Now that’s interop!

 Yawn. Too little too late. Who cares? Novell has slid to the insignificant.

Now that’s interop!

Check out Novell’s BrainShare keynote for an amazing demo of the interoperability they have built between Novell eDirectory and Microsoft Active Directory. You can fast-forward to the demo if you’re impatient. It’s at 1:15:43 and it is awesome.
In an earlier post (Jan. 18/07) I mentioned that BrainShare would be the first true test of the agreement – Would a Microsoft executive speak? Answer = yes! Craig Mundie from Microsoft was on-stage with Novell’s CTO for a fireside chat.
Novell basically demoed the software I mentioned in yesterday’s post called Novell Domain Services for Windows. Some of the key things shown during the demo included:

• Creating a user via the ADUC MMC but the user created is actually added to eDirectory
• Modified the added user via iManager and refreshed the MMC to see the change appear
• Set up a two-way trust between two companies (acme.com and widget.com)
• Enabled sharing a folder in one company for a specific user in the other company
• From the other company logged in as that user and accessed that resource

Very nice indeed. Good work guys!

Source: Jackson’s Identity Management & Active Directory Reality Tour Travelblog: Now that’s interop!

MHackers selling IDs for $14, Symantec says

This is old news, but it still scares me. What is an identiy worth these days?

 

Hackers selling IDs for $14, Symantec says

By Jeremy Kirk, IDG News Service

Identity thieves are offering a person’s credit-card number, date of birth and other sensitive information for as little as US$14 over the Internet, said a new report on online threats released Monday.

The data is sold on so-called “underground economy servers,” used by criminal organizations to hawk information they’ve captured through hacking, Symantec said in its Internet Security Threat Report, which tracked online trends from June to December 2006. The information can then be used for identity scams such as opening a bank account in a false name.

“U.S.-based credit cards with a card verification number were available for between US$1 to $6, while an identity — including a U.S. bank account, credit card, date of birth and government-issued identification number — was available for between $14 to $18,” the report said.

Source: Macworld: News: Hackers selling IDs for $14, Symantec says

34 Reasons Why Readers Unsubscribe from Your Blog

My biggest offense is infrequent posting. For this I have a remedy. Post more frequently. 

34 Reasons Why Readers Unsubscribe from Your Blog

Thanks to everyone who has added their thoughts on why they unsubscribe from a blog’s RSS feed. There have been 109 comments left on that post so far and some interesting recurring themes have emerged.

I’ve attempted to categorize them below. Obviously with 103 opinions (and most people giving multiple reasons all in their own words) I’ve had to make some judgement calls in classifying comments left. Some of the categories below have overlap but I think you’ll get a pretty good picture of what motivates people to unsubscribe from RSS feeds.

34 Reasons Why People Unsubscribe from RSS feeds:

• Too many posts (the post levels are too overwhelming) – 37
• Infrequent Posting (or the blog is effectively dead) – 29
• Partial Excerpts Feeds – 25
• Blog Changes Focus (too much off topic posting) – 23
• Too many posts that I see elsewhere (Redundant, Repeated or Recycled News) – 19
• Uninteresting Content – 16
• Irrelevant Content – 13
• The Blogger’s Ego – Too much self promotion – 11
• Low Quality Content – 11
• Too many posts that are too long – 10
• Negative blogging – 7
• Feed Errors – Especially when a Feed Reloads the latest 10-20 posts every time – 7
• Offensive Content/Personal attacks/Discrimination – 6
• ‘infomercials’ (too much selling) – 6
• Blog Titles that Don’t Tell what the post is about – 5
• No or Poor Formatting in posts – 5
• My own interests as a reader change – 5
• No Longer Useful or Valuable – 4
• Too many links in the text and not enough content – 4
• Advertising – 3
• Inconsistent writing (style and focus) – 2
• Too Many Grammatical Errors – 2
• Found other feeds that are better – 2
• Too Narrow a focus – 1
• Too much repetition in topic – 1
• Pushiness of Blogger – 1
• Blogger Doesn’t Respond to Comments – 1
• No Images in the feed – 1
• Lack of Confidence or Opinion – 1
• Lack of a sense of who the blogger is – 1
• Too much clutter/extras at the end of posts – 1
• Talking Down to Readers – 1
• Too many quotes – 1
• Change of Primary blogger – 1

Source: 34 Reasons Why Readers Unsubscribe from Your Blog

If you love me, don’t say good job

 Yikes. All this time I thought I had it right.

If you love me, don’t say good job

Po Bronson has a great piece in New York Magazine, How Not to Talk to Your Kids: The Inverse Power of Praise. In it, he reports on the research of Carol Dweck and others, all pointing to the need to use specific praise. While parents and teachers might think it’s a good thing to say, “Good job,” or “You’re so smart,” these empty phrases actually turn out to be de-motivating. Instead, we should be praising specific behaviors. For example, you might say something like, “I can tell you really worked hard on that.” Believe me, as a parent, it’s tough to check yourself when you want to say “good job” and force yourself to find something to praise.

Recently my 7-year old daughter completed what must have been a difficult level of SuperTux. I saw her peeking out the window as I pulled into the driveway, and she ran to meet me in the garage, jumping up and down, to tell me the news. I said, “You see, all that hard work paid off!” I wanted to praise her not for being a good video game player, but for sticking to it long enough to accomplish what she did. That’s very different from saying, “you’re so talented.”

My 4-year old daughter is pretty good at coloring. When she’s coloring, I’ll comment on how impressed I am that she is really taking her time, trying to do a good job. Again, I’m not praising her talent, I’m praising the effort.

There are some great examples of the effects of praise in the article. For example, 90% of students who were praised for their effort after taking a test picked a more challenging set of puzzles when given the choice; only 10% of students praised for intelligence chose the challenging set. After a difficult test (no choice), and a subsequent test of equal difficulty to the first, students praised for effort performed better than on the original test, while those praised for intelligence did worse. It really is fascinating, read the article if you haven’t already.

My question is: is this age-specific? Do adults come to our classes with these notions about being smart? Could we apply a simple treatment to our students, dropping hints about how intelligence can be developed? What kind of impact would that have? And, is it the job of developmental ed or study-skills classes, or is it something we all should do?

Source: Big IDEA » If you love me, don’t say good job

Novell drives nail into Microsoft Office coffin?

 Can anybody tell me what business Novell is in? This approach seems way of course to me and hardly a real threat to Msft.

Novell drives nail into Microsoft Office coffin

By Stan Beer

Tuesday, 06 March 2007

The news that Novell has released an Office Open XML (OOXML) translator for OpenOffice.org is yet another nail in the coffin of the office productivity franchise known as Microsoft Office. However, if the open source crowd is really serious about denting Microsoft’s dominance in this space, what is needed is a little Evolution.

With the translator, Microsoft cannot hold customers captive to Office 2007. OpenOffice.org users don’t have to worry about receiving a Microsoft Word (and hopefully soon Excel and Powerpoint) file they can’t read. Now the onus is on Microsoft to update Office 2007 to include open document format (ODF) capability, which OpenOffice.org already has and is being increasingly recognized as a global standard.

Source: iTWire – Novell drives nail into Microsoft Office coffin

Writer Zone

 Finally, LiveWriter support for FireFox. Gotta love it.

cb

Blog This for Firefox 2.0 now available on Windows Live Gallery

The Windows Live Writer Blog This extension for Firefox has been updated to officially support Firefox 2.0 (in addition to Firefox 1.5.x). 

The Blog This for Firefox extension adds a button to Firefox which starts a new Windows Live Writer blog post prepopulated with content and title from the current web page. Blog the whole page, or just selected snippets. Interacts with other registered plugins to parse and structure web content where appropriate. Blog quickly when you find something of interest on the web.

Spike Washburn
Developer, Windows Live Writer

Source: Writer Zone