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  • Ask How-To Geek: Learning the Office Ribbon, Booting to USB with an Old BIOS, and Snapping Windows

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    You’ve got questions and we’ve got answers. Today we highlight how to master the new Office interface, USB boot a computer with outdated BIOS, and snap windows to preset locations. Learning the New Office Ribbon Dear How-To Geek, I feel silly asking this (in light of how long the new Office interface has been out) but my company finally got around to upgrading from Windows XP and Office 2000 so the new interface it totally new to me. Can you recommend any resources for quickly learning the Office ribbon and the new changes? I feel completely lost after two decades of the old Office interface. Help! Sincerely, Where the Hell is Everything? Dear Where the Hell, We think most people were with you at some point in the last few years. “Where the hell is…” could possibly be the slogan for the new ribbon interface. You could browse through some of the dry tutorials online or even get a weighty book on the topic but the best way to learn something new is to get hands on. Ribbon Hero turns learning the new Office features and ribbon layout into a game. It’s no vigorous round of Team Fortress mind you, but it’s significantly more fun than reading a training document. Check out how to install and configure Ribbon Hero here. You’ll be teaching your coworkers new tricks in no time. Boot via USB with an Old BIOS Dear How-To Geek, I’m trying to repurpose some old computers by updating them with lightweight Linux distros but the BIOS on most of the machines is ancient and creaky. How ancient? It doesn’t even support booting from a USB device! I have a large flash drive that I’ve turned into a master installation tool for jobs like this but I can’t use it. The computers in question have USB ports; they just aren’t recognized during the boot process. What can I do? USB Bootin’ in Boise Dear USB Bootin’, It’s great you’re working to breathe life into old hardware! You’ve run into one of the limitations of older BIOSes, USB was around but nobody was thinking about booting off of it. Fortunately if you have a computer old enough to have that kind of BIOS it’s likely to also has a floppy drive or a CDROM drive. While you could make a bootable CDROM for your application we understand that you want to keep using the master USB installer you’ve made. In light of that we recommend PLoP Boot Manager. Think of it like a boot manager for your boot manager. Using it you can create a bootable floppy or CDROM that will enable USB booting of your master USB drive. Make a CD and a floppy version and you’ll have everything in your toolkit you need for future computer refurbishing projects. Read up on creating bootable media with PLoP Boot Manager here. Snapping Windows to Preset Coordinates Dear How-To Geek, Once upon a time I had a company laptop that came with a little utility that snapped windows to preset areas of the screen. This was long before the snap-to-side features in Windows 7. You could essentially configure your screen into a grid pattern of your choosing and then windows would neatly snap into those grids. I have no idea what it was called or if was anymore than a gimmick from the computer manufacturer, but I’d really like to have it on my new computer! Bend and Snap in San Francisco, Dear Bend and Snap, If we had to guess, we’d guess your company must have had a set of laptops from Acer as the program you’re describing sounds exactly like Acer GridVista. Fortunately for you the application was extremely popular and Acer released it independently of their hardware. If, by chance, you’ve since upgraded to a multiple monitor setup the app even supports multiple monitors—many of the configurations are handy for arranging IM windows and other auxiliary communication tools. Check out our guide to installing and configuring Acer GridVista here for more information. Have a question you want to put before the How-To Geek staff? Shoot us an email at [email protected] and then keep an eye out for a solution in the Ask How-To Geek column. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How to Upgrade Windows 7 Easily (And Understand Whether You Should) The How-To Geek Guide to Audio Editing: Basic Noise Removal Install a Wii Game Loader for Easy Backups and Fast Load Times The Best of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 The Worst of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 HTG Projects: How to Create Your Own Custom Papercraft Toy Download the New Year in Japan Windows 7 Theme from Microsoft Once More Unto the Breach – Facebook Apps Can Now Access Your Address and Phone Number Dial Zero Speeds You Through Annoying Customer Service Menus Complete Dropquest 2011 and Receive Free Dropbox Storage Desktop Computer versus Laptop Wallpaper The Kids Have No Idea What Old Tech Is [Video]

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  • Fast Fashion Freshness

    - by David Dorf
    Fashion retailers such as H&M, Zara, and Wet Seal have perfected the fast fashion retailing model. The concept requires no replenishment in order to maintain assortment freshness and to create a sense of urgency for the consumer to purchase now. However, maintaining assortment freshness results in high product turnover, making markdown optimization a necessity. Wet Seal, for instance, needed to move from ad-hoc markdowns and dealing with surplus inventory to handling markdowns methodically across 8,000 SKUs with only 12-15 week lifecycle (from DC receipt to exit). By optimizing and automating markdowns, Wet Seal is reaching their goal of assortment freshness, which in turn increases sales. If you're interested in learning more, register for a free webinar occurring on May 13th featuring Join Daniel Ryu, Vice President of Planning and Allocation at Wet Seal. He'll be discussing how the fast fashion retailer maintains their goal of assortment freshness.

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  • Installation Won't Finish

    - by Joey G
    I installed Ubuntu 12.10 (32-bit) on my Acer Aspire One notebook and replaced the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. Everything went fine, but right before the installation finished, it got stuck. The loading bar at the bottom is full, and it says "Copying installation logs," but my mouse won't move and it's been at this point for almost an hour. Also, the mouse is in the loading spin, so I know my computer didn't freeze. Should I just restart now? I'm not sure if it's at the last stage, but it seems like it is, and this has taken more than the rest of the installation together. EDIT- I had my computer go in sleep mode for a minute and now I can move the mouse again. When I click the "Copying.." part, it says "Activation (eth1) Stage 4 of 5 complete" but "5 of 5" (I assume that comes next) isn't starting.

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  • China’s Better Life Selects Oracle® Retail to Support Hypermarket Growth

    - by user801960
    On Monday, China’s first multi-format retailer, Better Life Commercial Chain Share Co. announced that it has selected a broad selection of Oracle solutions including specific Oracle Retail applications to support the growth of its hypermarket operations. Better Life currently operates 186 hypermarkets, department stores, consumer electronics stores, as well as entertainment and real estate operations across Southern China. The company’s expansion strategy for its hypermarket business is integral to its overall plan for rapid growth in an increasingly competitive market and after evaluating Oracle and SAP, Better Life identified a range of Oracle solutions including components of Oracle Retail Merchandising Operations Management, Oracle Retail Merchandise Planning and Optimization, and Oracle Retail In-Store Operations as key enablers to optimizing its operations. The Oracle Retail offering will help Better Life to create a consolidated view of product, price, inventory and associated back office information that facilitates improved fulfilment of customer demand.  These solutions will also provide a better understanding of inventory from buying through store transactions, delivering actionable insight with which it can make smarter, more profitable decisions around planning, forecasting and replenishment. You can read the full blog post here: http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1680357

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  • links for 2010-04-02

    - by Bob Rhubart
    Jeff Victor: Solaris Virtualization Book Jeff Victor with an update on the status of the book, "Oracle Solaris 10 System Virtualization Essentials." (tags: sun solaris virtualization) Mitch Denny: Architecture vs. Design It's an old post but it still resonates: "In the consumer electronics business, some people are actually hired to go through a system and remove components until it stops working – they do this to remove the cost before they go into mass production. We need more of this in the software business." -- Mitch Denny (tags: architecture design development) @vambenepe: Enterprise application integration patterns for IT management: a blast from the past or from the future? "In a recent blog post, Don Ferguson (CTO at CA) describes CA Catalyst, a major architectural overall which “applies enterprise application integration patterns to the problem of integrating IT management systems”. Reading this was fascinating to me. Not because the content was some kind of revelation, but exactly for the opposite reason. Because it is so familiar." -- William Vambenepe (tags: otn oracle eai)

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  • Address Regulatory Mandates for Data Encryption Without Changing Your Applications

    - by Troy Kitch
    The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, US state-level data breach laws, and numerous data privacy regulations worldwide all call for data encryption to protect personally identifiable information (PII). However encrypting PII data in applications requires costly and complex application changes. Fortunately, since this data typically resides in the application database, using Oracle Advanced Security, PII can be encrypted transparently by the Oracle database without any application changes. In this ISACA webinar, learn how Oracle Advanced Security offers complete encryption for data at rest, in transit, and on backups, along with built-in key management to help organizations meet regulatory requirements and save money. You will also hear from TransUnion Interactive, the consumer subsidiary of TransUnion, a global leader in credit and information management, which maintains credit histories on an estimated 500 million consumers across the globe, about how they addressed PCI DSS encryption requirements using Oracle Database 11g with Oracle Advanced Security. Register to watch the webinar now.

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  • Verizon Wireless Supports its Mission-Critical Employee Portal with MySQL

    - by Bertrand Matthelié
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Verizon Wireless, the #1 mobile carrier in the United States, operates the nation’s largest 3G and 4G LTE network, with the most subscribers (109 millions) and the highest revenue ($70.2 Billion in 2011). Verizon Wireless built the first wide-area wireless broadband network and delivered the first wireless consumer 3G multimedia service in the US, and offers global voice and data services in more than 200 destinations around the world. To support 4.2 million daily wireless transactions and 493,000 calls and emails transactions produced by 94.2 million retail customers, Verizon Wireless employs over 78,000 employees with area headquarters across the United States. The Business Challenge Seeing the stupendous rise in social media, video streaming, live broadcasting…etc which redefined the scope of technology, Verizon Wireless, as a technology savvy company, wanted to provide a platform to its employees where they could network socially, view and host microsites, stream live videos, blog and provide the latest news. The IT team at Verizon Wireless had abundant experience with various technology platforms to support the huge number of applications in the company. However, open-source products weren’t yet widely used in the organization and the team had the ambition to adopt such technologies and see if the architecture could meet Verizon Wireless’ rigid requirements. After evaluating a few solutions, the IT team decided to use the LAMP stack for Vzweb, its mission-critical, 24x7 employee portal, with Drupal as the front end and MySQL on Linux as the backend, and for a few other internal websites also on MySQL. The MySQL Solution Verizon Wireless started to support its employee portal, Vzweb, its online streaming website, Vztube, and internal wiki pages, Vzwiki, with MySQL 5.1 in 2010. Vzweb is the main internal communication channel for Verizon Wireless, while Vztube hosts important company-wide webcasts regularly for executive-level announcements, so both channels have to be live and accessible all the time for its 78,000 employees across the United States. However during the initial deployment of the MySQL based Intranet, the application experienced performance issues. High connection spikes occurred causing slow user response time, and the IT team applied workarounds to continue the service. A number of key performance indexes (KPI) for the infrastructure were identified and the operational framework redesigned to support a more robust website and conform to the 99.985% uptime SLA (Service-Level Agreement). The MySQL DBA team made a series of upgrades in MySQL: Step 1: Moved from MyISAM to InnoDB storage engine in 2010 Step 2: Upgraded to the latest MySQL 5.1.54 release in 2010 Step 3: Upgraded from MySQL 5.1 to the latest GA release MySQL 5.5 in 2011, and leveraging MySQL Thread Pool as part of MySQL Enterprise Edition to scale better After making those changes, the team saw a much better response time during high concurrency use cases, and achieved an amazing performance improvement of 1400%! In January 2011, Verizon CEO, Ivan Seidenberg, announced the iPhone launch during the opening keynote at Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in Las Vegas, and that presentation was streamed live to its 78,000 employees. The event was broadcasted flawlessly with MySQL as the database. Later in 2011, Hurricane Irene attacked the East Coast of United States and caused major life and financial damages. During the hurricane, the team directed more traffic to its west coast data center to avoid potential infrastructure damage in the East Coast. Such transition was executed smoothly and even though the geographical distance became longer for the East Coast users, there was no impact in the performance of Vzweb and Vztube, and the SLA goal was achieved. “MySQL is the key component of Verizon Wireless’ mission-critical employee portal application,” said Shivinder Singh, senior DBA at Verizon Wireless. “We achieved 1400% performance improvement by moving from the MyISAM storage engine to InnoDB, upgrading to the latest GA release MySQL 5.5, and using the MySQL Thread Pool to support high concurrent user connections. MySQL has become part of our IT infrastructure, on which potentially more future applications will be built.” To learn more about MySQL Enterprise Edition, Get our Product Guide.

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  • Download the Windows 8 Release Preview Themes for Windows 7 [Double Theme]

    - by Asian Angel
    The Windows 8 Release Preview came with two great sets of beautiful wallpapers, one for the desktop and one for the lock screen. With this in mind the good folks over at the 7 Tutorials blog decided to help bring that Windows 8 goodness to everyone’s Windows 7 desktops. You can see some of the wallpapers available for the desktop above and see some for the lock screen below… Special Note: While many of the wallpapers are the same as those for the Consumer Preview, there have been some changes in what has been included for the Release Preview. Download Windows 8 Release Preview Themes for Windows 7 [7 Tutorials] HTG Explains: What Is RSS and How Can I Benefit From Using It? HTG Explains: Why You Only Have to Wipe a Disk Once to Erase It HTG Explains: Learn How Websites Are Tracking You Online

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  • Simplified INotifyPropertyChanged Implementation with WeakReference Support and Typed Property Acces

    - by Daniel Cazzulino
    I've grown a bit tired of implementing INotifyPropertyChanged. I've tried ways to improve it before (like this "ViewModel" custom tool which even generates strong-typed event accessors). But my fellow Clarius teammate Mariano thought it was overkill and didn't like that tool much. He mentioned an alternative approach also, which I didn't like too much because it relied on the consumer changing his typical interaction with the object events, but also because it has a substantial design flaw that causes handlers not to be called at all after a garbage collection happens. A very simple unit test will showcase this bug....Read full article

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  • The Modern Marketer’s Guide to Connected Customer Journeys

    - by Richard Lefebvre
    By Amanda Batista on Thursday, August 14, 2014 in Marketing Efficiency Organizations are striving to deliver consistent experiences but very few feel they are there yet. It’s a simple consideration for marketers, really. Not only does industry data continue to support that customers demand personalized experiences when engaging with brands, but if you think about your own consumer driven shopping experiences, you, too, expect that stellar experience at every touch point. And when you don’t get it, that brand has potentially alienated the experience, as well as their shot at engaging with you in more meaningful ways. Oracle Marketing Cloud partnered with marketingfinder.co.uk to conduct a survey exploring how marketers are adapting to this new age of the customer and the challenges they face. Less than half (40%) of marketers in the study were able to track the customer journey across channels. These findings, as well as other data points showcasing marketers’ challenges, are explored in our latest eBook, “The Modern Marketer's Guide to Connected Customer Journeys.” Read the entire article and order your copy of the full report here

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  • Multi-Device Development in Visual Studio

    - by Daniel Moth
    You've read on Soma's blog post that Microsoft is broadening Visual Studio's reach to other platforms (including for example Android)…  specifically this is what Soma wrote: "With bring-your-own-device trends in the enterprise, and heterogeneity in the consumer mobile device market, developers are increasingly focused on building apps that can target a variety of devices. We are committed to enabling developers to build apps for this heterogeneous, mobile-first world with Visual Studio for the technology of your choice - whether .NET, C++ or JavaScript." If you live in Washington state in the USA (or are willing to relocate here) I am looking for a Program Manager to help with this effort – read the rest of the job description here which is also where you can apply for the position (or email me). Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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  • How to Buy an SD Card: Speed Classes, Sizes, and Capacities Explained

    - by Chris Hoffman
    Memory cards are used in digital cameras, music players, smartphones, tablets, and even laptops. But not all SD cards are created equal — there are different speed classes, physical sizes, and capacities to consider. Different devices require different types of SD cards. Here are the differences you’ll need to keep in mind when picking out the right SD card for your device. Speed Class In a nutshell, not all SD cards offer the same speeds. This matters for some tasks more than it matters for others. For example, if you’re a professional photographer taking photos in rapid succession on a DSLR camera saving them in high-resolution RAW format, you’ll want a fast SD card so your camera can save them as fast as possible. A fast SD card is also important if you want to record high-resolution video and save it directly to the SD card. If you’re just taking a few photos on a typical consumer camera or you’re just using an SD card to store some media files on your smartphone, the speed isn’t as important. Manufacturers use “speed classes” to measure an SD card’s speed. The SD Association that defines the SD card standard doesn’t actually define the exact speeds associated with these classes, but they do provide guidelines. There are four different speed classes — 10, 8, 4, and 2. 10 is the fastest, while 2 is the slowest. Class 2 is suitable for standard definition video recording, while classes 4 and 6 are suitable for high-definition video recording. Class 10 is suitable for “full HD video recording” and “HD still consecutive recording.” There are also two Ultra High Speed (UHS) speed classes, but they’re more expensive and are designed for professional use. UHS cards are designed for devices that support UHS. Here are the associated logos, in order from slowest to fastest:       You’ll probably be okay with a class 4 or 6 card for typical use in a digital camera, smartphone, or tablet. Class 10 cards are ideal if you’re shooting high-resolution videos or RAW photos. Class 2 cards are a bit on the slow side these days, so you may want to avoid them for all but the cheapest digital cameras. Even a cheap smartphone can record HD video, after all. An SD card’s speed class is identified on the SD card itself. You’ll also see the speed class on the online store listing or on the card’s packaging when purchasing it. For example, in the below photo, the middle SD card is speed class 4, while the two other cards are speed class 6. If you see no speed class symbol, you have a class 0 SD card. These cards were designed and produced before the speed class rating system was introduced. They may be slower than even a class 2 card. Physical Size Different devices use different sizes of SD cards. You’ll find standard-size CD cards, miniSD cards, and microSD cards. Standard SD cards are the largest, although they’re still very small. They measure 32x24x2.1 mm and weigh just two grams. Most consumer digital cameras for sale today still use standard SD cards. They have the standard “cut corner”  design. miniSD cards are smaller than standard SD cards, measuring 21.5x20x1.4 mm and weighing about 0.8 grams. This is the least common size today. miniSD cards were designed to be especially small for mobile phones, but we now have a smaller size. microSD cards are the smallest size of SD card, measuring 15x11x1 mm and weighing just 0.25 grams. These cards are used in most cell phones and smartphones that support SD cards. They’re also used in many other devices, such as tablets. SD cards will only fit into marching slots. You can’t plug a microSD card into a standard SD card slot — it won’t fit. However, you can purchase an adapter that allows you to plug a smaller SD card into a larger SD card’s form and fit it into the appropriate slot. Capacity Like USB flash drives, hard drives, solid-state drives, and other storage media, different SD cards can have different amounts of storage. But the differences between SD card capacities don’t stop there. Standard SDSC (SD) cards are 1 MB to 2 GB in size, or perhaps 4 GB in size — although 4 GB is non-standard. The SDHC standard was created later, and allows cards 2 GB to 32 GB in size. SDXC is a more recent standard that allows cards 32 GB to 2 TB in size. You’ll need a device that supports SDHC or SDXC cards to use them. At this point, the vast majority of devices should support SDHC. In fact, the SD cards you have are probably SDHC cards. SDXC is newer and less common. When buying an SD card, you’ll need to buy the right speed class, size, and capacity for your needs. Be sure to check what your device supports and consider what speed and capacity you’ll actually need. Image Credit: Ryosuke SEKIDO on Flickr, Clive Darra on Flickr, Steven Depolo on Flickr

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  • Google I/O 2012 - Designing for the Other Half: Sexy Isn't Always Pink

    Google I/O 2012 - Designing for the Other Half: Sexy Isn't Always Pink Leah Busque, Sepideh Nasiri, Jess Lee, Tracy Chou, Margaret Wallace Women control 80 percent of consumer spending and drive the majority of user activity on many of the largest social networks. Female gamers over 55 spend the most time online gaming among any demographic. Are you thinking about how your product or business is attracting and engaging women? Hear from our panel on the technologies winning over female users that aren't so pink. From: GoogleDevelopers Views: 15 1 ratings Time: 59:33 More in Science & Technology

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  • Microsoft pourrait présenter Windows 8 en janvier 2011, lors de la keynote de Steve Ballmer au CES

    Microsoft pourrait présenter Windows 8 en janvier 2011, lors de la keynote de Steve Ballmer au CES Mise à jour du 15.12.2010 par Katleen Cela fait près d'un an que Microsoft distille au compte goutte des informations sur Windows 8, son futur système d'exploitation. Et le sujet semble passionner les foules. Mais le peu de détails actuellement disponibles, et le grand nombre d'informations à ce sujet qui ne sont pour l'instant que des rumeurs, frustrent aussi beaucoup de monde. A quoi ressemblera Windows 8, quelles seront ses spécificités ? Nous pourrions bientôt en savoir plus. Le 5 janvier 2011, Steve Ballmer animera une keynote au CES (Consumer Electronics Show)... Et i...

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  • Why lock-free data structures just aren't lock-free enough

    - by Alex.Davies
    Today's post will explore why the current ways to communicate between threads don't scale, and show you a possible way to build scalable parallel programming on top of shared memory. The problem with shared memory Soon, we will have dozens, hundreds and then millions of cores in our computers. It's inevitable, because individual cores just can't get much faster. At some point, that's going to mean that we have to rethink our architecture entirely, as millions of cores can't all access a shared memory space efficiently. But millions of cores are still a long way off, and in the meantime we'll see machines with dozens of cores, struggling with shared memory. Alex's tip: The best way for an application to make use of that increasing parallel power is to use a concurrency model like actors, that deals with synchronisation issues for you. Then, the maintainer of the actors framework can find the most efficient way to coordinate access to shared memory to allow your actors to pass messages to each other efficiently. At the moment, NAct uses the .NET thread pool and a few locks to marshal messages. It works well on dual and quad core machines, but it won't scale to more cores. Every time we use a lock, our core performs an atomic memory operation (eg. CAS) on a cell of memory representing the lock, so it's sure that no other core can possibly have that lock. This is very fast when the lock isn't contended, but we need to notify all the other cores, in case they held the cell of memory in a cache. As the number of cores increases, the total cost of a lock increases linearly. A lot of work has been done on "lock-free" data structures, which avoid locks by using atomic memory operations directly. These give fairly dramatic performance improvements, particularly on systems with a few (2 to 4) cores. The .NET 4 concurrent collections in System.Collections.Concurrent are mostly lock-free. However, lock-free data structures still don't scale indefinitely, because any use of an atomic memory operation still involves every core in the system. A sync-free data structure Some concurrent data structures are possible to write in a completely synchronization-free way, without using any atomic memory operations. One useful example is a single producer, single consumer (SPSC) queue. It's easy to write a sync-free fixed size SPSC queue using a circular buffer*. Slightly trickier is a queue that grows as needed. You can use a linked list to represent the queue, but if you leave the nodes to be garbage collected once you're done with them, the GC will need to involve all the cores in collecting the finished nodes. Instead, I've implemented a proof of concept inspired by this intel article which reuses the nodes by putting them in a second queue to send back to the producer. * In all these cases, you need to use memory barriers correctly, but these are local to a core, so don't have the same scalability problems as atomic memory operations. Performance tests I tried benchmarking my SPSC queue against the .NET ConcurrentQueue, and against a standard Queue protected by locks. In some ways, this isn't a fair comparison, because both of these support multiple producers and multiple consumers, but I'll come to that later. I started on my dual-core laptop, running a simple test that had one thread producing 64 bit integers, and another consuming them, to measure the pure overhead of the queue. So, nothing very interesting here. Both concurrent collections perform better than the lock-based one as expected, but there's not a lot to choose between the ConcurrentQueue and my SPSC queue. I was a little disappointed, but then, the .NET Framework team spent a lot longer optimising it than I did. So I dug out a more powerful machine that Red Gate's DBA tools team had been using for testing. It is a 6 core Intel i7 machine with hyperthreading, adding up to 12 logical cores. Now the results get more interesting. As I increased the number of producer-consumer pairs to 6 (to saturate all 12 logical cores), the locking approach was slow, and got even slower, as you'd expect. What I didn't expect to be so clear was the drop-off in performance of the lock-free ConcurrentQueue. I could see the machine only using about 20% of available CPU cycles when it should have been saturated. My interpretation is that as all the cores used atomic memory operations to safely access the queue, they ended up spending most of the time notifying each other about cache lines that need invalidating. The sync-free approach scaled perfectly, despite still working via shared memory, which after all, should still be a bottleneck. I can't quite believe that the results are so clear, so if you can think of any other effects that might cause them, please comment! Obviously, this benchmark isn't realistic because we're only measuring the overhead of the queue. Any real workload, even on a machine with 12 cores, would dwarf the overhead, and there'd be no point worrying about this effect. But would that be true on a machine with 100 cores? Still to be solved. The trouble is, you can't build many concurrent algorithms using only an SPSC queue to communicate. In particular, I can't see a way to build something as general purpose as actors on top of just SPSC queues. Fundamentally, an actor needs to be able to receive messages from multiple other actors, which seems to need an MPSC queue. I've been thinking about ways to build a sync-free MPSC queue out of multiple SPSC queues and some kind of sign-up mechanism. Hopefully I'll have something to tell you about soon, but leave a comment if you have any ideas.

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  • What can Go chan do that a list cannot?

    - by alpav
    I want to know in which situation Go chan makes code much simpler than using list or queue or array that is usually available in all languages. As it was stated by Rob Pike in one of his speeches about Go lexer, Go channels help to organize data flow between structures that are not homomorphic. I am interested in a simple Go code sample with chan that becomes MUCH more complicated in another language (for example C#) where chan is not available. I am not interested in samples that use chan just to increase performance by avoiding waiting of data between generating list and consuming the list (which can be solved by chunking) or as a way to organize thread safe queue or thread-safe communication (which can be easily solved by locking primitives). I am interested in a sample that makes code simpler structurally disregarding size of data. If such sample does not exist then sample where size of data matters. I guess desired sample would contain bi-directional communication between generator and consumer. Also if someone could add tag [channel] to the list of available tags, that would be great.

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  • OData where art thou?

    - by Brian
    Douglas Purdy explains. I think the best part will be the governmental aspect. All public record should be available in a way that’s easy to query IMHO. From the article: Many of us at Microsoft believe the OData protocol can help usher in a more open and programmable Web by creating a common funnel to expose rich data, thereby creating a world of customized consumer mash-ups; a world where government data is transparent and accessible to any citizen; a world where you can ask a question and know, “There’s a feed for that.” Do check out www.odata.org, and while you’re at it, check out codename Dallas. For all those government IT workers out there, consider the savings. No need to pay someone to format the data for a specific department or constituent. Just put it online and point them there.

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  • Les offres TV des firmes informatiques ont-elles leur place sur le marché ? Google repousse la sienne suite aux mauvaises critiques

    Les offres TV des firmes informatiques ont-elles leur place sur le marché ? Google repousse la sienne suite aux mauvaises critiques Mise à jour du 20.12.2010 par Katleen La fièvre des box TV semblait avoir contaminé les plus grandes firmes informatiques : d'abord Apple, puis Google et Microsoft. Mais Mountain View vient d'annoncer ses réticences à poursuivre dans cette voie. La firme, qui devait lancer ses offres télévisuelles dans quelques jours lors du "Consumer Eclectronics Show", a décidé de les repousser. Pourquoi un tel revirement ? Suite aux premières critiques des professionnels qui ont pu tester le produit en avant première. Les retours ont été plutôt négatifs, quali...

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  • Advice On Price Comparison Affiliate Programs

    - by pixelcook
    I want a price comparison feature on my site similar to Consumer Reports' "Price & Shop" section. They use PriceGrabber.com, but as far as I can tell they have a special deal with CR, so I can't get a similar service for my site. I've gathered that I need to use an affiliate network, but the whole thing seems so shady, I don't really know what sites are legit, and I don't know what sites offer the price comparison feature. Datafeedfile.com comes up a lot during my searches, but the ugly site makes me wary. Does anyone have any experience with this? What affiliate networks do you recommend? Or should I be looking at something else altogether?

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  • Does UX matter for enterprise software?

    - by Ryan
    I've come to notice that a lot of software that companies use for managing things like time, expenses, setting up phone systems, etc is very non-intuitive from a user experience point of view. I know personally I waste a lot of time just trying to figure out how to navigate these systems, especially if I don't have a co-worker close by who I can bug to help me out. The help files are usually just as bad as the user interface itself. Are companies that complacent or are there just not any comparable enterprise products out there which do the job for these sorts of tasks? It seems that on the consumer side there is plenty of market opportunity for creating better user experiences, but how about for enterprise software? Obviously a certain level of slickness is not going to matter to a company, but when a better UX design translates to time saved, it's hard to argue against that. Edit: I'm not referring to in-house applications, but rather off the shelf systems from large software companies.

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  • My Latest Hare-Brained Scheme

    - by Liam McLennan
    I have not had a significant side project for a while but I have been working on a product idea. Its an analytics application that analyses twitter data and reports on market sentiment. The target market is companies who want to track trends in consumer sentiment. My idea is to teach the application to divide relevant tweets into ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ categories. If the input was the set of tweets featuring the word ‘telstra’ the application would find the following tweet:   and put it in the ‘negative’ category. Collecting data in this fashion facilitates the creation of graphs such as: which can then be correlated against events, such as a share offer or new product release. I may go ahead and build this, just because I am a programmer and it amuses me to do so. My concerns are: There  is no market for this tool There is a market, but I don’t understand it and have no way to reach it.

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  • How to send credentials to linkedIn website and get oauth_verifier without signing in again [closed]

    - by akash kumar
    I am facing a problem sending credentials to another website so that I can login the user (automatically, not clicked on sign in here) and get an oauth_verifier value. I want to send the email address and the password through a form (submit button) from my website (e.g. a Liferay portal) to another website (e.g. LinkedIn), so that it automatically returns an oauth_verifier to my website. That means I don't want the user of my website to submit his email and password to LinkedIn again. My goal is to take the email and password of the user in my website and show the user his LinkedIn connection, message, job posting (again, in my website, not LinkedIn). I dont want the user redirected to the LinkedIn website to sign in there and then come back to my website. I have taken a consumer key and a secret key from LinkedIn for my web aplication. I am using the LinkedIn API and getting oauth_verifier for access token but in order to login, I have to take user to LinkedIn to sign in, while I want it to happen in the backend.

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  • Reminder - Mobile World Congress - 4 Industry Workshops

    - by michael.seback
    Got 4G? Paving the Road to Profitable and Efficient LTE Network Planning and Monetization, Register by emailing your details here. Achieving Management Excellence through Enterprise Performance Management, Register by emailing your details here. Offer Deliver and Monetize: Mobile Operator Strategies Consumer and Enterprise Services featuring Telenor and Vodafone Groups, Register by emailing your details here. Is Your Head in the Cloud? How to Get it Right the First Time, Register by emailing your details here. With more than 49,000 communications industry attendees, Mobile World Congress is where the industry comes together and you won't want to miss Oracle at this year's show. The 2011 conference agenda will feature speakers representing the leaders of the world's most innovative companies, both from within the Communications industry and from the growing number of adjacent market sectors joining our expanding mobile ecosystem. Join us to learn how Oracle enables innovative services while reducing the cost and complexity of infrastructure software and hardware.

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  • How Do You Calculate Processor Speed on Multi-core Processors?

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    The advent of economical consumer grade multi-core processors raises the question for many users: how do you effectively calculate the real speed of a multi-core system? Is a 4-core 3Ghz system really 12Ghz? Read on as we investigate. Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-drive grouping of Q&A web sites. 6 Start Menu Replacements for Windows 8 What Is the Purpose of the “Do Not Cover This Hole” Hole on Hard Drives? How To Log Into The Desktop, Add a Start Menu, and Disable Hot Corners in Windows 8

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  • Microsoft Ramps up Security in Windows 8

    To the average consumer, improvements in the realm of security may not have the most appeal with it comes to a new working environment such as Windows 8. After all, the operating system's future release is expected to offer such flashy bells and whistles as a nifty Metro interface, a tile-based Start screen that provides a quick jump to different functions, and much more. Although these stylish features may be what jumps out at first, it is going to be hard to deny the usefulness and virtual necessity of Windows 8's new security features. The number of consumers who have turned to the intern...

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