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• Top 5 Reasons to Invest in Enterprise 2.0 Technologies

  - by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com

  In 2010, Oracle's portal, content management, and collaboration solutions evolved rapidly, supported by increasingly deep integrations across Oracle Fusion Middleware and the entire Oracle stack. In light of these developments, we asked Vince Casarez, vice president of Enterprise 2.0 product management, for his top five reasons to invest in Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0) technologies--including real-world examples of businesses already realizing the benefits of next-generation E2.0 technologies. 1. Provide a modern user experience As E2.0 technologies gain widespread adoption, customers and employees expect intuitive Web experiences that are both interactive and community-based. By partnering with Oracle, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Group is already making that happen. With 76,000 employees and operations in more than 100 countries, the company wanted a streamlined, personalized user experience with more relevant content in fewer clicks. Working with Oracle, they created a global support portal that supports personalization and integration with Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and Oracle E-Business Suite--and drives collaboration with tools such as wikis, blogs, and forums. Learn more about Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Group's Global Support Portal in this Webcast. 2. Improve productivity and collaboration As E2.0 technologies mature, Oracle anticipates companies moving beyond the idea of simply creating yet another Facebook-like destination for its employees, and instead shaping work environments around specific business tasks. After rapid growth--both organic and through acquisition--construction and infrastructure services leader Balfour Beatty found itself with multiple homegrown intranet sites with very minimal content-sharing capabilities. Today, thanks to Oracle WebCenter Suite, Oracle WebCenter Spaces, Oracle WebCenter Services, and Oracle Universal Content Management, Balfour Beatty is benefiting from collaborative workspaces, a central place to use and work with documents, and unified search across content. 3. Leverage business processes and applications Modern portals are now able to integrate users, content, and business processes in unprecedented ways. To take advantage of these new possibilities, leading dairy provider Land O'Lakes has implemented a fully integrated ERP solution together with Oracle's ECM platform. As a result, Land O'Lakes has been able to achieve better information management and compliance, increased adoption rates for enterprise tools, and increased business process efficiency thanks to more effective information sharing and collaboration. 4. Enhance customer and supplier relationships Companies have begun to move beyond the idea that E2.0 simply means enabling customer reviews or embedding chat functionality. They are taking E2.0 to the next level and providing interactive experiences for their customers. For example, to enhance customer and supplier relationships, Wind River, a global leader in device software optimization, successfully partnered with Oracle to: Integrate ERP and ECM content to provide customers the latest and most relevant support information for products they own Enable customers to personalize their support experience and receive updates regarding patches, application notes, and other relevant content Enable discussions, wikis, and blogs for more efficient collaboration 5. Increase business visibility and responsiveness By strategically embedding collaboration and communication tools into specific business contexts, companies significantly increase visibility into changing business conditions--and can respond much more agilely. Texas A&M University System--one of the largest systems of higher education in the U.S.--partnered with Oracle to create a unified repository that would enable the retrieval of research and grant data from disparate systems via an Enterprise 2.0 user interface. By enabling researchers to customize their own portals with easy-to-use tools, they have also been able to significantly reduce their reliance on the IT department. Learn how other Oracle customers are leveraging Enterprise 2.0 technologies.

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• Strategies for invoking subclass methods on generic objects

  - by Brad Patton

  I've run into this issue in a number of places and have solved it a bunch of different ways but looking for other solutions or opinions on how to address. The scenario is when you have a collection of objects all based off of the same superclass but you want to perform certain actions based only on instances of some of the subclasses. One contrived example of this might be an HTML document made up of elements. You could have a superclass named HTMLELement and subclasses of Headings, Paragraphs, Images, Comments, etc. To invoke a common action across all of the objects you declare a virtual method in the superclass and specific implementations in all of the subclasses. So to render the document you could loop all of the different objects in the document and call a common Render() method on each instance. It's the case where again using the same generic objects in the collection I want to perform different actions for instances of specific subclass (or set of subclasses). For example (an remember this is just an example) when iterating over the collection, elements with external links need to be downloaded (e.g. JS, CSS, images) and some might require additional parsing (JS, CSS). What's the best way to handle those special cases. Some of the strategies I've used or seen used include: Virtual methods in the base class. So in the base class you have a virtual LoadExternalContent() method that does nothing and then override it in the specific subclasses that need to implement it. The benefit being that in the calling code there is no object testing you send the same message to each object and let most of them ignore it. Two downsides that I can think of. First it can make the base class very cluttered with methods that have nothing to do with most of the hierarchy. Second it assumes all of the work can be done in the called method and doesn't handle the case where there might be additional context specific actions in the calling code (i.e. you want to do something in the UI and not the model). Have methods on the class to uniquely identify the objects. This could include methods like ClassName() which return a string with the class name or other return values like enums or booleans (IsImage()). The benefit is that the calling code can use if or switch statements to filter objects to perform class specific actions. The downside is that for every new class you need to implement these methods and can look cluttered. Also performance could be less than some of the other options. Use language features to identify objects. This includes reflection and language operators to identify the objects. For example in C# there is the is operator that returns true if the instance matches the specified class. The benefit is no additional code to implement in your object hierarchy. The only downside seems to be the lack of using something like a switch statement and the fact that your calling code is a little more cluttered. Are there other strategies I am missing? Thoughts on best approaches?

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• Deliberate Practice

  - by Jeff Foster

  It’s easy to assume, as software engineers, that there is little need to “practice” writing code. After all, we write code all day long! Just by writing a little each day, we’re constantly learning and getting better, right? Unfortunately, that’s just not true. Of course, developers do improve with experience. Each time we encounter a problem we’re more likely to avoid it next time. If we’re in a team that deploys software early and often, we hone and improve the deployment process each time we practice it. However, not all practice makes perfect. To develop true expertise requires a particular type of practice, deliberate practice, the only goal of which is to make us better programmers. Everyday software development has other constraints and goals, not least the pressure to deliver. We rarely get the chance in the course of a “sprint” to experiment with potential solutions that are outside our current comfort zone. However, if we believe that software is a craft then it’s our duty to strive continuously to raise the standard of software development. This requires specific and sustained efforts to get better at something we currently can’t do well (from Harvard Business Review July/August 2007). One interesting way to introduce deliberate practice, in a sustainable way, is the code kata. The term kata derives from martial arts and refers to a set of movements practiced either solo or in pairs. One of the better-known examples is the Bowling Game kata by Bob Martin, the goal of which is simply to write some code to do the scoring for 10-pin bowling. It sounds too easy, right? What could we possibly learn from such a simple example? Trust me, though, that it’s not as simple as five minutes of typing and a solution. Of course, we can reach a solution in a short time, but the important thing about code katas is that we explore each technique fully and in a controlled way. We tackle the same problem multiple times, using different techniques and making different decisions, understanding the ramifications of each one, and exploring edge cases. The short feedback loop optimizes opportunities to learn. Another good example is Conway’s Game of Life. It’s a simple problem to solve, but try solving it in a functional style. If you’re used to mutability, solving the problem without mutating state will push you outside of your comfort zone. Similarly, if you try to solve it with the focus of “tell-don’t-ask“, how will the responsibilities of each object change? As software engineers, we don’t get enough opportunities to explore new ideas. In the middle of a development cycle, we can’t suddenly start experimenting on the team’s code base. Code katas offer an opportunity to explore new techniques in a safe environment. If you’re still skeptical, my challenge to you is simply to try it out. Convince a willing colleague to pair with you and work through a kata or two. It only takes an hour and I’m willing to bet you learn a few new things each time. The next step is to make it a sustainable team practice. Start with an hour every Friday afternoon (after all who wants to commit code to production just before they leave for the weekend?) for month and see how that works out. Finally, consider signing up for the Global Day of Code Retreat. It’s like a daylong code kata, it’s on December 8th and there’s probably an event in your area!

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• What's wrong with my wireless?

  - by dazzle

  I am having issues with my wireless connection. My connection is constantly disconnecting, then attempting to reconnect, reconnecting momentarily, then disconnecting etc. on times scales that range from seconds to minutes. In the meantime, needless to say I'm having significant packet loss. I'm running Ubuntu 14.04 64bit, updated and upgraded to today. Here is my card and driver: delta@sager:~$ lspci -vq | grep -i wireless -B 1 -A 5 04:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Wireless 7260 (rev 73) Subsystem: Intel Corporation Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260 Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 47 Memory at f7d00000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8K] Capabilities: Kernel driver in use: iwlwifi Here is my kernel: delta@sager:~$ uname -r 3.13.0-34-generic None of the other machines on my home network are having these issues. Windows Vista is networking without issue for goodness sake ;-) Here is a small clipping from the output of dmesg. As you can see, I am getting a cfg80211 message of some sort over and over again (FYI, I've replaced my MAC address with a series of dashes, so anytime there is a ---------------, that was where the MAC address was: [ 1881.739161] wlan1: authenticate with --------------- [ 1881.741561] wlan1: send auth to --------------- (try 1/3) [ 1881.743440] wlan1: authenticated [ 1881.746027] wlan1: associate with --------------- (try 1/3) [ 1881.749244] wlan1: RX AssocResp from --------------- (capab=0x411 status=0 aid=4) [ 1881.754727] wlan1: associated [ 1881.754827] cfg80211: Calling CRDA for country: US [ 1881.761552] cfg80211: Regulatory domain changed to country: US [ 1881.761559] cfg80211: (start_freq - end_freq @ bandwidth), (max_antenna_gain, max_eirp) [ 1881.761564] cfg80211: (2402000 KHz - 2472000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2700 mBm) [ 1881.761568] cfg80211: (5170000 KHz - 5250000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 1700 mBm) [ 1881.761571] cfg80211: (5250000 KHz - 5330000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm) [ 1881.761574] cfg80211: (5490000 KHz - 5600000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm) [ 1881.761577] cfg80211: (5650000 KHz - 5710000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm) [ 1881.761580] cfg80211: (5735000 KHz - 5835000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 3000 mBm) [ 1881.761584] cfg80211: (57240000 KHz - 63720000 KHz @ 2160000 KHz), (N/A, 4000 mBm) [ 1882.391038] cfg80211: Calling CRDA to update world regulatory domain [ 1882.396254] cfg80211: World regulatory domain updated: [ 1882.396260] cfg80211: (start_freq - end_freq @ bandwidth), (max_antenna_gain, max_eirp) [ 1882.396265] cfg80211: (2402000 KHz - 2472000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm) [ 1882.396268] cfg80211: (2457000 KHz - 2482000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm) [ 1882.396271] cfg80211: (2474000 KHz - 2494000 KHz @ 20000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm) [ 1882.396274] cfg80211: (5170000 KHz - 5250000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm) [ 1882.396277] cfg80211: (5735000 KHz - 5835000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm) [ 1886.148252] wlan1: authenticate with --------------- [ 1886.150005] wlan1: send auth to --------------- (try 1/3) [ 1886.151807] wlan1: authenticated [ 1886.154847] wlan1: associate with --------------- (try 1/3) [ 1886.158147] wlan1: RX AssocResp from --------------- (capab=0x411 status=0 aid=4) [ 1886.163464] wlan1: associated [ 1886.163520] wlan1: Limiting TX power to 30 (30 - 0) dBm as advertised by --------------- [ 1886.163588] cfg80211: Calling CRDA for country: US [ 1886.170500] cfg80211: Regulatory domain changed to country: US [ 1886.170508] cfg80211: (start_freq - end_freq @ bandwidth), (max_antenna_gain, max_eirp) [ 1886.170513] cfg80211: (2402000 KHz - 2472000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2700 mBm) [ 1886.170517] cfg80211: (5170000 KHz - 5250000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 1700 mBm) [ 1886.170520] cfg80211: (5250000 KHz - 5330000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm) [ 1886.170523] cfg80211: (5490000 KHz - 5600000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm) [ 1886.170526] cfg80211: (5650000 KHz - 5710000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm) [ 1886.170529] cfg80211: (5735000 KHz - 5835000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 3000 mBm) [ 1886.170533] cfg80211: (57240000 KHz - 63720000 KHz @ 2160000 KHz), (N/A, 4000 mBm) [ 1887.200197] cfg80211: Calling CRDA to update world regulatory domain [ 1887.203655] cfg80211: World regulatory domain updated: [ 1887.203659] cfg80211: (start_freq - end_freq @ bandwidth), (max_antenna_gain, max_eirp) [ 1887.203662] cfg80211: (2402000 KHz - 2472000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm) [ 1887.203664] cfg80211: (2457000 KHz - 2482000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm) [ 1887.203666] cfg80211: (2474000 KHz - 2494000 KHz @ 20000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm) [ 1887.203668] cfg80211: (5170000 KHz - 5250000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm) [ 1887.203670] cfg80211: (5735000 KHz - 5835000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (300 mBi, 2000 mBm) I've poked around on AskUbuntu, and have not found any adequate solutions; have also found similar threads that were left unanswered. Any advice/experience/threads I might be able to pull on would be greatly appreciated. In your opinion, is this a kernel issue, hardware issue, etc.? Thanks in advance. EDIT: chili, here's the output of iwconfig: delta@sager:~$ iwconfig wlan1 IEEE 802.11abg ESSID:"LANbeforetime" Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz Access Point: ----------- Bit Rate=48 Mb/s Tx-Power=16 dBm Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Power Management:off Link Quality=44/70 Signal level=-66 dBm Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:80 Missed beacon:0 eth0 no wireless extensions. lo no wireless extensions.

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• Get Ready for Anytime, Anywhere Engagement

  - by Christie Flanagan

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; 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;} Are you ready for 2015?  According to IDC, 2015 is the year when more users are projected to access the internet using mobile devices than with PC’s or other wired devices.  It’s no doubt that mobile devices are a critical means of communication today, and are on track to become increasingly more important in the coming years. However, device formats are so varied that delivering a mobile web experience that will engage site visitors and enhance your brand can be a daunting task. Solutions that empower organizations to easily extend their web presence to the mobile channel, while saving significant time and effort in managing mobile sites, are now essential in our ever connected mobile world. So what are some of the things organizations should look for in such a solution? Mobile device form factors, networks, protocols, and browsers vary widely, and reformatting web content for thousands of different device and software combinations is a prohibitive task. An effective mobile solution can make this process seamless by automatically formatting designated web content for mobile delivery.  By automatically detecting a site visitor’s device configuration, the selected web content can be sized and formatted for optimal display on that particular device. This can save tremendous time involved in building, formatting, and maintaining individual websites or mobile applications for different mobile devices. It’s not enough to simply support the thousands of different mobile device types that are out there. It’s also critical to make it easy for marketers and other business users to manage mobile sites and mobile content. Those responsible for maintaining an organization’s web and mobile experiences need the ability to edit content using rich text editor tools and then preview that content directly in the context of the mobile website and the traditional website, ideally from the same business user interface. Powerful capabilities such as these make managing the web experience for mobile devices easy, even with frequently changing content, across a multitude of different devices. This saves tremendous time involved in building, formatting, and maintaining individual websites or mobile applications for different mobile devices. When content or business needs change, the business user needs only to change site content once, and it is seamlessly deployed to the web and all mobile channels.Geo-location is another critical input to making the online experience engaging and relevant for web visitors who are increasingly mobile. A mobile solution should enable use of device GPS data to deliver location-based content and services to mobile website visitors. Organizations can provide mobile site visitors with location-sensitive search results, location-based offers and recommendations, integration of maps and directions into site content, and much more – all critical for meeting the needs of those on the go.To hear more about how mobile is changing the game, check out our recent webcast with Ted Schadler, Vice President, Principal Analyst, Forrester, where he discussed why mobile is the new face of engagement, or learn more about how to extend your web presence to the mobile channel with Oracle WebCenter Sites and Oracle WebCenter Sites Mobility Server.

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• Best approach to depth streaming via existing codec

  - by Kevin

  I'm working on a development system (and game) intended for games set mostly in static third-person views. We produce our scenery by CG and photographic techniques. Our background art is rendered off-line by a production-grade renderer. To allow the runtime imagery to properly interact with the background art, I wrote a program to convert from depth output by Mental Ray into a texture, and a pixel shader to draw a quad such that the Z data comes from the texture. This technique is working out very well, but now we've decided that some of the camera angle changes between scenes should be animated. The animation itself is straightforward to produce from our CG models. We intend to encode it to some HD video codec such as H.264. The problem is that in order to maintain our runtime imagery on the screen, the depth buffer will need to be loaded for each video frame. Due to the bandwidth, the video's depth data will need to be compressed efficiently. I've looked into methods for performing temporal compression of depth info and found an interesting research paper here: http://web4.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/j.kautz/publications/depth-streaming.pdf The method establishes a mapping between 16-bit depth values and YCbCr values. The mapping is tuned to the properties of existing video codecs in order to maximize precision of the decoded depths after the YCbCr has undergone video compression. It allows an existing, unmodified video codec to be used on the backend. I'm looking at how to pull this off with the least possible work. (This design change was unplanned.) Our game engine itself is native C++, presently for Win32 and DirectX, although we've worked hard to keep platform dependence segregated because we intend other ports. We don't have motion video facilities in the engine yet but will ultimately need that anyway for cinematics. I was planning on using some off-the-shelf motion video solution we can plug into our engine, and haven't chosen one yet. This new added requirement makes selecting one harder since, among other things, we'll now need to bypass colourspace conversion on one of the streams, and also will need to be playing two streams simultaneously in lockstep, on top of in some cases audio on one of them (for the cinematics). I'm also wondering if it's possible (or even useful) to do the conversion from YCbCr to depth in a pixel shader, or if it's better to just do it in CPU and separately load the resulting depth values into a locked tex. The conversion unfortunately does involve branching logic per-pixel. (There are more naive mappings that don't need branching, but they produce inferior results.) It could be reduced to a table lookup but the table would be 32MB. Programming is second-nature to me but I'm not that experienced with pix shaders and have zero knowledge of off-the-shelf video solutions. I'd therefore be interested in advice from others who may have dealt more with depth streaming, pixel shaders, and/or off-the-shelf codecs, regarding how feasible the proposed application is and what off-the-shelf video systems out there would best get along with this usage case.

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• Meet Matthijs, Dutch Inside Sales Representative for Oracle Direct

  - by Maria Sandu

  Today we would like to share some information around the Dutch Core Technology team in Malaga. Matthijs is one of the team members who decided to relocate from the Netherlands to Malaga to join Oracle Direct two years ago. Matthijs: “For the past two years I have been working as an Oracle Direct Core Technology Inside Sales representative for Named Accounts in the Netherlands, based in Malaga, Spain. In my case, working for the Dutch OD Core Technology team means that I am responsible for the Account Management of Larger companies in the Travel & Transportation and the Manufacturing, Retail & Distribution sector. I work together with the Oracle Field Account Managers and our Field Sales Management in the Netherlands where I am often the main point of contact for customers. This means that I deal with their requests and I manage their various issues, provide solutions and suggestions based on the Oracle Core Technology portfolio. I work on interesting projects with end-customers, making financial proposals and building business cases. It is a very interesting sales environment and for the last two years I improved my skills substantially. This month I will finish my Inside Sales career in Malaga to move to a position within Field Sales in the Netherlands. Oracle Direct has proven to be a great stepping stone for my career. Boost your personal development One of the reasons for joining Oracle was to boost my personal & career development. You can choose from various different trainings to follow all over Europe which enable you to reach both your personal and professional goals. Furthermore, you can decide your own career path and plan the steps necessary to achieve your goal. Many people aim to grow into Field Sales in their native countries, Business Development or Sales Management, but there are many possibilities once you decide to join Oracle. Overall, working at Oracle means working for an international company and one of the worldwide leaders in Enterprise Hardware & Software. Here you get all the tools necessary to develop yourself personally & professionally. Another great advantage of working for Oracle Direct is working from our office in Malaga, Southern Spain where we have over 400 employees from many countries across EMEA. It is a truly international environment! Working and living in Spain gives you an excellent opportunity to learn Spanish and of course enjoy the Spanish lifestyle, cuisine, beaches and much, much more!” Interview day Utrecht If you are inspired by the story of Matthijs and would like to explore the opportunity to join the Technology Sales team for the Dutch market in Malaga, let us know! We will organise an Interview day in the Oracle office in Utrecht on the 18th and 19th of September. We currently have multiple openings in the Core Technology team that focus on selling our Database portfolio in the Dutch market. We are looking for native Dutch speakers with a Bachelors degree, 2-5 years sales experience (ideally in IT) who are willing to relocate to Malaga for at least 2 years! For more information please contact [email protected] or [email protected].

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• Seeking advice on tools and technology for my new game [closed]

  - by k.k. slider

  I'm a C# developer who has been programming a game in my spare time using XNA and Visual Studio. The game's logic is mostly done and I've completed a prototype that has most of the functionality of (what I envision to be) the final game. However, having heard about the uncertain future and (possibly) limited audience for XNA games, I'm looking to switch platforms... but I don't know what technology would best suit my needs. Below are some specifics about my game and what exactly I'm looking for, if you're interested: The game is a 2D turn-based tactical RPG (strategy game) for two players. It is a basic sprite and tile based game with animations and sound. 3D capabilities are not necessary. I'd like to allow players to compete with others online, and have a basic ranking/matchmaking system. I will probably need something that can interact with a server and a database (the game is turn-based and has no RNG, so cheating would be easy to detect even if most computation is done client-side and minimal data is sent to the server). Ideally, I would be able to release an early version of the game and have people give feedback as I develop additional features (similar to Minecraft). I'd prefer to have a way to release periodic updates to the game instead of releasing an absolute final product. To reach the widest possible audience, I'd prefer technology that allows me to release on PC, Android, iOS, and (maybe) Mac. This is a game with simple mouse inputs which can fit on a mobile touch screen. The game should be monetizable. If I find success with this game, then I may consider becoming a full-time indie game developer. I have several other game ideas and have learned quite a bit from my first attempt at game development. My first thought was an F2P/microtransaction model, but I'm open to other suggestions. Language isn't a primary concern of mine, since I have a decent amount of experience using several languages to program large projects. I'm willing to spend money (e.g. on a developer's license), but the more expensive it gets, the more hesitant I am to use it. I've looked into the following solutions... there are a LOT of tools out there... if anyone has experience with any of these and would like to recommend/reject any of them, it would be helpful. C#/.NET (XNA/MonoGame/SDL/SlimDX/Xamarin/ExEn/ANX?) HTML5/JS (AppMobi/PhoneGap/Marmalade/FlashCanvas/Cordova/libRocket?) Python (Pyglet/Pygame/Kivy?) Java (JavaFX/libGDX?) Unity/Construct 2/Cocos2D/NME/Corona/other game creation software? I'd like something that can do 2D and isn't limited by being too high-level. Other languages (Lua/LOVE? Moai?) Thanks for answering this rather long and tedious question...

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• Free hosting solution for a very low-traffic website [duplicate]

  - by user966939

  This question already has an answer here: How to find web hosting that meets my requirements? 4 answers I run a very low-traffic website (about 40 users, basically all of which are daily active on the site). I don't see it changing anytime soon either, as there is no way to sign up on the site right now. Until now I have just been using a sub-directory on a friend's host (shared), to host the web site. But in only a few weeks from now, his subscription will end, and he has no plans on renewing it. So of course this means I'll have to move on to something else. But I don't think I'll find someone who'd be willing to share a... shared host with me again. And besides, the software used on that server is ancient (PHP 4.4.9 + MySQL 4.1.22). There's one obvious solution that comes to mind, I guess: choose a better host and pay for it myself. The problem here is that I have no real fixed income, as I'm only a student. So even if the pricing is dirt cheap, I just can't be certain I will be able to afford it, every single month, for... at least 2 years maybe? So I've looked at free hosting solutions instead. The least requirement I had was that it was completely free of ads. But no matter where I look, I always find something in a corner or two ("what can you expect from a free host?" - yeah I know, but I guess it was worth a shot). For example, on Byethost (one of the free hosts I tried), if you trigger a PHP error while error reporting is set to E_ALL, you will spawn some hidden ad... Besides Byethost, I've tried 000Webhost, x10Hosting, 2Freehosting/1Freehosting, Wink.ws, and they are only worse. Okay, I'm running low on ideas. But! What if I just hosted the site myself, on my own computer? That could work. I actually do have my computer on practically 24/7. But not really. Sometimes I need to reboot it, and sometimes we even have power outages. And what if the hardware needs an upgrade? It's not such a big deal for me if the site went down, because I know what's going on; but what about the users? If I do decide to host it myself, is there some way to show users an alternate page instead of them just seeing a generic "server not found" page in the browser when the site is not accessible? Or is there something I have been missing out on? Is there a different kind of "web hosting" solution out there that I haven't heard of? Here is what I'm really looking for: Free (as in, no costs) NO ads Bandwidth enough for a low-traffic forum with roughly 40 users (Semi-)Up-to-date PHP and MySQL (at least not older than a year) No standard (non-extension) PHP functions turned off - such as sleep() The mbstring extension is enabled Disk space: at least 5 MB At least one MySQL database Some bonus points would be: Max execution time of PHP scripts can be set Remote access to MySQL database What would be the best solution for me? Is there one?

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• Making it GREAT! Oracle Partners Building Apps Workshop with UX and ADF in UK

  - by ultan o'broin

  Yes, making is what it's all about. This time, Oracle Partners in the UK were making great looking usable apps with the Oracle Applications Development Framework (ADF) and user experience (UX) toolkit. And what an energy-packed and productive event at the Oracle UK, Thames Valley Park, location it was. Partners learned the fundamentals of enterprise applications UX, why it's important, all about visual design, how to wireframe designs, and then how to build their already-proven designs in ADF. There was a whole day on mobile apps, learning about mobile design principles, free mobile UX and ADF resources from Oracle, and then trying it out. The workshop wrapped up with the latest Release 7 simplified UIs, Mobilytics, and other innovations from Oracle, and a live demo of a very neat ADF Mobile Android app built by an Oracle contractor. And, what a fun two days both Grant Ronald of ADF and myself had in running the workshop with such a great audience, too! I particularly enjoyed the wireframing and visual design sessions interaction; and seeing some outstanding work done by partners. Of note from the UK workshop were innovative design features not seen before and made me all the happier that developers were bringing their own ideas from the consumer IT world of mobility, simplicity, and social to the world of work apps in a smart way within an enterprise methodology too.  Partner wireframe exercise. Applying mobile design principles and UX design patterns means you've already productively making great usable apps! Next, over to Oracle ADF Mobile with it! One simple example from the design of a mobile field service app was that participants immediately saw how the UX and device functionality of the super UK-based app Hailo app could influence their designs (the London cabbie influence maybe?), as well as how we all use maps, cameras, barcode scanners and microphones on our phones could be used in work. And, of course, ADF Mobile has the device integration solutions there too! I wonder will U.S. workshops in Silicon Valley see an Uber UX influence (LOL)! That we also had partners experienced with Oracle Forms who could now offer a roadmap from Forms to Simplified UI and Mobile using ADF, and do it through through the cloud, really made this particular workshop go "ZING!" for me. Many thanks to the Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) team for organizing this event with us, and to the representatives of the Oracle Partners that showed and participated so well. That's what I love out this outreach. It's a two-way, solid value-add for all. Interested? Why would partners and developers with ADF skills sign up for this workshop? Here's why: Learn to use the Oracle Applications User Experience design patterns as the usability building blocks for applications development in Oracle Application Development Framework. The workshop enables attendees to build modern and visually compelling desktop and mobile applications that look and behave like Oracle Cloud Applications, and that can co-exist with partner integrations, new, or existing applications deployments. Partners learn to offer customers and clients more than just coded functionality; instead they can provide a complete user experience with a roadmap for continued ROI from applications that also creating more business and attracts the kudos and respect from other makers of apps as they're wowed by the results. So, if you're a partner and interested in attending one of these workshops and benefitting from such learning, as well as having a platform to show off some of your own work, stay well tuned to your OPN channels, to this blog, to the VoX blog, and to the @usableapps Twitter account too. Can't wait? For developers and partners, some key mobile resources to explore now Oracle ADF Mobile UX Patterns and Components Wiki Oracle ADF Academy (Mobile) Oracle ADF Insider Essentials Oracle Applications Mobile User Experience Design Patterns and Guidance

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• WF4 &ndash; Guess the number game!

  - by MarkPearl

  I posted yesterday how really good WF4 was looking. Today I thought I would show some real basics that I was able to figure out. This will be a simple example, I am going to make a flowchart workflow – which will prompt the user to guess the number until they guess the right number. Lets begin… Make a new project and make it a Workflow console Application. Then select the Workflow file and drag a FlowChart (2) to point 3. This will now show a green start circle in the designer form. We are going to work with primitives to start with. We are now going to drag a few objects onto the Workflow, We drag the WriteLine, Assign & Decision items onto the designer. Once they are dragged onto the designer we will want to link them up. The order that they are linked is critical since this will determine the order of the solution. In this case, we want the system to first ask “Guess a number”, then to wait for the user to input some code, and then to display “You got it” if they got it right, and “Try again” if they got it wrong. So we now link the arrows to the objects. This is done by moving the mouse pointer over the start objects and clicking on one of the toggles and then dragging it to the next object and releasing the button over one of the toggles. This will place an arrow from the source object to the target object. Okay… pretty simple stuff – now we just need these primitive objects to do stuff. Lets start with the WriteLine primitive. We place the text in inverted commas in the Text field. Because this field accepts any valid VB expression we could have put variables etc. in there if we wanted to. The next thing we want to do is allow the user to input a number. This brings up an interesting problem, if a user were to type in a number, there would need to be someway to declare a variable to hold that value for the life of the workflow. We can achieve this by declaring a variable. To declare a variable, move your cursor over the variables tab at the bottom of the workflow, and then type the name of the new variable in the “Create Variable” field and set it as shown in the image above. Now that we have a variable, we want to call the Console.Readline method and assign the inputted value from the Console to that variable. The code that cannot be seen is actually this – Convert.ToInt32(Console.ReadLine()) We now have a workflow that first prompts the user for a number, then allows the user to type in a number. We are almost done, we just need to make the system react to the value inputted. There are a few ways we could do this, I am going to use the Decision item. So select the Decision object on the designer and then view its properties (F4 for me), and in the condition field place a condition. For simplicity sake I have decided that if the user guesses 10, they will have guessed the number. This is now the completed workflow. Its really easy to understand and shows some really powerful principles for Business applications. You can run the application and see what it does. Imagine writing business solutions that do not worry about the exact flow of objects, but simply allows a business analyst or someone to configure the solution to work exactly as the business rules would dictate. And if the rules changed six months later all they would need to do is re-drag some of the flows. Now I do not know if WF4 will allow for this, but it feels like it is a step in the right direct.

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• Consumer Oriented Search In Oracle Endeca Information Discovery - Part 2

  - by Bob Zurek

  As discussed in my last blog posting on this topic, Information Discovery, a core capability of the Oracle Endeca Information Discovery solution enables businesses to search, discover and navigate through a wide variety of big data including structured, unstructured and semi-structured data. With search as a core advanced capabilities of our product it is important to understand some of the key differences and capabilities in the underlying data store of Oracle Endeca Information Discovery and that is our Endeca Server. In the last post on this subject, we talked about Exploratory Search capabilities along with support for cascading relevance. Additional search capabilities in the Endeca Server, which differentiate from simple keyword based "search boxes" in other Information Discovery products also include: The Endeca Server Supports Set Search.  The Endeca Server is organized around set retrieval, which means that it looks at groups of results (all the documents that match a search), as well as the relationship of each individual result to the set. Other approaches only compute the relevance of a document by comparing the document to the search query – not by comparing the document to all the others. For example, a search for “U.S.” in another approach might match to the title of a document and get a high ranking. But what if it were a collection of government documents in which “U.S.” appeared in many titles, making that clue less meaningful? A set analysis would reveal this and be used to adjust relevance accordingly. The Endeca Server Supports Second-Order Relvance. Unlike simple search interfaces in traditional BI tools, which provide limited relevance ranking, such as a list of results based on key word matching, Endeca enables users to determine the most salient terms to divide up the result. Determining this second-order relevance is the key to providing effective guidance. Support for Queries and Filters. Search is the most common query type, but hardly complete, and users need to express a wide range of queries. Oracle Endeca Information Discovery also includes navigation, interactive visualizations, analytics, range filters, geospatial filters, and other query types that are more commonly associated with BI tools. Unlike other approaches, these queries operate across structured, semi-structured and unstructured content stored in the Endeca Server. Furthermore, this set is easily extensible because the core engine allows for pluggable features to be added. Like a search engine, queries are answered with a results list, ranked to put the most likely matches first. Unlike “black box” relevance solutions, which generalize one strategy for everyone, we believe that optimal relevance strategies vary across domains. Therefore, it provides line-of-business owners with a set of relevance modules that let them tune the best results based on their content. The Endeca Server query result sets are summarized, which gives users guidance on how to refine and explore further. Summaries include Guided Navigation® (a form of faceted search), maps, charts, graphs, tag clouds, concept clusters, and clarification dialogs. Users don’t explicitly ask for these summaries; Oracle Endeca Information Discovery analytic applications provide the right ones, based on configurable controls and rules. For example, the analytic application might guide a procurement agent filtering for in-stock parts by visualizing the results on a map and calculating their average fulfillment time. Furthermore, the user can interact with summaries and filters without resorting to writing complex SQL queries. The user can simply just click to add filters. Within Oracle Endeca Information Discovery, all parts of the summaries are clickable and searchable. We are living in a search driven society where business users really seem to enjoy entering information into a search box. We do this everyday as consumers and therefore, we have gotten used to looking for that box. However, the key to getting the right results is to guide that user in a way that provides additional Discovery, beyond what they may have anticipated. This is why these important and advanced features of search inside the Endeca Server have been so important. They have helped to guide our great customers to success. 

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• Internet of Things Becoming Reality

  - by kristin.jellison

  The Internet of Things is not just on the radar—it’s becoming a reality. A globally connected continuum of devices and objects will unleash untold possibilities for businesses and the people they touch. But the “things” are only a small part of a much larger, integrated architecture. A great example of this comes from the healthcare industry. Imagine an expectant mother who needs to watch her blood pressure. She lives in a mountain village 100 miles away from medical attention. Luckily, she can use a small “wearable” device to monitor her status and wirelessly transmit the information to a healthcare hub in her village. Now, say the healthcare hub identifies that the expectant mother’s blood pressure is dangerously high. It sends a real-time alert to the patient’s wearable device, advising her to contact her doctor. It also pushes an alert with the patient’s historical data to the doctor’s tablet PC. He inserts a smart security card into the tablet to verify his identity. This ensures that only the right people have access to the patient’s data. Then, comparing the new data with the patient’s medical history, the doctor decides she needs urgent medical attention. GPS tracking devices on ambulances in the field identify and dispatch the closest one available. An alert also goes to the closest hospital with the necessary facilities. It sends real-time information on her condition directly from the ambulance. So when she arrives, they already have a treatment plan in place to ensure she gets the right care. The Internet of Things makes a huge difference for the patient. She receives personalized and responsive healthcare. But this technology also helps the businesses involved. The healthcare provider achieves a competitive advantage in its services. The hospital benefits from cost savings through more accurate treatment and better application of services. All of this, in turn, translates into savings on insurance claims. This is an ideal scenario for the Internet of Things—when all the devices integrate easily and when the relevant organizations have all the right systems in place. But in reality, that can be difficult to achieve. Core design principles are required to make the whole system work. Open standards allow these systems to talk to each other. Integrated security protects personal, financial, commercial and regulatory information. A reliable and highly available systems infrastructure is necessary to keep these systems running 24/7. If this system were just made up of separate components, it would be prohibitively complex and expensive for almost any organization. The solution is integration, and Oracle is leading the way. We’re developing converged solutions, not just from device to datacenter, but across devices, utilizing the Java platform, and through data acquisition and management, integration, analytics, security and decision-making. The Internet of Things (IoT) requires the predictable action and interaction of a potentially endless number of components. It’s in that convergence that the true value of the Internet of Things emerges. Partners who take the comprehensive view and choose to engage with the Internet of Things as a fully integrated platform stand to gain the most from the Internet of Things’ many opportunities. To discover what else Oracle is doing to connect the world, read about Oracle’s Internet of Things Platform. Learn how you can get involved as a partner by checking out the Oracle Java Knowledge Zone. Best regards, David Hicks

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• Should I manage authentication on my own if the alternative is very low in usability and I am already managing roles?

  - by rumtscho

  As a small in-house dev department, we only have experience with developing applications for our intranet. We use the existing Active Directory for user account management. It contains the accounts of all company employees and many (but not all) of the business partners we have a cooperation with. Now, the top management wants a technology exchange application, and I am the lead dev on the new project. Basically, it is a database containing our know-how, with a web frontend. Our employees, our cooperating business partners, and people who wish to become our cooperating business partners should have access to it and see what technologies we have, so they can trade for them with the department which owns them. The technologies are not patented, but very valuable to competitors, so the department bosses are paranoid about somebody unauthorized gaining access to their technology description. This constraint necessitates a nightmarishly complicated multi-dimensional RBAC-hybrid model. As the Active Directory doesn't even contain all the information needed to infer the roles I use, I will have to manage roles plus per-technology per-user granted access exceptions within my system. The current plan is to use Active Directory for authentication. This will result in a multi-hour registration process for our business partners where the database owner has to manually create logins in our Active Directory and send them credentials. If I manage the logins in my own system, we could improve the usability a lot, for example by letting people have an active (but unprivileged) account as soon as they register. It seems to me that, after I am having a users table in the DB anyway (and managing ugly details like storing historical user IDs so that recycled user IDs within the Active Directory don't unexpectedly get rights to view someone's technologies), the additional complexity from implementing authentication functionality will be minimal. Therefore, I am starting to lean towards doing my own user login management and forgetting the AD altogether. On the other hand, I see some reasons to stay with Active Directory. First, the conventional wisdom I have heard from experienced programmers is to not do your own user management if you can avoid it. Second, we have code I can reuse for connection to the active directory, while I would have to code the authentication if done in-system (and my boss has clearly stated that getting the project delivered on time has much higher priority than delivering a system with high usability). Third, I am not a very experienced developer (this is my first lead position) and have never done user management before, so I am afraid that I am overlooking some important reasons to use the AD, or that I am underestimating the amount of work left to do my own authentication. I would like to know if there are more reasons to go with the AD authentication mechanism. Specifically, if I want to do my own authentication, what would I have to implement besides a secure connection for the login screen (which I would need anyway even if I am only transporting the pw to the AD), lookup of a password hash and a mechanism for password recovery (which will probably include manual identity verification, so no need for complex mTAN-like solutions)? And, if you have experience with such security-critical systems, which one would you use and why?

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• Monitoring Windows Azure Service Bus Endpoint with BizTalk 360?

  - by Michael Stephenson

  I'm currently working with a customer who is undergoing an initiative to expose some of their line of business applications to external partners and SAAS applications and as part of this we have been looking at using the Windows Azure Service Bus. For the first part of the project we were focused on some synchronous request response scenarios where an external application would use the Service Bus relay functionality to get data from some internal applications. When we were looking at the operational monitoring side of the solution it was obvious that although most of the normal server monitoring capabilities would be required for the on premise components we would have to look at new approaches to validate that the operation of the service from outside of the organization was working as expected. A number of months ago one of my colleagues Elton Stoneman wrote about an approach I have introduced with a number of clients in the past where we implement a diagnostics service in each service component we build. This service would allow us to make a call which would flex some of the working parts of the system to prove it was working within any SLA. This approach is discussed on the following article: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman/archive/2011/12/12/the-value-of-a-diagnostics-service.aspx In our solution we wanted to take the same approach but we had to consider that the service clients were external to the service. We also had to consider that by going through Windows Azure Service Bus it's not that easy to make most of your standard monitoring solutions just give you an easy way to do this. In a previous article I have described how you can use BizTalk 360 to monitor things using a custom extension to the Web Endpoint Manager and I felt that we could use this approach to provide an excellent way to monitor our service bus endpoint. The previous article is available on the following link: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2012/09/12/150696.aspx   The Monitoring Solution BizTalk 360 currently has an easy way to hook up the endpoint manager to a url which it will then call and if a successful response is returned it then considers the endpoint to be in a healthy state. We would take advantage of this by creating an ASP.net web page which would be called by BizTalk 360 and behind this page we would implement the functionality to call the diagnostics service on our Service Bus endpoint. The ASP.net page could include logic to work out how to handle the response from the diagnostics service. For example if the overall result of the diagnostics service was successful but the call to the diagnostics service was longer than a certain amount of time then we could return an error and indicate the service is taking too long. The following diagram illustrates the monitoring pattern.   The diagnostics service which is hosted in the line of business application allows us to ping a simple message through the Azure Service Bus relay to the WCF services in the LOB application and we they get a response back indicating that the service is working fine. To implement this I used the exact same approach I described in my previous post to create a custom web page which calls the diagnostics service and then it would return an HTTP response code which would depend on the error condition returned or a 200 if it was successful. One of the limitations of this approach is that the competing consumer pattern for listening to messages from service bus means that you cannot guarantee which server would process your diagnostics check message but with BizTalk 360 you could simply add multiple endpoint checks so that it could access the individual on-premise web servers directly to ensure that each server is working fine and then check that messages can also be processed through the cloud. Conclusion It took me about 15 minutes to get a proof of concept of this up and running which was able to monitor our web services which had been exposed via Windows Azure Service Bus. I was then able to inherit all of the monitoring benefits of BizTalk 360 to provide an enterprise class monitoring solution for our cloud enabled API.

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• Test Drive for Partners on Oracle Endeca Information Discovery

  - by Mike.Hallett(at)Oracle-BI&EPM

  Normal 0 false false false EN-GB 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; 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-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;} Specifically for Oracle Partners, this half-day hands-on workshop allows you to experience Information Discovery from Oracle in order to: Understand Information Discovery and how it compliments classic BI solutions Use Search and Guided Navigation to see how structured and unstructured information can be rapidly brought together to unlock hidden value Explore all of your data in any format and from any source including social media, market surveys and reports Lay the foundation for helping business users who need fast answers to new questions Experience the amazing performance of Endeca on Oracle's in memory Exalytics machine Agenda After an introduction to Oracle Endeca Information Discovery, follow a self-paced, supervised, hands-on tutorial where you will see how easy it is to: Use Guided Navigation and Search to explore structured and unstructured data Rapidly integrate new and changing data sources such as Social Media Build new Discovery user interfaces Rapidly respond to changing business needs and data environments And ask questions of Oracle's Business Analytics experts throughout When 14th March 2013, Registration 9:00 a.m. - finish by 1:00 p.m.      Normal 0 false false false EN-GB 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; 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-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;} Register Now What: Oracle Endeca Information Discovery Test Drive Where: Oracle City Office, 1 South Place, London, EC2M 2RB

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• New Oracle BI Applications released

  - by THE

  Oracle has just released two new Applications for Oracle Business Intelligence Analytics with the Normal 0 21 false false false DE 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} 7.9.6.x Extension Pack: Normal 0 21 false false false DE 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} · Oracle Manufacturing Analytics, part of the Oracle BI Applications product family, helps discrete and process manufacturing organizations optimize their supply networks by integrating data from across the enterprise value chain, thereby enabling executives, operations managers, cost accountants and production supervisors to make informed and actionable decisions related to manufacturing execution. Normal 0 21 false false false DE 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} · Oracle Enterprise Asset Management Analytics, part of the Oracle BI Applications product family, offers complete and enhanced visibility to enterprise-wide maintenance information. Pre-built reports covering Maintenance History, Maintenance Cost Analysis and Maintenance Work Orders, provide Maintenance Managers information to maximize performance, identify potential issues much in advance, and address them before they escalate into serious problems.  More Information about the existing Business Intelligence Analytics Applications can be found on this page: http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/ent-performance-bi/bi-applications-066544.html If you are not familiar with Oracle Manufacturing or Oracle Enterprise Asset Management, these PDFs might get you started: http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/060289.pdf http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/057127.pdf

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• Oracle Executive Strategy Brief: Enterprise-Grade Cloud Applications

  - by B Shashikumar

  Cloud Computing has clearly evolved into one of the dominant secular trends in the industry. Organizations are looking to the cloud to change how they buy and consume IT. And its no longer about just lower up-front costs. The cloud promises to deliver greater agility and free up resources to focus on innovation versus running and maintaining systems. But are organizations actually realizing these benefits? The full promise of cloud is not being realized by customers who entrust their business to multiple niche cloud providers. While almost 9 out of 10 companies  expect more IT agility with cloud, only 47% are actually getting it (Source: 2011 State of Cloud Survey by Symantec). These niche cloud customers have also seen the promises of lower costs, efficiency gains, improved security, and compliance go unfulfilled. Having one cloud provider for customer relationship management (CRM) and another for human capital management (HCM), and then trying to glue these proprietary systems together while integrating to a back-office financial system can add to complexity and long-term costs. Completing a business process or generating an integrated report is cumbersome, and leverages incomplete data. Why can’t niche cloud providers deliver on the full promise of cloud? It’s simple: you still need to complete business processes. You still need reporting that enables you to take action using data from multiple systems. You still have to comply with SOX and other industry regulations. These requirements don’t go away just because you deploy in the cloud. Delivering lower up-front costs by enabling customers to buy software as a service (SaaS) is the easy part. To get real value that lasts longer than your quarterly report, it’s important to realize the benefits of cloud without compromising on functionality and while having the right level of control and flexibility. This is the true promise of cloud. Oracle’s cloud strategy centers around delivering the benefits of cloud—without compromise. We uniquely empower our customers with complete solutions and choice. From the richest functionality to integrated reporting and great user experience. It’s all available in the cloud. And it works not just with other Oracle cloud applications, but with your existing Oracle and third-party systems as well. This helps protect your current investments and extend their value as you journey to the cloud. We’ve made the necessary investments not only in our applications but also in the underlying technology that makes it all run—from the platform down to the hardware and operating system. We make it all. And we’ve engineered it to work together and be highly optimized for our customers, in the cloud. With Oracle enterprise-grade cloud applications, you get the benefits of cloud plus more power, more choice, and more confidence. Read more about how you can realize the true advantage of Cloud with Oracle Enterprise-grade Cloud applications in the Oracle Executive Strategy Brief here.  You can also attend an Oracle Cloud Conference event at a city near you. Register here. 

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• Where should instantiated classes be stored?

  - by Eric C.

  I'm having a bit of a design dilemma here. I'm writing a library that consists of a bunch of template classes that are designed to be used as a base for creating content. For example: public class Template { public string Name {get; set;} public string Description {get; set;} public string Attribute1 {get; set;} public string Attribute2 {get; set;} public Template() { //constructor } public void DoSomething() { //does something } ... } The problem is, not only is the library providing the templates, it will also supply quite a few predefined templates which are instances of these template classes. The question is, where do I put these instances of the templates? The three solutions I've come up with so far are: 1) Provide serialized instances of the templates as files. On the one hand, this solution would keep the instances separated from the library itself, which is nice, but it would also potentially add complexity for the user. Even if we provided methods for loading/deserializing the files, they'd still have to deal with a bunch of files, and some kind of config file so the app knows where to look for those files. Plus, creating the template files would probably require a separate app, so if the user wanted to stick with the files method of storing templates, we'd have to provide some kind of app for creating the template files. Also, this requires external dependencies for testing the templates in the user's code. 2) Add readonly instances to the template class Example: public class Template { public string Name {get; set;} public string Description {get; set;} public string Attribute1 {get; set;} public string Attribute2 {get; set;} public Template PredefinedTemplate { get { Template templateInstance = new Template(); templateInstance.Name = "Some Name"; templateInstance.Description = "A description"; ... return templateInstance; } } public Template() { //constructor } public void DoSomething() { //does something } ... } This method would be convenient for users, as they would be able to access the predefined templates in code directly, and would be able to unit test code that used them. The drawback here is that the predefined templates pollute the Template type namespace with a bunch of extra stuff. I suppose I could put the predefined templates in a different namespace to get around this drawback. The only other problem with this approach is that I'd have to basically duplicate all the namespaces in the library in the predefined namespace (e.g. Templates.SubTemplates and Predefined.Templates.SubTemplates) which would be a pain, and would also make refactoring more difficult. 3) Make the templates abstract classes and make the predefined templates inherit from those classes. For example: public abstract class Template { public string Name {get; set;} public string Description {get; set;} public string Attribute1 {get; set;} public string Attribute2 {get; set;} public Template() { //constructor } public void DoSomething() { //does something } ... } and public class PredefinedTemplate : Template { public PredefinedTemplate() { this.Name = "Some Name"; this.Description = "A description"; this.Attribute1 = "Some Value"; ... } } This solution is pretty similar to #2, but it ends up creating a lot of classes that don't really do anything (none of our predefined templates are currently overriding behavior), and don't have any methods, so I'm not sure how good a practice this is. Has anyone else had any experience with something like this? Is there a best practice of some kind, or a different/better approach that I haven't thought of? I'm kind of banging my head against a wall trying to figure out the best way to go. Thanks!

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• Options for different domain and hosting

  - by Carl

  The situation I have a hosting service (one.com) on which I have installed a wordpress.org site in a subdirectory 'wordpress': myhost.com/wordpress/ (myhost.com is actually my own domain, but it already has contents and I don't want wordpress/ to appear in the root of that domain.) I want to use a second domain for this site. Thinking I would be able to forward to the wordpress site without problems, I registered the domain at GoDaddy.com: mydomain.com What I want So when my visitors type in mydomaind.com, I want them to see the contents on myhost.com/wordpress/, and the same for all subpages (mydomain.com/a/subpage fetches from myhost.com/wordpress/a/subpage). Just a redirect isn't enough, I want my visitors to see only mydomain.com as their domain. Some notes If I set up forward with URL masking at GoDaddy, they just give a full frame, pointing to myhost.com/wordpress/. This isn't good enough for me, since mydomain.com will always show up in the adress bar, also for subpages (I want mydomain/a/subpage to show in the adress bar for a subpage). I believe this could in principle be done with a .htaccess file with URL rewriting, but I have no hosting with GoDaddy so I can't upload such a file there. Hosting with GoDaddy is very expensive (of course) so I don't want to do that. I don't think I can use DNS settings; the host of mydomain.com says they don't allow anyone else to point to their name servers. If possible, I wouldn't want to re-install the wordpress site, it would take quite some time. I'd prefer to keep it at myhost.com/wordpress/ (if possible) Anything involving transferring the domain is supposed to take 5-7 working days. I would need my site up-and-running earlier than that, so I'd like to avoid it if possible. Am I locked in? As it seems, I am rather locked-in with GoDaddy. I can't use the domain with .htaccess since I can't upload such a file (and won't pay for hosting by GoDaddy). I can't use any of their forward options since none of them do what I want (one just forwards, the one that masks the URL does it with frames). Would you agree? Possible solutions Transfer the domain to any hosting service with reasonable hosting pricing, as opposed to GoDaddy (I'd probably use one.com, the same host as for myhost.com, in that case), and there either re-install wordpress on the new account, or use .htaccess with URL rewrite on the new account to fetch the contents from myhost.com/wordpress/. Can this be set-up to work with sub-pages as well? And visitors won't ever see "myhost.com/wordpress", just "mydomain.com"? E.i., mydomain.com/a/subpage/ wold fetch from myhost.com/wordpress/a/subpage/? This might be a long shot but: Find some free (preferrably) hosting allowing to point to their nameservers Make DNS settings at GoDaddy so that my domain appears at the site above at that site, put a .htaccess file with URL rewriting to forward to myhost.com/wordpress/ Could this be possible? What services could I use in that case? As I see it, this would be the only way not to have to transfer a domain (taking 5-7 working days) and not having to re-install the wordpress site. Sorry for the long question. All info and ideas are welcome.

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• Cloud – the forecast is improving

  - by Rob Farley

  There is a lot of discussion about “the cloud”, and how that affects people’s data stories. Today the discussion enters the realm of T-SQL Tuesday, hosted this month by Jorge Segarra. Over the years, companies have invested a lot in making sure that their data is good, and I mean every aspect of it – the quality of it, the security of it, the performance of it, and more. Experts such as those of us at LobsterPot Solutions have helped these companies with this, and continue to work with clients to make sure that data is a strong part of their business, not an oversight. Whether business intelligence systems are being utilised or not, every business needs to be able to rely on its data, and have the confidence in it. Data should be a foundation upon which a business is built. In the past, data had been stored in paper-based systems. Filing cabinets stored vital information. Today, people have server rooms with storage of various kinds, recognising that filing cabinets don’t necessarily scale particularly well. It’s easy to ‘lose’ data in a filing cabinet, when you have people who need to make sure that the sheets of paper are in the right spot, and that you know how things are stored. Databases help solve that problem, but still the idea of a large filing cabinet continues, it just doesn’t involve paper. If something happens to the physical ‘filing cabinet’, then the problems are larger still. Then the data itself is under threat. Many clients have generators in case the power goes out, redundant cables in case the connectivity dies, and spare servers in other buildings just in case they’re required. But still they’re maintaining filing cabinets. You see, people like filing cabinets. There’s something to be said for having your data ‘close’. Even if the data is not in readable form, living as bits on a disk somewhere, the idea that its home is ‘in the building’ is comforting to many people. They simply don’t want to move their data anywhere else. The cloud offers an alternative to this, and the human element is an obstacle. By leveraging the cloud, companies can have someone else look after their filing cabinet. A lot of people really don’t like the idea of this, partly because the administrators of the data, those people who could potentially log in with escalated rights and see more than they should be allowed to, who need to be trusted to respond if there’s a problem, are now a faceless entity in the cloud. But this doesn’t mean that the cloud is bad – this is simply a concern that some people may have. In new functionality that’s on its way, we see other hybrid mechanisms that mean that people can leverage parts of the cloud with less fear. Companies can use cloud storage to hold their backup data, for example, backups that have been encrypted and are therefore not able to be read by anyone (including administrators) who don’t have the right password. Companies can have a database instance that runs locally, but which has its data files in the cloud, complete with Transparent Data Encryption if needed. There can be a higher level of control, making the change easier to accept. Hybrid options allow people who have had fears (potentially very justifiable) to take a new look at the cloud, and to start embracing some of the benefits of the cloud (such as letting someone else take care of storage, high availability, and more) without losing the feeling of the data being close. @rob_farley

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• Thinking Local, Regional and Global

  - by Apeksha Singh-Oracle

  The FIFA World Cup tournament is the biggest single-sport competition: it’s watched by about 1 billion people around the world. Every four years each national team’s manager is challenged to pull together a group players who ply their trade across the globe. For example, of the 23 members of Brazil’s national team, only four actually play for Brazilian teams, and the rest play in England, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Ukraine. Each country’s national league, each team and each coach has a unique style. Getting all these “localized” players to work together successfully as one unit is no easy feat. In addition to $35 million in prize money, much is at stake – not least national pride and global bragging rights until the next World Cup in four years time. Achieving economic integration in the ASEAN region by 2015 is a bit like trying to create the next World Cup champion by 2018. The team comprises Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. All have different languages, currencies, cultures and customs, rules and regulations. But if they can pull together as one unit, the opportunity is not only great for business and the economy, but it’s also a source of regional pride. BCG expects by 2020 the number of firms headquartered in Asia with revenue exceeding $1 billion will double to more than 5,000. Their trade in the region and with the world is forecast to increase to 37% of an estimated $37 trillion of global commerce by 2020 from 30% in 2010. Banks offering transactional banking services to the emerging market place need to prepare to repond to customer needs across the spectrum – MSMEs, SMEs, corporates and multi national corporations. Customers want innovative, differentiated, value added products and services that provide: • Pan regional operational independence while enabling single source of truth at a regional level • Regional connectivity and Cash & Liquidity  optimization • Enabling Consistent experience for their customers  by offering standardized products & services across all ASEAN countries • Multi-channel & self service capabilities / access to real-time information on liquidity and cash flows • Convergence of cash management with supply chain and trade finance While enabling the above to meet customer demands, the need for a comprehensive and robust credit management solution for effective regional banking operations is a must to manage risk. According to BCG, Asia-Pacific wholesale transaction-banking revenues are expected to triple to $139 billion by 2022 from $46 billion in 2012. To take advantage of the trend, banks will have to manage and maximize their own growth opportunities, compete on a broader scale, manage the complexity within the region and increase efficiency. They’ll also have to choose the right operating model and regional IT platform to offer: • Account Services • Cash & Liquidity Management • Trade Services & Supply Chain Financing • Payments • Securities services • Credit and Lending • Treasury services The core platform should be able to balance global needs and local nuances. Certain functions need to be performed at a regional level, while others need to be performed on a country level. Financial reporting and regulatory compliance are a case in point. The ASEAN Economic Community is in the final lap of its preparations for the ultimate challenge: becoming a formidable team in the global league. Meanwhile, transaction banks are designing their own hat trick: implementing a world-class IT platform, positioning themselves to repond to customer needs and establishing a foundation for revenue generation for years to come. Anand Ramachandran Senior Director, Global Banking Solutions Practice Oracle Financial Services Global Business Unit

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• Is Your Company Social on the Inside?

  - by Mike Stiles

  As we talk about the extension of social from an outbound-facing marketing tool to a platform that will reach across the entire enterprise, servicing multiple functions of that enterprise, it might be time to take a look at how social can be effectively employed for internal communications. Remember the printed company newsletter? Yeah, nobody reads it. Remember the emailed company newsletter? Yeah, nobody reads it. Why not? Shouldn’t your employees care about the company more than anything else in life and be voraciously hungry for any information related to it? The more realistic prospect is that a company’s employees don’t behave much differently at work where information is concerned than they do in their personal lives. They “tune in” to information that’s immediately relevant to them, that peaks their interest, and/or that’s presented in a visually engaging way. That currently makes an internal social platform the most ideal way to communicate within the organization. It not only facilitates more immediate, more targeted (and thus more relevant) messaging from the company out to employees, it sets a stage for employees to communicate with each other and efficiently get answers to questions from peers. It’s a collaboration tool on steroids. If you build such an internal social portal and you do it right, will employees use it? Considering social media has officially been declared more addictive than cigarettes, booze and sex…probably. But what does it mean to do an internal social platform “right”? The bar has been set pretty high. Your employees are used to Twitter and Facebook, and would roll their eyes at anything less simple or harder to navigate than those. All the Facebook best practices would apply to your internal social as well, including the importance of managing posting frequency, using photos and video, moderation & response, etc. And don’t worry, you won’t be the first to jump in. WPP's global digital agency Possible has its own social network called Colab. Nestle has “The Nest.” Red Robin’s got one. I myself got an in-depth look at McGraw-Hill’s internal social platform at Blogwell NYC. Some of these companies are building their own platforms, others are buying them off the shelf or customizing readymade solutions. But you won’t be the last either. Prescient Digital Media and the IABC learned 39% of companies don’t offer employees any social tools. Not a social network, not discussion forums, not even IM. And a great many continue to ban the use of Facebook and Twitter on the premises. That’s pretty astonishing since social has become as essential a modern day communications tool as the telephone. But such holdouts will pay a big price for being mired in fear while competitors exploit social connections unchallenged. Fish where the fish are. If social has become the way people communicate and take in information, let that be the way communication is trafficked in the organization.

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• Migrating VB6 to HTML5 is not a fiction - Customer success story

  - by Webgui

  All of you VB developers in the present or past would probably find it hard to believe that the old VB code can be migrated and modernized into the latest .NET based HTML5 without having to rewrite the application. But we have been working on such tools for the past couple of years and already have several real world applications that were fully 'transposed' from VB6. The solution is called Instant CloudMove and its main tool is called the TranspositionStudio. It is a unique solution that relies on the concept of transposition. Transposition comes from mathematics and music and refers to exchanging elements while everything else remains the same or moving an element as is from one environment to another. This means that we are taking the source code and put it in a modern technological environment with relatively few adjustments.The concept is based on a set of Mapping Expressions which are basically links between an element in the source environment and one in the target environment that has the same functionality. About 95% of the code is usually mapped out-of-the-box and the rest is handled with easy-to-use mapping tools designed for Visual Studio developers providing them with a familiar environment and concepts for completing the mapping and allowing them to extend and customize existing mapping expressions. The solution is also based on a circular workflow that enables developers to make any changes as required until the result is satisfying.As opposed to existing migration solutions that offer automation are usually a “black box” to the user, the transposition concept enables full visibility, flexibility and control over the code and process at all times allowing to also add/change functionalities or upgrade the UI within the process and tools.This is exactly the case with our customer’s aging VB6 PMS (Property Management System) which needed a technological update as well as a design refresh. The decision was to move the VB6 application which had about 1 million lines of code into the latest web technology. Since the application was initially written 13 years ago and had many upgrades since the code must be very patchy and includes unused sections. As a result, the company Mihshuv Group considered rewriting the entire application in Java since it already had the knowledge. Rewrite would allow starting with a clean slate and designing functionality, database architecture, UI without any constraints. On the other hand, rewrite entitles a long and detailed specification work as well as a thorough QA and this translates into a long project with high risk and costs.So the company looked for a migration solution as an alternative; the research lead to Gizmox and after examining the technology it was decided to perform a hybrid project which would include an automatic transposition of the core of the VB6 application (200,000 lines of code) while they redesigning the UI, adding new functionality, deleting unused code and rewriting about 140 reports with Crystal Reports will be done manually using Visual WebGui development tools.The migration part of the project was completed in 65 days by 3 developers from Mihshuv Group guided by Gizmox migration experts while the rewrite and UI upgrade tasks took about the same. So in only a few months period Mihshuv Group generated an up-to-date product, written in the latest Web technology with modern, friendly UI and improved functionality. Guest selection screen of the original VB6 PMS Guest selection screen on the new web–based PMS Compared to the initial plan to rewrite the entire application in Java, the hybrid migration/rewrite approach taken by Mihshuv Group using Gizmox technology proved as a great decision. In terms of time and cost there were substantial savings; from a project that was priced for at least a year (without taking into account the huge risk and uncertainty) it became a few months project only. More about this and other customer stories can be found here

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• Auto-organized / smart inventory system?

  - by VeXe

  for the past week I've been working on an inventory system with Unity3D. At first I got help from the guys at Design3 but it wasn't too long till we split path, because I really didn't like the way they did their code, it didn't have any smell of OOP whatsoever. I took it further steps ahead - items take more than one slot, advanced placement system (items tries their best to find the best close fit), local mouse system (mouse gets trapped in active bag area), etc. Here's a demo of my work. What we would like to have in our game, is an auto-organizing feature - not auto-sort. We want this feature because our inventory's going to be in 'real-time' - not like in Resident Evil 1,2,3 etc where you would pause the game and do things in your inventory. Now imagine your self in a sticky situation surrounded by zombies, and you don't have bullets, you look around, you see that there are bullets nearby on the ground, so you go for them and try to pick them up, but they don't fit! you look at your inventory and find out that if you reorganize some of the items, it will fit! - now the player - in that situation doesn't have time to reorganize because he's surrounded with zombies and will die if he stops and organizes the inventory to make space (remember inventory in real-time, no pausing) - wouldn't it be nice for that to happen automatically? - Yes! (I believe this has been implemented in some games like Dungeon siege or something, so sure it's doable) take a look at this picture for example: Yes, so if you auto-sort the issue you will get your spaces but it's bad because: 1- Expensive: it doesn't need a whole sort operation to free those spaces, in the first picture, just slide the red item at the bottom to the very left, and you get the same spaces that you got from the auto-sort. 2- It's annoying to the player: "Who the F told you to re-order my stuff?" I'm not asking for "How to write the code" for this, I'm just asking for some guidance, where to look, what algorithms are involved? Is this something related to graphs and shortest path stuff? I hope not cuz I didn't manage to continue my college studies :/ But even if it is, just tell me and I will learn the stuff related. Notice there could be more than just one solution. So I guess the first thing I have to do is figure out if the situation is 'solvable' - if I know how to determine if a situation is solvable or not, then I can 'solve' it. I just need to know the conditions that makes it 'solvable'. And I believe there must be some algorithm/data structure for this. Here's a pic for more than one solution of trying to fit a 1x3 item: The arrows show just one of the solutions, but if you look you will find more than one. This is what I ultimately not auto-sorting but find a solution and applying it. Note that if I spend time on it I will come up with a way to solve it, but it wouldn't be the best way, it's like, holding a car wheel with your feet instead of your hands! XD Or just like trying to solve an issue that requires arrays, but you're not yet aware of their existence! So what is the right approach to this? Hope somebody helps, thanks a lot in advance :)

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