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• How to force a login for an administrator when using Remote Desktop Connection and fast user switching enabled?

  - by brett rogers

  Scenario: I am at work. I want to remote desktop into my machine at home. Problem is, my 5-year-old daughter is playing games on Starfall.com (or something similar) on her (non-admin) account. When I attempt to connect I see this message: Another user is currently logged on to this computer. If you continue, this user has to disconnect from this computer. Do you want to continue? I click Yes and then see Please wait for 'UserName' to respond This presents my daughter with an Allow/Disallow dialog on whether to let me connect. She clicks Disallow (or No or whatever it says) and then I see 'UserName' has denied your request Question: How can I force my account to log in and disconnect her session? Additional Info: My account is an administrator account. My daughter's account is a non-administrator account. Home machine is Windows 7 Pro with fast user switching enabled. Turning off fast user switching is not an option (Kyle pointed out in his answer that turning it off would allow the admin to force another user off). I would keep fast user switching's ability to change accounts without closing the previous account's session over being able to force myself to connect.

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• Thin client - cloud machine - to run via iPad, iPhone, most Androids etc

  - by Carl Lindberg

  I'm tired of having a laptop macbook that breaks down or having files that I need to sync via dropbox etc all the time via the machines to different OS installations. It sucks. I want a thin client where I can login on any machine - my iPhone, PC desktop, iPad etc to one running machine. I would like to replace a modernly powerful desktop iMac with a thin client running via my iPad. I will connect the iPad with a keyboard/mouse too so you get the idea. But I want to be able to use some of the Android phones as well (I guess most Android phones today has a good enough performance/resolution etc to run a thin client). Of course it has to be able to have input/output in sound. Printing can be solved by PDF/emailing etc - so no direct communication to the printer ports to USB etc is necessary. Is there such a service today? It should cost somewhere under something like $40/ month. I will run stuff like CPU heavy duty ableton for music production, xCode for making iOS apps, some games etc. And on the thin client also run virtual machines. VM of Ubuntu and Windows.

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• Twice as long and half as long

  - by PointsToShare

  We are in a project and we hit some snags. What’s a snag? An activity that takes longer than expected. Actually it takes longer than the time assigned to it by an over pressed PM who accepts an impossible time table and tries his best to make it possible, but I digress (again!).  So we have snags and we also have the opposite. Let’s call these “cinches”. The question is: how does a combination of snags and cinches affect the project timeline? Well, there is no simple answer. It depends on the projects dependencies as we see in the PERT chart. If all the snags are in the critical path and all the cinches are elsewhere then the cinches don’t help at all. In fact any snag in the critical path will delay the project.  Conversely, a cinch in the critical path will expedite it. A snag outside the critical path might be serious enough to even change the critical path. Thus without the PERT chart, we cannot really tell. Still there is a principle involved – Time and speed are non-linear! Twice as long adds a full unit, half as long only takes ½ unit away. Let’s just investigate a simple project. It consists of two activities – S and C - each estimated to take a week. Alas, S is a snag and really needs twice the time allotted and – a sigh of relief – C is a cinch and will take half the time allotted, so everything is Hun-key-dory, or is it?  Even here the PERT chart is important. We have 2 cases: 1: S depends on C (or vice versa) as in when the two activities are assigned to one employee. Here the estimated time was 1 + 1 and the actual time was 2 + ½ and we are ½ week late or 25% late. 2: S and C are done in parallel. Here the estimated time was 1, but the actual time is 2 – we are a whole week or 100% late. Let’s change the equation a little. S need 1.5 and C needs .5 so in case 1, we have the loss fully compensated by the gain, but in case 2 we are still behind. There are cases where this really makes no difference. This is when the critical path is not affected and we have enough slack in the other paths to counteract the difference between its snags and cinches – Let’s call this difference DSC. So if the slack is greater than DSC the project will not suffer. Conclusion: There is no general rule about snags and cinches. We need to examine each case within its project, still as we saw in the 4 examples above; the snag is generally more powerful than the cinch. Long live Murphy! That’s All Folks

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• Automated Error Reporting = More Robust Software

  - by Laila

  I would like to tell you how to revolutionize your software development process </marketing hyperbole> On a more serious note, we (Red Gate's .NET Development team) recently rolled a new tool into our development process which has made our lives dramatically easier AND improved the quality of our software, and I (& one of our developers, Alex Davies) just wanted to take a quick moment to share the love. I work with a development team that takes pride in what they ship, so we take software testing rather seriously. For every development project we run, we allocate at least one software tester for every two developers, and we never ship software without first shipping early access releases and betas to get user feedback. And therein lies the challenge -encouraging users to provide consistent, useful feedback is a headache, but without that feedback, improving the software is. tricky. Until fairly recently, we used the standard (if long-winded) approach of receiving bug reports of variable quality via email or through our support forums. If that didn't give us enough information to reproduce the problem - which was most of the time - we had to enter into a time-consuming to-and-fro conversation with the end-user, to get scrape together the data we needed to work out where the problem lay. As I'm sure you're aware, this is painfully slow. To the delight of the team, we recently got to work with SmartAssembly, which lets us embed automated exception and error reporting into our software with very little pain, and we decided to do a little dogfooding. As a result, we've have made a really handy (if perhaps slightly obvious) discovery: As soon as we release a beta, or indeed any release of software, we now get tonnes of customer feedback through automated error reports. Making this process easier for our users has dramatically increased the amount (and quality) of feedback we get. From their point of view, they get an experience similar to Microsoft's error reporting, and process is essentially idiot-proof. From our side of things, we can now react much faster to the information we get, fixing the bugs and shipping a new-and-improved release, which our users rather appreciate. Smiles and hugs all round. Even more so because, as we're use SmartAssembly's Automated Error Reporting, we get to avoid having to spend weeks building an exception reporting mechanism. It takes just a few minutes to add reporting to a project, and we get a bunch of useful information back, like a stack trace and the values of all the local variables, which we can use to fix bugs. Happily, "Automated Error Reporting = More Robust Software" can actually be read two ways: we've found that we not only ship higher quality software, but we also release within a shorter time. We can ship stable software that our users are happy to upgrade to, and we then bask in the glory of lots of positive customer feedback. Once we'd starting working with SmartAssembly, we were curious to know how widespread error reporting was as a practice. Our product manager ran a survey in autumn last year, and found that 40% of software developers never really considered deploying error reporting. Considering how we've now got plenty of experience on the subject, one of our dev guys, Alex Davies, thought we should share what we've learnt, and he's kindly offered to host a webinar on delivering robust software with Automated Error Reporting. Drawing on our own in-house development experiences, he'll cover how to add error reporting to your program, how to actually use the error reports to fix bugs (don't snigger, not everyone's as bright as you), how to customize the error report dialog that your users see, and how to automatically get log files from your users' machine. The webinar will take place on Jan 25th (that's next week). It's free to attend, but you'll still need to register to hear Alex's dulcet tones.

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• Too Clever for My Own Good

  - by AjarnMark

  Yesterday I caught myself being a little too clever for my own good with some ASP.NET code.  It seems that I have forgotten some of my good old classic HTML and JavaScript skills, and become too dependent on the .NET Framework and WebControls to do the work for me.  Here’s the scenario… In order to improve the User Interface and better communicate to the user when something is happening that they need to wait for, we have started to modify some of our larger (slower) pages to display messages like Processing… or Reloading… while they are cycling through a postback.  (Yes, I understand this could be improved by using AJAX / Callbacks and so on, but even then, you need to let your user know that they need to wait for that section to be re-rendered, so for the moment these pages will continue to use good ol’ Postbacks.)  It’s a very simple trick, really.  All I want to do is when some control triggers a postback, first run a little client-side JavaScript to hide the main contents of the page (such as a GridView) and display the appropriate message.  This lets the user know, “Hey, we’re doing something, don’t click another link or scroll and try to take action right now.” The first places I hooked this up were easy.  Most common cause of a postback:  Buttons.  And when you’re writing the markup or declarative code for an ASP:Button control, there is the handy OnClientClick property which is designed for just this purpose…to run client-side JavaScript before the postback occurs.  This is distinguished from the OnClick property which tells the control what Server-side code to run.  Great!  Done!  Easy! But then there are other controls like DropDownLists and CheckBoxes that we use on our pages with the AutoPostback=True setting which cause postbacks.  And these don’t have OnClientClick or OnClientSelectedIndexChanged events.  So I started getting creative, using an ASP:CustomValidator control in conjunction with setting the CausesValidation and ValidationGroup settings on these controls, which basically caused the action on the control to fire the Custom Validator, which was defined with a Client Side validation function which then did the hide content/show message code (and return a meaningless IsValid setting).  This also caused me to define a different ValidationGroup setting for my real data entry validator controls so that I could control them separately and only have them fire when I really wanted validation, and not just my show/hide trick. For a little while I was pretty proud of myself for coming up with this clever approach to get around what I considered to be a serious oversight on the DropDownList and CheckBox controls declarative syntax.  Then, in the midst of my smugness, just as I was about to commit my changes to the source code repository, it dawned on me that there is a much simpler and much more appropriate way to accomplish this.  All that I really needed to do was to put in my server-side code (I used the Page_Init section) a call to MyControl.Attributes.Add(“onClick”, “myJavaScriptFunctionName()”) for the checkboxes, and for the DropDownLists (which become select tags) use “onChange” instead of “onClick”.  This is exactly the type of thing that the Attributes collection is there for…so you can add attributes to be rendered with the control that you would have otherwise stuck right into the HTML markup if you had been doing this by hand in the first place. Ugh!  A few hours wasted on clever tricks that I ended up completely removing, but I did learn a lot more about custom validators and validation groups in the process.  And got a good reminder that all that stuff (HTML, JavaScript, and CSS) I learned back when I wrote classic ASP pages is still valuable today.  Oh, and one more thing…don’t get lulled into too much reliance on the the whiz-bang tool to do it for you.  After all, WebControls are just another layer of abstraction, and sometimes you need to dig down through the layers and get a little closer to the native language.

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• SQLAuthority News – Stay Connected and Social Media

  - by pinaldave

  I think I have finally gotten back my faith in social media. If you are following my blog I am sure you are aware of my views on social media – SQLAuthority News – Social Media Confusion – Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn and Me. I was not happy about how social media was evolving. Whenever I go to Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, I noticed the same updates everywhere. I just thought I was wasting my time doing the same thing everywhere. I strongly believe that there is no dictator on internet. Nobody has authority over others, everybody can express their ideas as long as it is not violating others privacy and it is not morally wrong. I have decided that instead of trying to improve the world, I should change myself and adjust my needs. Here are few things I have done to relieve my social media confusion. Twitter I un-followed people who were taking up my time with too many updates. I un-followed people who hardly updated at all. I did not follow anybody else’s list, as I have no control over who other people follow. I follow not only serious SQL people but some fun stuff as well. I removed all my friends who were on Facebook and repeating the same updates on Twitter. I engage with them on Facebook. I followed people who are very conversational on Twitter. I let anybody follow me. I update all my blog posts through at least five tweets online. I decided to re-tweet at least five of my favorite tweets of the day, this way I force myself to remain active in the community. Follow me on Twitter! LinkedIn I updated my career and professional info on LinkedIn. I keep my LinkedIn profile updated with my latest jobs and career news. I let anybody connect with me on LinkedIn. I specify my email address in my profile, keeping it easy for those who want to add me. I read all the profile related updates of my connections – it is very valuable to know who is where and what changes are happening. I do not add my personal tweets or comments in LinkedIn profile. I just keep it professional. Link with me at LinkedIn Facebook I use Facebook only for personal friends. I visit all of my friends at regular intervals and make sure that they are really my friends. I often remove my friends from my Twitter list who are sending duplicate updates. I upload my family photos as well as family updates on Facebook, making sure that only my approved friends are able to read my updates. I keep my Facebook very personal and I often chat with my friends on Facebook chat. I am no longer confused about social media and I think I am using it appropriately. As I said, one cannot decide for others how to use social media, you can only decide for yourself. I have finally found my peace with social media. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Nec USB 3.0 controller drops connection - Ubuntu 12.04.1

  - by Tom

  I have some serious problems with Technaxx pci-e 302p card. It has uPD720200a NEC chip with 4020 firmware. BIOS recognises it. Sometimes it recognises devices and system mounts them and are functional for few minutes, other times they can't be mount and error occours. After fresh install card worked fine, but after kernel and firmware update it behaves as mentioned. Outputs: uname -a Linux asd-GA-MA770-UD3 3.2.0-30-generic #48-Ubuntu SMP Fri Aug 24 16:52:48 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux lspci -vvv USB controller: NEC Corporation uPD720200 USB 3.0 Host Controller (rev 04) (prog-if 30 [XHCI]) Control: I/O- Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B- DisINTx+ Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B- ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx- Latency: 0, Cache Line Size: 64 bytes Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 17 Region 0: Memory at fd8fe000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8K] Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel driver in use: xhci_hcd lsusb Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 007 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 008 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 009 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub Bus 001 Device 003: ID 07d1:3c0a D-Link System DWA-140 RangeBooster N Adapter(rev.B2) [Ralink RT3072] Bus 005 Device 004: ID 1997:1221 Bus 005 Device 003: ID 15c2:003c SoundGraph Inc. lsmod Module Size Used by nls_iso8859_1 12713 0 nls_cp437 16991 0 vfat 17585 0 fat 61512 1 vfat vesafb 13844 1 saa7134_alsa 18602 1 rfcomm 47604 0 bnep 18281 2 bluetooth 180104 10 rfcomm,bnep tda827x 18182 1 snd_hda_codec_hdmi 32474 1 ir_lirc_codec 12859 0 lirc_dev 19204 1 ir_lirc_codec tda8290 22616 1 arc4 12529 2 snd_hda_codec_realtek 224173 1 ir_mce_kbd_decoder 12777 0 ir_sony_decoder 12510 0 ir_jvc_decoder 12507 0 tuner 27428 1 ir_rc6_decoder 12507 0 snd_hda_intel 33773 5 rt2800usb 22684 0 rt2800lib 58925 1 rt2800usb crc_ccitt 12667 1 rt2800lib rt2x00usb 20762 1 rt2800usb rt2x00lib 51144 3 rt2800usb,rt2800lib,rt2x00usb mac80211 506816 3 rt2800lib,rt2x00usb,rt2x00lib ir_rc5_decoder 12507 0 rc_avermedia_m135a 12526 0 rc_imon_pad 12505 0 ir_nec_decoder 12507 0 cfg80211 205544 2 rt2x00lib,mac80211 snd_hda_codec 127706 3 snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_hda_intel snd_ctxfi 111202 2 snd_hwdep 13668 1 snd_hda_codec imon 32839 0 snd_pcm 97188 5 saa7134_alsa,snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec,snd_ctxfi snd_seq_midi 13324 0 saa7134 181851 1 saa7134_alsa videobuf_dma_sg 19354 2 saa7134_alsa,saa7134 snd_rawmidi 30748 1 snd_seq_midi snd_seq_midi_event 14899 1 snd_seq_midi joydev 17693 0 rc_core 26412 13 ir_lirc_codec,ir_mce_kbd_decoder,ir_sony_decoder,ir_jvc_decoder,ir_rc6_decoder,ir_rc5_decoder,rc_avermedia_m135a,rc_imon_pad,ir_nec_decoder,imon,saa7134 snd_seq 61896 2 snd_seq_midi,snd_seq_midi_event fglrx 3263886 101 videobuf_core 26390 2 saa7134,videobuf_dma_sg v4l2_common 16454 2 tuner,saa7134 videodev 98259 3 tuner,saa7134,v4l2_common sp5100_tco 13791 0 snd_timer 29990 2 snd_pcm,snd_seq snd_seq_device 14540 3 snd_seq_midi,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq snd 78855 28 saa7134_alsa,snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec,snd_ctxfi,snd_hwdep,snd_pcm,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq,snd_timer,snd_seq_device v4l2_compat_ioctl32 17128 1 videodev tveeprom 21249 1 saa7134 i2c_piix4 13301 0 soundcore 15091 1 snd edac_core 53746 0 serio_raw 13211 0 snd_page_alloc 18529 3 snd_hda_intel,snd_ctxfi,snd_pcm edac_mce_amd 23709 0 wmi 19256 0 mac_hid 13253 0 ppdev 17113 0 parport_pc 32866 1 k10temp 13166 0 lp 17799 0 parport 46562 3 ppdev,parport_pc,lp usb_storage 49198 0 uas 18180 0 usbhid 47199 0 hid 99559 1 usbhid firewire_ohci 41000 0 firewire_core 63558 1 firewire_ohci crc_itu_t 12707 1 firewire_core floppy 70365 0 pata_atiixp 13204 2 r8169 62099 0 dmesg | tail after plugging to usb 3.0 port [ 834.871296] sd 9:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device [ 834.871308] sd 9:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device [ 834.871319] sd 9:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device [ 834.871330] sd 9:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device [ 834.871530] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdd] Unhandled error code [ 834.871536] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdd] Result: hostbyte=DID_NO_CONNECT driverbyte=DRIVER_OK [ 834.871545] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdd] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 0e 8e 48 0a 00 00 3e 00 [ 834.871564] end_request: I/O error, dev sdd, sector 244205578 [ 834.875497] sd 8:0:0:1: Device offlined - not ready after error recovery [ 834.885339] usb 9-2: USB disconnect, device number 2 Are there any other outputs need for answering? I'll post them ASAP. I could of course reject updating the system but I think it's halfway solution. Any help appreciated. BTW USB 2.0 and 1.1 ports run well, card itself runs under win7 as charm. Tom

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• Restore passwd for root on a server

  - by s.mihai

  Hello,       I have a DVR server with linux embeded. It has some telnet functions but i don't have the password for it (the chinese manufacturer refuses to give me the password). I did get a upgrade folder from them and found a passwd file inside.       So i assume that when i upgrade the firmware the password in that file will be used.       Now i am trying to modify the file so taht i can insert a password i already know.       The problem is that i don't know how to create the password hash from what i figured the password hash is $1$1/lfbDKX$Hmd.FqzB8IZEohPesYi961       The file is named rom.ko and i found a command telnetd /mnt/yaffs/web/boa -c /mnt/yaffs/web & /bin/cp -f /mnt/yaffs/rom.ko /etc/shadow in a script file so i assume this is the right way.       Can you help me reconstruct a password that i know already? Tell me how or make one for me :) ?... passwd file: root:$1$1/lfbDKX$Hmd.FqzB8IZEohPesYi961:0:0:99999:7:-1:-1:33637592 bin::10897:0:99999:7::: daemon::10897:0:99999:7::: adm::10897:0:99999:7::: lp::10897:0:99999:7::: sync::10897:0:99999:7::: shutdown::10897:0:99999:7::: halt::10897:0:99999:7::: mail::10897:0:99999:7::: news::10897:0:99999:7::: uucp::10897:0:99999:7::: operator::10897:0:99999:7::: games::10897:0:99999:7::: gopher::10897:0:99999:7::: ftp::10897:0:99999:7::: nobody::10897:0:99999:7::: next::11702:0:99999:7:::

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• My search what the Cloud will mean for my Work, part 2

  - by Kay Sellenrode

  My experience with the cloud and why work will change and not disappear. Until now I have multiple experiences with the cloud, for the most good. i have worked on multiple cloud solutions in the past but let me describe them as 0.x versions. For me the 1st real serious cloud experience was a bit more than 1 year ago, when our company switched from an in house server to Microsoft BPOS as a complete replacement. Since we are a small consultancy firm and don’t have that much else to do than consulting, our IT requirements are quite simple. We need Mail and Storage space for our documents. With the in house server we had multiple outages during a year, mostly by lack of administering. Being consultants in the field and hardly having time to maintain a server, BPOS was and still is for us the right solution. Since the migration we have less outages and a much more robust solution. Have we run into issues with BPOS for our own environment? No not that I’m aware of. Based on this experience I made a stance about deploy ability of BPOS and cloud solutions, they are suitable for MKB (Dutch for Medium and Small Businesses). Most Small businesses don’t have the amount of work to hire a full time it admin. Hiring a service provider to maintain their own server might be even more costly than hiring an admin. So seeing the capabilities of BPOS and the needs of most businesses I see it as a great solution that gives the business a complete Server replacement solution for a fixed price per user. resulting in a clear budget for IT spending, something most small businesses were looking for, for a long time. So right now I’m deploying BPOS with a customer, and I run into some of the Cloud 1.0 issues. In my opinion BPOS is a good working Cloud version 1.0 solution. What do I mean with 1.0? Well 1.0 is mostly a tested solution (unlike 0.x versions) but still have quite some limitations caused by too few market experience. in my opnion this is also the reason why we don’t see that much BPOS customers yet and why I think Office 365 will make a huge difference. What I have seen of 365 shows me it is a Cloud 2.0 version, meaning it has all needed features and is much more flexible to the customer. This is also why I see changes happen in my work field, changes and not unemployment due to Cloud solutions. Cloud 1.0 solutions gave me the idea that if every customer would adopt them I would be out of work. But in reality Cloud 1.0 solutions are here just to set the market needs. The Cloud 2.0 and higher versions will give the customer much more flexibility, but also require the need for a consultant. Where the 1.0 versions are simple to setup and maintain, the 2.0 solution needs more thought upfront and afterwards. ie. BPOS in its 1.0 version brings you a very simplified Exchange 2007 solution, Suitable for some customers. Looking at Office 365 you receive almost a full blown Exchange 2010 solution. I expect this to be even more customizable in the next version. In my search for the changes to my work I try to regulary write a post with my thought around the Cloud and the impact on my work as a consultant. I'm also planning to present around this topic, so if anyone is interested to see me present around this topic, you're more than welcome to contact me.

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• Oracle MDM Maturity Model

  - by David Butler

  A few weeks ago, I discussed the results of a survey conducted by Oracle’s Insight team. The survey was based on the data management maturity model that the Oracle Insight team has developed over the years as they analyzed customer IT organizations to help them get more out of everything they already have. I thought you might like to learn more about the maturity model itself. It can help you figure out where you stand when it comes to getting your organizations data management act together. The model covers maturity levels around five key areas: Profiling data sources; Defining a data strategy; Defining a data consolidation plan; Data maintenance; and Data utilization. Profile data sources: Profiling data sources involves taking an inventory of all data sources from across your IT landscape. Then evaluate the quality of the data in each source system. This enables the scoping of what data to collect into an MDM hub and what rules are needed to insure data harmonization across systems. Define data strategy: A data strategy requires an understanding of the data usage. Given data usage, various data governance requirements need to be developed. This includes data controls and security rules as well as data structure and usage policies. Define data consolidation strategy: Consolidation requires defining your operational data model. How integration is to be accomplished. Cross referencing common data attributes from multiple systems is needed. Synchronization policies also need to be developed. Data maintenance: The desired standardization needs to be defined, including what constitutes a ‘match’ once the data has been standardized. Cleansing rules are a part of this methodology. Data quality monitoring requirements also need to be defined. Utilize the data: What data gets published, and who consumes the data must be determined. How to get the right data to the right place in the right format given its intended use must be understood. Validating the data and insuring security rules are in place and enforced are crucial aspects for full no-risk data utilization. For each of the above data management areas, a maturity level needs to be assessed. Where your organization wants to be should also be identified using the same maturity levels. This results in a sound gap analysis your organization can use to create action plans to achieve the ultimate goals. Marginal is the lowest level. It is characterized by manually maintaining trusted sources; lacking or inconsistent, silo’d structures with limited integration, and gaps in automation. Stable is the next leg up the MDM maturity staircase. It is characterized by tactical MDM implementations that are limited in scope and target a specific division.  It includes limited data stewardship capabilities as well. Best Practice is a serious MDM maturity level characterized by process automation improvements. The scope is enterprise wide. It is a business solution that provides a single version of the truth, with closed-loop data quality capabilities. It is typically driven by an enterprise architecture group with both business and IT representation.   Transformational is the highest MDM maturity level. At this level, MDM is quantitatively managed. It is integrated with Business Intelligence, SOA, and BPM. MDM is leveraged in business process orchestration. Take an inventory using this MDM Maturity Model and see where you are in your journey to full MDM maturity with all the business benefits that accrue to organizations who have mastered their data for the benefit of all operational applications, business processes, and analytical systems. To learn more, Trevor Naidoo and I have written the Oracle MDM Maturity Model whitepaper. It’s free, so go ahead and download it and use it as you see fit.

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• Hardware doesn't work some times

  - by Ali

  I have an Asus n51vf laptop. I bought it not long time ago (less than a month) and installed Windows 7 on it. Since that it wasn't new when I bought it, I don't know, if the problem was occuring before re-installing Windows 7. There are two problems, that might (or might not) have something to do with each other: Problem The less annoying problem is that the screen flickers ONLY on YouTube when scrolling and/or pausing/playing the video or moving the curser over the video. The second more timeconsuming problem is that some of the hardware doesn't work when I turn up the computer. Then I have to reboot the computer and try again. Example: I turn on the computer, and the touchpad doesn't work - I then reboot and it works again. This has so far happened to the screen (leading to a black screen), the keyboard and the touchpad. More frequently the mouse. What have I tried to do so far? I tried reeinstalling the touchpad driver (Synaptic Touchpad driver from Asus Support Page) - didn't help at all. I even tried reinstalling the driver when the non-responding mouse on startup-problem occured (using the keyboard), but it asked me to reboot and didn't help at all. I also installed (and reinstalled) the graphics driver; it's a GeForce GT 130M. Now, the problem never occurs spontaneously - it only appears when booting my computer. I can even use the computer for heavy tasks (games, multiple programs running etc.) with no problem at all. I suspect, that the problem is in some booting mechanism that fails: Maybe the Windows driver loading? Motherboard problems?

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• Windows 7 restarts while being idle

  - by Ondrej Slinták

  My Windows 7 almost always restarts when I keep it idle for ~20-30mins. It happened randomly before, but lately, if I leave the computer I can be sure it's gonna restart after those 30mins. It never happens when I play games or work tho, just when it's idle. It's a fresh install of Windows 7 64bit. I had also problems while installing it, it always crashed while finalizing the install and I had to reinstall again. Eventually it installed on 3rd or 4th try after I deleted all of my partitions and added them again. I thought it might have been a hardware problem, but temperatures seem to be okay and I have no idea how to track what might have been causing it. Any ideas? I'm running Windows 7 64bit on: Gigabyte EX58-UD4P Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 920 @ 2.67GHz NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 6GB of DDR3 1066Mhz RAM WDC WD1001FALS-00J7B0 1TB SATA II I have a very bad feeling it might be something with HDD and its compatibility with Windows 7 as I haven't had those problems for 1 year while I had Vista.

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• Two Candidates + One Job = Two Different Outcomes

  - by david.talamelli

  Recruiters have always headhunted (sidenote: I do not like this word, in general I think the type of people who use the phrase “headhunting” are the ones who are trying to sound more important than what they likely are). Any serious Recruiter engages in direct recruiting activity, it is part and parcel of the business it is not something unique. With the uptake in Social Media the past 4-5 years, we have seen an increase in the number of Recruiters proactively reaching out to people about job opportunities. We have also seen this activity increase across all levels of hire, from help desk roles to C-Level Executives. While getting approached about a role can be a nice boost to a person’s ego, do not let it give you an inflated sense of entitlement. It is The way that people handle themselves during these calls and subsequent interviews will have a large impact on their potential to land that job. Last week I spoke to two very different candidates, both about the same position and both with very different outcomes. On paper, Candidate #1 looked fantastic; they ticked many of the boxes that we were looking for. The person is working at global IT company and working in a similar role as the one we were hiring for but not in as senior as the role we had. This role would have been the perfect step to getting involved in more complex work for the person. Candidate #2 had less polished IT experience, ticked some of the boxes we were looking for and on paper in comparison to Candidate #1 was not as close a fit as Candidate #1 was. It seemed like I was comparing apples and oranges. After speaking to both candidates it turns out I was comparing apples and oranges except the person better suited for our role was not the one I was expecting it would be. The first candidate on paper looked great – they had the experience we were looking for and appeared to be just right for the role, but after talking to them, they gave me the impression that they thought the world owed them. The impression I was left with was that they did not equate success with hard work, they seemed more interested in “what is in it for me”. Rather than having a proper conversation with me, I was often cut off and asked to hurry it up when explaining our business, what we are doing, etc... . This person seemed more interested in the job title and money than how rather than think about ways to make the role successful. Candidate #2 who had limited experience, made up for any perceived lack of experience and them some with a demonstrated motivation to succeed and do the things needed to make that happen. Candidate #2 made a great first impression, they did not seem afraid of hard work and demonstrated a “team player” attitude. In talking to them they kept me engaged, listened and asked thoughtful questions that made me think this is the type of person who creates their own luck and who would thrive in a place like Oracle. Skills, capabilities, experience and a good resume can certainly get your foot in the door, but the wrong attitude or approach to work can close those opportunities just as easily. On the other hand, hard work, effort and a genuine work ethic may help open those doors that would otherwise closed for you. A resume with all the credentials gets you in the front door but that is just the beginning of the process. It is not how we start the race that is important, it’s how things end that matter most.

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• Java EE @ No Fluff Just Stuff Tour

  - by reza_rahman

  If you work in the US and still don't know what the No Fluff Just Stuff (NFJS) Tour is, you are doing yourself a very serious disfavor. NFJS is by far the cheapest and most effective way to stay up to date through some world class speakers and talks. This is most certainly true for US enterprise Java developers in particular. Following the US cultural tradition of old-fashioned roadshows, NFJS is basically a set program of speakers and topics offered at major US cities year round. Many now famous world class technology speakers can trace their humble roots to NFJS. Via NFJS you basically get to have amazing training without paying for an expensive venue, lodging or travel. The events are usually on the weekends so you don't need to even skip work if you want (a great feature for consultants on tight budgets and deadlines). I am proud to share with you that I recently joined the NFJS troupe. My hope is that this will help solve the lingering problem of effectively spreading the Java EE message here in the US. For NFJS I hope my joining will help beef up perhaps much desired Java content. In any case, simply being accepted into this legendary program is an honor I could have perhaps only dreamed of a few years ago. I am very grateful to Jay Zimmerman for seeing the value in me and the Java EE content. The current speaker line-up consists of the likes of Neal Ford, Venkat Subramaniam, Nathaniel Schutta, Tim Berglund and many other great speakers. I actually had my tour debut on April 4-5 with the NFJS New York Software Symposium - basically a short train commute away from my home office. The show is traditionally one of the smaller ones and it was not that bad for a start. I look forward to doing a few more in the coming months (more on that a bit later). I had four talks back to back (really my most favorite four at the moment). The first one was a talk on JMS 2 - some of you might already know JMS is one of my most favored Java EE APIs. The slides for the talk are posted below: What’s New in Java Message Service 2 from Reza Rahman The next talk I delivered was my Cargo Tracker/Java EE + DDD talk. This talk basically overviews DDD and describes how DDD maps to Java EE using code examples/demos from the Cargo Tracker Java EE Blue Prints project. Applied Domain-Driven Design Blue Prints for Java EE from Reza Rahman The third talk I delivered was our flagship Java EE 7/8 talk. As you may know, currently the talk is basically about Java EE 7. I'll probably slowly evolve this talk to gradually transform it into a Java EE 8 talk as we move forward (I'll blog about that separately shortly). The following is the slide deck for the talk: JavaEE.Next(): Java EE 7, 8, and Beyond from Reza Rahman My last talk for the show was my JavaScript+Java EE 7 talk. This talk is basically about aligning EE 7 with the emerging JavaScript ecosystem (specifically AngularJS). The slide deck for the talk is here: JavaScript/HTML5 Rich Clients Using Java EE 7 from Reza Rahman Unsurprisingly this talk was well-attended. The demo application code is posted on GitHub. The code should be a helpful resource if this development model is something that interests you. Do let me know if you need help with it but the instructions should be fairly self-explanatory. My next NFJS show is the Central Ohio Software Symposium in Columbus on June 6-8 (sorry for the late notice - it's been a really crazy few weeks). Here's my tour schedule so far, I'll keep you up-to-date as the tour goes forward: June 6 - 8, Columbus Ohio. June 24 - 27, Denver Colorado (UberConf) - my most extensive agenda on the tour so far. July 18 - 20, Austin Texas. I hope you'll take this opportunity to get some updates on Java EE as well as the other awesome content on the tour?

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• 13 MORE Things from the Oracle Social Summit You Should Know

  - by Mike Stiles

  In our previous blog, we started giving those of you who couldn’t make it just a sampling of the valuable takeaways from the first annual Oracle Social Summit, held Nov 14 and 15 in Las Vegas. And while yes, 13 items is a pretty healthy sampling, we wanted to go the extra mile and give you 13 more, an indication of just how much great information came out of it.  Follow the arrow, and come on in as if you were there with us. 1. Weber Shandwick takes a 70/20/10 approach when advising clients how to allocate resources to paid social opportunities. 70% of spend should go toward paid opportunities the agency and client both know work, 20% should go toward paid social the agency knows works, and 10% should go toward experimentation. (Matt Dickman – Weber Shandwick) 2. By 2017, the technically competent CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO. (Gartner Study) 3. CIOs are focused on infrastructure. As the roles of the CMO and CIO continue coming together, those CIOs have to make a very conscious decision to get CMOs what they need. 4. It’s now harder for brands to differentiate based on product. The advantage will go to the brands that are successful in garnering customer trust. 5. More and more, enterprise software is going to start looking like the software consumers are used to seeing and using. 6. You will see brands prioritizing mobile and dropping investments in www, HTML, POS systems, etc. 7. The social graph has to be added to brands’ customer data for a more holistic view. Customers will give you the information you need if the reward is appropriate. 8. Viacom did a study that showed viewers are most honest on social. Not so much on surveys or other feedback vehicles. 9. How are you determining your influencers? Influence isn’t about reach. It’s about getting people to change behavior. 10. A mix of skills is becoming critically important in a social staff. It shouldn’t be a mixture of several disciplines, not just a bunch of “social experts.” 11. If senior management isn’t engaged, the social team is forced into guessing what might be considered a “success” by the C-suite. 12. Mobile customization will be getting big investments from brands in 2013. Brands need to provide shoppers utility, not just information. 75% will use mobile this holiday season to avoid in-store madness. 13. Data becomes information, information becomes insight, and insight becomes actionable. The Oracle Social Summit brought together brands, agencies, Oracle social experts and industry thought leaders to take a serious look at where social stands today, and where it’s headed in the near future. Given the speed of social’s evolution, attending such events (or at least reading nifty summary blogs) is a good investment in making sure your enterprise isn’t falling gradually behind.

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• What would cause my Windows machine to seize?

  - by Coltin

  I run Windows XP SP2 on a Desktop I built (I know that doesn't provide much, but I can't say "on a Dell X103938R" or something). It has 'seized' about 7 times in its year and a half life. Everything freezes. I can't move the mouse cursor and the keyboard seems unresponsive. I can turn the monitor on and off and it will hold the last image. The light for the mouse is responsive if I move it. The keyboard lights change when pressed (cap locks, etc). I've waited upto ten minutes for a change, nothing. I haven't connected any activity to the seizing. It's happened when all I was "running" were fullscreen programs (games), just checking email, or once when I was sitting at my desktop (I was reading a book and when I tried to use the mouse, nothing). I've never been able to figure it out. I have to hard reset, and then its fine. It doesn't file system check or anything (not sure if Windows does that). No error when I load up the computer, nothing. If I had uTorrent open, it will have to recheck the torrent files to make sure they weren't corrupted though. (It's not always open when it seizes either). I'm using an AMD Athlon 5400+ with a NVidia GeForce 8600 GT, if that helps. I'm using two hard drives, 500Gb Wester Digital with a 1Tb Hitachi.

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• What is the best VM for developing WPF apps from within OS X?

  - by MarqueIV

  All of my machines are Macs (Mac Pro, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air and Mac Mini (and Apple TV 2.0 too! :) ) but for my day-job, I develop .NET/WPF applications. Normally I just boot into Boot Camp and develop that way, which of course works great, but there are times when I need to simultaneously get to things on my Mac-side of the equation, so I've bought both VMware 3.1 and Parallels 6. Both work, however, even on my Mac Pro where I paid to upgrade to the better video cards (the NVidia 8600s I think vs. the stock ATI cards) the WPF performance bites!! Now this confuses me since both boast that they support not only hardware-accelerated OpenGL 2.1, but also hardware-accelerated DirectX 9 (VMware even allegedly supports DirectX 10!) via their respective virtual drivers and both can run 3D games just fine, even in a window. But even the simple act of resizing a WPF window that has a tiled background results in some HIDEOUS repainting and resizing behaviors. It's damn near closer to what you'd expect over RDP let alone a software-only renderer (forget accelerated hardware completely!) So... can anyone please tell me WTF WPF is doing differently? More importantly, how can I speed up the WPF performance? Should I switch to VirtualBox that also has support for DirectX? Or am I just gonna have to 'byte' the bullet (sorry... had to. So I like puns! Thank Jon Stewart!) and continue using Boot Camp?

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• Sprinkle Some Magik on that Java Virtual Machine

  - by Jim Connors

  GE Energy, through its Smallworld subsidiary, has been providing geospatial software solutions to the utility and telco markets for over 20 years.  One of the fundamental building blocks of their technology is a dynamically-typed object oriented programming language called Magik.  Like Java, Magik source code is compiled down to bytecodes that run on a virtual machine -- in this case the Magik Virtual Machine. Throughout the years, GE has invested considerable engineering talent in the support and maintenance of this virtual machine.  At the same time vast energy and resources have been invested in the Java Virtual Machine. The question for GE has been whether to continue to make that investment on its own or to leverage massive effort provided by the Java community? Utilizing the Java Virtual Machine instead of maintaining its own virtual machine would give GE more opportunity to focus on application solutions.   At last count, there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of examples of programming languages that have been hosted atop the Java Virtual Machine.  Prior to the release of Java 7, that effort, although certainly possible, was generally less than optimal for languages like Magik because of its dynamic nature.  Java, as a statically typed language had little use for this capability.  In the quest to be a more universal virtual machine, Java 7, via JSR-292, introduced a new bytecode called invokedynamic.  In short, invokedynamic affords a more flexible method call mechanism needed by dynamic languages like Magik. With this new capability GE Energy has succeeded in hosting their Magik environment on top of the Java Virtual Machine.  So you may ask, why would GE wish to do such a thing?  The benefits are many: Competitors to GE Energy claimed that the Magik environment was proprietary.  By utilizing the Java Virtual Machine, that argument gets put to bed.  JVM development is done in open source, where contributions are made world-wide by all types of organizations and individuals. The unprecedented wealth of class libraries and applications written for the Java platform are now opened up to Magik/JVM platform as first class citizens. In addition, the Magik/JVM solution vastly increases the developer pool to include the 9 million Java developers -- the largest developer community on the planet. Applications running on the JVM showed substantial performance gains, in some cases as much as a 5x speed up over the original Magik platform. Legacy Magik applications can still run on the original platform.  They can be seamlessly migrated to run on the JVM by simply recompiling the source code. GE can now leverage the huge Java community.  Undeniably the best virtual machine ever created, hundreds if not thousands of world class developers continually improve, poke, prod and scrutinize all aspects of the Java platform.  As enhancements are made, GE automatically gains access to these. As Magik has little in the way of support for multi-threading, GE will benefit from current and future Java offerings (e.g. lambda expressions) that aim to further facilitate multi-core/multi-threaded application development. As the JVM is available for many more platforms, it broadens the reach of Magik, including the potential to run on a class devices never envisioned just a few short years ago.  For example, Java SE compatible runtime environments are available for popular embedded ARM/Intel/PowerPC configurations that could theoretically host this software too. As compared to other JVM language projects, the Magik integration differs in that it represents a serious commercial entity betting a sizable part of its business on the success of this effort.  Expect to see announcements not only from General Electric, but other organizations as they realize the benefits of utilizing the Java Virtual Machine.

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• Is It Worth It To Learn Experimental Languages

  - by Xander Lamkins

  I'm a young programmer who desires to work in the field someday as a programmer. I know Java, VB.NET and C#. I want to learn a new language (as I programmer, I know that it is valuable to extend what I know - to learn languages that make you think differently). I took a look online to see what languages were common. Everybody knows C and C++ (even those muggles who know so little about computers in general), so I thought, maybe I should push for C. C and C++ are nice but they are old. Things like Haskell and Forth (etc. etc. etc.) are old and have lost their popularity. I'm scared of learning C (or even C++) for this same reason. Java is pretty old as well and is slow because it's run by the JVM and not compiled to native code. I've been a Windows developer for quite a while. I recently started using Java - but only because it was more versatile and spreadable to other places. The problem is that it doesn't look like a very usable language for these reasons: It's most used purpose is for web application and cellphone apps (specifically Android) As far as actual products made with it, the only things that come to mind are Netbeans, Eclipse (hurrah for making and IDE with the language the IDE is for - it's like making a webpage for writing HTML/CSS/Javascript), and Minecraft which happens to be fun but laggy and bipolar as far as computer spec. support. Other than that it's used for servers but heck - I don't only want to make/configure servers. The .NET languages are nice, however: People laugh if I even mention VB.NET or C# in a serious conversation. It isn't cross-platform unless you use MONO (which is still in development and has some improvements to be made). Lacks low level stuff because, like Java with the JVM, it is run/managed by the CLR. My first thought was learning something like C and then using it to springboard into C++ (just to make sure I would have a strong understanding/base), but like I said earlier, it's getting older and older by the minute. What I've Looked Into Fantom looks nice. It's like a nice middleman between my two favorite languages and even lets me publish between the two interchangeably, but, unlike what I want, it compiles to the CLR or JVM (depending on what you publish it to) instead of it being a complete compile. D also looks nice. It seems like a very usable language and from multiple sources it appears to actually be better than C/C++. I would jump right with it, but I'm still unsure of its success because it obviously isn't very mainstream at this point. There are a couple others that looked pretty nice that focused on other things such as Opa with web development and Go by GOOGLE. My Question Is it worth learning these "experimental" languages? I've read other questions that say that if you aren't constantly learning languages and open to all languages that you aren't in the right mindset for programming. I understand this and I still might not quite be getting it, but in truth, if a language isn't going to become mainstream, should I spend my time learning something else? I don't want to learn old (or any going to soon be old) programming languages. I know that many people see this as something important, *but would any of you ever actually consider (assuming you didn't already know) FORTRAN? My goal is to stay current to make sure I'm successful in the future. Disclaimer Yes, I am a young programmer, so I probably made a lot of naive statements in my question. Feel free to correct me on ANYTHING! I have to start learning somewhere so I'm sure a lot of my knowledge is sketchy enough to have caused to incorrect statements or flaws in my thinking. Please leave any feelings you have in the comments.

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• Managing Operational Risk of Financial Services Processes – part 1/ 2

  - by Sanjeevio

  Financial institutions view compliance as a regulatory burden that incurs a high initial capital outlay and recurring costs. By its very nature regulation takes a prescriptive, common-for-all, approach to managing financial and non-financial risk. Needless to say, no longer does mere compliance with regulation will lead to sustainable differentiation.  Genuine competitive advantage will stem from being able to cope with innovation demands of the present economic environment while meeting compliance goals with regulatory mandates in a faster and cost-efficient manner. Let’s first take a look at the key factors that are limiting the pursuit of the above goal. Regulatory requirements are growing, driven in-part by revisions to existing mandates in line with cross-border, pan-geographic, nature of financial value chains today and more so by frequent systemic failures that have destabilized the financial markets and the global economy over the last decade.  In addition to the increase in regulation, financial institutions are faced with pressures of regulatory overlap and regulatory conflict. Regulatory overlap arises primarily from two things: firstly, due to the blurring of boundaries between lines-of-businesses with complex organizational structures and secondly, due to varying requirements of jurisdictional directives across geographic boundaries e.g. a securities firm with operations in US and EU would be subject different requirements of “Know-Your-Customer” (KYC) as per the PATRIOT ACT in US and MiFiD in EU. Another consequence and concomitance of regulatory change is regulatory conflict, which again, arises primarily from two things: firstly, due to diametrically opposite priorities of line-of-business and secondly, due to tension that regulatory requirements create between shareholders interests of tighter due-diligence and customer concerns of privacy. For instance, Customer Due Diligence (CDD) as per KYC requires eliciting detailed information from customers to prevent illegal activities such as money-laundering, terrorist financing or identity theft. While new customers are still more likely to comply with such stringent background checks at time of account opening, existing customers baulk at such practices as a breach of trust and privacy. As mentioned earlier regulatory compliance addresses both financial and non-financial risks. Operational risk is a non-financial risk that stems from business execution and spans people, processes, systems and information. Operational risk arising from financial processes in particular transcends other sources of such risk. Let’s look at the factors underpinning the operational risk of financial processes. The rapid pace of innovation and geographic expansion of financial institutions has resulted in proliferation and ad-hoc evolution of back-office, mid-office and front-office processes. This has had two serious implications on increasing the operational risk of financial processes: ·         Inconsistency of processes across lines-of-business, customer channels and product/service offerings. This makes it harder for the risk function to enforce a standardized risk methodology and in turn breaches harder to detect. ·         The proliferation of processes coupled with increasingly frequent change-cycles has resulted in accidental breaches and increased vulnerability to regulatory inadequacies. In summary, regulatory growth (including overlap and conflict) coupled with process proliferation and inconsistency is driving process compliance complexity In my next post I will address the implications of this process complexity on financial institutions and outline the role of BPM in lowering specific aspects of operational risk of financial processes.

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• Tri-head linux system with Xmonad: is it possible to have HW acceleration

  - by progo

  What means there exists to have three monitors, all controlled by Xmonad and have hardware 3D acceleration as well? I had the pleasure of using three monitors earlier this year, and while Xmonad and Xinerama handle three monitors easily, I had to throw in an extra display driver, and also let go of Nvidia's own TwinView (which is a hack on Xinerama). This left me with no HW acceleration and some flickering as double buffering wouldn't work with certain applications. However, the three monitors handle so beautifully that I had hard time coming back to two. I understand the easiest way to achieve HW-accelerated tri-head combo is to split into two Xorgs. I wouldn't be able to switch windows between the Xorgs, so I'm not really into this solution. What's more, having a cheap and old PCI card along with even slightly better PCIe seemed to slow things down. Even if I occasionally disabled the third monitor from Xorg configure, I couldn't get HW acceleration to work. Only after I physically disconnected the old PCI card, I could get the games back in business. Would a Matrox Dual/Tri-head2go and a powerful Nvidia GPU do the trick? I understand Xmonad can be configured to "believe" that a "single" (as Dualhead2Go will merge) 3360x1050 display is actually two different ones? So that Xmonad's Mod-w and Mod-e would work properly there.

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• Managing game state / 'what to update' within an XNA game 'screen'

  - by codinghands

  Note - having read through other GDev questions suggested when writing this question I'm confident this isn't a dupe. Of course, it's 3am and I'm likely wrong, so please mod as such if so. I'm trying to figure out how best to manage state within my game screens - please bare with me though! At the moment I'm using a heavily modified version of the fantastic game state management example on the XNA site available here. This is working perfectly for my 'Screens' - 'IntroScreen' with some shiny logos, 'TitleScreen' and a 'MenuScreen' stacked on top for the title and menu, 'PlayScreen' for the actual gameplay, etc. Each screen has the a bunch of sprites, and an 'Update' and 'Draw', managed by a 'ScreenManager'. In addition to the above, and as suggested as an answer to my other question here, most screens have a 'GameProcessQueue' class full of 'GameProcess'es which lets me do just about anything (animations, youbetcha!), in any order, in sequence or parallel. Why mention all this? When I talk about managing game state I'm thinking more for complex scenarios within a 'Screen'. 'TitleScreen', 'MenuScreen' and the like are all relatively simple. 'Play Screen' less so. How do people manage the different 'states' within the screen (or whatever you call it) that 'does' gameplay? (for me, the 'PlayScreen') I've thought about the following: Enum of different states in the Screen, 'activeState' enum-type variable, switching on the enum in the Screen Update() loop to determine what Screen Update 'sub'-function is called. I can see this getting hairy pretty fast though as screens get more complex and with the 'PlayScreen' becoming a behemoth mega-class. 'State' class with Update loop - a Screen can have any number of 'States', 1+ of which are 'active'. Screen update loop calls update on all active states. States themselves know which screen they belong to, and may even belong to a 'StateManager' which handles transitioning from one state to the next. Once a state is over it's removed from the ScreenState list. The Screen doesn't need a bunch of GameProcessQueues, each State has its own. Abstract Screen further to be more flexible - I can see the similarities between what I've got (game 'Screens' handled by a ScreenManager) and what I want (states within a screen, and a mechanism to manage them). However at the moment I see 'Screens' as high level and very distinct ('PlayScreen' with baddies != 'MenuScreen' with 4 words and event handlers), where as my proposed 'States' are more intrinsically tied to a specific screen with complex requirements. I think. This is for a turn-based board game, so it's easier to define things as a discrete series of steps (IntroAnimation - P1Turn - P2Turn - P1Turn ... - GameOver - .... Obviously with an open-world RPG things are very different, but any advice in this scenario is appreciated. If I'm just going OOP-crazy please say so. Similarly I'm concious there's a huge amount on this site re: state management. But as my first 'serious' game after a couple of false starts I'd like to get this right, and would rather be harassed and modded down than never ask :)

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• HP G61 Laptop wont boot- display stays off, caps and num lock indicators blink repeatedly

  - by Benguy12

  I had my HP G61 laptop running in sleep for a while. When I came back to it about a half-hour later, it was no longer in sleep mode - the power light and the Wi-Fi indicator light were on (I keep Wi-Fi off becuase I use a wired connection) - but nothing was showing on screen. In fact, the display wasn't even turned on. So I let it sit for about 10 minutes but nothing happened. I did a force shut down and rebooted. Instead of a normal boot, the display didnt turn on, the Wi-Fi indicator was off, and the Caps Lock and Num Lock lights just blinked repeatedly. On the external keyboard i use, none of the light indicators were blinking or even on. I tried force shut-down again 10 times, then unplugged all connections except for the power cable (my laptop battery dosent hold a charge for more than 2 minutes, so I always must have a wall connection) and tried to boot again but still nothing happened. I unplugged the battery and even then nothing happened. I also tried booting with the disk drive open, and then with it closed again. On the time it was closed, I was able to successfully boot into Windows, but recieved a "Windows did not shut-down sucessfully" notice. Does anybody know why this may have happened? My PC's specs: Windows 7 Home Premium, 64-bit 4GB of physical RAM, 8GB of vRAM (on a flash drive) AMD Vision x64 processor (don't know any other specs about it) ATI Radeon graphics card, 392 MB DVD-R/W lightscribe drive 2 External hard-disks (first one is 1.5TB, second one is 1TB) custom boot-screen and boot-annimation Standard BIOS apps running before sleep: firefox 10.4 itunes 10.6 adobe photoshop extended CS5.1 rockstar games social club (running in background) microsoft powerpoint 2010 professional edition google chrome I was NOT running Aero or any fancy themes - I was using the normal windows classic theme. I have a desktop icon manager application called Stardock Fences that was also running (it runs as a service/process).

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• Blue screen error code 1000008e

  - by Kas

  I'm getting blue screens, mostly when trying to boot a program that required a lot of memory (games, photo editing software.) So far I've only managed to catch one set of error codes: BCCode: 1000008e BCP1: C0000005 BCP2: ADA393BA BCP3: E9BCEBC4 BCP4: 00000000 OS Version: 6_0_6002 Service Pack: 2_0 Product: 768_1 It's on a Sony VAIO Laptop VGN FW-41E, Vista OS service pack 2. Besides these codes it lists two 'temporary' files that were related with this crash: ...AppData\Local\Temp\WER-134925-0.sysdata.xml ...AppData\Local\Temp\WERDA66.tmp.version.txt When I googled these files some site said it was linked to a worm called 'yodo', but virus scans don't return any results (hitman pro, malware bytes, avast antivirus all turn up empty). Upon further searching about this yodo worm, I came across security stronghold where someone posted they had acquired this worm when downloading access and excel templates. Now, I actually did download templates for the same programs, they might have been the same, they may be related or I might be grasping at straws here. I have not noticed any issues other in performance as of late, just BSOD's when I start software that requires some memory, but I never had issues with these exact same programs before. Help and/or hints are required on how to actually figure out what's the root of this BSOD issue and how can I fix it. Do you reckon it's actually a virus? What program should be able to remove YODO worm stuff?

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• Port forwarding + shared connection with Ubuntu

  - by Joey Adams

  Because my wireless router's ethernet ports are defective, I set up a shared wireless connection from my laptop (which has wifi) to my eMac (which does not) via a crossover ethernet cable. The laptop is behind a router as 192.168.1.131, and the eMac is behind the laptop as 10.42.43.1 . The laptop is running Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic). I achieved the shared connection through NetworkManager Applet. I right-clicked on the network icon at the topright, went to Edit Connections, selected the Wired connection named "Auto eth0", clicked "Edit...", went to the "IPv4 Settings" tab, and selected the Method "Shared to other computers". The eMac can now access the Internet. Now I want to enable port forwarding. There's a game I want to play that needs port 6112 forwarded (both TCP and UDP) in order to host games. I set up the router to enable port forwarding for 192.168.1.131 (the laptop), but port forwarding still isn't available on the eMac. I suppose I need to pretend my laptop is a router and configure port forwarding on it, indicating that incoming connections to the laptop (192.168.1.131) should be forwarded to the eMac on the shared connection (10.42.43.1 ). Thus, packets coming into the router on port 6112 would be redirected to the laptop (by the router), then to the eMac (by the laptop). My question is, how would I do that on Ubuntu (in light of NetworkManager's presence)? Also, if I can't get this to work, does anyone mind hosting a comp stomp? :D

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