PS3 gets Gaming Integration with Facebook

Facebook will be integrated into an upcoming PlayStation 3 firmware update.
Sony has confirmed earlier reports that the social networking website will arrive on the console in the near future.
Firmware 3.10 is to allow PSN accounts to be linked to the service, updating trophy and purchase information to news feeds.
The integration will also let developers publish additional information related to the game and set specific criteria such as the regularity of updates.
The upgrade will further streamline photo viewing functionality and modify the look of the PSN friends listing.
The announcement came as Facebook and Twitter support was released on xbox 360.

Security App Uses 'Keystroke Biometrics'

Boston-based Delfigo Security has introduced information systems user authentication software that uses "keystroke biometrics" among other factors for verifying user identity.
Keystroke biometrics capture a user's typing patterns, such as how fast a user types and how long keys are pressed. The DSGateway product is being marketed to financial institutions, health care organizations and e-commerce firms. The cardiology department of Children's Hospital Boston is the vendor's first health care customer.
In addition to usernames and passwords, the product captures 14 other identification profiles. These include typing patterns and system and browser identifiers, among other profiles. The vendor also offers third-party single-sign-on software with the authentication product.
Delfigo Security was founded in July 2008 and DSGateway is its first project. It is available in remotely hosted or client-hosted versions. More information is available at delfigosecurity.com.

The Fastest Computer In The World

A Cray XT5 supercomputer dubbed “Jaguar” has claimed the spot as the world’s most powerful computer, taking away the crown from an IBM supercomputer called Roadrunner.

Located at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, Jaguar posted a 1.75 petaflop per second (petaflop/sec.) performance speed running a benchmark called the Linpack, according to the newest edition of the Supercomputer Top 500 list. The newest edition of the list was released at the SC 09 supercomputer conference this week in Portland, Ore.

This was actually Jaguar’s third attempt to take the title away from IBM’s Roadrunner, which has held the world’s top spot for the last 18 months. This time Jaguar roared ahead with new six core Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices. Jaguar utilizes nearly a quarter of a million cores and has a theoretical peak capacity of 2.3 petaflop/sec.

IBM’s Roadrunner system, which is installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, was the world’s first supercomputer to reach petaflop/sec. speeds. It claimed the top supercomputer crown in June 2008 and held the spot in the November 2008 and June 2009 Top 500 roundup. This time around, however, Roadrunner only managed a 1.04 petaflop/sec. performance, down from 1.105 petaflop/sec. in June 2009, which was attributed to a repartitioning of the system.

Kraken, another upgraded Cray XT5 system, installed at the National Institute for Computational Sciences at the University of Tennessee, claimed the No. 3 position with a performance of 832 teraflops/sec. No. 4 was the IBM BlueGene/P supercomputer located at the Forschungszentrum Juelich in Germany at 825.5 teraflop/sec. And rounding out the top five was the new Tianhe-1, which means River in Sky, located at the National Super Computer Center in Tianjin, China. Tianhe-1 is being used for research in petroleum exploration and simulation of large aircraft designs.

Overall, the world’s supercomputers are getting faster. The entry level of the latest Top 500 list moved up to 20 teraflop/sec. from 17.1 teraflop/sec. The last system on the latest list would have ranked No. 336 on the previous Top 500 list just six months ago.

The full list can be viewed here: http://www.top500.org/

IBM Mashes Information and Analytics to Support Information Accessibility

IBM announced a new version of IBM Mashup Center that will simplify the assembly and publishing of information across a workforce and across the Internet for consumers, constituents and customers. This IBM Software wide product that is designed to enable business and IT to work together in the harvesting of information across the enterprise including content, documents, reports and integrate capabilities that can help individuals interact with the information but also information and services across the Internet. The growing volumes of information in organizations is not easily leveraged into business efficiently can be integrated easily for use across applications.

The IBM Mashup Center uses the IBM iWidget framework that provides a common technology wrapper around sources of information and capabilities that can be easily managed in a library where they can be shared and used for a wide range of needs. These iWidgets can be integrated together into composite widgets and can be easily assembled without programming or traditional application development cycles.

Reference: www.imformation-management.com

Business Intelligence v/s SOA

Business intelligence enlightens an organization about Information but it has to be relative to the business process Statistics (why things are happening), Trends and Forecasting / Predictive Modeling and finally Business process optimization. all require an understanding of the data in context. Most BI solutions or data warehouses are information integration solutions that bring together disparate information sources into a single well documented solution (with metadata) and are often updated daily. A BI solution requires a managed information architecture / environment which includes:

• Basic Metadata – reporting and operational
• Common Communications – semantic consistency, dictionary
• Data Architecture – data models, taxonomies, ontology
• Trusted Data (data quality) & Usage (data governance)
• Information Delivery - reporting and I even included data services

Not all BI solutions require or use a single integrated information source. An example of this is an organization that utilizes an ERP (like SAP, Peoplesoft, etc.) – although, they may still wish to develop customized reports using a BI package.

Services based architectures (including web services) required that we break the solution or application into small business chunks that support the processing of these services. Information about the processing becomes a natural output of this and this information occurs and is collected in real-time. Building Services Oriented Architectures [SOA] also required managed information architecture environment which similarly included:

• Metadata and Meta-process information (enhanced beyond reporting)
• Common communications – processes (business rules, choreography, orchestration, event-correlation), messaging (mechanism – MOM, delivery)
• Enterprise Architecture – component or flexible implementations,, defined layers of abstractions
• Data layer abstraction
• Governance – architecture, security, SLA’s, applications, portfolio, etc.

Next came a common integration point known as Master Data Management – something that required both disciplines. I think that this was the impetus for the convergence of SOA and Business Intelligence. It required the real-time integration of multiple applications (services based) but also the trusted data foundation (information architecture). It was a given that both solutions were developed using the business architecture as the source of requirements, and that both required structured communications (metadata) and governance (data at a minimum).

The IT community has sensed that there is a need for an overall integration architecture or method that we employ to the integration of systems and data and these terms we use should be consistent. Just as the builder, electrician and plumber can all communicate, we should learn from them.

CIS 8020 Assignment 2 AO Google Static Maps

A company in California manufactures and sells laboratory instruments and employs over 40 sales and service personnel, who are each based in various geographic parts all over the country. Sales people visit their local hospitals and laboratories, while service people stay on call and move from client site-to-site to perform maintenance and repairs on existing units. The headquarters in California must constantly be aware of the whereabouts of the sales/service in the field, so that when an emergency arises, HQ can properly allocate the job to the field person who happens to be the nearest.


Using Google's Static Maps API, the headquarters can update whereabouts of the people in the field, however often they decide would be necessary, map-pointing points of emergency against that of where a nearby field person is.
For instance, the field service rep. serving the Atlanta territory serves the states of Georgia, northern Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi. When an emergency arises and the person serving North Carolina is not available, the management may look at where reps currently are and make the decision to dispatch whoever is nearest at the moment.


View Larger Map

This API was chosen because of the simplicity it offers, and the company's needs are simple enough as well to be well served by the API. Being simple to implement and use offers the ability for quick updates, which is important since the locations for the people in the field are constantly changing.

CIS 8020 Assignment 2 - BM - Google Static maps

A map solution to keeping track of your offices.

A small business is quickly expanding and needs to provide a map to their city or office locations to potential clients. Their office locations are in growing areas so roads, buildings, and other pieces of infrastructure are changing often. The directions on their website need to keep changing, and showing a picture of the building is becoming difficult with the often changing surroundings. The decide to use a static map from Google which is easy to integrate, and is maintained by Google. 

Here is the map that would be shown for their Berkley office:

A light example of how you could select between offices is here:
http://coldmails.com/assignment2/Default.aspx.

This shows how easy it would be to switch between maps in 4 different locations.

The largest advantage to this solution is the maintenance by Google Alleviates the worry that many of the companies would have if they were going to try to maintain their own maps. The solutions is easy to implement and will automatically update. The speed is very quick, and the user experience is not affected at all given that you can adjust the image size to your liking in the API requests.