e-Clippings (Learning As Art)

The Dead Horse Has New Legs! MSFT Breaks Standards Promise on IE8

This story from the Register is just beautiful; especially in light of my recent rants RE browsers. The story recounts how MSFT has already broken a promise it made all the way back in March - that the default mode for IE8 would be the "standards mode". That was contrary to earlier plans to which it appears MSFT has returned. Now it appears that most INTRAnet pages will NOT be shown in Standards mode - what does all this mean?

This means that a good many INTRAnet pages are going to start showing up with little broken page icons. Imagine that. This could be interesting - if MSFT starts breaking all kinds of corporate intranet pages - and yes, you can change the setting but boy is this sucker buried - then I wonder if this might herald a new opening for corporate Firefox....

Day 5 - HP, This is Just Obscene Packaging

(story link)

Seriously - there should be a fine in this for HP. You have to got to read the story to see what was in this box!

A Flashback to an Angry Bill Gates

I love talking about design and how important it is to keep the end users in mind - now this story that was re-printed on the eve of Bill Gates' retirement is wonderful and actually makes me like him more knowing that he gave someone hell about stuff like this:

(this is an excerpt from a Bill gates email from 2003)

"I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don't drive usability issues. Let me give you my experience from yesterday. I decided to download (Moviemaker) and buy the Digital Plus pack ... so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a download place so I went there.....This site is so slow it is unusable......In fact it is more like a puzzle that you get to solve. It told me to go to Windows Update and do a bunch of incantations...Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night -- why should I reboot at that time?....So I did the reboot because it INSISTED on it. Of course that meant completely getting rid of all my Outlook state."

There is much more in the story but isn't that great!

OMG...There are spies everywhere sabotaging our organizations!!

OK at least now we have an explanation for what has been going on in all of organizations.
We have thoroughly been infiltrated by spies who have read and are following this manual. Seriously. This is a manual from 1944 that taught spies how to sabotage everything from railways to organizations. It came to light as part of a presentation at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference on Intellipedia. 

Wanna hear the crazy part? I have excerpted the portion of the manual below that explains how to disrupt and destroy the internal workings of organizations. Tell me that many of these don't read like many of our own SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures).

(11) General Interference with Organizations and Production
     (a) Organizations and Conferences
            (1) Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to   expedite decisions.
            (2) Make "speeches." Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your "points" by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate "patriotic" comments.
           (3) When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committees as large as possible — never less than five.
           (4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
           (5) Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
           (6) Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
           (7) Advocate "caution." Be "reasonable" and urge your fellow-conferees to be "reasonable" and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
          (8) Be worried about the propriety of any decision — raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.

How about it? Any of it sound familiar? It all becomes clear to me now.

Oh..this does not bode well for Microsoft....

Instead of a man with no country, I'm a man with three computers and three operating systems. The 'no country' thing might be easier. I've got a workaday Dell Inspiron laptop as my base computer - nothing special here except that this one is the "approved" computer meaning this is the one that I can hook into my work network. I also have a shiny new Dell XPS M1710 laptop for evaluating apps that I can't install on my first computer because we can't have admin rights to those. Then I have a new MacBook that we use for yet another set of projects and evaluations. The first Dell runs XP, the second Dell runs Vista Home Premium and the I need to upgrade the MacBook to Leopard.

Neither of the Dells are particularly fast. The XPS is a big gun with the 17 inch screen and its pretty and all but I am about to put a bullet into the screen because of Vista. This is the worst piece of software engineering excrement ever to wander up onto the shore since I don't know what. What arrogant bloathead or series of tiered bloatheads decided that it was OK to design an OS that will choke a Core Duo machine if it doesn't have at least (as in minimum) two Gigs of RAM?!? I'm serious. I'd like to meet this dope. I can barely run Opera or Firefox with a few tabs open on an Intel Core Duo 2.16 MHz without the stupid thing hanging up.

So my first Dell has a 15 inch screen and runs XP. Its stable and does its job but offers nothing that any other generic PC wouldn't also bring to the table.

The MacBook then. I want a two-button mouse and a two-button touchpad and then I'd be pretty happy. The thing about the MacBook is that it runs so well, has Office for Mac on it so I think I can work in and create documents like Word and Powerpoint with less worries about compatibility than between XP and Vista! The MacBook also has the integrated camera, feels lighter, seems to use less power than the Inspiron and so on. So what's the point of Vista as an OS? Who cares anymore? I run all the MSFT stuff I need to on my Mac and if I really need to, I can use Parallels and/or Boot Camp.

Understand this...I have never owned a Mac before...don't own one now (the MacBook is for work remember?)...I've been a Windows user all my life except for a brief stint on a Mac in the early 90's. But now I just don't see the point. Anybody out there care to tell me why I need a Windows-based laptop?

Firefox and Opera...You Are Both Pissing Me Off!!

So I upgrade to Firefox 2.0.0.11 and all of a sudden, my fav browser is unstable; with 4 tabs open, I get a "Not Responding" error about every 5-10 minutes!

So I switch over to Opera my second fav...and I figure I'll just work in it...and they still haven't figured out how to render the blog posting pages at Typepad correctly!! Come on people!

I did notice that with the exact same tabs open, Opera is using significantly less memory than Firefox (hmmm...all those extensions maybe?).

That error happened while writing this post and I almost threw something! Fix these problems, BOTH OF YOU!!

Zone Alarm Listen UP!! This is NOT Customer Service!

Normally I run Zone Alarm's security suite of products and I generally think they are the best out there - they are certainly better than Norton in terms of being Norton being such a resource hog. I was having this problem though with my anti-virus not updating (hang in there, there is a point). I contacted tech support, not nearly as easy as it should be and I will re-print their "solution" to my problem below. Suffice it to say that I now in about Hour Two of this "solution" (typing this on my MacBook which is oddly virus free) and the uninstall program has totally frozen my system.

My problem, beyond the obvious, is that the response from Zone Alarm acts as if this is just something that happens all the time (probably does) but worse than that  - that it is somehow acceptable to create a product that routinely kills multiple hours of customers' time fixing the problem! This should not be acceptable. I will say the piece that gives me pause is when I wonder how many e-learning products are engineered like this - so that problem requires the client to supply the labor or eat the system downtime.

Maybe I'm just torqued at the system right now but there is a bad design principle at work here somewhere.

I'm tired people, so I'm only going to say this about 1,000 more times...

Look, we probably learn differently as adults than we do as children. Everything from our neurochemistry to our  physiology and  mental and economic contexts  have shifted...change is expected.  Industries also change; the horse and carriage give way to the car  which gives way to what? - the personal jetpack maybe.
The point (hard to see though as it is) however, is that with learning - the changes are going on inside our own heads and bodies. We are acted upon by outside forces but ultimately learning is an internal act mediated by our own individual/collective contexts. What learning is NOT is a product. It can NOT be shrink-wrapped. It can NOT be updated to version 1.2. It does NOT rely on a particular OS or even give a crap about what version of the Web we happen to on. Learning scoffs at mergers of companies and at specifications like CORDRA and SCORM. This misunderstanding has led us to countless, pointless discussions about lots of issues but ROI makes a great example (you can't really measure what's going on in someone's head can you? - no but you can measure performance - but people aren't selling Performance management systems (those would be PMSs and marketing would NOT let that happen).

We can do better or worse at creating opportunities for people to learn. We can use methodologies and technologies that seem to have a positive impact on peoples' ability to learn; but we are NOT selling learning.  So let's freakin' STOP talking about learning like its a product. Hey LMS CEO - you ever manage "a learning"? Hey authoring tool person - you ever make "a learning"? Can you send me one?

So how about for pete's sake, we all agree to start indulging in some semantic accuracy. Sell training. Sell systems that manage training or resources. Sell hardware or software but don't tell me you sell 'learning'  - because I swear, the next person/vendor/guru tells me something about 'learning' that implies a lack of understanding regarding the conditions above...I'm going to ask you to hand me one...a learning that is, and if you can't put in on my desk..out you go.

I swear...this is why people switch to Apple...

I just got a brand new M1710 Dell XPS for work. Looks like this...It runs Vista which is kinda nice since Vista

is now looking a lot like Mac OS X. Nice catch-up guys. Got it on Friday though and I am two service calls in. The first one is to replace the defective DVD drive and the second one is find out that I had to rip out the NVidia driver that came with the machine (turns out it was a 2006 driver..that makes sense on a laptop ordered and delivered in September 2007), and load up a new driver from Dell (couldn't use the "Update Driver" command in Windows cause that would just check the silly old Windows site). So my whole weekend gets shot spending time on support chats with Dell. Then I look over at my Macbook that worked out of the box...hmmm.

Yea!! Apple Gives Me Back $100...that I can only spend with them...

...in case you can't see it in the picture, I think that's my wallet he's holding. So apologies are nice but while I'll take the $100 and while I think this effort goes well beyond anything you'd ever see any other tech company do, its still weak - no getting around it.