An Early Look at OpenOffice.org 3.0

ahziem writes "With the final release 167 days away and an alpha version available, it's time to look at OpenOffice.org 3.0's new features: view multiple pages in Writer, notes in the margin, Microsoft Office 2007 file format support, Solver in Calc, new visual theme in Calc, native tables in Impress, more columns in Calc, error bars in charts, performance improvements, real native Aqua Mac support, and more."

Comments

Re:Crap, is documentation out of date?

[SlashWombat]

Actually, I'd call that a flaw in the documentation ;). Too many people believe that your everyday "Delete" on a computer is absolutely permanent, and as such few take the time to "securely delete" sensitive data (ie, by overwriting it several times before removing the file system entry, the latter of which is the only thing done by a regular delete).

You obviously dont have a clue! What makes you think the operating system "overwrites" the file to the same place on the HDD? All you have done by "overwriting" the file is to create more copies of it on the HDD. The "DoD overwrite" is performed more like a low level format, and done on the entire media. It NOT something you can successfully apply from most OS file management utilities.
The reason for the overwrite used to be that using drive forensics, data that had been stored for a long time would affect the magnetic domains beyond the edge of the written track. one overwrite would not effectively "reset" the data at (beyond really) the "accidental" data. To read back the data required special hardware to extract the signal. (Just for starters, the HDD head needs to be moved OFF its track slightly, and the signal thresholds need adjustment.) It is extremely unlikely that these techniques still work with modern disk drives due to the newer record head technologies employed.

So, except for floppy disks, DoD overwite is unlikely to be of much use in this day and age. (And, who uses floppies anymore?)