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This post is sponsored by TechSmith.

Some people will do anything to get attention. One of The cases that popped up the last couple of days is where a church hands out iTunes for attending. The Church by the Glades in Florida has seminars called "i", all about "Living in a self absorbed world". Now that's fine, but I still believe that if you have no audience, apparently whatever you have to say is of no importance. The church of course can't accept this, so they try to lure you into their seminars by handing out iTunes vouchers.

The church is no fool though - they had a billboard up in january saying ""The Bare Naked Truth on Sex," and it drove 50,000 hits to their website. That might have been only pornaddicts checking the link though...

Their site is here. They seem to be, at least, innovative.
Source : Palmbeachpost

According to this article in E-Commerce Times, users only spend one third of their time online to send email. Most of the remaining 70% is consumed by reading. The only thing really interesting about the report that was created on the subject is the fact that users start to turn to the internet for information they used to gather offline.

I noticed a lot of people very close to me have no clue on how to use the internet to search for things - they don't believe they could find the info they're looking for, so they don't bother. As a result, they often come up empty handed or with the wrong information, which sometimes leads to overpaying products or services. I realized that I might be a little ahead of some.

During the same period as the explosion in online content, online messaging has seen a trend toward efficiency, according to the association. Much more communication between individual Internet users happens in the form of instant messaging (IM) now than in 2003.

Now that's something I did expect - the ways we communicate are changing, and the report shows it clearly.

LAX, LA's airport caused big trouble for 17,000 passengers last week, due to computer malfunction. What happened ? One single computer inside the customs office crashed. The networkcard of that computer caused a domino effect on other systems in it's range.

U.S. Customs officials say the card - - which allows computers to connect to a local area network - experienced a partial failure around 12:50 p.m. Saturday that had a domino effect with other computer network cards.(CBS)

After the computer came backup one day later, it experienced an outage again that lasted for 80 minutes. This time it was due to power supply failures.

It seems to me this is due to poor design. When you design your network, you should think about these scenarios, as a lot of things can easily be prevented.

The HotLan Trojan is the latest development of an industry that is apparantly worth a lot of money. Recently it was reported that the captcha system had been cracked, and aparently that has been done by the creators of the HotLan Trojan. The trojan was able to setup more than 500,000 hotmail accounts and over 40,000 gmail accounts. The technology behind it is advanced. The CAPTCHA image is sent to a server which deciphers is and sends the deciphered string back to the form where it gets filled in the right field.

A spokesperson from BitDefender Anti-Virus Lab says that gmail accounts usually get blocked within 4 days. I wonder how many accounts can be created by the trojan in 4 days though - this could become a race against time, or, as the dutch say "bringing water to the ocean". I can't help but conclude that the spam business is a very profitable business.

Oracle has never been known to be cheap, and they hold on to the image. After a long wait, the price of Oracle 11g has finally been announced at a staggering $40,000 per cpu or $800 per user. The price only goes for running the database on Linux and there is still no availability date for 11g on windows or unix.

I cannot help but wonder why anyone would upgrade to 11g, especially right now. Sure there are improvements compared to 10, but there are two things I recommend to think about :

• Do you really need to upgrade ? I don't like to be the first in line for new releases, let the new version become adult first.


• The price is no different from what you pay for 10. So there's no benefite here.

Furthermore, I believe that any other company this size, that releases software for one platform only, should call it a beta release.

The chinese government has a different look on things. After having been a control freak over anything people might think of doing, they have finally picked up on something a certain german gentleman had come up with back in the forties : the art of selection.

A new ID card has been introduced holding an embedded chip that will include the holder's name, address, work history, educational background, religion, Ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord's phone number. The cards will also carry reproductive history information, to further aid authorities in enforcing China's "one child" policy.(Engadget)

Anyone notcarrying this ID will be expelled from the great country.

In order to enforce their new laws and the use of this ID, new cameras are installed around big cities with face recognition software. Most interesting fact in all of this is this : The technology behind it is developed by US companies IBM, HP and Dell.

Some say the US economy has dried out and China is the new production superpower, but I can't help but wonder how long China will be able to hold that position. It is probably no different from Europe, where all IT companies offshore their production to asian countries. In ten years time, that will no longer be profitable, so offshoring will become a thing of the past and we will be right where we started : here.

Business intelligence (BI) is a business management term, which refers to applications and technologies that are used to gather, provide access to, and analyze data and information about company operations. Business intelligence systems can help companies have a more comprehensive knowledge of the factors affecting their business, such as metrics on sales, production, internal operations, and they can help companies to make better business decisions. Business Intelligence should not be confused with competitive intelligence, which is a separate management concept.Wikipedia

Although the explanation from wikipedia is disputed, it gives us a fair idea of what BI actually is. I don't believe I could have explained it better.

Although the acceptance and understanding of the term has only just begun, it seems that BI version 2.0 is on it's way. At least, that's what The Register says in it's article on Next generation BI :

As such, BI is moving away from being an exclusive tool for power users, or "information producers", to empowering the "information consumers" in accessing, analysing, and sharing data.

I believe that, although the term BI doesn't cover it completely, it has brought a better and clearer understanding of how business and IT can be tighter integrated to us all. 10 Years ago, IT was not seen as a serious business for companies other than IT companies. BI has brought the realization to business people that you can use IT to improve business. And that's what business is all about. If you can do something more efficiently than before, you can generate more business, and therefore, more money.

The Santa Cruz Operation, probably the most hated company that has even been involved in unix, has claimes to "own unix" for years, trying to squeeze cash out of a lot of companies. Several smaller companies have paid up years ago, in fear of expensive lawsuits. IBM and Novell only smiled and told SCO to show some evidence. SCO never did, and a few years back a judge told SCO to shut it. Today there's Breaking News : Novell owns the rights to unix that were claimed by SCO.

I wonder what's to happen to SCO now. Their closure has been predicted for years, and now, with no big money won and huge legal fees, I think SCO better jump in their grave. IBM probably sent a letter to SCO saying "I told you so" and chances are the smaller companies that had paid already will now sue SCO to get their money back.

It's pathetic to see how SCO couldn't accept their losses in the unix department and as a reaction tried to sue the whole world for something they didn't own.

The Register has all the details.