Daily IT Readings

• BIRT - Open-source business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) project with the Eclipse Foundation.
• Groove Virtual Office v3.0
• Maximizer Enterprise 8
• NetSuite

Since the digitizing wave in the industry, every piece of information is stored electronically: e-mails, prepackaged or in-house developed database applications, documents, attachments, etc. In all of these electronic formats there is a corresponding growth in database applications.Over a period of time, database applications start spreading roots in search of more storage and start to cause performance issues: complexity in maintenance, functionality enhancements, and backup and recovery delays. In most organizations there is more than one database application environment involved along with the production which supports development activities and quality testing. On top of internal maintenance activities, the organization now has to face compliance regulations to store information for certain period of time based on the its industry. It becomes absolutely necessary to keep information live in the production system, accessible via standard interface. The question is how to control this growth and satisfy everyone's needs.

• Fifty-four percent of the executives polled have a positive outlook for their business in 2005, compared with 44 percent last year.

• Business services, and financial services, and insurance were the most optimistic industries, with 63 percent of each industry indicating a positive outlook.
  

• Public sector organizations - government, healthcare, and education - are increasing IT spending by 7 percent in 2005, compared with a decrease last year.

• Application Upgrades Are Top Priority For 2005

• Applications are the big winner for budgets in 2005. Fifty-nine percent of decision-makers surveyed identified deployment or upgrade of major packaged applications as a priority, replacing security as the top priority from the past year.

• Demand for business intelligence (BI) increases 9 percent. Regulatory concerns and an increasing quantity of data caused BI to retain the top spot in planned purchases. Demand for financial applications also stayed on top in 2005 with 4 percent growth.

• Content management could be the next "killer app." Purchase plans for content management increased 15 percentage points from last year, as firms adopt enterprise-wide strategies for managing Web content, documents, records, and digital assets.

• IT outsourcing remains strong. Application outsourcing is fueling Forrester's forecasted growth of 9 percent for the category, with outsourcing for applications maintenance growing 27 percent in 2005.

• TotalLMS – delivers, manages tracks and reports on any blend of learning activities: self-paced Web, live interactive Web, on-the-job, traditional instructor-led and documentation
  


• TotalLCMS – provides a complete environment for creating, managing, assembling, and delivering learning content
  


• TotalDashboard – offers the most complete packaged solution for measuring and analyzing the impact of learning activities on business performance by connecting to mission-critical applications
  


• TotalPerformance – provides a performance management solution that ensures all levels of the organization are aligned and working together to attain business objectives
  


• TotalAccess – enables offline learning capabilities for the mobile workforce
  


• TotalCollaboration – allows instant learner collaboration with peers and experts
  


• TotalInformation – helps manage tacit knowledge by allowing authorized users to publish and manage unstructured content to any web server, with instant, searchable access to information
  


• Virtual Classroom – provides a live, Web-based forum for real-time communication and collaboration among geographically dispersed individuals

• 10. Wireless Printing
  
• 9. Caring about 802.11i
• 8. Review of WiFi Finder
• 7. WPA’s Little Secret
• 6. Weak Defense…But Getting Better
• 5. Tool to Crack Cisco LEAP Released
• 4. WPA for Free under Windows 2000
• 3. WPA Cracking Proof of Concept Available
• 2. Weakness in Passphrase Choice in WPA Interface

And our most popular story? Best Wi-Fi Signal Finder Yet, a signal finder that has now been trumped by the Canary Wireless Digital Hotspotter, however!

• Winner: Water on Mars. Nasa's Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity discovered compelling evidence for the prolonged existence of salty, acidic water on the surface of the Red Planet.
• Runner up: Indonesian "hobbit". A team of archaeologists made the mind-blowing discovery of a new species of human that stood only one metre tall and lived on the Indonesian island of Flores.
• Human cloning. South Korean researchers made headlines across the world after announcing they had cloned human embryos, the first published and "peer reviewed" evidence this technique could work with human cells.
• Understanding condensates. In 2004, scientists made giant leaps in understanding ultra-cold gases called condensates, shedding light on some key problems in physics.
• Hidden DNA treasures. Stretches of "junk DNA" proved to be far more important than previously thought. They turned out to be essential for helping genes turn on at the right time and in the right place.
• Pulsar pair. Astrophysicists discovered the first known pair of pulsars, spinning neutron stars that shoot out jets of radiation.
• Declining plant and animal diversity. There was disturbing news this year about the decline of species diversity from large studies that surveyed amphibians, butterflies, plants and birds.
• Water on tap. New results on the structure and chemical behaviour of water could reshape fields from chemistry to atmospheric science.
• Medicines for the World's Poor. "Public-private partnerships" emerged as a force in 2004, according to Science magazine, affecting the way medicines are developed and delivered to emerging nations.
• Genes in a Drop of Water. This year, researchers hit on a new way to identify lifeforms too small and too remote to see. They collected water from diverse environments and sequenced the genes floating in it.

• Hitachi's TagmaStore
• Ultrium LTO 3
• Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) products

• Over four billion Web pages, each an average of 10KB, all fully indexed


• Up to 2,000 PCs in a cluster


• Over 30 clusters


• 104 interface languages including Klingon and Tagalog


• One petabyte of data in a cluster -- so much that hard disk error rates of 10-15 begin to be a real issue


• Sustained transfer rates of 2Gbps in a cluster


• An expectation that two machines will fail every day in each of the larger clusters


• No complete system failure since February 2000

Migrating to Page Controllers by Ethan McCallum -- Simple web apps can start simple, but when they grow more complex, they often need pruning and refactoring to be maintainable. The Page Controller design pattern can help separate concerns such as templates and logic. Ethan McCallum demonstrates this language-neutral technique with PHP.

• Explain how companies are creating efficient new processes and then redeploying them throughout the organization.

• Describe the basic features to look for in the still-new BPM software category.

• Provide a Product Guide to 24 of the leading BPM products.

• Share the nine habits of highly effective BPM deployments (gleaned from early adopters).

• Introduce programmatic integration servers, a new software category. These products wrap existing processes into new processes automated by BPM software, instead of ripping out and replacing legacy applications — ultimate reuse.

• Present a five-step approach to BPM success.