I haven’t blogged for quite a while (although I’m constantly micro blogging on Twitter and Facebook), but I have been storing up a collection of links, stories, thoughts and other tidbits that I thought would be nice to share with all of you here who read my blog 🙂

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 Canberra wants us to believe that the technology we’re spending anything up to $60 billion on won’t be outdated by the time it’s rolled out.”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 The reason I think the NBN will take an extremely long time to be outdated (if ever) is that it sends data as light pulses down the wire and currently the speed of light is the fastest anything can travel, that’s just physics.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 :D. 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!