Internal Memo Confirms IBM Move to Linux Desktop
A few years ago, IBM gained a large price advantage by installing its own office suite on the computers it sells, rather than Microsoft's Office - I know because I bought two IBM desktops and a laptop at prices hundreds of dollars less than competing systems from Gateway, Dell, etc. So this next phase of IBM's plan is logical - to replace Windows with Linux in-house, probably as a prequel to using Linux as its primary distribution OS, thus undercutting the competition (who must add the cost of Windows to the sticker price) even more. More...

OLDaily Lite?
My apologies to everyone for yesterday's issue of 'OLDaily Lite' - all the fluff, none of the content. It was caused by a server hiccup that erased my links database (currently a 4 megabyte file containing some 5,000 records, give or take - you can grab it here if you're interested in my collected wisdom since August 12, 1999 (when I first started using this file format). Anyhow. It doesn't work any more. More...

New Laws Will Make Spam Worse
In my predictions paper a couple of weeks ago I said that new anti-spam laws would effectively legalize spam, making it worse. The laws are in effect now, and the early result is that they are making spam worse. More...

The Future is Now
Good set of tech predictions. Most interesting is the ietm about the iPod - Apple has really outflanked Microsoft with a slim, portable device that doesn't cater to the Windows proprietary music format. More...

The World’s Oldest Blockchain Has Been Hiding in the New York Times Since 1995
Daniel Oberhaus, Motherboard, 2018/08/31

A blockchain is created by hashing the contents of one body of text and implanting it into the next body of text. In this example, has was stored for all to see in the pages of the New York Tomes. This means that in order to change the contents of the text (which would change the hash) someone would have to crecreate the entire press run of the New York Times. More...

BU, ACC developing virtual reality look at First World War internment camp
Brandon Sun, 2018/08/23
This is a part of our history that has to a large degree been expunged and forgotten, but during the first world war internment camps were set up across Canada to isolate "so-called 'enemy aliens' -  immigrants who’d come to Canada from countries that were fighting against the British Empire." The records of these camps were destroyed in the 1950s. More...

The Future of the Profession Formerly Known as Training
The verdict? Murky. "In the end, it became clear that not only was there no consensus, but also that the richness of opinion mirrored the actual state of the profession: semantic chaos concealing highly organized pockets of practice. Instructors, courseware designers, competency experts, group facilitators, knowledge managers, executive coaches, career coaches, performance improvement specialists, diversity consultants, chief learning officers…they all feel they are part of the 'profession' no matter what they call themselves." But there are some trends emerging: leadership training, action learning, for example. More...