Chapter 6: Databases and Data Warehouses

In a recent article in Business Week entitled: "California unveils prescription database to spot abuse", the author shares that with a new database online installed, the law enforcement will have a more advanced way of keeping track of what doctors are prescribing to their patients, and what the patients are picking up from the pharmacies. What I did not know before was that with one prescription from their doctor, people actually abuse the use of the prescription and visit multiple doctors to get multiple times the amount of drugs. With the database installed, a patient's information is stored into the online system and all the drugs that the patient is picking up is recorded and the amount that they are getting whether it be from multiple doctors or not. Each time a prescription is picked up under that name, it is recorded and let known to law enforcements. Thousands of pharmacies and doctors have signed up to join this effort but hundreds are still expected to join. With this new database installed online, law enforcements will be able to crack down on the drug abuse and also do it at a faster rate then before. California is the 26th state to join the online efforts in cracking down the abuse on the online database.

With more and more people being caught for the abuse, we as a state will be able to save ourselves quite some money. "If you took the dollars that were wasted on diverted and abused medicines in this country, it would come to billions of dollars a year".

This link to this article can be found here.

Chapter 5: Enterprise Architectures

When you are running a lot of projects on several different computers, it is essential that all of your work is continually backed up on external hard drives in case your computer ever crashes spontaneously. If the files and projects are not backed up continuously and the computer crashes, it may cost the company a lot of time and money to have their employees either re-do the work or recover the projects.

For example, I have been working all summer on five different video projects on five separate PC computers. I just learned tonight that of the five computers, two of them have been infected with a virus through some internet web page that the students accessed without permission. They violated a trust that we had for them. What concerns me most is that this is going to set back the project and cost me more time to get the projects up and running again.

According to PC World Magazine, there is an easier way to store over 400 types of files on your computer with the new Storage Appliance's Clickfree Automatic Backup line, the Clickfree Backup Drive. The drive has a storage space of 1TB. I've noticed that as time passes and equipments become "easier and cheaper" to make for companies, these external hard drives and flash drives are also becoming cheaper to purchase. The Clickfree Backup Drive's cost ranges between $160 to $250 depending on which merchant you make the purchase from.

The back up drive starts off with a 25-second countdown and then scans your computer's system for data files that are compatible with it to back up. After it has scanned the system and found the files that it can back up, it will ask you and warn you that it will back up those files. When the warning pops up, you are able to choose which files you wish to remove from the list or which other files to include. Once the files are backed up, you are still able to access the files on the backup drive through the Clickfree software to either print, share, email, or etc the files.

The backup drive is similar to other ones out there but it does not back up system files or support disaster recovery. The backup drive performs glitch-free on most operating systems but reviewers found problems with it when using the Windows XP system. The backup drive also has a reminder clock installed to ask you occasionally when to next back up your drive.

Overall, I need something like this in my line of work. It's hard to remember to backup all of the work that I do because I get so caught up in the work, but with a Clickfree backup drive, it can automatically search my system for me to backup my files at set times.

The link to this article can be found by clicking here.

Chapter 4: Ethics and Information Security

According to the Business Week article written on September 15, 2009, the country of France is approving a bill that will allow the police and authorities to shut down the Internet usage of someone illegally downloading music/movies/ etc. There are millions and millions of Internet users in the world today and how France is planning on containing the population of Internet users in its country is mind blowing for me. How do they even plan on maintaining a close eye on who downloads what? They need for Internet users to install a program onto the computer user's computer that will allow authorities to watch over what is being done over the time of Internet usage. Does this not violate privacy laws? I would not want the government to watch over everything that I do on the Internet. They would be able to read what I write, see what I see, and etc. I would have no privacy at all on my own computer usage and thus it violates my privacy as a citizen. This bill has been in circulation for the past year, having different versions declined. This latest version that was approved on Tuesday, allows for a judge to make the decision on cutting the Internet usage in a home because of illegal downloading and charging the person with up to 300,000 euros ( which is about $435,000 in US money).

I don't know why this issue isn't being brought up to the bigger public. I would not have known about this bill if I did not read this article. I believe that the government is moving away from a hands off approach to basically violating privacy rights of the public. If France allows this bill to pass, imagine other countries taking on the same law. Yes, illegal downloading is wrong and people should know that ethically it is not right, but people's privacy should not be violated to correct this problem.

You can check out the article by clicking here. I'll try to stay on top of what's next to come.

Chapter 3: Ebusiness

When the Internet was first discovered, it did not have many users at all because it came very complicated for the public to learn how to. However, when the Internet expanded into more and more of the population, demand for businesses to expand their work onto the World Wide Web started increasing. To be successful in today's business market, one must be available to its consumers and customers via the Internet. The Internet has allowed information to be easier to compile, increased richness, increased the reach of one's business to a global level, and it has definitely improved upon the content of the business that can be shared with the public. According to a Business Week article, successful businesses must be online. However, to remain successful once it is up and running online, the company must keep an eye out on its "reputation" online. There are so many review web sites of companies and products that the company must be aware of what is being said about them from the customers or critics, whether it is positive or negative. Using popular search engines like Google and Yahoo! can be helpful in maintaining an eye and ear on what is being stated from the customers or critics. But if you want extra protection, there are even sites that you can pay for them to send you alerts whenever there is something new posted about you on the Internet. If a company does not pay attention to what is being said about their services and products, the company can potentially lose its customers to the bad reviews. The BW article features the Escapist, "a 39-employee video gaming Web site based in Durham, N.C." that helps companies protect its reputation online. The company's services provides that whenever there is any new information posted about a particular company, that company is informed of it right away; allowing the company to either take action against the negative comment or dwell in the positive feedback they were able to receive. A lot of small businesses are still unaware of its reputation online. Just because something is not said about you on your own website, it doesn't mean that you are not being talked about on other websites.

Link to article: CLICK HERE