benj

Part 3 - Covers the different financial markets and investment avenues.

part-3.ppt

Part 2 - Covers the Income Statement, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow Statement

BA422 - Part 2

Part 1 : Covers the different kinds of business organizations

BA 422 - Part 1

In the latest news gripping the I.T. industry, Oracle has just agreed to buy Sun Microsystems for $7.4 Billion. The board of both companies has already agreed to the deal in principle, and it should be finalized within the next few months barring any antitrust problems.

This is exciting news indeed, most especially for end users familiar with both companies. Sun Microsystems is the owner of the widely used Java programming language, and the thought of better (and easier) integration with Oracle’s database systems should be something to look forward to. Aside from that, what’s really grabbing my interest is that fact that Sun Microsystems also owns MySQL, arguably the most popular database system used in web based applications. It’s the database system I use in developing web applications and it has certainly stood the test of time, data, and traffic. I’m curious to see just how Oracle can improve upon the current MySQL architecture, maybe we will start seeing more and more Oracle features in MySQL?

It should be interesting to see any product developments that might happen over the next few months and years. My only regret was not getting hold of Sun Microsystems stock before when IBM backed off from purchasing the company. The stock jumped 30% yesterday and should increase few more percentage points.

I was giving a lecture on File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and web hosting last Saturday when I recalled something about Google’s Data Center.

Basically, Google handles its own hosting for its website as well as its internal requirements. The link below containts some tidbits about Google’s Data Center.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html

Interestingly, Google builds its own server architecture instead of just buying servers from IBM, HP, etc. (if your market cap is in the hundreds of billions of dollars, you can do this easily). The article doesn’t point out how many servers there are but it does say that each server container has 1,160 servers with each data center having many containers. So I guess it’s safe to say that Google has at least 15,000 servers? That’s a lot of computing power, but with the complexity of Google’s search algorithm, the large number of daily visitors, as well as hundreds of applications for their internal use, I would think that all this computing power is really necessary.

Over the past few days news about the latest “super-worm” called Conficker has been spreading. It’s supposed to go live on April 1 and do all sorts of damage, but so far so good. Or is it April 1 US time? Anyway, here are some general tools you can use to get rid of or minimize the effects of viruses and worms:

1. Windows Update - Make sure you’re using a licensed copy of Windows though

2. HiJack This - This is a slightly more complicated tool to use, but so far it has been able to clean up everything I’ve encountered. Be sure you know what you’re doing before you even attempt to use this tool. Misuse can lead to a total system crash.

3. Trend Micro’s Cleanup Engine - I haven’t actually used this tool yet, but Trend Micro knows their stuff, so this should be pretty good.

4. McAfee Stinger - This is a tool to scan for and get rid of certain viruses and worms. As stated in their website, it’s not a substitute for a full anti-virus system.

5. Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool - I’ve had quite a bit of success with this. Mostly it seems to fix some of the effects of worms like disabling the task manager, disabling the different options of the control panel, etc.

I came across these pictures recently while browsing for stuff about my favorite game Gran Turismo 5 Prologue on Playstation 3. Apparently the developers of the game (Polyphony Digital) use Autodesk Maya exclusively for creating the models of the cars and environments. I think it’s really cool that a game such as GT5 Prologue, which is known for extreme attention to detail and for being one of the first games to harness the full power of the PS3, uses an off the shelf product available to most consumers in creating their models.

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My first post in this blog is going to tackle something that is very dear to me.

I know that student life here at Informatics is an incredibly busy one. Each student has his/her own classes with different teachers. Although a student may spend upwards of 6 hours in school, most of the time is spent inside the classroom in the company of teachers. Most of the contact students have with me is done at the office for strictly academic concerns. In short, I have not been able to talk to students as much as I would like. Our duty as educators is not simply to impart knowledge on the latest technology but also to impart wisdom and life learnings to help students grow up and realize their full potential. Hopefully I can start doing that through this blog.

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