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.