intel core i7 - Page 232

What is Agile Modeling and why do I need it?

What is Agile Modeling and why do I need it? Agile Modeling is an add-on to existing agile methodologies like Extreme programming (XP) and Rational Unified Process (RUP). Agile Modeling enables developers to develop a customized software development process that actually meets their current development needs and is flexible enough to adjust in the future. According to Scott Ambler, Agile Modeling consists of five core values that enable this methodology to be effective and light weight Agile Modeling Core Values: Communication Simplicity Feedback Courage Humility Communication is a key component to any successful project. Open communication between stakeholder and the development team is essential when developing new applications or maintaining legacy systems. Agile models promote communication amongst software development teams and stakeholders. Furthermore, Agile Models provide a common understanding of an application for members of a software development team allowing them to have a universal common point of reference. The use of simplicity in Agile Models enables the exploration of new ideas and concepts through the use of basic diagrams instead of investing the time in writing tens or hundreds of lines of code. Feedback in regards to application development is essential. Feedback allows a development team to confirm that the development path is on track. Agile Models allow for quick feedback from shareholders because minimal to no technical expertise is required to understand basic models. Courage is important because you need to make important decisions and be able to change direction by either discarding or refactoring your work when some of your decisions prove inadequate, according to Scott Ambler. As a member of a development team, we must admit that we do not know everything even though some of us think we do. This is where humility comes in to play. Everyone is a knowledge expert in their own specific domain. If you need help with your finances then you would consult an accountant. If you have a problem or are in need of help with a topic why would someone not consult with a subject expert? An effective approach is to assume that everyone involved with your project has equal value and therefore should be treated with respect. Agile Model Characteristics: Purposeful Understandable Sufficiently Accurate Sufficiently Consistent Sufficiently Detailed Provide Positive Value Simple as Possible Just Fulfill Basic Requirements According to Scott Ambler, Agile models are the most effective possible because the time that is invested in the model is just enough effort to complete the job. Furthermore, if a model isn’t good enough yet then additional effort can be invested to get more value out of the model. However if a model is good enough, for the current needs, or surpass the current needs, then any additional work done on the model would be a waste. It is important to remember that good enough is in the eye of the beholder, so this can be tough. In order for Agile Models to work effectively Active Stakeholder need to participation in the modeling process. Finally it is also very important to model with others, this allows for additionally input ensuring that all the shareholders needs are reflected in the models. How can Agile Models be incorporated in to our projects? Agile Models can be incorporated in to our project during the requirement gathering and design phases. As requirements are gathered the models should be updated to incorporate the new project details as they are defined and updated. Additionally, the Agile Models created during the requirement phase can be the bases for the models created during the design phase. It is important to only add to the model when the changes fit within the agile model characteristics and they do not over complicate the design.

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Inside Red Gate - Exercises in Leanness

- by Simon Cooper

There's a new movement rumbling around Red Gate Towers - the Lean Startup. At its core is the idea that you don't have to be in a company with single-digit employees to be an entrepreneur; you simply have to (being blunt) not know what you should be doing. Specifically, you accept that you don't know everything you need to know in order to create a useful, successful & profitable product. This is something that Red Gate has had problems with in the past; we've created products that weren't aimed at the correct market, or didn't solve the problem the user had (although they solved the problem we thought the users had, or the problem the users thought they had). As a result, these products weren't as successful as they could have been. The ideas at the core of the Lean Startup help to combat this tendency to build large, well-engineered products that solve the wrong problem. You need to actually test your hypotheses about what the users and the market needs, rather than just running a project based on those untested assumptions. Furthermore, these tests need to be done as fast as possible (on the order of a week) so that, if necessary, you can change the direction of the project without wasting effort going down a dead end. Over time, as more tests are done and more hypotheses are confirmed or refuted, the project moves towards something that solves users' actual problems. However, re-aligning the development teams that operate within Red Gate along these lines does itself have some issues; we've got very good at doing large, monolithic releases, with a feature set decided well in advance. Currently it takes about 2 weeks to do install & release testing before a release; this is clearly not practicable for a team doing weekly, or even daily releases. There's also many infrastructure issues to be solved; in our source control, build system, release mechanism, support pages & documentation, licensing system, update system, and download pages. All these need modifications to allow the fast releases necessary for each experiment. Not only do we have to change our infrastructure, we have to change our mindset. Doing daily releases means each release won't get nearly as much testing as 'standard' releases. As a team, we have to be prepared that there will be releases that have bugs and issues with them; not only do we have to be prepared to change direction with every experiment we do, but we have to be ready to fix any bugs that are reported very quickly as well. The SmartAssembly team is spearheading this move towards leanness within the company, using Feature Usage Reporting (FUR). We think this is a cracking feature that will really help developers learn how people use their products, but we need to confirm this hypothesis. So, over the next few weeks, we'll be running a variety of experiments on SmartAssembly to either confirm or refute our hypotheses concerning how people use SmartAssembly and apply FUR to their own products. In the rest of this series, I'll be documenting how the experiments we perform get on, and our experiences with applying the Lean Startup model to a mature product like SmartAssembly.

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Inside Red Gate - Exercises in Leanness

- by simonc

There's a new movement rumbling around Red Gate Towers - the Lean Startup. At its core is the idea that you don't have to be in a company with single-digit employees to be an entrepreneur; you simply have to (being blunt) not know what you should be doing. Specifically, you accept that you don't know everything you need to know in order to create a useful, successful & profitable product. This is something that Red Gate has had problems with in the past; we've created products that weren't aimed at the correct market, or didn't solve the problem the user had (although they solved the problem we thought the users had, or the problem the users thought they had). As a result, these products weren't as successful as they could have been. The ideas at the core of the Lean Startup help to combat this tendency to build large, well-engineered products that solve the wrong problem. You need to actually test your hypotheses about what the users and the market needs, rather than just running a project based on those untested assumptions. Furthermore, these tests need to be done as fast as possible (on the order of a week) so that, if necessary, you can change the direction of the project without wasting effort going down a dead end. Over time, as more tests are done and more hypotheses are confirmed or refuted, the project moves towards something that solves users' actual problems. However, re-aligning the development teams that operate within Red Gate along these lines does itself have some issues; we've got very good at doing large, monolithic releases, with a feature set decided well in advance. Currently it takes about 2 weeks to do install & release testing before a release; this is clearly not practicable for a team doing weekly, or even daily releases. There's also many infrastructure issues to be solved; in our source control, build system, release mechanism, support pages & documentation, licensing system, update system, and download pages. All these need modifications to allow the fast releases necessary for each experiment. Not only do we have to change our infrastructure, we have to change our mindset. Doing daily releases means each release won't get nearly as much testing as 'standard' releases. As a team, we have to be prepared that there will be releases that have bugs and issues with them; not only do we have to be prepared to change direction with every experiment we do, but we have to be ready to fix any bugs that are reported very quickly as well. The SmartAssembly team is spearheading this move towards leanness within the company, using Feature Usage Reporting (FUR). We think this is a cracking feature that will really help developers learn how people use their products, but we need to confirm this hypothesis. So, over the next few weeks, we'll be running a variety of experiments on SmartAssembly to either confirm or refute our hypotheses concerning how people use SmartAssembly and apply FUR to their own products. In the rest of this series, I'll be documenting how the experiments we perform get on, and our experiences with applying the Lean Startup model to a mature product like SmartAssembly. Cross posted from Simple Talk.

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Major Analyst Report Chooses Oracle As An ECM Leader

- by brian.dirking(at)oracle.com

Oracle announced that Gartner, Inc. has named Oracle as a Leader in its latest "Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management" in a press release issued this morning. Gartner's Magic Quadrant reports position vendors within a particular quadrant based on their completeness of vision and ability to execute. According to Gartner, "Leaders have the highest combined scores for Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. They are doing well and are prepared for the future with a clearly articulated vision. In the context of ECM, they have strong channel partners, presence in multiple regions, consistent financial performance, broad platform support and good customer support. In addition, they dominate in one or more technology or vertical market. Leaders deliver a suite that addresses market demand for direct delivery of the majority of core components, though these are not necessarily owned by them, tightly integrated, unique or best-of-breed in each area. We place more emphasis this year on demonstrated enterprise deployments; integration with other business applications and content repositories; incorporation of Web 2.0 and XML capabilities; and vertical-process and horizontal-solution focus. Leaders should drive market transformation." "To extend content governance and best practices across the enterprise, organizations need an enterprise content management solution that delivers a broad set of functionality and is tightly integrated with business processes," said Andy MacMillan, vice president, Product Management, Oracle. "We believe that Oracle's position as a Leader in this report is recognition of the industry-leading performance, integration and scalability delivered in Oracle Enterprise Content Management Suite 11g." With Oracle Enterprise Content Management Suite 11g, Oracle offers a comprehensive, integrated and high-performance content management solution that helps organizations increase efficiency, reduce costs and improve content security. In the report, Oracle is grouped among the top three vendors for execution, and is the furthest to the right, placing Oracle as the most visionary vendor. This vision stems from Oracle's integration of content management right into key business processes, delivering content in context as people need it. Using a PeopleSoft Accounts Payable user as an example, as an employee processes an invoice, Oracle ECM Suite brings that invoice up on the screen so the processor can verify the content right in the process, improving speed and accuracy. Oracle integrates content into business processes such as Human Resources, Travel and Expense, and others, in the major enterprise applications such as PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel, and E-Business Suite. As part of Oracle's Enterprise Application Documents strategy, you can see an example of these integrations in this webinar: Managing Customer Documents and Marketing Assets in Siebel. You can also get a white paper of the ROI Embry Riddle achieved using Oracle Content Management integrated with enterprise applications. Embry Riddle moved from a point solution for content management on accounts payable to an infrastructure investment - they are now using Oracle Content Management for accounts payable with Oracle E-Business Suite, and for student on-boarding with PeopleSoft e-Campus. They continue to expand their use of Oracle Content Management to address further use cases from a core infrastructure. Oracle also shows its vision in the ability to deliver content optimized for online channels. Marketers can use Oracle ECM Suite to deliver digital assets and offers as part of an integrated campaign that understands website visitors and ensures that they are given the most pertinent information and offers. Oracle also provides full lifecycle management through its built-in records management. Companies are able to manage the lifecycle of content (both records and non-records) through built-in retention management. And with the integration of Oracle ECM Suite and Sun Storage Archive Manager, content can be routed to the appropriate storage media based upon content type, usage data or other business rules. This ensures that the most accessed content is instantly available, and archived content is stored on a more appropriate medium like tape. You can learn more in this webinar - Oracle Content Management and Sun Tiered Storage. If you are interested in reading more about why Oracle was chosen as a Leader, view the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management.

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WEB203 – Jump into Silverlight!… and Become Effective Immediately with Tim Huckaby, Fou

- by Robert Burger

Getting ready for the good stuff. Definitely wish there were more Silverlight and WCF RIA sessions, but this is a start. Was lucky to get a coveted power-enabled seat. Luckily, due to my trustily slow Verizon data card, I can get these notes out amidst a total Internet outage here. This is the second breakout session of the day, and is by far standing-room only. I stepped out before the session started to get a cool Diet COKE and wouldn’t have gotten back in if I didn’t already have a seat. Tim says this is an intro session and that he’s been begging for intro sessions at TechEd for years and that by looking at this audience, he thinks the demand is there. Admittedly, I didn’t know this was an intro session, or I might have gone elsewhere. But, it was the very first Silverlight session, so I had to be here. Tim says he will be providing a very good comprehensive reference application at the end of the presentation. He has just demoed it, and it is a full CRUD-based Sales Manager application based on… AdventureWorks! Session Agenda What it is / How to get started Declarative Programming Layout and Controls, Events and Commands Working with Data Adding Style to Your Application Silverlight… “WPF Light” Why is the download 4.2MB? Because the direct competitor is a 4.2MB download. There is no technical reason it is not the entire framework. It is purely to “be competitive”. Getting Started Get all of the following downloads from www.silverlight.net/getstarted Install VS2010 or Visual Web Developer Express 2010 Install Silverlight 4 Tools for VS2010 Install Expression Blend 4 Install the Silverlight 4 Toolkit Reference Application Features Uses MVVM pattern – a way to move data access code that would normally be inline within the UI and placing it in nice data access libraries Images loaded dynamically from the database, converting GIF to PNG because Silverlight does not support GIF. LINQ to SQL is the data access model WCF is the data provider and is using binary message encoding Declarative Programming XAML replaces code for UI representation Attributes control Layout and Style Event handlers wired-up in XAML Declarative Data Binding Layout Overview Content rendering flows inside of parent Fixed positioning (Canvas) is seldom used Panels are used to house content Margins and Padding over fixed size Panels StackPanel – Arranges child elements into a single line oriented horizontally or vertically Grid – A flexible grid are that consists of rows and columns Canvas – An are where positions are specifically fixed WrapPanel (in Toolkit) – Positions child elements in sequential position left to right and top to bottom. DockPanel (in Toolkit) – Positions child controls within a dockable area Positioning Horizontal and Vertical Alignment Margin – Separates an element from neighboring elements Padding – Enlarges the effective size of an element by a thickness Controls Overview Not all controls created equal Silverlight, as a subset of WPF, so many WPF controls do not exist in the core Siverlight release Silverlight Toolkit continues to add controls, but are released in different quality bands Plenty of good 3rd party controls to fill the gaps Windows Phone 7 is to have 95% of controls available in Silverlight Core and Toolkit. Events and Commands Standard .NET Events Routed Events Commands – based on the ICommand interface – logical action that can be invoked in several ways Adding Style to Your Application Resource Dictionaries – Contains a hash table of key/value pairs. Silverlight can only use Static Resources whereas WPF can also use Dynamic Resources Visual State Manager Silverlight 4 supports Implicit styles ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries combines many different file-based resources Downloads

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Ubuntu 12.10 broken, shutdown while updating

- by UnknownDude

I got the following problem: My PC shutdown while upgrading from 12.04 to 12.10. Everything seems to work but I can't install the missing updates. It always tells me to run apt-get install -f, but when I do so it just says: (It's in German, hope it doesn't matter) Paketlisten werden gelesen... Fertig Abhängigkeitsbaum wird aufgebaut Statusinformationen werden eingelesen... Fertig Abhängigkeiten werden korrigiert... Fertig Die folgenden Pakete wurden automatisch installiert und werden nicht mehr benötigt: espeak gcc-4.6-base:i386 gir1.2-notify-0.7 libcamel-1.2-29 libebook-1.2-12 libedataserver-1.2-15 libgconf2-4 libgnome-bluetooth8 libgnome-menu2 libgnomekbd7 libgomp1:i386 libgweather-3-0 libimobiledevice2 libindicate5 libkpathsea5 libpoppler19 libusbmuxd1 python-gmenu Verwenden Sie »apt-get autoremove«, um sie zu entfernen. Die folgenden zusätzlichen Pakete werden installiert: nvidia-current-updates xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-evdev xserver-xorg-input-mouse xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-fbdev xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-qxl xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware Vorgeschlagene Pakete: xfonts-100dpi xfonts-75dpi gpointing-device-settings touchfreeze firmware-linux Die folgenden Pakete werden ENTFERNT: nvidia-current Die folgenden Pakete werden aktualisiert (Upgrade): nvidia-current-updates xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-evdev xserver-xorg-input-mouse xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-fbdev xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-qxl xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware 20 aktualisiert, 0 neu installiert, 1 zu entfernen und 133 nicht aktualisiert. 8 nicht vollständig installiert oder entfernt. Es müssen noch 0 B von 70,6 MB an Archiven heruntergeladen werden. Nach dieser Operation werden 184 MB Plattenplatz freigegeben. Möchten Sie fortfahren [J/n]? j (Lese Datenbank ... 242727 Dateien und Verzeichnisse sind derzeit installiert.) Entfernen von nvidia-current ... Removing all DKMS Modules Error! There are no instances of module: nvidia-current 295.40 located in the DKMS tree. Done. Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/bin/quirks-handler", line 26, in <module> import Quirks.quirkapplier File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/Quirks/quirkapplier.py", line 26, in <module> import XKit.xutils ImportError: No module named XKit.xutils dpkg: Fehler beim Bearbeiten von nvidia-current (--remove): Unterprozess installiertes pre-removal-Skript gab den Fehlerwert 1 zurück Trigger für bamfdaemon werden verarbeitet ... Rebuilding /usr/share/applications/bamf.index... Trigger für libc-bin werden verarbeitet ... ldconfig deferred processing now taking place Fehler traten auf beim Bearbeiten von: nvidia-current E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) When I try to remove nvidia-current it tells me to run apt-get install -f. Do you guys have any idea? I don't want to reinstall my whole system, takes a lot of time to encrypt everything again and so on.

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Banshee encountered a Fatal Error (sqlite error 11: database disk image is malformed)

- by Nik

I am running ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat, and recently I am helping in testing out indicator-weather using the unstable buids. However there was a bug which caused my system to freeze suddenly (due to indicator-weather not ubuntu) and the only way to recover is to do a hard reset of the system. This happened a couple of times. And when i tried to open banshee after a couple of such resets I get the following fatal error which forces me to quit banshee. The screenshot is not clear enough to read the error, so I am posting it below, An unhandled exception was thrown: Sqlite error 11: database disk image is malformed (SQL: BEGIN TRANSACTION; DELETE FROM CoreSmartPlaylistEntries WHERE SmartPlaylistID IN (SELECT SmartPlaylistID FROM CoreSmartPlaylists WHERE IsTemporary = 1); DELETE FROM CoreSmartPlaylists WHERE IsTemporary = 1; COMMIT TRANSACTION) at Hyena.Data.Sqlite.Connection.CheckError (Int32 errorCode, System.String sql) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at Hyena.Data.Sqlite.Connection.Execute (System.String sql) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at Hyena.Data.Sqlite.HyenaSqliteCommand.Execute (Hyena.Data.Sqlite.HyenaSqliteConnection hconnection, Hyena.Data.Sqlite.Connection connection) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. at System.Reflection.MonoCMethod.Invoke (System.Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, System.Reflection.Binder binder, System.Object[] parameters, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at System.Reflection.MonoCMethod.Invoke (BindingFlags invokeAttr, System.Reflection.Binder binder, System.Object[] parameters, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at System.Reflection.ConstructorInfo.Invoke (System.Object[] parameters) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at System.Activator.CreateInstance (System.Type type, Boolean nonPublic) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at System.Activator.CreateInstance (System.Type type) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at Banshee.Gui.GtkBaseClient.Startup () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at Hyena.Gui.CleanRoomStartup.Startup (Hyena.Gui.StartupInvocationHandler startup) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 .NET Version: 2.0.50727.1433 OS Version: Unix 2.6.35.27 Assembly Version Information: gkeyfile-sharp (1.0.0.0) Banshee.AudioCd (1.9.0.0) Banshee.MiniMode (1.9.0.0) Banshee.CoverArt (1.9.0.0) indicate-sharp (0.4.1.0) notify-sharp (0.4.0.0) Banshee.SoundMenu (1.9.0.0) Banshee.Mpris (1.9.0.0) Migo (1.9.0.0) Banshee.Podcasting (1.9.0.0) Banshee.Dap (1.9.0.0) Banshee.LibraryWatcher (1.9.0.0) Banshee.MultimediaKeys (1.9.0.0) Banshee.Bpm (1.9.0.0) Banshee.YouTube (1.9.0.0) Banshee.WebBrowser (1.9.0.0) Banshee.Wikipedia (1.9.0.0) pango-sharp (2.12.0.0) Banshee.Fixup (1.9.0.0) Banshee.Widgets (1.9.0.0) gio-sharp (2.14.0.0) gudev-sharp (1.0.0.0) Banshee.Gio (1.9.0.0) Banshee.GStreamer (1.9.0.0) System.Configuration (2.0.0.0) NDesk.DBus.GLib (1.0.0.0) gconf-sharp (2.24.0.0) Banshee.Gnome (1.9.0.0) Banshee.NowPlaying (1.9.0.0) Mono.Cairo (2.0.0.0) System.Xml (2.0.0.0) Banshee.Core (1.9.0.0) Hyena.Data.Sqlite (1.9.0.0) System.Core (3.5.0.0) gdk-sharp (2.12.0.0) Mono.Addins (0.4.0.0) atk-sharp (2.12.0.0) Hyena.Gui (1.9.0.0) gtk-sharp (2.12.0.0) Banshee.ThickClient (1.9.0.0) Nereid (1.9.0.0) NDesk.DBus.Proxies (0.0.0.0) Mono.Posix (2.0.0.0) NDesk.DBus (1.0.0.0) glib-sharp (2.12.0.0) Hyena (1.9.0.0) System (2.0.0.0) Banshee.Services (1.9.0.0) Banshee (1.9.0.0) mscorlib (2.0.0.0) Platform Information: Linux 2.6.35-27-generic i686 unknown GNU/Linux Disribution Information: [/etc/lsb-release] DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu DISTRIB_RELEASE=10.10 DISTRIB_CODENAME=maverick DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 10.10" [/etc/debian_version] squeeze/sid Just to make it clear, this happened only after the hard resets and not before. I used to use banshee everyday and it worked perfectly. Can anyone help me fix this?

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Unreal Tournament 3 vs UDK: What Should I Choose?

- by Matt Christian

Many people in the mod community were very excited to see the release of the Unreal Developer Kit (UDK) a few months ago. Along with generating excitement into a very dedicated community, it also introduced many new modders into a flourishing area of indie-development. However, since UDK is free, most beginners jump right into UDK, which is OK though you might just benefit more from purchasing a shelf-copy of Unreal Tournament 3. UDK UDK is a free full version of UnrealEd (the editor environment used to create games like Gears of War 1/2, Bioshock 1/2, and of course Unreal Tournament 3). The editor gives you all the features of the editor from the shelf-copy of the game plus some refinements in many of the tools. (One of the first things you'll find about UnrealEd is that it's a collection of tools grouped into the same editor so it really isn't a single 'tool') Interestingly enough, Epic is allowing you to sell any game made in UDK with a few catches. First off, you must purchase a liscense for your game (which, I THINK is aproximately $99 starting). Secondly, you must pay 25% of all profits for the first $5,000 of your game revenue to them (about $1250). Finally, you cannot use any of the 'media' provided in UDK for your game. UDK provides sample meshes, textures, materials, sounds, and other sample pieces of media pulled (mostly) from Unreal Tournament 3. The final point here will really determine whether you should use UDK. There is a very small amount of media provided in UDK for someone to go in and begin creating levels without first developing your own meshes, textures, and other media. Sure, you can slap together a few unique levels, though you will end up finding yourself restriced to the same items over and over and over. This is absolutely how professional game development is; you are 'given' (typically liscensed or built in-house) an engine/editor and you begin creating all the content for the game and placing it. UDK is aimed toward those who really want to build their game content from scratch with a currently existing engine. It is not suited for someone who would like to simply build levels and quick mods without learning external 3D programs and image editing software. Unreal Tournament 3 Unless you have a serious grudge against FPS's, Epic, or your computer sucks, there really is no reason not to own this game for PC. You can pick it up on Steam or Amazon for around $20 brand new. Not only are you provided with a full single-player and multiplayer game, but you are given the entire UnrealEd 3.0 including all of the content used to build UT3. If you want to start building levels and mods quickly for UT3, you should absolutely pick up a shelf-copy. However, as off-the-shelf UT3 is a few years old now, the tools have not been updated for quite a while. Compared to UDK, the menus are more difficult to navigate through and take more time getting used to. Since UDK is updated almost every month, there are new inclusions to the editor that may not be in UT3 (including the future addition of 3D!). I haven't worked enough with shelf UT3 to see if there are more features in UDK or if they both feature the same stuff in different forms, however you should remember that the Unreal Engine 3.0 has undergone numerous upgrades between it's launch and Gears of War 2 (in fact, Epic had a conference to show off what changed just between the Gears of Wars games). Since UT3 has much more core content, someone who wants to focus on level editing or modding the core UT3 game may find their needs better suited with an off-the-shelf copy of UT3. If that level designer has a team that is generating custom assets, they may be better off with UDK. The choice is now yours...

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The type 'XXX' is defined in an assembly that is not referenced exception after upgrade to ASP.NET 4

- by imran_ku07

Introduction : I found two posts in ASP.NET MVC forums complaining that they are getting exception, The type XXX is defined in an assembly that is not referenced, after upgrading thier application into Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 at here and here . Description : The reason why they are getting the above exception is the use of new clean web.config without referencing the assemblies which were presents in ASP.NET 3.5 web.config. The quick solution for this problem is to add the old assemblies in new web.config. <assemblies> <add assembly="System.Web.Abstractions, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"/> <add assembly="System.Web.Routing, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"/> <add assembly="System.Web.Mvc, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"/> <add assembly="System.Data.Entity, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" /> <add assembly="System.Data.Linq, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, publicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" /> </assemblies> How It works : Currently i have not tested the above scenario in ASP.NET 4.0 because i have not yet get it. But the above scenario can easily be tested and verified in VS 2008. Just Open the root web.config and remove <add assembly="System.Core, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=B77A5C561934E089"/> Even you add the reference of System.Core in your project, you will still get the above exception because aspx pages are compiled in separate assembly. You can check this yourself by checking Show Detailed Compiler Output: below in the yellow screen of death, you will find something,/out:"C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files\root\e907aee4\5fa0acc8\App_Web_y5rd6bdg.dll" This shows that aspx pages are compiled in separate assembly in Temporary ASP.NET Files.Summary : After getting the above exception make sure to add the assemblies in web.config or add the Assembly directive at Page level. Hopefully this will helps to solve your problem.

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Technical workshop with the gurus: Architecting Oracle Database-As-A-Service (DBaaS)

- by Javier Puerta

Hardware and Software, Engineered to Work Together inside the Click Here The order you must follow to make the colored link appear in browsers. If not the default window link will appear 1. Select the word you want to use for the link 2. Select the desired color, Red, Black, etc 3. Select bold if necessary ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Templates use two sizes of fonts and the sans-serif font tag for the email. All Fonts should be (Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif) tags Normal size reading body fonts should be set to the size of 2. Small font sizes should be set to 1 !!!!!!!DO NOT USE ANY OTHER SIZE FONT FOR THE EMAILS!!!!!!!! ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ -- OCTOBER 2013 Invitation: Architecting Oracle Database-As-A-Service (DBaaS) Stay Connected Sign up for Specific Updates Architecting Oracle Database-As-A-Service (DBaaS) Dear partner, We are pleased to invite you to a 2-day workshop dedicated to EMEA partners on "Architecting Oracle Private Database Cloud & Delivering Database-As-A-Service (DBaaS)". This exclusive workshop will be delivered by Product Management and Product Development from Oracle HQ and focuses on the main theme CIOs are tackling with in the last decade: Consolidation to Private Cloud. For many customers the journey to consolidation has led to DBaaS Cloud deployments to significantly reduce costs and offer agile IT services. With the recent launch of Oracle Database 12c, the game really has changed in terms of what Oracle offers and how database clouds can be deployed. REGISTER NOW Who should attend: Enterprise Architects Infrastructure Architects DB Architects from System Integrators and large Independent Software Vendors. Take this opportunity to learn from the gurus, how you can help your customers maximize on their cloud consolidation strategies. The workshops main focus is service delivery, which includes standardization and consolidation, and how you would help your customers transform their current IT infrastructure to a service delivery model. It will discuss best practices and reviews customer examples that have successfully implemented a database cloud. The agenda is split into two days sessions: Day 1: Overview & Planning Database Cloud - Demos Customer Case Studies Database 12c Day 2: Database Cloud - Design Database Cloud - Implementation EM Cloud Control DBaaS on Engineered Systems Question and Answers Attendance is free of charge for qualified Oracle partners - Register now for one of the below sessions: Date Country Location 5 & 6 November 2013 United Kingdom Manchester 7 & 8 November 2013 Germany Munich 11 & 12 November 2013 Netherlands Amsterdam 14 & 15 November 2013 Turkey Istanbul 18 & 19 November 2013 Austria Vienna Looking forward to seeing you! Javier Puerta Director, Core Technology Partner Programs EMEA Prashant Barot Director, Core Technology Resources OPN Portal OPN Enablement News Blog Oracle Partner Store Use Oracle Trademark in Google AdWords OPN Events Calendar OPN Information Center OPN Solutions Catalog Promote Your Events on Oracle Calendar Copyright © 2013, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Contact Us | Legal Notices and Terms of Use | Privacy Statement Oracle Corporation - Worldwide Headquarters, 500 Oracle Parkway, OPL - E-mail Services, Redwood Shores, CA 94065, United States

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Technical workshop with the gurus: Architecting Oracle Database-As-A-Service (DBaaS)

- by Javier Puerta

Hardware and Software, Engineered to Work Together inside the Click Here The order you must follow to make the colored link appear in browsers. If not the default window link will appear 1. Select the word you want to use for the link 2. Select the desired color, Red, Black, etc 3. Select bold if necessary ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Templates use two sizes of fonts and the sans-serif font tag for the email. All Fonts should be (Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif) tags Normal size reading body fonts should be set to the size of 2. Small font sizes should be set to 1 !!!!!!!DO NOT USE ANY OTHER SIZE FONT FOR THE EMAILS!!!!!!!! ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ -- OCTOBER 2013 Invitation: Architecting Oracle Database-As-A-Service (DBaaS) Stay Connected Sign up for Specific Updates Architecting Oracle Database-As-A-Service (DBaaS) Dear partner, We are pleased to invite you to a 2-day workshop dedicated to EMEA partners on "Architecting Oracle Private Database Cloud & Delivering Database-As-A-Service (DBaaS)". This exclusive workshop will be delivered by Product Management and Product Development from Oracle HQ and focuses on the main theme CIOs are tackling with in the last decade: Consolidation to Private Cloud. For many customers the journey to consolidation has led to DBaaS Cloud deployments to significantly reduce costs and offer agile IT services. With the recent launch of Oracle Database 12c, the game really has changed in terms of what Oracle offers and how database clouds can be deployed. REGISTER NOW Who should attend: Enterprise Architects Infrastructure Architects DB Architects from System Integrators and large Independent Software Vendors. Take this opportunity to learn from the gurus, how you can help your customers maximize on their cloud consolidation strategies. The workshops main focus is service delivery, which includes standardization and consolidation, and how you would help your customers transform their current IT infrastructure to a service delivery model. It will discuss best practices and reviews customer examples that have successfully implemented a database cloud. The agenda is split into two days sessions: Day 1: Overview & Planning Database Cloud - Demos Customer Case Studies Database 12c Day 2: Database Cloud - Design Database Cloud - Implementation EM Cloud Control DBaaS on Engineered Systems Question and Answers Attendance is free of charge for qualified Oracle partners - Register now for one of the below sessions: Date Country Location 5 & 6 November 2013 United Kingdom Manchester 7 & 8 November 2013 Germany Munich 11 & 12 November 2013 Netherlands Amsterdam 14 & 15 November 2013 Turkey Istanbul 18 & 19 November 2013 Austria Vienna Looking forward to seeing you! Javier Puerta Director, Core Technology Partner Programs EMEA Prashant Barot Director, Core Technology Resources OPN Portal OPN Enablement News Blog Oracle Partner Store Use Oracle Trademark in Google AdWords OPN Events Calendar OPN Information Center OPN Solutions Catalog Promote Your Events on Oracle Calendar Copyright © 2013, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Contact Us | Legal Notices and Terms of Use | Privacy Statement Oracle Corporation - Worldwide Headquarters, 500 Oracle Parkway, OPL - E-mail Services, Redwood Shores, CA 94065, United States

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Agile Manifesto, Revisited

- by GeekAgilistMercenary

Again, conversations give me a zillion things to write about. The recent conversation that has cropped up again is my various viewpoints of the Agile Manifesto. Not all the processes that came after the manifesto was written, but just the core manifesto itself. Just for context, here is the manifesto in all the glory. We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more. Several of the key signatories at the time went on to write some of the core books that really gave Agile Software Development traction. If you check out the Agile Manifesto Site and do a search for any of those people, you will find a treasure trove of software development information. My 2 Cents First off, I agree with a few people out there. Agile is not Scrum for instance. Do NOT get these things confused when checking out Agile, or pushing forward with Scrum. As David Starr points out in his blog entry, "About 35 minutes into this discussion, I realized I hadn?t heard a question or comment that wasn?t related to Scrum. I asked the room, ?How many people are on an agile team that is NOT using Scrum?? 5 hands. Seriously, out of about 150 people of so. 5 hands." So know, as this is one of my biggest pet peves these days, that Scrum is not Agile. Another quote David writes, "I assure you, dear reader, 2 week time boxes does not an agile team make." This is the exact problem. Take a look at the actual manifesto above. First ideal, "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools". There are a couple of meanings in this ideal, just as there are in the other written ideals. But this one has a lot of contention with a set practice such as Scrum. There are other formulas, namely XP (eXtreme) and Kanban are two that come to mind often. But none of these are Agile, but instead a process based on the ideals of Agile. Some of you may be thinking, "that?s the same thing". Well, no, it is not. This type of differentiation is vitally important. Agile is a set of ideals. Processes are nice, but they can change, they may work for some and not others. The Agile Manifesto covers the ideals behind what is intended, that intention being to learn and find new ways to build better software. Ideals, not processes. Definition versus implementation. Class versus object. The ideals are of utmost importance, the processes are secondary, the first ideal is what really lays this out for me "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools". Yes, we need tools but we need the individuals and their interactions more. For those coming into a development team, I hope you take this to mind. It is of utmost importance that this differentiation is known and fought for. The second the process becomes more important than the individuals and interactions, the team will effectively lose the advantages of Agile Ideals. This is just one of my first thoughts on the topic of Agile. I will be writing more in the near future about each of the ideals. I will make a point to outline more of my thoughts, my opinions, and experience with the ideals of Agile and the various processes that are out there. Maybe, I may stumble upon something new with the help of my readers? It would be a grand overture to the ideals I hold. For the original entry, check out my personal blog with other juicy tech tidbits, rants, raves, and the like. Agilist Mercenary

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Why Your ERP System Isn't Ready for the Next Evolution of the Enterprise

- by ken.pulverman

ERP has been the backbone of enterprise software. The data held in your ERP system is core of most companies. Efficiencies gained through the accounting and resource allocation through ERP software have literally saved companies trillions of dollars. Not only does everything seem to be fine with your ERP system, you haven't had to touch it in years. Why aren't you ready for what comes next? Well judging by the growth rates in the space (Oracle posted only a 3% growth rate, while SAP showed a 12% decline) there hasn't been much modernization going on, just a little replacement activity. If you are like most companies, your ERP system is connected to a proprietary middleware solution that only effectively talks with a handful of other systems you might have acquired from the same vendor. Connecting your legacy system through proprietary middleware is expensive and brittle and if you are like most companies, you were only willing to pay an SI so much before you said "enough." So your ERP is working. It's humming along. You might not be able to get Order to Promise information when you take orders in your call center, but there are work arounds that work just fine. So what's the problem? The problem is that you built your business around your ERP core, and now there is such pressure to innovate your business processes to keep up that you need a whole new slew of modern apps and you need ERP data to be accessible from everywhere. Every time you change a sales territory or a comp plan or change a benefits provider your ERP system, literally the economic brain of your business, needs to know what's going on. And this giant need to access and provide information to your ERP is only growing. What makes matters even more challenging is that apps today come in every flavor under the Sun™. SaaS, cloud, managed, hybrid, outsourced, composite....and they all have different integration protocols. The only easy way to get ahead of all this is to modernize the way you connect and run your applications. Unlike the middleware solutions of yesteryear, modern middleware is effectively the operating system of the enterprise. In the same way that you rely on Apple, Microsoft, and Google to find a video driver for your 23" monitor or to ensure the Word or Keynote runs, modern middleware takes care of intra-application connectivity and process execution. It effectively allows you to take ERP out of the middle while ensuring connectivity to your vital data for anything you want to do. The diagram below reflects that change. In this model, the hegemony of ERP is over. It too has to become a stealthy modern app to help you quickly adapt to business changes while managing vital information. And through modern middleware it will connect to everything. So yes ERP as we've know it is dead, but long live ERP as a connected application member of the modern enterprise. I want to Thank Andrew Zoldan, Group Vice President Oracle Manufacturing Industries Business Unit for introducing me to how some of his biggest customers have benefited by modernizing their applications infrastructure and making ERP a connected application. by John Burke, Group Vice President, Applications Business Unit

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Oracle WebCenter: Common User Experience Architecture

- by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com

You may remember that the key goals of the new release of WebCenter are providing a Modern User Experience, unparalleled Application Integration, converging all the best of the existing portal platforms into WebCenter and delivering a Common User Experience Architecture. In previous weeks we've provided an overview of Oracle WebCenter and discussed some of the other key goals and this week, we'll focus on how the new release of Oracle WebCenter delivers a Common User Experience Architecture.When Oracle talks about a Common User Experience Architecture, it really focuses on a core set of areas. First, the way that information is accessed needs to be consistent and extensible so that as requirements change, the applications don't need to be rewritten for every change. Second, this information access layer needs to be securely accessible to any application, site, or any other channel that needs to leverage this information. Third, there needs to be a consistent presentation layout, Oracle calls it a UI shell, so that all resources can fit together in a useable, productive way. Fourth, there needs to be a common set of design patterns for how different menus, features, and services fit into this UI Shell for broad and productive usability. Fifth, there needs to be a set of design patterns for the individual services that plug into this UI shell so that end users can move from one module of the application to another without new learning. Finally, all of these layers need to be customizable in an easy way that insulates IT from patching and upgrading problems and allows the business owners the agility to quickly change with the market conditions.As Oracle has already announced, we will release our next generation of enterprise applications called Oracle Fusion Applications. We have thousands of developers building these applications that all had different programming tool experience and UI design experience. We've educated over 6,000 developers building Oracle Fusion Applications to leverage these Common User Experience Architecture patterns to speed their learning curve of the new Java standards as well as SOA principles to deliver a revolutionary new set of applications. You could imagine the big challenge with getting all these developers with different backgrounds and different UI design skills to deliver a completely integrated application user experience. This is why Oracle invested heavily in designing this Common User Experience Architecture, based on Oracle WebCenter and the Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF). It pulls together the best practices and design patterns that Oracle development required in order to bring Fusion Applications to market and Oracle WebCenter is the user experience layer that all of this is surfaced through. In this way, customers can quickly brand a deployment for new partnerships without having to redevelop a new site. Or they can quickly add new options to the UI Shell to enable their line of business managers to quickly adapt to a new competitive product. And with the core integration of the activities to produce a Business Activity Stream, customers are able to stay on top of all their key business actions when they happen as they happen and more importantly, the system can recommend actions or resources to help act on these activities.And we've authored this whole set of design patterns for Oracle development to take advantage of in delivering Fusion Applications. We're also applying these design patterns to our existing eBusiness Suite, Peoplesoft, Siebel, and JD Edwards applications so that they can tie in the exact same way that Fusion Applications has been brought together. This will provide customers with a complete Common User Experience Architecture for their entire ecosystem of applications within their enterprise whether they are from Oracle, another vender, or custom built applications. And this is all provided in the new release of Oracle WebCenter. These design patterns cover elements around delivering a complete, aggregated menu of all the capabilities that their role allows independent of which application they are trying to access. It means that as they move from one application to another, they will have a consistent user experience. And if they are using an Oracle application, any customizations that are made to the application are preserved and managed through upgrades and patches.Be sure to check back this week as we share more information and resources on Oracle's Common User Experience Architecture.

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Save the Date - Oracle Partner Community Forum: Exadata, Exalogic and Manageability, Vienna, 23-24 April 2013

- by Javier Puerta

Hardware and Software Engineered to Work Together .Ritu { font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; } .Ritu { font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; } .Ritu { font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; } body,td,th { font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; } .color { color: #F00; } .c { color: #F00; } .c { color: #F00; } .c { color: #000; font-size: xx-small; } .c a { color: #F00; } .c { color: #F00; } .cl { color: #F00; } .b { color: #000; font-size: xx-small; } .i { font-style: italic; } .i { font-style: italic; } .i { font-style: italic; } .i { font-style: italic; } .i { font-style: italic; } .c { color: #F00; font-size: small; } .b { font-weight: bold; font-size: x-small; } .c { color: #F00; font-size: x-small; } .clr { color: #F00; } .c { color: #F00; } inside the Click Here The order you must follow to make the colored link appear in browsers. If not the default window link will appear 1. Select the word you want to use for the link 2. Select the desired color, Red, Black, etc 3. Select bold if necessary ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Templates use two sizes of fonts and the sans-serif font tag for the email. All Fonts should be (Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif) tags Normal size reading body fonts should be set to the size of 2. Small font sizes should be set to 1 !!!!!!!DO NOT USE ANY OTHER SIZE FONT FOR THE EMAILS!!!!!!!! ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ -- Oracle PartnerNetwork | Account | Feedback SAVE THE DATE ORACLE PARTNER COMMUNITY FORUM: EXADATA, EXALOGIC AND MANAGEABILITY 23-24 APRIL 2013, VIENNA, AUSTRIA The 2013 event expands its scope to cover all the building blocks of the Cloud infrastructure: Exadata, Exalogic and Manageability! Dear partner I am delighted to announce the 2013 edition of the Exadata, Exalogic and Manageability Partner Community Forum for EMEA partners which will take place in Vienna, Austria, on April 23-24, 2013. After the experience of last year where we ran a joint Exadata and Manageability event, we received requests from many of you to add also Exalogic to the scope of the forum, and this way to cover the complete infrastructure architecture on the Exa platform. The continued market adoption of Exadata and Exalogic is being paralleled by a growth in the rate of projects sold and implemented by partners. Sharing customer cases and best-practices presented by other partners constitutes the core of this event. If you want to present an experience of your company around Exadata, Exalogic or Manageability that can be a learning experience for other partners, we still have some slots in the agenda. (Please contact Javier Puerta if you want to present.) Attending the Community Forum you will also have the opportunity to get Oracle’s insight on new products and market trends. And, of course, interact with the Oracle executives responsible for the Exadata, Exalogic and Manageability business. The atmosphere of beautiful Vienna will be the scenario of the event. Detailed venue and hotel booking information will be sent to you in January. Don't miss out on attending this key event! Save the date now - 23 & 24 April 2013, and watch out for your formal invitation coming soon. Kind regards, Javier Puerta Core Technology Partner Programs, Oracle EMEA E-Mail: [email protected] Jürgen Kress SOA Partner Adoption Oracle EMEA E-Mail: [email protected] Copyright © 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Contact PBC | Legal Notices and Terms of Use | Privacy Oracle Corporation - Worldwide Headquarters, 500 Oracle Parkway, OPL - E-mail Services, Redwood Shores, CA 94065, United States

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Save the Date - Oracle Partner Community Forum: Exadata, Exalogic and Manageability, Vienna, 23-24 April 2013

- by Javier Puerta

Hardware and Software Engineered to Work Together .Ritu { font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; } .Ritu { font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; } .Ritu { font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; } body,td,th { font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; } .color { color: #F00; } .c { color: #F00; } .c { color: #F00; } .c { color: #000; font-size: xx-small; } .c a { color: #F00; } .c { color: #F00; } .cl { color: #F00; } .b { color: #000; font-size: xx-small; } .i { font-style: italic; } .i { font-style: italic; } .i { font-style: italic; } .i { font-style: italic; } .i { font-style: italic; } .c { color: #F00; font-size: small; } .b { font-weight: bold; font-size: x-small; } .c { color: #F00; font-size: x-small; } .clr { color: #F00; } .c { color: #F00; } inside the Click Here The order you must follow to make the colored link appear in browsers. If not the default window link will appear 1. Select the word you want to use for the link 2. Select the desired color, Red, Black, etc 3. Select bold if necessary ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Templates use two sizes of fonts and the sans-serif font tag for the email. All Fonts should be (Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif) tags Normal size reading body fonts should be set to the size of 2. Small font sizes should be set to 1 !!!!!!!DO NOT USE ANY OTHER SIZE FONT FOR THE EMAILS!!!!!!!! ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ -- Oracle PartnerNetwork | Account | Feedback SAVE THE DATE ORACLE PARTNER COMMUNITY FORUM: EXADATA, EXALOGIC AND MANAGEABILITY 23-24 APRIL 2013, VIENNA, AUSTRIA The 2013 event expands its scope to cover all the building blocks of the Cloud infrastructure: Exadata, Exalogic and Manageability! Dear partner I am delighted to announce the 2013 edition of the Exadata, Exalogic and Manageability Partner Community Forum for EMEA partners which will take place in Vienna, Austria, on April 23-24, 2013. After the experience of last year where we ran a joint Exadata and Manageability event, we received requests from many of you to add also Exalogic to the scope of the forum, and this way to cover the complete infrastructure architecture on the Exa platform. The continued market adoption of Exadata and Exalogic is being paralleled by a growth in the rate of projects sold and implemented by partners. Sharing customer cases and best-practices presented by other partners constitutes the core of this event. If you want to present an experience of your company around Exadata, Exalogic or Manageability that can be a learning experience for other partners, we still have some slots in the agenda. (Please contact Javier Puerta if you want to present.) Attending the Community Forum you will also have the opportunity to get Oracle’s insight on new products and market trends. And, of course, interact with the Oracle executives responsible for the Exadata, Exalogic and Manageability business. The atmosphere of beautiful Vienna will be the scenario of the event. Detailed venue and hotel booking information will be sent to you in January. Don't miss out on attending this key event! Save the date now - 23 & 24 April 2013, and watch out for your formal invitation coming soon. Kind regards, Javier Puerta Core Technology Partner Programs, Oracle EMEA E-Mail: [email protected] Jürgen Kress SOA Partner Adoption Oracle EMEA E-Mail: [email protected] Copyright © 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Contact PBC | Legal Notices and Terms of Use | Privacy Oracle Corporation - Worldwide Headquarters, 500 Oracle Parkway, OPL - E-mail Services, Redwood Shores, CA 94065, United States

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Windows Azure Recipe: Mobile Computing

- by Clint Edmonson

A while back, mashups were all the rage. The idea was to compose solutions that provided aggregation and integration across applications and services to make information more available, useful, and personal. Mashups ushered in the era of Web 2.0 in all it’s socially connected goodness. They taught us that to be successful, we needed to add web service APIs to our web applications. Web and client based mashups met with great success and have evolved even further with the introduction of the internet connected smartphone. Nothing is more available, useful, or personal than our smartphones. The current generation of cloud connected mobile computing mashups allow our mobilized workforces to receive, process, and react to information from disparate sources faster than ever before. Drivers Integration Reach Time to market Solution Here’s a sketch of a prototypical mobile computing solution using Windows Azure: Ingredients Web Role – with the phone running a dedicated client application, the web role is responsible for serving up backend web services that implement the solution’s core connected functionality. Database – used to store core operational and workflow data for the solution’s web services. Access Control – this service is used to authenticate and manage users identity, roles, and groups, possibly in conjunction with 3rd identity providers such as Windows LiveID, Google, Yahoo!, and Facebook. Worker Role – this role is used to handle the orchestration of long-running, complex, asynchronous operations. While much of the integration and interaction with other services can be handled directly by the mobile client application, it’s possible that the backend may need to integrate with 3rd party services as well. Offloading this work to a worker role better distributes computing resources and keeps the web roles focused on direct client interaction. Queues – these provide reliable, persistent messaging between applications and processes. They are an absolute necessity once asynchronous processing is involved. Queues facilitate the flow of distributed events and allow a solution to send push notifications back to mobile devices at appropriate times. Training & Resources These links point to online Windows Azure training labs and resources where you can learn more about the individual ingredients described above. (Note: The entire Windows Azure Training Kit can also be downloaded for offline use.) Windows Azure (16 labs) Windows Azure is an internet-scale cloud computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services which can be used individually or together. It gives developers the choice to build web applications; applications running on connected devices, PCs, or servers; or hybrid solutions offering the best of both worlds. New or enhanced applications can be built using existing skills with the Visual Studio development environment and the .NET Framework. With its standards-based and interoperable approach, the services platform supports multiple internet protocols, including HTTP, REST, SOAP, and plain XML SQL Azure (7 labs) Microsoft SQL Azure delivers on the Microsoft Data Platform vision of extending the SQL Server capabilities to the cloud as web-based services, enabling you to store structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Windows Azure Services (9 labs) As applications collaborate across organizational boundaries, ensuring secure transactions across disparate security domains is crucial but difficult to implement. Windows Azure Services provides hosted authentication and access control using powerful, secure, standards-based infrastructure. Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone The Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone is designed to make it easier for you to build mobile applications that leverage cloud services running in Windows Azure. The toolkit includes Visual Studio project templates for Windows Phone and Windows Azure, class libraries optimized for use on the phone, sample applications, and documentation Windows Azure Toolkit for iOS The Windows Azure Toolkit for iOS is a toolkit for developers to make it easy to access Windows Azure storage services from native iOS applications. The toolkit can be used for both iPhone and iPad applications, developed using Objective-C and XCode. Windows Azure Toolkit for Android The Windows Azure Toolkit for Android is a toolkit for developers to make it easy to work with Windows Azure from native Android applications. The toolkit can be used for native Android applications developed using Eclipse and the Android SDK. See my Windows Azure Resource Guide for more guidance on how to get started, including links web portals, training kits, samples, and blogs related to Windows Azure.

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Why Your ERP System Isn't Ready for the Next Evolution of the Enterprise

- by [email protected]

By ken.pulverman on March 24, 2010 8:51 AM ERP has been the backbone of enterprise software. The data held in your ERP system is core of most companies. Efficiencies gained through the accounting and resource allocation through ERP software have literally saved companies trillions of dollars. Not only does everything seem to be fine with your ERP system, you haven't had to touch it in years. Why aren't you ready for what comes next? Well judging by the growth rates in the space (Oracle posted only a 3% growth rate, while SAP showed a 12% decline) there hasn't been much modernization going on, just a little replacement activity. If you are like most companies, your ERP system is connected to a proprietary middleware solution that only effectively talks with a handful of other systems you might have acquired from the same vendor. Connecting your legacy system through proprietary middleware is expensive and brittle and if you are like most companies, you were only willing to pay an SI so much before you said "enough." So your ERP is working. It's humming along. You might not be able to get Order to Promise information when you take orders in your call center, but there are work arounds that work just fine. So what's the problem? The problem is that you built your business around your ERP core, and now there is such pressure to innovate your business processes to keep up that you need a whole new slew of modern apps and you need ERP data to be accessible from everywhere. Every time you change a sales territory or a comp plan or change a benefits provider your ERP system, literally the economic brain of your business, needs to know what's going on. And this giant need to access and provide information to your ERP is only growing. What makes matters even more challenging is that apps today come in every flavor under the Sun™. SaaS, cloud, managed, hybrid, outsourced, composite....and they all have different integration protocols. The only easy way to get ahead of all this is to modernize the way you connect and run your applications. Unlike the middleware solutions of yesteryear, modern middleware is effectively the operating system of the enterprise. In the same way that you rely on Apple, Microsoft, and Google to find a video driver for your 23" monitor or to ensure that Word or Keynote runs, modern middleware takes care of intra-application connectivity and process execution. It effectively allows you to take ERP out of the middle while ensuring connectivity to your vital data for anything you want to do. The diagram below reflects that change. In this model, the hegemony of ERP is over. It too has to become a stealthy modern app to help you quickly adapt to business changes while managing vital information. And through modern middleware it will connect to everything. So yes ERP as we've know it is dead, but long live ERP as a connected application member of the modern enterprise. I want to Thank Andrew Zoldan, Group Vice President Oracle Manufacturing Industries Business Unit for introducing me to how some of his biggest customers have benefited by modernizing their applications infrastructure and making ERP a connected application. by John Burke, Group Vice President, Applications Business Unit

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Python Coding standards vs. productivity

- by Shroatmeister

I work for a large humanitarian organisation, on a project building software that could help save lives in emergencies by speeding up the distribution of food. Many NGOs desperately need our software and we are weeks behind schedule. One thing that worries me in this project is what I think is an excessive focus on coding standards. We write in python/django and use a version of PEP0008, with various modifications e.g. line lengths can go up to 160 chars and all lines should go that long if possible, no blank lines between imports, line wrapping rules that apply only to certain kinds of classes, lots of templates that we must use, even if they aren't the best way to solve a problem etc. etc. One core dev spent a week rewriting a major part of the system to meet the then new coding standards, throwing away several suites of tests in the process, as the rewrite meant they were 'invalid'. We spent two weeks rewriting all the functionality that was lost, and fixing bugs. He is the lead dev and his word carries weight, so he has convinced the project manager that these standards are necessary. The junior devs do as they are told. I sense that the project manager has a strong feeling of cognitive dissonance about all this but nevertheless agrees with it vehemently as he feels unsure what else to do. Today I got in serious trouble because I had forgotten to put some spaces after commas in a keyword argument. I was literally shouted at by two other devs and the project manager during a Skype call. Personally I think coding standards are important but also think that we are wasting a lot of time obsessing with them, and when I verbalized this it provoked rage. I'm seen as a troublemaker in the team, a team that is looking for scapegoats for its failings. Since the introduction of the coding standards, the team's productivity has measurably plummeted, however this only reinforces the obsession, i.e. the lead dev simply blames our non-adherence to standards for the lack of progress. He believes that we can't read each other's code if we don't adhere to the conventions. This is starting to turn sticky. Now I am trying to modify various scripts, autopep8, pep8ify and PythonTidy to try to match the conventions. We also run pep8 against source code but there are so many implicit amendments to our standard that it's hard to track them all. The lead dev simple picks faults that the pep8 script doesn't pick up and shouts at us in the next stand-up meeting. Every week there are new additions to the coding standards that force us to rewrite existing, working, tested code. Thank heavens we still have tests, (I reverted some commits and fixed a bunch of the ones he removed). All the while there is increasing pressure to meet the deadline. I believe a fundamental issue is that the lead dev and another core dev refuse to trust other developers to do their job. But how to deal with that? We can't do our job because we are too busy rewriting everything. I've never encountered this dynamic in a software engineering team. Am I wrong to question their adherence to coding standards? Has anyone else experienced a similar situation and how have they dealt with it successfully? (I'm not looking for a discussion just actual solutions people have found)

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Windows Azure Recipe: Social Web / Big Media

- by Clint Edmonson

With the rise of social media there’s been an explosion of special interest media web sites on the web. From athletics to board games to funny animal behaviors, you can bet there’s a group of people somewhere on the web talking about it. Social media sites allow us to interact, share experiences, and bond with like minded enthusiasts around the globe. And through the power of software, we can follow trends in these unique domains in real time. Drivers Reach Scalability Media hosting Global distribution Solution Here’s a sketch of how a social media application might be built out on Windows Azure: Ingredients Traffic Manager (optional) – can be used to provide hosting and load balancing across different instances and/or data centers. Perfect if the solution needs to be delivered to different cultures or regions around the world. Access Control – this service is essential to managing user identity. It’s backed by a full blown implementation of Active Directory and allows the definition and management of users, groups, and roles. A pre-built ASP.NET membership provider is included in the training kit to leverage this capability but it’s also flexible enough to be combined with external Identity providers including Windows LiveID, Google, Yahoo!, and Facebook. The provider model has extensibility points to hook into other identity providers as well. Web Role – hosts the core of the web application and presents a central social hub users. Database – used to store core operational, functional, and workflow data for the solution’s web services. Caching (optional) – as a web site traffic grows caching can be leveraged to keep frequently used read-only, user specific, and application resource data in a high-speed distributed in-memory for faster response times and ultimately higher scalability without spinning up more web and worker roles. It includes a token based security model that works alongside the Access Control service. Tables (optional) – for semi-structured data streams that don’t need relational integrity such as conversations, comments, or activity streams, tables provide a faster and more flexible way to store this kind of historical data. Blobs (optional) – users may be creating or uploading large volumes of heterogeneous data such as documents or rich media. Blob storage provides a scalable, resilient way to store terabytes of user data. The storage facilities can also integrate with the Access Control service to ensure users’ data is delivered securely. Content Delivery Network (CDN) (optional) – for sites that service users around the globe, the CDN is an extension to blob storage that, when enabled, will automatically cache frequently accessed blobs and static site content at edge data centers around the world. The data can be delivered statically or streamed in the case of rich media content. Training These links point to online Windows Azure training labs and resources where you can learn more about the individual ingredients described above. (Note: The entire Windows Azure Training Kit can also be downloaded for offline use.) Windows Azure (16 labs) Windows Azure is an internet-scale cloud computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services which can be used individually or together. It gives developers the choice to build web applications; applications running on connected devices, PCs, or servers; or hybrid solutions offering the best of both worlds. New or enhanced applications can be built using existing skills with the Visual Studio development environment and the .NET Framework. With its standards-based and interoperable approach, the services platform supports multiple internet protocols, including HTTP, REST, SOAP, and plain XML SQL Azure (7 labs) Microsoft SQL Azure delivers on the Microsoft Data Platform vision of extending the SQL Server capabilities to the cloud as web-based services, enabling you to store structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Windows Azure Services (9 labs) As applications collaborate across organizational boundaries, ensuring secure transactions across disparate security domains is crucial but difficult to implement. Windows Azure Services provides hosted authentication and access control using powerful, secure, standards-based infrastructure. See my Windows Azure Resource Guide for more guidance on how to get started, including links web portals, training kits, samples, and blogs related to Windows Azure.

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Critical Threads Optimization

- by Rafael Vanoni

Background One of the more common issues we've been seeing in the field is the growing difficulty in optimizing performance of multi-threaded applications. A good portion of this difficulty is due to the increasing complexity of modern processors that present various degrees of sharing relationships between hardware components. Take any current CMT processor and you'll find any number of CPUs sharing execution pipelines, floating point units, caches, etc. Consequently, applying the traditional recipe of one software thread for each CPU will have varying degrees of success, according to the layout of the underlying hardware. On top of this increasing complexity we've also seen processors with features that aim at dynamically resourcing software threads according to their utilization. Intel's Turbo Boost allows processors to increase their operating frequency if there is enough thermal headroom available and the processor isn't fully utilized. More recently, the SPARC T4 processor introduced dynamic threading, allowing each core to dynamically allocate more resources to its active CPUs. Both cases are in essence recognizing that current processors will be running a wide mix of workloads, some will be designed for throughput, others for low latency. The hardware is providing mechanisms to dynamically resource threads according to their runtime behavior. We're very aware of these challenges in Solaris, and have been working to provide the best out of box performance while providing mechanisms to further optimize applications when necessary. The Critical Threads Optimzation was introduced in Solaris 10 8/11 and Solaris 11 as one such mechanism that allows customers to both address issues caused by contention over shared hardware resources and explicitly take advantage of features such as T4's dynamic threading. What it is The basic idea is to allow performance critical threads to execute with more exclusive access to hardware resources. For example, when deploying an application that implements a producer/consumer model, it'll likely be advantageous to give the producer more exclusive access to the hardware instead of having it competing for resources with all the consumers. In the case of a T4 based system, we may want to have a producer running by itself on a single core and create one consumer for each of the remaining CPUs. With the Critical Threads Optimization we're extending the semantics of scheduling priorities (which thread should run first) to include priority over shared resources (which thread should have more "space"). Now the scheduler will not only run higher priority threads first: it will also provide them with more exclusive access to hardware resources if they are available. How does it work ? Using the previous example in Solaris 11, all you'd have to do would be to place the producer in the Fixed Priority (FX) scheduling class at priority 60, or in the Real Time (RT) class at any priority and Solaris will try to give it more "hardware space". On both Solaris 10 8/11 and Solaris 11 this can be achieved through the existing priocntl(1,2) and priocntlset(2) interfaces. If your application already assigns these priorities to performance critical threads, there's no additional step you need to take. One important aspect of this optimization is that it requires some level of idleness in the system, either as a result of sizing the application before hand or through periods of transient idleness during runtime. If the system is fully committed, the scheduler will put all the available CPUs to work.Best practices If you're an application developer, we encourage you to look into assigning the right priorities for the different threads in your application. Solaris provides different scheduling classes (Time Share, Interactive, Fair Share, Fixed Priority and Real Time) that offer different policies and behaviors. It is not always simple to figure out which set of threads are critical to the performance of a workload, and it may not always be feasible to take advantage of this optimization, but we believe that this can be correctly (and safely) done during development. Overall, the out of box performance in Solaris should meet your workload's requirements. If you are looking into that extra bit of performance, then the Critical Threads Optimization may be what you're looking for.

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Moving monarchs and dragons: migrating the JDK bugs to JIRA

- by darcy

Among insects, monarch butterflies and dragonflies have the longest migrations; migrating JDK bugs involves a long journey as well! As previously announced by Mark back in March, we've been working according to a revised plan to transition the JDK bug management from Sun's legacy system to initially an Oracle-internal JIRA instance which is afterward made visible and usable externally. I've been busily working on this project for the last few months and the team has made good progress on many aspects of the effort: JDK bugs will be imported into JIRA regardless of age; bugs will also be imported regardless of state, including closed bugs. Consequently, the JDK bug project will start pre-populated with over 100,000 existing bugs, some dating all the way back to 1994. This will allow a continuity of information and allow new issues to be linked to old ones. Using a custom import process, the Sun bug numbers will be preserved in JIRA. For example, the Sun bug with bug number 4040458 will become "JDK-4040458" in JIRA. In JIRA the project name, "JDK" in our case, is part of the bug's identifier. Bugs created after the JIRA migration will be numbered starting at 8000000; bugs imported from the legacy system have numbers ranging between 1000000 and 79999999. We're working with the bugs.sun.com team to try to maintain continuity of the ability to both read JDK bug information as well as to file new incidents. At least for now, the overall architecture of bugs.sun.com will be the same as it is today: it will be a gateway bridging to an Oracle-internal system, but the internal system will change to JIRA from the legacy database. Generally we are aiming to preserve the visibility of bugs currently viewable on bugs.sun.com; however, bugs in areas not related to the JDK will not be visible after the transition to JIRA. New incoming incidents will be sent to a separate JIRA project for initial triage before possibly being moved into the JDK project. JDK bug management leans heavily on being able to track the state of bugs in multiple releases, especially to coordinate delivering synchronized security releases (known as CPUs, critital patch updates, in Oracle parlance). For a security release, it is common for half a dozen or more release trains to be affected (for example, JDK 5, JDK 6 update, OpenJDK 6, JDK 7 update, JDK 8, virtual releases for HotSpot express, etc.). We've determined we need to track at least the tuple of (release, responsible engineer/assignee for the release, status in the release) for the release trains a fix is going into. To do this in JIRA, we are creating a separate port/backport issue type along with a custom link type to allow the multiple release information to be easily grouped and presented together. The Sun legacy system had a three-level classification scheme, product, category, and subcategory. Out of the box, JIRA only has a one-level classification, component. We've implemented a custom second-level classification, subcomponent. As part of the bug migration we've taken the opportunity to think about how bugs should be grouped under a two-level system and we'll the new system will be simpler and more regular. The main top-level components of the JDK product will include: core-libs client-libs deploy install security-libs other-libs tools hotspot For the libs areas, the primary name of the subcomportment will be the package of the API in question. In the core-libs component, there will be subcomponents like: java.lang java.lang.class_loading java.math java.util java.util:i18n In the tools component, subcomponents will primarily correspond to command names in $JDK/bin like, jar, javac, and javap. The first several bulk imports of the JDK bugs into JIRA have gone well and we're continuing to refine the import to have greater fidelity to the current data, including by reconstructing information not brought over in a structured fashion during the previous large JDK bug system migration back in 2004. We don't currently have a firm timeline of when the new system will be usable externally, but as it becomes available, I'll share further information in follow-up blog posts.

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11.10 desktop alerts (volume change and terminal bell) stopped working but all other audio still works

- by FlabbergastedPickle

All, My sound works just fine in 11.10 64-bit install on HP dm1-4050 Sandy Bridge notebook (e.g. audio works in Banshee, flash, games, browser, Thunderbird email notification, etc.), but the core desktop notifications (e.g. pressing a tab in a terminal where there is more than one option should trigger a terminal bell, or changing volume using volume keys should be accompanied with the supporting "quack" that the volume app makes) do not work. I've intentionally disabled login sound as explained here on ask ubuntu but even enabling it back makes no difference. These notifications did work before just fine and I am not sure when did the actually stop working but it must've been fairly recently. Only things I did were trying to install some ppa edge xorg drivers for my intel card (a separate issue) but also reverted them all with ppa-purge once I discovered they did not improve anything. Other thing I did was check volume settings with alsamixer and did alsactl store for the soundcard after I did some experimenting with volume settings for PCM (on my laptop PCM at 100% crackles so I had to lower it and make pulseaudio ignore its setting as per ask ubuntu's page). That said, neither of these should have any bearing on the said notifications since the volume is up and they clearly work everywhere else but the core desktop events. The system ready drum sound when Ubuntu boots and user reaches the login screen also does not work. The guest login behaves exactly same as mine. Audio works (including the login sound since I've not disabled it for the guest account), but no quacks when changing the volume or terminal bell sounds... I've tried copying ubuntu sounds to /usr/share/sounds/ as suggested on ask ubuntu and that did not work. I also tried using dconf-editor to check sound theme settings and tried both freedesktop (which is what it was set to) and ubuntu, as suggested on ask ubuntu. This did not work either. I tried purging the ~/.pulse folder and the /tmp/*pulse* entries, rebooting and restarting pulseaudio with -D flag. While audio came back on and behaved just fine in all aspects (e.g. one can adjust volume levels, play music, games, in-browser sound stuff, and other app alerts) except for the system ready drum sound (at the login screen), and any system event (terminal bell and volume change quack sound). It is interesting that the quack sound works inside system settings-sound when adjusting levels there, but it does not when volume is changed via top bar's volume settings... I do recall that at one point yesterday when I was restarting pulseaudio the quacks that accompany volume change did start working but I have no idea what caused that. This was also when I first realized those alerts were not working. After rebooting it was again gone. I did compile my own 3.0.14-rt31 kernel a little while ago as instructed on one of the wiki's for the 11.10 rt kernel. Everything works as before except for the said sound alerts. I am not sure if this began happening since I started using the rt kernel though and yesterday's momentary ability to hear those quacks while changing the volume make me believe that the kernel is not one responsible for this problem. One more thing I can think of is that I used alsoft-conf tool to configure buffering on the OpenAL (due to TA Spring's choppy audio) and changed in there default audio device to ALSA. I also tried reverting it to Pulseaudio as the only allowed output but the bottom part of the Backend tab always reverts to ALSA even when I select Pulseaudio. The pulseaudio does remain as the only active choice on top. This, however, once again does not make any sense in terms of preventing desktop audio alerts when everything else including OpenAL games plays sound just fine... So, there you have it, as verbose as I could make it :-). I tried all I could find on this issue and had no luck so far... Any ideas?

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How to get faster graphics in KVM? VNC is painfully slow with Haiku OS guest, Spice won't install and SDL doesn't work

- by Don Quixote

I've been coming up to speed on the Haiku operating system, an Open Source clone of BeOS 5 Pro. I'm using an Apple MacBook Pro as my development machine. Apple's BootCamp BIOS does not support more than four partitions on the internal hard drive. While I can set up extended and logical partitions, doing so will prevent any of the installed operating systems from booting. To run Haiku directly on the iron, I boot it off a USB stick. Using external storage is also helpful because I am perpetually out of filesystem space. While VirtualBox is documented to allow access to physical drives, I could not actually get it to work. Also VirtualBox can only use one of the host CPU's cores. While VB guests can be configured for more than one CPU, they are only emulated. A full build of the Haiku OS takes 4.5 under VB. I had the hope of reducing build times by using KVM instead, but it's not working nearly as well as VirtualBox did. The Linux Kernel Virtual Machine is broken in all manner of fundamental ways as seen from Haiku. But I'm a coder; maybe I could contribute to fixing some of those problems. The first problem I've got is that Haiku's video in virt-manager is quite painfully slow. When I drag Haiku windows around the desktop, they lag quite far behind where my mouse is. It's quite difficult to move a window to a precise position on the screen. Just imagine that the mouse was connected to the window title bar with a really stretchy spring. Also Haiku's mouse lags quite far behind where I have moved it. I found lots of Personal Package Archives that enable Spice from QEMU / KVM at the Ubuntu Personal Package Arhives. I tried a few of the PPAs but none of them worked; with one of them, the command "add-apt-repository" crashed with a traceback. There is a Wiki page about Spice, but it says that it only works on 64-bit. My Early 2006 MacBook Pro is 32-bit. Its Apple Model Identifier is MacBookPro1,1; these use Core Duos NOT Core 2 Duos. I don't mind building a source deb for 32-bit if I can expect it to work. Is there some reason that Spice should be 64-bit only? Does it need features of the x86_64 Instruction Set Architecture that x86 does not have? When I try using SDL from virt-manager, the configuration for Local SDL Window says "Xauth: /home/mike/.Xauthority". When I try to start my guest, virt-manager emits an error. When I Googled the error message, the usual solution was to make ~/.Xauthority readible. However, .Xauthorty does not exist in my home directory. Instead I have a $XAUTHORITY environment variable. There is no way to configure SDL in virt-manager to use $XAUTHORITY instead of ~/.Xauthority. Neither does it work to copy the value of $XAUTHORITY into the file. I am ready to scream, because I've been five fscking days trying to make KVM work for Haiku development. There is a whole lot more that is broken than the slow video. All I really want to do for now is speed up my full builds of Haiku by using "jam -j2" to use both cores in my CPU. I may try Xen next, but the last time I monkeyed with Xen it was far, far more broken than I am finding KVM to be. Just for now, I would be satisfied if there were some way to use my USB stick as a drive in VirtualBox. VB does allow me to configure /dev/sdb as a drive, but it always causes a fatal error when I try to launch the guest. Thank You For Any Advice You Can Give Me. -

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Taking HRMS to the Cloud to Simplify Human Resources Management

- by HCM-Oracle

By Anke Mogannam With human capital management (HCM) a top-of-mind issue for executives in every industry, human resources (HR) organizations are poised to have their day in the sun—proving not just their administrative worth but their strategic value as well. To make good on that promise, however, HR must modernize. Indeed, if HR is to act as an agent of change—providing the swift reallocation of employees and the rapid absorption of employee data required for enterprises to shift course on a dime—it must first deal with the disruptive change at its own front door. And increasingly, that means choosing the right technology and human resources management system (HRMS) for managing the entire employee lifecycle. Unfortunately, for most organizations, this task has proved easier said than done. This is because while much has been written about advances in HRMS technology, until recently, most of those advances took the form of disparate on-premises solutions designed to serve very specific purposes. Although this may have resulted in key competencies in certain areas, it also meant that processes for core HR functions like payroll and benefits were being carried out in separate systems from those used for talent management, workforce optimization, training, and so on. With no integration—and no single system of record—processes were disconnected, ease of use was impeded, user experience was diminished, and vital data was left untapped. Today, however, that scenario has begun to change, and end-to-end cloud-based HCM solutions have moved from wished-for innovations to real-life solutions. Why, then, have HR organizations been so slow in adopting them? The answer—it would seem—is, “It’s complicated.” So complicated, in fact, that 45 percent of the respondents to PwC’s “Annual HR Technology Survey” (for 2013) reported having no formal HR software roadmap, and 40 percent stated that they “did not know” whether their organizations would be increasing their use of cloud or software as a service (SaaS) for HR. Clearly, HR organizations need help sorting through the morass of HR software options confronting them. But just as clearly, there’s an enormous opportunity awaiting those that do. The trick will come in charting a course that allows HR to leverage existing technology while investing in the cloud-based solutions that will deliver the end-to-end processes, easy-to-understand analytics, and superior adaptability required to simplify—and add value to—every aspect of employee management. The Opportunity therefore is to cut costs, drive Innovation, and increase engagement by moving to cloud-based HCM. Then you will benefit from one Interface, leverage many access points, and gain at-a-glance insight across your entire workforce. With many legacy on-premises HR systems not being efficient anymore and cloud-based, integrated systems that span the range of HR functions finally reaching maturity, the time is ripe for moving core HR to the cloud. Indeed, for the first time ever there are more HRMS replacement initiatives than HRMS upgrade initiatives under way, and the majority of them involve moving to the cloud per Cedar Crestone’s 2013-2014 HRMS survey. To learn how you can launch your own cloud HCM initiative and begin using HR to power the enterprise, visit Oracle HRMS in the Cloud and Oracle’s new customer 2 cloud program. Anke Mogannam brings more than 16 years of marketing and human capital management experience in the technology industries to her role at Oracle where she is part of the Human Capital Management applications marketing team. In that role, Anke drives content marketing, messaging, go-to-market activities, integrated marketing campaigns, and field enablement. Prior to joining Oracle, Anke held several roles in communications, marketing, HCM product strategy and product management at PeopleSoft, SAP, Workday and Saba. Follow her on Twitter @amogannam

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