Technology Blog

Key pad voting system is an Interactive voting system for the audience. All service providers need a response to turn into a user oriented output. Whether it is a market research for product analysis, or training systems to gain the feedback of trainer in the view of the trainees, a feedback gives the idea of system or any service provider’s effectiveness.

Audience response is also required in the departmental meetings, training workshops, Medical symposiums, market research and a lot more. It has become essential to seek the seekers perspective. And that is best done by getting the audience response.

A keypad voting system is a system of wireless keypads used by a presenter to poll the audience and receive real time answers to the questions being asked. It consists of various components such as wireless keypad for the audience to feed response, a software system to capture response, a storage device to save and finally a display unit to display the data collected.

When the presenter shows the presentation with a computer that have built in ARS software; questions are displayed on the screen and audience responses with the wireless keypads.

The answers are immediately sent to a receiver that is attached to the presenter’s computer, and the audience response software collects and tabulates the results and graphically displays representation of the data within the presentation.

Become an ARS meeting master

To list a few essentials of keypad voting system, I can say that the important thing is the ability to restore attention of the audience. If you are getting the attention of audience then it means there is a true feedback.

Any Electronic Voting System should also be capable of tracking individual responses and displaying polling results immediately. And an added feature could be that a summary report should be created immediately after the responses are gathered. This will give the true picture of the audience response and enhance faster decision making.

PowerCom software and ARS together can create miracles in your work. The best thing is that data is transferred to PowerPoint presentations, word and excel spreadsheets.

A keypad is a key pad

The digit key 1 through 10 are used to enter the numeric responses, including multiple choice questions A through E or yes/no answers, into keypad memory. The key must be released to allow the next key press to occur. The entries are transmitted to the Reply Base Station, which is then transmitted to the computer. When the keys are pressed, the digits are echoed on the seven-segment display (SSD).

Normally the displayed digit will go out within 3 seconds. This indicates to the user that the base Station has accepted the entry and the hardware is operational. If the light blinks and comes back on, this means that the Base Station addressed the keypad but was not able to accept the entry. Where do we use keypad voting system?

The core areas in which Audience Response Systems used are education and learning, training held in Corporate, Game shows , conferences and events, surveys and research, sales, marketing, polling and voting, Decision makings.

Whether we are doing research for products analysis, education or whether we are doing medical symposiums or management meetings we use keypad voting system to get the feedback of people as it gives the idea of system and our area of improvements as well as our strengths.

Keypad voting system in marketing research

This is no amazing thing if I would say that several voting handsets has been sold from last few years. And again a high percentage of handsets are predicated to be sold.

To cope up with the present scenario in the market for future prospective some companies are initiating approaches of keypad voting System to know the needs and choices of customers and clients. They arrange polls to know the interests of their clients and customers.

This doesn’t require the high tech hardware and are really appreciated by professionals and large meeting halls that do not want to purchase or rent out the Audience Response System hardware.

In the past few years, “going green” has become very important for almost every type of business. The CD and DVD packaging industry have been no different. In fact, promoting environmentally friendly products has become a major marketing focus. So what are your options if you want to package your media and limit your carbon footprint at the same time?

Your first option is to limit the amount of plastic in the packaging that you use for your CD or DVD. Packaging has always focussed on the use of plastics mainly because plastics are cheap. The industry standard for an audio CD is still the jewel case which is made of polystyrene. The industry standard for the DVD is the Amaray DVD case which is made of polypropylene and the new box for the Blu-ray will also be made of this material. Keeping the sizes and styles of alternative packaging similar to the industry standards has been very important when developing a solution which consumers would recognize and accept. The Digipak is a fantastic alternative to the jewel case and the DVD case. It is made mostly of thick printed card and only includes plastic trays as the holders for the CD or DVD. The digipak looks expensive and impressive because of the large amount of space available for graphic display.

Another option is to eliminate the plastic altogether and use packaging made entirely out of card. In these types of packaging, the CD or DVD is held in die-cut slots or paper holders. A new and ingenious product available is the Jakebox which holds the media in a patented paper “claw”. In addition, you can request that the card used for the creation of the packaging is recycled. Paper types such as Resa offset are made of 100% post consumer recycled fibres instead of virgin fibres. If you like the idea of a tray, there is a product called the Paperfoam tray which is made of starch and cellulose. It can be used in the place of plastic trays in products such as the digipak. This product has already been used in music releases for artists such as Keane and Motley Crue.

A third option, which can be used in combination with the above choices, is to use soy or vegetable based inks in the printing process. Not many manufacturers offer this at the moment but it is increasing in popularity.

Keep in mind that there are significant additional costs to production of this type of packaging. In quantities around 1000 units, the costs for recycled paper and vegetable based inks can triple the standard pricing.

In this day and age, anybody who is anybody has, or has toyed with the idea of having, a Web site. Any good Web site has to have graphics, which is why I am going to delve into the world of Web graphics today.

Since the graphics started appearing in Web pages, graphic formats, compared to other various web technologies, really haven’t changed much. Despite its short history, however, Web graphics itself is both an art and a science and there are numerous Web sites that devote their whole site to the various aspects of Web graphics.

For those budding DIY Web enthusiasts, you may be happy to know there are plenty of Web graphic editing tool out there to ease your foray into the internet world. But like all things, Web graphics have their own quirks and idiosyncrasies and knowing more about them could prevent you from pulling out those last tuffs of hair.

Web Graphics Format

Bit-mapped graphics, the type supported by today’s browsers, are, in their natural state, too big to be quickly downloaded over the Web, so you have to compress them. When the first debates on which graphic formats to use for the Web were raging one of the main concerns was compression capabilities. Because of their complimentary compression algorithms, JPEG (also known as JPG, and pronounced “JAY-peg”) and GIF (pronounced either “Jif” or “Gif”) were chosen.

The JPEG file format supports over 16.7 million colors or are, in the industry parlance, 24-bit images regardless of whether your monitor can display them correctly or not. If you have an 8-bit video system, the image will be ‘dithered’ to approximate the effect as best it can from the 256 color available. Because of the large number of colors, JPEG is best for photographs or graphics with lots of colors that blend from one to another. However, JPEG is a “loss-y” compression algorithm, which means that during compression colors are literally being thrown away. Obviously, the higher the compression, the more information is lost and the lower the quality of the graphic (the upside is the file size is much smaller so it downloads much faster).

GIF on the other hand is a “loss-less” compression. Although quality is not compromised during compression, it is limited to handling no more than 256 colors. It is best for images that have text or solid colors for example logos.

Web-safe colors

Web safe colors is no longer as important as it used to be as we are using significantly sophisticated equipment compared to 5 years back. But being a fuddy-duddy that I am, I thought we could touch briefly on how Web safe colors come about.

Some graphics render differently on different systems. We can maximize the odds of having a Web graphic look the same on different monitors and different browsers by using Web-safe colors, sometimes known as the Web palette, the color cube, the 6×6x6 palette, the Netscape palette, the Explorer palette, or the 216-color palette. These colors are composed of 216 specific colors that are universally recognized by browsers and operating systems.

Why only 216 colors? After all, even the simplest computer video systems used nowadays are 8-bit systems that are able to render up to 256 colors.

The reason for only 216 colors is because different operating systems and browsers insist on reserving colors and cannot be changed. The Mac palette has two reserved colors (black and white), the Windows palette reserves 20 and Netscape themselves reserve 13 more colors for its logo leaving 223 colors available to the users. But for technical reasons, Netscape programmers decided reduced the color palette to the newest cube root - 216 colors. By eliminating these 40 variable colors, what we have is a palette that is optimized for cross-platform use.

Unix systems are an entirely different breed. Their palette is based on math, not beauty and many of the 216 colors may be dithered on Unix machines using a 256 color display, because of the way Unix handles color palettes on the fly. So the 216-color Web-safe color palette is a Mac/PC tool only.

So what happens to those colors in the graphics that are not part of the Web-safe color palette? What the browser or operating system will do is to choose those colors that simulate it the closest.

At the time of this writing, most graphic design/development tools (e.g. Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, Illustrator, Freehand, Fireworks, etc.) have the web safe colors palette built into the application, so using it is fairly easy.

However, currently too few users uses an 8-bit computer video systems to view the Web in 256 color, so the justification for using the Web-safe color palette is questionable. But alternative online devices, such as cell phones and PDAs are still in 1-bit (black and white) or 8-bit color, so there is some resurgence in the need for the Web-safe colors.

Also, there’s no harm in using Web-safe colors either. It simply limits your choices to 216 colors. To a professional graphic designer, it is more important to know how to combine colors in pleasing and effective ways rather than knowing the rights or wrongs when it comes to which colors you pick. Since most people don’t have a lot of color picking confidence, working with limited color choices is usually easier.

Conclusions

Web graphics is part science and part art and making the best use of them is part knowledge and part talent. Next month we will delve further into Web graphics.

What Is Spyware?

It goes by different names. Spyware, adware and malware are some of the more popular monikers. It really doesn’t matter what you call it, though. The bottom line is that you don’t want it on your computer. First of all, let me state for the record that I think the internet is a wonderful thing. I think a majority of people would agree that the World Wide Web has made life for all of us a little more convenient. Whether it’s reserving a hotel room, buying music online, checking the local weather or any number of thousands of useful sites (did I mention email?) we all have gotten a little bit spoiled with having all this information right at our fingertips. That being said though, sometimes we seem to get a little complacent and let our guard down. We forget that the internet has a seedy side full of ways for unscrupulous people to con honest (if not a little niaeve) people out of their money (or worse!). In this article, I’ll cover a few of the pitfalls that many people tend to have trouble with.

Adware: This type of malware is designed to do one thing and one thing only. Get you to buy something. Once this type of software has infected your computer, you will start getting a lot of pop-up ads. Sometimes these ads are the pop-under type. Pop-under’s get by any pop-up blockers by generating an ad without stealing the focus from the web page that your viewing. You usually won’t even know it’s there until you close your browser and see the ad (or ads) displayed on your desktop. Generally, this type of malware is little more than an annoyance, but sometimes multiple instances can cause major slowdowns in your PC or even cause system crashes. Adware is usually bundled with some other “free” software such as free desktop wallpaper, icons or screensavers. It may or may not be disclosed in the end-user license agreement (EULA) of the free software, but even when it is, most people never read those agreements anyway. If you want to protect your computer from this type of malware, you should ALWAYS be suspicious of free software.

Spyware: Spyware does exactly what it’s name implies. It spies on you. Well, actually it spies on your web surfing and purchasing habits. The information that is collected is usually then sold to unscrupulous vendors who target you with spam email. Again, this type of marketing is usually just an annoyance, but anytime your privacy is compromised (especially by some sleazy dirtbag who will do anything to make a buck) there is cause for concern.

Trojan Horses: Sometimes simply known as “Trojans”, these, in my humble opinion, are the worst offenders. If you know the story of the Trojan War, then the name given to these vicious baddies will make perfect sense to you. Here’s the way it works: You are happily surfing along the internet, minding your own business, when all of the sudden a banner pops up and cheerfully anounces that you have won a FREE IPHONE (or a free laptop computer, or a free vacation, etc.). All you have to do to claim this generous prize, it seems, is to “CLICK HERE!”. Trust me on this one, do not ever, EVER, “CLICK HERE!”. BIG MISTAKE! What you’re doing with that click, is allowing malware to be downloaded to your computer that will make your life miserable and, as an added bonus, you’ll never get your free prize.

Another popular trojan pops up a warning dialog helpfully pointing out that your computer “may be infected with spyware”. The mysterious dialog offers to remove the threat for you if you will just (you guessed it) “CLICK HERE”. The premise is a little different, but the scam is the same. Some anonymous total stranger randomly offers to do something really nice for you if you’ll just take the bait, umm, I mean accept the generous offer. Once you make that click and download their “antispyware” product, you will be inundated with warnings about the vicious viruses on your PC and you will be informed that the “free” version of their software can’t remove the threats, but if you’ll just upgrade to the “Gold” version for $49.95… well, you get the picture.

Well, There you have it. Some of the more common ways that spyware and adware can infect your PC. This is by no means a complete list. The people who come up with these schemes seem to have no limits to their imagination or their audacity, so be wary.

There are many different ways that PC users can protect themselves. First and foremost, make sure that your computer has a good antivirus/antispyware program installed and that your virus definitions are up to date. I’m always surprised when I get a call from a customer that has a severe infestation of malware on their PC and they tell me that they have antivirus on their computer only to find out that they never actually purchased the trial version of AV software that came bundled with the PC. It’s not uncommon for me to work on a PC whose owner thinks that they have virus protection even though their subscription for definition updates expired long ago. I really can’t stress this enough. Virus protection is absolutely essential.

Maybe even more important than protective software though, is common sense. The old adage that “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is” rings true. Don’t get me wrong, there really are some great free things available to you on the web. The main thing you should be wary of is that offer that tries to invoke a “knee-jerk” reaction. These guys want you to click first and think later. So before you “CLICK HERE”, stop and ask yourself “does it sound too good?”

One of the easiest ways to boost overall performance from your PC is to do regular hard disk maintenance. It’s not glamorous or even exciting, as a matter of fact, it’s downright boring. However it is relatively painless and easy to do. In this article, I want to discuss defragmenting your hard drive. I’ll give you a moment to finish yawning before continuing…..OK feel better now? Let’s get to it. Most PC users, even a lot of beginners, know about the defrag utility built into Windows. Some people even use it occasionally. However, judging by my experiences in the field, even those who use it fairly regularly could use a few pointers on how to get the most out of it.

First of all, what is disk fragmentation? We could get really technical and discuss file systems, cluster sizes and the like but I doubt you want to read it anymore than I want to write about it (BORING!…). You don’t really need to understand all of the technical details to understand that fragmentation can and does have a big impact on overall computer performance. I should explain however, that of all the major components of your computer, the hard drive is far and away the slowest. Knowing this, it should make sense that anything we can do to help this “weak link” with performance will improve the the overall computing experience.

Without going into a lot of detail, I’ll start with a brief explanation of how a hard drive works and what causes data fragmentation. Ready? Here goes: The hard drive has a series of platters that contain all of the stored data on your PC (including the operating system, programs and all of your personal data). These platters rotate at a high rate of speed and as they rotate, a mechanical read/write head moves along the surface of the platters and… well, reads and writes data. Your data is stored on this disk in clusters. A single file usually consists of many of these clusters. Over time as you use the computer these clusters get scattered all over the drive and as a result, the files contained in the clusters become fragmented.

The reason that this negatively affects performance is that when the read head looks for a particular file, it can find that information much faster and more efficiently if the clusters containing that file are in contiguous order as opposed to being scattered all over the drive. Think of it this way: If you have a stack of money in various bill denominations, how much faster and more efficiently could you count it if the bills are grouped according to denomination and placed in descending (contiguous) order! The process of defragmentation finds these scattered clusters of data and puts them back in order so that the read head can find them faster.

Now that you are familiar with that concept, let’s get going with the defrag. For those of you who aren’t familiar, the windows defrag utility is located under ‘Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools’. When you start the application, the user interface is pretty straightforward. You just select the drive that you want to defragment and click the button that says “Defragment”. If you don’t do any more than this, you’ll go a long way toward improving the responsiveness of your computer. However, there are a couple major limitations in the defrag utility that can easily be overcome if you know what to do. Here are a couple of tricks you can use to really get the most out of the defrag process.

Temporarily remove the pagefile. Windows uses a section of the hard disk as virtual memory to help speed up performance of the PC. This virtual memory space is known as the paging file or swap file. Windows uses this reserved space to move frequently accessed data into and out of as you work (or play) on your computer. Because this space is reserved as system file space, the defrag utility cannot defragment this section of the disk. This reserved space can be quite large and will become very fragmented over time and since this is the first area of the disk that is accessed by the system when requesting data, it goes without saying that it’s counterproductive for this file to be highly fragmented. So to get this file back in order you have to delete it. (?!) Don’t worry, you are not going to delete anything important and it’s only temporary. Here’s how to do it:

First, save all work and close all open windows. Once you have done this, go to ‘Start > Control Panel(Classic View) > System’. Select the ‘Advanced’ tab and click on the ‘Settings’ button under ‘Performance’. Again, select the ‘Advanced’ tab and under ‘Virtual memory’ click the ‘Change’ button. Click the radio button that says “No paging file” and click the ‘Set’ button. Now close each dialog box by clicking ‘OK’ on each one. You’ll get a message stating that the changes require the computer to be restarted. Click ‘OK’ and restart the PC. When the computer reboots it may seem a little sluggish, but that’s OK because when you’re finished with the defrag, you will restore the swap file and it will be one big contiguous file. That’s a VERY good thing!

Now, before you run the defrag utility, there is one more thing you can do to help optimize the defragmenting process. If your PC has hibernation enabled (it is by default), it uses a file called hiberfil.sys to store the current state of your PC before it “goes to sleep”. This file is then restored when the computer “wakes up” so that it is in the exact same state it was in before hibernating. The whole hibernation thing is a long story and the subject of another article, so for now just understand that hiberfil.sys is a very large file that becomes fragmented over time and because it is designated as reserved system space, can’t be defragmented. So again, the solution is to remove the file. Windows doesn’t need hiberfil.sys to run properly. It is only necessary if you want your computer to have the ability to hibernate when left unattended, so restoring hiberfil.sys is completely optional after you defragment the hard drive. To delete hiberfil.sys, right click any open area on the desktop and choose ‘properties’. Select the ‘Screen Saver’ tab and click the button toward the bottom labeled “Power”. When the ‘Power Options’ dialog box opens, select the ‘Hibernate’ tab. Remove the check from the box that says “Enable hibernation”. The hiberfil.sys file will automatically be deleted.

Now that you have removed these two rather large and uncooperative files run the defrag utility as described above. This time the ENTIRE hard drive will be defragmented! See now, that wasn’t so bad. After windows finishes defragging the disk, don’t forget to re-enable the paging file. Navigate to the virtual memory dialog as described above and this time click the radio button that says “System managed size”. Click ‘Set’ and close all the dialog boxes. Optionally, you can re-enable hibernation also, but it’s not necessary unless you use the hibernate feature.

Disks such as CD, DVD, HD DVD, Blu-ray, flash drives, and external hard drives are convenient means of data storage. They are characterized by small size and light weight, which allows them to be easily carried and transported.

There can be different situations in which you may need to copy your information to a disk. To start with, you may want to distribute a piece of information among many people similar to the way they do it in a music industry when millions of copies of a single CD are made and sold.

You may also want to create a reserve copy of some critical data, or simply record some files to a disk in order to open them on another computer. Disks present a perfect solution for any of the above mentioned situations.

There are different ways in which you can record your information to a disk depending on the type of disk, its storage capacity, and the type of connectivity with the PC. Here we will consider the advantages and disadvantages of the most common types of disks.

CD

CD is probably the most wide-spread type of optical disk. The capacity of a single CD is about 700 MB and allows recording any types of digital data including music, video, images, and applications. To read and record a CD on a personal computer, a CD-ROM drive is required. The type of the CD-ROM drive defines the speed of reading and recording CDs. The CD may be recorded with the help of special recording software or using Windows recording tools.

DVD

DVD is an optical disk that allows recording up to 9 GB (double layer DVD) on a single disk. To read and record DVDs, a DVD-ROM is required. Special DVD burning software is needed to record information to DVD.

HD DVD

HD DVD is a high density optical disk that expands the storage of a single disk up to 60 GB. To read and record HD DVD, a HD DVD-ROM is required. To record HD DVD you must have DVD burning software.

Blu-ray

Blu-ray is a high density optical disk that allows storing up to 80 GB of digital data including high definition video. To be able to read and write Blu-ray disks, a BD-ROM must be available on a PC.

Flash drives

Flash drives are not disks in a proper sense of the word, but they do perform the same function as traditional disks such as data transfer and storage. Flash drives do not use spinning platters like standard hard drives, but they are not optical disks either, instead they use flash memory to record and store information.

Flash drives and USB flash drives

A distinction must be drawn between a flash drive and a USB flash drive. A flash drive imitates conventional hard drive is size, shape and interface, so it can serve as a replacement for conventional hard drive in extreme conditions as it has a lower sensitivity towards mechanical damage. A USB flash drive is a small lightweight hand-held device with a USB connector.

Here in Orange County I find it very important to have a solid technical structure. No computer = no business. Computer repair here in Orange County seems to be very popular, but that quality of good support seems to be declining at a surprisingly fast pace. Say your computer is broken and you need some repair work done, so you call the big name companies. They charge you a ridiculous amount then before you know it you may be having the same problem. You call then back and they charge you again. What type of computer repair or computer service is that. Im not for sure, but if you have a business running and are constantly having issues with your computer you realize how much money your truly are loosing.

Then you have the companies that have “OK” Techs. Meaning the job gets done but as far as service goes its not really prompt. It takes longer than ever but you feel that it would be more of a pain to replace that tech because they have been your technicians for such a lime and you feel that it would be hard to find someone else and teach them your systems. That’s actually not correct at all, Sometimes you need someone to come in and have a fresh set of eyes on your computer systems and networks. If your company is having problem after problem and you always seem to need your computer repaired that means something is wrong and you should not really have to go through all the pain and struggles of a badly working computer.

In Orange County there are many companies who work on computers, and offer computer repair services. However I would say before you just choose any company you should make sure that the company has a nice portfolio. Also just because the owner has a great portfolio you need to find out who is actually working on your computer systems. Sometimes the owner of a computer repair company may boast about all the different qualifications that they have but when it comes down to the actual service they send one of there lower level techs out to work on your system. This is exactly what you need to steer clear away from. Also do not be afraid of price. For example some may charge $125 - $150/ hour for support and another company may charge $60-$80/ hour. OK now your probably thinking that it would be a better investment for you to stick with the lower price. However you get what you pay for, so when it takes the lower price computer repair shop 4 hours to do what the other person can do in 2 hours it starts to add up. Your time is more important so please do not think that you are saving money when not properly researching the company or person who is working on your systems. Always ask for a portfolio like stated above.

Ok I will admit that it can get tricky when your paying a company a lot of money when there service is also not good, so once again I would say ASK FOR A PORTFOLIO! Remember any good technical company will lead your company technically. You should have no doubts about your technical company!

Abstract: The sheer number of safety inspections to be performed by a limited pool of trained safety inspectors places a considerable strain on the inspection process, with inspectors spending a significant amount of time on travel and administrative tasks managing inspection data. This paper focuses on a Virginia Tech study describing how modernization of inspection data management with mobile computing can lead to a highly efficient inspection process. The key being that onsite electronic data capture on to a mobile computer is a component that facilitates integrating all aspects of the inspection process.

This article is relevant to those who are responsible for safety inspections in the field, including highway construction inspections, fire prevention inspections, building safety inspections, environmental inspections and food and social welfare inspections. We focus on a university study describing how modernization of inspection data management can lead to safer communities.

The Strained Public Safety Inspection Process

The trained professionals responsible for the inspection of the nation’s infrastructure, the safety of the public buildings that we occupy, the safety of our food and water supply and the welfare of our children, often spend a significant amount of their time managing inspection data.

This is time not spent on actually performing inspections and improving the safety of our communities.

This paper focuses on a Virginia Tech University study [1] that describes how inspection quality and efficiency can be improved by modernizing how inspection data is managed.

The particular study, conducted by Thomas Mills and Ronald Wakefield of Virginia Polytechnic & State University and described in the report, “Modernizing Bridge Safety Inspection with Process Improvement and Digital Assistance,” was specific to bridge inspections; however we believe that many of their findings are more generally applicable to many other types of safety inspections.

The premise for the work was that the sheer number of safety inspections to be performed by a limited pool of trained safety inspectors places a considerable strain on the inspection process. Furthermore, it is conceivable that inspectors spend as much time on administration and travel as they do on actual inspections.

Research Methodologies

The stated purpose of their research was “to provide insights into alternative inspection techniques that could lead to faster inspection turnarounds, higher quality observations, easier retrieval of inspection data, and a more efficient information and communication exchange within the inspection process.”

Their basic research was conducted using both informal conversation interviews with Virginia Department of Transportation bridge inspectors and direct observation techniques. The interviews were used to document the procedures for the inspection process. The observation was used to capture the nuances of the actual work flow.

In the study, researchers describe the inspection process as having four distinct stages:

Stage 1: Inspection management, where essential data including previous inspection results are gathered

Stage 2: Inspection and condition assessment, where data is collected onsite

Stage 3: Reporting, where the inspection data is delivered into appropriate format; often this means entry into one or more electronic formats

Stage 4: Distributing and archiving, where paper copies may be made and delivered via mail or hand delivered and archived in either paper or electronic form.

Their work yielded the insights that processes based on collecting inspection results on paper, lead to inefficiencies at all stages of the inspection process. At Stage 1, there may be the making of copies of previous inspection results to bring paper copies to the field. Stage 2 will be explored further shortly. Stage 3 may result in the keying in of inspection results into one or more different reporting systems. This is an error-prone stage as the likelihood of mistakes or oversights are high. The downside to not keying the information into an electronic reporting system may be even higher since it represents a lost opportunity to mine valuable data for trends. Stage 4 inefficiencies pertain to the effort involved in getting the inspections reports into all of the right hands that need the data and how the data is archived and retrieved.

Modernizing the Safety Inspection Process

The assessment of the research team was that integrating mobile computing into the inspection process was of paramount importance to the key underlying problem of how to extract inspection data precisely and quickly. Their research indicates “that the inspection process is one that is readily transformable from one that relies on marking up paper forms in the field and then returning to the office for semi-manual reporting, to one that is electronically assisted in areas of data capture, automated updates, and semi-automated report production.”

Returning to the issue of Stage 2 efficiency gains, the research team further stated that “the most desirous tool is one that assists or leads the inspector through a systematic inspection assisted by smart tag or macro inputs.” Smart tags are simply input that can be initiated with minimum keystrokes. They go on to describe the desired system as one where inefficient reporting practices can be eliminated with the implementation of a process in which an inspector can retrieve previous reports on site through a mobile computer. Further, the process would combine field data collection report preparation and avoid separate data entry into one or more backend programs.

Conclusion

The team concluded with some incremental steps that could be taken to improve the inspection process but stressed that the breakthrough strategy is taking the position that mobile computers are essential to transforming current inspection processes, improving the efficiency and quality of inspections and making inspection information available in a timely fashion. They also indicated that as more of the functions that comprise the four stages get automated, they become less a distinct functional area and a more universal adaptation across all functions.

J2EE or the Java to Enterprise Edition platform developed by Sun Microsystems stipulates the criterion for developing multi-tier enterprise applications. The J2EE platform leverages the robustness of the Java programming language that allows developers to write the code only once and execute the application on any platform. Presently more than two-thirds of development managers use the J2EE platform to develop and deploy their applications.

Businesses all over the globe have realized that they can gain a sustainable advantage over their peers by developing custom applications for their unique business needs. Quick development and deployment are required whether in-house applications for raising employee efficiency are being created or rich internet applications to cater to the specialized needs of the clients are being developed. Another issue, which is of concern to enterprises, is the portability and scalability of their enterprise applications. An enterprise application is viable only when it is easily portable across platforms and devices. Scalability is also another parameter, which decides the long-term feasibility of an application. Enterprise applications must be scalable so that they can be scaled up to accommodate thousands of users simultaneously. J2EE based enterprise applications can be executed across platforms and are functional across devices.

J2EE based enterprise applications succeed because stable J2EE standards help developers create multilevel applications with a component based approach. Existing database management systems and legacy applications can be brought under one umbrella so that the critical requirements of the enterprise can be fulfilled. J2EE, in our opinion, has a very bright future and the recent addition of interoperable web services and other new services in version 1.4 will make it even more market-friendly.

Overview
A lot was done and said about EDI, EDI implementations and etc. However there are other alternative to EDI and I will try to high-light the plus and minus of EDI file format while I’m going to focus on the X12 standard, but pretty much goes to EDIFACT as well.

EDI Pros
The EDI file format contain both data and data structure organize in a way where it contains both mandatory and optional segments and elements enabling the user to use any type of information and style he used to by his ERP system and the type of company he runs.

All type of companies can find that the document they use will feet them in one way or another when they first wants to implement the EDI and integrate it with their ERP software package. AT the early stage of EDI, when the engineers from X12 sat down and planned how EDI is going to work they thought about only two industries, the Food and Car industries, however over the years when almost all businesses started to use computer systems with different types of software packages to manage their business, a new need was born. The need for a common denominator for all types of businesses to use electronic document and since that’s what EDI does, then X12 engineers started to add more and more documents to many other industries like the medical industry.

When starting implementing EDI to other industries, they notice that there are major differences between each industry and that each industry works a little bit or a lot different than other industries, so they started to develop new documents for each industry based on that specific industry needs. So today when a company needs to start having a business relationship with other businesses, they can go to the X12 directory and look for a specific document that will fit their needs.

The good thing about EDI is that by agreeing on an EDI document, both parties understand exactly how the file format looks like, yet they still have the option do some custom work and send some information in the file to their trading partners upon agreement with the other side. EDI files as open enough to hold mandatory fields and optional fields, so a company can set the optional fields to what ever they want to, with preference to something that reminds the field description.

This flexibility to send information between computer systems is vital because most businesses who have relationships with other businesses use different ERP systems so when they finally wants to start using EDI they can do that without a problem even though, both ERP systems use different database structure and file format for their import and export routines.

EDI Cons
The EDI file format is complex, have many elements, segments and documents, so when a business wants to achieve a simple talk of sending and receiving an order and he already has a computer system inside but that computer system doesn’t “talk” EDI, then it usually needs to contact some other software vendor who specialize in EDI to do the integration with EDI, that cost more money on the software package, implementation and integration of the EDI software and then having to pay a monthly fee for the EDI Administrator to check out that all EDI transactions went fine and that there are no errors. If there are errors the EDI administrator has to send some type of report to the company, let them know that something went wrong.