Daily Archives: August 24, 2010

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Microsoft Page Aimed at Mac Switchers

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Microsoft Page Aimed at Mac Switchers
PCs just work, Microsoft MCTS Training argues in a new Web page that attempts to convince Windows users not to switch to the Mac platform.

The site contains a list of talking points, including “Having Fun,” “Simplicity,” “Working Hard,” “Sharing,” “Compatibility,” and “Choice”.

It’s a bit of propaganda, perhaps. But Microsoft recognizes who its chief rival is, and has attacked it directly.

In the “Simplicity” section, for example, Microsoft says: “The computer that’s easiest to use is typically the one you already know how to use. While some may say Macs are easy, the reality is that they can come with a learning curve. PCs running Windows 7 look and work more like the computers you’re familiar with, so you can get up and running quickly.”

Users might interpret other comments less favorably: “Apple’s productivity suite file formats won’t open in Microsoft Office on PCs,” Microsoft MCITP Certification says in its “Simplicity” section. “This can be a real hassle for Mac users sharing work documents with PC users.”

MCITP, mcitp certification, MCITP Training, MCSE, MCSE Certification, MCSE Training, Microsoft

Dominate Your Fantasy Football Draft With Excel

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Dominate Your Fantasy Football Draft With Excel

Using the Value Based Drafting strategy and Excel spreadsheets, you can create a straightforward cheatsheet that’ll help you dominate your fantasy football draft.

NFL training camps are in full swing, and the regular season is only a month away. This is an exciting time for fantasy football players getting ready to draft their teams. If you own a fantasy football team and are looking to dominate your draft, creating a simple spreadsheet using Value Based Drafting (VBD) strategies can give you the championship edge. Fire up Microsoft MCTS Training Excel (or your spreadsheet of choice) and give it a try.

The ABCs of VBD
VBD is a strategy that goes beyond simply drafting the best player available and digs deeper to help you draft players that will give you the most value at their position. “It’s tempting to look at standard-scoring leagues and say, ‘Oh, clearly quarterbacks score the most points, so I should make sure and get one of those first,'” said Christopher Harris, fantasy analyst for ESPN.com in an e-mail to me. “But if all QBs score a lot of points, scarcity isn’t an issue, and you can potentially afford to wait.”

For instance, say you’re in a 10-team league that starts 1 QB and 2 Running Backs (RB) per game. If there isn’t much difference in quality among the top 10 QBs, but there’s huge gap in production when you get beyond the top 5 RBs, you’re better off drafting one of the top five RBs before the top five QBs even if those QBs score more fantasy points. As Footballguys.com writer Joe Bryant, the guy credited with coming up with the VBD concept, puts it, “The value of a player is determined not by the number of points he scores, but by how much he outscores his peers at his particular position.”
View Slideshow See all (8) slides
Step One: Determine Your Baseline
Step Two: Setup Stats
Step Three: Project Stats
Step Four: Sort Players by Fantasy Points

More

Another big advantage of using a VBD cheatsheet is you can tailor your cheatsheet specifically to your league settings and scoring system. “Gone are the days of counting touchdowns and field goals. Now yardage, receptions, bonuses for TD length, performance bonuses, etc., are all standard fare,” said David Dodds of Footballguys.com in an e-mail, “So it is natural that people want projections (and cheatsheets) that match up closely to their scoring system.”

Your VBD Cheatsheet
Creating your own VBD cheatsheet is fairly straightforward once you know the formulas involved in applying VBD principles, and have a good spreadsheet program like Excel. The first, and most time-consuming, step is projecting stats for the players to be drafted. You can do this by looking at each player’s stats from the past few years and factoring in their current playing situation to estimate this year’s stats.

To create my VBD spreadsheet I decided to trust the projected stats found on ESPN.com and CBSsports.com and my own intuition to estimate how well each player in my league draft pool will perform. Next, I used those stats to determine how many fantasy points each player would score and ranked them from the highest scorer to the lowest.

Ranking Potential Draftees
The critical step in determining players’ value is creating a baseline you can use to gauge other players at that position. The easiest way to do this is the Worst Starter method. With this method, you use the projected fantasy points of the worst starting player at a position as your baseline. So if you’re in a 10-team league that starts 3 Wide receivers (WR), your baseline for WRs would be the 30th WR in your rankings.

While this method works fine, Microsoft MCITP Certification I prefer to use Chris Harris’ method of counting how many players at each position are likely to be drafted in the first 10 rounds. This is harder to determine, but I feel like it gives me a more precise ranking. So if 28 RBs are drafted in the first 10-rounds of a draft, the 28th ranked RB will serve as my baseline player in determining the VBD values for other RBs. You can find a good estimation of what players are taken in the first 10 rounds of most drafts at FantasyFootballCalculator.com.

From there you determine each player’s VBD value by subtracting the projected fantasy points of your baseline player from the projected fantasy points of each player at that position. Finally, you rank all players of every position by their VBD value to determine each player’s overall value.

Go With Your Gut
As with anything in fantasy football, VBD isn’t absolute. There are times where you can afford to, or even should, deviate from the VBD concept. “I think of VBD as a way to normalize positions, so I can have a better sense of breaking points: where does it make sense for me to get my starting quarterback, or my flex player, or my starting tight end?” said Harris. “I’ll also factor in stuff like keepers, ADP(Average Draft Position), and what I know about the knuckleheads in my league (e.g., what positions they like, what players they tend to overdraft, etc.).”

Step-by-Step VBD
For the actual nuts and bolts of creating a spreadsheet using Excel, I called Todd Beckstead of FantasyStrategies.com, and he walked me through the process of creating a VBD spreadsheet of my own. Check out the slideshow to see how to create your own VBD spreadsheet.

If this seems like too much work, Beckstead and Dodd offer applications that can do all the heavy lifting of VBD for you. FantasyStrategies.com uses a Web-based application to generate a cheatsheet tailored to your league’s settings. FootballGuys.com’s Draft Dominator is an awesome standalone app that goes in-depth using dynamic VBD strategies that constantly change priorities based on needs/wants of the other teams and many other factors. The free versions work great, but you’ll want to pay for the premium versions ($4.95 for the premium Fantasystrategies.com draft guide, and $27.95 for the premium Draft Dominator) to get the most up-to-date projections.

Personally, however, I enjoy putting together my own VBD spreadsheet; it really helps you understand the nuts and bolts of your fantasy football league and it’s one of the best ways I’ve ever found to dig into NFL stats. And, as any sports fan worth his or her salt knows, the stats are half the fun. If you’re serious about fantasy football, give VBD a try—you’ll be glad you did.

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Like EMC HP pushes around smaller rival in bidding war

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Like EMC HP pushes around smaller rival in bidding war

The HP/Dell bidding war over storage vendor 3Par is shaping up to be a repeat of last year’s high-profile battle between EMC and NetApp.

In May 2009 NetApp triumphantly announced a $1.5 billion deal to purchase Data Domain, but was quickly outbid by EMC. Although NetApp raised its bid to $1.9 billion, EMC eventually won the seven-week bidding war with a $2.1 billion offer that provided a key victory over its smaller rival.
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Tech M&A deals of 2010

Fast forward to August 2010, and HP has offered $1.6 billion to purchase 3Par, topping Dell’s bid of $1.15 billion. If the HP/Dell contest follows the same pattern, Dell will soon raise the bid closer to $2 billion. (See also: Five technology bidding wars preceding EMC vs. NetApp.)

“The strategic value of 3Par to Dell is such that it wouldn’t surprise me to see Dell come back with a counteroffer,” says Pund-IT analyst Charles King. “3Par is going to go to whichever company has the stomach to stick with the bidding.”

Like EMC, HP is trying to push around a smaller competitor. HP reported more than $30 billion of revenue in the most recent quarter, compared to $15.5 billion for Dell. But while the HP/Dell situation is similar to the EMC/NetApp bidding war of 2009, there are some key differences.

At the time of the Data Domain bidding war, EMC reportedly had $7 billion in cash reserves, compared to $2.7 billion for NetApp. According to YCharts, HP has $14.17 billion cash on hand, compared to Dell’s $10.88 billion Microsoft MCTS Training.

While HP clearly has more money to spare in the contest for 3Par, Dell has a much larger cushion than NetApp did when it was pursuing Data Domain.

HP is also in a precarious position with shareholders, partly due to CEO Mark Hurd being forced out of the company in the wake of sexual harassment accusations.

“If HP pushes this too far, they’re going to have to come up with some very solid justification,” King says. “3Par is a highly innovative company, but this is still a fairly young market. The payoff is further down the road than a deal for a well-known entity like, say, NetApp would be.”

But even if one assumes that Dell is in a better position vs. HP than NetApp was vs. EMC, there is still at least one other consideration: 3Par isn’t the only option for either HP or Dell.

EMC and NetApp seemed to believe that Data Domain was far and away the best option in the data de-duplication market. 3Par is attractive to HP and Dell because of its thin provisioning and virtualized storage technology. But there are other vendors offering cloud-centric, highly virtualized storage systems (Isilon and Compellent are two examples).

Thus, if either HP or Dell believes the price for 3Par is too high, they may be less gung ho than EMC and NetApp were over Data Domain because they have other options Microsoft MCITP Certification.

“There are other companies in this space,” King says. “3Par wasn’t alone.”

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Registry operator Afilias embraces DNS security

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Registry operator Afilias embraces DNS security
which operates .info and more than a dozen other Web site extensions, will announce on Monday plans to deploy an emerging standard known as DNSSEC that adds a layer of encryption to the Internet’s Domain Name System.

Will security worries propel DNS into the cloud?
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Afilias will deploy DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) on 13 of the domains it operates — including .info, India’s .in and the Hong Kong-based .asia — by the end of the year. DNSSEC prevents spoofing attacks by allowing Web sites to verify their domain names and corresponding IP addresses using digital signatures and public-key encryption.

“Afilias supports more different top-level domains across the Internet than any other provider,” says Roland LaPlante, senior vice president and chief marketing officer for Afilias.”When we start making a move and start expanding the use of DNSSEC, it really makes quite a big difference on the Internet.”

The Internet’s root servers began supporting DNSSEC on July 15.

Since then, 26 top-level domains — including .org for non-profits and .edu for universities — have begun digitally signing DNS look-ups with DNSSEC.

“Afilias supporting DNSSEC is a pretty big increase in the number of top-level domains that support DNSSEC,” LaPlante adds.
In order to be effective, DNSSEC must be deployed across the entire Internet infrastructure, from the root servers at the top of the DNS hierarchy to the servers that run .com and .net and other top-level domains, and then down to the servers that cache content for individual Web sites.

Once it is fully deployed, DNSSEC will prevent cache poisoning attacks, where traffic is redirected from a legitimate Web site to a fake one without the Web site operator or user knowing. Cache poisoning attacks are the result of a serious flaw in the DNS that was disclosed by security researcher Dan Kaminsky in 2008.

Afilias says it will support DNSSEC for the .info domain, which has 6.5 million registered names, in September, followed by .in and .asia in early October.

Next, Afilias will roll out DNSSEC for the following domains before the end of the year: Mongolia’s .mn; Seychelles’ .sc; Honduras’ .hn; Belize’s .bz ; Antigua and Barbuda’s .ag; St. Lucia’s .lc ; St. Vincent and the Grenadines’ .vc ; Gibralter’s .gi; and Montenegro’s .me. Afilias also will support DNSSEC for .aero, a Web site name extension restricted to the aviation industry.

Afilias already helped the Public Interest Registry add DNSSEC support to .org.

“We learned a lot from the .org DNSSEC deployment experience,” says Ram Mohan, executive vice president and CTO for Afilias. “When you digitally sign a zone, the size of the zone increases. The size and type of queries that you get increase quite a bit. There are all sorts of infrastructure changes that you have to accommodate on the back end, but the end user doesn’t really see that much of a change.”

Afilias says it has spent several million dollars upgrading its DNS software — it runs both the BIND and NSD open source offerings — as well as adding server capacity to support DNSSEC.

“It’s been a multi-million dollar effort on our part,” Mohan says. “If you look at the DNSSEC deployment since 2006-2007, all of the DNS infrastructure upgrades, the software, the energy and the time, and you add them all up, it’s many millions of dollars…I think we’re going to recoup that cost in attracting customers who want to have a dot-info name that is signed.”
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Afilias also is touting its DNSSEC experience as it markets itself to be the back-end registry operator for hundreds of new top-level domains such as .nyc for New York City and .ibm for IBM Corp. that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a policymaking body that oversees the Internet’s DNS, plans to support next year.

“For the next round of new top-level domains, ICANN is requiring all registries to be DNSSEC signed from the start,” Mohan says. “When we talk to corporations about bringing up a new top-level domain, one of the things that has them liking us over others is that we have four to five years of design, deployment and practical experience doing DNSSEC.”

The Afilias announcement is another indicator that DNSSEC is gathering momentum across the Internet now that the root zone is signed.

The U.S. federal government is migrating all .gov Web sites to support DNSSEC, and that effort got a boost in early August when popular content delivery network provider Akamai announced that it was supporting the standard.

Another significant milestone for DNSSEC will occur in December, when VeriSign supports DNSSEC in .net. But the biggest boon for DNSSEC will occur next March, when VeriSign adds this extra layer of protection to the more than 80 million registered .com names.

One potential stumbling block for DNSSEC deployment is that some domain name registrars are lagging in their support of the security standard. Among the U.S. registrars that are leading the charge towards DNSSEC are GoDaddy, Dyn Inc. and NamesBeyond.

In a recent survey of domain name registrars, Afilias found that while 80% believed that DNSSEC was a good idea, only 69% had plans to offer DNSSEC services in 2011 or beyond. Registrars said they were waiting for their customers to demand the service, with 29% saying that a lack of user demand was their top concern regarding DNSSEC deployment.

“Cost does not seem to be much of a factor for registrars,” Mohan says. “They want enough time to roll DNSSEC out in a prepared and managed way, and they seem to want it to be market driven. They want to hear their big customers demand it.”

Despite these issues, Afilias is urging CIOs and other IT executives to prepare to deploy DNSSEC on the Web sites that they operate.

DNSSEC “is the single largest security upgrade of the core DNS, of the core of the Internet, ever,” Mohan says. “It’s happening right now at the network level, but in a short time, it will come up at your MIS level, and you have to be ready for it Microsoft MCITP Certification.”

Read more about security in Network World’s Security section.