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You Can Store Your Data Outside Your Organisation	05 November 2007
... disaster data recovery service for organisations and businesses. The service enables organisations and businesses to ... providers of disaster recovery solutions in East Africa. The company has implemented disaster recovery solutions ... and Kenya, and disaster recovery consultancy in Ethiopia. In Uganda, the firm has installed disaster ...
Troubled Pakistan aims for a larger share of outsourcing	17 August 2007
(InfoWorld) - Pakistan, which has been affected by Islamic extremist violence and civil unrest against the current government, is trying hard to compete for a share of the offshore outsourcing business. The country's highly skilled, English-speaking people provide a key advantage, said Yusuf Hussain, managing director of the Pakistan Software Export Board (PSEB), a government agency set up to promote the IT, BPO (business process outsourcing), and call center industries in Pakistan. Some multinational companies have centers in Pakistan, while others are outsourcing work to IT and services companies in the region, he added. Salaries in Pakistan are lower by 30 percent than in neighboring India, said Ashraf Kapadia, president of the Pakistan Software Houses Association (PASHA), an association of software, call center, and BPO companies in Pakistan. On the downside, the country has an image problem, according to Kapadia. "There is this perception abroad that Pakistan is politically unstable," he said. However, these problems have not scared away customers, Kapadia said. His software and BPO company, Systems Limited, has a number of large multinational customers, including Bank of America and Citigroup, which continue to do business with his company, despite the country's unrest, he said. A customer that has never done business in Pakistan may hesitate to outsource to a company in the country, Kapadia said. But regular customers understand that Pakistan is large, and trouble in a corner of the country will not affect their operations in another part of the country, he said. Software, BPO, and call center companies have in place disaster recovery strategies, and centers in many locations, to ensure that work does not get disrupted, he added. Pakistan's exports of IT and services have grown by 50 percent year-on-year for the last three years, Hussain said. The PSEB now has an ambitious target: to boost exports of software, IT services, call center, and BPO from $1.4 billion in the fiscal year ended June to about $4.5 billion by 2010. By then, the overall IT and services industry in the country is also expected to grow to $10 billion from the current $2.4 billion a year. In computing its IT and services export figure, Pakistan includes exports by Pakistani companies, salaries of its people with work permits working on IT jobs abroad, as well as sales of services to operations in Pakistan of foreign companies and foreign government agencies. Several challenges abound. Pakistan has similar characteristics that have made India successful as an outsourcing hub, such as its low-cost, skilled, English-speaking staff, said Siddharth Pai, a partner at sourcing consultancy firm, Technology Partners International in Houston. But the IT industry in Pakistan is still in its early stages, and companies have very little experience in the business and lack the ability to scale their operations, he added. To boost the country's outsourcing industry, PSEB and other Pakistan government agencies have launched a multipronged strategy covering infrastructure, cheaper communications, investment in education, quality certifications, and a data confidentiality law. The PSEB is also investing in promoting Pakistan as an offshore location to European and U.S. companies. Most of the media coverage of the country so far has focused on law-and-order problems, rather than on its thriving economy, Hussain said. Not many people outside Pakistan know, for example, that the country has over 63 million mobile phone subscribers for a population of about 164 million people, Hussain said. The percentage of Pakistan's population using mobile phones is more than that of India, which is seen as a key Asian market for mobile-phone vendors. Besides helping to earn foreign exchange and provide large-scale employment in Pakistan, the country expects a booming IT industry to change the nation's business culture from "industrial age" to a more modern, "knowledge age" industry, Hussain said. Growth of the IT sector will also help increase productivity in local agriculture and industrial sectors, he added. The PSEB has introduced a package of incentives including tax breaks for the IT sector until 2016, and low-rent facilities for IT companies. The PSEB already operates 750,000 square feet of software technology parks in eleven building across Pakistan, with large IT parks planned in Islamabad, Karachi, and Lahore. For the Islamabad park, the PSEB has invited global developers to bid to set up and operate the park under a "build, operate, transfer" model. Other government agencies are also pitching in. The country is investing in education with an eye to avoid the shortages of staff that have affected India's outsourcing industry. The annual budget of the Higher Education Commission has gone up to about 30 billion Pakistan rupees ($497 million) from 600 million rupees seven years ago, Hussain said. Nine engineering universities are being set up with foreign collaboration, and will have foreign faculty, curriculum, and certification, he added. "We don't have staff shortages now, but that could change in the next three years, as the industry is growing very fast," Kapadia said. The PSEB is also setting up a venture capital fund, which will be run by international venture capital, Hussain said. The fund will invest in both IT services and products companies, he added.
Amadeus to provide travel booking data to the United Nations	28 November 2007
Statistics will be used to monitor and predict global trends
Weak orders hit US firms	28 November 2007
US factory orders fell for the third month in a row, a further sign of the slowing economy, government data shows. a survey shows.
Discs 'worth £1.5bn' to criminals	28 November 2007
Two missing discs containing personal data of 25 million people could be worth £1.5bn to criminals, say the Lib Dems.
Programming less	28 November 2007
A programming lesson I keep relearning. The design of the central data structure of an app determines the quality of the app, in every way. Any extra thought that goes into this, will pay off in: 1. Maintainability of the code. 2. Size of the code (you'll write less code with a well thought-out central data structure). 3. Simplicity of the user interface (the structure inevitably shows through in the UI). 4. Ability to respond to feature requests. 5. Adapt to new hardware, OS changes, other apps. 6. More "it just works" experiences. This is why it's sometimes the right thing to start over from scratch. Programmers often want to start over because they look at the code and it looks complicated, and they think they can make it simpler if they start over. They're right, of course, it will be simpler when they start over, because it won't do nearly as much as the mature product does. Once they finish building out the feature set, it may well be just as complicated. It's a judgement call. I remember looking at the source of Unix kernel for the first time as a grad student in Wisconsin, and being amazed at the simplicity and obviousness of the code. I couldn't believe something so simple actually worked. Your code at its kernel level must have this simplicity. But at the edges, where you're accomdating the minds of users, inevitably it gets a little messy. The key thing to look for is how hard is it to add a completely new feature. It should be easy to do that. If it's not, it's likely because of a poorly organized (and therefore not well-understood) central data structure. I've rewritten apps many times, over many years, because when I wrote the first or second versions, I didn't understand the problem well enough, and the code had turned into a morass of patches and workarounds. Right now I'm recoding the internals of a special-purpose aggregator. I've written many of these, over the years, always quickly, trying to get something running fast, and then lived with data structures that resulted. This time I'm going slowly and carefully, with an installed base of one (me) and ripping up the pavement whenever I find even a slightly better way of doing something. I have other users who are waiting, but that's life. 5/7/97: "When a programmer catches fire it's because he or she groks the system, its underlying truth has been revealed."
Google service uses cell towers to locate users	28 November 2007
Google launched a location service for mobile users on Wednesday that doesn't rely on GPS.Google Maps with My Location, currently in beta, locates users who don't have GPS-enabled phones based on their location to nearby cell towers. The result isn't as accurate as GPS but works for people who lack the positioning technology in their phones."It helps users speed up search by showing the general neighborhood they're in," said Steve Lee, product manager at Google for the service. Without the location service, users must type in their address or neighborhood in order to find nearby businesses using Google Maps.Google Maps with My Location will use GPS data to locate the user if the phone has the capability. But even for users of GPS-enabled phones, the cell location service might be useful, Lee said. That's because the cell tower feature works better indoors than GPS, it doesn't drain the phone battery as quickly and can bring up a result quicker, he said.The service could be useful to a person who might be traveling in an unfamiliar city and looking for restaurants or other businesses. A user pulls up Google Maps and hits the zero key on the phone. A blue dot will appear on the map in the user's location. If the service used GPS in the phone, the blue dot will be solid. If the service used cell towers to determine the location, the blue dot will have a halo around it, indicating that the location isn't precise. The user can then search for nearby businesses.Google says the cell tower technique will locate the user within about 1000 meters. It doesn't use triangulation, which calculates a user location based on the user's distance to three nearby towers. Instead, it essentially shows the range of the tower that the user's phone is connecting to.But the accuracy should improve as more people use the service, Lee said. That's because Google is keeping a database of location queries, minus any personal information like individual phone numbers or names. That will allow Google to learn more precise information about the range of each tower so that it can deliver a more accurate location area to users. The coverage area of cell towers can vary from about a quarter of a mile to several miles based on whether the tower is in an urban or rural area.For now, Google Maps with My Location doesn't feature any advertising, but it could in the future. "This product makes a lot of sense for advertising," Lee said.In order to use the service, phone owners must download a free application from Google. The application will work on BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Symbian phones as well as many phones that support Java. A few notable exceptions include the Samsung Blackjack, Moto Q, and Palm Treo 700W, which don't support the APIs Google requires to find cell towers, Lee said.
Micron exec: SSDs to reach portable devices in 2008	28 November 2007
Memory maker Micron Technology on Wednesday introduced a line of solid-state drives (SSDs) and said it would plug the technology into portable storage devices by mid- to end 2008.Micron's new RealSSD hard drive, announced at an event in San Francisco, will come in sizes of 1.8 inches and 2.5 inches with storage capacities of 32GB and 64GB. Micron also announced embedded SSD modules for blade servers with storage capacities of 1GB to 8GB.Purported by many to be the future replacement of hard drives, the growth of SSDs has been stymied by high pricing, longevity, and storage issues. However, the power-efficient and ruggedness of SSDs may attract users, said Dean Klein, vice president of memory system development at Micron.RealSSD is 50 percent lighter than standard hard drives, and at under 2 watts of power consumption, the drives will be ideal for laptops, Klein said. The drives also support the SATA II interface, a standard typically used to connect hard drives to computer systems.With no moving parts, RealSSD drives also have a rugged design and store data reliably. They handle vibrations and resist shock better than rotating media, Klein said.Despite multiple advantages, SSDs may not replace hard drives as storage devices in the near future, he said. SSD technology is under development, and some markets are sensitive to price-per-gigabyte of SSDs, Klein said.SSDs currently cost between $7 and $10 per gigabyte, making them much more expensive than hard drives, which cost $0.20 to $0.30 per gigabyte, according to data from research firm iSuppli.Initial consumers for RealSSD could be OEMs or enterprises, which look for reliability and high data throughput, and laptop consumers, which require portability and power efficiency, Klein said.RealSSD drives could reach consumers in the form of portable storage devices or ExpressCards by mid- to end 2008, depending on consumer demand, Mark Adams, Micron's vice president of digital media said in an interview. An ExpressCard fits in a laptop's PCMCIA slot.Sending SSDs to consumers immediately is questionable as the emerging technology hasn't proven itself yet, Adams said. There is a risk in being first-to-market if the product doesn't sell, which will build up unnecessary inventory of SSDs. Instead, Micron will try to get feedback from OEMs that include SSDs in their products and develop devices accordingly, Adams said.Micron sells portable consumer storage devices through Lexar Media, which it acquired last year.There are already a few vendors that include SSDs in their hardware. Aurora, a gaming systems manufacturer, includes them in its Area-51 ALX and Aurora ALX desktop PCs, and Toshiba includes SSDs in its laptops.
Firefox Fixes Three Security Flaws, Though More Remain (TechWeb)	27 November 2007
TechWeb - The vulnerabilities could be used to gather sensitive data from sites in other windows or inject data or code into those sites, Mozilla said.
Iron Mountain lands ICANN data escrow agreement	29 November 2007
Long time coming Iron Mountain announced today that it has begun providing long-awaited data escrow services to ICANN and its panoply of approved registrars. Ever since the RegisterFly debacle exposed ICANN’s failure to account properly for the data escrow requirements of its Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA), data escrow has been at or near the top of the ICANN agenda.…