I'd have to say I agree with garrett's take on this one. I'm guessing the reason it was published was precisely because it is troll-bait.

04/09/02 21:30 CEST. chronicle of higher ed: american culture goes global ... or does it? i don't agree with this, but i don't have time to belabor the point.

4:54:23 PM  [] blah blah blah'd on this    [ blinked via dangerousmeta! ]

Bill Humphries' points to a SJ Merc article about FrameMaker.

Adobe Relaunches Framemaker to try for leadership on the Document Side of XML. The Mercury News had a front of the business page article on Adobe's re-launch of Framemaker. The gist of the article is that while Microsoft and Open Source have taken the lead on XML for data (XML-RPC, .NET, RSS, etc.) Adobe could take the lead in tools for editing large XML documents. But the article doesn't mention Adobe's competitors in that market: SoftQuad and ArborText, who have not let their products age.

SoftQuad and ArborText may not have 'aged', but they also do not have the same reach across OS platforms, and for certain tasks, Frame's interface can still be less horrific, IMHO...

The article mentions some people's effort to move their documentation efforts from Word to FrameMaker:

But there are a couple of huge barriers. One, people know how to use Word already, and it hasn't been easy to persuade them to switch. Two, FrameMaker feels a bit too intimidating for a lot of people.

First, it's very easy to persuade people to switch, if they have:

• documents longer than, oh, 45 pages or more
• lots of graphics in their documents (presuming you don't want the large red X instead of your graphic)
• numbered lists that they don't want spontaneously renumbering (Word's autonumbering is a DOCUMENT-level feature, not a paragraph-level one, which is why the numbers get all cattywhumpused for no apparent reason.)
• headers and footers they do not want to have spontaneously reconfiguring themselves

Second, Frame may be intimidating, but once you learn how it works (Here's a template, add content to it, and perhaps apply some additional styling to that content -- hmmm, what other products do that?), you can quickly be much more productive handling long documents. Compare the cost of some software and some training and third-party books on it (such as Tom Neuburger's The Masters Series: FrameMaker 6, which will be updated for v7.x) to the huge time-sink that Word causes as documents spontaneously recompose themselves, and it can be a real no brainer...

1:55:13 PM  [] blah blah blah'd on this    [ blinked via More Like This WebLog ]

There is a large body of evidence on the need for reflection in the learning process. It allows the learner to assimilate the information, and to create connections to their own prior knowledge and experience.

Mortimer Adler. "You have to allow a certain amount of time in which you are doing nothing in order to have things occur to you, to let your mind think."

Now all I have to do is make a convincing argument that surfing/blogging is a more productive form of this kind of reflection. Hey McGee, got any help for making this one fly?

11:19:35 AM  [] blah blah blah'd on this    [ blinked via Motivational Quotes of the Day ]