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Education

How Do I Start a University Transition To Open Source? 497

exmoron writes "I work at a small university (5,500 students) and am in a position to potentially influence future software purchasing decisions. I use a number of FOSS solutions at home (OpenOffice.org, Zotero, GIMP, VirtualBox). My university, on the other hand, is a Microsoft and proprietary software groupie (Vista boxes running MS Office 2007, Exchange email server, Endnote, Photoshop, Blackboard, etc.). I'd like to make an argument that going open source would save the university money and think through a gradual transition process to open source software (starting small, with something like replacing Endnote with Zotero, then MS Office with OpenOffice.org, and so on). Unfortunately, I can't find very good information online on site licenses for proprietary software. How much does a site-license for Endnote cost? What about a site license for MS Office for 2,000 computers? In short, what's the skinny on moving to open source? How much money could a university like mine save? Additionally, what other benefits are there to moving to open source that I could try to sell the university on? And what are the drawbacks (other than people whining about change)?"
Government

Submission + - The First Federally Certified Voting System (electiontechnology.com)

InternetVoting writes: "The Election Assistance Commission has announced the the first ever federally certified voting system.While the Election Management System (EMS) 4.0 by MicroVote General Corporation has successfully completed 17 months of testing, many questions still remain about the United States voting system Testing and Certification program. Many systems are still being tested to obsolete standards, the current standards are set to become obsolete soon and cost estimates for future certifications are skyrocketing. The future of improved innovating voting systems does not look bright."
Security

Submission + - Microsoft Bows To Critics, Changing Windows 7 UAC (computerworld.com)

CWmike writes: "Reacting to intense criticism of an important security feature in Windows 7, Microsoft today said it will change the behavior of User Account Control (UAC) in Windows 7's release candidate. 'We are going to deliver two changes to the Release Candidate that we'll all see,' said John DeVaan and Steven Sinofsky, two Microsoft executives responsible for Windows' development. 'First, the UAC control panel will run in a high integrity process, which requires elevation,' said DeVaan and Sinofsky. 'Second, changing the level of the UAC will also prompt for confirmation.' The changes, they said, were prompted by feedback from users, including comments appended to an earlier post Thursday by DeVaan in which he defended the modifications Microsoft made to UAC in Windows 7."

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