Chandan Banerjee

Project management is an approach of planning, organizing, and managing resources to bring about the flourishing achievement of specific project goals and objectives. Project management is a long procedure that needs involvement of many persons and required an efficient plan to be followed; otherwise the whole project can go to a chaos.
According to a recent study, only 29% of the IT projects are completely successful in year 2007, 23 % were failed, 45% were average cost overrun, 65% were time overrun and 49% were challenged projects. The above statistics shows that a superior project management can make a project successful, while a poor project management can spoil your efforts, money and time.
There are many reasons for an unsuccessful project. In general there can be staffing mistakes, process mistakes, planning mistakes or communication mistakes. Here, we are discussing some Project management Mistakes that can make your project a big confusion.
Mismatch between right resource and right skills: This mismatch between resources and skills can be a major reason for a project collapse. Improper allocation of resources can lead to the erroneous utilization of skills.
Lack of experienced project managers: A project manager directs all the people concerned with the project to accomplish their jobs. If a leader is not performing it’s job in a fine manner, then we can’t expect a prolific outcome from a project. Team members can take advantage of the experiences faced by a senior team manager.
Attitude of ignoring small problems: This is a common problem that many projects have to follow. Some team members ignore small problems at the initial stages and it can lead to a huge dilemma at the later stage.
Lack of up to date information about the project: Team members should have detailed information about the project. With the lack of information, they could not be able to establish proper coordination between resources and the skills required to make the project a success.
IT Doesn’t Follow a Standard, Repeatable Project Management Process: Lack of suitable methodology increases the risk that tasks related to the project will fall through the cracks, that projects will have to be re-worked, and ultimately that a project won’t be completed on time or on budget.
Working on more than one project at one time: Handling more than one project at one time can divert team member’s mind and they would not be able to concentrate on aspects like requirements of the projects or the proper utilization of resources etc.
Lack of communication between project sponsors and shareholders: This can be another reason for a project failure. Communication is the key element for project success. A strapping bidirectional communication helps in understanding the requirements of the project and the
the available resources. A project can never show good results unless the requirements are clear between the two parties (developer and the client).
The above are some very common project management mistakes that have to be removed in time, otherwise they can spoil a project and it will lead to wastage of efforts, money and time.

Microsoft  has made its Photosynth technology easier to use and opened it up for anyone to create their own images, the company planned to announce Thursday.
Photosynth automatically stitches together digital photos just a handful or a few hundred to create an image that a user can spin around to look at from all angles or zoom in to check out a close-up detail.
A project created in part through a collaboration between Microsoft Live Labs and the University of Washington, Photosynth was already open to anyone as a tech preview but heavily taxed many systems, resulting in a very slow user experience. Also, users could only view a handful of images and couldn’t make their own.
Those shortcomings have changed with this launch, said Alex Daley, group product manager at Microsoft Live Labs. The technology behind Photosynth is now designed to do most of the computing work locally, on a user’s computer, with the photos stored remotely on Microsoft servers. That division of labor has made it a much faster experience for end users, Daley said. The technology behind the new service was developed in part by David Gedye, group manager at Live Labs, who founded the SETI@home project that harnesses unused computer time contributed by individuals to search for extraterrestrial intelligent life.
His experience helped in designing Photosynth to use local computing power. "There’s a green story here," Gedye said. "Instead of massive data centers, we’re using the available power on your machine."
At Photosynth.com, anyone can view images created by other people and create their own. The creation process is simple, but still takes some time. Users select and upload a group of photos from their computers. The technology takes several minutes, depending on the number of photos, to examine the photos for common components in order to stitch them together into one image.
Users still must download a piece of software that is about 8M bytes in size in order to use Photosynth, Daley said.  Microsoft hopes to add more community sharing features to Photosynth.com in the future. For now, all images are public and people can comment on images. In the future, Microsoft may allow users to create communities and restrict viewing to people in those communities. Also, the front page of the Web site might feature the most popular images in the future. For now, Microsoft has chosen which images to display on the main page. Users can embed their Photosynth images on other Web sites and send links to them to other people via e-mail. After creating a new Photosynth, people can mark them as copyrighted, protected under the Creative Commons license or public domain. Users can also flag images they think are inappropriate and Microsoft will consider removing them.
The Web site already has many images available for viewing, including some from National Geographic, which has worked with Microsoft over the past couple of months to upload images. Photosynth.com visitors can browse around pictures of iconic international sites such as the Taj Mahal, Hagia Sophia, Machu Picchu and the Sphinx.
Microsoft built Photosynth by combining technology it developed in collaboration with researchers at the University of Washington with technology it acquired from SeaDragon.

Los Angeles, 15th November 2008.

Today, many people rely on computers to do homework, work, and create or store useful information. Therefore, it is important for the information on the computer to be stored and kept properly. It is also extremely important for people on computers to protect their computer from data loss, misuse, and abuse. For example, it is crucial for businesses to keep information they have secure so that hackers can’t access the information. Home users also need to take means to make sure that their credit card numbers are secure when they are participating in online transactions.

A computer security risk is any action that could cause lost of information, software, data, processing incompatibilities, or cause damage to computer hardware, a lot of these are planned to do damage. An intentional breach in computer security is known as a computer crime which is slightly different from a cyber-crime. A cyber-crime is known as illegal acts based on the internet and is one of the FBI’s top priorities. There are several distinct categories for people that cause cyber-crimes, and they are refereed as hacker, cracker, cyber-terrorist, cyber-extortionist, unethical employee, script kiddie and corporate spy. The term hacker was actually known as a good word but now it has a very negative view. A hacker is defined as someone who accesses a computer or computer network unlawfully. They often claim that they do this to find leaks in the security of a network. The term cracker has never been associated with something positive this refers to someone how intentionally access a computer or computer network for evil reasons. It’s basically an evil hacker.

They access it with the intent of destroying, or stealing information. Both crackers and hackers are very advanced with network skills. A cyber-terrorist is someone who uses a computer network or the internet to destroy computers for political reasons. It’s just like a regular terrorist attack because it requires highly skilled individuals, millions of dollars to implement, and years of planning. The term cyber-extortionist is someone who uses emails as an offensive force. They would usually send a company a very threatening email stating that they will release some confidential information, exploit a security leak, or launch an attack that will harm a company’s network. They will request a paid amount to not proceed sort of like black mailing in a since. An unethical employee is an employee that illegally accesses their company’s network for numerous reasons. One could be the money they can get from selling top secret information, or some may be bitter and want revenge. A script kiddie is someone who is like a cracker because they may have the intentions of doing harm, but they usually lack the technical skills. They are usually silly teenagers that use pre-written hacking and cracking programs. A corporate spy has extremely high computer and network skills and is hired to break into a specific computer or computer network to steal or delete data and information.

Shady companies hire these type people in a practice known as corporate espionage. They do this to gain an advantage over their competition an illegal practice. Business and home users must do their best to protect or safeguard their computers from security risks. The next part of this article will give some pointers to help protect your computer. However, one must remember that there is no one hundred percent guarantee way to protect your computer so becoming more knowledgeable about them is a must during these days. When you transfer information over a network it has a high security risk compared to information transmitted in a business network because the administrators usually take some extreme measures to help protect against security risks. Over the internet there is no powerful administrator which makes the risk a lot higher. If your not sure if your computer is vulnerable to a computer risk than you can always use some-type of online security service which is a website that checks your computer for email and Internet vulnerabilities. The company will then give some pointers on how to correct these vulnerabilities.

The Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center is a place that can do this. The typical network attacks that puts computers at risk includes viruses, worms, spoofing, Trojan horses, and denial of service attacks. Every unprotected computer is vulnerable to a computer virus which is a potentially harming computer program that infects a computer negatively and altering the way the computer operates without the user’s consent. Once the virus is in the computer it can spread throughout infecting other files and potentially damaging the operating system itself. It’s similar to a bacteria virus that infects humans because it gets into the body through small openings and can spread to other parts of the body and can cause some damage. The similarity is, the best way to avoid is preparation. A computer worm is a program that repeatedly copies itself and is very similar to a computer virus. However the difference is that a virus needs to attach itself to an executable file and become a part of it. A computer worm doesn’t need to do that I seems copies to itself and to other networks and eats up a lot of bandwidth. A Trojan Horse named after the famous Greek myth and is used to describe a program that secretly hides and actually looks like a legitimate program but is a fake. A certain action usually triggers the Trojan horse, and unlike viruses and worms they don’t replicate itself. Computer viruses, worms, and Trojan horses are all classifies as malicious-logic programs which are just programs that deliberately harms a computer.

Although these are the common three there are many more variations and it would be almost impossible to list them. You know when a computer is infected by a virus, worm, or Trojan horse if one or more of these acts happen:

• Screen shots of weird messages or pictures appear.
• You have less available memory then you expected
• Music or sounds plays randomly.
• Files get corrupted
• Programs are files don’t work properly
• Unknown files or programs randomly appear
• System properties fluctuate

Computer viruses, worms, and Trojan horses deliver their payload or instructions through four common ways. One, when an individual runs an infected program so if you download a lot of things you should always scan the files before executing, especially executable files. Second, is when an individual runs an infected program. Third, is when an individual bots a computer with an infected drive, so that’s why it’s important to not leave media files in your computer when you shut it down. Fourth is when it connects an unprotected computer to a network. Today, a very common way that people get a computer virus, worm, or Trojan horse is when they open up an infected file through an email attachment. There are literally thousands of computer malicious logic programs and new one comes out by the numbers so that’s why it’s important to keep up to date with new ones that come out each day. Many websites keep track of this.

There is no known method for completely protecting a computer or computer network from computer viruses, worms, and Trojan horses, but people can take several precautions to significantly reduce their chances of being infected by one of those malicious programs. Whenever you start a computer you should have no removable media in he drives. This goes for CD, DVD, and floppy disks. When the computer starts up it tries to execute a boot sector on the drives and even if it’s unsuccessful any given various on the boot sector can infect the computer’s hard disk. If you must start the computer for a particular reason, such as the hard disk fails and you are trying to reformat the drive make sure that the disk is not infected.