I moved this blog over to Wordpress at this address. I will continue to host the legacy posts here until such time that I can find a good migration tool. Please let me know if anyone has ideas.

http://digitaldilemma.wordpress.com/

I am a huge supporter of Microsoft. I am also a huge supporter of OpenOffice and hundreds of other open source / free software initiatives. I don't think these things need to live to the exclusion of one another. What I am not fond of is corporations, in the absence of the ability to compete, jumping to patent litigation and threats of litigation to squelch competition.

Recently, I had great fun using Microsoft OneNote 2007 on a tablet PC while on a technical training bootcamp. I leveraged Outlook 2007 and Sharepoint integration. I can publish directly from Word 2007 to my various blogs. It's all truly amazing, and it is breaking down many of my integration issues! Microsoft is doing wonderful things, but so is OpenOffice.

My initial reaction seems to be the most simple: Microsoft wants to kill OpenOffice. My kids use OpenOffice for school projects, and I have probably 8 personal computers in my life. Not being forced to license 8 copies of Microsoft products, even at steep academic discount, is a beautiful thing. I am very irritated that this is coming up. I reserve my final judgment for now, as I don't know all of the merits of Microsoft's claims, but at first blush it really alarms me. Here are a few links that I hope can get you thinking about the issue:

Infoworld Article

CNN Money Article

Slashdot

Additionally, there is a wonderful book that I would encourage everyone without a history of Microsoft's interesting business model when faced when competition. The hard cover edition was first published in 1992.

Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire

In Newark and the Poconos this week, my Verizon NationalAccess wireless delivered. I completed my Computer Forensic Hacking Investigator certification at Training Camp. At their facility in Bushkill, PA., there was no on premise wireless. Internet, streaming media, and Lord of the Rings On-line all worked without fail. I am very pleased with this service, and it demonstrates how the carriers are making anywhere computing a reality.

From Dallas to Newark I received this result

Most people conceive of K-12 and college as a classroom experience. Students sit in neat, geometrically aligned rows facing the ultimate source of knowledge: the teacher / professor.

The learning is structured and has a start time and an end time. Let's look at some not so atypical schedules:

a) K-12 student time in a classroom: 07:30 - 14:30 / 08:30 - 15:30 = 6 to 7 hours of classroom for 30 - 43 hours per week.
b) Typical 15 hour semester (5 3 hour courses) college curriculum: 15 hours per week in the classroom.
c) Summers off
d) Homework time in the evenings, play time on the weekends
e) 86 Instructional days per semester.
f) Yields around 1032 hours per year for K-12 where my kids go to school

This leaves 1032 of 8736 hours filled. Meals and sleeping occupy just north of 3000 hours per year, and it still leaves over 4700 hours per year of unoccupied time. Does learning STOP during this time?

These traditional structures, geared around pre-industrial agricultural calendars, move students through systems which certify certain learning outcomes and general convey a certificate of some form at the end of the cycle. The goal is generally to certify these students to the marketplace. These schedules were born of an era before YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, and vast choice in entertainment and news choices. Up until the 1980s, people even still only had 3 television networks and major news print for sources of information and entertainment. Now, these sources are democratized and unlimited.

Today, everyone can be a teacher and a learner. Even the professional teachers are going live on the Internet. I reference video learning on Google. Berkeley and Google team up to deliver many interesting and full length courses to anyone on the Internet. I posit that these sorts of inch forward movements are really precursors to amazing leaps forward in the way new generations of learners acquire new knowledge.

A very compelling pitch from Microsoft. Free mail with two GB per client. Rich integration with mobility; IM; and fat client in addition to the web client.

My workspace. A model of the future? What are the workspaces of the future going to look like. I have bluetooth, SLI, voip phone and much more. This is really just better of the same old. When will computing break out and do something new? Consumers lead this charge.

As of 14:03 CT, I checked Facebook on the Cho Seung-Hui shooter at Virginia Tech. So far, there are 58 groups dedicated to some form of discussion around this tragic individual.

Networking legends in the Southeast come together to discuss various regional opportunities in addition to our view of NLR and I2. In the photo, Don Riley of University of Maryland provides Larry Conrad of Florida State with high tech teleconferncing services. I.E. There was no conference bridge in the room.

Live from the floor of the Rosenstiel Schoolof Marine and Atmospheric Science comes the plenary session. As a new member, I hope to learn and observe during my stay here. I am a participating member in the Regionally Organized Networking group.

I am sitting on a seawall in Key Biscayne enjoying the latest Wired. This visitor was curious about some of the articles, so he eased on over to me. He learned about the shots fired sensor network put in by the City of Oakland. It is called shot spotter.