Free Republic

Thank you for clicking on this thread, and I beg your indulgence to read further. I am looking for a database-management-type software package on behalf of a children's summer-camp in Michigan. My problem is that I don't know where to begin my search, or whether an off-the-shelf product of this sort is even available. The requirements are quite simple, and I would imagine similar to the software one would use to run a baseball Little League. This software would have to have fields for such information as:name; address; phone; sex; age; birthdate; have forms been sent?; have forms been received?;...

Oracle has been in the news lately, as the investigation into a no-bid $95 million sale the company made to the State of California winds its way through the political process and, possibly, into the courts. The deal was supposed to save the state money, but it now appears that California has more software than it has employees to use it. And the savings the software was to bring the state may, in fact, be offset by the costs of fixing the problem. From where I sit, it looks like Oracle was all too willing to take advantage of state...

A few weeks ago I joined the free software camp, replacing my trusty and mostly reliable, Microsoft Office with the 1.0 release of OpenOffice.org. By free, I mean OpenOffice.org is an open source, zero-cost replacement for Microsoft Office with a comparable feature set. My verdict so far: OpenOffice.org rates a 7 on a scale of 10 from the perspective of an individual user untethered from corporate manacles. OpenOffice.org is indeed comparable to Microsoft Office in terms of its capabilities across its various modules. I've been using the version 1.0 release for my daily word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and drawing tasks....

The cat is out of the bag. During testimony before a federal judge, Microsoft executive Jim Allchin has admitted that some code critical to the security of Microsoft products is so flawed it could not be safely disclosed to other developers or the public. Allchin was arguing against efforts by nine states and the District of Columbia to impose antitrust remedies that would require Microsoft to disclose its code. He constructed dire scenarios of U.S. national security and the war against terrorism being compromised if such disclosure were required. Now turn this around. Allchin has testified under oath in a...

A company has a patent that essentially derives a fingerprint (hash, certificate, digital signature) from files on a client computer. It then sends the fingerprint to a server to see if they already possess the file. If they do, they just indicate in a database that this computer client has this particular file, and sets a pointer to it. If not the file is then backed up over the LAN/Internet (really the same thing). My question is, is this patentable? And if it is, does this mean the whole process is patented, or are all of its parts also patented....

CHP Undertakes Investigation SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- Reports of document shredding at the California Department of Information Technology prompted a California Highway Patrol investigation and the seizure of a large trash receptacle by Department of Justice agents, adding new intrigue to a growing Capitol scandal over a software contract with the Oracle Corp. The growing scandal prompted Republican calls for the U.S. Attorney's Office to step in. They want an investigation into a six-year, $95 million software contract with Oracle. A state auditor said that the contract could cost taxpayers millions of dollars. Republicans turned up the heat, accusing Gov....

May 2, 2002 George Skelton: Capitol Journal No Defense Tactic Can Hide This Ugly Software Scandal SACRAMENTO One sure sign that a governor's staff is scared and cowering is when it delays an important announcement until late on a Friday afternoon. This is straight out of every press secretary's tattered playbook, under defense tactics: Wait until Capitol reporters have left for the weekend--well past their deadlines--then release the embarrassing news. Minimize the negative coverage. It seldom works, of course. Alarm bells go off. Annoyed reporters and editors scramble and run the story. Then on Monday, they dig deeper. That's what...

WISCONSIN COMPANY PAYS SOFTWARE WATCHDOG $150,000 BSA Announces Software Grace Period in MilwaukeeWashington, D.C., April 29, 2002 – The Business Software Alliance (BSA), a watchdog group representing the nation’s leading software manufacturers, today announced that Commercial Communication, Inc., a printing company located in Hartland, WI, paid BSA $150,000 after a self-audit revealed more copies of Adobe, Autodesk, Macromedia, Microsoft and Symantec software programs on its computers than it had licenses to support. In addition to the payment, the company agreed to delete any unlicensed copies, purchase replacement software and strengthen its software management practices. This settlement announcement comes at...

One of the newsgroups I read reqularly is news.admin.net-abuse.email. This newsgroup deals with the ongoing war against spam. Today, a user posted a question about the email software that Senator Boxer was using. One reader quickly established that the copy of the program she is using was pirated. Can you believe it? A US Senator may be a common thief! Read the thread.

Quark shifting jobs to India Denver workforce halved while 300 join firm overseas By Andy Vuong Denver Post Business Writer Friday, April 05, 2002 - Quark Inc., one of Denver's most successful software makers, has cut its workforce here in half while significantly increasing operations in India over the past year, according documents obtained by The Denver Post. The privately held company's staff in Denver has dropped to about 200 employees from about 440 in July. During that time, Quark has hired more than 300 engineers in India. The shrinking local workforce, coupled with the company's growing presence in India,...

I had a job interview yesterday (seems to have gone really well) with a local electrical contractor. They're looking for a geek to come in and learn how to run their estimating software, part-time for the first 4-5 weeks, and then full-time. They were impressed with my resume, work history, and current job (I'm a student-worker helpdesk tech with a local community college). They're getting ready to use an estimation package called ConEst 2000 Plus, and wanted to know if I felt I could learn the package. It's a Windows based package, and I don't think I'll have any problem...

The technology behind Google's great resultsAs a Google user, you're familiar with the speed and accuracy of a Google search. How exactly does Google manage to find the right results for every query as quickly as it does? The heart of Google's search technology is PigeonRank™, a system for ranking web pages developed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University.Building upon the breakthrough work of B. F. Skinner, Page and Brin reasoned that low cost pigeon clusters (PCs) could be used to compute the relative value of web pages faster than human editors or machine-based algorithms....

My wife and I have come to suspect that our cable modem (high bandwidth) internet connection is not nearly as fast as our ISP (Road Runner) has claimed. We are looking for software that can monitor and report data transfer speed. My wife said she had heard of such a software but can't remember its name or where to get it. Anyone know about this? Thanks,lafroste

<p>WASHINGTON -- America's programmers, engineers and sundry bit-heads have not yet figured out how much a new copyright bill will affect their livelihood.</p> <p>When they do, watch for an angry Million Geek March to storm Capitol Hill.</p> <p>A bill introduced this week by Sen. Fritz Hollings (D-South Carolina) would roil the electronics industry by forcibly embedding copy protection into all digital devices, from MP3 players to cell phones, fax machines, digital cameras and personal computers.</p>

The Department of Defense is preparing to implement the most sweeping restrictions yet on foreign information technology (IT) workers. This planned policy—which will cover one-third of civilian federal employees—will ban non-U.S. citizens from a wide range of computer projects. The Departments of Justice and Treasury have instituted similar restrictions on non-citizens working in certain areas. Those steps were taken prior to last September’s attacks. The DOD policy—slated for adoption within 60 to 90 days—extends restrictions on foreign nationals handling secret information to “sensitive but unclassified positions,” which include the growing number of contract workers who process paychecks, write software,...

The Department of Defense is preparing to implement the most sweeping restrictions yet on foreign information technology (IT) workers. This planned policy—which will cover one-third of civilian federal employees—will ban non-U.S. citizens from a wide range of computer projects. The Departments of Justice and Treasury have instituted similar restrictions on non-citizens working in certain areas. Those steps were taken prior to last September’s attacks. The DOD policy—slated for adoption within 60 to 90 days—extends restrictions on foreign nationals handling secret information to “sensitive but unclassified positions,” which include the growing number of contract workers who process paychecks, write software,...

CRASH - The Online Edition - Issue 56 Contents Previous article:19 Part One: Boot Camp Next article:Jetman In the second of an occasional series examining the far-reaching effects of computers on today's society, MEL CROUCHER discovers that there really are such things as:KILLER COMPUTERS COMPUTERS CAN KILL! We all know about the rogue mainframes that have tried to start World War III (don't we?), or the computers that drove a pensioner to suicide by charging £2172 for two phone calls (don't we?), or the fantasy games that drive kids to murder (yes we do; see Monitor in Issue 54)....