Now, this guy works for schools, so its not like Bill Gates coming out and saying “Hey, Apple Bad, Buy MS” or anything.  But what he IS falling prey to is that we MUST keep lowering the bar on everything.  Software has to all be the same or else how can we deal?  Shockingly, kids deal with this just fine.  If they want to.  Further, the more they DO want to, the more they DEMAND better software, the more other companies will have to respond. 
What I dislike even more about this is the subtext that we should sacrifice kids creativity to make sure they know how to handle crappy software that inhibits their creativity for the sake of…what…learning to install drivers and how you have to reboot every time after you print?
Oh self-fulfilling prophecy…thy irony is sweet…

$800 Mac Mini? I’m all set, Apple | Education IT | ZDNet.com

However, even iLife has its drawbacks in an educational setting. It simply hands so much to the students that they struggle with software (whether Windows, Linux, or even pro-level software on the Mac) that isn’t so brilliantly plug and play. Yes, iLife rocks in many ways, but the level of spoonfeeding it encourages actually makes me think twice about using it widely, especially at the high school level.

(h/t to Fireball)

Software specifications, when introduced for the first time to a company, can be a horrible thing. 

There’s the initial design of the specification document, who gets to write them, etc.

Process stuff.

But there’s a bigger problem.

The lie.

When a specification is written, and sent to development, it should be a static document.  Understandably, this isn’t always possible.  Not every company has the resources to do the kind of thorough design review best practices require, and during development you learn, change your mind, etc.  So, in a perfect world, a specification is static, but in the real world, not so much.

The problem is when a specification changes but the document doesn’t.  If you tell me to do A,B,C and then change it to A,B+1,C and don’t change the document, we are living a lie.  And mostly I’m worried about the damage the lie can do to me.  Really, I can’t win.  If I do what the designer ask, and it goes poorly, they go back to the document and see that what I did doesn’t match the specification.  If I go with the original document and it goes poorly, the designer can complain about how they made a change and just didn’t record it. 

If a design specification document is not sacrosanct, then the developer has to work overtime keeping track of things so that when people come to complain, his ass is covered.

I can’t even imagine the size of this problem, if true

I also don’t understand the logic behind the decision that spawned this.  If going to Windows7 means buying all new software, and/or patching code so extensively as to pale the Y2K crisis (and, contrary to the post, I believe it would far exceed Y2K) why does Gates et al. think that anyone would bother staying with the MS product line?  At that point, you are faced with two choices: virtually start over from scratch, or actually start over from scratch.

I have a very hard time believing this is true, but I also have a very hard time believing Vista got released.

Again, I should preface this by saying I am, in fact, behind a firewall of no shallow depth.

However, I find it hard to believe that the firewall is causing all of IE7 to take forever, simply fail, or behave poorly in general.

For example…I have three tabs open.  None of them are on pages of any complexity.  No youtube, no flash, no video or audio or anything.  I am in tab 1.  I click on tab 3.  4 seconds go by before tab 3 activates and comes to front.  That is utterly unacceptable.

Can anyone tell me why, exactly, this monstrosity is beating out Firefox?  Why aren’t IT managers doing something about this? 

So I was VERY excited when I heard Firefox3 would have tags for bookmarks. But, even better, it does the below! W00t! Seems to me that a site with a well written description should be VERY helpful

Macworld | Hands on with Firefox 3

So how exactly do you use the tags you’ve created? You just enter one of them in the URL bar, and Firefox 3 goes and finds the sites in your bookmarks that match that tag, and displays them in a drop-down menu:

At the far right of each displayed URL, a small graphic indicates the source of the match. In this case, the first three matches were found based on their tags, and the last came from the bookmarked site’s description. When you open the full Bookmarks screen, you can see all of your tags and which sites are associated with each tag.