Inventorying information technology systems: supporting the "paradigm of change"

One of the most significant failures of the IT profession is the absence of systems to gather, support, and supply information for managing software items. Most IT professionals, if they consider software management, think in terms of version or configuration control license and patch management. Version control systems (VCSs) and software configuration management (SCM) systems aim to manage versions of individual software objects with support for linking into sets for release purposes. This has nothing to do with addressing the issues of controlling large amounts of geographically disbursed software, executing on different kinds of systems, maintained by hundreds to thousands of programmers. Software systems are the only major organizational asset with no real support for managing them based on information technology. An appropriate IT inventory management facility is the cornerstone of an integrated set of technologies, called the "paradigm of change" designed to address constantly changing technologies and business processes.     

Mycoplasma fermentans glycolipid triggers inflammatory response in rat astrocytes

Post-translational formation of hypusine in eukaryotic initiation factor 5A (eIF-5A) is essential for cell viability. Recently, we showed that hypusine protein is an in vitro substrate for transglutaminases (TGases). We report the effect of tissue TGase expression on the in vivo hypusine metabolic pathway. The stable expression of tTGase in BALB/c 3T3 cells induced a 100-fold reduction of hypusine levels and a 50% increase of gamma-glutamyl-omega-hypusine formation. Such changes were paralleled by a consistent decrease in the free polyamine pool and an enhancement of their excretion and of the formation of their gamma-glutamyl derivatives. These effects occurred together with a significant reduction of cell proliferation. In this report we suggest, for the first time, that tTGase affects hypusine metabolism, thus regulating the eIF-5A activity and cell proliferation.     

Web metadata standards: observations and prescriptions

The World Wide Web has spawned numerous standards initiatives that aim to facilitate more powerful and interoperable functionality based on text exchange, but beyond mere Web page transfers. Software can take a Web page's data as input to further value-added processing, such as filtering items of interest, comparison shopping, finding potential business partners, and executing transactions. But software can do this only if the page's meaning is formalized and explicit. We review various Web content metadata standards and offer observations on their development efforts. We're motivated both by the sheer number of standards and a concern that in our haste to advance these standards and their promised functionality, we might overlook key lessons learned in various disciplines, including software engineering, software reuse, and library science. We call particular attention to the apparent confluence of standards development and artificial intelligence, which raises additional possibilities and concerns.     

IT assets-control by importance and exception: supporting the "paradigm of change"

Enterprise IT and, along with it, IT management have become increasingly complex. Continuous changes in hardware, software, communications, and organizational requirements force continual procedural changes to both business and engineering processes. These changes can be evolutionary because of normal business competition or revolutionary resulting from a merger, an acquisition, or a decision to replace a legacy system with a major commercial package.