NEWS Bytes
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook. - William
James.
COMPUTER CLUB MEETING
Last week's computer club meeting was interesting and well attended. At
our last meeting we'll have a linux Red Hat demonstration (Thursday,
May 22nd at 3:30). We will also give out a few awards to students and
elect officers for next year.
STUDY SHOWS BRIGHT FUTURE FOR WEB SERVICES
A new report from research firm
IDC paints a fairly rosy picture for
Web services, despite the overall slump in technology. According to
IDC, about 55 percent of North American organizations are working with
or are implementing Web services. The IDC study states that "the idea
of Web services as a solution has touched the large proportion of North
American organizations by the end of 2002, and there may be an open
market for providers of such solutions in 2003." The data show a
strong, positive correlation between the size of business and the use
of Web services. Similar data were reported by Forrester, though Laura
DiDio of the Yankee Group estimates that only 12 percent of businesses
are involved with Web services. DiDio noted, however, that Web-services
standards are maturing and getting closer to being finalized, which
will encourage adoption. (
NewsFactor
Network, 9 May 2003)
ACTORS WITH ZERO-AND-ONE TALENTS
In the new movie "The Matrix Reloaded," scenes
were created by
photographing real people and then manipulating them digitally. Producer
Joel Silver says: "This is going to change the way people make movies.
It's
not 'Shrek' or 'Toy Story.' You're seeing reality-based scenes dealing with
human characters, and it's designed so you really can't distinguish between
the real actor and the ones and zeros. And you're talking about shots that
are close-ups on faces, and emotion coming through. There are some really
remarkable scenes that the audience will never know were constructed in a
computer, or that there's nobody actually in it." (San
Jose Mercury News 13 May 2003)
GROUP ADVOCATES FOR BLIND-FRIENDLY WEB SITES
The National Federation of the
Blind has released a seal of approval
for organizations that have designed their Web sites to be accessible
by people with visual impairments. Such sites take steps to make the
content available and navigable either through magnification or the use
of screen readers. Wells Fargo Bank, Hewlett-Packard, and the Social
Security Administration received the first certifications from the
federation. The accessibility of the Social Security site is due in
part to a federal law that mandates equal access for persons with
disabilities. Javier Bustamonte of the Social Security agency said the
requirements of that law made it easy to qualify for the federation's
new seal of approval. The federation hopes that the seal will encourage
many businesses to design--or redesign--their sites to be available to
persons with visual impairments. (Nando
Times, 12 May 2003)
THE NEW WHITE-COLLAR CRIME: TECHNO-SLACKING
It's getting easier than ever
to convince your customers, supervisors and
employees that you're hard at work -- firing off e-mail messages and
opening files on your office PC while you're really attending your kids'
soccer game or sleeping in. Services like GoToMyPC.com enable users to
manipulate their office computers by remote control -- even going so far as
to move the cursor on the screen, open documents and print them on the
networked office printer. E-mail timers allow workers to compose messages
during the day and then queue them to be sent hours after they've gone to
bed, giving the impression that they're up burning the midnight oil.
Instant Message software can be reconfigured so that the "idle" message
that pops up signaling inactivity is disabled, making users look
perpetually available. And BlackBerry aficionados can change their settings
to make on-the-road e-mail look like it came straight from the office PC.
Psychologists call these activities "impression management," but
other see
signs of a disturbing trend: "If you're out playing golf, and you look
like
you've spent four hours in the office… If everybody does that, the company
goes bankrupt," says Stuart Gilman, director of the Ethics Resource Center
in Washington. A recent survey conducted by the Society for Human Resource
Management found that 59% of HR professionals had personally observed
employees lying about the number of hours they'd worked, and 53% said
they'd seen employees lying to a supervisor, a jump of eight percentage
points in six years. (Wall
Street Journal 15 May 2003 - sub req'd)
