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Pentaho 3.2 Data Integration 103

Posted by samzenpus from the read-all-about-it dept.
diddy81 writes "A book about the open source ETL tool Kettle (Pentaho Data Integration) is finally available. Pentaho 3.2 Data Integration: Beginner's Guide by María Carina Roldán is for everybody who is new to Kettle. In a nutshell, this book will give you all the information that you need to get started with Kettle quickly and efficiently, even if you have never used it before.The books offers loads of illustrations and easy-to-follow examples. The code can be downloaded from the publisher website and Kettle is available for free from the SourceForge website. In sum, the book is the best way to get to know the power of the open source ETL tool Kettle, which is part of the Pentaho BI suite. Read on for the rest of diddy81's review.

Comment Local? Try Global.... (Score 1) 605

by bugg_tb (#30607834) Attached to: Do Your Developers Have Local Admin Rights?
I just left a company after 3 years. What amazed me(as a developer) was that not only did we have local admin rights, we had global rights. This was ok for me as I have an element of sysadmin understanding, but my ex boss who used to be an administrator but now runs the BI systems did quite 'get' admin rights and the systems we ran.

Every day he'd randomly reboot servers, install different software in different places and generally make administration and licencing a nightmare. Also as a developer he didn't really have a clue as to how to organize things properly so things like SQL Server could only run one database on one machine, if he'd actually asked around (ie the sys admins) things would have been far easier, and I wouldn't have quit.

So in a nutshell testing servers with admin rights, fair enough, online servers with admin rights, don't let developers near them.
Software

An Early Look At New Features In OpenOffice.org 3.1 260

Posted by kdawson from the hot-bits dept.
ahziem writes "With the final release two months away and an alpha version available, it's time to look at OpenOffice.org 3.1's new features: eye candy, better charts, replying to notes in the margin, overlining, macros in Base, RTL improvements for Arabic and Hebrew, and (believe it or not) better sorting. Download and report any bugs you find."
Google

New Google Favicon Deja Vu All Over Again? 227

Posted by timothy from the matters-of-deep-significance dept.
theodp writes "Last June, Google rolled out a new favicon, the small branding icon that graces your URL bar when you visit Google. Which, as it turned out, bore a striking similarity to Garth Brooks' Circle-G logo. Well, Google went back to the drawing board and has come back with a new favicon, which it says was inspired by — not copied from, mind you — its users' submitted ideas. Some are also seeing inspiration elsewhere for the new favicon, which consists of white 'g' on a background of four color swatches. Take the AVG antivirus icon, for instance. Or everybody's favorite memory toy, Simon. Or — in perhaps the unkindest cut of all — the four-color Microsoft Windows logo, shown here with a superimposed white '7'. Anything else come to mind?" What comes to mind for me is just how obsessed many people are with the Google favicon.
Communications

The State of UK Broadband — Not So Fast 279

Posted by kdawson from the but-you-have-actual-competition dept.
Barence writes "The deplorable speed of British broadband connections has been revealed in the latest figures from the Office of National Statistics, which show that 42.3% of broadband connections are slower than 2Mb/sec. More worryingly, the ONS statistics are based on the connection's headline speed, not actual throughput, which means that many more British broadband connections are effectively below the 2Mb/sec barrier. Better still, a separate report issued yesterday by Ofcom revealed that the majority of broadband users had no idea about the speed of their connection anyway."
Quickies

Submission + - Which Countries Have An IT Skills Shortage?

Submitted by
bugg_tb
bugg_tb writes: "I am a programmer based in England and after a few years in the same job have finally got itchy feet. I don't want to leave the industry but I would like a change in scenery.
So my question is, if the destination really isn't an issue(I've done some contract work in Afghanistan), which countries have an IT skill shortage where I could put my skills to good use?"
Music

Submission + - Study shows file sharing has no effect on CD sales

Submitted by
jibjibjib
jibjibjib writes: "Ars Technica reports that a study by Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf, recently published in the Journal of Political Economy, shows that file sharing is not responsible for declining CD sales figures.

The study, entitled "The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis," claims that "a one-standard-deviation increase in file sharing reduces an album's weekly sales by a mere 368 copies, an effect that is too small to be statistically distinguishable from zero.""
Microsoft

Submission + - Did Microsoft buy Kazakhstan?

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft's open letter on Interoperability, Choice and Open XML is mocked by Opera's CTO in a CNET article titled Microsoft's amusing standards stance. Microsoft claims that governments wants a "choice" among standards.

Which countries? Is it Kazakhstan by any chance? Kazakhstan recently joined the relevant ISO group. In the past, consultants paid by Microsoft have joined standardization groups and become sympathetic voices. Are they buying countries this time?
Further, Microsoft's technical contributions to standards — and in particular Jean Paoli's (who co-authored the open letter) contributions to W3C — is questioned:

One of the authors of that submission was Jean Paoli. It is unlikely that he did much of the technical work on XSL, and he was probably listed for political reasons. Similarly, he was listed as an editor of the XML specification after Microsoft made some phone calls.
The author is not a fan of ODF, though, calling it a "memory dump with angle brackets around it". Instead, he suggests an advanced document format based on HTML and CSS that can be viewed in common browsers.
GNU is Not Unix

Submission + - how does one learn to use new distros

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "Close on the heels of Raymond Knocks Fedora, Switches to Ubuntu I ask slashdot. How do you switch distros ? I was a die-hard user of SUSE until the 10.1 release came out riddled with package manager problems and switched to ubuntu. Learning apt-get took a while and currently I am pleased with it. Some of my colleagues are using slackware and want me to switch to that. Is there somewhere one can stop ?"
Operating Systems

Submission + - SA turns back on Microsoft

Submitted by jacobez
jacobez writes: "South Africa plans to switch all government departments over to open source computer software instead of using Microsoft systems, a cabinet spokesperson said on Thursday. Themba Maseko told reporters the cabinet would use the open source Linux operating system in a bid to lower administration costs and enhance local IT skills. "

http://www.news24.com/News24/Technology/News/0,929 4,2-13-1443_2073631,00.html
The Courts

DoD Warez Leader Faces 10 Years in Jail 339

Posted by CowboyNeal from the hard-times dept.
An anonymous reader writes "After spending nearly 3 years in a detention center fighting his extradition from Australia, a leader of notorious warez group 'DrinkorDie' was yesterday arraigned before a U.S. District Court to face charges of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement and one count of actual criminal copyright infringement. If found guilty he faces 10 years in jail & a $500,000 fine."

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