Someone inside the bowels of the NBC organization will immediately grasp the simple fact that Microsoft’s Silverlight is locking out ~20% of all web users because of a buggy Mac Silverlight runtime shipped with buggy  implementations for Firefox and Safari.  That simply drives viewers away.

I think the thing that bugs me the most is the pervasive culture of mediocrity that goes into decision to support a limited number of visitors to what is a huge investment/opportunity for NBC.  The attitude that alienating 20%  of your audience is perfectly okay is bewildering.  I’d think advertisers would feel differently about it, but my gut feeling is that mediocrity is just okay with them too.

The ‘Office Space’ moment that has already occurred was when the list of browser/OS combinations tested was severely limited due to ‘resource constraints.’   ‘ Resource constraint’ being the code words for,  “Do as little work as possible.”  and a workplace culture that aggressively penalizes risk takers.

The next ‘Office Space’ moment will be where Yahoo’s Olympic traffic beating NBC’s Olympic traffic is cast as a win for NBC, advertisers, Moms everywhere, and the U.S. of A.

I discovered that Disk Utility has what appear to be multiple restrictions on creating bootable disk images.  What you can do is burn an .iso image that is already configured to boot.  What you cannot do:

• Create/modify an iso/.cdr image that can boot on a PC.
• Make a disk image that will boot on a Mac.

As a system administrator, this is more Rights management shenanigans on the part of entertainment media distribution’s best customers Apple and Microsoft that prevent me from doing my job.

The competition for worst consumer computer operating system is now a two-horse race.  Let’s dispense with the drama and call it a tie.

Rasperries for blackboard! -Zero support for Apple’s browser. Must use Firefox.
-I had headphone/mic connectivity issues of the highest (non-functioning) order with the Java client. It seems to me it’s java runtime issue as the devices appear, but don’t actually connect to the OS.

Regarding headphone choices:
-Get plain-vanilla heaphones that plug into the Mac’s microphone, headphone ports.

I made the mistake of buying a set of higher-priced Plantronics headphones with the USB dongle provided as an ‘enhancer’ of some non-specific kind only to discover a number of problems.
-The way OSX works one needs to switch input/output options in the control panel when using the USB dongle. Fiddley, very fiddlely.
-The java client sees the devices. But it doesn’t work.

Blackboard appears to be Mac-hostile in the worst of all ways. That over-promised Marketing, “It’s Java and Java runs everywhere” speech the PHB’s get before they give money to Blackboard only to find out later the dozen users with Mac’s are riddled with problems. Since it’s only a dozen users, it sucks to be you.

I will test with Linux and see if it’s any better over the next few weeks.