U.S. Energy Department loses nearly 20 laptops a month
Last year we learned that the U.S. Commerce Department was losing an average of 17 laptop laptop computers per month. Now the Energy Department reports 1,415 laptops have vanished between 2001 and 2006, inclusive. That’s 19.6 laptops per month, on average, out of a reported total inventory of 71,874.
The Department claims none of the misplaced hardware had classified information, and only a few had personal or otherwise sensitive data. However, you have to wonder about such claims… if the organization has so much trouble keeping track of physical assets, how skilled are they at tracking information assets, such as what data those laptops had on them?
Reducing spreadsheet errors by suggestion?
Number-oriented people love their spreadsheets. Every once in a while I run into someone who has created a prized Excel document encrusted with VBA macros, filters and formulas that make String Theory look simple. Usually these monsters started life as a quick-and-dirty “what if” then grew over several years like fungus.
As I’ve written before, testing of these beasts is usually minimal yet the calculations they produce are trusted as gospel. Spreadsheet errors are estimated to cause billions in losses each year, yet the issue remains a blind spot for most organizations.
Oregon State University has announced a unusual tool they’re calling “GoalDebug” that attempts to help reduce spreadsheet errors. I say “unusual” because the software isn’t an auditing tool to verify spreadsheet accuracy in any definitive way, but rather what sounds like an expert-system driven suggestion system. According to the announcement, the tool identifies ways humans commonly make mistakes then “gives end users a chance to explore, apply, refine, or reject suggested changes”. From the announcement:
For instance, if someone sees a figure in a spreadsheet that seems suspicious or is clearly incorrect, they can plug in the correct number, and the OSU system can suggest several programming mistakes that might have created the error – which the user can then sort through and use to identify the problem.
I’m sure the system bears no resemblance but that description reminds me of the “Clippy” assistant for MS Office. As an end-user on-the-job training tool such a tool might have value, but should software regularly used for critical financial analysis be debugged with such a loose approach? Compare the functionality to other statements in the announcement:
“…it has been observed that up to 90 percent of the spreadsheets being used have non-trivial errors in them.”
“…the costs or financial misrepresentations are far more serious, and companies have lost millions or billions of dollar”
“There are dozens of places an error can be made… A person can click their mouse in the wrong spot, a simple mechanical error. They could use a plus instead of a minus, add a row at the end of a data area instead of in the middle, and get a completely different result.”
What other form of software is widely used and trusted yet results in errors 90% of the time, costs millions or billions and can be broken dozens of trivial ways? If spreadsheets are this bad, maybe it’s time to rethink using spreadsheets at all.
VMware Workstation 6 released
The latest edition of VMware Workstation is finally out of beta and available for download. Once again, VMware allows existing users of Workstation 5 to upgrade for a hundred bucks U.S.
In addition to the usual incremental improvements and official support for an even greater number of guest operating systems (including Windows Vista as both host and guest), this iteration of Workstation adds USB 2.0 support, session record/reply, and ability to run VMs without the console also running. See the full release notes for details.
There are only a few really useful new features I see:
- Ability to use all host memory (previous limit was 4GB) and up to 8GB per VM.
- Debugger integration with Eclipse and Visual Studio IDEs.
- Experimental support for para-virtualized kernels in Linux guests (”Virtual Machine Interface 3.0 enabled kernels”, according to the release notes).
- a new “ACE option pack” add-on that allows Workstation to create guests that can run stand-alone from portable media.
It’s not clear whether the guests created with the “option pack” are equally as protected from the host as they are with VMware ACE. Looks like I’ll find out soon… until May of 2006, VMware is offering the ACE option pack free both for new purchases and for users upgrading from Workstation 5.5.
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