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The article reports on the release of a white paper entitled "An Economical Alternative to Boundary Scan in Memory Devices," by the IEEE PI58I Working Group. The study offers an overview of the proposed standard that defines a low-overhead design-for-test methodology to be implemented in memory devices.

The article focuses on new pen-based design tool SketchBook Pro that turns a tablet PC into a sketchpad with a customizable collection of pens, markers, and brushes at the ready for digital artists. The drawing tools are pressure-sensitive. Even a felt-tipped pen held to the screen for several second "bleeds" into the screen, just like a real pen would do on paper. Users can create different pen and brush sizes and shapes and save them in a personal library for future use. Instead of traditional dropdown menus, the primary interface is a simple artist's palette located in the lower left corner of the screen, but movable to any area. A user chooses tools by tapping on them with the tablet PC's pen. The software allows designers to create layers in their sketches and undo up to 20 previous penstrokes. Its ease of use will make this tool a favorite among sketch-happy designers.

In the real world, business users are adopting Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), but they are typically using it in very selective, targeted applications such as linking voice services in branch offices to their existing data networks. They are running VoIP over their corporate networks, but do not trust it for external customers. They are concerned about quality and security when calls are routed over the real Internet. They are finding that the cost savings may not really justify the technology. They say a lot of the technology does not work as promised. In short, they are getting frustrated. This article focuses on the factors that inhibit the adoption of VoIP in the enterprise. INSET: BellSouth latest to offer VoIP business services.

The official result of the Moonv6 project that ended on March 2004 will be a white paper describing how participants got a varied bunch of Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) equipment, networks, functions and applications working together. The unofficial, but more important, result may be a thriving future U.S. IPv6 market, sparked by government and industry working together. Things started to change, at least for service providers, last June 2003. That is when the U.S. Department of Defense mandated that, beginning October 1, 2003, all assets procured for its global information grid be IPv6-capable, with the goal of having all DOD networks running IPv6 by 2008. In the end, it may be a stretch to predict that government initiatives like the DOD mandate, and related efforts like Moonv6, will eventually set off an IPv6 explosion in the U.S.

An excerpt from a white paper sponsored by Sterling Commerce which describes the use of multi-enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA) to provide a business interface that costs effectively is presented.

This paper provides information on storage area networks (SAN). SAN have been adopted in the enterprise data center to facilitate the use and management of the growing amount of data that today's organizations must store, protect and share. Among the benefits of SAN is that they increase disk utilization 100-200 percent over direct-attached storage (DAS) architectures. SAN also allow consolidation of storage and servers, and can provide improved management and control, giving storage administrators better viewing, reporting and monitoring capabilities that reduce management costs and total cost of ownership. In a DAS architecture, the storage is captive to the server to which it is attached. In this way, a SAN is more flexible and scalable than DAS, making SAN useful in mission-critical applications such as data warehousing, e-commerce and business continuance. Customers that have already built a number of small SAN with fabric switches can protect their investment in those switches by building a core-to-edge fabric architecture. This architecture is achieved by purchasing a high-availability, high-performance director-class switch as the core switch, and connecting existing switches to the director.

This article discusses the author's pursuit of a service oriented architecture (SOA) to clean up business processes and reduce human interaction in the handling of advertising sales. In today's information technology (IT) environments, the handling of data is a messy set of business processes. Many IT organizations are trying to construct a never touched by human hands environment by implementing technologies such as Web services. My current project is to try to take a data-rich business process with lots of human touch points and deploy systems to minimize unnecessary data handling. During the past several weeks, I have been driving review of our advertising sales processes, digging deeply into business processes that surround the core of our revenue-producing activities. The business process review is just the beginning what I hope will be a complete transformation of our online and print publishing supply chain. The idealistic technologist in me wanted to eliminate paper from the process and replace it with pristine XML envelopes arriving from our partners via extranet, each delivering just-in-time data and instructions to Web services running on systems within our organization. In short, I had SOA on the brain.