The UNIX genealogy

The UNIX genealogy diagram below is released to the public domain and free for use for any purpose. It shows the relations between several UNIX systems.



UNIX is born in AT&T's Bell Laboratories. Its history began from 1969 when Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and others started working on a project with a PDP-7 minicomputer in their lab.

It was first written in Assembly Language, and was then rewritten in C Language in 1973. In 1975, UNIX version 6 branched out with the emergence of the first version of BSD, which was developed based on UNIX version 6 free source code.

In the 1980s, the two common branches of UNIX were BSD (from the University of California, Berkeley), and System V (from AT&T). Both were derived from the earlier UNIX version 7, but had diverged considerably.

The GNU Project, started in 1984 by Richard Stallman, had the goal of creating a "complete UNIX-compatible software system" made entirely of free software. This mission was eventually realised by Linus Torvalds, who has developed the Linux kernel in early 1990s.

Today, the BSD family has branched out to FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, Mac OS, etc. On the other hand, the System V family has branched out to HP-UX, AIX, UnixWare, IRIX, etc. Meanwhile, Linux, which was derived from Minix (a UNIX-like system intended for academic use), has gained its popularity and rapidly growing in both the server and desktop markets.

Gartner Business Intelligence Summit to be held in The Hague, Netherlands

With the theme of "The BIg Discrepancy: How can we do better with BI?", the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit will be held in The Hague, Netherlands on the coming 20-22 January 2009.

The conference, consists of more than 80 conference sessions and exhibition with more than 25 leading BI technology and service providers, will focus on the following key Business Intelligence issues:

• Key steps to making Business Intelligence strategic
• Creating a BI and performance management strategy to widen the use of BI
• The evolving role of corporate performance management
• Role, structure and organization of the BI Competency Center
• Identifying the right metrics to measure performance
• The Data Warehouse in a time of data explosion
• New delivery models: Open Source and BI "as a service"
• The impact of SOA on BI
• Trends in Enterprise Information Management (EIM) and Master Data Management
• Difficult choices in the Data Quality tools market
• Portal strategies for BI integration
• Business Activity Monitoring and the rise of process-driven BI
• Determining the "return on BI"
• Performance management and compliance
• BI market trends and the increasing impact of the mega-vendors
• Best practices in budgeting, planning & forecasting

Some key benefits to attend this Summit are:

• Understanding the business forces that will affect IT leaders of BIIM initiatives
• Insight into the future scenarios facing BI leaders
• Techniques in making the right innovation choices at the right time
• Improved decision-making responsibilities for BI investment
• Evaluation of the market dynamics when making investment decisions
• Approaches for melding emerging technologies with existing tools and infrastructure
• Development of ROI and cost allocation models that impact the business case
• Linking of CPM to strategic planning, budgets and operational activities to aid strategy execution
• Improved decision-making through BI initiatives and techniques

Click here for more information about the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit and its online registration.

Serious security flaw found in Internet Explorer

You might be awared that recently, there is a serious security flaw found in Internet Explorer versions 5.01, 6 and 7. The security bug is related to the way Internet Explorer handles XML (Extensible Markup Language), which allows hackers to put and run trojan horse program in your computer without your knowledge, when you visit infected website with unpatched Internet Explorer.

In fact, this exploits have already been rigged into many hacked Chinese language websites. Later, launching of massive SQL injection attacks to thousands of legitimate websites to serve this exploit were also found and over 100,000 websites were affected.

In simple words, if you are using Internet Explorer to browse websites, and you haven't patch up this security flaw via Windows' Automatic Updates service or manually download and install the patch, your computer is vulnerable to the attack, and your password and other information could be exposed and stolen by the hackers. Your computer can also be made use by hackers to launch further attacks to other computers.

This security issue is discussed in Microsoft Security Bulletin MS08-078 (KB-960714) published on 17 December 2008, and rated as Critical by Microsoft. Microsoft has responded quickly and come out with an out-of-band patch. Links to download the security patch for various version of Internet Explorer is available in that article.

Therefore, you should immediately patch up your Internet Explorer, or use other browsers such as Firefox to surf the Internet. However, Firefox has also just released a new version 3.0.5 which fixed up several security issues (which were not as critical as the Internet Explorer's security flaw). Even though you use Firefox (or SeaMonkey suite), it is also advisable for you to update the browser to the latest version.

You may click here to go to the download page of Firefox.

How do you know the security patch has been applied to your computer?

For Windows XP, run the "Add or Remove Programs" in the Control Panel, and ensure the "Show updates" option is selected. You should be able to find the installed patch in the listing under Internet Explorer 7 as "Security Update for Windows Internet Explorer 7 (KB960714)" as shown in the diagram below. You should also ensure that other earlier security patches also installed for your browser.