The Nokia Lumia 800 Now Appearing AS: The Motorola Defy

The Nokia Lumia 710 Now Appearing AS: The LG Optimus 3D

Now, I’m pretty sure the explaination is that Optus simply replaced the Motorola Defy and LG Optimus 3D with the Lumia 800 and Lumia 710 respecitvely and just haven’t replaced the labels yet, but still, this reflects poorly on Optus and they have a history of incorrectly labelling Windows Phone handsets.

OPTUS, SORT IT OUT, WINDOWS PHONE DESERVES BETTER! I bet you wouldn’t let this happen to the iPhone, would you…

This first evolution of Windows started with a combined File & Program Manager (called MS-DOS Executive which was the Shell) before splitting that program into two seperate programs, the Program Manager (which stayed open the entire time Windows was running, it was the Windows Shell)) and the File Manager, which you could open when needed. There was also a Print Manager and Control Panel too. This screenshot was Windows 3.1, the first version of Windows that most people actually took seriously (Windows 1.0 and 2.0 were not seen as serious competitors).

The Second Evolution Of Windows (1995-2012)

The second evolution of Windows is what bought Microsoft so much success. This screenshot is of Windows 95, but all of the main elements that Microsoft introduced into Windows 95 are still the fundimental pieces of the user interface today in Windows 7. The desktop in Windows 95 could actually have icons that you chose (the desktop in the first generation of Windows only had icons for minimised programs) alongside the few that Microsoft put there including, My Computer, Network Neighbourhood (renamed My Network Places in 2000/Me then then simply Network in Vista) and the Recycle Bin. The second key piece of user interface that was added in Windows 95 that still exists today is the taskbar. It contained the Start Button, programs that were currently running (so you could switch between them) and the System Tray & Clock. The taskbar has morphed into a program launcher as well as program switcher, but the concept hasn’t changed too fundimentally since Windows 95 (Windows 7 was the first time the design had really been modified since 95). The Start Menu was the 3rd major piece of GUI that was added in Windows 95 that still exists today in Windows 7. Yes, the Start Menu today doesn’t resemble the simple one that debuted in Windows 95, but it’s still got the same concepts behind it, a place to list all the programs, documents and settings on your computer as well as the place where you can search for things, find help and shut down the computer (as they say, press the Start Button to Stop ). Finally all the extra concepts and programs that Microsoft bought along in Windows 95 including the Recycle Bin, Windows Explorer, Long File Names (255 Characters instead of 11), the design of the Minimise, Maximise/Restore & Close buttons, Ctrl-Alt-Delete to close frozen programs & much much more is all thanks to Windows 95. Lots of things have changed in Windows since 1995, but most of the key fundimentals have not.

The Third Evolution Of Windows (2012-??)

Tomorrow, Microsoft will debut Windows 8 in full for the first time and it really is going to be the 3rd evolution of Windows. While it will retain the old Windows 7  style (second evolution) shell, this will be called the Classic Desktop and it WON’T be the default. The new Start Screen & the associated Metro style guidelines will be the future for Windows GUI design from 2012 onwards. Just like Windows 95 was a real step away from the Windows 3.1 (first evolution) shell, away from all those Manager programs and the useless Desktop, Windows 8 will be a real step away from the Windows 95 (second evolution) shell, away from the Taskbar, Desktop and Start Menu. This is the ultimate UI, the one UI that Microsoft says will be scalable from a 7 inch tablet to a 70 inch TV screen and everything in between!

I really am so excited about what Microsoft has to announce and I’m ready for the rollercoaster ride ahead that Microsoft has planned for us!

P.S: For some perspective, I just wanted to mention the Mac in the context of all this. Just like Windows, the Mac is currently in the second evolution of it’s GUI design. When will we see the 3rd evolution of the UI? I do not know.

Mac OS First Evolution (1984-2000)

Mac OS Second Evolution (2000-??)

Today, Microsoft released the final version of the Zune 4.8 software, which allows phones that are running Windows Phone 7.5 to communicate with the Zune PC Software (Zune 4.7 can only communicate with Windows Phone 7.0 handsets). During the announcement, Microsoft put up a fairly pathetic table (very undetailed) and announced some new markets that the software (and some of Zune’s associated services) would be expanding to. The service expansion today only included the Zune Video Rental section of the marketplace and that only expanded to 5 countries (Denmark, Finland, Japan, Norway and Sweden). The next question is, will the Zune Music Marketplace (and associated Zune Music Pass & Podcast Marketplace) be expanding soon and if it does expand, which countries will it expand to? For a brief period of time during the Zune 4.8 beta, the Music Marketplace was enabled in Canada and Australia and the Podcast Marketplace was enabled in Canada, Australia, Ireland, UK & New Zealand. These disappeared a few weeks ago and still aren’t present in the final version of the software. I’m not sure exactly how the software detects feature availability, but as far as I know, it isn’t hard coded into the software, but rather the software checks Microsoft servers for the information to enable and disable features as appropriate, which means Microsoft can enable and disable pieces of the Zune Software to each region from their end without making us download new builds of the software. Clever really!

So I’ve decided to have a poke around the final version of the Zune 4.8 PC and see what I can find. What I’ve found isn’t huge (I can’t hack software, I’m no Rafael Rivera or Chris Walsh) but I know enough to find interesting things here and there by simply changing the settings on my computer and seeing what impact that has on the Zune Software. So here’s what I’ve found.

There’s a small bug in the Zune 4.8 Software, that if you’re in a country which has the Windows Phone App Marketplace available AND you don’t have any music in your Zune Collection (aka a blank My Music folder on your PC), even if your region doesn’t have access to the Zune Music Marketplace, you get a message saying “You Have No Music In Your Collection” and a link which says “Find Music At Zune Music Marketplace”. I think Microsoft meant for this link only to appear for countries where the Music Marketplace was actually available, but with most software, bugs creep through and that’s a part of life (the same bug didn’t make it through for Podcasts or Videos though). Here’s a screenshot of that message and link (taken while regional settings were set to Australia).

So if you click that link, you get sent to the Music Marketplace, well it attempts to send you there. You get a display like this one, where the browse section of the left navigation is displayed (but clicking the links does nothing) and the genres sections, but without any genres listed. I set my computer’s regional settings to New Zealand and took this screenshot.

That’s how it appears for almost every country you try it on. The 2 exceptions that I could find were Australia and Canada, the SAME two countries that did get the Music Marketplace during the beta before it disappeared again. When you set your regional settings to Australia and perform the same trick as before, you get slightly more information than you do for most countries. In addition to the browse section, you get a full list of genres listed under the genres heading (all these links work too) and you get a listing of the top songs and top albums. You can even manage to get to an artists page (with metadata and everything) and get to the screen with track listings. You can even listen to previews. I set my computer’s regional settings back to Australia while taking this screenshot.

For completeness sake, I’ll show what it should look like if you actually do have the Music Marketplace enabled properly (which is currently the case in the US, UK, France, Italy, Spain & Germany). I set my computer’s regional settings to the United States while taking this screenshot.

In addition to this, Windows Phone 7.5 includes a feature called Bing Music Search (sometimes called Bing Audio) which works in a very similar fashion to Shazam: It listens to a portion of music and tries to match it to a name and artist. The Bing Music Search links very closely with the Zune Music Marketplace (which is what it uses to find the name and artist of music it scans), when you find a track, there’s a Marketplace button which will take you to that track in the Zune Music Marketplace.  This feature is going to be released in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK and the US. All of those countries currently have the Zune Music Marketplace except Canada and Australia. If Microsoft didn’t enable the Zune Music Marketplace for Australia and Canada and left that feature in, they’d have a broken Marketplace button appear each time someone did a search and I personally don’t think Microsoft would do that. So all this information makes me continue my assertion that Australia and Canada WILL be getting the Zune Music Marketplace sooner rather than later. Additional questions such as will Australia, Canada and Germany get the Zune Music Pass are ones that I don’t have any answer for and all I can do is HOPE that they will. The other question you may be asking is, will the Zune Podcasts Marketplace be expanding too? I also don’t know the answer to this, but if what was discovered during the beta was correct (and the beta is looking like a pretty accurate source), then the Podcasts Marketplace may expand to Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and the UK.

Finally, I was looking around in the Registry Editor and found a key called Features under the Zune key in the Current User root of the registry. This appears to be the place where Microsoft tells the Zune Software what features to enable for which countries. I tried to add Australia (AU) to the Music value and start the Zune Software, but Zune must check for new information each time the software loads and replaces the keys with what they want you to see prompting that message saying that the Feature Availability for Zune has changed and to restart for changes. I didn’t restart and I could actually see the Music pivot reappear (like it did during the beta, when I use that trick to make it appear in the final version of the software, it doesn’t actually make the pivot reappear) and display the same Marketplace that Australia currently sees using my trick, but the settings revert to how Microsoft wants them on the next load of the Zune Software. I’ll post the screenshot of this registry key for your interest, but there’s not much to see here really.

So that’s my afternoon of playing around with the Zune 4.8 software. There’s actually not a lot of new UI options in this version of the software. Something makes me think that Zune 5.0 might be here sooner than we think, I suspect Matt Akers has a surprise for us at some point . I hope that you see my logic and see why I think the Zune Music Marketplace expansions are still coming for us in the near future, even if they didn’t appear today alongside the Zune 4.8 release and Video Marketplace Expansions. Microsoft certainly has the technical capabilities to simply flick a switch and we’d get it the next time we loaded our Zune Clients (and the next time we load the Marketplace Hub on our phones too, since I think it also checks a server to see what to display in there too). Feel free to leave any feedback or thoughts in the comments.

PS: As a free plug to myself, I updated the Windows Phone ‘Mango’ 7.5 Feature Availablity Matrix Today (after loading the final version of the Zune 4.8 Software AND loading WP7.5 Build 7720 onto my phone, thanks XDA-Developers and yes commenters I know that it’s not complete until the manufacturers drivers appear, which is why I’ll be restoring to NoDo when Telstra approves the update). Check out the near final version of the chart here.

Learning OS X from a Windows User’s Experience

I found this article by Stephen Chapman on ZDNet which tells the experience of the author switching from Windows to Mac OS X. Apple in many of their ads say you should switch from a PC to a Mac and that it’s easy to do so, but the author of this article questions that. I have Mac OS X running on my Dell Inspiron 15R (n5110) as an experiment (mainly to keep myself up to date with what’s happening on the OS X side of the technology world and also to prove that your Mac isn’t anything more than a PC built with parts that OS X has exact drivers for) and I can tell you I’ve found some really weird behaviours that would confuse any user who had been using Windows for quite a while. The Green button with the plus (which is the approximate equivalent of the Maximise button in Windows) doesn’t actually make a screen take up as much space as it can in OS X like it does in Windows. In most apps it just stretches the window to a point where all the content is visible (such as the width of a webpage in Safari), but in other apps such as iTunes, it actually transforms the window into a mini player which is completely unexpected behaviour. In Windows the Maximise button always just makes the program fill up the entire screen from the top of your monitor to the top of the taskbar at the bottom of the screen. The only program I’ve found which breaks this rule is the Command Prompt, but you’re not going to find most regular users going in there. There are countless other things that I could list, but I’m not going to. My real point is, if you’re a Windows user who is used to the way Windows works, switching to a Mac isn’t something that is just “going to happen painlessly”, it’s going to be a bit difficult (just as the transition from OS X to Windows will be too) and this article reminds us of that truth.

 Two PC Industry Surprises In One Week!

This week we had 2 very surprising announcements during the week, both of which could possibly work in Microsoft’s favour. The first one occurred on Tuesday and this was Google announcing they were acquiring Motorola Mobility. There’s so much that can be said about this story, but the main point to get from this is why they decided to purchase Motorola Mobility: Patents! Google wants the 24,500 patents that Motorola Mobility has, so it can defend Android against Apple & Microsoft’s patent lawsuits. One of the most curious things that was noticed by a few bloggers was the page of quotes that Google put together listing all of it’s major partners and their apparent support of this acquisition. The quotes all sounded very similar as if they had all been written by the one person. So someone put together an Android Press Release Generator where you can make your own Press Release for this event. I think this is just brilliant.

The other big story was that only about 1 year after they acquired Palm for their WebOS software, HP announced that they were not only dumping all their WebOS products (which included Tablets & Smartphones) but that they’re looking to sell of their consumer PC business and switch to being an enterprise software services company and this includes acquiring a British company called Autonomy for $10 billion. HP essentially announced they want to follow the exact footsteps that IBM had taken many years ago (and there’s nothing particular wrong with that, IBM is a very successful company, it’s just nobody knows exactly what they do because they don’t produce consumer products). Although most people expected HP to give WebOS a little more time before making any decision about dumping it (the new HP Touchpad wasn’t doing very well in the market, but it had only been out less than a month or so), nobody expected HP to announce they wanted to exit the consumer PC business, especially since they’re the number 1 supplier of PCs in the world. There’s talk that Microsoft might buy HP’s consumer PC business so that they can produce Mac like systems that have completely integrated hardware and software (especially useful for tablets), but that’s unlikely I would think, although after the shock announcements of this week, anything could happen really!

Wow…

No, not the video game, I’m simply saying the word “wow…”. The ABC this week published an article on their news website titled: Most Australians duped by science fiction. This article went through to publish some quite amazing statistics of a number of different surveys that had been giving to many Australians about what conecpts in science fiction that they believed were true or not. One survey found that around 1/2 of the survey respondants thought that humans can be frozen and thawed back to life. Another survey found that 30% of the survey respondants thought that humans and dinosaurs coexisted on earth (a story that many religious organisations have spread because the discovery of the dinosaurs put a dent in their creation stories) and 1/4 thought the earth travelled all the way around the sun in just 1 day (despite it actually being 365 and 1/4 which is where the concept of ‘the year’ comes from). Apparently a similar survey last year found that 30% of respondants in the UK city of Birmingham thought that time travel was possible. Sometimes I just just shake my head and wonder

Interesting World War II Tactics

This week the ABC also published a story about some of the possible tactics the Allies came up with during World War II to try and beat the Nazis. One apparently was to have spies put the female hormone oestrogen into Hitler’s food to cause him to be less aggressive. Apparently others included dropping poisonous snakes onto Nazi soldiers and bombing them with glue to cause them to stick to the ground. I hope they mention some of these proposed (but never executed) tactics in history classes in the future, because they’re actually quite amusing.

Love You Brisbane

Growing up just east of Brisbane City here in Australia, I have a connection to this city and I know quite a lot about it (especially transport related as we’ll come to in a sec), but I didn’t know that it had it’s own song. The other morning when I was getting ready to go to University, my Mum was listening to Spencer Houson on 612 ABC Brisbane and I heard this song play with the lyrics “Love You Brisbane”. I found out that Brisbane actually has a song written about it, well nearly anyway. The song is actually a Jingle that Channel 7 wrote in the 1980s for Brisbane, and it was also used in Darwin & Perth too (with the word Brisbane replaced appropriately), although not to the same success as here in Brisbane. Regardless of its origins and purposes, I still think it’s pretty cool. You can watch it below.

Adelaide’s Southern Expressway

I went to Adelaide a couple of weeks ago and one of my favourite parts of the trip was driving down Adelaide’s Southern Expressway (M2). This road holds the record for being the world’s longest one-way reversible freeway, 24km of Expressway that can only be open in 1 direction at a time. It operates 2am-12:30pm inbound and 2pm-12:30am outbound Monday-Fri and the opposite on Weekends & Public Holidays. The 1.5 hour gap is used to close the expressway to make sure all cars get off it before opening it to traffic in the opposite direction. I recorded a video of my trip down the entire 24km of Expressway travelling southbound and 2km of the return northbound trip to show how the reversible freeway works. Only Adelaide could do something like this . Apparently they will begin the duplication project late 2011, so by next time I visit, this will probably be no different to any other freeway. You can watch the video below.

Microsoft & Windows 8

With the BUILD conference less than 1 month away now, the Windows 8 news is starting to heat up. I thought Ars Technica wrote an excellent piece on Windows 8 in their article entitled: “A sort of PC”: how Windows 8 will invade tablets (and why it might work). I won’t go into any detail about the article, because I think it explains everything really well itself, so if you have time, checking out the 4 page artuic

Busways & Tollways

Finally, since I’m so interested in roads and mapping, I will soon write a few blog posts about 2 related issues (when I’m not busy with something else). One of them will be about Today Tonight’s Toll Road report that they aired last week and the second will be about public transport in Brisbane and more particularly, in the Redlands City Council.

Microsoft made a beta version of the Mango OS to flash to Windows Phone devices available to registered developers on the App Hub in late June. The process of upgrading your phone to Mango included reading & accepting the terms and conditions on the Microsoft Connect site that developers were invited to, then downloading the Mango bits, creating a complete imaged backup of your device in it’s current NoDo state, then upgrading the phone to the beta of Mango. Microsoft has said that to be able to upgrade to the final release of Mango, you will have to actually restore back to your Telco approved NoDo state and that’s why the backup that was created is so important: because this is the only way you’ll be able to get back to NoDo so you can upgrade to the final Telco approved version of Mango.

This is something that Microsoft wanted to make absolutely clear to people downloading and installing the Mango Beta onto their phone. In fact, a message warning about the absolute extreme importance of backing up was mentioned no less than 3 times in the terms and conditions. Here are the relevant sections from the Terms & Conditions page:

2. WP Backup: Prior to updating your Retail Windows Phone
device, the instructions will walk through the steps required to back up the
data on your Windows Phone, ensuring that you will be able to return to a
supported state when the program is complete. Restoring from this backup is the
only way that your phone can be updated to the final, retail version of ‘Mango’
for your Retail Windows Phone.

To participate in this program, you must make a back-up before
upgrading your phone as specified in the instructions, and you
must keep this backup in a safe place during your participation in this
program. Microsoft is unable to support developers who have not taken or
retained a backup of their device.

6. WP Backup: It’s still very important that you understand
that you really must take a backup of your device and save that backup. It is
probably also a good idea that you save a copy of that backup somewhere, just in
case.

10. WP Backup: It really can’t be stressed how important it
is that you take and retain your backup in a safe place. Once you see and use
‘Mango’, you’ll want to continue using it once we release it – and we want you
to, as well. Keeping a backup is the only way that you can get there in a
supported fashion. Please keep your backup.

As you can see, even Microsoft found it slightly amusing the amount of times they wrote that you needed make sure you kept a backup. They wrote it in a very non technical way and in a way that was quite obvious how much they were stressing that you NEEDED to do this. Finally, you had to tick a box under each of these paragraphs (and the other 7 non backup related points too), confirming that you’d read them.

Well, today Microsoft released build 7712 to these registered developers, which provides a near complete version of the Mango update, which should make developers happy (I know I was excited). For a few developers though, today has not turned out to be a good day, because they’ve lost their NoDo backups. It turns out a that a combination of not reading these instructions about backing up your NoDo update and an arguably poor decision made by the people who wrote the backup tool, which should have probably created 2 backups (one in the AppData folder and a second at a location that the user running the tool could have chosen themselves) has caused a number of people to lose their backups because they never made a copy of the C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Phone Update folder, which apparently gets deleted when you uninstall the Zune 4.8 beta (although, this is not entirely Microsoft’s fault really, they made it absolutely clear that you needed to keep this backup in a safe place and the AppData folder isn’t somewhere that I’d call safe, the Documents folder & a USB hard drive is what I’d call safe). So many developers have lost their NoDo backups (Microsoft has confirmed that this issue does exist on it’s Windows Team Blog). There is hope for them though as one final safety net could possibly exist for most people.

Microsoft has had a technology called Previous Versions since Windows Server 2003 (and it’s been included in client versions and turned on by default since Windows Vista). This technology is essentially the same technology that Apple has built into their OS X Lion operating system (which was released last week), although Apple have made the technology more accessible and usable by creating a Time Machine style UI to access it (which means that many people will unfortuantely incorrectly attribute this technology to Apple, when it was really Microsoft who first started using it in client OSes). Well, if you’re lucky, Previous Versions might have a backed up version of the Windows Phone Update folder that you can restore and then make 2 copies of, one to put back in the AppData folder (so you can restore from it) and one to keep in your Documents folder, so that you don’t lose it again. You need to do this pretty quickly though, the Previous Versions don’t hang around forever, especially if you use your computer a lot. Here’s how to attempt to restore your Windows Phone Update folder using Previous Versions. I’m going to write these instructions in a really specific manner (probably overly simplistic for people who are Windows Phone Developers) because following instructions isn’t something that people who’ve had this issue are good at it seems (I joke, but you kind of know it’s true).

1. Hold Windows-Key and R to open the Run dialog. Type %userprofile%\AppData\Local\ and press Enter.

2. Right click the Microsoft folder and choose Properties. The reason we’re going to restore the entire Microsoft folder is, it’s likely the entire Windows Phone Update folder got deleted, so you don’t have it to right click on to access Previous Versions within it, so you need to go one level up!

3. In the Properties Dialog click the Previous Versions tab. Select an entry from the list AFTER your NoDo backup was created (so somewhere after you updated your phone to the Beta 2 release, it’s going to be after about June 30) but BEFORE you lost the backup folder. So probably the earliest point available after you upgraded your phone the first time would be the best point to choose. Then click the Copy button, NOT the Restore button. This is important. The Microsoft folder has a lot of important files in it that get changed on a regular basis by simply using Windows, you don’t want to restore a previous version of it over the top of the existing one, you want to make a copy of it somewhere else so you can fish out the Windows Phone Update folder and then delete the rest of the copy of the Microsoft folder. So click the Copy button.

4. A folder chooser dialog box will appear. From this dialog, choose somewhere easy to find (I suggest the desktop) and then click the “Make New Folder” and name your new folder something appropriate such as WP7 Backup folder. Then select this newly created folder and click Copy. Now you will need to wait. This is probably going to make a copy of possibly GBs of files, so it could take a while, so just let it run.

5. Once you have this copy of the Microsoft folder in your new folder created on the desktop, you can now open it and find the Windows Phone Update folder. In the Windows Phone Update folder should be a folder with some type of identification string (this is the GUID of your phone) which contains the phone’s backup! All you need to do now is copy the entire Windows Phone Update folder from your desktop restored version of the Microsoft folder to the real Microsoft folder you restored from AND then make a second copy of this Windows Phone Update folder to somewhere else safe. Once you’ve done this, you can then delete the Microsoft folder that’s on your desktop (not the original one). To test if this worked, plug your phone in, open Zune, go to Settings, Phone, Update and you should see a button to restore to a previous version with the date you first updated your phone from NoDo to the Beta 2 update.

Hopefully this guide has saved your Windows Phone NoDo backup, so you don’t have to contact Microsoft support to see what your options are (which will probably involve taking your phone to the Telco shop to get it reflashed or sending it to Microsoft so they can do it on your behalf). The moral of the story is, read the instructions carefully and always make backups when Microsoft strongly suggest you do, because, sometimes things happen!

Richard Dreyfuss Does A Dramatic Reading Of The iTunes EULA

This was pretty funny. There’s not really too much to explain here other than listen to them below (each uses a different voice).

Please Read

Responsibility

Damages

Effective Until

Source: http://www.cnet.com/8301-30976_1-20068778-10348864.html

Microsoft Gives Away Apple iPods As Prizes

This is a story which is about 3 years old now that I stumbled upon this week. If you don’t know, Microsoft sells their own brand of MP3 players called Zunes. They’re actually really really good music players and if you are a music enthusiast who loves listening to music, then this is the device you’d want to get over the iPod (sounds crazy, but it’s true). The thing is, these were (and still are) only sold in the US & Canada for some reason. While most of the functionality from these players have been moved into Windows Phone 7 which is available here in Australia, Windows Phone 7 wasn’t around back in 2008. So the story was essentially, that NineMSN (a 50% joint partnership between the Nine Network and MSN (The Microsoft Network) was giving away iPods as prizes to Australias who used Microsoft’s Live Search (now Bing). The Microsoft US response was obviously, “using competitor products was frowned on at Microsoft”. NineMSN hit back though with the very true statement that, “if the Zune music player was sold in Australia it would have been offered as a prize instead. Where we don’t have a great product or we don’t have a product at all there’s no internal edict that says we’re not allowed to use competitor products”.

That’s completely true, we don’t have the Zune here in Australia, it’s not NineMSN’s fault that’s the situation. While this story is completely irrelevant to what’s happening today, I bring it up, only because we’re fighting a similar battle at the moment, not to bring the Zune Hardware to Australia, but to bring the Zune services such as the Music Marketplace. This is one small example of how Microsoft is letting their competitors get the upper hand on them here in Australia simply by not bringing the services that are available in the US to Australia.

Source: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/biztech/use-microsoft-to-win-apple-products/2008/07/02/1214950806443.html

Swiss Radio Station Airs 5 Hours Of Pornographic Music & Sounds

I listen to lots and lots of radio, but this one really weirds me out. Apparently a Swiss Radio station has started a 5 hour radio show (from Midnight to 5am) which is described by the producer as “acoustic porn”.

News.com.au says “The show will play soundtracks from 1970s porn movies – which according to Mr Scotoni have more “value” than the “cheap music” in modern porn – along with disco classics such as Love To Love You Baby by Donna Summer.”

This just shouts out ‘weird’ to me, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it rated highly in their ratings surveys in a few months time.

Source: http://www.news.com.au/technology/radio-porn-versus-internet-porn-swiss-get-rocks-off-and-roll-to-five-hours-of-erotic-beats/story-e6frfro0-1226072809602

Politicians are poorly paid and deserve higher pay, says Labor MP Robert Schwarten

I’m not sure if too many of you are going to agree with this (I don’t), but he said it anyway. He thinks that politicians should be paid more money, because they’re getting less than high school principals. Politicians make $133,804 per year (which actually seems like a pretty good pay packet really), but what he failed to mention is, they get a really good superannuation deal and pension when they retire. So they’re definitely not going to be struggling when they retire from a financial perspective. If you check out the comments from the story, wow, this pollie gets absolutely reamed! Back in your box sir, and start to help get the state out of debt!

Source: http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/politicians-are-poorly-paid-and-deserve-higher-pay-says-labor-mp-robert-schwarten/story-e6freoof-1226072227131

Canberra Has Australia’s Best Nightlife, Or So They’re Trying To Say?

This was just plain odd, but at the same time very very funny. If you’ve ever watch The Gruen Transfer, then you’ll know there’s a segment each week called “The Pitch” where 2 ad agencies battle it out to create ads to sell something that is just so stupid or unsellable (e.g Invading New Zealand etc.). Well there was an ad agency event this week (held in conjunction with The Gruen Transfer) that asked ad agencies to sell Canberra’s nightlife as the best in Australia. I prefer the second one best, but they’re both, very odd and very funny.

Source: http://www.news.com.au/travel/australia/go-governmental-ads-aim-to-convince-us-canberra-nightlife-is-the-best-in-the-world/story-e6frfq89-1226072005651

Woman pees from veranda, falls on picket fence, sues her ex

After reading this story, one thing comes to mind really: What’s wrong with the toilet, the inside one?…….

Source: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/more-news/woman-sues-ex-for-falling-while-peeing/story-fn7x8me2-1226072672462

I think that’s all the posts I’ve got for this week. There’s a bunch of other weird stories including the St Kilda School story & the Pauline Hanson vote counting story that are just too weird and complex to go into so I’ll let you look them up yourself if you want. Leave comments as usual! Over & Out!

Opera Talks Oprah

Oprah’s show finished up this week in the US and as their tribute to this, the browser company Opera (which is a common misspelling of Oprah because the words sound very similar) decided to post a blog featuring letters they had received from fans over the years, intended for Oprah but received by them instead. They’re very funny some of them (including the responses) and you can check them all out at: http://my.opera.com/chooseopera/blog/2011/05/25/oprah-winfrey-we-will-miss-you

Alan Jones & The National Broadband Network

Alan Jones is Sydney’s number 1 breakfast radio show on station 2GB and he’s always fired up on several issues. This week he spent some time talking about an advancement in Fibre-Optic technology. Apparently, “German scientists have broken a speed record, sending data contained on 700 DVDs over a single laser beam in one second, Seven hundred DVDs. In one second. The scientists at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology said they’ve broken the world record by sending data at a speed of 26 terabits per second. Canberra wants us to believe that the technology we’re spending anything up to $60 billion on won’t be outdated by the time it’s rolled out.”

What Alan Jones did though, was unintentionally give his support to the NBN, because as he probably didn’t realise, the NBN is going to be a Fibre-Optic network and therefore the speed records these German scientists have come up with could be added into the NBN. This is the problem, the people who are generally in charge in this world (baby boomers) and who against this don’t understand the technology properly. The reason I think the NBN will take an extremely long time to be outdated (if ever) is that it sends data as light pulses down the wire and currently the speed of light is the fastest anything can travel, that’s just physics. So the bit that we can speed up in the future if needed is not the cabling, but the transmitters and receivers at each end that convert electrical pulses to light and back again. So all we would need to do theoretically is upgrade these transmitters at each end and we’re all good, replacing the copper cabling with Fibre-Optic cabling only needs to be done once.

You can read the whole Alan Jones & NBN story here: http://www.news.com.au/technology/shock-jock-impressed-by-laser-speed-breakthrough/story-e6frfro0-1226062824273

Windows Phone 7 Major Update (Codenamed: Mango) Announced, But Still A Few Concerns About It…

This week was a big week for Microsoft as they announced about a dozen out of the 500 new features coming to the Mango release of Windows Phone 7, which is due to hit phones in Spring here in Australia. Microsoft didn’t announce every feature though (they’re going to keep drip feeding features over the next few months to keep the excitement & momentum up between now and the actual release) and they left a number of questions remaining. Firstly they didn’t announce the version number this update would bring the phone up to. Some say it will bring the phone up to version 7.5, others say 7.1 (the beta tools they released are 7.1) and others say they will brand it as 7.5 but internally it will be 7.1. The much more important questions that Microsoft still haven’t answered are in relation to feature availability outside the US. In January (after visiting Leo Laporte in the TWiT cottage in California) I wrote an article talking about Windows Phone 7 feature availability in regions outside the US. This week Microsoft demoed some amazing technology called Bing Local Scout which allows you to see all the local attractions, shops and eating places in the location you’re currently at, all within Bing Search built into the phone. As I was watching this, I was thinking, wow this is great, but I don’t think this is coming to Australia. I was right, as in the promo graphics about it, there was fine print saying US & UK only. The same will probably occur for anything involving speech commands too. I’ll be getting around to writing a new article at some point which details the new markets for the App Marketplace and about what Australia now will and won’t have access to in Mango. We will get probably about 3/4 of the features they’ve announced so far, but as for the other 1/4 – we can only hope

My Goal To Become A Microsoft Student Partner

Talking of Microsoft, I am planning to try and become a Microsoft Student Partner. Now that’s not an easy thing to do, but I’m going to try it, because I simply love Microsoft products and want to try and become involved with the company and make some contacts. So over the next week I’ll probably try and plan a submission and hopefully I can get into that. If I do, it would be quite exciting

Mac Malware

This month is has been the one where Macs all around the world are about to lose their innocence and will have something installed on them that they’ve never had installed before: Malware. Yes, the Mac has finally come of age (thanks mainly to the success of the iPhone, iPod & iPad as well as Apple’s clever marketing during Microsoft’s stumble with Vista from 2006-2009) and they’ve become popular enough that they’ve just started to become a target for Malware authors. This article (http://www.tuaw.com/2011/05/14/malware-macs-and-crying-wolf-doing-the-math/) is a great article on the topic. Essentially what it says now, is about 80% of people running Windows have working Malware on their systems and that 16% of computers now are Macs and essentially NONE of them run Anti-Virus or even think about Malware, thanks to this belief Apple has sold people on: “Macs Can’t Get Viruses”. Well – They Can! So essentially about 20% of the Windows PC market is easily susceptible to viruses and now the Mac is catching up to that very quickly with 16% of it’s users easily susceptible to viruses. So that explains the Malware. So Mac users, your time of innocence is over. Please – go and get yourself and Anti-Virus and install it and practise safe computing just like Windows users have had to do for years, don’t install strange software, turn off Safari’s featuring of automatically opening “Safe” files & be careful where you surf – no more ideas like “I’m going to buy a Mac so I can surf porn without getting viruses”. By the way, the two pieces of Malware are MacDefender (which shares the name of an actual legitimate piece of software just to confuse you), which is also being known as Mac Protector, Mac Security and Apple Security Center which requires the user to actually enter their administrator username and password to install the malware. The second new piece of malware that’s just been released by the same people is called MacGuard and the scary thing is: this one DOESN’T require the administrator username and password. So that’s that and hopefully I don’t start getting tech support calls from Mac users wondering what the heck is going on. Oh & this goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway – If it does get on your system: DON’T give it your credit card number!

Sony, Sony, Sony – What Are We Going To Do With You?

Sony has been hacked about 3-4 times in the last 7 days. They NEED to fix their security and QUICKLY. Nuff said!

End Of Semester 1 Near

It’s only 1 week left until Semester 1 of  my first year at uni is finished! It’s been such a fast semester. QUT was a great choice and I’m enjoying it immensely. Now I’ve gotten my core units out of the way, I can start to go study units I’m really interested in . The only thing I miss at Uni is not being to see some people every day that I used to see every day at OC, but that’s the way things go, at least I can still communicate with them on Facebook. It’s also allowed me to find some new friends too, which is probably good for me, especially since they’re all studying IT too! I’m nearly at 70 hours in my Learners logbook, so I’m well on the way to getting my P plates by September like I plan to!

Well I think that’s it for now. I hope lots of you get to read this blog post and leave your comments as you see fit! Also keep any eye out on www.andrewtechhelp.com. I have a few articles planned for the site coming up soon (within the next month or so), so follow me on twitter (http://twitter.com/andrewtechhelp) or Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Andrew-Tech-Help/53742949428) and that will keep you up to date with any changes there!

I bought the HTC 7 Mozart from Telstra because it was the best Windows Phone being offered in Australia and had the best plan at the time I purchased it (during a pre Christmas sale) as well as using the best phone network in Australia (Vodaphone is having a lot of issues). The problem is, Telstra is the ONLY carrier in Australia who still hasn’t finished testing the tiny February Windows Phone Update which updates the updater. So I don’t think they’ll get around to releasing the March Update till mid to late April at the earliest (I hope I’m wrong). Microsoft shouldn’t be letting the carriers decide when OS updates go out, Microsoft should be saying, we’re ready now and allow every customer to upgrade at the same time if they choose. Windows Phone 7 is a very different OS to Google’s Android, all the phones being shipped with Windows Phone 7 software have the same hardware which is compatible with the OS without the manufacturer having to make major changes to it each time an update is released. Manufacturers and carriers also can’t modify or brand the phone’s UI other than through exclusive applications in the Marketplace so they don’t have to worry about checking or updating those either like they do on Android. The carriers say they have to test the updates to make sure they’re compatible with their networks, but I say that unless Microsoft actually makes changes to the networking stacks or phone’s radio (not FM radio, communications radio), then the carriers should not have any part of the process as the phone will continue to operate on their network in the same way (I mean, seriously, copy and paste could bring down the Telstra network?, of course it won’t!). I understand manufacturers might ocasionally like to update the firmware in the phone that could impact the carrier’s network and I can understand needing to test those updates, but they should be kept SEPERATE from the Microsoft produced OS feature updates. Anyway, I’ll keep an eye on this chart and hopefully it will be updated next week to show Telstra as either scheduling or delivering update.

So now to the happier news. There has been a article around in the last few days saying that Windows Phones are selling well in Australia compared to the test of the world! According to Smarthouse.com.au (http://smarthouse.com.au/Phones/Industry/E2T3Q8E6?page=1) Windows Phone 7 devices have a 3.2% market share in Australia, which while still isn’t all that huge, is actually 1% more than the rest of the world. The other big piece of information that I found this morning on the Sydney Morning Herald website (http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/mobiles/windows-phone-7-has-stronger-start-than-android-in-australia-20110324-1c7oy.html) was that Windows Phone 7 has had a stronger start here in Australia than Android did when it was first launched here. Apparently for Q4 in 2010, 4.4% of smartphone sales were for Window Phone devices. Again it’s a small win, but it’s little wins like this, which give me confidence that Windows Phone is going to be a serious player in the long run. I’m hoping that this news saying that Windows Phone devices are selling well in Australia means that Microsoft will prioritise finishing making the full range of services the phone can utilise available here in Australia such as the Zune Music Marketplace and Bing Local Search (see this article for more information).

One last article predicts by 2016 that Windows Phones will have a larger market than iOS worldwide. The article states that Android will be number one with 38.7% marketshare, Windows Phone second with 22.6% marketshare, iOS third with 19% marketshare and RIM’s Blackberry fourth with 9.2% marketshare. This makes sense, because Apple market’s their products at the more wealthy audience so having a smaller marketshare makes sense, while Android works on nearly anything and so has a large market it can attract. Windows Phone sits somewhere between Android and iOS in terms of market, so being between them in marketshare adds up. You can read all the details here (http://wmpoweruser.com/ovum-predicts-nokiamicrosoft-will-redraw-smartphone-market-overtake-ios-by-2016/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter)

I started off the trip by flying direct from Brisbane to Los Angeles via VAustralia. This is an excellent airline, their in-flight entertainment system means that although the flight was 13 hours, I didn’t get bored because there was numerous movies, songs, tv shows and games to play. I ended up watching Vampires Suck, listening to good music such as Meatloaf and Kylie and just generally relaxing. We left at 12pm Brisbane time and got in at 1am, or 7am US Pacific Time.

In Los Angeles we stayed out at Anaheim, or about 10 minutes walk from Disneyland. We spent the next day driving out to Hermosa beach to see one of Dad’s old friends and then up to Venice beach. America has some very interesting differences when it comes to driving. Yes, they drive on the other side of the road compared to us, but there are several other differences too. Firstly, at the majority of intersections, a red light doesn’t always mean stop, it means stop if you’re going straight ahead or left, but if you’re turning right, then go right through. This is quite hard to get used to coming from Australia where red means stop… no matter what, especially as a pedestrian who expects all the traffic to have stopped when the walk man comes up, but then sees a car who is turning right. They’re legally supposed to give way to you, but they don’t always. They also often turn their lights to flashing red or yellow at night, which means treat this light as a stop sign or treat this light as a Yield sign respectively. Finally, the traffic is a lot more stop and start than here in Australia due to 4 way stop signs. Most suburban intersections in Australia either have no signs, a Give Way sign or a stop sign, but only on the minor road in the intersection. In America there are a lot of 4 way stop signs at intersections which means that all directions have to stop and then the car which got there first can go, followed by the next car which got there 2nd etc. I don’t know what happens when 4 cars get there at exactly the same time though lol.

So the next day I went and did the Hollywood and Universal studios tours. Hollywood is just a bunch of normal upper class suburbs with lots and lots of trees blocking out the mansions from view from the street. I get angry though when I hear that some of these celebrities have 40 houses across the world. I don’t think they need or should be allowed to own that many houses, especially when they would spend the majority of their time empty – it’s just an example of the need to spread extreme wealth more equally. The Universal studios complex is just a theme park, so not to much to write about here.

The next 2 days I spent at Disneyworld. Again it’s a theme park, so I don’t have a lot to write about this, but there was one sweet as room called Innoventions. This room was basically a home of the future style exhibit using to my shock – completely Microsoft products: Xbox 360′s, Zune HD’s, Windows 7 PCS, Windows Media Center, Microsoft Surface tables, everything except Windows Phone 7, which I imagine would be coming. We spent New Years Eve at Disneyland (which was just overcrowded) and then moved on to the next part of our trip.

We then drove up the Interstate 15 and 40 towards the Grand Canyon. This was a long drive and we never did make it to the Grand Canyon that night because once we got close to a town called Williams, there was snow everywhere. So we stayed at Williams that night under advice from the locals who said the small road up to the Grand Canyon would be dangerous at night because of possible black ice. It was -16 degrees there that night, very cold. We did make it up to the Grand Canyon the next day and we had a helicopter flight over the Canyon which is an amazing experience. We then drove to the visitors centre and looked over the edge of the Grand Canyon. What shocked me the most is that, there’s not any fencing around the edge. Just a small knee high brick wall, nothing more, which is so strange when you think of America’s “I’ll Sue You” society.

We then drove to Las Vegas. Well this is an interesting place, there are Poker Machines at the airport, at the car rental place, in the Casinos obviously, and as a child I was legally allowed to walk through all of them, as long as I didn’t try to play the machines. We visited the Coca-Cola store which was a pretty cool place and also saw “The Lion King” stage show, which was excellent! Dad was getting a bit sick here, so we decided instead of driving out to the coast and then up the coast to San Francisco that we would fly back to Los Angeles and then proceed up the coast. Well Dad fell unconscious on the plane there so we had to stay at the hospital at Marina Del Rey in Los Angeles. This treatment cost $7000, but thankfully travel insurance covered that. Dad was then fine, so we continued up the coast on US Highway 101 to San Francisco.

San Francisco was my favourite place on the whole trip. It didn’t have the glitz and glamour of Los Angeles, but it was calmer and had more class and style. It also was very close to Silicon Valley down near San Jose. If you lived in San Francisco and you walked around, you’d certainly be quite fit, because it’s an extremely hilly city, with the building style more like that in the UK where houses are all connected together and backyards are non existent. The first day we were in San Francisco we drove down to look around Silicon Valley. This was an amazing place. It’s so cool to see where companies like Google, Apple, Skype, HP and Intel have their headquarters. You unfortunately can’t go into most of those companies’ buildings, but just seeing them from the outside is cool. Intel have a great Museum/Shop which I visited and could have spent more time at, but time constraints meant I couldn’t. I also wanted to visit The Computer History Museum but sadly that was closed for renovations. The rest of the week in San Francisco was spent checking out the city, riding the cablecars and streetcars and the BART and MUNI public transport systems. I visited a Best Buy and they seriously have cheaper prices than Australia for nearly every piece of electronic equipment.

On the day before I went home, I got to drive to Petaluma and meet the one and only Leo Laporte in the TWiT Cottage (TWiT stands for This Week in Tech). TWiT is responsible for some of the best technology podcasts available on the internet and soon moving to an Internet enabled TV near you. This is one of the many things I wished to check off to have done before it’s not possible to anymore, so it’s great I got the opportunity. The TWiT team are very friendly and Leo Laporte is the legend I thought he’d be.

The next day we flew home back to Brisbane and flying in over Moreton Bay I witnessed the aftermath of the Brisbane Floods, with all the debris in the bay. The Queensland floods actually made big news in America, which is a real surprise, considering their media mainly focuses on internal affairs. Everyone who found out we were from Queensland immediately asked if our house was going to be ok with the floods and we thankfully were able to tell them that it was. So now it’s probably time to mention my thoughts on the country. In many ways, it felt a bit backwards compared to the way we do things in Australia, which surprised me. Here are a few examples:

• Money – They still use paper money which all looks exactly the same and is easily tear-able. Here in Australia we used polymer plastic bank notes with different colours and sizes for each denomination. Showing Australian money to Americans amazed them and many said they wished they had our money. Coins were also weird, especially the one cent coins, which are essentially useless and just build up in your pockets. Also the coins don’t get bigger for each denomination (the 5 cent coin is bigger than the 1c and 10c coin) and most coins don’t have a big number on them telling you how much they’re worth. It just makes things harder. Australia definitely has better money than the US.
• Tax Exclusive Prices – The other major issue I had was paying for items using cash. In Australia, the price tag on the item is exactly what you will pay at the cash register (except for rounding, you have to round to the closest 5 cents, but that’s easy enough), but in the US, the price on the tag is not what you will pay at the register because it doesn’t include tax. Here in Australia it is illegal to advertise the tax exclusive price, all prices must be tax inclusive. It would make things a LOT easier in the US if they introduced that, because paying for items over there is a bit of a guess if you want to pay just using small change.
• Tipping – Tipping is simply a way to make up for employers not paying their staff enough. We don’t have to tip in Australia because we actually pay our staff a larger wage that they don’t need to ask for more. It means prices are more expensive for services, but you end up equalling that anyway once you add the tip on.
• Homelessness – There’s a lot more homeless people who are visible on the street in the US, which made me sad . I simply don’t see that around Brisbane. You see them occasionally, but not on every street corner and that’s because we have a well established welfare program here. For the sake of all those homeless people, America needs one too.
• Guns – I swear the attitude on guns stems back from the independence and civil wars. In these moderns days, it’s just not necessary in my opinion for every citizen to carry around loaded firearms. There aren’t any enemy forces to need to protect yourself from and if nobody had weapons in public then you also wouldn’t need guns to protect yourself from other guns. The stats of the rate of gun sales increasing 16% in Arizona after the Arizona shootings just shows that a serious change of attitude surrounding guns is probably needed. That’s my view anyway, I know a lot of you will disagree, I can understand that.

So that’s basically it. I will mention that I had a great time in America, the people were very friendly, the technology was modern (yay for Free Wifi), there was lots and lots to see and it was an enjoyable experience I hope to have again, possibly in the form of a Uni Exchange in a few years!

Graduation day was a wonderful day. The school made it a really special day and made each graduate feel special and valued. It started with a full school assembly (Prep to Year 12) where the prefects and medallion students (those who spent their schooling from year 1 to 12 at the same school) were recognised. Then the valedictory with just the year 12 parents, students, form teachers and administration was also a special event. Many year 12 students spoke (some who were normally so quiet I had never heard more than 2 words out of them at a time) about their experiences from year 8 to year 12 and it was just a wonderful day. We then were presented with our certificates and we then left school forever. I went to a mini graduation party that night, which was a nice time to chill and just relax with friends from school.

The next day most graduates disappeared off to schoolies, while I stayed home and started reading about how to program Windows Phones – very exciting stuff. On Tuesday I went down to visit the schoolies on the Gold Coast. Was awesome to see Dan, Bre, Fraser, Rachael, Robyn, Ashleigh, Ashlee, Ashley, Madi, Hugh, Harry, Rob, Tom, Chris, Will, Michael, Stix, Chanelle, Alicia, Joel, Dexter & Many Others. Spent some time chilling in apartments, shopping and playing mini golf, but avoided the beach as usual ;D (curse you sand). That was a great day and I think I left at the right time before dark

Then Wednesday I finally got it – My First Windows Phone 7 handset! Sooo Happy! It’s a HTC 7 Mozart on Telstra’s $49 Cap which means $400 worth of texts and calls per month, plus 1GB of data to use each month (since they put the data limits on all their plans up 2 days before I purchased). It’s just a gorgeous phone, very sleek and responsive, most of the apps I want are there, integrates well with Microsoft services and anything which is currently missing is to be added in future updates which should hopefully ship regularly throughout 2011. Thanks for my step brother Michael for selling this to me

HTC 7 Mozart - Windows 7 Start Screen

HTC 7 Mozart - Windows Phone Games Hub

Thursday I went for my first driving lesson with an instructor. Now, I know my driving has been shocking over the last 2 years – since getting my learners in Feburary 2009 I have only driven about 6 hours and that was with my parents. Well finally I decided I needed to start to learn to drive, so with the help of an official driving instructor I will build up my confidence and aim to have my 100 hours done as quickly as I can. I’m hoping by September or October next year to have made up my 100 hours so I can start to go for my P plates.

Finally yesterday I went an visited my old primary school’s Special Education Unit to see my friends and old primary school teachers at the cafe they run up there every fortnight. It was a great day. So coming up for me there are  few exciting things. Firstly there’s the Melbourne trip which is going to be fantastic. Melbourne’s a wonderful city and spending a whole week there doing things for myself is awesome! Then there’s getting upgraded internet from ADSL1 to TPG ADSL2+ 200GB download per month, which will mean I can start to look at using Ustream for things more often and finally then America!

Anyway – I think this post is done. The first post school week has been great and I hope the rest of the holidays between now and university continue to be awesome!