Grown up.
Sure you shouldn't use Excel to store data that is supposed to be mission critical, highly available, maintain strong integrity etc but to perform quick and dirty dataset analysis its a very effective tool.
And no, I don't believe even MS Access fits the category to trust important information - it shares the same mechanism as Excel to
I use it mainly for doing onsite analysis, and to share this information with my customers without the need for them to install anything else. Its portable in the sense that anyone with Office can look at my data, charts and reports easily.
It IS the right tool for the right job, for what I use it for.
Like most people, I was apprehensive of the ribbon UI however after about 2 weeks of solid use I fell in love with it. Microsoft really nailed it, something had to be done given the shear amount of features available in a modern editor.
I hope to see some innovation from the OOo team to give their program a fresh face although I was impressed to see some improvements in their 3.1 release.
The demo was so much fun, playing co-op with a friend was really hard. We had to try the scenerio a good 5 times before we finished it.
The game has a sense of urgency, my heart was pounding during the first invasion of zombies into the house. The game requires a level of strategy I hadn't seen before.
To all these people that are whinging about the controls, it's refreshing that a somewhat different approach to game playing has been released. I'm tired of all the Doom wannabes.
Shame on the media for beating up the story regarding "media-fueled race controversy over the fact that Africa's zombies". Here's News! Its in Africa! If the scene was in New York, then you have got a point, but this is just blatant attempt to stir the pot in order to get reviews.
I'm definitely going to buy this game when it comes out.
We were using Novell e-Directory for the authority user database and AD downstream via DirXML for compatibility/legacy reasons.
Remember, Novell basically wrote the book on directory services. Microsoft just copied their implementation.
You can use ZENworks to store Group Policy objects but it will take much more than a Slashdot article to explain these concepts.
The beauty of eDirectory is that Novell have agents for basically every platform that is worth a damn, try that natively on Windows.
When you're dealing with something as critical as a central directory you don't want to mess about. If you have to throw some money at it to ensure some accountability and support then do it. Windows AD works as advertised, but it only works with Windows - you're on your own with anything else.
There is third party companies that have written software that bridge the gap to manage UNIX systems, users, applications, policy which from what I've seen works pretty well.
At the end of the day it comes down to understanding your environment, budget constraints, support, IT strategy, applications, business/IT partners.
Oh yeah one more thing, this big install is for an education body.
The OLPC is a noble idea, but I think Negroponte has underestimed the the will of its competitors to ensure OLPC doesn't take hold to give them a clear advantage.
When Intel "stole" the contract for the government of Venezuela, Negroponte was outraged, but what his missing is, its just business.
I congratulate Negroponte for his incredible effort to have a vision to give the poor the tools needed to escape dispair and to build a device, but in the end, if Intel can do it, and do it better - than it really doesn't matter.
I'd like to see the poor using free software, but in the end i'd prefer them to have food in their bellies and using commercial software than having free software and going hungry with a bankrupt OLPC.
Its a shame, because I personally love the look of the OLPC, the Classmate looks terrible purely from an aesthetic perspective.
In the event that Notes is open sourced, I doubt this will greatly impact the reach of the product further into the enterprise.
Notes is such a horrid development platform who only seen the Web as a medium a few ages ago. The last major release closed some of the gap but it has a far, far way to go.
There's a difference between open sourcing OpenSolaris, and open sourcing Notes which the article fails to mention. Sun has something to gain by open sourcing OpenSolaris: to sell more Sun hardware. Notes can run on a multitude of platforms and doesn't require specialised hardware (like z/OS) to take advantage of the system.
Anyway if I was running a serious Notes environment, I'd be running it on IBM hardware anyway. For small deployments it won't matter that much.
Protection of data is hard. There are many variables to consider.
The first step to understanding what data that requires protection is to perform a risk assessment. This will help identify information which may result in financial loss, corporate brand confidence in the event that the data is compromised.
It's important that this task has senior management sponsorship. Getting a sysadmin to "get on with it" is not good enough. It needs input from the business to understand the information that needs protection and also the funds to purchase the relevent software, hardware to provide the enforcement controls. Policies and procedures should be written to make it clear what should be done with the data, and also to illustrate to staff, guests, business partners what is acceptable.
Controls typically are installed on the desktop, servers and network in-line controls to capture information as it flows throughout the network.
In your direct question, there are a few options to protect the Word documents. But this is only a small set of the things you need to consider. Word does have some DRM controls and I'll leave it up to you to look into it. What is important to note is that Word format may not have all the necessary controls that you need, and you may need to compensate these with others.
If your company is serious about this, they really should get a security consultant involved to help you identify the risk areas, document the controls, and help with an architecture to protect the information across your enterprise environment.
A couple of security vendors do have some products on the market, but this area is still pretty young, but it is a growth area.
Google Data Loss Protection products from RSA and McAfee for a start.
It was prone to problems, and became so annoying I ended up buying a license of VMWare.
There is also one area which is very unstable - OpenBSD support. It crashes the latest versions of OpenBSD, reports out-of-disk errors etc. OpenBSD is definitely more picky on the hardware it runs due to its strong security features, which Virtual Box doesn't appear to implement properly to make it look "real enough"
Sun has recognised problems with OpenBSD but has said its so far down the important-list it won't bother for some time.
The NSW State Govt can't organise a chook raffle let alone something such as equiping kids with open source laptops. It has bigger fish to fry.
Besides, the topic is slightly wrong. Rudd isn't part of an Australian State, his part of the Federal Government. Two different beasts. The State won't 'give', it will 'receive'.
Rudd wants to give lumps of cash to a number of States based on need, spending not just on technology, but more importantly on infrastructure, health and education.
I'm no iPhone fanboy but it seems ironic that after 6 iterations of Windows Mobile, Microsoft still hasn't released an update to handle gestures.
iPhone is way ahead of the game in this area, and I'm sure Apple intend to exploit this position agressively.
Microsoft must be kicking themselves for resting up during the last couple of revisions, whilst Apple takes away significant market share and "wow factor".
Yeah, some would say our MA 15+ (highest for games and second from the highest for movies excluding porn which is X) is on par with the US NC-17 rating.
In a way our classification system is a little bit more liberal, we do allow our children to listen to fairly strong language,sex,gore when they are 15.
Yet adults can't play an adult rated game?
Exactly, this is my point. We hope to change that. However such themes as strong language, sex/themes is allowed because the rating is still fairly liberal. However none of the 'nasty/good' stuff that adults like to watch.
While we do enjoy some of the most liberal laws in terms of broadcast medium, we suffer due to the lack of a classification (R+) that would limit the sale of a game to an adult.
Apparently there is talk of a proposal and the govt is seeking comment on an adults-only rating for games.
This surely makes sense as the average gamer is now 28 years old. In fact, 20 per cent of Australian game players are aged 39 and over.
Let's hope this is brought into line with the movie ratings where we enjoy an adult only R rating.
The fault has to lie with the government and not the aide.
This comes down to just bad security governance, even my blackberry is encrypted and our BES servers enforce security down to the handset so that you can't install any unauthorised applications.
These devices of course are prone to loss, and given the confidential information potentially held on these devices should be reason enough to enforce the appropriate security measures on the devices.
I bet if Cuba had a ready supply of oil, this trade embargo would of only lasted a couple of years at best.
To deny your own neighbor access to the most basic of commodities is just as bad as the fight for ownership of the West Bank.
Cuba has dug their heels in for the past 15 years, maybe its time an olive branch is given. Why doesn't the UN step in? This embargo is hurting the people of Cuba more than the Cuban government.
Windows isn't a monolithic design. Its a hybrid kernel, and with every release of Windows Microsoft has seperated out user space even further, including dll-hell to further improve the paradigm.
One of the main guys behind Windows NT was David Cutler, a renowed software engineer and designer for VMS. Go and Google him, I can't be bothered to look up the URL.
That should at least give you a clue as to the seriousness of the product and what they set out to achieve: the copy bits of the system that mattered most to Microsoft.
I don't like toot my own horn but I've studied chaos theory and made some significant findings over the years.
My best work has been realised over a night of heavy intoxication especially between 18 and 23 years of age. This work requires a lot of effort and is usually conducted on Friday and Saturday nights. I can't believe just how many gifted mathematicians there is over these nights. So much research, so many beers.
However these days I'm a bit more relaxed and allow the the younger crowds to take over.
Even doing simple L3 inspection on the dataflows that ISPs like BT deal with would require insane amounts of hardware, let alone inspection on the application (5/7) layer. Not if they know what they are doing. You can easily segregate the network routes for inspection based on the customer by putting them into a different virtual network based on their credentials. The inspection part is even easier, with in-line products to do everything you'll ever to need to know about what's going on.
Slashdot Mirror
Grown up. Sure you shouldn't use Excel to store data that is supposed to be mission critical, highly available, maintain strong integrity etc but to perform quick and dirty dataset analysis its a very effective tool. And no, I don't believe even MS Access fits the category to trust important information - it shares the same mechanism as Excel to I use it mainly for doing onsite analysis, and to share this information with my customers without the need for them to install anything else. Its portable in the sense that anyone with Office can look at my data, charts and reports easily. It IS the right tool for the right job, for what I use it for.
As a power user of Word and Excel I find the inclusion of a native 64 bit version to be very welcomed indeed.
Excel 2007 added some much needed features that has truely turned it into a portable database program, whereby increasing the amount of rows from 64k to over 1 million, and from 256 columns to over 10k among other notable changes. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa730921.aspx#Office2007excelPerf_BigGridIncreasedLimitsExcel
Like most people, I was apprehensive of the ribbon UI however after about 2 weeks of solid use I fell in love with it. Microsoft really nailed it, something had to be done given the shear amount of features available in a modern editor.
I hope to see some innovation from the OOo team to give their program a fresh face although I was impressed to see some improvements in their 3.1 release.
The demo was so much fun, playing co-op with a friend was really hard. We had to try the scenerio a good 5 times before we finished it.
The game has a sense of urgency, my heart was pounding during the first invasion of zombies into the house. The game requires a level of strategy I hadn't seen before.
To all these people that are whinging about the controls, it's refreshing that a somewhat different approach to game playing has been released. I'm tired of all the Doom wannabes.
Shame on the media for beating up the story regarding "media-fueled race controversy over the fact that Africa's zombies". Here's News! Its in Africa! If the scene was in New York, then you have got a point, but this is just blatant attempt to stir the pot in order to get reviews.
I'm definitely going to buy this game when it comes out.
I've worked on very large directory deployments.
10 million user accounts.
We were using Novell e-Directory for the authority user database and AD downstream via DirXML for compatibility/legacy reasons.
Remember, Novell basically wrote the book on directory services. Microsoft just copied their implementation.
You can use ZENworks to store Group Policy objects but it will take much more than a Slashdot article to explain these concepts.
The beauty of eDirectory is that Novell have agents for basically every platform that is worth a damn, try that natively on Windows.
When you're dealing with something as critical as a central directory you don't want to mess about. If you have to throw some money at it to ensure some accountability and support then do it. Windows AD works as advertised, but it only works with Windows - you're on your own with anything else.
There is third party companies that have written software that bridge the gap to manage UNIX systems, users, applications, policy which from what I've seen works pretty well.
At the end of the day it comes down to understanding your environment, budget constraints, support, IT strategy, applications, business/IT partners.
Oh yeah one more thing, this big install is for an education body.
The OLPC is a noble idea, but I think Negroponte has underestimed the the will of its competitors to ensure OLPC doesn't take hold to give them a clear advantage.
When Intel "stole" the contract for the government of Venezuela, Negroponte was outraged, but what his missing is, its just business.
I congratulate Negroponte for his incredible effort to have a vision to give the poor the tools needed to escape dispair and to build a device, but in the end, if Intel can do it, and do it better - than it really doesn't matter.
I'd like to see the poor using free software, but in the end i'd prefer them to have food in their bellies and using commercial software than having free software and going hungry with a bankrupt OLPC.
Its a shame, because I personally love the look of the OLPC, the Classmate looks terrible purely from an aesthetic perspective.
In the event that Notes is open sourced, I doubt this will greatly impact the reach of the product further into the enterprise.
Notes is such a horrid development platform who only seen the Web as a medium a few ages ago. The last major release closed some of the gap but it has a far, far way to go.
There's a difference between open sourcing OpenSolaris, and open sourcing Notes which the article fails to mention. Sun has something to gain by open sourcing OpenSolaris: to sell more Sun hardware. Notes can run on a multitude of platforms and doesn't require specialised hardware (like z/OS) to take advantage of the system.
Anyway if I was running a serious Notes environment, I'd be running it on IBM hardware anyway. For small deployments it won't matter that much.
Protection of data is hard. There are many variables to consider.
The first step to understanding what data that requires protection is to perform a risk assessment. This will help identify information which may result in financial loss, corporate brand confidence in the event that the data is compromised.
It's important that this task has senior management sponsorship. Getting a sysadmin to "get on with it" is not good enough. It needs input from the business to understand the information that needs protection and also the funds to purchase the relevent software, hardware to provide the enforcement controls. Policies and procedures should be written to make it clear what should be done with the data, and also to illustrate to staff, guests, business partners what is acceptable.
Controls typically are installed on the desktop, servers and network in-line controls to capture information as it flows throughout the network.
In your direct question, there are a few options to protect the Word documents. But this is only a small set of the things you need to consider. Word does have some DRM controls and I'll leave it up to you to look into it. What is important to note is that Word format may not have all the necessary controls that you need, and you may need to compensate these with others.
If your company is serious about this, they really should get a security consultant involved to help you identify the risk areas, document the controls, and help with an architecture to protect the information across your enterprise environment.
A couple of security vendors do have some products on the market, but this area is still pretty young, but it is a growth area.
Google Data Loss Protection products from RSA and McAfee for a start.
was the reason why I tossed out Virtual Box.
It was prone to problems, and became so annoying I ended up buying a license of VMWare.
There is also one area which is very unstable - OpenBSD support. It crashes the latest versions of OpenBSD, reports out-of-disk errors etc. OpenBSD is definitely more picky on the hardware it runs due to its strong security features, which Virtual Box doesn't appear to implement properly to make it look "real enough"
Sun has recognised problems with OpenBSD but has said its so far down the important-list it won't bother for some time.
Fuck Apple.
They are trigger happy, litigating, non-compete iphone apps, trade secret party pooper mother fuckers.
I want my Think Secret back!
Its about time they get some of their own back.
The NSW State Govt can't organise a chook raffle let alone something such as equiping kids with open source laptops. It has bigger fish to fry.
Besides, the topic is slightly wrong. Rudd isn't part of an Australian State, his part of the Federal Government. Two different beasts. The State won't 'give', it will 'receive'.
Rudd wants to give lumps of cash to a number of States based on need, spending not just on technology, but more importantly on infrastructure, health and education.
I'm no iPhone fanboy but it seems ironic that after 6 iterations of Windows Mobile, Microsoft still hasn't released an update to handle gestures.
iPhone is way ahead of the game in this area, and I'm sure Apple intend to exploit this position agressively.
Microsoft must be kicking themselves for resting up during the last couple of revisions, whilst Apple takes away significant market share and "wow factor".
p.s i don't own an iPhone :D
Yeah, some would say our MA 15+ (highest for games and second from the highest for movies excluding porn which is X) is on par with the US NC-17 rating.
In a way our classification system is a little bit more liberal, we do allow our children to listen to fairly strong language,sex,gore when they are 15.
Yet adults can't play an adult rated game?
Exactly, this is my point. We hope to change that. However such themes as strong language, sex /themes is allowed because the rating is still fairly liberal. However none of the 'nasty/good' stuff that adults like to watch.
hehehe i like it...
While we do enjoy some of the most liberal laws in terms of broadcast medium, we suffer due to the lack of a classification (R+) that would limit the sale of a game to an adult.
Apparently there is talk of a proposal and the govt is seeking comment on an adults-only rating for games.
This surely makes sense as the average gamer is now 28 years old. In fact, 20 per cent of Australian game players are aged 39 and over.
Let's hope this is brought into line with the movie ratings where we enjoy an adult only R rating.
I felt a great disturbance in the CVS, as if millions of lines of code suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
I honestly thought this article was regarding the Arora browser based on WebKit.
Whilst I liked visiting the USA, its increasing stance against visitors is becoming too invasive to care anymore.
The first time I was forced to electronically store my fingerprints on your systems for an unknown period of time was the start of the end.
How wrong we were to assume that bio passports were enough to subdue to spooks.
Have a 'nice' day!
The fault has to lie with the government and not the aide.
This comes down to just bad security governance, even my blackberry is encrypted and our BES servers enforce security down to the handset so that you can't install any unauthorised applications.
These devices of course are prone to loss, and given the confidential information potentially held on these devices should be reason enough to enforce the appropriate security measures on the devices.
I bet if Cuba had a ready supply of oil, this trade embargo would of only lasted a couple of years at best.
To deny your own neighbor access to the most basic of commodities is just as bad as the fight for ownership of the West Bank.
Cuba has dug their heels in for the past 15 years, maybe its time an olive branch is given. Why doesn't the UN step in? This embargo is hurting the people of Cuba more than the Cuban government.
Australians will enjoy the ability to buy a pre-paid iPhone and unlock it to work on any network for $80.
They have allowed unlocking because the laws here don't allow you to lock a phone to a given provider without a reasonable option.
What a whole lot of trolling effort.
Windows isn't a monolithic design. Its a hybrid kernel, and with every release of Windows Microsoft has seperated out user space even further, including dll-hell to further improve the paradigm.
One of the main guys behind Windows NT was David Cutler, a renowed software engineer and designer for VMS. Go and Google him, I can't be bothered to look up the URL.
That should at least give you a clue as to the seriousness of the product and what they set out to achieve: the copy bits of the system that mattered most to Microsoft.
In Australia, at least one of the carriers will be offering a prepaid option. So no contract.
Their rules.
If you don't like it, then leave.
If you want somebody to blame, then direct it to the International Olympic Committee. Each country took a vote and China was selected.
Like or not....
I don't like toot my own horn but I've studied chaos theory and made some significant findings over the years.
My best work has been realised over a night of heavy intoxication especially between 18 and 23 years of age. This work requires a lot of effort and is usually conducted on Friday and Saturday nights. I can't believe just how many gifted mathematicians there is over these nights. So much research, so many beers.
However these days I'm a bit more relaxed and allow the the younger crowds to take over.