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  • Reading from a file, atoi() returns zero only on first element

    - by Nazgulled
    Hi, I don't understand why atoi() is working for every entry but the first one. I have the following code to parse a simple .csv file: void ioReadSampleDataUsers(SocialNetwork *social, char *file) { FILE *fp = fopen(file, "r"); if(!fp) { perror("fopen"); exit(EXIT_FAILURE); } char line[BUFSIZ], *word, *buffer, name[30], address[35]; int ssn = 0, arg; while(fgets(line, BUFSIZ, fp)) { line[strlen(line) - 2] = '\0'; buffer = line; arg = 1; do { word = strsep(&buffer, ";"); if(word) { switch(arg) { case 1: printf("[%s] - (%d)\n", word, atoi(word)); ssn = atoi(word); break; case 2: strcpy(name, word); break; case 3: strcpy(address, word); break; } arg++; } } while(word); userInsert(social, name, address, ssn); } fclose(fp); } And the .csv sample file is this: 900011000;Jon Yang;3761 N. 14th St 900011001;Eugene Huang;2243 W St. 900011002;Ruben Torres;5844 Linden Land 900011003;Christy Zhu;1825 Village Pl. 900011004;Elizabeth Johnson;7553 Harness Circle But this is the output: [900011000] - (0) [900011001] - (900011001) [900011002] - (900011002) [900011003] - (900011003) [900011004] - (900011004) What am I doing wrong?

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  • "<" operator error

    - by Nona Urbiz
    Why is the ( i < UniqueWords.Count ) expression valid in the for loop, but returns "CS0019 Operator '<' cannot be applied to operands of type 'int' and 'method group'" error when placed in my if? They are both string arrays, previously declared. for (int i = 0;i<UniqueWords.Count;i++){ Occurrences[i] = Words.Where(x => x.Equals(UniqueWords[i])).Count(); Keywords[i] = UniqueWords[i]; if (i<UniqueURLs.Count) {rURLs[i] = UniqueURLs[i];} } EDITED to add declarations: List<string> Words = new List<string>(); List<string> URLs = new List<string>(); //elements added like so. . . . Words.Add (referringWords); //these are strings URLs.Add (referringURL); UniqueWords = Words.Distinct().ToList(); UniqueURLs = URLs.Distinct().ToList(); SOLVED. thank you, parentheses were needed for method .Count() I still do not fully understand why they are not always necessary. Jon Skeet, thanks, I guess I don't understand what exactly the declarations are either then? You wanted the actual values assigned? They are pulled from an external source, but are strings. I get it! Thanks. (the ()'s at least.)

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  • find(:all) and then add data from another table to the object

    - by Koning Baard XIV
    I have two tables: create_table "friendships", :force => true do |t| t.integer "user1_id" t.integer "user2_id" t.boolean "hasaccepted" t.datetime "created_at" t.datetime "updated_at" end and create_table "users", :force => true do |t| t.string "email" t.string "password" t.string "phone" t.boolean "gender" t.datetime "created_at" t.datetime "updated_at" t.string "firstname" t.string "lastname" t.date "birthday" end I need to show the user a list of Friendrequests, so I use this method in my controller: def getfriendrequests respond_to do |format| case params[:id] when "to_me" @friendrequests = Friendship.find(:all, :conditions => { :user2_id => session[:user], :hasaccepted => false }) when "from_me" @friendrequests = Friendship.find(:all, :conditions => { :user1_id => session[:user], :hasaccepted => false }) end format.xml { render :xml => @friendrequests } format.json { render :json => @friendrequests } end end I do nearly everything using AJAX, so to fetch the First and Last name of the user with UID user2_id (the to_me param comes later, don't worry right now), I need a for loop which make multiple AJAX calls. This sucks and costs much bandwidth. So I'd rather like that getfriendrequests also returns the First and Last name of the corresponding users, so, e.g. the JSON response would not be: [ { "friendship": { "created_at": "2010-02-19T13:51:31Z", "user1_id": 2, "updated_at": "2010-02-19T13:51:31Z", "hasaccepted": false, "id": 11, "user2_id": 3 } }, { "friendship": { "created_at": "2010-02-19T16:31:23Z", "user1_id": 2, "updated_at": "2010-02-19T16:31:23Z", "hasaccepted": false, "id": 12, "user2_id": 4 } } ] but rather: [ { "friendship": { "created_at": "2010-02-19T13:51:31Z", "user1_id": 2, "updated_at": "2010-02-19T13:51:31Z", "hasaccepted": false, "id": 11, "user2_id": 3, "firstname": "Jon", "lastname": "Skeet" } }, { "friendship": { "created_at": "2010-02-19T16:31:23Z", "user1_id": 2, "updated_at": "2010-02-19T16:31:23Z", "hasaccepted": false, "id": 12, "user2_id": 4, "firstname": "Mark", "lastname": "Gravell" } } ] I thought of a for loop in the getfriendrequests method, but I don't know how to implement this, and maybe there is an easier way. It must also work for XML. Can anyone help me? Thanks

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  • How can I get this dynamic WHERE statement in my LINQ-to-XML to work?

    - by Edward Tanguay
    In this question Jon Skeet offered a very interesting solution to making a LINQ-to-XML statement dynamic, but my knowledge of lambdas and delegates is not yet advanced enough to implement it: I've got it this far, but of course I get the error "smartForm does not exist in the current context": private void LoadWithId(int id) { XDocument xmlDoc = null; try { xmlDoc = XDocument.Load(FullXmlDataStorePathAndFileName); } catch (Exception ex) { throw new Exception(String.Format("Cannot load XML file: {0}", ex.Message)); } Func<XElement, bool> whereClause = (int)smartForm.Element("id") == id"; var smartForms = xmlDoc.Descendants("smartForm") .Where(whereClause) .Select(smartForm => new SmartForm { Id = (int)smartForm.Element("id"), WhenCreated = (DateTime)smartForm.Element("whenCreated"), ItemOwner = smartForm.Element("itemOwner").Value, PublishStatus = smartForm.Element("publishStatus").Value, CorrectionOfId = (int)smartForm.Element("correctionOfId"), IdCode = smartForm.Element("idCode").Value, Title = smartForm.Element("title").Value, Description = smartForm.Element("description").Value, LabelWidth = (int)smartForm.Element("labelWidth") }); foreach (SmartForm smartForm in smartForms) { _collection.Add(smartForm); } } Ideally I want to be able to just say: var smartForms = GetSmartForms(smartForm=> (int) smartForm.Element("DisplayOrder").Value > 50); I've got it this far, but I'm just not grokking the lambda magic, how do I do this? public List<SmartForm> GetSmartForms(XDocument xmlDoc, XElement whereClause) { var smartForms = xmlDoc.Descendants("smartForm") .Where(whereClause) .Select(smartForm => new SmartForm { Id = (int)smartForm.Element("id"), WhenCreated = (DateTime)smartForm.Element("whenCreated"), ItemOwner = smartForm.Element("itemOwner").Value, PublishStatus = smartForm.Element("publishStatus").Value, CorrectionOfId = (int)smartForm.Element("correctionOfId"), IdCode = smartForm.Element("idCode").Value, Title = smartForm.Element("title").Value, Description = smartForm.Element("description").Value, LabelWidth = (int)smartForm.Element("labelWidth") }); }

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  • How to make a small engine like Wolfram|Alpha?

    - by Koning WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW
    Lets say I have three models/tables: operating_systems, words, and programming_languages: # operating_systems name:string created_by:string family:string Windows Microsoft MS-DOS Mac OS X Apple UNIX Linux Linus Torvalds UNIX UNIX AT&T UNIX # words word:string defenitions:string window (serialized hash of defenitions) hello (serialized hash of defenitions) UNIX (serialized hash of defenitions) # programming_languages name:string created_by:string example_code:text C++ Bjarne Stroustrup #include <iostream> etc... HelloWorld Jeff Skeet h AnotherOne Jon Atwood imports 'SORULEZ.cs' etc... When a user searches hello, the system shows the defenitions of 'hello'. This is relatively easy to implement. However, when a user searches UNIX, the engine must choose: word or operating_system. Also, when a user searches windows (small letter 'w'), the engine chooses word, but should also show Assuming 'windows' is a word. Use as an <a href="etc..">operating system</a> instead. Can anyone point me in the right direction with parsing and choosing the topic of the search query? Thanks. Note: it doesn't need to be able to perform calculations as WA can do.

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  • How do I write test code to exercise a C# generic Pair<TKey, TValue> ?

    - by Scott Davies
    Hi, I am reading through Jon Skeet's "C# in Depth", first edition (which is a great book). I'm in section 3.3.3, page 84, "Implementing Generics". Generics always confuse me, so I wrote some code to exercise the sample. The code provided is: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; public sealed class Pair<TFirst, TSecond> : IEquatable<Pair<TFirst, TSecond>> { private readonly TFirst first; private readonly TSecond second; public Pair(TFirst first, TSecond second) { this.first = first; this.second = second; } ...property getters... public bool Equals(Pair<TFirst, TSecond> other) { if (other == null) { return false; } return EqualityComparer<TFirst>.Default.Equals(this.First, other.First) && EqualityComparer<TSecond>.Default.Equals(this.Second, other.Second); } My code is: class MyClass { public static void Main (string[] args) { // Create new pair. Pair thePair = new Pair(new String("1"), new String("1")); // Compare a new pair to previous pair by generating a second pair. if (thePair.Equals(new Pair(new string("1"), new string("1")))) System.Console.WriteLine("Equal"); else System.Console.WriteLine("Not equal"); } } The compiler complains: "Using the generic type 'ManningListing36.Paie' requires 2 type argument(s) CS0305" What am I doing wrong ? Thanks, Scott

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  • How do JVM's implicit memory barriers behave when chaining constructors

    - by Joonas Pulakka
    Referring to my earlier question on incompletely constructed objects, I have a second question. As Jon Skeet pointed out, there's an implicit memory barrier in the end of a constructor that makes sure that final fields are visible to all threads. But what if a constructor calls another constructor; is there such a memory barrier in the end of each of them, or only in one being called from outside? That is, when the "wrong" solution is: public class ThisEscape { public ThisEscape(EventSource source) { source.registerListener( new EventListener() { public void onEvent(Event e) { doSomething(e); } }); } } And the correct one would be a factory method version: public class SafeListener { private final EventListener listener; private SafeListener() { listener = new EventListener() { public void onEvent(Event e) { doSomething(e); } } } public static SafeListener newInstance(EventSource source) { SafeListener safe = new SafeListener(); source.registerListener(safe.listener); return safe; } } Would the following work too, or not? public class MyListener { private final EventListener Listener; private MyListener() { listener = new EventListener() { public void onEvent(Event e) { doSomething(e); } } } public MyListener(EventSource source) { this(); source.register(listener); } }

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  • Can LINQ expression classes implement the observer pattern instead of deferred execution?

    - by Tormod
    Hi. We have issues within an application using a state machine. The application is implemented as a windows service and is iteration based (it "foreaches" itself through everything) and there are myriads of instances being processed by the state machine. As I'm reading the MEAP version of Jon Skeets book "C# in Depth, 2nd ed", I'm wondering if I can change the whole thing to use linq expression instances so that guards and conditions are represented using expression trees. We are building many applications on this state machine engine and would probably greatly benefit from the new Expression tree visualizer in VS 2010 Now, simple example. If I have an expression tree where there is an OR Expression condition with two sub nodes, is there any way that these can implement the observer pattern so that the expression tree becomes event driven? If a condition change, it should notify its parent node (the OR node). Since the OR node then changes from "false" to "true", then it should notify ITS parent and so on. I love the declarative model of expression trees, but the deferred execution model works in opposite direction of the control flow if you want event based "live" conditions. Am I off on a wild goose chase here? Or is there some concept in the BCL that may help me achieve this?

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  • Write contents of custom View to large Image file on SD card

    - by JFortney
    I have a class that extends View. I override the onDraw method and allow the user to draw on the screen. I am at the point where I want to save this view as an image. I Can use buildDrawingCache and getDrawingCache to create a bitmap that I can write to the SD card. However, the image is not good quality at a large size, it has jagged edges. Since I have a View and I use Paths I can transform all by drawing to a bigger size. I just don't know how to make the Canvas bigger so when I call getDrawingCache it doesn't crop all the paths I am just transformed. What is happening is I transform all my paths but when I write the Bitmap to file I am only getting the "viewport" of the actual screen size. I want something much bigger. Any help in the right direction would be greatly appreciated. I have been reading the docs and books and am at a loss. Thanks Jon

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  • Parse string to create a list of element

    - by Nick
    I have a string like this: "\r color=\"red\" name=\"Jon\" \t\n depth=\"8.26\" " And I want to parse this string and create a std::list of this object: class data { std::string name; std::string value; }; Where for example: name = color value = red What is the fastest way? I can use boost. EDIT: This is what i've tried: vector<string> tokens; split(tokens, str, is_any_of(" \t\f\v\n\r")); if(tokens.size() > 1) { list<data> attr; for_each(tokens.begin(), tokens.end(), [&attr](const string& token) { if(token.empty() || !contains(token, "=")) return; vector<string> tokens; split(tokens, token, is_any_of("=")); erase_all(tokens[1], "\""); attr.push_back(data(tokens[0], tokens[1])); } ); } But it does not work if there are spaces inside " ": like color="red 1".

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  • Design by contracts and constructors

    - by devoured elysium
    I am implementing my own ArrayList for school purposes, but to spice up things a bit I'm trying to use C# 4.0 Code Contracts. All was fine until I needed to add Contracts to the constructors. Should I add Contract.Ensures() in the empty parameter constructor? public ArrayList(int capacity) { Contract.Requires(capacity > 0); Contract.Ensures(Size == capacity); _array = new T[capacity]; } public ArrayList() : this(32) { Contract.Ensures(Size == 32); } I'd say yes, each method should have a well defined contract. On the other hand, why put it if it's just delegating work to the "main" constructor? Logicwise, I wouldn't need to. The only point I see where it'd be useful to explicitly define the contract in both constructors is if in the future we have Intelisense support for contracts. Would that happen, it'd be useful to be explicit about which contracts each method has, as that'd appear in Intelisense. Also, are there any books around that go a bit deeper on the principles and usage of Design by Contracts? One thing is having knowledge of the syntax of how to use Contracts in a language (C#, in this case), other is knowing how and when to use it. I read several tutorials and Jon Skeet's C# in Depth article about it, but I'd like to go a bit deeper if possible. Thanks

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  • Image in table cell doesn't scale down: using ie8/7

    - by monks1975
    Can anyone help me troubleshoot my website? http://www.andrewstonyer.co.uk/test/ My problem: On IE8/7 if you click on a thumbnail (only 'Pulse' and 'Time Within The Hour' are wired in right now) an overlay appears with detail of that piece. What should happen, and does in Gecko/Webkit, is that the overlay contains a table with a heading, a scaled, centered image, and a nav menu. There is a toggle for text, which pushes up the image cell and makes the image smaller, keeping proportion. I know the overlay looks like ass right now- those are just placeholder colours :) On IE, the image doesn't fit perfectly in the table cell, which means that everything is pushed down outside the window. I can't see the nav menu. It appears to render the image at actual pixel size (in the CSS, the img class element is set to 100% height). The text cell is toggled with jquery, when toggled on in IE, it doesn't appear to 'squeeze' the above cell, which is what I want to happen. Could any experts help? Regards, Jon

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  • JSDoc with AngularJS

    - by Nick White
    Currently within my Project we are using JSDoc, we have recently started to implement Angular and I want to continue using JSDoc to ensure that all the documentation is within the same place. I have taken a look at people mainly just saying to use ngDoc but this isn't really a viable option as we will always have separate JavaScript and I ideally would have everything together. /** * @author Example <[email protected]> * @copyright 2014 Example Ltd. All rights reserved. */ (function () { window.example = window.example || {}; /** * Example Namespace * @memberOf example * @namespace example.angular */ window.example.angular = window.example.angular || {}; var exAngular = window.example.angular; /** * A Example Angular Bootstrap Module * @module exampleAngularBootstrap */ exAngular.bootstrap = angular.module('exampleAngularBootstrap', [ 'ngRoute', 'ngResource', 'ngCookies' ]) .run(function ($http, $cookies) { $http.defaults.headers.post['X-CSRFToken'] = $cookies.csrftoken; $http.defaults.headers.common['X-CSRFToken'] = $cookies.csrftoken; }); })(); Currently this is what I have but am unable to put documentation for the run() any ideas? Thank you in advanced!

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  • What to call factory-like (java) methods used with immutable objects

    - by StaxMan
    When creating classes for "immutable objects" immutable meaning that state of instances can not be changed; all fields assigned in constructor) in Java (and similar languages), it is sometimes useful to still allow creation of modified instances. That is, using an instance as base, and creating a new instance that differs by just one property value; other values coming from the base instance. To give a simple example, one could have class like: public class Circle { final double x, y; // location final double radius; public Circle(double x, double y, double r) { this.x = x; this.y = y; this.r = r; } // method for creating a new instance, moved in x-axis by specified amount public Circle withOffset(double deltaX) { return new Circle(x+deltaX, y, radius); } } So: what should method "withOffset" be called? (note: NOT what its name ought to be -- but what is this class of methods called). Technically it is kind of a factory method, but somehow that does not seem quite right to me, since often factories are just given basic properties (and are either static methods, or are not members of the result type but factory type). So I am guessing there should be a better term for such methods. Since these methods can be used to implement "fluent interface", maybe they could be "fluent factory methods"? Better suggestions? EDIT: as suggested by one of answers, java.math.BigDecimal is a good example with its 'add', 'subtract' (etc) methods. Also: I noticed that there's this question (by Jon Skeet no less) that is sort of related (although it asks about specific name for method)

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  • MySQL running on an EC2 m1.small instance has high load but low memory usage, possible resolutions?

    - by Tosh
    I have a MySQL server 5.0.75 Ubuntu, on an m1.small instance running on Amazon's EC2 as part of an application. During peak usage the server load will rise very high, while the memory usage stays low and the application server is no longer responsive since it's waiting for query results. The application server has only 5-8 apache processes running (mod_perl processes). The data directory uses only 140MB of data so the MyIsam tables aren't very big. The queries are pretty complicated with some big joins being performed, and the application makes a lot of queries. mysqltuner reports everything OK except "Maximum possible memory usage: 1.7G (99% of installed RAM)" but I'm nowhere close to using that. My question is, where should I be looking to fix this? Is this something that can be tuned away, or do I just need a larger instance/server? Googling indicates either or also upgrading MySQL server. Any pointers in the right direction would be greatly appreciated, thanks! EDIT: I just discovered this in my slow queries log: # Time: 101116 11:17:00 # User@Host: user[pass] @ [host] # Query_time: 4063 Lock_time: 1035 Rows_sent: 0 Rows_examined: 19960174 SELECT * FROM contacts WHERE contacts.contact_id IN (SELECT external_id FROM contact_relations WHERE external_table = 'contacts' AND contact_id IN (SELECT contact_id FROM contacts WHERE (company_name like '%%butan%%%' OR country like '%%butan%%%' OR city like '%%butan%%%' OR email1 like '%%butan%%%') AND (company_name is not null and company_name != ''))); Which actually brings up a different but related question: If I have a contact table containing: John Smith,The Fun Factory,555-1212,[email protected] What's the best way to search for that record using "factory" as a search key? Fulltext rarely seems to find items in the middle of a word, for example "actor" should bring up "Factory"

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  • jquery how to access the an xml node by index?

    - by DS
    Hi, say I've an xml returned from server like this: <persons> <person> <firstname>Jon</firstname> </person> <person> <firstname>Jack</firstname> </person> <person> <firstname>James</firstname> </person> </persons> If I want to access the 3rd firstname node (passed dynamically and stored in i, assumed to be 3 here), how do I do that? My weird attempt follows: var i=3; $(xml).find('firstname').each(function(idx){ if (idx==i) alert($(this).text()); }); It does fetch me the right content... but it just feels wrong to me especially the looping part. Basically I'm looping through the whole tree using .each()! Is there any better approach than this? Something that'd take me to the nth node directly like: alert( $(xml).find('firstname')[idx].text() ); // where idx=n I'm new to jquery so please excuse my jquery coding approach.

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  • Why can't my vector access the variables in my nested structs?

    - by chucknorris
    #include<iostream> #include<vector> #include<string> #include<list> using namespace std; struct record{ int id; string fName; }; struct cells{ list<record> rec; }; vector<cells> hp; int main() { **hp.front().rec.front().fName = "jon"; return 0; } I have 2 structs. The first struct, struct record, is composed of 2 regular variables. In struct 2, I have a linked list of type "record", which includes all the variable listed in struct 1. Why is it that when ever I attempt to access a variable in the structs, using my vector, I get the error "linked list iterator not dereferencable?"

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  • General ORM design question

    - by Calvin
    Suppose you have 2 classes, Person and Rabbit. A person can do a number of things to a rabbit, s/he can either feed it, buy it and become its owner, or give it away. A rabbit can have none or at most 1 owner at a time. And if it is not fed for a while, it may die. Class Person { Void Feed(Rabbit r); Void Buy(Rabbit r); Void Giveaway(Person p, Rabbit r); Rabbit[] rabbits; } Class Rabbit { Bool IsAlive(); Person pwner; } There are a couple of observations from the domain model: Person and Rabbit can have references to each other Any actions on 1 object can also change the state of the other object Even if no explicit actions are invoked, there can still be a change of state in the objects (e.g. Rabbit can be starved to death, and that causes it to be removed from the Person.rabbits array) As DDD is concerned, I think the correct approach is to synchronize all calls that may change the states in the domain model. For instance, if a Person buys a Rabbit, s/he would need to acquire a lock in Person to make a change to the rabbits array AND also another lock in Rabbit to change its owner before releasing the first one. This would prevent a race condition where 2 Persons claim to be the owner of the little Rabbit. The other approach is to let the database to handle all these synchronizations. Who makes the first call wins, but then the DB needs to have some kind of business logics to figure out if it is a valid transaction (e.g. if a Rabbit already has an owner, it cannot change its owner unless the Person gives it away). There are both pros/cons in either approach, and I’d expect the “best” solution would be somewhere in-between. How would you do it in real life? What’s your take and experience? Also, is it a valid concern that there can be another race condition the domain model has committed its change but before it is fully committed in the database? And for the 3rd observation (i.e. state change due to time factor). How will you do it?

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  • TV not detected by Windows/VGA - when there is a WHDI device in the signal chain

    - by ashwalk
    I'm at my wit's end with this one... I had an EVGA GTS 250, and I used to plug it's HDMI out into a WHDI sender, which transmitted to its corresponding WHDI receiver 15ft away, which then connected to a Samsung LN40D LCD TV through another HDMI cable. PC/VGA < [hdmi cable] < WHDI sender <[air] WHDI receiver < [hdmi cable] < TV It was perfect, stable, no perceivable latency. I just plugged everything the first time and it worked instantly. It sent 5.1 audio, and Windows/nVidia Control Center detected the TV by its name. The WHDI device is this one: http://goo.gl/Q8iWI5 Now I bought an EVGA GTX 650, and WHDI doesn't work anymore. Both Windows and nVidia Control Center won't detect the TV, only the monitor that's connected via DVI. The TV screen shows "TX202913 connected. Check video signal." on top of a black screen. Though the device is not the problem itself, just the fact that it's not allowing direct connection between PC and TV. I would bet that if put an AVR in its place I'd also have this issue. The HDMI on this new card works with other monitors. If I put the older card back, WHDI works normally. I have googled this for 5 months on and off. Once I bumped into a page that showed how to force a display device to always-on through registry edit. Once I restarted windows, the Tv (through WHDI) displayed my expanded or duplicated desktop at 1024x768 ONLY, and listed the display as "digital display". I could not change the resolution and it wouldn't playback audio (although the option was available at nVidia Control Center HDMI audio options, but did not work). This proves that there is no conflict between the devices, except that software-wise, Windows cannot, for the life of it, understand that there's a TV there to send video/audio to. Since this won't do (no audio, poor video), I reverted this regedit. It's also not an EDID problem within the TV, since when connected directly it works. The last weird bit of this saga is that today, I reminded of Windows' "Add Device" dialog, gave it a go, and a "Samsung Generic UPNP TV" showed up, which I promptly installed the drives for, rising to a climax of... ...NOTHING HAPPENING. As far as I can tell, it really didn't change anything other than using up a few kb in my main disc. I should also say that I looked a LOT into handshake problems and nothing applied either. Do any of you have an idea of what may be going on? I can't stand the thought of having a us$200 device not working because of the addition of a newer graphics card, when the much older one had no issues. There is absolutely NO REASON for this to happen. There is NO documentation on WHDI online. Apparently no one buys this stuff. For the same reason, no one responded to this same plea for help on NVidia and EVGA forums. Worst case, this can be a warning about this setup for people in the future. Thanx in advance.

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  • Why can I view my site over a 3G connection but not through my wifi?

    - by Jonathan
    So, I am sitting in my office with four computers on the same network and internet connection. Two of the computers can visit this particular website. Two of the computer get a message "Google Chrome could not find". I have tried FF and IE also with the same problem. I can view the site 90% of the time on two of the working computers although the site seems slow and sometimes I also get the same errors as the other two computers. I have flushed the DNS, reset the router, tested the site on other peoples computers with success. Is this likely to be a site issue, an ISP issue, a hosting issue? Any advice is greatly appreciated. Here is the ping from the working machine: C:\Users\Jon>ping www.balihaicruises.com Pinging www.balihaicruises.com [208.113.173.102] with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 208.113.173.102: bytes=32 time=331ms TTL=47 Reply from 208.113.173.102: bytes=32 time=327ms TTL=47 Reply from 208.113.173.102: bytes=32 time=326ms TTL=47 Reply from 208.113.173.102: bytes=32 time=329ms TTL=47 Ping statistics for 208.113.173.102: Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss), Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 326ms, Maximum = 331ms, Average = 328ms Traceroute: Tracing route to www.balihaicruises.com [208.113.173.102] over a maximum of 30 hops: 1 1 ms 17 ms 3 ms 192.168.1.1 2 42 ms 37 ms 36 ms 180.254.224.1 3 39 ms 47 ms 40 ms 180.252.1.69 4 36 ms 616 ms 57 ms 61.94.115.221 5 84 ms 76 ms 80 ms 180.240.191.98 6 73 ms 80 ms 72 ms 180.240.191.97 7 157 ms 143 ms 116 ms 180.240.190.82 8 115 ms 113 ms 120 ms ae1-123.hkg11.ip4.tinet.net [183.182.80.93] 9 331 ms 332 ms 335 ms xe-3-2-1.was14.ip4.tinet.net [89.149.184.30] 10 327 ms 330 ms 331 ms internap-gw.ip4.tinet.net [77.67.69.254] 11 437 ms 415 ms 350 ms border10.pc2-bbnet2.wdc002.pnap.net [216.52.127.73] 12 322 ms 823 ms 398 ms dreamhost-2.border10.wdc002.pnap.net [216.52.125.74] 13 328 ms 336 ms 326 ms ip-208-113-156-4.dreamhost.com [208.113.156.4] 14 326 ms 328 ms 336 ms ip-208-113-156-14.dreamhost.com [208.113.156.14] 15 327 ms 331 ms 333 ms apache2-udder.crisp.dreamhost.com [208.113.173.102] And then for the machine that doesn't work: C:\Users\Microsoft>ping www.balihaicruises.com Ping request could not find host www.balihaicruises.com. Please check the name and try again. C:\Users\Microsoft>tracert www.balihaicruises.com Unable to resolve target system name www.balihaicruises.com.

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  • SQLAuthority News – Pluralsight Course Review – Practices for Software Startups – Part 1 of 2

    - by pinaldave
    This is first part of the two part series of Practices for Software Startup Pluralsight Course. The course is written by Stephen Forte (Blog | Twitter). Stephen Forte is the Chief Strategy Officer of the venture backed company, Telerik, a leading vendor of developer and team productivity tools. Stephen is also a Certified Scrum Master, Certified Scrum Professional, PMP, and also speaks regularly at industry conferences around the world. He has written several books on application and database development.  Stephen is also a board member of the Scrum Alliance. Startups – Everybodies Dream Start-up companies are an important topic right now – everyone wants to start their own business.  It is also important to remember that all companies were a start up at one point – from your corner store to the giants like Microsoft and Apple.  Research proves that not every start-up succeeds, in fact, most will fail before their first year.  There are many reasons for this, and this could be due to the fact that there are many stages to a start-up company, and stumbling at any of these stages can lead to failure.  It is important to understand what makes a start-up company succeed at all its hurdles to become successful.  It is even important to define success.  For most start-ups this would mean becoming their own independently functioning company or to be bought out for a hefty profit by a larger company.  The idea of making a hefty profit by living your dream is extremely important, and you can even think of start-ups as the new craze.  That’s why studying them is so important – they are very popular, but things have changed a lot since their inception. Starting the Startups Beginning a start-up company used to be difficult, but now facilities and information is widely available, and it is much easier.  But that means it is much easier to fail, also.  Previously to start your own company, everything was planned and organized, resources were ensured and backed up before beginning; even the idea of starting your own business was a big thing.  Now anybody can do it, and the steps are simple and outlines everywhere – you can get online software and easily outsource , cloud source, or crowdsource a lot of your material.  But without the type of planning previously required, things can often go badly. New Products – New Ideas – New World There are so many fantastic new products, but they don’t reach success all the time.  I find start-up companies very interesting, and whenever I meet someone who is interested in the subject or already starting their own company, I always ask what they are doing, their plans, goals, market, etc.  I am sorry to say that in most cases, they cannot answer my questions.  It is true that many fantastic ideas fail because of bad decisions.  These bad decisions were not made intentionally, but people were simply unaware of what they should be doing.  This will always lead to failure.  But I am happy to say that all these issues can be gone because Pluralsight is now offering a course all about start-ups by Stephen Forte.  Stephen is a start up leader.  He has successfully started many companies and most are still going strong, or have gone on to even bigger and better things. Beginning Course on Startup I have always thought start-ups are a fascinating subject, and decided to take his course, but it is three hours long.  This would be hard to fit into my busy work day all at once, so I decided to do half of his course before my daughter wakes up, and the other half after she goes to sleep.  The course is divided into six modules, so this would be easy to do.  I began the first chapter early in the morning, at 5 am.  Stephen jumped right into the middle of the subject in the very first module – designing your business plan.  The first question you will have to answer to yourself, to others, and to investors is: What is your product and when will we be able to see it?  So a very important concept is a “minimal viable product.”  This means setting goals for yourself and your product.  We all have large dreams, but your minimal viable product doesn’t have to be your final vision at the very first.  For example: Apple is a giant company, but it is still evolving.  Steve Jobs didn’t envision the iPhone 6 at the very beginning.  He had to start at the first iPhone and do his market research, and the idea evolved into the technology you see now.  So for yourself, you should decide a beginning and stop point.  Do your market research.  Determine who you want to reach, what audience you want for your product.  You can have a great idea that simply will not work in the market, do need, bottlenecks, lack of resources, or competition.  There is a lot of research that needs to be done before you even write a business plan, and Stephen covers it in the very first chapter. The Team – Unique Key to Success After jumping right into the subject in the very first module, I wondered what Stephen could have in store for me for the rest of the course.  Chapter number two is building a team.  Having a team is important regardless of what your startup is.  You can be a true visionary with endless ideas and energy, but one person can still not do everything.  It is important to decide from the very beginning if you will have cofounders, team leaders, and how many employees you’ll need.  Even more important, you’ll need to decide what kind of team you want – what personalities, skills, and type of energy you want each of your employees to bring.  Do you want to have an A+ team with a B- idea, or do you have a B- idea that needs an A+ team to sell it?  Stephen asks all the hard questions!  I was especially impressed by his insight on developing.  You have to decide if you need developers, how many, and what their skills should be. I found this insight extremely useful for everyday usage, not just for start-up companies.  I would apply this kind of information in management at any position.  An amazing team will build an amazing product – and that doesn’t matter if you’re a start-up company or a small team working for a much larger business. Customer Development – The Ultimate Obective Chapter three was about customer development. According to Stephen, there are four different steps to develop a customer base.  The first question to ask yourself is if you are envisioning a large customer base buying a few products each, or a small, dedicated base that buys a lot of your product – quantity vs. Quality.  He also discusses how to earn, retain, and get more customers.  He also says that each customer should be placed in a different role – some will be like investors, who regularly spend with you and invest their money in your business.  It is then your job to take that investment and turn it into a better product in the future.  You need to deal with their money properly – think of it is as theirs as investors, not yours as profit.  At the end of this module I felt that only Stephen could provide this kind of insight, and then he listed all the resources he took his information from.  I have never seen a group of people so passionate about their customers. It was indeed a long day for me. In tomorrow’s part 2 we will discuss rest of the three module and also will see a quick video of the Practices for Software Startup Pluralsight Course. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Best Practices, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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  • Making Money from your SQL Server Blog

    - by Bill Graziano
    My SQL Server blog reading list is around one hundred blogs.  Many people are writing great content and generating lots of page views.  I see some of them running Google AdSense and trying to make a little money off their traffic.  If you want to earn some some extra money from what you’ve written there are a couple of options.  And one new option that I’m announcing here. Background Internet advertising is sold based on a few different pricing schemes.  Flat Fee.  You offer either all your impressions (page views) or some percentage of your impressions in exchange for a flat monthly fee.  CPM or cost per thousand impressions.  If the quoted price is $2 CPM you’ll get $2 for every 1,000 times the ad is displayed.  While you might think the “M” means millions, the “M” in CPM is the roman numeral for 1,000. CPC or cost per click.  This is also called PPC or pay per click.  In this method you get paid based on how many clicks there are on the ad.  CPA or cost per action.  In this method you get paid based on an action that occurs on the advertisers site after they click on the ad.  This is typically some type of sign up form.  This is how most affiliate programs work. Darren Rowse at ProBlogger has been writing about blogging and making money off blogs for years.  He has a good introduction to making money on your blog in his “Making Money” section.  If you’re interested in learning more he has a post up titled How to Make More Money From Your Blog in the New Year that links to many of his best posts on the subject. Google AdSense This is the most common method for people earning money from their blogging.  It’s easy to setup and administer.  You tell AdSense what size ads you’d like to run and it gives you a little piece of JavaScript to put on your site.  AdSense quickly learns the topics you write about and displays ads that are appropriate for your site.  I typically see ads for hosting, SQL Server tools and developer tools running in AdSense slots.  AdSense pays on a CPC model.  If you translate that back to CPM pricing you’ll see rates from $0.50 to $1.00 CPM. Amazon While you might not make much money writing books it’s now possible to make even less helping Amazon sell them.  You can sign up for an Amazon affiliate program.  Each time you send Amazon a link and someone buys the book you get a cut of that sale.  This is the CPA model from above.  Amazon can help you build some pretty nice “stores”.  Here’s the SQL Server bookstore I built for SQLTeam.com.  If you’re just putting in a page with books like I’ve done on SQLTeam you should keep your expectations low.  If you’re writing book reviews of suggesting books on your blog it really does make sense to setup an Amazon affiliate link.  People are much more likely to buy a book based on a review from a trusted source.  I always try to buy through a referral link if there is one. Amazon pays about 4% of the price as a referral fee.  You also get credit for anything else they buy while on the site.  I recently had someone buy an iPod nano with their SQL Server book making me an extra $5.60 richer!  Estimating how much you can make is difficult though.  How much attention you draw to the links and book reviews can dramatically affect the earnings. Private Ad Sales This is the hardest but potentially most lucrative option.  You sell advertising directly to companies that want to sell things to your readers.  Typically this would be SQL Server tool vendors, hosting companies or anyone else that wants to make money off database administrators.  This is also the most difficult to do.  You’ll need the contacts at the companies and enough page views to make it worth their while.  You’ll also need software to track the page views and clicks, geo-target your ads and smooth out the impressions.  Your earnings are based on whatever you can negotiate with the companies. SQL Server Ad Network For the last couple of years I’ve run any extra ads that I sold on the SQLTeam Weblogs.  You can see an example of that on Mladen’s blog.  The ad in the upper right corner is one that I’m running for him.  (Note: Many of the ads I’m running are geo-targeted to only appear in English speaking countries.  You may see a different set of ads outside the US, Canada and the UK.  You can also see he has a couple of Google ads on his blog.)  When I run ads on his blog I split the advertising revenue with him.  They make a little and I make a little. I recently started to expand this and sell advertising specifically to run on SQL Server-related blogs.  I’m also starting to run ads on non-SQLTeam blogs.  The only way I can sell more advertising is to have more blogs to run it on.  And that’s where you come in. I’ve created a SQL Server advertising network.  I handle all the ad sales and provide the technology to serve the ads.  I handle collections and payments back to you.  You get paid at the end of each month regardless of when (or if) the advertiser actually pays.  All you need to do is add a small piece of JavaScript to your site to display the ads. If you’re writing about SQL Server and interested in earning a little money for your site I’d like to talk to you.  You can use the Contact Us page on SQLTeam.com to reach me.  Running advertising on your blog isn’t for everyone.  If you’re concerned about what advertisers might think about certain posts then you might not be a good fit.  For the most part this isn’t an issue.  You’ll also need to have a PayPal account to receive payments.  You probably won’t get rich doing this.  But you can earn extra cash on the side for doing what you would do anyway.  I do know that people have earned enough to buy themselves a nice laptop doing this. My initial target is blogs with more than 10,000 page views per month.  I expect to pay two to three times what Google pays.  If you have less than 10,000 page views per month but are still interested I’d still like to hear from you.  I may not be able to sign up smaller blogs right away but we’ll get the process started.  If you’re unsure about your traffic Google Analytics is a free tool that provides great reporting on traffic, popular posts and how people find your blog.  If you have any questions or are just curious drop me a line and I’ll try to answer your questions.

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  • A Look Back at 2010 Predictions

    - by David Dorf
    Now is the time of year people make their predictions for next year, but before I start thinking about 2011 it's worth a look back to see how my predictions for 2010 fared. 1. Borders and Blockbuster bite the dust. I would have never predicted a strong brand such as Circuit City could die, but now I know it can happen to anyone. Borders has lost the battle with Barnes & Noble and Blockbuster has lost to Netflix. And just to be sure, Amazon put an extra nail in each coffin. Borders received additional investment from Bennett LeBow to keep it afloat, but the stock is down around $1.25 with no profits in sight. Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy back in September. 2. Every retailer finally has a page on Facebook... but very few figure out how to keep fans engaged. Retailer postings become noise, and fans start to unsubscribe. Twitter goes in the same direction. A few standout retailers will figure out how to use social media, and the rest will remain dumbfounded. Most retailers are on the Facebook bandwagon, and their fan bases seem to be increasing thanks to promotions like The Gap's logo redesign, Lowes' black Friday sneak peak, and Walmart's Crowd Savers. There are several examples of f-commerce advancements, including some interesting integrations from Amazon.3. Smartphones consolidate and grow. More and more people will step-up to smartphones, most of which will choose iPhone, Blackberry, and Android phones. Other smartphones will vanish, and networks will start to strain. But retailers will finally embrace mobile as the next big channel. Retail marketing departments will build mobile apps without the help of their IT department, and eventually they will get into a bind. Android has been on a tear lately stealing market share from Blackberry. Palm and Microsoft are trending down, and Apple is holding steady. Smartphone sales are up 15% and expected to continue. Retailers understand the importance of mobile, and some innovative applications have been produced this year. 4. Google helps the little guys. Google will push its Favorite Places project to help give exposure to small retailers and restaurants. They will enable small retailers to act like big ones by providing storefronts, detailed product information, and coupons for consumers. Google will find a way to bring augmented reality to the masses. I can't say I've seen much new from Google regarding Favorite Places, but they've continued to push local product search. From the PC or smartphone, consumers can search for products and see which nearby stores have it stock. Oracle Retail even productized an integration to Google to support this effort. I suppose if Google ever buys Groupon then it will bring them even closer to local shopping. Google talked about augmented humanity, but that has nothing to do with augmented reality. 5. Steve Jobs Is Bugs Bunny and Steve Ballmer is Elmer Fudd. (OK, I stole that headline from an InformationWeek article. I couldn't resist.) Both Apple and Microsoft will continue to open new stores, but only Apple will show real growth. POSReady 2009 (formerly WEPOS) will continue to share the POS market with Linux. The iPhone and iPod will continue to capture market share, but there won't be an Apple tablet. There won't be an Apple tablet? What was I thinking? While Apple has well over 300 stores, there are less than 10 Microsoft stores. Initial impressions show that even though Microsoft is locating its store near Apple Stores, they are not converting customers, with shoppers citing a lack of assortment and high prices. 6. Consolidation of e-commerce software providers. Software vendors in the areas of search, reviews, online call-centers, payments, and e-commerce will consolidate, partly driven by the success of m-commerce and SaaS. Amazon will find someone else to buy, and eBay will continue to lose momentum. Consolidation of e-commerce providers continued with IBM acquiring Sterling Commerce and CoreMetrics, and Oracle recently announcing the acquisition of ATG. Amazon grabbed Zappos, Woot, and Diapers.com to continue its dominance of online selling. While eBay's Marketplace growth may have slowed, its PayPal division is doing quite well, fueled in part by demand for mobile payments. 7. Book publishers mirror music labels. Just as the iPod brought digital downloads to the masses, the Kindle and Nook will power the e-book revolution. Books will continue to use DRM for a few more years before following the path of music. Publishers will try to preserve the margins of hardbacks by associating e-book releases with paperbacks. Amazon has done a good job providing e-reader clients for smartphones, PCs, and tablets. Competition from Barnes & Noble has forced Amazon to support book loaning, and both companies are making it easier for people to publish ebooks (with or without DRM). Progress is slow but steady. 8. NFC makes inroads, RFID treads water. Near Field Communications start to appear in mobile phones, and retailers beta test its use for payments and loyalty programs. RFID tag costs come down a bit, but not enough to spur accelerated adoption.Nokia announced plans to offer NFC-enabled phones in 2011, and rumors are swirling about NFC in the upcoming iPhone.  I think NFC is heading in the right direction, and I've heard more interest from retailers about specialized uses for RFID.9. Digital Signage goes the way of augmented reality. People use their camera phones to leave geo-tagged notes all over cities, rating stores and restaurants, and "painting" graffiti. But people get tired of holding their phones in front of their faces, so AR glasses are offered in much the same way bluetooth headsets emerged. Retailers experiement with in-store advertising using AR. Several retailers like Pizza Hut, Benetton, and Target have experimented with AR but its still somewhat of a gimmick used by marketing.  I think this prediction is a year or two too early. 10. JDA flip-flops again. After announcing their embracing of the .Net architecture, then switching to J2EE after the Manugistics acquisition, JDA will finally decide to standardize on Apple's Objective C. Everything will be ported to the iPhone and be available on the AppStore. After all, there's not much left to try. This was, of course, a joke but the sentiment is still valid.  JDA seems more supply-chain focused than retail focused, which is a an outcrop if their i2 acquisition.  Of the 10 predictions, I'm going to say I got 6 somewhat correct.  (Don't you just love grading your own paper?)  Soon I'll post my predictions for 2011 so be on the lookout.  Until then here's one more prediction:  Va Tech beats Stanford in the Orange Bowl -- count on it!

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  • Master Data

    - by david.butler(at)oracle.com
    Let's take a deeper look at what we mean when we talk about 'Master' data. In its most general sense, master data is data that exists in more than one operational application. These are the applications that automate business processes. These applications require significant amounts of data to function correctly.  This includes data about the objects that are involved in transactions, as well as the transaction data itself.  For example, when a customer buys a product, the transaction is managed by a sales application.  The objects of the transaction are the Customer and the Product.  The transactional data is the time, place, price, discount, payment methods, etc. used at the point of sale. Many thousands of transactional data attributes are needed within the application. These important data elements are local to the applications and have no bearing on other applications. Harmonization and synchronization across applications is not necessary. The Customer and Product objects of the transaction also have a large number of attributes. Customer for example, includes hierarchies, hierarchical and matrixed relationships, contacts, classifications, preferences, accounts, identifiers, profiles, and addresses galore for 'ship to', 'mail to'; 'service at'; etc. Dozens of attributes exist for individuals, hundreds for organizations, and thousands for products. This data has meaning beyond any particular application. It exists in many applications and drives the vital cross application enterprise business processes. These are the processes that define and differentiate the organization. At every decision point, information about the objects of the process determines the direction of the process flow. This is the nature of the data that exists in more than one application, and this is why we call it 'master data'. Let me elaborate. Parties Oracle has developed a party schema to model all participants in your daily business operations. It models people, organizations, groups, customers, contacts, employees, and suppliers. It models their accounts, locations, classifications, and preferences.  And most importantly, it models the vast array of hierarchical and matrixed relationships that exist between all the participants in your real world operations.  The model logically separates people and organizations from their relationships and accounts.  This separation creates flexibility unmatched in the industry and accounts for the fact that the Oracle schema for Customers, Suppliers, and Accounts is a true superset of the wide variety of commercial and homegrown customer models in existence. Sites Sites are places where business is conducted. They can be addresses, clusters such as retail malls, locations within a cluster, floors within a building, places where meters are located, rooms on floors, etc.  Fully understanding all attributes of a site is key to many business processes. Attributes such as 'noise abatement policy' at a point of delivery, or the size of an oven in a business kitchen drive day-to-day activities such as delivery schedules or food promotions. Typically this kind of data is siloed in departments and scattered across applications and spreadsheets.  This leads to conflicting information and poor operational efficiencies. Oracle's Global Single Schema can hold all site attributes in one place and enables a single version of authoritative site information across the enterprise. Products and Services The Oracle Global Single Schema also includes a number of entities that define the products and services a company creates and offers for sale. Key entities include Items organized into Catalogs and Price Lists. The Catalog structures provide for the ability to capture different views of a product such as engineering, manufacturing, and service which are based on a unified product model. As a result, designers, manufacturing engineers, purchasers and partners can work simultaneously on a common product definition. The Catalog schema allows for unlimited attributes, combines them into meaningful groups, and maps them to catalog categories to track these different types of information. The model also maps an unlimited number of functional structures for each item. For example, multiple Bills of Material (BOMs) can be constructed representing requirements BOM, features BOM, and packaging BOM for an item. The Catalog model also supports hierarchical information about each item and all standard Global Data Synchronization attributes. Business Processes Utilizing Linked Data Entities Each business entity codified into a centralized master data environment significantly improves the efficiency of the automated business processes that use the consolidated data.  When all the key business entities used by an organization's process are so consolidated, the advantages are multiplied.  The primary reason for business process breakdowns (i.e. data errors across application boundaries) is eliminated. All processes are positively impacted and business process automation is itself automated.  I like to use the "Call to Resolution" business process as an example to help illustrate this important point. It involves call center applications, service applications, RMA applications, transportation applications, inventory applications, etc. Customer, Site, Product and Supplier master data must all be correct and consistent across these applications.  What's more, the data relationships between customer and product, and product and suppliers must be right. This is the minimum quality needed to insure the business process flows without error. But that is not the end of the story. Critical master data attributes such as customer loyalty, profitability, credit worthiness, and propensity to buy can optimize the call center point of contact component of the process. Critical product information such as alternative parts or equivalent products can optimize the resolution selected by the process. A comprehensive understanding of the 'service at' location can help insure multiple trips are avoided in the process. Full supplier information on reliability, delivery delays, and potential alternates can prevent supplier exceptions and play a significant role in optimizing the process.  In other words, these master data attributes enable the optimization of the "Call to Resolution" enterprise business process. Master data supports and guides business process flows. Thus the phrase 'Master Data' is indeed appropriate. MDM is the software that houses, manages, and governs the master data that resides in all applications and controls the enterprise business processes. A complete master data solution takes a data model that holds fully attributed master data entities and their inter-relationships. Oracle has this model. Oracle, with its deep understanding of application data is the logical choice for managing all your master data within the enterprise whether or not your organization actually runs any Oracle Applications.

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  • Reviewing Retail Predictions for 2011

    - by David Dorf
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} I've been busy thinking about what 2012 and beyond will look like for retail, and I have some interesting predictions to share.  But before I go there, let’s first review this year’s predictions before making new ones for 2012. 1. Alternate Payments We've seen several alternate payment schemes emerge over the last two years, and 2011 may be the year one of them takes hold. Any competition that can drive down fees will be good for everyone. I'm betting that Apple will add NFC chips to their next version of the iPhone, then enable payments in stores using iTunes accounts on the backend. Paypal will continue to make inroads, and Isis will announce a pilot. The iPhone 4S did not contain an NFC chip, so we’ll have to continuing waiting for the iPhone 5. PayPal announced its moving into in-store payments, and Google launched its wallet in selected cities.  Overall I think the payment scene is heating up and that trend will continue. 2. Engineered Systems The industry is moving toward purpose-built appliances that are optimized across the entire stack. Oracle calls these "engineered systems" and the first two examples are Exadata and Exalogic, but there are other examples from other vendors. These are particularly important to the retail industry because of the volume of data that must be processed. There should be continued adoption in 2011. Oracle reports that Exadata is its fasting growing product, and at the recent OpenWorld it announced the SuperCluster and Exalytics products, both continuing the engineered systems trend. SAP’s HANA continues to receive attention, and IBM also seems to be moving in this direction. 3. Social Analytics There are lots of tools that provide insight into how a brand is perceived across popular internet sites, but as far as I know, these tools are not industry specific. The next step needs to mine the data and determine how it should influence retail operations. The data needs to help retailers determine how they create promotions, which products to stock, and how to keep consumers engaged. Social data alone does not provide the answers, but its one more data point that will help retailers make better decisions. Look for some vendor consolidation to help make this happen. In March, Salesforce.com acquired leading social monitoring vendor Radian6 and followed up with acquisitions of Heroku and Model Metrics. The notion of Social CRM seems to be going more mainstream now. 4. 2-D Barcodes Look for more QRCodes on shelf-tags, in newspaper circulars, and on billboards. It's a great portal from the physical world into the digital one that buys us time until augmented reality matures further. Nobody wants to type "www", backslash, and ".com" on their phones. QRCodes are everywhere. ‘Nuff said. 5. In the words of Microsoft, "To the Cloud!" My favorite "cloud application" is Evernote. If you take notes on your work laptop, you will inevitably need those notes on your home PC. And if you manage to solve that problem, you'll need to access them from your mobile phone. Evernote stores your notes in the cloud and provides easy ways to access them. Being able to access a service from anywhere and not having to worry about backups, upgrades, etc. is great. Retailers will start to rely on cloud services, both public and private, in the coming year. There were no shortage of announcements in this area: Amazon’s cloud-based Kindle Fire, Apple’s iCloud, Oracle’s Public Cloud, etc. I saw an interesting presentation showing how BevMo moved their systems to the cloud.  Seems like retailers are starting to consider the cloud for specific uses. 6. F-CommerceTop of Form Move over "E" and "M" so we can introduce "F-Commerce," which should go mainstream in 2011. Already several retailers have created small stores on Facebook, and it won't be long before Facebook becomes a full-fledged channel in the omni-channel world of retail. The battle between Facebook and Google will heat up over retail, where both stand to make lots of money. JCPenney and ASOS both put their entire catalogs on Facebook, and lots of other retailers have connected Facebook to their e-commerce site. I still think selling from the newsfeed is the best approach, and several retailers are trying that approach as well. I just don’t see Google+ as a threat to Facebook, so I think that battle is over.  I called 2011 The Year of F-Commerce, and that was probably accurate. Its good to look back at predictions, but we also have to think about what was missed.  I didn't see Amazon entering the tablet business with such a splash, although in hindsight it was obvious. Nor did I think HP would fall so far so fast.  Look for my 2012 predictions coming soon.

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