Search Results

Search found 1493 results on 60 pages for 'cycle'.

Page 46/60 | < Previous Page | 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53  | Next Page >

• SOA Community Newsletter October 2013

  - by JuergenKress

  Dear SOA & BPM Partner Community member, Our October newsletter edition focuses on Oracle OpenWorld 2013, highlights, keynotes and all presentations. Thanks to all partners who made the conference a huge success. If you could not come to San Francisco you will find all the details within this newsletter. As the newsletter edition contains a lot of content thus we have three sections - SOA, BPM & ACM, and AppAdvantage & UX. Make sure you share your content with the community, best via twitter @soacommunity #soacommunity! What is new in SOA Suite 12c? At OOW the product management team demonstrated some of the key features of the upcoming version. The important SOA topics are mobile integration and cloud integration - make sure you re-use your existing SOA platform! Bruce Tierney showcased the Agilent mobile integration and you try the new Mobile Order Management for EBS GSE Demo using middleware technology. On cloud integration the product management team presented several OOW sessions and published two whitepapers. As SOA becomes mature the awareness for SOA Governance continues to raise, Introducing Oracle Enterprise Repository Express Workflows and watch Luis Weir: Challenges to Implementing SOA Governance. Thanks to Ronald for the SOA Made Simple | Introduction to SOA series, the next article in the Industrial SOA series is SOA and User Interfaces (UI). Have you achieved successful BPM implementation? Nominate your customer references for the Gartner Business Process Management Excellence Awards 2014. Do you want to showcase the latest BPM Suite? Make sure you use the hosted BPM PS6 (11.1.1.7) demo. Do you want to become an expert in BPM Suite? Attend one of our BPM Bootcamps in Germany, Netherland, Spain or UK! If you can not make it – we offer plenty of on-demand content Advanced BPM Scenarios & BPM Architecture Topics & Process Modeling and Life Cycle & Adaptive Case Management & Smart Application Extensibility with Oracle Process Accelerators. I would also recommend to watch great introduction to Adaptive Case Management the on-demand webcast with Bruce Silver & Ajay Khanna. Thanks to Mark Foster from the A-team for the ACM article series & Leon Smiers for their blog posts. If you accomplished a SOA Suite or BPM Suite project and want to become a certified SOA or BPM expert, we are offering again free vouchers to become a certified SOA & BPM expert (limited to partners in Europe Middle East and Africa). Don't miss this opportunity and become Specialized! Best regards, Jürgen Kress To read the newsletter please visit http://tinyurl.com/soaNewsOctober2013 (OPN Account required) To become a member of the SOA Partner Community please register at http://www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Mix Forum Technorati Tags: newsletter,SOA Community newsletter,SOA Community,Oracle,OPN,Jürgen Kress

  Read the article

• Abstracting entity caching in XNA

  - by Grofit

  I am in a situation where I am writing a framework in XNA and there will be quite a lot of static (ish) content which wont render that often. Now I am trying to take the same sort of approach I would use when doing non game development, where I don't even think about caching until I have finished my application and realise there is a performance problem and then implement a layer of caching over whatever needs it, but wrap it up so nothing is aware its happening. However in XNA the way we would usually cache would be drawing our objects to a texture and invalidating after a change occurs. So if you assume an interface like so: public interface IGameComponent { void Update(TimeSpan elapsedTime); void Render(GraphicsDevice graphicsDevice); } public class ContainerComponent : IGameComponent { public IList<IGameComponent> ChildComponents { get; private set; } // Assume constructor public void Update(TimeSpan elapsedTime) { // Update anything that needs it } public void Render(GraphicsDevice graphicsDevice) { foreach(var component in ChildComponents) { // draw every component } } } Then I was under the assumption that we just draw everything directly to the screen, then when performance becomes an issue we just add a new implementation of the above like so: public class CacheableContainerComponent : IGameComponent { private Texture2D cachedOutput; private bool hasChanged; public IList<IGameComponent> ChildComponents { get; private set; } // Assume constructor public void Update(TimeSpan elapsedTime) { // Update anything that needs it // set hasChanged to true if required } public void Render(GraphicsDevice graphicsDevice) { if(hasChanged) { CacheComponents(graphicsDevice); } // Draw cached output } private void CacheComponents(GraphicsDevice graphicsDevice) { // Clean up existing cache if needed var cachedOutput = new RenderTarget2D(...); graphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(renderTarget); foreach(var component in ChildComponents) { // draw every component } graphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(null); } } Now in this example you could inherit, but your Update may become a bit tricky then without changing your base class to alert you if you had changed, but it is up to each scenario to choose if its inheritance/implementation or composition. Also the above implementation will re-cache within the rendering cycle, which may cause performance stutters but its just an example of the scenario... Ignoring those facts as you can see that in this example you could use a cache-able component or a non cache-able one, the rest of the framework needs not know. The problem here is that if lets say this component is drawn mid way through the game rendering, other items will already be within the default drawing buffer, so me doing this would discard them, unless I set it to be persisted, which I hear is a big no no on the Xbox. So is there a way to have my cake and eat it here? One simple solution to this is make an ICacheable interface which exposes a cache method, but then to make any use of this interface you would need the rest of the framework to be cache aware, and check if it can cache, and to then do so. Which then means you are polluting and changing your main implementations to account for and deal with this cache... I am also employing Dependency Injection for alot of high level components so these new cache-able objects would be spat out from that, meaning no where in the actual game would they know they are caching... if that makes sense. Just incase anyone asked how I expected to keep it cache aware when I would need to new up a cachable entity.

  Read the article

• Oracle Announces Release of PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 Feature Pack 2

  - by Jay Zuckert

  Big things sometimes come in small packages.  Today Oracle announced the availability of PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 Feature Pack 2 which delivers a new HR self service user experience that fundamentally changes the way managers and employees interact with the HCM system.  Earlier this year we reviewed a number of new concept designs with our Customer Advisory Boards.  With the accelerated feature pack development cycle we have adopted, these innovations are  now available to all 9.1 customers without the need for an upgrade.   There are no new products that need to be licensed for the capabilities below. For more details on Feature Pack 2, please see the Oracle press release. Included in Feature Pack 2 is a new search-based menu-free navigation that allows managers to search for employees by name and take actions directly from the secure search results.  For example, a manager can now simply type in part of an employee’s first or last name and receive meaningful results from documents related to performance, compensation, learning, recruiting, career planning and more.   Delivered actions can be initiated directly from these search results and the actions are securely tied to HCM security and user role.  The feature pack also includes new pages that will enable managers to be more productive by aggregating key employee data into a single page.  The new Manager Dashboard and Talent Summary provide a consolidated view of data related to a manager’s team and individual team members, respectively.   The Manager Dashboard displays information relevant to their direct reports including team learning, objective alignment, alerts, and pending approvals requiring their attention.  The Talent Summary provides managers with an aggregated view of talent management-related data for an individual employee including performance history, salary history, succession options, total rewards, and competencies.   The information displayed in both the Manager Dashboard and Talent Summary is configurable by system administrators and can be personalized by each of your managers. Other Feature Pack 2 enhancements allow organizations to administer Matrix or Dotted-Line Relationship Management, which addresses the challenge of tracking and maintaining project-based organizations that cut across the enterprise and geographic regions.  From within the Company Directory and Org Viewer organization charts, managers now have access to manager self-service transactions from related actions.  More than 70 manager and employee self-service transactions have been tied into the related action framework accessible from Org Viewer, Manager Dashboard, Talent Summary and Secure Enterprise Search (SES) results.  In addition to making it easier to access manager self-service transactions, the feature pack delivers streamlined transaction pages making everyday tasks such as promoting an employee faster and more efficient. With the delivery of PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 Feature Pack 2, Oracle continues to deliver on its commitment to our PeopleSoft customers.  With this feature pack, HCM 9.1 customers will be able to deploy the newest functionality quickly, without a major release upgrade, and realize added value from their existing PeopleSoft investment.    For customers newly deploying 9.1, a new download with all of Feature Pack 2  will be available early next year.   This will aslo include recertified upgrade paths from 8.8, 8.9 and 9.0, for customers in the upgrade process.

  Read the article

• PASS: International Travels

  - by Bill Graziano

  Nihao!  One of the largest changes PASS is going through is the the expansion outside the US and Canada.  We’ve had international chapters and events in Europe since the early 2000’s.  But nothing on the scale we’re seeing now.  Since January 1st there have been 18 SQL Saturday events outside North America and 19 events in North America.  We hope to have three international SQLRally events outside the US in FY13 (budget willing).  I don’t know the exact percentage of chapters outside the US but it’s got be 50% or higher. We recently started an effort to remake the Board to better reflect the growing global face of PASS.  This involves assigning some Board seats to geographic regions.  You can ask questions about this in our feedback forum, participate in a Twitter chat or ask questions directly of Board members.  You can email me at if you’d like to ask a question directly.  We’re doing this very slowly and deliberately in hopes that a long communication cycle gives us a chance to address all the issues that our members will raise. After the Summit we passed a budget exception allocating an extra $20,000 for Board members to travel to local events.  I think it’s important for Board members to visit new areas and talk to more of our members.  I sent out an email asking where people had attended events outside their home city.  Here’s the list I got back: Albuquerque, Amsterdam, Boston, Brisbane, Chicago, Colorado Springs, Columbus, Dallas, Houston, Jacksonville, Las Vegas, London, Louisville, Minneapolis, New York City, Orange County, Orlando, Pensacola, Perth, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Redmond, Seattle, Silicon Valley, Sydney, Tampa Bay, Vancouver, Washington DC and Wellington.  (Disclaimer: Some of this travel was paid for by employers or Board members themselves.  Some of this travel may have been completed before the Summit.  That’s still one heck of a list!) The last SQL Saturday event this fiscal year is SQL Saturday Shanghai.  And that’s one I’m attending.  This is our first event in China and is being put on in cooperation with the local Microsoft office.  Hopefully this event will be the start of a growing community in China that includes chapters, SQL Saturdays and maybe a SQLRally or two in the future.  I’m excited to speak with people that are just starting down this path and watching this community grow. I encourage you to visit the PASS Global Growth site and read through the material there.  This is the biggest change we’ve made to our governance since I’ve been on the Board.  You need to understand how it affects you and how it affects the organization. And wish me luck on the 15 hour flight to Shanghai on Friday afternoon.  Rob Farley flies from Australia to the US for PASS events multiple times per year and I don’t know how he does it so often.  I think one of these is going to wipe me out.  (And Nihao (knee-how) is Chinese for Hello.)

  Read the article

• Cloud Apps News @#OOW12

  - by Natalia Rachelson

  All eyes were on Oracle this past week and the news cycle was in full swing. What better time to make some key announcements that were guaranteed to create buzz ... and so we did. The name of the game was Cloud! Here are the key Cloud announcements for Apps, which included Fusion Tap that enables mobility across all Cloud Apps, HCM customer momentum in the Cloud, and our very first ERP Cloud Services customer. Oracle Unveils Oracle Fusion Tap for the iPadOracle Fusion Tap - Productivity Amplified Anywhere, Anytime "Both the enterprise and technology providers must recognize the need to innovate and adapt for the increasing mobility of the workforce - not just for sales teams, but across the organization," said Carter Lusher, Research Fellow and Chief Analyst of Enterprise Applications Ecosystem, Ovum. "A mobile application that quickly and powerfully allows employees to make connections, analyze data, and complete activities at any time and wherever they may be located drives new levels of business value and enhances efficiency. Frankly, mobile access is no longer a 'nice to have' but a 'must have.'"  "The mobile workforce is a business reality, and Oracle Fusion Tap is an example of how Oracle delivers mobile and cloud innovations that fundamentally improve productivity and how we work," said Chris Leone, Senior Vice President of Application Development, Oracle. "With Oracle Fusion Tap users will have an all-in-one, easily extensible app that puts mission-critical data and colleague connection at their fingertips." The entire release is available here http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1855392 Customers Live on Oracle Fusion Human Capital ManagementOracle HCM Cloud Service Helps Power HR's Contribution to the Business "More than 25 of the 100-plus customers who have selected Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management (HCM) are already live. Ardent Leisure, Peach Aviation, Toshiba Medical Systems and Zillow have deployed Oracle HCM Cloud Service and are using it to transform their HR operations. They join companies such as Principal Financial Group and Elizabeth Arden, who are already using Oracle HCM Cloud Service to help manage international growth and deliver pervasive, role-based, configurable solutions to their employees. With these recent go-lives, Oracle takes a leading position in successfully bringing live HCM customers in the cloud."  "As a technology company, Zillow looked to a partner who could scale with us. Zillow has gone live on Oracle HCM Cloud Service, which will give us the ability automate and streamline HR operations for our employees in the near future," said Sarah Bilton, Senior Director HR, Zillow. Read the entire release here http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1859573 Lending Club Selects Oracle ERP Cloud Service to Help Increase Insight and EfficienciesOracle ERP Cloud Service Provides an Open Architecture, Best-of-Breed Decision-Making, and Scalability in the Cloud "Lending Club, the leading platform for investing in and obtaining personal loans, has selected Oracle ERP Cloud Service to help improve decision-making and workflow, implement robust reporting, and take advantage of the inherent scalability and cost savings provided by the cloud. With more than 76,000 borrowers and 90,000 investors Lending Club utilizes technology and innovation to reduce the cost of traditional banking and offer borrowers better rates and investors better returns.  After an extensive search, Lending Club selected Oracle ERP Cloud Service due to the breadth and depth of capabilities and ongoing innovation of Oracle ERP Cloud Service, as well as Oracle's open architecture, industry leadership and commitment to partners." "Lending Club is an innovative, data-intensive, high-growth company and we needed a solution and partner that could match us," said Carrie Dolan, CFO, Lending Club. "We conducted a thorough review of our options, and Oracle ERP Cloud Service was the clear winner in terms of capabilities and business value as well as commitment to us as a customer." Read the entire release here http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1859020

  Read the article

• Webcast Q&A: Hitachi Data Systems Improves Global Web Experiences with Oracle WebCenter

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  Last Thursday we had the third webcast in our WebCenter in Action webcast series, "Hitachi Data Systems Improves Global Web Experiences with Oracle WebCenter", where customer Sean Mattson from HDS and Rob Vandenberg from Oracle Partner Lingotek shared how Oracle WebCenter is powering Hitachi Data System’s externally facing website and providing a seamless experience for their customers. In case you missed it, here's a recap of the Q&A.   Sean Mattson, Hitachi Data Systems  Q: Did you run into any issues in the deployment of the platform?A: There were some challenges, we were one of the first enterprise ‘on premise’ installations for Lingotek and our WebCenter platform also has a lot of custom features.  There were a lot of iterations and back and forth working with Lingotek at first.  We both helped each other, learned a lot and in the end managed to resolve all issues and roll out a very compelling solution for HDS. Q: What has been the biggest benefit your end users have seen?A: Being able to manage and govern the content lifecycle globally and centrally and at the same time enabling the field to update, review and publish the incremental content changes without a lot of touchpoints has helped us streamline and simplify the entire publishing process. Q: Was there any resistance internally when implementing the solution? If so, how did you overcome that?A: I wouldn't say resistance as much as skepticism that we could actually deploy an automated and self publishing solution.  Even if a solution is great, adoption of a new process can be a challenge and we are still pursuing our adoption targets.  One of the most important aspects is to include lots of training and support materials and offer as much helpdesk type support as needed to get the field self sufficient and confident in the capabilities of the system.  Rob Vandenberg, Lingotek  Q: Are there any limitations regarding supported languages such as support for French Canadian and Indian languages?A: Lingotek supports all language pairs. Including right to left languages and double byte languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean Q: Is the Lingotek solution integrated with the new 11g release of WebCenter Sites? A: Yes! In fact, Lingotek is the first OVI partner for Oracle WebCenter Sites  Q: Can translation memories help to improve the accuracy of machine translation?A: One of the greatest long term strategic benefits of using Lingotek is the accumulation of translation memories, or past human translations. These TMs can be used to "train" statistical machine translation engines to have higher and higher quality. This virtuous cycle is ongoing and will consistently improve both machine and human translations.  Q: We have existing translation memories from previous work with our translation service provider. Can they be easily imported in to the Lingotek solution for re-use? Q: Yes, Lingotek is standards compliant. We support TM import in both the TMX and XLIFF formats. Q: If we use Lingotek as a service to do our professional translation and also use the Lingotek software solution, do we get the translation memories to give us a means of just translating future adds and changes ourselves? A: Yes, all the data is yours, always. Lingotek can provide both the integrated translation software as well as the professional translation services. All the content and translation memories are yours. Q: Can you give us an example of where community translation has proved to be successful?A: The key word here is community. If you have a community that cares about you, your content, and the rest of the community, then community translation can work for you. We've seen effective use cases in Product User Groups content, Support Communities, and other types of User Generated content, like wikis and blogs.   If you missed the webcast, be sure to catch the replay to see a live demonstration of WebCenter in action!   Hitachi Data Systems Improves Global Web Experiences with Oracle WebCenter from Oracle WebCenter

  Read the article

• Ask HTG: How Can I Check the Age of My Windows Installation?

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Curious about when you installed Windows and how long you’ve been chugging along without a system refresh? Read on as we show you a simple way to see how long-in-the-tooth your Windows installation is. Dear How-To Geek, It feels like it has been forever since I installed Windows 7 and I’m starting to wonder if some of the performance issues I’m experiencing have something to do with how long ago it was installed. It isn’t crashing or anything horrible, mind you, it just feels slower than it used to and I’m wondering if I should reinstall it to wipe the slate clean. Is there a simple way to determine the original installation date of Windows on its host machine? Sincerely, Worried in Windows Although you only intended to ask one question, you actually asked two. Your direct question is an easy one to answer (how to check the Windows installation date). The indirect question is, however, a little trickier (if you need to reinstall Windows to get a performance boost). Let’s start off with the easy one: how to check your installation date. Windows includes a handy little application just for the purposes of pulling up system information like the installation date, among other things. Open the Start Menu and type cmd in the run box (or, alternatively, press WinKey+R to pull up the run dialog and enter the same command). At the command prompt, type systeminfo.exe Give the application a moment to run; it takes around 15-20 seconds to gather all the data. You’ll most likely need to scroll back up in the console window to find the section at the top that lists operating system stats. What you care about is Original Install Date: We’ve been running the machine we tested the command on since August 23 2009. For the curious, that’s one month and a day after the initial public release of Windows 7 (after we were done playing with early test releases and spent a month mucking around in the guts of Windows 7 to report on features and flaws, we ran a new clean installation and kept on trucking). Now, you might be asking yourself: Why haven’t they reinstalled Windows in all that time? Haven’t things slowed down? Haven’t they upgraded hardware? The truth of the matter is, in most cases there’s no need to completely wipe your computer and start from scratch to resolve issues with Windows and, if you don’t bog your system down with unnecessary and poorly written software, things keep humming along. In fact, we even migrated this machine from a traditional mechanical hard drive to a newer solid-state drive back in 2011. Even though we’ve tested piles of software since then, the machine is still rather clean because 99% of that testing happened in a virtual machine. That’s not just a trick for technology bloggers, either, virtualizing is a handy trick for anyone who wants to run a rock solid base OS and avoid the bog-down-and-then-refresh cycle that can plague a heavily used machine. So while it might be the case that you’ve been running Windows 7 for years and heavy software installation and use has bogged your system down to the point a refresh is in order, we’d strongly suggest reading over the following How-To Geek guides to see if you can’t wrangle the machine into shape without a total wipe (and, if you can’t, at least you’ll be in a better position to keep the refreshed machine light and zippy): HTG Explains: Do You Really Need to Regularly Reinstall Windows? PC Cleaning Apps are a Scam: Here’s Why (and How to Speed Up Your PC) The Best Tips for Speeding Up Your Windows PC Beginner Geek: How to Reinstall Windows on Your Computer Everything You Need to Know About Refreshing and Resetting Your Windows 8 PC Armed with a little knowledge, you too can keep a computer humming along until the next iteration of Windows comes along (and beyond) without the hassle of reinstalling Windows and all your apps.         

  Read the article

• What You Can Learn from the NFL Referee Lockout

  - by Christina McKeon

  American football is a lot like religion. The fans are devoted followers that take brand loyalty to a whole new level. These fans that worship their teams each week showed that they are powerful customers whose voice has an impact. Yesterday, these fans proved that their opinion could force the hand of a large and powerful institution. With a three-month NFL referee lockout that seemed like it was nowhere close to resolution, the Green Bay Packers and the Seattle Seahawks competed last Monday night. For those of you that might have been out of the news cycle the past few days, Green Bay lost the game due to a controversial call that many experts and analysts agree should have resulted in Green Bay winning the game. Outrage ensued. The NFL had pulled replacement referees from the high school ranks, and these replacements did not have the knowledge and experience to handle high intensity NFL games. Fans protested about their customer experience. Their anger-filled rants were heard in social media, in the headlines of newspapers, on radio, and on national TV. Suddenly, the NFL was moved to reach an agreement with the referees. That agreement was reached late in the night on Wednesday with many believing that the referees had the upper hand forcing the owners into submission. Some might argue that the referees benefited, not the fans. Since the fans wanted qualified and competent referees, I would say the fans did benefit. The referees are scheduled to return to the field this Sunday, so the fans got what they wanted. What can you learn from this negative customer experience? Customers are in control. NFL owners thought they were controlling this situation with the upper hand over referees. The owners figured out they weren’t in control when their fans reacted negatively. Customers can make or break you more now than ever before, which is why it is more important to connect with them, engage them in a personal manner, and create rewarding relationships. Protect your brand. Whether knowingly or unknowingly, the NFL put their brand and each team’s brand at risk with replacement referees. Think about each business decision you make, and how it may impact your brand at different points in time. A decision that results in a gain today could result in a larger loss down the road. Customer experience matters. The NFL likely foresaw declining revenues in ticket sales, merchandising, advertising, and other areas if the lockout continued. While fans primarily spoke with their minds in the days following the Green Bay debacle, their wallets would be the next things to speak. Customer experience directly affects your success and is one of the few areas where you can differentiate your business. What would you do if your brand got such negative attention? Would you be prepared to navigate such stormy waters? Would you be able to prevent such a fiasco? If you don’t have a good answer to these questions, consider joining us October 3-5, 2012 at the Oracle Customer Experience Summit in San Francisco. You’ll have the opportunity to learn even more about customer experience from industry experts such as best-selling author Seth Godin, Paul Hagen and Kerry Bodine from Forrester Research, Inc., George Kembel from the Stanford d.School, Bruce Temkin of The Temkin Group, and Gene Alvarez from Gartner Inc.. There will also be plenty of your peers and customer experience experts available for networking and discussions.

  Read the article

• Oracle Fusion Supply Chain Management (SCM) Designs May Improve End User Productivity

  - by Applications User Experience

  By Applications User Experience on March 10, 2011 Michele Molnar, Senior Usability Engineer, Applications User Experience The Challenge: The SCM User Experience team, in close collaboration with product management and strategy, completely redesigned the user experience for Oracle Fusion applications. One of the goals of this redesign was to increase end user productivity by applying design patterns and guidelines and incorporating findings from extensive usability research. But a question remained: How do we know that the Oracle Fusion designs will actually increase end user productivity? The Test: To answer this question, the SCM Usability Engineers compared Oracle Fusion designs to their corresponding existing Oracle applications using the workflow time analysis method. The workflow time analysis method breaks tasks into a sequence of operators. By applying standard time estimates for all of the operators in the task, an estimate of the overall task time can be calculated. The workflow time analysis method has been recently adopted by the Applications User Experience group for use in predicting end user productivity. Using this method, a design can be tested and refined as needed to improve productivity even before the design is coded. For the study, we selected some of our recent designs for Oracle Fusion Product Information Management (PIM). The designs encompassed tasks performed by Product Managers to create, manage, and define products for their organization. (See Figure 1 for an example.) In applying this method, the SCM Usability Engineers collaborated with Product Management to compare the new Oracle Fusion Applications designs against Oracle’s existing applications. Together, we performed the following activities: Identified the five most frequently performed tasks Created detailed task scenarios that provided the context for each task Conducted task walkthroughs Analyzed and documented the steps and flow required to complete each task Applied standard time estimates to the operators in each task to estimate the overall task completion time Figure 1. The interactions on each Oracle Fusion Product Information Management screen were documented, as indicated by the red highlighting. The task scenario and script provided the context for each task.  The Results: The workflow time analysis method predicted that the Oracle Fusion Applications designs would result in productivity gains in each task, ranging from 8% to 62%, with an overall productivity gain of 43%. All other factors being equal, the new designs should enable these tasks to be completed in about half the time it takes with existing Oracle Applications. Further analysis revealed that these performance gains would be achieved by reducing the number of clicks and screens needed to complete the tasks. Conclusions: Using the workflow time analysis method, we can expect the Oracle Fusion Applications redesign to succeed in improving end user productivity. The workflow time analysis method appears to be an effective and efficient tool for testing, refining, and retesting designs to optimize productivity. The workflow time analysis method does not replace usability testing with end users, but it can be used as an early predictor of design productivity even before designs are coded. We are planning to conduct usability tests later in the development cycle to compare actual end user data with the workflow time analysis results. Such results can potentially be used to validate the productivity improvement predictions. Used together, the workflow time analysis method and usability testing will enable us to continue creating, evaluating, and delivering Oracle Fusion designs that exceed the expectations of our end users, both in the quality of the user experience and in productivity. (For more information about studying productivity, refer to the Measuring User Productivity blog.)

  Read the article

• World Record Siebel PSPP Benchmark on SPARC T4 Servers

  - by Brian

  Oracle's SPARC T4 servers set a new World Record for Oracle's Siebel Platform Sizing and Performance Program (PSPP) benchmark suite. The result used Oracle's Siebel Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Industry Applications Release 8.1.1.4 and Oracle Database 11g Release 2 running Oracle Solaris on three SPARC T4-2 and two SPARC T4-1 servers. The SPARC T4 servers running the Siebel PSPP 8.1.1.4 workload which includes Siebel Call Center and Order Management System demonstrates impressive throughput performance of the SPARC T4 processor by achieving 29,000 users. This is the first Siebel PSPP 8.1.1.4 benchmark supporting 29,000 concurrent users with a rate of 239,748 Business Transactions/hour. The benchmark demonstrates vertical and horizontal scalability of Siebel CRM Release 8.1.1.4 on SPARC T4 servers. Performance Landscape Systems Txn/hr Users Call Center Order Management Response Times (sec) 1 x SPARC T4-1 (1 x SPARC T4 2.85 GHz) – Web 3 x SPARC T4-2 (2 x SPARC T4 2.85 GHz) – App/Gateway 1 x SPARC T4-1 (1 x SPARC T4 2.85 GHz) – DB 239,748 29,000 0.165 0.925 Oracle: Call Center + Order Management Transactions: 197,128 + 42,620 Users: 20300 + 8700 Configuration Summary Web Server Configuration: 1 x SPARC T4-1 server 1 x SPARC T4 processor, 2.85 GHz 128 GB memory Oracle Solaris 10 8/11 iPlanet Web Server 7 Application Server Configuration: 3 x SPARC T4-2 servers, each with 2 x SPARC T4 processor, 2.85 GHz 256 GB memory 3 x 300 GB SAS internal disks Oracle Solaris 10 8/11 Siebel CRM 8.1.1.5 SIA Database Server Configuration: 1 x SPARC T4-1 server 1 x SPARC T4 processor, 2.85 GHz 128 GB memory Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2.0.2) Storage Configuration: 1 x Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array 80 x 24 GB flash modules Benchmark Description Siebel 8.1 PSPP benchmark includes Call Center and Order Management: Siebel Financial Services Call Center – Provides the most complete solution for sales and service, allowing customer service and telesales representatives to provide superior customer support, improve customer loyalty, and increase revenues through cross-selling and up-selling. High-level description of the use cases tested: Incoming Call Creates Opportunity, Quote and Order and Incoming Call Creates Service Request . Three complex business transactions are executed simultaneously for specific number of concurrent users. The ratios of these 3 scenarios were 30%, 40%, 30% respectively, which together were totaling 70% of all transactions simulated in this benchmark. Between each user operation and the next one, the think time averaged approximately 10, 13, and 35 seconds respectively. Siebel Order Management – Oracle's Siebel Order Management allows employees such as salespeople and call center agents to create and manage quotes and orders through their entire life cycle. Siebel Order Management can be tightly integrated with back-office applications allowing users to perform tasks such as checking credit, confirming availability, and monitoring the fulfillment process. High-level description of the use cases tested: Order & Order Items Creation and Order Updates. Two complex Order Management transactions were executed simultaneously for specific number of concurrent users concurrently with aforementioned three Call Center scenarios above. The ratio of these 2 scenarios was 50% each, which together were totaling 30% of all transactions simulated in this benchmark. Between each user operation and the next one, the think time averaged approximately 20 and 67 seconds respectively. Key Points and Best Practices No processor cores or cache were activated or deactivated on the SPARC T-Series systems to achieve special benchmark effects. See Also Siebel White Papers SPARC T4-1 Server oracle.com OTN SPARC T4-2 Server oracle.com OTN Siebel CRM oracle.com OTN Oracle Solaris oracle.com OTN Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition oracle.com OTN Disclosure Statement Copyright 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Results as of 30 September 2012.

  Read the article

• The Rise of Project Intelligence and Why It Matters

  - by Melissa Centurio Lopes

  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-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-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} By Amy DeWolf Are you doing any of these in your organization? How are you leveraging historical data to forecast projects? There’s a lot going on in government today. The economic pressures agencies feel from the uncertainty of budget cuts and sequestration effect every part of an organization, including the Project Management Office (PMO).  The PMO is responsible for monitoring and administering government IT projects. As time goes on, priorities shift, technology advances, and new regulations are imposed, all of which make planning and executing projects more difficult.  For example, think about your own projects.  How many boxes do you need to check and hoops do you need to jump through to ensure you comply with new regulations? While new regulations and technology advancements can be a good thing, they add an additional layer of complexity to already complex projects. To overcome some of these pressures, particularly new regulations, many in the PMO world are adopting a new approach- Project Intelligence (PI). According to a new Oracle Primavera white paper, The Rise of Project Intelligence: When Project Management is Just Not Enough, “PI uses Business Intelligence methods to leverage historical project data to make more informed decisions and greatly enhance project execution.” Currently, project managers plan and forecast the possible phases in an execution cycle.  However, most project managers don’t have the proper tools to do this as effectively as they would like. As the white paper noted, “The underlying deficiencies in most forecasting approaches are that 1) the PM fails in most instances to leverage historical data and 2) the PM doesn’t employ current Business Intelligence tools.” PI seeks to overturn this by combining modeling tools used in Business Intelligence for projects with the understanding of Emotional Intelligence for managing people.   Simply put, Project Intelligence is built off four main pillars: Actively use historical data to forecast project cycles Understand the intricacies of complex projects Enhance social and emotional intelligence in projects Actively use Business intelligence tools Read our complimentary whitepaper and discover the importance of emotional intelligence and best practices for improving projects, specifically in terms of communication.

  Read the article

• Graphics trouble after resuming from hibernate or suspend

  - by Voyagerfan5761

  I have a Dell Inspiron 2650 (with NVidia graphics, using nouveau drivers) that I'm using to try out Ubuntu. It's all great, except that Hibernate and Suspend aren't usable. Yes, I know that questions about power-save issues are rampant in the Linux support universe, but it seems that every time I find a solution it's for a very specific hardware combination and doesn't apply to me. So anyway, here goes. When I resume from either power-saving mode, I'll get graphics problems anywhere on the range from a few scattered random-colored pixels that won't change; all the way to full-screen patterns that don't change as I move the mouse, hit keys on the keyboard, or even bring up the shutdown dialog using the power button. Those full-screen issues (which may involve stripes with random pixels, partial black screen, or both) always end in me forcing the machine to shut down by holding the power button. I haven't done much testing yet to determine what severity level is most commonly associated with each mode, but I do avoid using either power-save option because of these issues. I'll add info on my hardware as I can gather it (no home internet connection, and this laptop is tethered to my desk by a dead battery and casing degradation). Please feel free to request something specific in the question comments. Hardware Info See this hardinfo report for my system's hardware configuration. (No, my username is not "myuser"; I sanitized hardinfo's output before publishing it.) Screenshots These screenshots are from a relatively mild occurrence, which happened after the second hibernation I took that session. The first one worked great, though I used the wireless card and Firefox heavily between the two hibernation attempts. Take a look at what happened when I opened my home directory in Nautilus and scrolled it: See below for the situations I've tested so far. The real trouble comes when the machine resumes to an unusable state; in such cases I can't even unlock the screen or properly reboot, much less take a screenshot. I have a hunch that putting a CD in the drive will cause such major failures, and I will try that at some point; see related question. Situations Tested Maverick (10.10) Suspend Seems to suspend nicely with nothing running Seems to suspend nicely with flash drive plugged in On resume from suspend with no flash drive, Terminal and gedit running: Funky graphics on top of log output, then blank screen with pixelated cursor; no response to power button (normally will shutdown 60 seconds later) Hibernate Seems to hibernate nicely with nothing running Seems to hibernate nicely with a few apps (Terminal, Mouse preferences) running Seems to not hibernate when flash drive plugged in Seems to not hibernate when System Monitor is running Have encountered failed hibernation (after several hours and one successful hibernate/thaw cycle) with no external media connected and no programs running except normal background stuff Natty LiveCD (11.04_2010-12-22) When I tested it, Natty wouldn't stay logged in. It played part of the login sound and then [ OK ] appeared in the top right corner (white-on-black terminal text) for a few seconds. Then it kicked me back to the Unlock screen. It did that four times before I gave up and just tested suspend from the Unlock screen. Suspend Resumed to vertical gray and black lines 2px (?) wide, then shifted to vertical "jail bars" of black over a black screen with above-described random pixels and mouse pointer. No apparent response to input from mouse (clicking randomly). Keyboard and touchpad unrecognized.

  Read the article

• 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!

  Read the article

• How to fix: Ubuntu 12.04 reboots after loading with elilo

  - by Casey

  I have an HP p6-2120 with CPU: AMD A6-3620 APU with Radeon Graphics RAM: 6GB BIOS: HO2_710.ROM v7.10 [AMI v7.10 4/19/2012] Disk: SATA1 (/dev/sda) - 1 TB (windows) Disk: SATA2 (/dev/sdb) - 1 TB partitioned using "parted -a optimal /dev/sdb" as follows: .. 1049KB 201MB FAT32 boot flag set .. 201MB 60GB ext2 (/) .. 68GB 78GB linux-swap(v1) (swap) .. 78GB 790GB ext4 (/home) .. - rest is "free" space reserved for other purposes (eventually) ubuntu: 12.04.1 LTS [specifically: Release 12.04 (precise) 64-bit] kernel: linux 3.2.0-29-generic I created a bootable EFI USB from the ISO (64-bit) which I downloaded. I can run and install from the USB without any problems. The BIOS is an EFI bios that appears to be capable of booting in either EFI or Legacy mode. Initially, I did the "standard" install with NOTHING on disk2, and let the installer configure everything. The net result of this was that when I started the computer and forced it into "boot" menu mode, it DOES NOT recognize SATA2 as an EFI drive, and when I attempt to "legacy" boot from it, I get the message "ERROR: No Boot Disk has been detected." The "standard" install created one large partition that consumed the entire disk. At that point, I manually partitioned the disk (using sudo parted -a optimal /dev/sdb) as described above. I selected the "other" install, and changed the /dev/sdb1 to "bios_grub", /dev/sdb2 as "/" (ext4), /dev/sdb3 as swap, and /dev/sdb4 as "/home". [Note: fearing that possibly elilo did not recognize ext4, I switched /dev/sdb2 to ext2 and re-insalled] The net result was that the install appeared to trash the /dev/sdb1 partition so that it was NOT readable by anything. I re-formated /dev/sdb1 as FAT32 and set the boot flag. I repeated the install ignoring the messages about no bios_grub partition. After several attempts to get GRUB2 to work, I switched to elilo. I downloaded the most recent version and copied it (elilo-3.14-ia64.efi) to /dev/sdb1/efi/boot/bootx64.efi. (The BIOS boot loader did not recognize it either as elilo-3.14.ia64.efi or as elilo.efi. Based on the advice in one of the web-pages I found, I renamed it to bootx64.efi. This worked.) In that same directory (/efi/boot), I copied the file pointed to the link in /dev/sdb2/vmlinuz to /efi/boot/vmlinuz, and the file pointed to the link in /dev/sdb2/initrd.img to /efi/boot/initrd.img. I created an elilo.conf file as follows: timeout=5000 prompt default=linux-boot image=vmlinuz label=linux-boot read-only initrd=initrd.img root=/dev/sdb2 The /efi/boot directory contains 4 files: bootx64.efi elilo.conf vmlinuz initrd.img When I power-cycle the computer and force the boot menu, drive2 shows up as an EFI bootable drive. When I select it, I get the elilo prompt. Pressing , it appears to load the kernal (I have tried it with verbose=5, and there is a long string of messages with the final one a command line to load the kernel and a series of several dots that fly by) then the screen goes blank, and it reboots the computer. [Note: I have also tried substituting the UUID as found in the /etc/fstab of the installed system for the root directory. This had no effect.] This is a brief synopsis of several nights of fiddling with this. I would deeply appreciate any help you can give.

  Read the article

• Proving What You are Worth

  - by Ted Henson

  Here is a challenge for everyone. Just about everyone has been asked to provide or calculate the Return on Investment (ROI), so I will assume everyone has a method they use. The problem with stopping once you have an ROI is that those in the C-Suite probably do not care about the ROI as much as Return on Equity (ROE). Shareholders are mostly concerned with their return on the money the invested. Warren Buffett looks at ROE when deciding whether to make a deal or not. This article will outline how you can add more meaning to your ROI and show how you can potentially enhance the ROE of the company.   First I want to start with a base definition I am using for ROI and ROE. Return on investment (ROI) and return on equity (ROE) are ways to measure management effectiveness, parts of a system of measures that also includes profit margins for profitability, price-to-earnings ratio for valuation, and various debt-to-equity ratios for financial strength. Without a set of evaluation metrics, a company's financial performance cannot be fully examined by investors. ROI and ROE calculate the rate of return on a specific investment and the equity capital respectively, assessing how efficient financial resources have been used. Typically, the best way to improve financial efficiency is to reduce production cost, so that will be the focus. Now that the challenge has been made and items have been defined, let’s go deeper. Most research about implementation stops short at system start-up and seldom addresses post-implementation issues. However, we know implementation is a continuous improvement effort, and continued efforts after system start-up will influence the ultimate success of a system.   Most UPK ROI’s I have seen only include the cost savings in developing the training material. Some will also include savings based on reduced Help Desk calls. Using just those values you get a good ROI. To get an ROE you need to go a little deeper. Typically, the best way to improve financial efficiency is to reduce production cost, which is the purpose of implementing/upgrading an enterprise application. Let’s assume the new system is up and running and all users have been properly trained and are comfortable using the system. You provide senior management with your ROI that justifies the original cost. What you want to do now is develop a good base value to a measure the current efficiency. Using usage tracking you can look for various patterns. For example, you may find that users that are accessing UPK assistance are processing a procedure, such as entering an order, 5 minutes faster than those that don’t.  You do some research and discover each minute saved in processing a claim saves the company one dollar. That translates to the company saving five dollars on every transaction. Assuming 100,000 transactions are performed a year, and all users improve their performance, the company will be saving $500,000 a year. That $500,000 can be re-invested, used to reduce debt or paid to the shareholders.   With continued refinement during the life cycle, you should be able to find ways to reduce cost. These are the type of numbers and productivity gains that senior management and shareholders want to see. Being able to quantify savings and increase productivity may also help when seeking a raise or promotion.

  Read the article

• Application Logging needs work

  Application Logging Application logging is the act of logging events that occur within an application much like how a court report documents what happens in court case. Application logs can be useful for several reasons, but the most common use for logs is to recreate steps to find the root cause of applications errors. Other uses can include the detection of Fraud, verification of user activity, or provide audits on user/data interactions. “Logs can contain different kinds of data. The selection of the data used is normally affected by the motivation leading to the logging. “ (OWASP, 2009) OWASP also stats that logging include applicable debugging information like the event date time, responsible process, and a description of the event. “There are many reasons why a logging system is a necessary part of delivering a distributed application. One of the most important is the ability to track exactly how many users are using the application during different time periods.” (Hatton, 2000) Hatton also states that application logging helps system designers determine whether parts of an application aren't being used as designed. He implies that low usage can be used to identify if users like or do not like aspects of a system based on user usage of the application. This enables application designers to extract why users don't like aspects of an application so that changes can be made to increase its usefulness and effectiveness. “Logging memory usage can also assist you in tuning up the internals of your application. If you're experiencing a randomly occurring problem, being able to match activities performed with the memory status at the time may enable you to discover the cause of the problem. It also gives you a good indication of the health of the distributed server machine at the time any activity is performed. “ (Hatton, 2000) Commonly Logged Application Events (Defined by OWASP) Access of Data Creation of Data Modification of Data in any form Administrative Functions  Configuration Changes Debugging Information(Application Events)  Authorization Attempts  Data Deletion Network Communication  Authentication Events  Errors/Exceptions Application Error Logging The functionality associated with application error logging is actually the combination of proper error handling and applications logging.  If we look back at Figure 4 and Figure 5, these code examples allow developers to handle various types of errors that occur within the life cycle of an application’s execution. Application logging can be applied within the Catch section of the TryCatch statement allowing for the errors to be logged when they occur. By placing the logging within the Catch section specific error details can be accessed that help identify the source of the error, the path to the error, what caused the error and definition of the error that occurred. This can then be logged and reviewed at a later date in order recreate the error that was received based data found in the application log. By allowing applications to log errors developers IT staff can use them to recreate errors that are encountered by end-users or other dependent systems.

  Read the article

• Data Mining Email with Thunderbird

  - by user554629

  Oracle has many formal, searchable locations:  Service Requests, BugIDs, Technical Documents. These contain the results of an investigation for a customer crash situation;  they're created after the intense work of resolution is over, and typically contain the "root cause" of the failure ... but not the methods for identifying that cause. Email is still the standby for interacting with quickly formed groups of specialists, focusing on a particular incident.Customer BI, Network and System specialists;  Oracle Tech Support, Development, Consultants; OEM Database, OS technical support.   It is a chaotic, time-oriented set of configuration, call stacks, changes, techniques to discover and repair the failure. I needed to organize that information into something cohesive to prepare the blog entry on Teradata.  My corporate email client of choice is Thunderbird.   My original (flawed) search technique: R-Click on Inbox in Thunderbird left pane, and choose Search Messages Subject:  [ teradata ] Results: A new window titled "Search Messages"Single pane of selected messagesColumn headings:  Subject  From  Date  LocationNo preview window for messages There are 673 email entries in the result ( too many )  R-click icon just above the vertical scroll bar on the rightCheck [x] Tags Click on the Tags header to sort by "Important" View contents of message by double-clickingOpens in the Thunderbird Main Window in a new Tab Not what I was looking for, close the tab and try again. There has to be a better way.  ( and there is ) I need to be more productive, eliminating duplicate-chained messages, for example.   Even the Tag "Important" that was added during the investigation phase, is "not so much" for my current task. In the "Search Messages" window, click [ Save as Search Folder ] [ teradata ]  Appears as a new folder in my Inbox. Focus on that folder and the results appear with a list of messages like every other folder in the Inbox.Only the results of the search are shown A preview window is now available for each message Sort, Select message, Cursor Down ... navigates quickly through the messages. But wait, there's more ... Click Find ( Ctrl-F) Enter a search term for the message body, like.[ LIBPATH ] The search is "sticky" ... each message you cycle through wil focus ( and highlight) the LIBPATH search term. And still more .... Reset the Tag"Important" message.   Press "1" and the tag is removed Press "4" and a new Tag "ToDo" is applied After applying all of the tags, sort by Tag for a new message order Adjust the search criteria ... R-click on the [ teradata ] search folder, and choose Properties Add additional criteria to narrow the search Some of the information I'm looking for did not contain "teradata" in the subject line. + Body  [ contains ] [ Best Practices ] That's it.  Much more efficient search.   Thank you Thunderbird.

  Read the article

• No Customer Left Behind

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by David Vap, Group Vice President, Oracle Applications Product Development What does customer experience mean to you? Is it a strategy for your executives? A new buzz word and marketing term? A bunch of CRM technology with social software added on? For me, customer experience is a customer-centric worldview that produces a deeper understanding of your business and what it takes to achieve sustainable, differentiated success. It requires you to prioritize and examine the journey your customers are on with your brand, so you can answer the question, "How can we drive greater value for our business by delivering a better customer experience?" Businesses that embrace a customer-centric worldview understand their business at a much deeper level than most. They know who their customers are, what their value is, what they do, what they say, what they want, and ultimately what that means to their business. "Why Isn't Everyone Doing It?" We're all consumers who have our own experiences with many brands. Good or bad, some of those experiences stay with us. So viscerally we understand the concept of customer experience from the stories we share. One that stands out in my mind happened as I was preparing to leave for a 12-month job assignment in Europe. I wanted to put my cable television subscription on hold. I wasn't leaving for another vendor. I wasn't upset. I just had a situation where it made sense to put my $180 per month account on pause until I returned. Unfortunately, there was no way for this cable company to acknowledge that I was a loyal customer with a logical request - and to respond accordingly. So, ultimately, they lost my business. Research shows us that it costs six to seven times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. Heavily funding the efforts of getting new customers and underfunding the efforts of serving the needs of your existing (who are your greatest advocates) is a vicious and costly cycle. "Hey, These Guys Suck!" I love my Apple iPad because it's so easy to use. The explosion of these types of technologies, combined with new media channels, has raised our expectations and made us hyperaware of what's going on and what's available. In addition, social media has given us a megaphone to share experiences both positive and negative with greater impact. We are now an always-on culture that thrives on our ability to access, connect, and share anywhere anytime. If we don't get the service, product, or value we expect, it is easy to tell many people about it. We also can quickly learn where else to get what we want. Consumers have the power of influence and choice at a global scale. The businesses that understand this principle are able to leverage that power to their advantage. The ones that don't, suffer from it. Which camp are you in?Note: This is Part 1 in a three-part series. Stop back for Part 2 on November 19.

  Read the article

• NSString variable out of scope in sub-class (iPhone/Obj-C)

  - by Rich

  I am following along with an example in a book with the code exactly as it is in the example code as well as from the book, and I'm getting an error at runtime. I'll try to describe the life cycle of this variable as good as I can. I have a controller class with a nested array that is populated with string literals (NSArray of NSArrays, the nested NSArrays initialized with arrayWithObjects: where the objects are all string literals - @"some string"). I access these strings with a helper method added via a category on NSArray (to pull strings out of a nested array). My controller gets a reference to this string and assigns it to a NSString property on a child controller using dot notation. The code looks like this (nestedObjectAtIndexPath is my helper method): NSString *rowKey = [rowKeys nestedObjectAtIndexPath:indexPath]; controller.keypath = rowKey; keypath is a synthesized nonatomic, retain property defined in a based class. When I hit a breakpoint in the controller at the above code, the NSString's value is as expected. When I hit the next breakpoint inside the child controller, the object id of the keypath property is the same as before, but instead of showing me the value of the NSString, XCode says that the variable is "out of scope" which is also the error I see in the console. This also happens in another sub-class of the same parent. I tried googling, and I saw slightly similar cases where people were suggesting this had to do with retain counts. I was under the impression that by using dot notation on a synthesized property, my class would be using an "auto generated accessor" that would be increasing my retain count for me so that I wouldn't have this problem. Could there be any implications because I'm accessing it in a sub-class and the prop is defined in the parent? I don't see anything in the book's errata about this, but the book is relatively new (Apress - More iPhone 3 Dev). I also have double checked that my code matches the example 100 times.

  Read the article

• How to build google breakpad

  - by Steve

  Hi, I'm totally lost on how to build Google's breakpad. There is a sln file, but it depends on a library that doesn't seem to have an associated sln. It seems to use something called gyp that I haven't figured out how to get working. I tried python gyp ..\breakpad\src\client\windows\breakpad_client.gyp and that just gives the following errors Traceback (most recent call last): File "gyp", line 18, in <module> sys.exit(gyp.main(sys.argv[1:])) File "pylib\gyp\__init__.py", line 445, in main options.circular_check) File "pylib\gyp\__init__.py", line 84, in Load depth, generator_input_info, check, circular_check) File "pylib\gyp\input.py", line 2165, in Load VerifyNoGYPFileCircularDependencies(targets) File "pylib\gyp\input.py", line 1429, in VerifyNoGYPFileCircularDependencies ' '.join(bad_files) gyp.input.CircularException: Some files not reachable, cycle in .gyp file dependency graph detected involving some or all of: ..\breakpad\src\client\windows\sender\crash_report_sender.gyp ..\breakpad\src\client\windows\h andler\exception_handler.gyp ..\breakpad\src\client\windows\breakpad_client.gyp ..\breakpad\src\client\windows\unittests\client_tests.gyp ..\breakpad\src\client\windows\crash_generation\crash_generation.gyp Which I can't make any sense out of. I also can't seem to find any documentation. Any help would be appreciated.

  Read the article

• jerky animation using Core Animation

  - by Paul from Boston

  In my iPhone app, I am trying to get some red and white stripes that are scrolling across the screen to animate smoothly when the speed of the stripes gets high. In my app the user starts the animation and changes the scrolling speed by a finger swipe and changes the width of the stripes by a two finger pinch. Animation is stopped in response to a double tap. If the speed gets high or the stripes get narrow the animation is no longer smooth to the eye. The edges of the stripes seem to jump around. The animation is simple. I draw the stripes in a layer that's a bit larger than the screen. I then set up an animation that moves the layer position by exactly the distance from one red stripe to the next. The duration is set by the speed of the finger swipe and the repeat count is 1. When the animation stops the delegate checks a flag to see if the user wants to stop the scrolling. If not, the animation is restarted again for one cycle. Are there better ways of doing this so that the animation is smooth at high speeds or with narrow stripes? Thanks--

  Read the article

• Silverlight and Encryption, how to store/generate they key/iv pair?

  - by cmaduro

  I have a Silverlight app that connects to a php webservice. I want to encrypt the communication between the webservice and the Silverlight client. I'm not relying on SSL. I'm encrypting/decrypting the POST string myself using AES 256bit Key and IV. The big questions then are: How do I generate a random unique key/iv pair in PHP. How do I share this key/iv pair between the web service and silverlight client in a secure way. It seems impossible without having some kind of hard coded key or iv on the client. Which would compromise security. This is a public website, there are no logins. Just the requirement of secure communication. I can hard code the seed for the key/iv (which is hashed with SHA256 with a time stamp salt and then assigned as the key or iv) in PHP source code, that's on the server so that is pretty safe. However on the client the seed for the key/iv pair would be visible, if it is hard coded. Further more using a time stamp as the basis for uniqueness/randomness is definitely not ok, since timestamps are predictable. It does however provide a common factor between the C# code and the PHP code. The only other option that I can think of would be to have a 3rd service involved that provides the key/iv to the Silverlight client, as well as the php webservice. This of course start the cycle anew, with the question of how to store the credentials for accessing the key/iv distribution service on the Silverlight client. Sounds like the solution is then asymmetric encryption, since sensitive data will be viewed only on the administrative back end of the website. Unfortunately Silverlight has no asymmetric encryption classes. The solution? Roll my own Diffie-Hellman key exchange! Plug that key into AES256!

  Read the article

• C# Assembly.GetTypes() - ReflectionTypeLoadException

  - by Veskechky

  We implement a plugin framework for our application and load plugin assemblies using Assembly.Loadfrom. We then use GetTypes() and further examine the types with each plugin file for supported Interfaces. A path for the plugins is provided by the user and we cycle through each of the files in the folder to see if it (the plugin) supports our plugin interface. If it does, we create an instance, if not we move onto the next file. We build two versions of software from the one code base (appA_1 and appA_2). Loading the plugins works well when the plugins are loaded by the application that was built at the same time as the plugin file. However if we build appA_2 and point to the plugin folder of appA_1, we get an exception when GetTypes() is called. A basic version of our code is; var pluginAssembly = Assembly.LoadFrom(FileName); foreach (var pluginType in pluginAssembly.GetTypes()) { We get a "ReflectionTypeLoadException" exception. This is concerning because we want our application to be able to load the types of any plugin, built by anyone. Is there something we are missing?

  Read the article

• Python progression path - From apprentice to guru

  - by Morlock

  Hi all, I've been learning, working, and playing with Python for a year and a half now. As a biologist slowly making the turn to bio-informatics, this language has been a the very core of all the major contributions I have made in the lab. (bash and R scripts have helped some too. My C++ capabilities are very not functional yet). I more or less fell in love with the way Python permits me to express beautiful solutions and also with the semantics of the language that allows such a natural flow from thoughts to workable code. What I would like to know from you is your answer to a kind of question I have seldom seen in this or other forums. Let me sum up what I do NOT want to ask first ;) I don't want to know how to QUICKLY learn Python Nor do I want to find out the best way to get acquainted with the language Finally, I don't want to know a 'one trick that does it all' approach. What I do want to know your opinion about, is: What are the steps YOU would recommend to a Python journeyman, from apprenticeship to guru status (feel free to stop wherever your expertise dictates it), in order that one IMPROVES CONSTANTLY, becoming a better and better Python coder, one step at a time. The kind of answers I would enjoy (but feel free to surprise the readership :P ), is formatted more or less like this: Read this (eg: python tutorial), pay attention to that kind of details Code for so manytime/problems/lines of code Then, read this (eg: this or that book), but this time, pay attention to this Tackle a few real-life problems Then, proceed to reading Y. Be sure to grasp these concepts Code for X time Come back to such and such basics or move further to... (you get the point :) This process depicts an iterative Learn/Code cycle, and I really care about knowing your opinion on what exactly one should pay attention to, at various stages, in order to progress CONSTANTLY (with due efforts, of course). If you come from a specific field of expertise, discuss the path you see as appropriate in this field. Thanks a lot for sharing your opinions and good Python coding!

  Read the article

• Feature element repeatedly added with every feature activation/deactivation

  - by ccomet

  This is a very minor behavior when compared with the entire scope, but it is one that I'd like to put a stop to. I have created a very, very simple SharePoint Feature. It has two elements in its manifest: an aspx webpart page, and an elements xml. I'll paraphrase my elements xml, which just adds a module, below. <Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/"> <Module Name="Pass" Url="" Path=""> <File Url="pasq.aspx" NavBarHome="True" Type="Ghostable"> <AllUsersWebPart WebPartZoneID="Left" WebPartOrder="0"> <![CDATA[ WARGH THIS PART DOESN'T MATTER FOR THIS QUESTION! ]]> </AllUsersWebPart> </File> </Module> </Elements> Now, on the first time I deploy and activate this feature, it works properly. But if I have to deactivate and then reactivate the feature in order to fix some properties in the webpart, then I find myself with a second webpart on the page. Naturally, each similar cycle will just add more and more. I understand that a new webpart must be created in order to employ the changes I just made, but why is the old webpart still on the page? Can I make this older webpart go away automatically as part of the feature activation/deactivation process without needing to employ a Receiver class?

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53  | Next Page >