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).