROBLEM! I deserve unlimited for the price I pay; stop spending my cash on mansions and instead ramp up the network! Oh, and lets not forget those lovely roaming charges. Don’t we all just love roaming charges? I think its only fair that the operators can charge us hundreds to use our phone outside our home country. Very, very, VERY fair. £10.13 for 1MB of data in Europe, my God what a bargain (notice unbelievably strong use of irony)! We are being held at the mercy of the operators = a monopoly.

The Porters

After a historical Friday and an ordinary Sunday, I have finally gotten down to writing a post. You might be asking, why was Friday historic? Well, the Obama Administration have cut NASAs funding, so they have to cancel the Space Shuttle program, as detailed in my “The Ongoing Pinnacle of Human Achievement” post. As you may know, I am highly pissed over this (sounding like a pompous twat!), as the Space Shuttle was very useful for ferrying objects up and down from the ISS, Mir station and other places in low Earth orbit. Friday was the final launch of a Space Shuttle, this specific one being Atlantis. It will bring vital supplies to the ISS (The Raffaello multi-purpose logistics module) so it can go on for a year, following the discontinuation of the Space Shuttle. When Atlantis lands at Edwards Air force Base on the 20/1 of July, it will have signed off to a 30 year long program that has greatly helped our everyday lives in ways we do not even think about. These spacecraft were designed for 300 flights; they have done a maximum of 40 so far. Kind of a shame.

Anyway, now we have that moment of reflection and feeling sorry for the ignorant cuts to the space program, let me explain the title of this post. The porters are the guys who carry things around a building, be it mail, information, or a package, right? The rant above links in with the title, and the next bit, even more.

So, while I was pondering over which post to write from my long list of ideas (yes, I know I promised a Microsoft one, but I need a better internet connection for that one; lots of embedding to do) I saw a seemingly boring and insignificant post title. As you may have gathered, this post is that seemingly boring and insignificant post. Its about ports.

How can I possibly make a post about computer connections interesting? Well, ladies and gentlemen, watch me [hopefully] succeed in doing the impossible: I shall educate you on USB, FireWire and Thunderbolt, a HIGHLY mundane and useless topic, in an interesting and captivating way. Want to know how I will do it? Through the world-famous (yes, even in South Korea) style of ranting that TheCompBlog is based on!

A Splurge of Thoughts

On a BMI flight destined for Vienna, I am writing on my iPad while listening to old greats such as the Beatles and Johnny Cash. Looking through my notes app, I find many topics, some old, some new, that I would like to write about. There I find 3 topics I would like to write about, however, there is no way I can write 800 words on a mundane topic such as iTunes Ping or the Microsoft acquisition of Skype, so I will talk about all of them in the style of my ancient "3 More Thoughts" post. Let us start with Ping.

Back in September 2010, Apple released iTunes 10. A new logo, new music browsing services and many other UI fixes, but they made a huge deal about their new music social network, called Ping. Ok, so, you might think that apple would have social sorted by now, but they have not. Look at Facebook, they rule at social, but they are inept at anything else. Now look at apple, they can do everything, but not social, right? Ping was a doomed concept from the start. Remember MySpace? Yep, that small little deflated service sitting in the corner of cyberspace, where nobody ever dares to venture. Well, they tried this exact thing. They realized that they were doing terribly compared to Facebook, so they changed the meaning of their social network to be based around music. This failed, again, and now they have been bought out for a measly $30 million, when they were once worth much, much more.

The concept of music + networking never, and will never, work, for the simple reason that people, like me, do not want others seeing that they listen to something embarrassing. Take an example; if one of my friends started listening to Rihanna, I would laugh at them, as I do not like Rihanna. It's just personal taste, but come on, how does Rihanna compare to the Beatles?

See? Now I have embarrassed myself as well as the person listening to Rihanna.

A Gameplay Update

After 2 weeks and 4 projects, I am finally able to write a post again. As a quick update ['upgrade' get it?] to my many school projects, my water rockets both failed, we came second to a different group in biology by 2 points, were not able to fully present our hard work in History and did not receive our prize for doing well in the geography project. So, all in all, a very good end to my first year in my new school! On a lighter note, I got a terrible report for Latin, saying that I ended the year on a disappointing note, did not do well in class at all and put the least amount of effort into my work as is humanly possible (or so was the impression). Now, you might be thinking, "how on earth is this on a lighter note?". Well, that is exactly what I wanted from the report! If you follow me on twitter, you will have seen that I have burned my Latin text books in my backyard! So now you know that I hate Latin and found every lesson of it excruciatingly painful and boring, let me justify.

CAN SOMEONE PLEASE GIVE ME A VALID REASON TO THE POINT OF LATIN? I have been searching for an answer for the past 2 years and have come up with nothing valid. Please do not give me "It helps when learning European languages". Ok, if I want to learn French, I will go and learn French, not Latin and then French. I kindly invite you to send me an email or to leave a comment regarding this and I will counter your argument with astoundingly stubborn logic. Have a go arguing against my view on #pointlesslatin!

Good, now my rant has been taken care of, lets move on to the point of this post, the 'gameplay' bit.

If you read my previous 'The Ongoing Pinnacle of Human Achievement' post, you will know that I have recently been asked by my sister to set up our old PS2 to play Singstar with her. Those songs were basically the songs of my childhood, lost for years in the back of my mind. This evoked my interest in what other games we might still have in our house. I started looking around the house, in the attic (well, more our top floor), in the TV room and even in the most obscure draws I had never seen beforehand. After about 2 hours of looking, my results were astounding.

A Google State of Affairs

In light of recent announcements and blog posts from TechCrunch and other online resources of mine, I thought I should talk about the current state of affairs at Google (or at least, my perspective). As this is partly included in the series of posts on old tech, introduced in the preceding post, lets make sure we know where we are coming from (to quote a famous song) and to give my possibly technologically inferior readers a good starting point for this post.

For all those oldies out there, remember Alta Vista? That old, crappy, insignificant search engine? Well, that was once everyones port of call when it came to internet search! Google Swiftly, and without a trace, murdered it and took over, after its launch in 1998. The company expanded into more areas and is now, as you should now know, developing a phone OS called Android, which I personally believe is flawed from the ground up, to be rationalised later.

Now thats out the way, lets start on the interesting stuff. Google have ventured into the smartphone business, but they have also invested in many other technologies, largely web based, such as Gmail, Chromium projects, Docs, Calendar and most importantly, computer operating systems. The soon to be released "Chrome Books" are running the latest version of Chromium OS. This is largely based on the fact that everything is online, and one only needs a browser. For the most part on netbooks, this is true: how many of you store your documents, or calendars, or contacts, or mail, and the list goes on, online, "in the cloud" in some form or another? Many people already do this, like me, so the idea is not all that bad.

The Ongoing Pinnacle of Human Achievement

After 12 long years of ferrying labs, modules and transport vehicles up and down, The International Space Station (ISS) was completed last week by members of the Endeavor STS-134 NASA Flight crew. When they had attached the final part to the ISS, the space walker “stepped” back and said, “Wow. This is a big Space Station”. All this, I watched on the NASA TV live stream from the space station onboard cameras. The quote will stay with me for a long time, as one of the greatest human achievements within my lifetime.

NASA are about to retire their 30 year old Space Shuttle program. The last flight of Discovery launched in February, Endeavor launched 3 weeks ago, and Space Shuttle Atlantis will grace our skies one last time on July 8th on STS-135, the 135th Space Shuttle mission since the program started 30 years ago.

As NASA look into the future of space flight, I would like to dedicate a series of posts, albeit a very short one, to the ancient history of technology as we know it.

Enough of the serious talk for now. My class were asked to “make notes about how you find things out, how you discover and share information, and how you then store or remember what you've learned. Then turn the notes into a well-written blog post.”

Being myself, I had been making some notes, very flimsy ones, during exam time as well as free time (I seem to have way to little to do these days). Compiling these notes into a well-written blog post is challenging for me, as my teacher’s standard of “well written” is a list of examples. I don’t do that. Lists are useful, but boring in a blog post. I do paragraphs, and within them, make my futile attempt to convey my point, in an often entertaining and amusing way, I hope.

The Full Oxford Dictionary in Nine and a Half Millimetres

Its now possible. Think, less than 10 years ago, the full 20 book Oxford dictionary would take up nearly 1 metre on your shelf, now we have the internet, our mobiles, tablets, and [pause here for effect] eBook readers.

To start, let me tell you the amusing story about how I came to write this post. It was Thursday morning in an ICT lesson, and the issue on discussion was eBooks. The homework was to work together in pairs and blog about an assigned topic, such as publishers or libraries. As my teacher was going around the class, assigning the topics and pairs, he came to me, being last in the register. He said, “and Nic, you’re on your own and your writing about [dramatic pause] everything!” So, in my customary way, I am sitting here on a Friday evening, typing whatever comes into my head. I always like a challenge! There was another post planned, but that will have to wait until next week.

eBooks, what are they [was one of the questions asked]? They are electronic books, capable of being read where a device supports it. The most popular examples, the Amazon Kindle and the Sony eReader. The latter kinda failed, being a Sony product, but the Kindle took off like the Saturn V rocket. I personally own one. I choose a book, pay for it using the “family” Amazon account, of which I only know the password, and am reading within seconds. To be honest, I only take my kindle on holiday; most of the time it is underneath my bed, hidden from the annoying, little, devious troll that is my sister. I always, however, have 3 things with me: my MacBook, iPhone and iPad, on all of which I can read the book I downloaded on the kindle. Huge benefit for me, considering I always loose the physical book. I am also a lazy person and I do not like going out to buy things. My philosophy: “Buy it on Amazon”. Unfortunately, up until now, I was unable to implement that philosophy if I needed a book urgently. Now, instead of lugging myself to the bookshop, I buy it from Amazon! Oh, and its cheaper as well, considering we need to pay for parking at the shopping center. Also, out of copyright books are available for free, such as the Iliad and Odyssey. One more final thing, I can sync bookmarks and notes! Yay!

Agreed or Disagreed?

To quote from one of my many informative friends: “The biggest lie ever? I Agree”.

Oh yes, I agree. Admit to it. Everyone at least once has encountered a piece of software, which prompts you to “read” the privacy policy and terms & conditions, then agree to it. Apple requires you to agree to one of them every time they make a small change. Only the paranoid lawyers will read 60 pages of legal crap, which no one understands, to download an app. Apple is just the start, there are websites, email services, twitter, Facebook and every other possible online and offline service ever created in the history of mankind, who do the exact same thing. I will guarantee that even the ancient Greeks had some form of long legal contract to sign, which no one read.

Why do all these companies make them so long? Why do they make them incomprehensible? Why, why, why? The simple, blatant answer is,

They know you will never read it.

Sony and Microsoft: What I forgot (Plus a Bit Extra)

If you read my Microsoft and Sony posts, or if you are a regular reader, you will know that I hold a “slight” grudge against these two companies. Well, “slight” is a bit of an understatement: I hold an unbelievably huge grudge against them, and for good reason, apparent in the two posts. However, there were a few things I missed out in them, partly because they would have exceeded 1500 words and partly because I had forgotten about them. Anyway, I plan to include a few more stories of deceit, amusement and interest.

Let’s start with Sony. Crappy Sony. Unfaithful Sony. Insecure Sony.

That sparked some interest, didn’t it? Insecure Sony? We all know what has happened with the PlayStation Network (PSN) and the Sony Entertainment Network (SEN), who make those useless Facebook games. If not, let m fill you in: Once upon a time, there were a few million users on the PSN and the SEN. One day, an evil (or in my opinion, appreciated) group of witches (hackers) who broke into the house of the PSN/SEN and stole everything (yes, everything, including credit cards). PSN/SEN were very sad and told no one for 3 days, until guests started to complain. And the story goes on and on, but its becoming weird typing in a Disney fairytale way.

Customer Support

Yay! Another airplane post filled with many subordinate clauses and one sided opinions, with a good topic to do it with. For those of you who do not know, an airplane post is a blog post, which I type up on any European flight. These are usually about topics I care a great deal about, typed up on my iPhone or iPad, as I have nothing better to do. Let us get started with a subordinate clause, customary in an airplane post.

While sitting on a Swiss air flight next to my dad, on the way back from the long weekend, with no more than a few centimetres between me and the seat in front of me, I decided to write about the well known (and hated) customer support services, after my dad had a slight falling out with BT.

A Final Word on Copyright

Unfortunately, this will be my final post about copyright. I am sorry, but keeping up with the ridiculous amount of suing going on between companies has become almost impossible. I am well aware that these recent "copyright, infringement and stupidity" posts have been mainly based on patent infringement, however, that was just to widen the extremely narrow topic of copyright. So, why did I choose this topic to talk about [for those who do not know, I was writing about this topic for my school ICT project] instead of something more "juicy"! The reason? I have absolutely no idea! I just liked the challenge of making an unbelievably dry topic interesting and I think I succeeded, sort of, even while going on a massive tangent towards patents.

Moving on, as a final assignment from school, I was set the task of making my own copyright law. Being the last in the register (and possibly the fact that I posted a lot on copyright over the past month) I was given the title "Tzar of copyright"! So, to fulfil my duty as Tzar, I shall divide this post up into distinctive parts (unlike my previous posts) to be topped off with a final copyright rant full of passion, as usual!

Microsoft

Oh yes, its time…

I have been wanting to write this post for a while now, actually, ever since I started bloging. Over the course of the past 10 years, I have had several, let's say, interesting experiences when it comes to Microsoft. Very many "interesting" experiences. My regular readers may know that I hold a grudge against Microsoft and the long-time readers will know a bit about why I hold this grudge. I hope to shine a bit of light upon how this grudge came about in this post.

This post consists of two parts:

   1) My many interesting experiences + a bit of history.

   2) Facts (Wait for this one...)

So, lets get started. To cover The history bit: Microsoft developed programs for the early macs then stole everything from Apple. Got it? A short and sweet "History of Microsoft in a Nutshell". Moving on to my "interesting" experiences (you will see why i am using that phrase repeatedly soon).

Apple Discussions Page Renew?

FINALY! I have been waiting for this for a while now. The Apple support pages on the website were always below par, due to the fact that finding them was a pain. The actual content was always good though (unlike Google support). You had to navigate through pages and pages of usless content to finally get to where you want to be. There was no obvious place to search for a question that you may have (unless you know what you are doing) and it was usually faster calling AppleCare directly for help. 

I am thrilled to see that Apple is now taking action. I always ranked the apple support page very low in Apple surveys. 

Copyright, Infringement and VICTORY: Update 8

Remember that post, 3 More Thoughts? I was rambling on about a few things (3 to be precise), including the then recent lawsuit against the PS3 hacker, George Hotz. Sony sued Hotz because he had hacked the PlayStation 3 to play home brew games on the device, his device, which he bought, making it his own property. In my opinion, Sony had no right to sue him, as he bought the device, so he can do whatever he wants with it. Sony cannot hold us down to their operating system, just like Apple is not allowed to hold us down to iOS on the i-devices.

New Logo

Recently, I have been looking around for a new logo for the site and social network pages of the blog. After much searching, two of my good friends (Elliot. G and Henry. H) designed and produced two different logos. Being myself, I was extremely (I cannot stress that enough) picky and on the verge of driving them nuts! Henry. H [blog link in the sidebar] continued designing and improving the logo, with an open source program called "The Gimp", until we had the perfect logo. The whole process took us about a week using Facebook, due to the fact that I cannot, to save my life, give instructions over text and the fact that my ideas turned out to look like a messy jumble of lines instead of a good logo. After using Skype, we finished the process within one night.

New Ways to Read, View, Interact and Share

As many of you will probably NOT know, Blogger, the client I use to blog and post with, are having a complete revamp of their system, allowing for a more modern user experience and post editor. As a start, they are introducing new ways to view people's blogs, if you do not like the design of the blog or RSS feeds. I have embedded a Google video showing you these new styles.

Now, you want to know how to access them, right? If you are not using the Google Chrome browser, then you will have to type in /view in the URL box (so it looks like thecompblog.com/view).

If you are using the Chrome Browser, download the extension here. Then, whenever the extension sees a blogger blog, the B logo appears, and if you click on it, you will immediately be put into Dynamic View mode

copyright, Infringement and Stupidity: Update 7

This update is not so much infringement and copyright (although I have overplayed this term in recent posts), but more stupidity. Companies are going crazy about patents. At the moment, they are the most valuable thing a company can have, and I totally agree with that. Every company has the right to protect their ideas. What I classify as stupidity is when companies claim and create thousands of patents that do not actually deserve to be patented. I cannot think of any off the top of my head, but I have read a lot of CNN and BBC Tech news recently!

Look at Google for a sec. They have just bided $900 for the patent portfolio of Nortel Networks, a Canadian HARDWARE manufacturer. $900 for hardware patents? Google do not even make hardware! It would have made much more sense for Google to invest that $900 in product development or, dare I say, a charity? The Red Cross could preform miracles with $900 of Googles disposable income. A company like Nokia or HTC would benefit much more by owning these patents, and they think so too. The maximum bid for the portfolio is estimated at $2b! Wow. 

All these law suits and useless patents will stifle innovation one day in the future. 

Here is the link to the BBC news article, from where I got this information. 

My New Blog Partner

After careful consideration (although it did not take that much), I have teamed up with one of my fellow school mates, who also runs a highly entertaining blog/vlog. direthought.blogspot.com is his blog, which is about, you guessed it, his thoughts, opinions and "professional ranting," as he likes to call it. He has his own YouTube channel, where he uploads a video once every few weeks, (the link is on the "Contact Us" page) which are also very entertaining. 

The one thing that sets him apart from other bloggers? He is completely and totally mad (in a good way)! His rants and rambles will have you hooked from day 1. Just try it out. 

copyright, Infringement and Stupidity: Update 6

And we have yet another Apple patent dispute on our hands, which has been won yet again by Apple. This time, the dispute was over Cover Flow, Spotlight and TimeMachine technologies.

For those diehard windows uses out there (who have no place in modern society as they are using outdated technologies!), Cover Flow is the system allowing you to flick through your files in the Finder (file explorer) or music in iTunes; Spotlight is the search function, and TimeMachine is the integrated backup system.

A judge in Tyler, Texas, said Apple did not infringe a patent, owned by Mirror Worlds LLC, and closed the case in Apple’s favour. The case was filed way back in October, even though Apple has been using these technologies for years now. Prime example of a company trying to steal money from the better competitor.

Copyright, Infringement and Stupidity: Update 5

Another Google one folks! The Buzz experiment by Google labs has been heavily criticised for its privacy.  It enrolled all Gmail users and made their contacts public without seeking permission first. A group of Gmail users are now suing Google for this. Google changed this extremely quickly hand has now got to undergo a privacy investigation every year for the next 20 years! 

That is the very bacics of the story, but if you want to read more, go to this BBC Article. 

Eureka!

As many of you know, I hated the name Nic's CompBlog, as this blog was originally called. After a massive overhaul and a change of name, I was unable to change to domain to thecompblog.blogger.com, as someone else owned it. I decided to invest in an actual domain, which I bought through Google apps to be registered on the eNom DNS host. (don't worry if you have no idea what this is, It took me a week to get to grips with, and I am good with tech!). 

So, after setting up the domain, I was presented with problems left, right and centre when trying to forward the domain to this blog. After reading through hundreds of useless Google Support files (telling me about CNAME, MX records, A records and many other useless numbers which make no sense) and trying to contact Google directly through email, which took me another 30 minuets to find, I finally cracked it! Now, This blog can be accessed through thecompblog.com and we have our own personal emails! So now, If there are any questions, please contact admin@thecompblog.com. 

4 hours and a very late night later, I finally have a domain!

Think Different, Again. Kind of.

Apple yesterday released their "We Believe" iPad 2 TV ad in the US. There are many aspects to this ad which mirror the Apple "Think Different" ad campaign, analysed in great depth in one of my older posts, such as changing the industry and the how we compute. Steve Jobs said in his iPad 2 keynote that the iPad was a "Post PC Device", saying that the iPad changed how we worked and interacted with computers, which is very true. This new ad pushes that idea, as seen through the words "when technology gets out of the way, everything becomes more delightful", which is also very true. So Apple are "Thinking different" when it comes to computing, not talking about specs, but what it is like to use the device. Other tablet manufacturers have to talk about specs to make them sound better than the iPad, even though they are worse, as they are not running iOS, and they are more expensive. Here that, the iPad is the cheapest in its category!

Copyright, Infringement and Stupidity: Update 4

Google Vs. Microsoft all over again. These are both two companies I hold a grudge against, but a very small one in the case of Google. I use google search, apps (to run my upcoming domain), gmail, blogger, etc. but I have not used any Microsoft products to date, except for testing, which I am extremely proud of. 

Moving on, Microsoft is taking Google to the European courts due to claims of anti-competitiveness. This basically means that Microsoft feel that Google is blocking Bing (Microsofts search engine, which is much worse than googles) from growing and is abusing its influence in the market. This may be a serious case, If Microsoft win, but if Google wins, they will have just avoided yet another allegation. The interesting thing about this one is that Microsoft actually have something to fight with here. The whole story is far to long to type up in a short update, so here is a link to the BBC News Site. 

I am Honoured...

I was very glad to see today that the majority of my users were either using a mac or Safari! I know this sounds a bit nerdy, but still! All regular viewers know I resent Microsoft, although I have not made that official yet with a lengthy rant (hint, hint), and much prefer macs, yet to be formalised (hint, hint; again). Unfortunately, there are some people stuck in their old ways, so in 2nd place comes Windows OSs and Internet Explorer, which everyone knows is a complete and utter disgustingly huge pile of horse shoes (did not expect that one, eh?). anyway, here is a detailed breakdown of the stats: 

P.S. I have no idea what Apple PubSub is. 

New Theme, New Name, New Ideas.

You probably have by now noticed that the theme and name of the blog have completely changed (read my post on why i changed the name). Out of the limited choice Blogger offers regarding themes, I chose this one. Its modern and suited for the new age of the web, although it does not use HTML5, unfortunately! I have no idea how to code!

Moving on, why did I choose this theme with the wind turbine in the background? It looks good for a start and that should be, but it's not, my only reason. I chose the wind turbine to present my thoughts on the world and how we interact with it (read my "Earth, Nature and Mankind" post). It is of vital importance that we learn how to use nature in a constructive way and not destroy it. We need to learn to adapt ourselves around nature instead of trying to force nature to adapt to us. We can clearly see the consequences of this (Japan, Chile, Haiti).

Tech companies have to lead the revolution, by making and selling eco-friendly products, while manufacturing them in a sustainable way (unlike Apple with Foxxcon).

The wind turbine is the perfect example of man working alongside nature.

Copyright, Infringement and Stupidity: Update 3

Ok, these posts have been mainly about patents, not copyright, but who cares? Anyway, lets get on with the post.

Did you know that Apple and Microsoft have hired linguists to fight for the name App Store. Bit of background: Apple filed for a trademark 2008, I think, for the App Store name. Microsoft combated that move, saying the term is too generic, even though no one, not even Microsoft, were using the term!

Microsoft have now filed a formal complaint (notice the italics), against the Apples strong linguistic team, with their own expensive linguist definition of the term:

"The compound noun 'app store' means simply 'store at which apps are offered for sale,' which is merely a definition of the thing itself--a generic characterisation."

In my opinion, Apple deserves the right to the name, as they invented the whole idea of apps, whereas previouly, they were programs (a dirty Windows word) for the PDA, with limited access for 3rd party developers.

This goes into a bit more detail here, but I will let you read it if you are interested.