STORIES

Cfengine 3 is released

Following speculation about the progress of cfengine 3, plans for which were first unveiled at the USENIX/LISA conference in San Diego 2005, cfengine author Mark Burgess finally announced the release of a training pack for the new cfengine language at LISA 2007 in Dallas, Texas, two years later.

"This marks the beginning of a dramatic improvement in the power and flexibilty of cfengine," says Mark Burgess, author of cfengine. "We are celebrating by forming a company." So the question on everyone's lips is: why the delays?
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Promising a rose garden?

"A Promising Approach to Management" is the subtitle of the essay written by Mark Burgess develops the philosphy that has made cfengine a flexible and successful solution to autonomic computer management. But there is more to this essay than a cute jingle. According to its author, we should think less about the details of our technologies and more about the promises we make.
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The Science of Compliance?

Following the financial fiascos of the 1990s that led to prosecutions for accounting irregularities, compliance with US federal and EU regulations has become an important imperative for many companies listed on the international stock-exchanges. When the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (2002) was introduced in the US, companies clammered to provide compliance services. Now, taking up the rear, EU regulators will introduce their own version of this act, called (with typical EU poetry) the "The 8th Company Law Directive" (2006). In each case, independent auditors can be brought in to determine whether companies show due diligence in complying with the regulations.

Legal documents are rather hard nuggets to digest for computer engineers, of course, so it is only natural to ask what the engineering consequnces might be and how these two laws actually compare. What about those companies that are listed on both European and US exchanges?

Now a new master thesis project at Oslo University College is now looking at a model for these documents and asking: can we create a common model both for SOX and EURO-SOX? Moreover, can we go further and map this into a set of configuration requirements, patterns and practices for users of cfengine?
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