A quick burst of 6 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team
The fascinating thing in this is how few commands are used most of the time, and the appalling user interface decisions made in the new ribbon: "people use lots of commands, so let's cram them all in there explicitly."
An alternative view: keep the most used commands visible. Put the others in contextual menus. Simplify, don't complicate.
"Microsoft has rolled out a special deal (and new spoof video) for its cloud Customer Relationship Management (CRM) service, in an effort to draw customers away from from Salesforce.com, Oracle and SAP.
"The Redmond company will pay $150 in cash per user seat (minimum 50 seats per company; maximum 500) for customers that switch to its Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online service.
"However, to qualify for the service, businesses must be located in U.S. or Canada, subscribe to at least 50 Microsoft CRM Online licenses, and sign a 2-year licensing subscription for the service."
Interesting how Microsoft's principal business is built around the idea that it's expensive to shift from its products to rivals'. How does it go when the boot's on the other foot?
"Let's say you were given a year to kill Hewlett-Packard. Here's how you do it."
Witty.
Probably the best title for the COTD ever. Now you'll have to click through to understand it.
"One of the several new features in Chrome is the addition of HTTP Strict Transport Security. HSTS allows a site to request that it always be contacted over HTTPS. HSTS is supported in Google Chrome, Firefox 4, and the popular NoScript Firefox extension.
"The issue that HSTS addresses is that users tend to type http:// at best, and omit the scheme entirely most of the time. In the latter case, browsers will insert http:// for them.
"However, HTTP is insecure. An attacker can grab that connection, manipulate it and only the most eagle eyed users might notice that it redirected to https://www.bank0famerica.com or some such. From then on, the user is under the control of the attacker, who can intercept passwords etc at will."
Chrome will start having a preloaded list of must-HSTS sites. Seems like other major browsers should do this too.
A fun open data project in Toronto, Canada: "The City's controversial Core Service Review, a consultant-led examination of which municipal services might be cut or reduced for cost savings, involved public consultations in May and June. Those consultations generated over 13,000 responses from residents who either attended a consultation session, or filled out a form online.
"The City, being the City, crunched all that data into some black-and-white PDFs and posted it on an obscure section of its website. Brian Gilham had other ideas.
"What Toronto Said, a cleanly designed website that Gilham, a professional web designer, built over the course of three weeks in his spare time, provides a search-bar interface for the entire corpus of feedback data. It makes filtering the raw opinions of thousands of Torontonians about as simple as using Google to find a recipe for soup. It launches August 29."
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