Khoji On Tech (and more)

Rolf from Düsseldorf is haffing a rant, this time about American cellphone providers who charge for incoming calls…

I’ve now been using Office 2008 for about five days and I’m already ready to remove it from my Mac. It is painfully, embarrassingly, frustratingly bad. Either the Microsoft Mac team screwed up completely and lost all track of what they were trying to do or Microsoft is consciously trying to force users away from the Mac and back onto Windows. Possibly a little bit of both. This isn’t just my opinion — c’t, Germany’s most reputable professional computer publication, comes out very strongly and warns all users against installing Office 2008 in their new issue due to be published on Monday.

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I just got a nifty little gadget from Gear4 called the BluEye that adds Bluetooth, an FM radio and a wired remote to my iPod Touch and effectively transforms it into a phone with voice dialing. When calls come in anything playing on the Touch is automatically paused and you accept the call by pressing Play on the remote. If your phone supports voice dialing you can use that too, you just press the Bluetooth button on the remote once and speak the name to dial. This means that you can leave the phone in your pocket pretty much all the time and you don’t miss calls because you’re listening to your iPod. You also have the added advantage of the wired remote, so you can pause, skip tracks and adjust the volume without having to futz around with the touchscreen.

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You often hear about how tough it is to get good information from software support desks. What you don’t so often hear is how tough it is for software support staff to understand the mails that they get from some users. Many users write clear and comprehensible mails to support, but there are others.

In addition to my other work I often have to answer questions in technical support mails from users of a professional authoring system for technical writers. Before I started doing this I thought that it would be relatively easy — after all, I thought, they’re writers, I’ll only be getting well-written, comprehensible questions. Don’t you believe it — the Dilbert cartoons on software documentation are not only close to the truth, they are actually the opposite of an exaggeration. When I read some of the questions these “help authors” and “technical writers” send in I often wonder how they manage to tie their shoelaces in the morning, let alone produce comprehensible documentation.

So let me give you a few little tips that may help you to be a little more successful when you write an email to a support desk:

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One of the few really annoying things about WordPress has always been its stone age updating mechanism. Actually, it doesn’t really have an updating mechanism at all - you have to do everything by hand and so many WordPress bloggers never update.

No longer! If you don’t have it already go out and get the WordPress Automatic Updater. It’s brilliant, it works and it just takes a couple of minutes on any WordPress installation from 1.5 and higher. Highly recommended!

Adding to the HD format wars confusion comes a new contestant, HD Versatile Multilayer Disc (HD VMD), from the upstart British tech company New Medium Enterprises. What sounds like a new layer of insanity in the video formats farce may actually turn the industry on its head.

HD VMD uses regular red laser technology and large numbers of multiple layers — with up to 30 layers on a single disc it can match or exceed the capacities of BluRay and HD DVD. It has several huge advantages:

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The Magnatune music podcasts on the iTunes store are a terrific deal. There are nearly fifty different podcasts for virtually all kinds of music genres and every podcast is an hour of great music at 128kbps, without advertising and completely free, and it looks like new podcasts are added at regular intervals. It’s a great way to get into some of the really good music that Magnatune distributes. Just search for “Magnatune” in the podcasts section of iTunes store.

In addition to distributing good music Magnatune also has a Creative Commons license — you’re allowed to use all their music without royalties in non-commercial podcasts and the rates are also very reasonable for commercial use, based on what you are turning over. They also do a fair 50/50 split with the artists and when you buy stuff you get to choose what you want to pay, you have the right to give away copies to three friends (no DRM) and can download all qualities all the way up to CD quality WAV files. Highly recommended, lots of good music!

OK, the story was different: Apple actually wanted to allow customers to be able to create their own ringtones for free. The RIAA forced them to charge royalties and pass them on to the RIAA, while ensuring that the artists responsible for actually creating the music would not get any cut of the royalties. Words fail me…

Apple is the latest major company to get into nickel and dime crime, which is safe, legal and fantastically profitable. Their new iPhone ringtones function gets people to pay 99 cents for something they already own, and money for nothing is always the best best profit margin you can have. It used to be called theft.

Robbers used to hang out in the woods and collect loot from unwary travellers by threatening to insert sharp instruments into their soft parts or banging them over the head with a heavy stick. This is no longer necessary, there are much better ways to boil a frog nowadays.

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Maybe it’s time to treat digital media formats in the same way as radio spectrum bandwidth: We don’t have any problem with regulating the radio spectrum because it’s clearly a limited resource that everybody needs to use. Leaving it completely open would obviously make the spectrum useless.

The same applies to digital formats, it’s just not as immediately obvious. For example, a situation in which four or five different high-definition DVD formats coexist would effectively be as chaotic and useless as an unregulated radio spectrum.

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