Dr. Dobb's Journal, February 2006
IBM has unveiled details about Viper, its next-generation DB2 database that is designed to help manage and access data across service-oriented architectures (http://www.ibm.com/db2/xml/). Viper will be the first database with both native XML data management and relational data capability. Scheduled for release in 2006, DB2 Viper will supposedly be able to seamlessly manage both conventional relational data and XML data without requiring the XML data to be reformatted or placed into a large object within the database. DB2 Viper also will simultaneously handle range partitioning, multidimensional clustering, and hashing, and provide XQuery support.
Among the technology demonstrations presented at the 12th World Congress on Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) (http://www.itsworldcongress.org/) were those involving: Vehicle-Infrastructure Integration (VII) technology, in which "smart" roads with roadside antennas wirelessly communicated information to cars equipped with on-board units—the communication network provides information about travel times and about warnings and locations of work zones or traffic incidents to the driver; Integrated Collision Warning Systems, in which conference attendees rode transit buses fitted with a front and side collision warning system designed for use on both highways and in dense urban environments; Automated Bus Rapid Transit Technology, in which buses were fitted with sensors, actuators, and computer-based processors that let them perform automated lane maneuvers and precisely dock at boarding platforms; and Smart Intersections, in which radar, GPS, and sensors were used to track the position of vehicles approaching intersections and activate warning signs. ITS is an organization of international researchers, industry professionals, and government officials developing advanced transportation technologies and deployment activities.
Microsoft has announced that it will open up and submit its file format technology for its Office produces—Word, PowerPoint, and Excel—to the Ecma International standards body. In turn, Ecma will develop and make available documentation of those formats. In addition, Microsoft will make available tools to enable old documents to make use of the open standard format.
In a study entitled "Innovation, R&D and Offshoring," University of California at Berkeley researchers Dwight Jaffee and Ashok Bardhan concluded that technological innovation—even if it takes place in emerging international markets—will not spell economic doom. According to their study (http://repositories.cdlib.org/iber/fcreue/reports/1005/), new jobs and economic growth will result in the U.S., particularly in the Silicon Valley. Jaffee and Bardhan found that many large U.S. firms are increasingly sending R&D activities offshore by setting up affiliated, intrafirm R&D centers abroad. Their research also shows that smaller firms generally conduct their research in the U.S.—and tend to produce more innovation. At the same time, the authors found that the U.S. market could benefit from the geographical dispersion of innovation and research to India, China and other transitioning countries.
Researchers at the University of Bath have developed a biometric iris recognition system that uses the colored part of the eye to validate a person's identity (http://www.bath.ac.uk/elec-eng/pages/sipg/irisweb/). According to Professor Don Monro of the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, the algorithm at the heart of the system has produced 100 percent accuracy in initial trials. Monro and his team are currently road testing the technology using a specially constructed database containing thousands of iris images collected from students and colleagues at the university. Iris recognition, which is regarded as the most accurate biometric recognition technology, works by "unwrapping" a digital image of a person's iris and creating a unique encrypted "barcode" that is stored in a database. The images are captured using a special camera and an infrared light source that helps get over problems caused by shadows and competing light sources. Hundreds of images can be captured in a few minutes, and the team selected 20 from each eye from each volunteer. Monro hopes to build a database with 16,000 iris images.
Sun Microsystems will distribute the Postgres database with its Solaris 10 operating system. At the same time, the company announced integration of Solaris ZFS, a 128-bit filesystem with error detection and correction capabilities, into OpenSolaris. Finally, Sun announced plans to integrate Solaris Containers for Linux applications, which lets companies run Red Hat binaries unmodified in Containers on Solaris 10 into OpenSolaris. The Solaris ZFS filesystem supports self-healing data through advanced error detection and correction, task automation that simplifies storage management—in some cases reducing task times from hours to seconds—and built-in storage virtualization that eliminates the complexity of a volume manager.
In a recent study entitled "2005 Attack Trends: Beyond The Numbers," security expert Bruce Schneier reports that criminals who are motivated by money are generally better funded, less risk-averse, and more tenacious than run-of-the-mill intruders who are in it for thrills (http://www.counterpane .com/cgi-bin/attack-trends2.cgi). Schneier also pointed out that, although the financial industry ranks second highest in attacks, it is actually the most vulnerable to criminal activity. Of the 13 major vertical markets tracked by Counterpane (the security company Schneier founded), approximately 50 percent of all targeted scans detected by Counterpane occurred within the financial industry. According to Schneier, damaging attacks such as Trojan viruses and bot networks are expected to increase. All categories of organizations are at risk, but the financial industry is expected to remain the highest risk vertical in the near term.
For the first time, the SANS Institute has included cross-platform applications as targets in its annual list of top Internet security threats (http://www.sans.org/top20/). The list includes backup programs, media players, antivirus software, PHP-based applications, and database software, among others.
DDJ