Computer Applications In Business

What is tablet computer?

2012-06-03T18:44:00.001-07:00

A tablet computer is a versatile portable computing device featuring a touch sensitive screen that can be used as a writing or drawing pad.

It is a thin stand alone general purpose computer with an integrated interactive screen.

A slate tablet configuration resembles a high tech clipboard and lacks a built in keyboard (although one can be attached). The clearest defining characteristic of a tablet computer is its size and shape.

The term tablet surfaced to the general public around 2000 when Microsoft promoted the release of Tablet PCs from several major manufacturers.

All the functions provided by notebook computers are available in tablet computers but they are lighter than notebook computers.

Tablet computers shine for applications that involve handwritten input. Most tablet computers are also configured to accept voice input.

It can be connected to a network to transforms them into standard notebook computers.

Tablets are very light, weighing in at anywhere from slightly less than a pound and its battery is often longer than average laptop, coming around 10 hours or more.

These capabilities are particularly useful for insurance adjusters who do most of their work at the scene of accidents and natural disasters, real estate’s agents who need access to data while out with clients, and healthcare workers who are moving quickly from one patient to the next.

Tablet computing has evolved and changed dramatically. As the market continues to evolve and as more consumers adopt to technology, the tablet computer will became a dominant player in the world of mobile marketing.

What is tablet computer?

Business Intelligence: Impact on the Internet

2012-05-29T09:27:00.001-07:00

Business intelligence will empower users by giving them access to easily analyze and visualize essential financial and statistical data from the company’s different transactional databases.

The internet is making business intelligence applications even more powerful for several reasons:

Data sources such as exchange rates, competitive or industry measures, and so on can be accessed online and use by the business intelligence applications.

Convenience – the business intelligence application itself can be web-based, allowing users to access the system from home, while traveling or from remote offices.

Speed data of distribution or information is available immediately from anywhere.

Speed data collection – budgets, statistics, comments and the like can be entered from anywhere.

There is no need for software installation and maintenance on users’ computers.

Most business intelligence vendors now have a web version of their software, and as long as you have the infrastructure in place, you should seriously evaluate making your business intelligence information available through a web based application.
Business Intelligence: Impact on the Internet

Computer Attack

2012-05-22T07:30:00.008-07:00

Denial of Service Attacks
A denial of service attack results when access to computer or network resource is intentionally blocked or degraded as a result of malicious action taken by another user.

These attacks do not necessarily damage data directly or permanently (although they could), but they intentionally compromise the availability of the resources.

These types of attacks tend to affect the availability of computer systems for legitimate usage. These forms of attacks can include e-mail bomb attacks, sending thousands of e-mails to a particular computer system until that system crash, the software required to carry out denial of service attacks in widely available on the internet.

Another commonly used denial of service attack is the Ping O’ Death. The Ping O’ Death can crash or reboot a computer by sending a ‘ping’ message of greater than 65,536 bytes the default size is 64 bytes. Router updates have nearly eliminated these problems.

Denial of service attacks could be very effective against an Internet based company, since they rely on on-line connectivity. These sorts of attacks could easily disrupt electronic commerce on-line mechanisms.

Direct Attack

A direct attack would take the form of hacking into computer system and rewriting or stealing information. Some recent examples have that hackers operate for political purposes.

Another method of hacking is more concerned with attacking computers files and destroying, modifying or extracting data. These types of hacking attacks may be less apparent to organizations, as they may not realize they have a victim.

Cyber terrorists would use hacking as an extensive part of their ‘attack strategy’ against electronic commerce. By hacking Web sites, cyber terrorists will gain a global audience for their political message and they will also be able to discredit the security of the companies using the on-line service.

It should be remembered that hackers are available for hire on the open market and therefore their service can be easily acquired.

By actually hacking the data contained within the system, sales can be disrupted, or data altered. This would help to harm the organization’s effectiveness or allow fraud to take place.
Computer Attack

Intranet Business Value: Publication Cost Savings

2012-05-18T06:32:00.002-07:00

Many companies have derived business value from their intranet applications.

Intranet using companies report cost reductions, revenue increases or other benefits after they replaced traditional methods of accomplishing information publishing and other business processes with intranet based methods.

Many companies are replacing the publications of paper documents, company newsletter and employee manuals with electronic multimedia versions published on intranet Web servers.

Eliminations of printing, mailing and distribution costs are a major source of cost savings. Companies are also electronically publishing telephone directories, human resource materials, company policies, job openings, and many other former paper–based communications on intranet websites.

Companies that use web technology to distribute documents may experience momentous gains in productivity and incredible cost savings.

Like the reengineering craze that has marked the other half of the client/server revolution, converting many paper-based systems to web systems can save both labor and over head costs within an organization.
Intranet Business Value: Publication Cost Savings

What is a Groupware?

2012-05-08T09:20:00.001-07:00

What is a Groupware?
Groupware is collaboration software, that is software that helps workgroups and teams work together to accomplish group assignments.

Groupware is a fast-growing category of general purpose application software that combines a variety of software features and functions to facilitate collaboration. For example, groupware products like Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchanges, and Netscape Communicator support collaboration through electronic mail, discussion groups and databases, scheduling, task management, data, audio and video conferencing.

Groupware products are changing in several ways to meet the demand for better tools for collaboration. Groupware in now designed to use internet and corporate internet and extranets to make collaboration possible in a global scale by virtual teams located anywhere in the world.

For example, team members might use the Internet for global E-mail, project discussion forums, and joint Web page development. Or they might use corporate intranets to publish project news and progress reports, and work jointly on documents stored on Web servers.

Collaborative capabilities are also being added to other software to give them groupware features. For examples, in the Microsoft Office software suite, Microsoft World keep track of who made revisions to each document, Excel tracks all changes made to a spreadsheet, and Outlooks lets you keep track of tasks you delegate to other team members.
What is a Groupware?

Cyber Crime

2012-05-03T02:21:00.005-07:00

Online terrorism, computer crimes and cyber attacks are no longer abstract possibilities. They are real major threats requiring real, major safeguards.

The awareness of security has since September 11 events increased in many ways - increased concerned over physical sites, increased concerns of securing networked infrastructure and changes in corporate attitude from being confident about their organization’s security and delaying spending on security, to seeing IT security as an essential capital investment.

Surveys indicate an increase in external, as well as internal, attacks on information systems. The question is not if an organization’s system and business critical assets will be compromised, but when. We have already seemed numerous examples of viruses and worms.

Systems, data and personal information will come under attack. Every day, companies like EDS are discovering seven to ten vulnerabilities in systems around the world. Tomorrow it will be web defacements, semantic attacks, domain name server (DNS) attacks, distributed denial service (DDoS) attacks, routing systems and infrastructure attacks.

These are hidden weak spots attackers and cyber criminals use to get our information assents. What was secure yesterday simply does not hold up today. In addition to direct financial loss, the loss of reputation and trust cause real long term damage.

Companies have been facing real network related challenges in the regular course of business. Now, we add terrorist attacks to that list and government and private business have begin to think about vulnerability of the computer systems and networks that support critical infrastructures.

Society’ vital services and critical infrastructure: communications, finance, transportation, and utilities such as electricity, oil, gas and water rely on computer and computer networked. If these networked are damaged the nation will be disrupt.

Governments as well as business that own and operate banks, utility infrastructure, transportation systems, telecommunications networks and other critical systems, must be prepared for the possibility of a destructive attack in cyberspace. The cyber threat is out there, either directly or as collateral damage in other kinds of attacks.
Cyber Crime

Wireless Internet

2012-04-28T01:36:00.003-07:00

Vast arrays of technologies and applications have been developing for nearly twenty five years.

Not only have people and businesses become accustomed to using devices and data in new different ways, the manufacturer of devices, the middleware/software developers, and the communications companies have been increasing the offerings and capabilities of the available goods and services.

The listed below give some of the areas that are taking advantages of wireless application. It is to give an idea of what is currently happening.

1. Portable work devices. Being seen as UPS drivers’ tracking systems.

2. Transportation management. Trucking companies utilities laptop computer systems to monitor, track and manage every aspect of their drives’ and vehicles’ daily activities.

3. GPS and mapping services. Global positioning devices let us to know, through satellite tracking, where a devise is located.

4. Personal vehicle system

5. Inventory and ordering system

6. Banking and finance. Banks and other financial institutions are leading the way in offering services available through wireless devices as well as sending fund transfers through wireless network.

7. Utilities. For many years the power companies, phone companies and cable providers have used wireless devices both to analyze on site problem and also to communicate with centralized information sources.

8. Toll roads. Driving through toll booths using the ‘e-lanes’ to save times by paying tolls through a wireless communications.

9. Science. Field work and laboratory work can now combine notes, GPS data, and computational power a well as instrumental data. All through wireless network.

10. PDA applications

11. Military
Wireless Internet

E-Government

2012-04-18T17:46:00.006-07:00

In the commercial sphere, business to business (B2B), business to consumer (B2C) and business to employee (BTE) electronic business has come widely accepted.

Government are also embracing the internet to provide services to business (G2B) and citizens (C2C), as well as government to government (G2G), citizen to citizen (C2C), government to supplier (G2S) and government to employee (G2E).

In year 2000 European Union Summit in Lisbon set ambitious goal of making Europe the world most competitive and dynamic knowledge based economy.

It resulted in the eEurope Action plan to exploit the full potential of the Internet to promote a competitive economy. The objective is to make it easier to deal with local, regional and national governments by making services available electronically.

The benefits of e Government are reduced costs through more efficient processes, the integration of disparate agencies systems, and improved service to citizens via the internet and other electronic channels.

Investment by government will also decrease the cost of doing business through simplification of procedures self-service systems and one stop shop for enterprises.

The biggest beneficiaries here will be the small to medium enterprises, which are the backbone of the European economy.

E-Government

Privacy Issues

2012-04-10T18:41:00.001-07:00

Information technology makes it technically and economically feasible to collect, store, integrate, interchange and retrieve data and information quickly and easily.

This characteristic has an important beneficial effect on the efficiency and effectiveness of computer based information systems.

However, the power of information technology to store and retrieve information can have a negative effect on the right of privacy of every individual.

For example, confidential E-mail messages by employees are monitored by many companies. Personal information is being collected about individuals every time they visit a site on the World Wide Web.

Confidential information on individuals contained in centralized computer database by credit bureau, government agencies and private business firm has been stolen or misused, resulting in the invasion of privacy, fraud and other injustice.

The unauthorized use of such information has seriously damaged the privacy of individuals. Errors in such databases could seriously hurt the credit standing or reputation of an individual.

Privacy Issues

The Customer is Always Right

2012-04-03T19:15:00.000-07:00

Merchants who implemented this saying may take a few losses with untruthful customers, but their reward from good customer is immeasurable loyalty and confidence that customers will enjoy – or at least approve of – every shopping experience they have with merchant.

Ensuring that customer feels “always right” begins with the before mentioned prompt reply to e-mails, even if they are substantial complaints that must be evaluated within the company.

Answer all the complaints - within twenty four hours is, again, a good rule of thumb. Have someone designated to answer complaints or to route them to the appropriate person for maximum efficiency in replying.

If the complaint is serious and a offer of resolution will take time to develop, then send e-mail notifying the complainant that their complaint has been heard, a proposed solution is forthcoming and give them some time line for receiving the expected reply.

Along these lines, sometimes twenty four hours will seem too long to wait for an answer to a complaint. List your company’s customer service phone number on your web site for those customers’ that feels more like crises.

If no one will be available after hours to listen to a complaint, provide voice-mail access, and ensure a reply within one business day. Sometimes allowing customers or clients to vent their frustration when they need to, is enough to win their trust and respect and to keep them coming back.

The Customer is Always Right

Managing Information: Accessible Filing

2012-03-29T18:37:00.001-07:00

The reason why computers are sure to take over in more and more areas of organizational life is that they can make any information already collected for one purpose instantly available, to be used for many other secondary purposes. This has opened up totally new ways of using information.

Let us take for example the way information about groceries bought by consumers can be used in a retail outlet. In corner shops the proprietor often operates the till and once the customer has paid for his or her purchases the only record of the transaction is on the till roll – to all intents and purposes inaccessible.

It is of little consequence though because the proprietor is close enough to the action for decision making and knows roughly what the day’s taking are, how many customer have been served and whether there has been a run on a particular item.

In the supermarket, however, there may be 30 checkout operators and 10 000 or more different lines stocked. At peak times, purchases may be leaving the supermarket at a rate of 40 000 items per hour.

Stocks of each line must be reordered to arrive at the rate of consumption or changing demand for particular lines caused by promotional; activities or food scarce could be easily lead to empty shelves to throw away ‘till roll’ data collected for the primary purpose of calculating how much to charge the customer.

Once collected it must be used again for stock control, a secondary use. And that’s not the end of the story. Information is expensive to collect, but once held in digital form it costs next to nothing to store and so can be freely used over and over gain for a variety of secondary purpose.

For instance, till roll data collected over a period of months or years can be analyzed for long term trends and presented graphically to aid in forecasting and strategic planning. Till roll data becomes valuables for direct marketing when linked to particular customers who presented a loyalty card.

Customer who buys cat food may be interested in special offers in cat litter, and those who buy diapers may try a new range of baby foods. Their addresses are known, so they can be targeted for mail shots customized to their life styles and preferences.
Managing Information: Accessible Filing

Terrorist in the Internet

2012-03-19T22:34:00.002-07:00

In the developed world, the influence of information systems can now be seen in most operational areas of business.

A significant result of these advances is that organizations have become increasingly dependent upon the availability of systems and reliant upon the data they hold.

In recent years the internet has grown from a solely military/academic network to one that can be used by business or individual.

In the years since the first WWW applications were developed, there has been an explosion in the global use of the internet. With this growth has come an increasing usage of the medium by criminal and terrorist groups.

The term terrorist or terrorism is a highly emotive term. Generally it is use t0 denote “revolutionists who seek to use terror systemically to further their views or to govern a particular area”.

‘Cyber-terrorism’ is a different form of terrorism since physical systematic terror does not usually occur (although it can if it causes disruption to a critical system), but a widespread destruction of information resources can.

The problem of defining the term ‘terrorist’ relates to the fact that a terrorist group could easily be perceived as a resistance group carrying out lawful or morally legitimate actions.

Terrorist or resistance groups have difficulty in relaying their political messages to the general public without encountering censorship, they can now overcome this by using the Internet.

Different terrorist groups or political parties use the Internet for a variety of different reasons:
• Irish Republican Information Service is a service offering news articles relating to the troubles in Northern Ireland. Sinn Fein offer their own site containing of information about Sinn Fein, the armed struggle, policy documents………
• Zapatista Movement. They have several sites, detailing their struggle against the Mexican authorities.
• Third world terrorist/resistance groups have a cyber space presence.
Terrorist in the Internet

Supercomputers

2012-03-15T07:24:00.003-07:00

The fastest and most expensive computers available at any given time are generally called supercomputers.

Supercomputers have the most processing power of computers available. They are designed to perform large amounts of numeric computation quickly.

Initially, the term supercomputer only applied to the larger mainframe machines, today, the term also includes parallel processing machines.

They are primarily designed for high speed computation, especially for scientific research or the defense industry, but their use is growing rapidly in business as supercomputer prices decrease.

Some applications require extraordinary speed, accuracy and processing capabilities - such as sending astronaut into space, controlling missile guidance systems and satellites, forecasting the weather, exploring for oil, and assisting with some kinds of scientific research.

Supercomputer were developed to fill this need. Supercomputer is commonly used by the popular media to describe certain types of computer architectures that are, in some sense the most powerful available.

Supercomputers are also very valuable for large model simulation and complex mathematical calculations.

Supercomputers

Secure Electronic Payments

2012-03-13T08:49:00.004-07:00

When you make an online purchase on the Internet our credit card information is vulnerable to interception by network sniffers, software that easily recognized credit card number formats.

Several basic security measures are being used to solve this security problem:
• Encrypt (code and scramble) the data passing between the customer and merchants
• Encrypt the data passing between the customer and the company authorizing the credit card transaction
• Take sensitive information offline.

For example many companies use the Secure Socket Layer (SSL), security method developed by Netscape Communications that automatically encrypts data passing between Web browser and a merchant’s server.

However, sensitive information is still vulnerable to misuse once it’s decrypted (decode and unscrambled) and stored on a merchant’s server. So a digital wallet approach such as the CyberCash payment system was developed.

In this method, you add security software add-on modules to your web browser: That enables browser to encrypt credit card data in such a way that only the bank that authorize credit card transactions for the merchant gets to see it.

All the merchant is told is whether credit card transaction is approved or not. The Secure Electronic Transaction, or SET, standard for electronic payment security extends the CyberCash digital wallet approach.

In this method, EC software encrypts a digital envelop of digital certificates specifying the payment details for each transaction. Secure Electronic Transaction or SET has been agreed by the most industry players.

Therefore, SET is expected to eventually become dominant standard for secure electronic payments on the Internet.

Secure Electronic Payments

Google Power

2012-03-12T06:22:00.004-07:00

Search engines are magical machines. It is a software system that allows users to locate an internet resource – a web page, news group entry or other public file based on some search characteristic.

They’re mysterious black boxes that accept the requests for information and somehow manage to locate relevant regardless of where in the Web (or in the world) it’s located.

The Google search engine is simply the biggest and most successful search engine presently available.

Google was built by some seriously smart people and the company employs more than 200 PhDs.

The company was incorporated as Google Inc, on September 7, 1998. The data Google provides via it search capabilities were previously available in sources such as phone books, scholarly journals, library archives, restaurant menu, and newspaper.

Google has just dominated the market share in organizing and expediting access to the world’s information stores.

Google desktop enables users to search their own computer. Google Scholar allows specialized searches of material relevant in the academic world. Google Book Search provides an index to a vats array of books from leading libraries around the world.

Google images provides a comprehensive search engine of images. Google also provides limited capabilities for locating images based on the name of the file containing the image.

The Google advantage is the ability to index documents in a wide variety of information storage mechanism and the means for retrieving data in unified manner, with zero end user training.

Google Power

Personal Information Manager

2012-03-06T08:17:00.003-08:00

Personal Information Manager is a popular software package for end user productivity and collaborations, and is a popular application for personal digital assistant (PDA) hand held devices.

Personal information manager such as Lotus Organizer and Microsoft Outlook help end users, store, organize and retrieve information about customers, clients and prospects, of schedule and manage appointments, meetings and tasks.

The personal information manager will organize data entered and retrieve information in a variety of forms, depending on the style and structure of the personal information and the information wanted. For example, information can be retrieved as an electronic calendar or list of appointments, meeting, or other things to do, the time tables for a project; or a display of key facts and financial data about customers, clients, or sales prospects.

Personal information managers are sold as independent programs or are included in software suites and vary widely in their styles.

Structure and features, for example, Lotus Organizer uses a notebook with tabs format, while Microsoft Outlook organizes data about people as a continuous A to Z list.

Most personal information managers emphasize the maintenance of contact list, that is, customers, clients or prospects. Scheduling appointments and meetings and task management are top personal information manager applications.

Personal information manager are now changing to include the ability to access the World Wide Web also provide e-mail capability.
Personal Information Manager

Google Dance

2012-03-03T20:00:00.004-08:00

While search engine optimizers study every Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft patent application and search algorithm upgrade to figure out how to play it, most search engines keep their methods and ranking algorithms well guarded secret so as to collect the best search engine results and outfit spammers in this ongoing game of one-upmanship.

Google updates their PageRank vector on a monthly basis. This process of updating is known as the Google Dance because pages dance up and down the rankings during the three days of updating computation.

Google stores dozens of copies of its search index across its clusters an during the Google dance, which is period of time between the start and end, of the index update, some servers will inevitably have an old version of the index.

So at any point during the “dance,” the same searches could yield very different results.

Normally, the Google dance takes a few days, and this period is considered to be the best time for web sites to update the content of their web pages.

While the dance has change and Google now uses several update processes, the same kind of problem can still occur at Google and the other search engines.

Many webmaster have come to fear the Google Dance. After working so hard to improve rankings (by hook or by crook or by good content), just a slight tweak by Google in their page rank or content score algorithms can ruin a webmaster’s traffic and business.

The Google dance is Google’s time of the month. The dance is a major re-ranking of web pages that occurs after the Deepbot has finished indexing content.

As soon as the dance finished, Google starts a new crawl in full swing, and of the new crawl does not harvest the updated web pages, webmasters will have to wait for another month before Google will have a fresh copy of their site.

It manifests itself in fluctuating site positions in search results and changes in an individual site’s toolbar rank.

It is a time of great excitement for site owners as their site gain or lose toolbar rank.

The Google dance is unannounced but can be detected when results between the various data centers that Google serves results from are out of synch.

However since the IPO Google has become much more protective of its operation and these data centers are no longer publicly visible except through their IP address.

Google Dance

To ensure business trust

2012-02-29T04:27:00.000-08:00

The global economy is a digital economy, which depends on business fundamentals. At any given time, one of these fundamental is to establish trust. We have to make sure we are taking measures that infuse trust in our business partners, our employees, our consumers – and in the market.

Security and privacy are the enablers of trust in today’s economy. Effective security cannot be accomplished though technology alone: it is a process.

Collaboration and business continuity issues have therefore especially relevant: mission critical business functions, technology and business risks as well as risk mitigation and recovery strategies have to be identified.

Digitization by electronically capturing and storing records and data in secure, remote locations, creating stable systems and putting business continuity plans in place.

Business, as well as local, regional and national governments around the world need to increasingly turn to information technology – to digitization – to create more efficient and more secure processes to response to the new security challenges we are facing.

In addition, legal certainty is essential to establish trust. We must look to standardize out law and punishments for information technology crimes. Existing legislation needs to be reviewed to ensure that e-crimes can be prosecuted effectively. The current laws vary from country to country and the punishments often do not fit the crime.

It is essential that legal framework to combat cyber crime focus at international solutions that are balanced, flexible and meet broad international compatibility.

Furthermore, if not carefully considered, new laws can also have unintended damaging effects and government solution should take into account the expertise and adequate involvement of industry.

Action needs to be taken to both prevent criminal activity by enhancing security, but also to ensure that law enforcement authorities have the appropriate means to act if the prevention fails. However, the primary objective of computer and network security is to reduce risk, not to catch criminals.

To ensure business trust

Damn Small Linux Text Processing

2012-02-19T17:53:00.000-08:00

Damn Small Linux can be an excellent tool for learning Linux commands and running the Linux operating system. But what if you are not interested in becoming a computer nerd; can this software still be useful to regular people? The answer is a resounding yes; you can make use of this tiny operating system whether or not you want to learn the sometimes gruesome details of operating systems.

This article introduces the text editors that come with your free Damn Small Linux that runs on even obsolete Windows computers. You can use these applications to compose simple text or programs of any level of complexity.

Once you have downloaded and installed Damn Small Linux there are several equivalent ways of launching its text editors. You can click on the DSL button in the lower-left hand corner or on the Apps icon toward the top of the screen. Then open the Editors: there are four, Beaver, Nano, Notepad, and vi (actually vim). We will look at these editors in order plus an additional one.

Beaver is my choice for creating and editing the text files used in my Damn Small Linux tutorials. The name Beaver stands for Beaver is an Early AdVanced EditoR which is the kind of joke that many Linux and Unix people find funny. This editor is particularly useful for programming and web page editing.

Among Beaver's special features are color coding and the ability to convert text to Upper Case, Lower Case or to capitalize the first letter of every word. You can convert text among the following formats: Unix, DOS, and Mac. Programmers will be happy to learn that Beaver formats code for the following programming languages: C/C++, HTML, Perl, JavaScript, PHP, and Bash. Unfortunately the Help function is not available.

The nano program is especially used for email messages. It stems from the widely used Pico email program that is not available for some versions of Linux. I have not had the pleasure of working with nano but am told that many Linux and Unix people like it.

What the Damn Small Linux people call Notepad is actually another text processor that is similar to the DOS/Windows Notepad. I haven't used it because Beaver is more powerful, and just about as easy to use.

The final application in this group is VIM, vi IMproved. The original vi was a very-widely used text editor for Unix and Linux systems. Today most Unix and Linux people work with other, more sophisticated text editors. When I teach Linux on systems other than Damn Small Linux I teach a reduced version of vi. This editor is cumbersome, but you make like the improved version. Damn Small Linux offers you a choice.

The Office folder contains Ted, a word processor that is compatible with Microsoft Word. Ted saves documents in RTF (rich text format) that can be read by Microsoft Word and other word processors including Open Office. Ted and Beaver belong to different worlds; you can't take documents back and forth between these two applications.
Damn Small Linux Text Processing
About author: Levi Reiss has authored or co-authored ten books on computers and the Internet. He loves the occasional glass of wine as exemplified by his wine websites including www.theworldwidewine.com. He teaches Linux and Windows operating systems plus other computer courses at an Ontario French-language community college. Visit his new website http://www.linux4windows.com which enables you to download and run Damn Small Linux on even outdated Windows computers.

Cyber terrorism

2012-02-13T17:02:00.000-08:00

Online terrorism, computer crimes and cyber attacks are no longer abstract possibilities. They are real major threats requiring real, major safeguards.

The awareness of security has since September 11 events increased in many ways - increased concerned over physical sites, increased concerns of securing networked infrastructure and changes in corporate attitude from being confident about their organization’s security and delaying spending on security, to seeing IT security as an essential capital investment.

Surveys indicate an increase in external, as well as internal, attacks on information systems. The question is not if an organization’s system and business critical assets will be compromised, but when. We have already seemed numerous examples of viruses and worms.

Systems, data and personal information will come under attack. Every day, companies like EDS are discovering seven to ten vulnerabilities in systems around the world.

Tomorrow it will be web defacements, semantic attacks, domain name server (DNS) attacks, distributed denial service (DDoS) attacks, routing systems and infrastructure attacks. These are hidden weak spots attackers and cyber criminals use to get our information assents. What was secure yesterday simply does not hold up today.

In addition to direct financial loss, the loss of reputation and trust cause real long term damage.

Companies have been facing real network related challenges in the regular course of business. Now, we add terrorist attacks to that list and government and private business have begin to think about vulnerability of the computer systems and networks that support critical infrastructures.

Society’ vital services and critical infrastructure: communications, finance, transportation, and utilities such as electricity, oil, gas and water rely on computer and computer networked.

If these networked are damaged the nation will be disrupt. Governments as well as business that own and operate banks, utility infrastructure, transportation systems, telecommunications networks and other critical systems, must be prepared for the possibility of a destructive attack in cyberspace.

The cyber threat is out there, either directly or as collateral damage in other kinds of attacks.
Cyber terrorism

Single Database in Organization

2012-02-08T21:10:00.000-08:00

One of the reasons that organization were so slow to respond in the past was that they simply did not have a clear view of what was happening within their company. Yes, a large amount of data was available, but it was fragmented around the organization in many different places, different isolated systems and incompatible formats. Additional, the data was inconsistent due to different definitions, cut-off dates and measurement criteria.

Large businesses (and countries) have been traditionally less efficient than smaller organizations due to the cost of coordination and the increase in bureaucracy to deal with large amounts of information. Delegation of authority to compensate for this factor has led to lack of control, lower efficiency and fragmentation of business.

The solution is a single, logical, central database that gives everybody in the organization access to the same data at the same time. Many organizations are now bringing together all their separate systems to achieve this singular view.

A single source of data gives the organization the ability to combine information across all business operations. Whereas managers used to receive a separate printed monthly report from each system, they can now obtain daily, or even hourly, electronic reports that give a single view of what matters, as it happens, across their entire organization.

Chief executive can access a single dynamic report on screen to monitor their critical success factors and key performance indicators, such as sales, leads, liquidity, staffing or inventory levels. These interactive reports allow the user, not just to monitor everything that is important to the company, but also to investigate variances and get immediate answers within a few mouse clicks.

The availability of global information systems enables companies to maintain a functional structure on a large scale, which is more efficient, rather than creating multiple business units with complicated communication cycles.
Single Database in Organization

Google Books Project

2012-02-04T18:01:00.001-08:00

Google Books is a database of millions of books on almost any topic. It is a search tool that searches the full text of the books that Google has digitalized and added to its database.

The project started around 2003 when Google approached the Library of Congress with proposal to digitize all the books in the library. When the Library of Congress offered a counterproposal that would only include public domain books, Google did not follow up.

Google then turned other major libraries including those at the University of Michigan, Oxford University and Harvard University and the New York Public Library with some success.

The Google Library Project began in 2004 with the announcement that to would be digitizing the collections of five major university libraries. which would cover more than 15 million volumes.

It is an amazing resources and the good of using Google books that it can help educators assess the content of a book for its relation to the topic, readability level and to teach students about public domain materials and copyright laws.

Google Books has provided scholars the ability to engage on primary research in a way that did not exist till now. Google Books has taken some limitations such as lack of funding, travelling and research at various location by scanning historical documents that would have been difficult to obtain through traditional modes.

Google Books Project

Managing Information

2012-01-30T23:25:00.000-08:00

All organization must manage information, just as all businesses must make a profit, but for a chief executive to tell you to improve your information management, like telling you to improve profits, is no help at all. What you need is more specific direction on the route to those overall goals.

Is it fair to suggest that managing information is as important as making profit? However well you manage information, without profits your business will fail. But profits depend upon good decisions based on accurate information.

Decisions are impossible without information and manager are constantly seeking more and better information to support their decision making. Hence the growth of information systems – a term that generally means networks of computers, but strictly speaking should also include non-computerized channels or communication such as regular meetings, the in and out trays full of memos and reports and of course the phone.

To survive, every organization must have an information system. All organization must be able to collect information, communicate it internally and process it so that managers can make decisions quickly and effectively in pursuit of organizational objectives in a changing, competitive environment.

The information system is the nervous system, which allows an organization to respond to opportunities and avoid threats. To be effective it must reach every part of the organization, and beyond, into the furthest extremities of the extended enterprise.
Managing Information

E-Government

2012-01-25T21:45:00.000-08:00

In the commercial sphere, business to business (B2B), business to consumer (B2C) and business to employee (BTE) electronic business has come widely accepted.

Government are also embracing the internet to provide services to business (G2B) and citizens (C2C), as well as government to government (G2G), citizen to citizen (C2C), government to supplier (G2S) and government to employee (G2E).

In year 2000 European Union Summit in Lisbon set ambitious goal of making Europe the world most competitive and dynamic knowledge based economy. It resulted in the eEurope Action plan to exploit the full potential of the Internet to promote a competitive economy.

The objective is to make it easier to deal with local, regional and national governments by making services available electronically.

The benefits of e-Government are reduced costs through more efficient processes, the integration of disparate agencies systems, and improved service to citizens via the internet and other electronic channels.

Investment by government will also decrease the cost of doing business through simplification of procedures self-service systems and one stop shop for enterprises. The biggest beneficiaries here will be the small to medium enterprises, which are the backbone of the European economy.
E-Government

Targeting the Best Shoppers

2012-01-18T17:08:00.000-08:00

E-commerce ventures, just like retail stores, will sell their merchandise to three types of customers: the customers who know what they want and go get it, the customers who want to buy something but are undecided, and the potential customers who merely browse the Web.

The more directed the shopper, the easier the sale – as long as that shopper can quickly and easily find the product online, get all the information on the product and then complete the purchase. Therefore, websites should concentrate on the shopper who came for a product and wants to quickly and easily purchase that product.

The well known Amazon.com has a small search box that allows its customers to search for any product by title, author, artist, or other applicable data, the quickly lists all available versions, prices and the average shipping time of that product on the screen. One click shopping allows past customers to purchase the book or books without reentering credit card information. The directed shopper can access, buy, and leave the site with minimum effort.

However, sites that ignore the less directed, undecided buyers will miss a good deal of clientele. If site and products attract these types of buyers, it must be prepared to develop a storefront that help them easily and quickly browse products by brand, age, manufacturer, category, price and any other appropriate criteria. These shoppers will buy when they find a product they like, so they should be exposed to as many products as possible.

The least directed, browsing shoppers are the most difficult to convert into buyers. Personalized searches, specialty shops, hot products lists, and online promotions help attract these shoppers, who often will be drawn to a website’s “glitter’” or its look and feel, rather than its content, service, or products.

Sophisticated marketing campaigns and online tools such as generalized, all product queries; chat room and discussion groups; and other promotions can help turn these browsers into buyers, but a website should not count on these shoppers to succeed. Targeting a strong and directed base of customers is essential.
Targeting the Best Shoppers