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.