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• Problem with a* implementation in pygame

  - by piyush3dxyz

  Yesterday i decide to make RTS game in pygame(pygame is best).I figured out many components of RTS game like unit selecting,health,resources but only 1 thing i still not understand.. which is a* pathfinding in pygame... I also done little bit of research on wiki,articles and papers...but still cant figure out problem.... function A*(start,goal) closedset := the empty set // The set of nodes already evaluated. openset := {start} // The set of tentative nodes to be evaluated, initially containing the start node came_from := the empty map // The map of navigated nodes. g_score[start] := 0 // Cost from start along best known path. // Estimated total cost from start to goal through y. f_score[start] := g_score[start] + heuristic_cost_estimate(start, goal) while openset is not empty current := the node in openset having the lowest f_score[] value if current = goal return reconstruct_path(came_from, goal) remove current from openset add current to closedset for each neighbor in neighbor_nodes(current) if neighbor in closedset continue tentative_g_score := g_score[current] + dist_between(current,neighbor) if neighbor not in openset or tentative_g_score <= g_score[neighbor] came_from[neighbor] := current g_score[neighbor] := tentative_g_score f_score[neighbor] := g_score[neighbor] + heuristic_cost_estimate(neighbor, goal) if neighbor not in openset add neighbor to openset return failure here is the pseudocode for wiki a* implementation......

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• How do you compare programming job offers from companies in different countries?

  - by Danny Tuppeny

  This isn't really a programmer-specific question, but I'm not sure of a more appropriate place, and I think the users of this site are best able to answer the question in the context of programmers. Relocating to the US seems fairly common in the programming industry. I live in the UK, and maybe one day, I might do it too. So, if that day comes - how would you go about comparing job offers? Benefits are fairly easy to compare, but given the differences in cost of living, how would you go about comparing salaries and the quality of living you'll have? In a country where the cost of living is lower, you might be able to accept a lower salary (based on exchange rate) and still have the same quality of living. But what can you do to ensure this? In some cases, you may even take a "pay rise" in terms of exchange rate, but end up far worse off. How can you compare job offers across different countries to get an idea of the salary you would need in order to not feel you've gone "backwards"?

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• Costs/profit of/when starting an indie company

  - by Jack

  In short, I want to start a game company. I do not have much coding experience (just basic understanding and ability to write basic programs), any graphics design experience, any audio mixing experience, or whatever else technical. However, I do have a lot of ideas, great analytical skills and a very logical approach to life. I do not have any friends who are even remotely technical (or creative in regards to games for that matter). So now that we've cleared that up, my question is this: how much, minimally, would it cost me to start such a company? I know that a game could be developed in under half a year, which means it would have to operate for half a year prior, and that's assuming that the people working on the first project do their jobs good, don't leave game breaking bugs, a bunch of minor bugs, etc.. So how much would it cost me, and what would be the likely profit in half a year? I'm looking at minimal costs here, as to do it, I would have to sell my current apartment and buy a new, smaller one, pay taxes, and likely move to US/CA/UK to be closer to technologically advanced people (and be able to speak the language of course). EDIT: I'm looking at a small project for starters, not a huge AAA title.

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• external hard drive not detected after ubuntu crash [restarting machine]

  - by Netmoon

  today i tried to watch movie [with vlc media player] from my external hard drive [expansion portable 500 GB], and it's play good, then pause the movie and play it again, and my Ubuntu crashed! [Ubuntu 12.04]i had to restart the machine, so did it, but after that Ubuntu can't recognize this hard drive! i changed USB cable but it was not effective. this is my dmesg command result : [ 191.281630] usb 2-1.3: new full-speed USB device number 9 using ehci_hcd [ 191.353527] usb 2-1.3: device descriptor read/64, error -32 [ 191.529115] usb 2-1.3: device descriptor read/64, error -32 [ 191.704669] usb 2-1.3: new full-speed USB device number 10 using ehci_hcd [ 191.776524] usb 2-1.3: device descriptor read/64, error -32 [ 191.952202] usb 2-1.3: device descriptor read/64, error -32 [ 192.127772] usb 2-1.3: new full-speed USB device number 11 using ehci_hcd [ 192.534742] usb 2-1.3: device not accepting address 11, error -32 [ 192.606749] usb 2-1.3: new full-speed USB device number 12 using ehci_hcd [ 193.013696] usb 2-1.3: device not accepting address 12, error -32 [ 193.013906] hub 2-1:1.0: unable to enumerate USB device on port 3 note: I am able to hear the sound of the external drive lens. When attach hard drive to usb port, the status light goes on, but it's low bright and i think its power is low! try to mount in Microsoft Windows 7, but nothing happened.

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• PeopleSoft CRM 9.2 Release Value Proposition

  - by Race Bannon

  Oracle's PeopleSoft Customer Relationship Management (CRM) delivers solutions that have been tailored to fit your industry business processes, your customer strategies, and your success criteria. With PeopleSoft CRM 9.2, organizations will be able to deploy a solution that delivers built-in best practices specific to your industry with a highly configurable, tightly integrated platform, ensuring that solutions will be fast to implement. The result is less configuration, less customization, and less integration. PeopleSoft Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a world-class solution for organizations of every size and Oracle’s planned product roadmap for PeopleSoft applications is to deliver valuable, needed features for all of an organization’s constituents along three design principles — Simplicity, Productivity, and Lowered Total Cost of Ownership — as well as new application functionality as prioritized by our customers. The upcoming 9.2 release of PeopleSoft Customer Relationship Management focuses on these themes of Simplicity, Productivity, and Lower Total Cost of Ownership while also delivering robust new functionality to help your organization succeed. The recently published PeopleSoft CRM 9.2 Release Value Proposition provides overviews of the new features and enhancements planned for these applications for Release 9.2. This document offers customers a road map intended to help them assess the business benefits of upgrading to the 9.2 release while also helping them plan their IT projects and investments. (Link is to a My Oracle Support page, available to customers and partners.) Oracle continues to deliver enterprise-wide features that enhance our customer ownership experience and helps them run their businesses more efficiently and profitably. With the CRM 9.2 release, we continue to abide by this firm commitment we’ve made to our customers.

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• 724% Return on an SFA project with Oracle Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud combined!

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  Oracle Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud customer Apex IT gained just that?a 724% return on investment (ROI) when it implemented these Oracle Cloud solutions in its fast-moving, rapidly-growing business. Apex IT was just announced as a winner of the Nucleus Research 11th annual Technology ROI Awards. The award, given by the analyst firm, highlights organizations that have successfully leveraged IT deployments to maximize value per dollar spent. Fast Facts: Return on Investment – 724% Payback – 2 months Average annual benefit – $91,534 Cost : Benefit Ratio – 1:48 Business Benefits In addition to the ROI and cost metrics the award calls out improvements in Apex IT’s business operations—across both Sales and Marketing teams: Improved ability to identify new opportunities and focus sales resources on higher-probability deals Reduced administration and manual lead tracking—resulting in more time selling and a net new client increase of 46% Increased campaign productivity for both Marketing and Sales, including Oracle Marketing Cloud’s automation of campaign tracking and nurture programs Improved margins with more structured and disciplined sales processes—resulting in more effective deal negotiations Read the full Apex IT ROI Case Study. You also can learn more about Apex IT’s business, including the company’s work with Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud on behalf of its clients. You can point your prospects and customers to the CX blog for a similar recap of the Apex IT award and a link to the Case Study.

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• Is embedded programming closer to electrical engineering or software development?

  - by Jeremy Heiler

  I am being approached with a job for writing embedded C on micro controllers. At first I would have thought that embedding programming is to low on the software stack for me, but maybe I am thinking about it wrong. Normally I would have shrugged off an opportunity to write embedded code, as I don't consider myself an electrical engineer. Is this a bad assumption? Am I able to write interesting and useful software for embedded systems, or will I kick myself for dropping too low on the software stack? I went to school for computer science and really enjoyed writing a compiler, managing concurrent algorithms, designing data structures, and developing frameworks. However, I am currently employed as a Flex developer, which doesn't scream the interesting things I just described. (I currently deal with issues like: "this check box needs to be 4 pixels to the left" and "this date is formatted wrong".) I appreciate everyone's input. I know I have to make the decision for myself, I just would like some clarification on what it means to be a embedded programmer, and if it fits what I find to be interesting.

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• Web dev/programmer with 4.5 yrs experience. Better for career: self-study or master's degree? [closed]

  - by Anonymous Programmer

  I'm a 28 year-old web developer/programmer with 4.5 years of experience, and I'm looking to jump-start my career. I'm trying to decide between self-study and a 1-year master's program in CS at a top school. I'm currently making 65K in a high cost-of-living area that is NOT a hot spot for technology firms. I code almost exclusively in Ruby/Rails, PHP/CodeIgniter, SQL, and JavaScript. I've slowly gained proficiency with Git. Roughly half the time I am architecting/coding, and half the time I am pounding out HTML/CSS for static brochureware sites. I'd like to make more more money while doing more challenging/interesting work, but I don't know where to start. I have an excellent academic record (math major with many CS credits, 3.9+ GPA), GRE scores, and recommendations, so I am confident that I could be admitted to a great CS master's program. On the other hand, there is the tuition and opportunity cost to consider. I feel like there are a number of practical languages/tools/skills worth knowing that I could teach myself - shell scripting, .NET, Python, Node.js, MongoDB, natural language processing techniques, etc. That said, it's one thing to read about a subject and another thing to have experience with it, which structured coursework provides. So, on to the concrete questions: What programming skills/knowledge should I develop to increase my earning potential and make me competitive for more interesting jobs? Will a master's degree in CS from a top school help me develop the above skills/knowledge, and if so, is it preferable to self-study (possibly for other reasons, e.g., the degree's value as a credential)?

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• Resume on 30 Days of SharePoint

  Dear readers, as you might have noticed... It was an organisational desaster on my end! Even though I continued my studies and research on Microsoft SharePoint 2013 during the last 30 days, I wasn't able to write an article a day to keep you posted on my progress. Nonetheless, I gathered a good number of additional blogs, mainly SharePoint MVP sites, and online forums which will be helpful in the next couple of weeks while I'm actually going to develop a C#-based client which will enable an existing 'legacy' application to SharePoint as a document management system (DMS) besides other already existing solutions. Finding excuses Well, no. Not really. I simply didn't block any or enough time every day to write down my progress during my own challenge. My log book on learning about SharePoint stands at 41 hours and 15 minutes during this month. Which means that I spent an average of more than 1 hour per day on getting into SharePoint. I know that might sound a little bit low but also keep in mind that I went for the challenge on top of my daily job and private responsibilities. During the same period there had been two priority 0 incidents from clients - external root cause - which took presedence over this leisure project. More to come Anyway, it was a first trial and despite the low level of reporting on my blog, I'm confident about what I learned during the last 30 days, and I'm ready to implement the client's requirements. At least, I would say that I have a better understanding about the road map or the path to walk during the next month. As time and secrecy allows I'm going to note down some bits and pieces... During the process of development, I'm going to 'cheat' on the challenge summary article and add links to those new entries. Just for the sake of completeness. Next challenge? Hmm, there had been ideas during the last meetup of the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community (MSCC) regarding certifications in IT and eventually we might organise some kind of a study group for specific exams, most probably Microsoft exams towards MCSD Web Developer or Windows Developer.

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• Location Change Salary Differences [closed]

  - by GameDev

  DISCLAIMER: I know that this might be a "regional" question but I'm also asking for help as far as what resources to use to determine my decision. I'm currently talking to a recruiter for a game developer in the SF Bay area. I work in a relatively low-cost area in the south. I really want to get into game development but my current career is general web development. I'm very interested in taking the job, but my concern is that the amount they're willing to pay might be a relative pay cut. Here are some factors: It's not an entry-level position, the title is Senior Software Engineer. I have 5+ years of experience. The calculators online tell me that I should be expecting around 2x my current pay rate(http://www.bestplaces.net/col/). My current pay is in the mid $60k/yr, so that's like 120-130k. The recruiter told me at my experience level I can expect about $90-100/yr, and that those cost of living calculators were way off. The benefits will definitely be better, it's much larger company (help with commuting, catered meals, etc). But is the recruiter trying to give me a snow job on the pay scale, or is that a reasonable change from a smallish town in the south to somewhere in the SF bay area? How can I find this out? Glassdoor and Payscale seem to say "senior software developers" in that area make around 110 in median salary, but Payscale says it's closer to $135k, that range seems pretty large.

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• How "commercially savvy" should software developers be? [closed]

  - by mattnz

  I have been watching answers to many questions on this site, and have come to the conclusion that commercial pragmatism does not factor into many software development discussions. As a result, I seriously wonder at the commercial skills within the industry, specifically the ability to deliver projects on time and to a budget. I see no indication from the site that commercially successful project delivery is a serious concern, yet the industry has a reputation for poor performance in this. Rarely, if ever, does the cost of time factor into discussions. I have never seen concepts such as opportunity cost, time to market, competitive advantage or cash flow mentioned, let alone discussed in technical answers to questions. How can you answer virtually any question without understanding the commercial background on which it is asked? Even Open source projects have a need to operate efficiently and deploy their limited resources to providing the most value for effort. Typically small start-ups have cash flow issues that outweigh longevity concerns, yet they are typically still advised to build for a future they probably won’t have if they do. Is it fair to say that these problems are solely the Managers and Project managers to solve, or are we, as developers, also responsible for ensuring successful on time, within budget delivery of projects, even if those budgets do not allow use to achieve engineering excellence?

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• Solaris 11 VNC Server is "blurry" or "smeared"

  - by user12620111

  I've been annoyed by quality of the image that is displayed by my VNC viewer when I visit a Solaris 11 VNC server. How should I describe the image? Blurry? Grainy? Smeared? Low resolution? Compressed? Badly encoded? This is what I have gotten used to seeing on Solaris 11: This is not a problem for me when I view Solaris 10 VNC servers. I've finally taken the time to investigate, and the solution is simple. On the VNC client, don't allow "Tight" encoding. My VNC Viewer will negotiate to Tight encoding if it is available. When negotiating with the Solaris 10 VNC server, Tight is not a supported option, so the Solaris 10 server and my client will agree on ZRLE.  Now that I have disabled Tight encoding on my VNC client, the Solaris 11 VNC Servers looks much better: How should I describe the display when my VNC client is forced to negotiate to ZRLE encoding with the Solaris 11 VNC Server? Crisp? Clear? Higher resolution? Using a lossless compression algorithm? When I'm on a low bandwidth connection, I may re-enable Tight compression on my laptop. In the mean time, the ZRLE compression is sufficient for a coast-to-coast desktop, through the corporate firewall, encoded with VPN, through my ISP and onto my laptop. YMMV.

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• Efficient algorithm for Virtual Machine(VM) Consolidation in Cloud

  - by devansh dalal

  PROBLEM: We have N physical machines(PMs) each with ram Ri, cpu Ci and a set of currently scheduled VMs each with ram requirement ri and ci respectively Moving(Migrating) any VM from one PM to other has a cost associated which depends on its ram ri. A PM with no VMs is shut down to save power. Our target is to minimize the weighted sum of (N,migration cost) by migrating some VMs i.e. minimize the number of working PMs as well as not to degrade the service level due to excessive migrations. My Approach: Brute Force approach is choosing the minimum loaded PM and try to fit its VMs to other PMs by First Fit Decreasing algorithm or we can select the victim PMs and target PMs based on their loading level and shut down victims if possible by moving their VMs to targets. I tried this Greedy approach on the Data of Baadal(IIT-D cloud) but It isn't giving promising results. I have also tried to study the Ant colony optimization for dynamic VM consolidating but was unable to understand very much. I used the links. http://dumas.ccsd.cnrs.fr/docs/00/72/52/15/PDF/Esnault.pdf http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/72/38/56/PDF/RR-8032.pdf Would anyone please clarify the solution or suggest any new approach/resources for better performance. I am basically searching for the algorithms not the physical optimizations and I also know that many commercial organizations have provided these solution but I just wanted to know more the underlying algorithms. Thanks in advance.

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• What's is the point of PImpl pattern while we can use interface for same purpose in C++?

  - by ZijingWu

  I see a lot of source code which using PIMPL idiom in C++. I assume Its purposes are hidden the private data/type/implementation, so it can resolve dependence, and then reduce compile time and header include issue. But interface class in C++ also have this capability, it can also used to hidden data/type and implementation. And to hidden let the caller just see the interface when create object, we can add an factory method in it declaration in interface header. The comparison is: Cost: The interface way cost is lower, because you doesn't even need to repeat the public wrapper function implementation void Bar::doWork() { return m_impl->doWork(); }, you just need to define the signature in the interface. Well understand: The interface technology is more well understand by every C++ developer. Performance: Interface way performance not worse than PIMPL idiom, both an extra memory access. I assume the performance is same. Following is the pseudocode code to illustrate my question: // Forward declaration can help you avoid include BarImpl header, and those included in BarImpl header. class BarImpl; class Bar { public: // public functions void doWork(); private: // You doesn't need to compile Bar.cpp after change the implementation in BarImpl.cpp BarImpl* m_impl; }; The same purpose can be implement using interface: // Bar.h class IBar { public: virtual ~IBar(){} // public functions virtual void doWork() = 0; }; // to only expose the interface instead of class name to caller IBar* createObject(); So what's the point of PIMPL?

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• Are my negative internship experiences representative of the real world? [closed]

  - by attemptAtAnonymity

  I'm curious if my current experiences as an intern are representative of actual industry. As background, I'm through the better part of two computing majors and a math major at a major university; I've aced every class and adored all of them, so I'd like to think that I'm not terrible at programming. I got an internship with one of the major software companies, and half way through now I've been shocked at the extraordinarily low quality of code. Comments don't exist, it's all spaghetti code, and everything that could be wrong is even worse. I've done a ton of tutoring/TAing, so I'm very used to reading bad code, but the major industry products I've been seeing trump all of that. I work 10-12 hours a day and never feel like I'm getting anywhere, because it's endless hours of trying to figure out an undocumented API or determine the behavior of some other part of the (completely undocumented) product. I've left work hating the job every day so far, and I desperately want to know if this is what is in store for the rest of my life. Did I draw a short straw on internships (the absurdly large paychecks imply that it's not a low quality position), or is this what the real world is like?

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• Are my negative internship experiences respresentative of the real world?

  - by attemptAtAnonymity

  I'm curious if my current experiences as an intern are representative of actual industry. As background, I'm through the better part of two computing majors and a math major at a major university; I've aced every class and adored all of them, so I'd like to think that I'm not terrible at programming. I got an internship with one of the major software companies, and half way through now I've been shocked at the extraordinarily low quality of code. Comments don't exist, it's all spaghetti code, and everything that could be wrong is even worse. I've done a ton of tutoring/TAing, so I'm very used to reading bad code, but the major industry products I've been seeing trump all of that. I work 10-12 hours a day and never feel like I'm getting anywhere, because it's endless hours of trying to figure out an undocumented API or determine the behavior of some other part of the (completely undocumented) product. I've left work hating the job every day so far, and I desperately want to know if this is what is in store for the rest of my life. Did I draw a short straw on internships (the absurdly large paychecks imply that it's not a low quality position), or is this what the real world is like?

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• Having trouble returning a value from a method call when sending an array and the program is error out when run in reference to the sort

  - by programmerNOOB

  I am getting the following output when this program is run: Please enter the Social Security Number for taxpayer 0: 111111111 Please enter the gross income for taxpayer 0: 20000 Please enter the Social Security Number for taxpayer 1: 555555555 Please enter the gross income for taxpayer 1: 50000 Please enter the Social Security Number for taxpayer 2: 333333333 Please enter the gross income for taxpayer 2: 5464166 Please enter the Social Security Number for taxpayer 3: 222222222 Please enter the gross income for taxpayer 3: 645641 Please enter the Social Security Number for taxpayer 4: 444444444 Please enter the gross income for taxpayer 4: 29000 Taxpayer # 1 SSN: 111111111, Income is $20,000.00, Tax is $0.00 Taxpayer # 2 SSN: 555555555, Income is $50,000.00, Tax is $0.00 Taxpayer # 3 SSN: 333333333, Income is $5,464,166.00, Tax is $0.00 Taxpayer # 4 SSN: 222222222, Income is $645,641.00, Tax is $0.00 Taxpayer # 5 SSN: 444444444, Income is $29,000.00, Tax is $0.00 Unhandled Exception: System.InvalidOperationException: Failed to compare two elements in the array. --- System.ArgumentException: At least one object must implement IComparable. at System.Collections.Comparer.Compare(Object a, Object b) at System.Collections.Generic.ObjectComparer`1.Compare(T x, T y) at System.Collections.Generic.ArraySortHelper`1.SwapIfGreaterWithItems(T[] keys, IComparer`1 comparer, Int32 a, Int32 b) at System.Collections.Generic.ArraySortHelper`1.QuickSort(T[] keys, Int32 left, Int32 right, IComparer`1 comparer) at System.Collections.Generic.ArraySortHelper`1.Sort(T[] keys, Int32 index, Int32 length, IComparer`1 comparer) --- End of inner exception stack trace --- at System.Collections.Generic.ArraySortHelper`1.Sort(T[] keys, Int32 index, Int32 length, IComparer`1 comparer) at System.Array.Sort[T](T[] array, Int32 index, Int32 length, IComparer`1 comparer) at System.Array.Sort[T](T[] array) at Assignment5.Taxpayer.Main(String[] args) in Program.cs:line 150 Notice the 0s at the end of the line that should be the tax amount??? Here is the code: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; namespace taxes { class Rates { // Create a class named rates that has the following data members: private int incLimit; private double lowTaxRate; private double highTaxRate; // use read-only accessor public int IncomeLimit { get { return incLimit; } } public double LowTaxRate { get { return lowTaxRate; } } public double HighTaxRate { get { return highTaxRate; } } //A class constructor that assigns default values public Rates() { int limit = 30000; double lowRate = .15; double highRate = .28; incLimit = limit; lowTaxRate = lowRate; highTaxRate = highRate; } //A class constructor that takes three parameters to assign input values for limit, low rate and high rate. public Rates(int limit, double lowRate, double highRate) { } // A CalculateTax method that takes an income parameter and computes the tax as follows: public int CalculateTax(int income) { int limit = 0; double lowRate = 0; double highRate = 0; int taxOwed = 0; // If income is less than the limit then return the tax as income times low rate. if (income < limit) taxOwed = Convert.ToInt32(income * lowRate); // If income is greater than or equal to the limit then return the tax as income times high rate. if (income >= limit) taxOwed = Convert.ToInt32(income * highRate); return taxOwed; } } //end class Rates // Create a class named Taxpayer that has the following data members: public class Taxpayer { //Use get and set accessors. string SSN { get; set; } int grossIncome { get; set; } // Use read-only accessor. public int taxOwed { get { return taxOwed; } } // The Taxpayer class should be set up so that its objects are comparable to each other based on tax owed. class taxpayer : IComparable { public int taxOwed { get; set; } public int income { get; set; } int IComparable.CompareTo(Object o) { int returnVal; taxpayer temp = (taxpayer)o; if (this.taxOwed > temp.taxOwed) returnVal = 1; else if (this.taxOwed < temp.taxOwed) returnVal = -1; else returnVal = 0; return returnVal; } // End IComparable.CompareTo } //end taxpayer IComparable class // **The tax should be calculated whenever the income is set. // The Taxpayer class should have a getRates class method that has the following. public static void GetRates() { // Local method data members for income limit, low rate and high rate. int incLimit = 0; double lowRate; double highRate; string userInput; // Prompt the user to enter a selection for either default settings or user input of settings. Console.Write("Would you like the default values (D) or would you like to enter the values (E)?: "); /* If the user selects default the default values you will instantiate a rates object using the default constructor * and set the Taxpayer class data member for tax equal to the value returned from calling the rates object CalculateTax method.*/ userInput = Convert.ToString(Console.ReadLine()); if (userInput == "D" || userInput == "d") { Rates rates = new Rates(); rates.CalculateTax(incLimit); } // end if /* If the user selects to enter the rates data then prompt the user to enter values for income limit, low rate and high rate, * instantiate a rates object using the three-argument constructor passing those three entries as the constructor arguments and * set the Taxpayer class data member for tax equal to the valuereturned from calling the rates object CalculateTax method. */ if (userInput == "E" || userInput == "e") { Console.Write("Please enter the income limit: "); incLimit = Convert.ToInt32(Console.ReadLine()); Console.Write("Please enter the low rate: "); lowRate = Convert.ToDouble(Console.ReadLine()); Console.Write("Please enter the high rate: "); highRate = Convert.ToDouble(Console.ReadLine()); Rates rates = new Rates(incLimit, lowRate, highRate); rates.CalculateTax(incLimit); } } static void Main(string[] args) { Taxpayer[] taxArray = new Taxpayer[5]; Rates taxRates = new Rates(); // Implement a for-loop that will prompt the user to enter the Social Security Number and gross income. for (int x = 0; x < taxArray.Length; ++x) { taxArray[x] = new Taxpayer(); Console.Write("Please enter the Social Security Number for taxpayer {0}: ", x + 1); taxArray[x].SSN = Console.ReadLine(); Console.Write("Please enter the gross income for taxpayer {0}: ", x + 1); taxArray[x].grossIncome = Convert.ToInt32(Console.ReadLine()); } Taxpayer.GetRates(); // Implement a for-loop that will display each object as formatted taxpayer SSN, income and calculated tax. for (int i = 0; i < taxArray.Length; ++i) { Console.WriteLine("Taxpayer # {0} SSN: {1}, Income is {2:c}, Tax is {3:c}", i + 1, taxArray[i].SSN, taxArray[i].grossIncome, taxRates.CalculateTax(taxArray[i].grossIncome)); } // end for // Implement a for-loop that will sort the five objects in order by the amount of tax owed Array.Sort(taxArray); Console.WriteLine("Sorted by tax owed"); for (int i = 0; i < taxArray.Length; ++i) { Console.WriteLine("Taxpayer # {0} SSN: {1}, Income is {2:c}, Tax is {3:c}", i + 1, taxArray[i].SSN, taxArray[i].grossIncome, taxRates.CalculateTax(taxArray[i].grossIncome)); } } //end main } // end Taxpayer class } //end Any clues as to why the dollar amount is coming up as 0 and why the sort is not working?

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• Why should you choose Oracle WebLogic 12c instead of JBoss EAP 6?

  - by Ricardo Ferreira

  In this post, I will cover some technical differences between Oracle WebLogic 12c and JBoss EAP 6, which was released a couple days ago from Red Hat. This article claims to help you in the evaluation of key points that you should consider when choosing for an Java EE application server. In the following sections, I will present to you some important aspects that most customers ask us when they are seriously evaluating for an middleware infrastructure, specially if you are considering JBoss for some reason. I would suggest that you keep the following question in mind while you are reading the points: "Why should I choose JBoss instead of WebLogic?" 1) Multi Datacenter Deployment and Clustering - D/R ("Disaster & Recovery") architecture support is embedded on the WebLogic Server 12c product. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no direct D/R support included, Red Hat relies on third-part tools with higher prices. When you consider a middleware solution to host your business critical application, you should worry with every architectural aspect that are related with the solution. Fail-over support is one little aspect of a truly reliable solution. If you do not worry about D/R, your solution will not be reliable. Having said that, with Red Hat and JBoss EAP 6, you have this extra cost that will increase considerably the total cost of ownership of the solution. As we commonly hear from analysts, open-source are not so cheaper when you start seeing the big picture. - WebLogic Server 12c supports advanced LAN clustering, detection of death servers and have a common alert framework. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has limited LAN clustering support with no server death detection. They do not generate any alerts when servers goes down (only if you buy JBoss ON which is a separated technology, but until now does not support JBoss EAP 6) and manual intervention are required when servers goes down. In most cases, admin people must rely on "kill -9", "tail -f someFile.log" and "ps ax | grep java" commands to manage failures and clustering anomalies. - WebLogic Server 12c supports the concept of Node Manager, which is a separated process that runs on the physical | virtual servers that allows extend the administration of the cluster to WebLogic managed servers that are often distributed across multiple machines and geographic locations. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no equivalent technology. Whole server instances must be managed individually. - WebLogic Server 12c Node Manager supports Coherence to boost performance when managing servers. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no similar technology. There is no way to coordinate JBoss and infiniband instances provided by JBoss using high throughput and low latency protocols like InfiniBand. The Node Manager feature also allows another very important feature that JBoss EAP lacks: secure the administration. When using WebLogic Node Manager, all the administration tasks are sent to the managed servers in a secure tunel protected by a certificate, which means that the transport layer that separates the WebLogic administration console from the managed servers are secured by SSL. - WebLogic Server 12c are now integrated with OTD ("Oracle Traffic Director") which is a web server technology derived from the former Sun iPlanet Web Server. This software complements the web server support offered by OHS ("Oracle HTTP Server"). Using OTD, WebLogic instances are load-balanced by a high powerful software that knows how to handle SDP ("Socket Direct Protocol") over InfiniBand, which boost performance when used with engineered systems technologies like Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand only offers support to Apache Web Server with custom modules created to deal with JBoss clusters, but only across standard TCP/IP networks.  2) Application and Runtime Diagnostics - WebLogic Server 12c have diagnostics capabilities embedded on the server called WLDF ("WebLogic Diagnostic Framework") so there is no need to rely on third-part tools. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no diagnostics capabilities. Their only diagnostics tool is the log generated by the application server. Admin people are encouraged to analyse thousands of log lines to find out what is going on. - WebLogic Server 12c complement WLDF with JRockit MC ("Mission Control"), which provides to administrators and developers a complete insight about the JVM performance, behavior and possible bottlenecks. WebLogic Server 12c also have an classloader analysis tool embedded, and even a log analyzer tool that enables administrators and developers to view logs of multiple servers at the same time. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand relies on third-part tools to do something similar. Again, only log searching are offered to find out whats going on. - WebLogic Server 12c offers end-to-end traceability and monitoring available through Oracle EM ("Enterprise Manager"), including monitoring of business transactions that flows through web servers, ESBs, application servers and database servers, all of this with high deep JVM analysis and diagnostics. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand, even using JBoss ON ("Operations Network"), which is a separated technology, does not support those features. Red Hat relies on third-part tools to provide direct Oracle database traceability across JVMs. One of those tools are Oracle EM for non-Oracle middleware that manage JBoss, Tomcat, Websphere and IIS transparently. - WebLogic Server 12c with their JRockit support offers a tool called JRockit Flight Recorder, which can give developers a complete visibility of a certain period of application production monitoring with zero extra overhead. This automatic recording allows you to deep analyse threads latency, memory leaks, thread contention, resource utilization, stack overflow damages and GC ("Garbage Collection") cycles, to observe in real time stop-the-world phenomenons, generational, reference count and parallel collects and mutator threads analysis. JBoss EAP 6 don't even dream to support something similar, even because they don't have their own JVM. 3) Application Server Administration - WebLogic Server 12c offers a complete administration console complemented with scripting and macro-like recording capabilities. A single WebLogic console can managed up to hundreds of WebLogic servers belonging to the same domain. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a limited console and provides a XML centric administration. JBoss, after ten years, started the development of a rudimentary centralized administration that still leave a lot of administration tasks aside, so admin people and developers must touch scripts and XML configuration files for most advanced and even simple administration tasks. This lead applications to error prone and risky deployments. Even using JBoss ON, JBoss EAP are not able to offer decent administration features for admin people which must be high skilled in JBoss internal architecture and its managing capabilities. - Oracle EM is available to manage multiple domains, databases, application servers, operating systems and virtualization, with a complete end-to-end visibility. JBoss ON does not provide management capabilities across the complete architecture, only basic monitoring. Even deployment must be done aside JBoss ON which does no integrate well with others softwares than JBoss. Until now, JBoss ON does not supports JBoss EAP 6, so even their minimal support for JBoss are not available for JBoss EAP 6 leaving customers uncovered and subject to high skilled JBoss admin people. - WebLogic Server 12c has the same administration model whatever is the topology selected by the customer. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand differentiates between two operational models: standalone-mode and domain-mode, that are not consistent with each other. Depending on the mode used, the administration skill is different. - WebLogic Server 12c has no point-of-failures processes, and it does not need to define any specialized server. Domain model in WebLogic is available for years (at least ten years or more) and is production proven. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand needs special processes to garantee JBoss integrity, the PC ("Process-Controller") and the HC ("Host-Controller"). Different from WebLogic, the domain model in JBoss is quite new (one year at tops) of maturity, and need to mature considerably until start doing things like WebLogic domain model does. - WebLogic Server 12c supports parallel deployment model which enables some artifacts being deployed at the same time. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does not have any similar feature. Every deployment are done atomically in the containers. This means that if you have a huge EAR (an EAR of 120 MB of size for instance) and deploy onto JBoss EAP 6, this EAR will take some minutes in order to starting accept thread requests. The same EAR deployed onto WebLogic Server 12c will reduce the deployment time at least in 2X compared to JBoss. 4) Support and Upgrades - WebLogic Server 12c has patch management available. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no patch management available, each JBoss EAP instance should be patched manually. To achieve such feature, you need to buy a separated technology called JBoss ON ("Operations Network") that manage this type of stuff. But until now, JBoss ON does not support JBoss EAP 6 so, in practice, JBoss EAP 6 does not have this feature. - WebLogic Server 12c supports previuous WebLogic domains without any reconfiguration since its kernel is robust and mature since its creation in 1995. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a proven lack of supportability between JBoss AS 4, 5, 6 and 7. Different kernels and messaging engines were implemented in JBoss stack in the last five years reveling their incapacity to create a well architected and proven middleware technology. - WebLogic Server 12c has patch prescription based on customer configuration. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such capability. People need to create ticket supports and have their installations revised by Red Hat support guys to gain some patch prescription from them. - Oracle WebLogic Server independent of the version has 8 years of support of new patches and has lifetime release of existing patches beyond that. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand provides patches for a specific application server version up to 5 years after the release date. JBoss EAP 4 and previous versions had only 4 years. A good question that Red Hat will argue to answer is: "what happens when you find issues after year 5"?  5) RAC ("Real Application Clusters") Support - WebLogic Server 12c ships with a specific JDBC driver to leverage Oracle RAC clustering capabilities (Fast-Application-Notification, Transaction Affinity, Fast-Connection-Failover, etc). Oracle JDBC thin driver are also available. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand ships only the standard Oracle JDBC thin driver. Load balancing with Oracle RAC are not supported. Manual intervention in case of planned or unplanned RAC downtime are necessary. In JBoss EAP 6, situation does not reestablish automatically after downtime. - WebLogic Server 12c has a feature called Active GridLink for Oracle RAC which provides up to 3X performance on OLTP applications. This seamless integration between WebLogic and Oracle database enable more value added to critical business applications leveraging their investments in Oracle database technology and Oracle middleware. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no performance gains at all, even when admin people implement some kind of connection-pooling tuning. - WebLogic Server 12c also supports transaction and web session affinity to the Oracle RAC, which provides aditional gains of performance. This is particularly interesting if you are creating a reliable solution that are distributed not only in an LAN cluster, but into a different data center. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such support. 6) Standards and Technology Support - WebLogic Server 12c is fully Java EE 6 compatible and production ready since december of 2011. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand became fully compatible with Java EE 6 only in the community version after three months, and production ready only in a few days considering that this article was written in June of 2012. Red Hat says that they are the masters of innovation and technology proliferation, but compared with Oracle and even other proprietary vendors like IBM, they historically speaking are lazy to deliver the most newest technologies and standards adherence. - Oracle is the steward of Java, driving innovation into the platform from commercial and open-source vendors. Red Hat on the other hand does not have its own JVM and relies on third-part JVMs to complete their application server offer. 95% of Red Hat customers are using Oracle HotSpot as JVM, which means that without Oracle involvement, their support are limited exclusively to the application server layer and we all know that most problems are happens in the JVM layer. - WebLogic Server 12c supports natively JDK 7, which empower developers to explore the maximum of the Java platform productivity when writing code. This feature differentiate WebLogic from others application servers (except GlassFish that are also managed by Oracle) because the usage of JDK 7 introduce such remarkable productivity features like the "try-with-resources" enhancement, catching multiple exceptions with one try block, Strings in the switch statements, JVM improvements in terms of JDBC, I/O, networking, security, concurrency and of course, the most important feature of Java 7: native support for multiple non-Java languages. More features regarding JDK 7 can be found here. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does not support JDK 7 officially, they comment in their community version that "Java SE 7 can be used with JBoss 7" which does not gives you any guarantees of enterprise support for JDK 7. - Oracle WebLogic Server 12c supports integration with Spring framework allowing Spring applications to use WebLogic special transaction manager, exposing bean interfaces to WebLogic MBeans to take advantage of all WebLogic monitoring and administration advantages. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no special integration with Spring. In fact, Red Hat offers a suspicious package called "JBoss Web Platform" that in theory supports Spring, but in practice this package does not offers any special integration. It is just a facility for Red Hat customers to have support from both JBoss and Spring technology using the same customer support. 7) Lightweight Development - Oracle WebLogic Server 12c and Oracle GlassFish are completely integrated and can share applications without any modifications. Starting with the 12c version, WebLogic now understands natively GlassFish deployment descriptors and specific configurations in order to offer you a truly and reliable migration path from a community Java EE application server to a enterprise middleware product like WebLogic. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no support to natively reuse an existing (or still in development) application from JBoss AS community server. Users of JBoss suffer of critical issues during deployment time that includes: changing the libraries and dependencies of the application, patching the DTD or XSD deployment descriptors, refactoring of the application layers due classloading issues and anomalies, rebuilding of persistence, business and web layers due issues with "usage of the certified version of an certain dependency" or "frameworks that Red Hat potentially does not recommend" etc. If you have the culture or enterprise IT directive of developing Java EE applications using community middleware to in a certain future, transition to enterprise (supported by a vendor) middleware, Oracle WebLogic plus Oracle GlassFish offers you a more sustainable solution. - WebLogic Server 12c has a very light ZIP distribution (less than 165 MB). JBoss EAP 6 ZIP size is around 130 MB, together with JBoss ON you have more 100 MB resulting in a higher download footprint. This is particularly interesting if you plan to use automated setup of application server instances (for example, to rapidly setup a development or staging environment) using Maven or Hudson. - WebLogic Server 12c has a complete integration with Maven allowing developers to setup WebLogic domains with few commands. Tasks like downloading WebLogic, installation, domain creation, data sources deployment are completely integrated. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a limited offer integration with those tools.  - WebLogic Server 12c has a startup mode called WLX that turns-off EJB, JMS and JCA containers leaving enabled only the web container with Java EE 6 web profile. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such feature, you need to disable manually the containers that you do not want to use. - WebLogic Server 12c supports fastswap, which enables you to change classes without redeployment. This is particularly interesting if you are developing patches for the application that is already deployed and you do not want to redeploy the entire application. This is the same behavior that most application servers offers to JSP pages, but with WebLogic Server 12c, you have the same feature for Java classes in general. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no such support. Even JBoss EAP 5 does not support this until now. 8) JMS and Messaging - WebLogic Server 12c has a proven and high scalable JMS implementation since its initial release in 1995. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a still immature technology called HornetQ, which was introduced in JBoss EAP 5 replacing everything that was implemented in the previous versions. Red Hat loves to introduce new technologies across JBoss versions, playing around with customers and their investments. And when they are asked about why they have changed the implementation and caused such a mess, their answer is always: "the previous implementation was inadequate and not aligned with the community strategy so we are creating a new a improved one". This Red Hat practice leads to uncomfortable investments that in a near future (sometimes less than a year) will be affected in someway. - WebLogic Server 12c has troubleshooting and monitoring features included on the WebLogic console and WLDF. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no direct monitoring on the console, activity is reflected only on the logs, no debug logs available in case of JMS issues. - WebLogic Server 12c has extremely good performance and scalability. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has a JMS storage mechanism relying on Oracle database or MySQL. This means that if an issue in production happens and Red Hat affirms that an performance issue is happening due to database problems, they will not support you on the performance issue. They will orient you to call Oracle instead. - WebLogic Server 12c supports messaging enterprise features like SAF ("Store and Forward"), Distributed Queues/Topics and Foreign JMS providers support that leverage JMS implementations without compromise developer code making things completely transparent. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand do not even dream to support such features. 9) Caching and Grid - Coherence, which is the leading and most mature data grid technology from Oracle, is available since early 2000 and was integrated with WebLogic in 2009. Coherence and WebLogic clusters can be both managed from WebLogic administrative console. Even Node Manager supports Coherence. JBoss on the other hand discontinued JBoss Cache, which was their caching implementation just like they did with the messaging implementation (JBossMQ) which was a issue for long term customers. JBoss EAP 6 ships InfiniSpan version 1.0 which is immature and lack a proven record of successful cases and reliability. - WebLogic Server 12c has a feature called ActiveCache which uses Coherence to, without any code changes, replicate HTTP sessions from both WebLogic and other application servers like JBoss, Tomcat, Websphere, GlassFish and even Microsoft IIS. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does have such support and even when they do in the future, they probably will support only their own application server. - Coherence can be used to manage both L1 and L2 cache levels, providing support to Oracle TopLink and others JPA compliant implementations, even Hibernate. JBoss EAP 6 and Infinispan on the other hand supports only Hibernate. And most important of all: Infinispan does not have any successful case of L1 or L2 caching level support using Hibernate, which lead us to reflect about its viability. 10) Performance - WebLogic Server 12c is certified with Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and can run unchanged applications at this engineered system. This approach can benefit customers from Exalogic optimization's of both kernel and JVM layers to boost performance in terms of 10X for web, OLTP, JMS and grid applications. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no investment on engineered systems: customers do not have the choice to deploy on a Java ultra fast system if their project becomes relevant and performance issues are detected. - WebLogic Server 12c maintains a performance gain across each new release: starting on WebLogic 5.1, the overall performance gain has been close to 4X, which close to a 20% gain release by release. JBoss on the other hand does not provide SPECJAppServer or SPECJEnterprise performance benchmarks. Their so called "performance gains" remains hidden in their customer environments, which lead us to think if it is true or not since we will never get access to those environments. - WebLogic Server 12c has industry performance benchmarks with submissions across platforms and configurations leading SPECJ. Oracle WebLogic leads SPECJAppServer performance in multiple categories, fitting all customer topologies like: dual-node, single-node, multi-node and multi-node with RAC. JBoss... again, does not provide any SPECJAppServer performance benchmarks. - WebLogic Server 12c has a feature called work manager which allows your application to embrace new performance levels based on critical resource utilization of the CPUs usage. Work managers prioritizes work and allocates threads based on an execution model that takes into account administrator-defined parameters and actual run-time performance and throughput. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand has no compared feature and probably they never will. Not supporting such feature like work managers, JBoss EAP 6 forces admin people and specially developers to uncover performance gains in a intrusive way, rewriting the code and doing performance refactorings. 11) Professional Services Support - WebLogic Server 12c and any other technology sold by Oracle give customers the possibility of hire OCS ("Oracle Consulting Services") to manage critical scenarios, deployment assistance of new applications, high skilled consultancy of architecture, best practices and people allocation together with customer teams. All OCS services are available without any restrictions, having the customer bought software from Oracle or just starting their implementation before any acquisition. JBoss EAP 6 or Red Hat to be more specifically, only offers professional services if you buy subscriptions from them. If you are developing a new critical application for your business and need the help of Red Hat for a serious issue or architecture decision, they will probably say: "OK... I can help you but after you buy subscriptions from me". Red Hat also does not allows their professional services consultants to manage environments that uses community based software. They will probably force you to first buy a subscription, download their "enterprise" version and them, optionally hire their consultants. - Oracle provides you our university to educate your team into our technologies, including of course specialized trainings of WebLogic application server. At any time and location, you can hire Oracle to train your team so you get trustful knowledge according to your specific needs. Certifications for the products are also available if your technical people desire to differentiate themselves as professionals. Red Hat on the other hand have a limited pool of resources to train your team in their technologies. Basically they are selling training and certification for RHEL ("Red Hat Enterprise Linux") but if you demand more specialized training in JBoss middleware, they will probably connect you to some "certified" partner localized training since they are apparently discontinuing their education center, at least here in Brazil. They were not able to reproduce their success with RHEL education to their middleware division since they need first sell the subscriptions to after gives you specialized training. And again, they only offer you specialized training based on their enterprise version (EAP in the case of JBoss) which means that the courses will be a quite outdated. There are reports of developers that took official training's from Red Hat at this year (2012) and in a certain JBoss advanced course, Red Hat supposedly covered JBossMQ as the messaging subsystem, and even the printed material provided was based on JBossMQ since the training was created for JBoss EAP 4.3. 12) Encouraging Transparency without Ulterior Motives - WebLogic Server 12c like any other software from Oracle can be downloaded any time from anywhere, you should only possess an OTN ("Oracle Technology Network") credential and you can download any enterprise software how many times you want. And is not some kind of "trial" version. It is the official binaries that will be running for ever in your data center. Oracle does not encourages the usage of "specific versions" of our software. The binaries you buy from Oracle are the same binaries anyone in the world could download and use for testing and personal education. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand are not available for download unless you buy a subscription and get access to the Red Hat enterprise repositories. If you need to test, learn or just start creating your application using Red Hat's middleware software, you should download it from the community website. You are not allowed to download the enterprise version that, according to Red Hat are more secure, reliable and robust. But no one of us want to start the development of a software with an unsecured, unreliable and not scalable middleware right? So what you do? You are "invited" by Red Hat to buy subscriptions from them to get access to the "cool" version of the software. - WebLogic Server 12c prices are publicly available in the Oracle website. If you want to know right now how much WebLogic will cost to your organization, just click here and get access to our price list. In the case of WebLogic, check out the "US Oracle Technology Commercial Price List". Oracle also encourages you to get in touch with a sales representative to discuss discounts that would make possible the investment into our technology. But you are not required to do this, only if you are interested in buying our technology or maybe you want to discuss some discount scenarios. JBoss EAP 6 on the other hand does not have its cost publicly available in Red Hat's website or in any other media, at least is not so easy to get such information. The only link you will possibly find in their website is a "Contact a Sales Representative" link. This is not a very good relationship between an customer and an vendor. This is not an example of transparency, mainly when the software are sold as open. In this situations, customers expects to see the software prices publicly available, so they can have the chance to decide, based on the existing features of the software, if the cost is fair or not. Conclusion Oracle WebLogic is the most mature, secure, reliable and scalable Java EE application server of the market, and have a proven record of success around the globe to prove it's majority. Don't lose the chance to discover today how WebLogic could fit your needs and sustain your global IT middleware strategy, no matter if your strategy are completely based on the Cloud or not.

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• SQL SERVER – Example of Performance Tuning for Advanced Users with DB Optimizer

  - by Pinal Dave

  Performance tuning is such a subject that everyone wants to master it. In beginning everybody is at a novice level and spend lots of time learning how to master the art of performance tuning. However, as we progress further the tuning of the system keeps on getting very difficult. I have understood in my early career there should be no need of ego in the technology field. There are always better solutions and better ideas out there and we should not resist them. Instead of resisting the change and new wave I personally adopt it. Here is a similar example, as I personally progress to the master level of performance tuning, I face that it is getting harder to come up with optimal solutions. In such scenarios I rely on various tools to teach me how I can do things better. Once I learn about tools, I am often able to come up with better solutions when I face the similar situation next time. A few days ago I had received a query where the user wanted to tune it further to get the maximum out of the performance. I have re-written the similar query with the help of AdventureWorks sample database. SELECT * FROM HumanResources.Employee e INNER JOIN HumanResources.EmployeeDepartmentHistory edh ON e.BusinessEntityID = edh.BusinessEntityID INNER JOIN HumanResources.Shift s ON edh.ShiftID = s.ShiftID; User had similar query to above query was used in very critical report and wanted to get best out of the query. When I looked at the query – here were my initial thoughts Use only column in the select statements as much as you want in the application Let us look at the query pattern and data workload and find out the optimal index for it Before I give further solutions I was told by the user that they need all the columns from all the tables and creating index was not allowed in their system. He can only re-write queries or use hints to further tune this query. Now I was in the constraint box – I believe * was not a great idea but if they wanted all the columns, I believe we can’t do much besides using *. Additionally, if I cannot create a further index, I must come up with some creative way to write this query. I personally do not like to use hints in my application but there are cases when hints work out magically and gives optimal solutions. Finally, I decided to use Embarcadero’s DB Optimizer. It is a fantastic tool and very helpful when it is about performance tuning. I have previously explained how it works over here. First open DBOptimizer and open Tuning Job from File >> New >> Tuning Job. Once you open DBOptimizer Tuning Job follow the various steps indicates in the following diagram. Essentially we will take our original script and will paste that into Step 1: New SQL Text and right after that we will enable Step 2 for Generating Various cases, Step 3 for Detailed Analysis and Step 4 for Executing each generated case. Finally we will click on Analysis in Step 5 which will generate the report detailed analysis in the result pan. The detailed pan looks like. It generates various cases of T-SQL based on the original query. It applies various hints and available hints to the query and generate various execution plans of the query and displays them in the resultant. You can clearly notice that original query had a cost of 0.0841 and logical reads about 607 pages. Whereas various options which are just following it has different execution cost as well logical read. There are few cases where we have higher logical read and there are few cases where as we have very low logical read. If we pay attention the very next row to original query have Merge_Join_Query in description and have lowest execution cost value of 0.044 and have lowest Logical Reads of 29. This row contains the query which is the most optimal re-write of the original query. Let us double click over it. Here is the query: SELECT * FROM HumanResources.Employee e INNER JOIN HumanResources.EmployeeDepartmentHistory edh ON e.BusinessEntityID = edh.BusinessEntityID INNER JOIN HumanResources.Shift s ON edh.ShiftID = s.ShiftID OPTION (MERGE JOIN) If you notice above query have additional hint of Merge Join. With the help of this Merge Join query hint this query is now performing much better than before. The entire process takes less than 60 seconds. Please note that it the join hint Merge Join was optimal for this query but it is not necessary that the same hint will be helpful in all the queries. Additionally, if the workload or data pattern changes the query hint of merge join may be no more optimal join. In that case, we will have to redo the entire exercise once again. This is the reason I do not like to use hints in my queries and I discourage all of my users to use the same. However, if you look at this example, this is a great case where hints are optimizing the performance of the query. It is humanly not possible to test out various query hints and index options with the query to figure out which is the most optimal solution. Sometimes, we need to depend on the efficiency tools like DB Optimizer to guide us the way and select the best option from the suggestion provided. Let me know what you think of this article as well your experience with DB Optimizer. Please leave a comment. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Joins, SQL Optimization, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Unique Business Value vs. Unique IT

  - by barry.perkins

  When the age of computing started, technology was new, exciting, full of potential and had a long way to grow. Vendor architectures were proprietary, and limited in function at first, growing in capability and complexity over time. There were few if any "standards", let alone "open standards" and the concepts of "open systems", and "open architectures" were far in the future. Companies employed intelligent, talented and creative people to implement the best possible solutions for their company. At first, those solutions were "unique" to each company. As time progressed, standards emerged, companies shared knowledge, business capability supplied by technology grew, and companies continued to expand their use of technology. Taking advantage of change required companies to struggle through periodic "revolutionary" change cycles, struggling through costly changes that were fraught with risk, resulted in solutions with an increasingly shorter half-life, and frequently required altering existing business processes and retraining employees and partner businesses. The pace of technological invention and implementation grew at an ever increasing rate, making the "revolutionary" approach based upon "proprietary" or "closed" architectures or technologies no longer viable. Concurrent with the advancement of technology, the rate of change in business increased, leading us to the incredibly fast paced, highly charged, and competitive global economy that we have today, where the most successful companies are companies that are good at implementing, leveraging and exploiting change. Fast forward to today, a world where dramatic changes in business and technology happen continually, a world where "evolutionary" change is crucial. Companies can no longer afford to build "unique IT", nor can they afford regular intervals of "revolutionary" change, with the associated costs and risks. Human ingenuity was once again up to the task, turning technology into a platform supporting business through evolutionary change, by employing "open": open standards; open systems; open architectures; and open solutions. Employing "open", enables companies to implement systems based upon technology, capability and standards that will evolve over time, providing a solid platform upon which a company can drive business needs, requirements, functions, and processes down into the technology, rather than exposing technology to the business, allowing companies to focus on providing "unique business value" rather than "unique IT". The big question! Does moving from "older" technology that no longer meets the needs of today's business, to new "open" technology require yet another "revolutionary change"? A "revolutionary" change with a short half-life, camouflaging reality with great marketing? The answer is "perhaps". With the endless options available to choose from, it is entirely possible to implement a solution that may work well today, but in 5 years time will become yet another albatross for the company to bear. Some solutions may look good today, solving a budget challenge by reducing cost, or solving a specific tactical challenge, but result in highly complex environments, that may be difficult to manage and maintain and limit the future potential of your business. Put differently, some solutions might push today's challenge into the future, resulting in a more complex and expensive solution. There is no such thing as a "1 size fits all" IT solution for business. If all companies implemented business solutions based upon technology that required, or forced the same business processes across all businesses in an industry, it would be extremely difficult to show competitive advantage through "unique business value". It would be equally difficult to "evolve" to meet or exceed business needs and keep up with today's rapid pace of change. How does one ensure that they do not jump from one trap directly into another? Or to put it positively, there are solutions available today that can address these challenges and issues. How does one ensure that the buying decision of today will serve the business well for years into the future? Intelligent & Informed decisions - "buying right" In a previous blog entry, we discussed the value of linking tactical to strategic The key is driving the focus to what is best for your business, handling today's tactical issues while also aligning with a roadmap/strategy that is tightly aligned with your strategic business objectives. When considering the plethora of possible options that provide various approaches to solving today's complex business problems, it is extremely important to ensure that vendors supplying those options, focus on what is best for your business, supplying sufficient information, providing adequate answers to questions, addressing challenges, issues, concerns and objections honestly and openly, and focus on supplying solutions that are tailored for, and deliver the most business value possible for your business. Here are a few questions to consider relative to the proposed options that should help ensure that today's solution doesn't become tomorrow's problem. Do the proposed solutions: Solve the problem(s) you are trying to address? Provide a solid foundation upon which to grow/enhance your business? Provide tactical gains that align with and enable your strategic business goals/objectives? Provide an infrastructure that can be leveraged with subsequent projects? Solve problems for the business overall, the lines of business, or just IT? Simplify your current environment Provide the basis for business: Efficiency Agility Clarity governance, risk, compliance real time business visibility and trend analysis Does your IT staff have the knowledge/experience to successfully manage the proposed systems once they are deployed in production? Done well, you will be presented with options tailored to your business, that enable you to drive the "unique business value" necessary to help your business stand out from others, creating a distinct competitive advantage, delivering what your customers need, when they need it, so you can attract new customers, new business, and grow top line revenue, all at a cost that provides a strong Return on Investment/Return on Assets. The net result is growth with managed cost providing significantly improved profit margin and shareholder value.

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• AWS: setting up auto-scale for EC2 instances

  - by Elton Stoneman

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman/archive/2013/10/16/aws-setting-up-auto-scale-for-ec2-instances.aspxWith Amazon Web Services, there’s no direct equivalent to Azure Worker Roles – no Elastic Beanstalk-style application for .NET background workers. But you can get the auto-scale part by configuring an auto-scaling group for your EC2 instance. This is a step-by-step guide, that shows you how to create the auto-scaling configuration, which for EC2 you need to do with the command line, and then link your scaling policies to CloudWatch alarms in the Web console. I’m using queue size as my metric for CloudWatch,  which is a good fit if your background workers are pulling messages from a queue and processing them.  If the queue is getting too big, the “high” alarm will fire and spin up a new instance to share the workload. If the queue is draining down, the “low” alarm will fire and shut down one of the instances. To start with, you need to manually set up your app in an EC2 VM, for a background worker that would mean hosting your code in a Windows Service (I always use Topshelf). If you’re dual-running Azure and AWS, then you can isolate your logic in one library, with a generic entry point that has Start() and Stop()  functions, so your Worker Role and Windows Service are essentially using the same code. When you have your instance set up with the Windows Service running automatically, and you’ve tested it starts up and works properly from a reboot, shut the machine down and take an image of the VM, using Create Image (EBS AMI) from the Web Console: When that completes, you’ll have your own AMI which you can use to spin up new instances, and you’re ready to create your auto-scaling group. You need to dip into the command-line tools for this, so follow this guide to set up the AWS autoscale command line tool. Now we’re ready to go. 1. Create a launch configuration This launch configuration tells AWS what to do when a new instance needs to be spun up. You create it with the as-create-launch-config command, which looks like this: as-create-launch-config sc-xyz-launcher # name of the launch config --image-id ami-7b9e9f12 # id of the AMI you extracted from your VM --region eu-west-1 # which region the new instance gets created in --instance-type t1.micro # size of the instance to create --group quicklaunch-1 #security group for the new instance 2. Create an auto-scaling group The auto-scaling group links to the launch config, and defines the overall configuration of the collection of instances: as-create-auto-scaling-group sc-xyz-asg # auto-scaling group name --region eu-west-1 # region to create in --launch-configuration sc-xyz-launcher # name of the launch config to invoke for new instances --min-size 1 # minimum number of nodes in the group --max-size 5 # maximum number of nodes in the group --default-cooldown 300 # period to wait (in seconds) after each scaling event, before checking if another scaling event is required --availability-zones eu-west-1a eu-west-1b eu-west-1c # which availability zones you want your instances to be allocated in – multiple entries means EC@ will use any of them 3. Create a scale-up policy The policy dictates what will happen in response to a scaling event being triggered from a “high” alarm being breached. It links to the auto-scaling group; this sample results in one additional node being spun up: as-put-scaling-policy scale-up-policy # policy name -g sc-psod-woker-asg # auto-scaling group the policy works with --adjustment 1 # size of the adjustment --region eu-west-1 # region --type ChangeInCapacity # type of adjustment, this specifies a fixed number of nodes, but you can use PercentChangeInCapacity to make an adjustment relative to the current number of nodes, e.g. increasing by 50% 4. Create a scale-down policy The policy dictates what will happen in response to a scaling event being triggered from a “low” alarm being breached. It links to the auto-scaling group; this sample results in one node from the group being taken offline: as-put-scaling-policy scale-down-policy -g sc-psod-woker-asg "--adjustment=-1" # in Windows, use double-quotes to surround a negative adjustment value –-type ChangeInCapacity --region eu-west-1 5. Create a “high” CloudWatch alarm We’re done with the command line now. In the Web Console, open up the CloudWatch view and create a new alarm. This alarm will monitor your metrics and invoke the scale-up policy from your auto-scaling group, when the group is working too hard. Configure your metric – this example will fire the alarm if there are more than 10 messages in my queue for over a minute: Then link the alarm to the scale-up policy in your group: 6. Create a “low” CloudWatch alarm The opposite of step 4, this alarm will trigger when the instances in your group don’t have enough work to do (e.g fewer than 2 messages in the queue for 1 minute), and will invoke the scale-down policy. And that’s it. You don’t need your original VM as the auto-scale group has a minimum number of nodes connected. You can test out the scaling by flexing your CloudWatch metric – in this example, filling up a queue from a  stub publisher – and watching AWS create new nodes as required, then stopping the publisher and watch AWS kill off the spare nodes.

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• 2012 Oracle Fusion Innovation Awards - Part 2

  - by Michelle Kimihira

  Author: Moazzam Chaudry Continuing from Friday's blog on 2012 Oracle Fusion Innovation Awards, this blog (Part 2) will provide more details around the customers. It was a tremendous honor to be in single room of winners. We only wish we could have had more time to share stories from all the winners.  We received great insight from all the innovative solutions that our customers deploy and would like to share them broadly, so that others can benefit from best practices. There was a customer panel session joined by Ingersoll Rand, Nike and Motability and here is what was discussed: Barry Bonar, Enterprise Architect from Ingersoll Rand shared details around their solution, comprised of Oracle Exalogic, Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle SOA Suite. This combined solutoin enabled their business transformation to increase decision-making, speed and efficiency, resulting in 40% reduced IT spend, 41X Faster response time and huge cost savings. Ashok Balakrishnan, Architect from Nike shared how they leveraged Oracle Coherence to analyze their digital "footprint" of activities. This helps them compete, collaborate and compare athletic data over time. Lastly, Ashley Doodly, Head of IT from Motability shared details around their solution compromised of Oracle SOA Suite, Service Bus, ADF, Coherence, BO and E-Business Suite. This solution helped Motability achieve 100% ROI within the first few months, performance in seconds vs. 10's of minutes and tremendous improvement in throughput that increased up to 50%.  This year's winners by category are: Oracle Exalogic Customer Results using Fusion Middleware Netshoes ATG on Exalogic: 6X Reduced H/W foot print, 6.2X increased throughput and 3 weeks time to market Claro Part of America Movil, running mission critical Java Application on Exalogic with 35X Faster Java response time, 5X Throughput Underwriters Laboratories Exalogic as an Apps Consolidation platform to power tremendous growth Ingersoll Rand EBS on Exalogic: Up to 40% Reduction in overall IT budget, 3x reduced foot print Oracle Cloud Application Foundation Customer Results using Fusion Middleware  Mazda Motor Corporation Tuxedo ART Batch runtime environment to migrate their batch apps on new open environment and reduce main frame cost. HOTELBEDS Technology Open Source to WebLogic transformation Globalia Corporation Introduced Oracle Coherence to fully reengineer DTH system and provide multiple business and technical benefits Nike Nike+, digital sports platform, has 8M users and is expecting an 5X increase in users, many of who will carry multiple devices that frequently sync data with the Digital Sport platform Comcast Corporation The solution is expected to increase availability, continuity, performance, and simplify and make the code at the application layer more flexible. Oracle SOA and Oracle BPM Customer Results using Fusion Middleware NTT Docomo Network traffic solution based on Oracle event processing and coherence - massive in scale: 12M users (50M in future) - 800,000 events/sec. Schneider National, Inc. SOA/B2B/ADF/Data Integration to orchestrate key order processes across Siebel, OTM & EBS.  Platform runs 60M trans/day and  50 million composite SOA instances per day across 10G and 11G Amadeus Oracle BPM solution: Business Rules and processes vary across local (80), regional (~10) and corporate approval process. Up to 10 levels of approval. Plans to deploy across 20+ markets Navitar SOA solution integrates a fully non-Oracle legacy application/ERP environment using Oracle’s SOA Suite and Oracle AIA Foundation Pack. Motability Uses SOA Suite to synchronize data across the systems and to manage the vehicle remarketing process Oracle WebCenter Customer Results using Fusion Middleware  News Limited Single platform running websites for 50% of Australia's newspapers University of Louisville “Facebook for Medicine”: Oracle Webcenter platform and Oracle BIEE to analyze patient test data and uncover potential health issues. Expecting annualized ROI of 277% China Mobile Jiangsu Company portal (25k users) to drive collaboration & productivity Life Technologies Portal for remotely monitoring & repairing biotech instruments LA Dept. of Water & Power Oracle WebCenter Portal to power ladwp.com on desktop and mobile for 1.6million users Oracle Identity Management Customer Results using Fusion Middleware Education Testing Service Identity Management platform for provisioning & SSO of 6 million GRE, GMAT, TOEFL customers Avea Oracle Identity Manager allowing call center personnel to quickly change Identity Profile to handle varying call loads based on a user self service interface. Decreased Admin Cost by 30% Oracle Data Integration Customer Results using Fusion Middleware Raymond James Near real-time integration for improved systems (throughput & performance) and enhanced operational flexibility in a 24 X 7 environment Wm Morrison Supermarkets Electronic Point of Sale integration handling over 80 million transactions a day in near real time (15 min intervals) Oracle Application Development Framework and Oracle Fusion Development Customer Results using Fusion Middleware Qualcomm Incorporated Solution providing  immediate business value enabling a self-service model necessary for growing the new customer base, an increase in customer satisfaction, reduced “time-to-deliver” Micros Systems, Inc. ADF, SOA Suite, WebCenter  enables services that include managing distribution of hotel rooms availability and rates to channels such as Hotel Web-site, Expedia, etc. Marfin Egnatia Bank A new web 2.0 UI provides a much richer experience through the ADF solution with the end result being one of boosting end-user productivity    Business Analytics (Oracle BI, Oracle EPM, Oracle Exalytics) Customer Results using Fusion Middleware INC Research Self-service customer portal delivering 5–10% of the overall revenue - expected to grow fast with the BI solution Experian Reduction in Time to Complete the Financial Close Process Hologic Inc Solution, saving months of decision-making uncertainty! We look forward to seeing many more innovative nominations. The nominatation process for 2013 begins in April 2013.    Additional Information: Blog: Oracle WebCenter Award Winners Blog: Oracle Identity Management Winners Blog: Oracle Exalogic Winners Blog: SOA, BPM and Data Integration will be will feature award winners in its respective areas this week Subscribe to our regular Fusion Middleware Newsletter Follow us on Twitter and Facebook

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• Slow boot on Ubuntu 12.04

  - by Hailwood

  My Ubuntu is booting really slow (Windows is booting faster...). I am using Ubuntu a Dell Inspiron 1545 Pentium(R) Dual-Core CPU T4300 @ 2.10GHz, 4GB Ram, 500GB HDD running Ubuntu 12.04 with gnome-shell 3.4.1. After running dmesg the culprit seems to be this section, in particular the last three lines: [26.557659] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready [26.565414] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready [27.355355] Console: switching to colour frame buffer device 170x48 [27.362346] fb0: radeondrmfb frame buffer device [27.362347] drm: registered panic notifier [27.362357] [drm] Initialized radeon 2.12.0 20080528 for 0000:01:00.0 on minor 0 [27.617435] init: udev-fallback-graphics main process (1049) terminated with status 1 [30.064481] init: plymouth-stop pre-start process (1500) terminated with status 1 [51.708241] CE: hpet increased min_delta_ns to 20113 nsec [59.448029] eth2: no IPv6 routers present But I have no idea how to start debugging this. sudo lshw -C video $ sudo lshw -C video *-display description: VGA compatible controller product: RV710 [Mobility Radeon HD 4300 Series] vendor: Hynix Semiconductor (Hyundai Electronics) physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0 version: 00 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm pciexpress msi vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom configuration: driver=fglrx_pci latency=0 resources: irq:48 memory:e0000000-efffffff ioport:de00(size=256) memory:f6df0000-f6dfffff memory:f6d00000-f6d1ffff After loading the propriety driver my new dmesg log is below (starting from the first major time gap): [2.983741] EXT4-fs (sda6): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: (null) [25.094327] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready [25.119737] udevd[520]: starting version 175 [25.167086] lp: driver loaded but no devices found [25.215341] fglrx: module license 'Proprietary. (C) 2002 - ATI Technologies, Starnberg, GERMANY' taints kernel. [25.215345] Disabling lock debugging due to kernel taint [25.231924] wmi: Mapper loaded [25.318414] lib80211: common routines for IEEE802.11 drivers [25.318418] lib80211_crypt: registered algorithm 'NULL' [25.331631] [fglrx] Maximum main memory to use for locked dma buffers: 3789 MBytes. [25.332095] [fglrx] vendor: 1002 device: 9552 count: 1 [25.334206] [fglrx] ioport: bar 1, base 0xde00, size: 0x100 [25.334229] pci 0000:01:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16 [25.334235] pci 0000:01:00.0: setting latency timer to 64 [25.337109] [fglrx] Kernel PAT support is enabled [25.337140] [fglrx] module loaded - fglrx 8.96.4 [Mar 12 2012] with 1 minors [25.342803] Adding 4189180k swap on /dev/sda7. Priority:-1 extents:1 across:4189180k [25.364031] type=1400 audit(1338241723.027:2): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_load" name="/sbin/dhclient" pid=606 comm="apparmor_parser" [25.364491] type=1400 audit(1338241723.031:3): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_load" name="/usr/lib/NetworkManager/nm-dhcp-client.action" pid=606 comm="apparmor_parser" [25.364760] type=1400 audit(1338241723.031:4): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_load" name="/usr/lib/connman/scripts/dhclient-script" pid=606 comm="apparmor_parser" [25.394328] wl 0000:0c:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 17 [25.394343] wl 0000:0c:00.0: setting latency timer to 64 [25.415531] acpi device:36: registered as cooling_device2 [25.416688] input: Video Bus as /devices/LNXSYSTM:00/device:00/PNP0A03:00/device:34/LNXVIDEO:00/input/input6 [25.416795] ACPI: Video Device [VID] (multi-head: yes rom: no post: no) [25.416865] [Firmware Bug]: Duplicate ACPI video bus devices for the same VGA controller, please try module parameter "video.allow_duplicates=1"if the current driver doesn't work. [25.425133] lib80211_crypt: registered algorithm 'TKIP' [25.448058] snd_hda_intel 0000:00:1b.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 21 (level, low) -> IRQ 21 [25.448321] snd_hda_intel 0000:00:1b.0: irq 47 for MSI/MSI-X [25.448353] snd_hda_intel 0000:00:1b.0: setting latency timer to 64 [25.738867] eth1: Broadcom BCM4315 802.11 Hybrid Wireless Controller 5.100.82.38 [25.761213] input: HDA Intel Mic as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1b.0/sound/card0/input7 [25.761406] input: HDA Intel Headphone as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1b.0/sound/card0/input8 [25.783432] dcdbas dcdbas: Dell Systems Management Base Driver (version 5.6.0-3.2) [25.908318] EXT4-fs (sda6): re-mounted. Opts: errors=remount-ro [25.928155] input: Dell WMI hotkeys as /devices/virtual/input/input9 [25.960561] udevd[543]: renamed network interface eth1 to eth2 [26.285688] init: failsafe main process (835) killed by TERM signal [26.396426] input: PS/2 Mouse as /devices/platform/i8042/serio2/input/input10 [26.423108] input: AlpsPS/2 ALPS GlidePoint as /devices/platform/i8042/serio2/input/input11 [26.511297] Bluetooth: Core ver 2.16 [26.511383] NET: Registered protocol family 31 [26.511385] Bluetooth: HCI device and connection manager initialized [26.511388] Bluetooth: HCI socket layer initialized [26.511391] Bluetooth: L2CAP socket layer initialized [26.512079] Bluetooth: SCO socket layer initialized [26.530164] Bluetooth: BNEP (Ethernet Emulation) ver 1.3 [26.530168] Bluetooth: BNEP filters: protocol multicast [26.553893] type=1400 audit(1338241724.219:5): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_replace" name="/sbin/dhclient" pid=928 comm="apparmor_parser" [26.554860] Bluetooth: RFCOMM TTY layer initialized [26.554866] Bluetooth: RFCOMM socket layer initialized [26.554868] Bluetooth: RFCOMM ver 1.11 [26.557910] type=1400 audit(1338241724.223:6): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_load" name="/usr/lib/lightdm/lightdm/lightdm-guest-session-wrapper" pid=927 comm="apparmor_parser" [26.559166] type=1400 audit(1338241724.223:7): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_replace" name="/usr/lib/NetworkManager/nm-dhcp-client.action" pid=928 comm="apparmor_parser" [26.559574] type=1400 audit(1338241724.223:8): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_replace" name="/usr/lib/connman/scripts/dhclient-script" pid=928 comm="apparmor_parser" [26.575519] type=1400 audit(1338241724.239:9): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_load" name="/usr/lib/telepathy/mission-control-5" pid=931 comm="apparmor_parser" [26.581100] type=1400 audit(1338241724.247:10): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_load" name="/usr/lib/telepathy/telepathy-*" pid=931 comm="apparmor_parser" [26.582794] type=1400 audit(1338241724.247:11): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_load" name="/usr/bin/evince" pid=929 comm="apparmor_parser" [26.605672] ppdev: user-space parallel port driver [27.592475] sky2 0000:09:00.0: eth0: enabling interface [27.604329] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready [27.606962] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready [27.852509] vesafb: mode is 1024x768x32, linelength=4096, pages=0 [27.852513] vesafb: scrolling: redraw [27.852515] vesafb: Truecolor: size=0:8:8:8, shift=0:16:8:0 [27.852523] mtrr: type mismatch for e0000000,400000 old: write-back new: write-combining [27.852527] mtrr: type mismatch for e0000000,200000 old: write-back new: write-combining [27.852531] mtrr: type mismatch for e0000000,100000 old: write-back new: write-combining [27.852534] mtrr: type mismatch for e0000000,80000 old: write-back new: write-combining [27.852538] mtrr: type mismatch for e0000000,40000 old: write-back new: write-combining [27.852541] mtrr: type mismatch for e0000000,20000 old: write-back new: write-combining [27.852544] mtrr: type mismatch for e0000000,10000 old: write-back new: write-combining [27.852548] mtrr: type mismatch for e0000000,8000 old: write-back new: write-combining [27.852551] mtrr: type mismatch for e0000000,4000 old: write-back new: write-combining [27.852554] mtrr: type mismatch for e0000000,2000 old: write-back new: write-combining [27.852558] mtrr: type mismatch for e0000000,1000 old: write-back new: write-combining [27.853154] vesafb: framebuffer at 0xe0000000, mapped to 0xffffc90005580000, using 3072k, total 3072k [27.853405] Console: switching to colour frame buffer device 128x48 [27.853426] fb0: VESA VGA frame buffer device [28.539800] fglrx_pci 0000:01:00.0: irq 48 for MSI/MSI-X [28.540552] [fglrx] Firegl kernel thread PID: 1168 [28.540679] [fglrx] Firegl kernel thread PID: 1169 [28.540789] [fglrx] Firegl kernel thread PID: 1170 [28.540932] [fglrx] IRQ 48 Enabled [29.845620] [fglrx] Gart USWC size:1236 M. [29.845624] [fglrx] Gart cacheable size:489 M. [29.845629] [fglrx] Reserved FB block: Shared offset:0, size:1000000 [29.845632] [fglrx] Reserved FB block: Unshared offset:fc21000, size:3df000 [29.845635] [fglrx] Reserved FB block: Unshared offset:1fffb000, size:5000 [59.700023] eth2: no IPv6 routers present

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• Calling All Agile Customers-Share Your Stories at the Upcoming PLM Summit

  - by Terri Hiskey

  Now that we've closed the door on another Oracle OpenWorld, planning is in full swing for the next PLM Summit, taking place February 4-6, 2013 in San Francisco, in conjunction with the Oracle Value Chain Summit. This event is a must-attend for all Agile PLM customers. We will be holding five tracks with over forty Agile PLM-focused sessions covering a range of topics and industries. If you'd like to be notified once registration is live for this event, be sure to sign up at www.oracle.com/goto/vcs. CALL FOR PRESENTATIONS: We are looking for some fresh, new customer stories to share with attendees. Read below for descriptions of the five tracks, and the suggested topics that we'd like to hear from customers. If you are interested in presenting at the PLM Summit (and getting a FREE pass to attend if your presentation is accepted!) send me an email at terri.hiskey-AT-oracle.com with: Your proposed session title and the track your session fits into 3-5 bullets of takeaways that attendees will get from your presentation Your complete contact information including name, title, company, telephone number and email The deadline for this call for presentations is Thursday, November 15, so get your submission in soon! PLM Track #1:  Product Insights and Best Practices This track will provide executive attendees and line of business managers with an overview of how Agile PLM has been deployed and used at customers to enable and manage critical product-related business processes including enterprise quality and supplier management, compliance, product cost management, portfolio management, commercialization and software lifecycle management. These sessions will also provide details around how to manage the development and rollout of the solutions and how to achieve and track value. Possible session topics: Software Lifecycle Management Enterprise Quality Management New Product Development Integrated Business Planning ECO effectivity planning Rapid Commercialization             Manage the Design to Release Process for Complex Configured Products PLM for Life Sciences Companies I (Compliant Data Set) PLM for Life Sciences Companies II (eMDR, UDI) Discrete CPG – Private Label Mgmt Cost Management and Strategic Sourcing IP Mgmt in the Semiconductor Industry Implementing the Enterprise Training Record using Agile PLM PLM Track #2: Product Deep Dives & Demos This track is aimed at line of business  and IT managers who would like to understand the benefits of expanding their PLM footprint. The sessions in this track will provide attendees with an up-close and in-depth look Agile PLM’s newer and exciting applications, including analytics and innovation management, and will detail features and functionality that are available in the latest version of Agile PLM Possible session topics: Oracle Product Lifecycle Analytics Integrating PLM with Engineering and Supply Chain Systems Streamline PLM Design to Manufacturing Processes with AutoVue Visualization Solutions         Achieve Environmental Compliance (REACH and ROHS) with Agile Product Governance & Compliance PIM Deep Dive Achieving Integrated Change Control with Agile PLM and E-Business Suite Deploying PLM at Small and Midsize Enterprises Enhancing Oracle PQM w/APQP and 8D functionality Advanced Roles and Privileges – Enabling ITAR Model Unit Effectivity Implementing REACH with 9.3.2 Deploying Job Functions, Functional Teams in 9.3.2 to Improve Your Approval Matrix PLM Track #3: Administration & Integrations This track will provide sessions for Agile administrators, managers and daily Agile PLM users who are preparing to upgrade or looking to extend the use of their current PLM implementation through AIA and process extensions. It will include deeper conversation about Agile PLM features and best practices on managing an Agile PLM infrastructure. Possible session topics: Expand the Value of your Agile Investment with Innovative Process Extension Ideas Ensuring Implementation & Upgrade Success Ensure the Integrity and Accuracy of Product Data Across the Enterprise              Maximize the Benefits of an Integrated Architecture with AIA Integrating your PLM Implementation with ERP               Infrastructure Optimization Expanding Your PLM Implementation PLM Administrator Open Forum Q&A/Discussion FDA Validation Best Practices Best Practices for Managing a large Agile Deployment: Clustering, Load Balancing and Firewalls PLM Track #4: Agile PLM for Process This track is aimed at attendees interested in or currently using Agile PLM for Process. The sessions in this track will go over new features and functionality available in the newest version of PLM for Process and will give attendees an overview on how PLM for Process is being used to manage critical business processes such as formulation, recipe and specification management Possible session topics: PLM for Process Strategy, Roadmap and Update New Product Development and Introduction Effective Product Supplier Collaboration             Leverage Agile Formulation and Compliance to Manage Cost, Compliance, Quality, Labeling and Nutrition Menu Management Innovation Data Management Food Safety/ Introduction of P4P Quality Mgmt PLM Track #5: Agile PLM and Innovation Management This track consists of five sessions, and is for attendees interested in learning more about Oracle’s Agile Innovation Management, an exciting new addition to the Agile PLM application family that redefines the industry’s scope of product lifecycle management. Oracle’s innovation solutions enable companies to collaborate in a focused way among various functional groups (marketing, sales, operations, engineering/R&D and sourcing), combining insights of customer needs/requirements, competition, available technologies, alternate design scenarios and portfolio constraints to deliver what customers truly value. The results are better products, higher margins, greater efficiencies, more satisfied customers and the increased ability to continuously innovate. Possible session topics: Product Innovation Management Solution Overview Product Requirements & Ideation Management Concept Design Management Product Lifecycle Portfolio Management Innovation as a Competitive Differentiator

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• ACORD LOMA Session Highlights Policy Administration Trends

  - by [email protected]

  Helen Pitts, senior product marketing manager for Oracle Insurance, attended and is blogging from the ACORD LOMA Insurance Forum this week. Above: Paul Vancheri, Chief Information Officer, Fidelity Investments Life Insurance Company. Vancheri gave a presentation during the ACORD LOMA Insurance Systems Forum about the key elements of modern policy administration systems and how insurers can mitigate risk during legacy system migrations to safely introduce new technologies. When I had a few particularly challenging honors courses in college my father, a long-time technology industry veteran, used to say, "If you don't know how to do something go ask the experts. Find someone who has been there and done that, don't be afraid to ask the tough questions, and apply and build upon what you learn." (Actually he still offers this same advice today.) That's probably why my favorite sessions at industry events, like the ACORD LOMA Insurance Forum this week, are those that include insight on industry trends and case studies from carriers who share their experiences and offer best practices based upon their own lessons learned. I had the opportunity to attend a particularly insightful session Wednesday as Craig Weber, senior vice president of Celent's Insurance practice, and Paul Vancheri, CIO of Fidelity Life Investments, presented, "Managing the Dynamic Insurance Landscape: Enabling Growth and Profitability with a Modern Policy Administration System." Policy Administration Trends Growing the business is the top issue when it comes to IT among both life and annuity and property and casualty carriers according to Weber. To drive growth and capture market share from competitors, carriers are looking to modernize their core insurance systems, with 65 percent of those CIOs participating in recent Celent research citing plans to replace their policy administration systems. Weber noted that there has been continued focus and investment, particularly in the last three years, by software and technology vendors to offer modern, rules-based, configurable policy administration solutions. He added that these solutions are continuing to evolve with the ongoing aim of helping carriers rapidly meet shifting business needs--whether it is to launch new products to market faster than the competition, adapt existing products to meet shifting consumer and /or regulatory demands, or to exit unprofitable markets. He closed by noting the top four trends for policy administration either in the process of being adopted today or on the not-so-distant horizon for the future: Underwriting and service desktops New business automation Convergence of ultra-configurable and domain content-rich systems Better usability and screen design Mitigating the Risk When Making the Decision to Modernize Third-party analyst research from advisory firms like Celent was a key part of the due diligence process for Fidelity as it sought a replacement for its legacy policy administration system back in 2005, according to Vancheri. The company's business opportunities were outrunning system capability. Its legacy system had not been upgraded in several years and was deficient from a functionality and currency standpoint. This was constraining the carrier's ability to rapidly configure and bring new and complex products to market. The company sought a new, modern policy administration system, one that would enable it to keep pace with rapid and often unexpected industry changes and ahead of the competition. A cross-functional team that included representatives from finance, actuarial, operations, client services and IT conducted an extensive selection process. This process included deep documentation review, pilot evaluations, demonstrations of required functionality and complex problem-solving, infrastructure integration capability, and the ability to meet the company's desired cost model. The company ultimately selected an adaptive policy administration system that met its requirements to: Deliver ease of use - eliminating paper and rework, while easing the burden on representatives to sell and service annuities Provide customer parity - offering Web-based capabilities in alignment with the company's focus on delivering a consistent customer experience across its business Deliver scalability, efficiency - enabling automation, while simplifying and standardizing systems across its technology stack Offer desired functionality - supporting Fidelity's product configuration / rules management philosophy, focus on customer service and technology upgrade requirements Meet cost requirements - including implementation, professional services and licenses fees and ongoing maintenance Deliver upon business requirements - enabling the ability to drive time to market for new products and flexibility to make changes Best Practices for Addressing Implementation Challenges Based upon lessons learned during the company's implementation, Vancheri advised carriers to evaluate staffing capabilities and cultural impacts, review business requirements to avoid rebuilding legacy processes, factor in dependent systems, and review policies and practices to secure customer data. His formula for success: upfront planning + clear requirements = precision execution. Achieving a Return on Investment Vancheri said the decision to replace their legacy policy administration system and deploy a modern, rules-based system--before the economic downturn occurred--has been integral in helping the company adapt to shifting market conditions, while enabling growth in its direct channel sales of variable annuities. Since deploying its new policy admin system, the company has reduced its average time to market for new products from 12-15 months to 4.5 months. The company has since migrated its other products to the new system and retired its legacy system, significantly decreasing its overall product development cycle. From a processing standpoint Vancheri noted the company has achieved gains in automation, information, and ease of use, resulting in improved real-time data edits, controls for better quality, and tax handling capability. Plus, with by having only one platform to manage, the company has simplified its IT environment and is well positioned to deliver system enhancements for greater efficiencies. Commitment to Continuing the Investment In the short and longer term future Vancheri said the company plans to enhance business functionality to support money movement, wire automation, divorce processing on payout contracts and cost-based tracking improvements. It also plans to continue system upgrades to remain current as well as focus on further reducing cycle time, driving down maintenance costs, and integrating with other products. Helen Pitts is senior product marketing manager for Oracle Insurance focused on life/annuities and enterprise document automation.

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