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  • Linux FHS: /srv vs /var ... where do I put stuff?

    - by wag2639
    My web development experience has started with Fedora and RHEL but I'm transitioning to Ubuntu. In Fedora/RHEL, the default seems to be using the /var folder while Ubuntu uses /srv. Is there any reason to use one over the other and where does the line split? (It confused me so much that until very recently, I thought /srv was /svr for server/service) My main concern deals with two types of folders default www and ftp directories specific application folders like: samba shares (possibly grouped under a smb folder) web applications (should these go in www folder, or do can I do a symlink to its own directory like "_/www/wordpress" - "/srv/wordpress") I'm looking for best practice, industry standards, and qualitative reasons for which approach is best (or at least why its favored).

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  • What are the best code-less website design sites available?

    - by Ken Pespisa
    I'm looking for an alternative to www.squarespace.com. Squarespace is great, but leans slightly toward the social networking industry. I'm looking for a simple way to build Web sites for small businesses. The criteria is the following: Requires no programming knowledge. No software to download - all design and maintenance can be done via browser Has a good selection of templates and layouts Essentially I'm looking for the features within Typepad.com or WordPress.com, but instead of focusing around a blog it would help build a more traditional Web site.

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  • Matte or non-widescreen laptop? Do they exist?

    - by Alan Harris-Reid
    Does anyone know of any matte-screen laptops being sold now (15.6 or 17") in the UK? All I can find is the Dell Vostro 3500/3700 range, but there is a premium of around £200 over the price of their Inspiron range (for the 17" model), and I find it hard justifying the extra cost just to have a matte screen. I do not like glossy screens, but it seems the laptop industry has gone the way of "glossy is better - let's get rid of matte". I have read and heard from other developers that as long as there are no strong light sources to reflect off the screen, one can soon get used to a glossy screen, but I am yet to be convinced. I would also be interested if anyone knows of any non 16:9 screen laptops. I find this ratio too wide and not high-enough for the work I do. 16:10 or lower would be better. Any opinions would be appreciated. Alan

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  • How to consolidate servers with the not-very-strong infrastructure

    - by Sim
    All, Situation We are in retail industry with about 10 distributors and use Solomon as the standard ERP for all our systems Each distributor has 1 HQ and 5 - 10 branches, each branch has their own server (Windows 2000/XP/2003 + Solomon + another built-in POS system) Everyday, branches has to extract data and send (via email/Skype) to HQ for data consolidation purpose When we first deployed our ERP, the infrastructure (e.g. Internet connection) wasn't reliable enough. That's why we went with the de-centralized model (each branch got their own server) Now, the infrastructure is mature already. And we need to consolidate data more quickly (not from branches -- HQ -- our company but something like HQ -- our company only) Goal We just have Solomon servers in distributor HQ. All the transactions in branches (retrieved from POS) will by synchronized with HQ server directly) There is a backup plan just in case the Internet goes down, or HQ server goes down Question With the above question, could you guys suggests some model for me ? Should we use Terminal services, any other solutions ? Any watchout/suggestions ? Any good article to read 'bout this ? Thanks a lot

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  • How Often Do Windows Servers Need to be Restarted?

    - by Evan
    A little background: We have several Windows servers (2003, 2008) for our department. We're a division of IT so we manage our own servers. Of the four of us here I'm the only one with a slight amount of IT knowledge. (Note the "slight amount".) My boss says the servers need to be restarted at least weekly. I disagree. Our IT Department says that because she restarts them constantly that's the reason why our hard drives fail and power supplies go out on them. (That's happened to a few of our servers a couple times over the last four years, and very recently.) So the question is: How often does everyone restart their Windows servers? Is there an industry standard or recommendation? Is our IT department correct in saying that because we re-start that's why we're having hardware issues? (I need a reason if I'm going to change her mind!)

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  • Suggest Wireless AP

    - by sunny
    I'm doing a data and voice install for a client in the hotel industry. I'm done with voice and am looking for my options to provide a Wireless AP. The building's dimensions are 100ft X 50ft. There are a ton of options out there which have left me confused now. Please help me decide. I am not clear as to how I should ensure that the Wireless Network is visible throughout the premises. Personally I would love to setup a WDS on 3-4 linksys wrt54gl routers using OpenWRT. Is this advisable? If not please recommend some other AP's. If a more expensive appliance is absolutely necessary, then please suggest something that can be powered using IEEE 802.3af PoE. Thanks

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  • Does an unmanaged 4/8-port GBit Ethernet switch with a GBIC port exist?

    - by Aaron Digulla
    I'm looking for a simple unmanaged switch with 4-8 GBit Ethernet ports and a fiber port (either as a GBIC slot or pre-installed with a 1000BASE-SX port). Does something like that exist? [EDIT] I want to connect to places in my home without drilling large holes though the floors. Therefore, I'm looking for a cheap way to connect two GBit switches via fiber. I tried with a media converter (GBit <- multimode fiber) but that costs about 50% throughput. So I was hoping that there is a cheap, small GBit switch which has a GBIC slot). All I found so far are very expensive managed switches with 12 or 24 ports for industry use.

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  • Incident Management-Monitoring Ideas

    - by sprsr
    Hello all, What we are tring to do at our company (banking industry) is to apply some ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) principles and I need some ideas to develop our incident management system of our company. For those who have experienced with incident management, what are the things that helps you most ? What are the things that you can't live without while managing the incidents. Do you have some good screenshots of such a monitoring software ? Since we choosed to develop our own system instead of buying a big system, there are lots of things we may miss, and we are brainstorming here. I need some key points that most crucial in incident management and monitoring. Thanks.

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  • Sending large files - do any vendors sell their solution?

    - by Rob Nicholson
    We currently have an account with www.mailbigfile.com to allow us to send & receive files which exceed our client's email limits. In our industry, a 10MB limit is not unknown. Mailbigfile works fine for what it is but increasingly, our clients are starting to block it as a security risk. A solution would be for us to license the software and run it from our own web server which is far less likely to be blocked. Does anyone know of vendors in this market? We are looking at web collaboration systems but that's a much bigger project. The technology behind www.mailbigfile.com isn't that complex (http upload, email notification and then http download) so I'm hoping it won't be very expensive. Cheers, Rob.

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  • Ideas of subjects for Diplomas for students who are getting Network Engineering degree

    - by wik
    Looking for an ideas and solutions of possible problems to be used as a part of pre-diploma practice for students who getting Network Engineering degree. The important requirement: The problem must be solved by designing new device or software which incorporate(or improve) with existent device. It's could be something industry specific, particular problem, etc. Thanks. p.s. The time for writing diploma is also limited by few month here, i.e. it's will be hard to solve very complex problems, but would be nice to hear something fresh :)

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  • What constitutes valid justification for more IP addresses?

    - by David
    I host a small website with a well known VPS service. They provided me with one IPv4 address upon registering and said additional addresses would require justification. I requested one additional IPv4 address so as to have one for a production environment and one for a testing/QA environment. They said this was unnecessary as I could just use alternative TCP ports for the test environment. I can live with using a non-standard port for non-production hosting, but it got me thinking, what would be valid justification? (I asked them and they didn't want to answer). Is there an industry standard for what counts as "valid" justification for additional IPv4 addresses?

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  • Which PSU should one chose? The biggest is the best?

    - by Shiki
    I'm fully aware of PSU's "Active PFC" and that they won't consume the written W all the time. (Makes sense). But now I'm before a PSU replacement (Guys: NEVER buy a Chieftec. Seriously.) The question is: If one can get a bigger one (in my case 750W and 650W) ... should that person go for the bigger one ? (The difference in price is not much). No, I don't think I'll soon use all that much. (Please help (if you want of course) to make the question more generic if the question is really not OK in this form. I've been wondering about this for a time already. In my case it would be XFX Black Edition Silver 750W and 650W) (Basically about "which one" I would go with XFX/Antec/something which comes with industry qualified parts. Like Duracell but in a PSU. :) But the performance is a different thing.)

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  • High frequency, kernel bypass vs tuning kernels?

    - by Keith
    I often hear tales about High Frequency shops using network cards which do kernel bypass. However, I also often hear about them using operating systems where they "tune" the kernel. If they are bypassing the kernel, do they need to tune the kernel? Is it a case of they do both because whilst the network packets will bypass the kernel due to the card, there is still all the other stuff going on which tuning the kernel would help? So in other words, they use both approaches, one is just to speed up network activity and the other makes the OS generally more responsive/faster? I ask because a friend of mine who works within this industry once said they don't really bother with kernel tuning anymore-because they use kernel bypass network cards? This didn't make too much sense as I thought you would always want a faster kernel for all the CPU-offloaded calculations.

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  • Poor disk performance with high disk capacity usage

    - by GoldenNewby
    I've heard numerous times in the web hosting industry that using "too much" disk space on a drive is bad for performance. Is this just a myth? Can someone explain why this is an issue, even in a situation where the amount of IO done to the drive would be the same at 10% as it would be at 90%? I'm especially curious in the case of virtual servers. If I set up 10 Logical volumes as the virtual disks for some VMs, is it going to run better if I "waste" 20% of the disk space?

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  • Managing client passwords

    - by HurkNburkS
    I am just starting up a small website development business and one of the issues I am having is remembering passwords and account information for clients hosting, cpanel, ftp accounts etc. I was wondering what is the most suitable system / industry standard for controlling such information? Pretty marginal on the close there... I read the FAQ and I felt list this could be a common issue for webmasters, its defiantly not a coding questions so stackoverflow is out of the question and its not a broad question its focused on one particular aspect of being a webmaster.

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  • Can Google App users view Exchange users public calendars and contacts?

    - by CT
    My company currently uses MS Exchange 2003 for company email, contacts, and calendars. We have approximately 150 users. Construction industry. I would like to look into migrating from Exchange to Google Apps. It will be an easier sell to the powers that be if we can migrate certain smaller departments first successfully than an entire company move. I would like to first migrate our field superintendents who are usually out of the office working remotely. Approx 30 users. Will Google App users be able to see our Exchange user's calendars and vice versa? How about public folders? Anyone's migration story is much appreciated. Thank you.

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  • A format for storing personal contacts in a database

    - by Gart
    I'm thinking of the best way to store personal contacts in a database for a business application. The traditional and straightforward approach would be to create a table with columns for each element, i.e. Name, Telephone Number, Job title, Address, etc... However, there are known industry standards for this kind of data, like for example vCard, or hCard, or vCard-RDF/XML or even Windows Contacts XML Schema. Utilizing an standard format would offer some benefits, like inter-operablilty with other systems. But how can I decide which method to use? The requirements are mainly to store the data. Search and ordering queries are highly unlikely but possible. The volume of the data is 100,000 records at maximum. My database engine supports native XML columns. I have been thinking to use some XML-based format to store the personal contacts. Then it will be possible to utilize XML indexes on this data, if searching and ordering is needed. Is this a good approach? Which contacts format and schema would you recommend for this? Edited after first answers Here is why I think the straightforward approach is bad. This is due to the nature of this kind of data - it is not that simple. The personal contacts it is not well-structured data, it may be called semi-structured. Each contact may have different data fields, maybe even such fields which I cannot anticipate. In my opinion, each piece of this data should be treated as important information, i.e. no piece of data could be discarded just because there was no relevant column in the database. If we took it further, assuming that no data may be lost, then we could create a big text column named Comment or Description or Other and put there everything which cannot be fitted well into table columns. But then again - the data would lose structure - this might be bad. If we wanted structured data then - according to the database design principles - the data should be decomposed into entities, and relations should be established between the entities. But this adds complexity - there are just too many entities, and lots of design desicions should be made, like "How do we store Address? Personal Name? Phone number? How do we encode home phone numbers and mobile phone numbers? How about other contact info?.." The relations between entities are complex and multiple, and each relation is a table in the database. Each relation needs to be documented in the design papers. That is a lot of work to do. But it is possible to avoid the complexity entirely - just document that the data is stored according to such and such standard schema, period. Then anybody who would be reading that document should easily understand what it was all about. Finally, this is all about using an industry standard. The standard is, hopefully, designed by some clever people who anticipated and described the structure of personal contacts information much better than I ever could. Why should we all reinvent the wheel?? It's much easier to use a standard schema. The problem is, there are just too many standards - it's not easy to decide which one to use!

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  • Is there a Telecommunications Reference Architecture?

    - by raul.goycoolea
    @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Abstract   Reference architecture provides needed architectural information that can be provided in advance to an enterprise to enable consistent architectural best practices. Enterprise Reference Architecture helps business owners to actualize their strategies, vision, objectives, and principles. It evaluates the IT systems, based on Reference Architecture goals, principles, and standards. It helps to reduce IT costs by increasing functionality, availability, scalability, etc. Telecom Reference Architecture provides customers with the flexibility to view bundled service bills online with the provision of multiple services. It provides real-time, flexible billing and charging systems, to handle complex promotions, discounts, and settlements with multiple parties. This paper attempts to describe the Reference Architecture for the Telecom Enterprises. It lays the foundation for a Telecom Reference Architecture by articulating the requirements, drivers, and pitfalls for telecom service providers. It describes generic reference architecture for telecom enterprises and moves on to explain how to achieve Enterprise Reference Architecture by using SOA.   Introduction   A Reference Architecture provides a methodology, set of practices, template, and standards based on a set of successful solutions implemented earlier. These solutions have been generalized and structured for the depiction of both a logical and a physical architecture, based on the harvesting of a set of patterns that describe observations in a number of successful implementations. It helps as a reference for the various architectures that an enterprise can implement to solve various problems. It can be used as the starting point or the point of comparisons for various departments/business entities of a company, or for the various companies for an enterprise. It provides multiple views for multiple stakeholders.   Major artifacts of the Enterprise Reference Architecture are methodologies, standards, metadata, documents, design patterns, etc.   Purpose of Reference Architecture   In most cases, architects spend a lot of time researching, investigating, defining, and re-arguing architectural decisions. It is like reinventing the wheel as their peers in other organizations or even the same organization have already spent a lot of time and effort defining their own architectural practices. This prevents an organization from learning from its own experiences and applying that knowledge for increased effectiveness.   Reference architecture provides missing architectural information that can be provided in advance to project team members to enable consistent architectural best practices.   Enterprise Reference Architecture helps an enterprise to achieve the following at the abstract level:   ·       Reference architecture is more of a communication channel to an enterprise ·       Helps the business owners to accommodate to their strategies, vision, objectives, and principles. ·       Evaluates the IT systems based on Reference Architecture Principles ·       Reduces IT spending through increasing functionality, availability, scalability, etc ·       A Real-time Integration Model helps to reduce the latency of the data updates Is used to define a single source of Information ·       Provides a clear view on how to manage information and security ·       Defines the policy around the data ownership, product boundaries, etc. ·       Helps with cost optimization across project and solution portfolios by eliminating unused or duplicate investments and assets ·       Has a shorter implementation time and cost   Once the reference architecture is in place, the set of architectural principles, standards, reference models, and best practices ensure that the aligned investments have the greatest possible likelihood of success in both the near term and the long term (TCO).     Common pitfalls for Telecom Service Providers   Telecom Reference Architecture serves as the first step towards maturity for a telecom service provider. During the course of our assignments/experiences with telecom players, we have come across the following observations – Some of these indicate a lack of maturity of the telecom service provider:   ·       In markets that are growing and not so mature, it has been observed that telcos have a significant amount of in-house or home-grown applications. In some of these markets, the growth has been so rapid that IT has been unable to cope with business demands. Telcos have shown a tendency to come up with workarounds in their IT applications so as to meet business needs. ·       Even for core functions like provisioning or mediation, some telcos have tried to manage with home-grown applications. ·       Most of the applications do not have the required scalability or maintainability to sustain growth in volumes or functionality. ·       Applications face interoperability issues with other applications in the operator's landscape. Integrating a new application or network element requires considerable effort on the part of the other applications. ·       Application boundaries are not clear, and functionality that is not in the initial scope of that application gets pushed onto it. This results in the development of the multiple, small applications without proper boundaries. ·       Usage of Legacy OSS/BSS systems, poor Integration across Multiple COTS Products and Internal Systems. Most of the Integrations are developed on ad-hoc basis and Point-to-Point Integration. ·       Redundancy of the business functions in different applications • Fragmented data across the different applications and no integrated view of the strategic data • Lot of performance Issues due to the usage of the complex integration across OSS and BSS systems   However, this is where the maturity of the telecom industry as a whole can be of help. The collaborative efforts of telcos to overcome some of these problems have resulted in bodies like the TM Forum. They have come up with frameworks for business processes, data, applications, and technology for telecom service providers. These could be a good starting point for telcos to clean up their enterprise landscape.   Industry Trends in Telecom Reference Architecture   Telecom reference architectures are evolving rapidly because telcos are facing business and IT challenges.   “The reality is that there probably is no killer application, no silver bullet that the telcos can latch onto to carry them into a 21st Century.... Instead, there are probably hundreds – perhaps thousands – of niche applications.... And the only way to find which of these works for you is to try out lots of them, ramp up the ones that work, and discontinue the ones that fail.” – Martin Creaner President & CTO TM Forum.   The following trends have been observed in telecom reference architecture:   ·       Transformation of business structures to align with customer requirements ·       Adoption of more Internet-like technical architectures. The Web 2.0 concept is increasingly being used. ·       Virtualization of the traditional operations support system (OSS) ·       Adoption of SOA to support development of IP-based services ·       Adoption of frameworks like Service Delivery Platforms (SDPs) and IP Multimedia Subsystem ·       (IMS) to enable seamless deployment of various services over fixed and mobile networks ·       Replacement of in-house, customized, and stove-piped OSS/BSS with standards-based COTS products ·       Compliance with industry standards and frameworks like eTOM, SID, and TAM to enable seamless integration with other standards-based products   Drivers of Reference Architecture   The drivers of the Reference Architecture are Reference Architecture Goals, Principles, and Enterprise Vision and Telecom Transformation. The details are depicted below diagram. @font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoCaption, li.MsoCaption, div.MsoCaption { margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; font-size: 9pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(79, 129, 189); font-weight: bold; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } Figure 1. Drivers for Reference Architecture @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Today’s telecom reference architectures should seamlessly integrate traditional legacy-based applications and transition to next-generation network technologies (e.g., IP multimedia subsystems). This has resulted in new requirements for flexible, real-time billing and OSS/BSS systems and implications on the service provider’s organizational requirements and structure.   Telecom reference architectures are today expected to:   ·       Integrate voice, messaging, email and other VAS over fixed and mobile networks, back end systems ·       Be able to provision multiple services and service bundles • Deliver converged voice, video and data services ·       Leverage the existing Network Infrastructure ·       Provide real-time, flexible billing and charging systems to handle complex promotions, discounts, and settlements with multiple parties. ·       Support charging of advanced data services such as VoIP, On-Demand, Services (e.g.  Video), IMS/SIP Services, Mobile Money, Content Services and IPTV. ·       Help in faster deployment of new services • Serve as an effective platform for collaboration between network IT and business organizations ·       Harness the potential of converging technology, networks, devices and content to develop multimedia services and solutions of ever-increasing sophistication on a single Internet Protocol (IP) ·       Ensure better service delivery and zero revenue leakage through real-time balance and credit management ·       Lower operating costs to drive profitability   Enterprise Reference Architecture   The Enterprise Reference Architecture (RA) fills the gap between the concepts and vocabulary defined by the reference model and the implementation. Reference architecture provides detailed architectural information in a common format such that solutions can be repeatedly designed and deployed in a consistent, high-quality, supportable fashion. This paper attempts to describe the Reference Architecture for the Telecom Application Usage and how to achieve the Enterprise Level Reference Architecture using SOA.   • Telecom Reference Architecture • Enterprise SOA based Reference Architecture   Telecom Reference Architecture   Tele Management Forum’s New Generation Operations Systems and Software (NGOSS) is an architectural framework for organizing, integrating, and implementing telecom systems. NGOSS is a component-based framework consisting of the following elements:   ·       The enhanced Telecom Operations Map (eTOM) is a business process framework. ·       The Shared Information Data (SID) model provides a comprehensive information framework that may be specialized for the needs of a particular organization. ·       The Telecom Application Map (TAM) is an application framework to depict the functional footprint of applications, relative to the horizontal processes within eTOM. ·       The Technology Neutral Architecture (TNA) is an integrated framework. TNA is an architecture that is sustainable through technology changes.   NGOSS Architecture Standards are:   ·       Centralized data ·       Loosely coupled distributed systems ·       Application components/re-use  ·       A technology-neutral system framework with technology specific implementations ·       Interoperability to service provider data/processes ·       Allows more re-use of business components across multiple business scenarios ·       Workflow automation   The traditional operator systems architecture consists of four layers,   ·       Business Support System (BSS) layer, with focus toward customers and business partners. Manages order, subscriber, pricing, rating, and billing information. ·       Operations Support System (OSS) layer, built around product, service, and resource inventories. ·       Networks layer – consists of Network elements and 3rd Party Systems. ·       Integration Layer – to maximize application communication and overall solution flexibility.   Reference architecture for telecom enterprises is depicted below. @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoCaption, li.MsoCaption, div.MsoCaption { margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; font-size: 9pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(79, 129, 189); font-weight: bold; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Figure 2. Telecom Reference Architecture   The major building blocks of any Telecom Service Provider architecture are as follows:   1. Customer Relationship Management   CRM encompasses the end-to-end lifecycle of the customer: customer initiation/acquisition, sales, ordering, and service activation, customer care and support, proactive campaigns, cross sell/up sell, and retention/loyalty.   CRM also includes the collection of customer information and its application to personalize, customize, and integrate delivery of service to a customer, as well as to identify opportunities for increasing the value of the customer to the enterprise.   The key functionalities related to Customer Relationship Management are   ·       Manage the end-to-end lifecycle of a customer request for products. ·       Create and manage customer profiles. ·       Manage all interactions with customers – inquiries, requests, and responses. ·       Provide updates to Billing and other south bound systems on customer/account related updates such as customer/ account creation, deletion, modification, request bills, final bill, duplicate bills, credit limits through Middleware. ·       Work with Order Management System, Product, and Service Management components within CRM. ·       Manage customer preferences – Involve all the touch points and channels to the customer, including contact center, retail stores, dealers, self service, and field service, as well as via any media (phone, face to face, web, mobile device, chat, email, SMS, mail, the customer's bill, etc.). ·       Support single interface for customer contact details, preferences, account details, offers, customer premise equipment, bill details, bill cycle details, and customer interactions.   CRM applications interact with customers through customer touch points like portals, point-of-sale terminals, interactive voice response systems, etc. The requests by customers are sent via fulfillment/provisioning to billing system for ordering processing.   2. Billing and Revenue Management   Billing and Revenue Management handles the collection of appropriate usage records and production of timely and accurate bills – for providing pre-bill usage information and billing to customers; for processing their payments; and for performing payment collections. In addition, it handles customer inquiries about bills, provides billing inquiry status, and is responsible for resolving billing problems to the customer's satisfaction in a timely manner. This process grouping also supports prepayment for services.   The key functionalities provided by these applications are   ·       To ensure that enterprise revenue is billed and invoices delivered appropriately to customers. ·       To manage customers’ billing accounts, process their payments, perform payment collections, and monitor the status of the account balance. ·       To ensure the timely and effective fulfillment of all customer bill inquiries and complaints. ·       Collect the usage records from mediation and ensure appropriate rating and discounting of all usage and pricing. ·       Support revenue sharing; split charging where usage is guided to an account different from the service consumer. ·       Support prepaid and post-paid rating. ·       Send notification on approach / exceeding the usage thresholds as enforced by the subscribed offer, and / or as setup by the customer. ·       Support prepaid, post paid, and hybrid (where some services are prepaid and the rest of the services post paid) customers and conversion from post paid to prepaid, and vice versa. ·       Support different billing function requirements like charge prorating, promotion, discount, adjustment, waiver, write-off, account receivable, GL Interface, late payment fee, credit control, dunning, account or service suspension, re-activation, expiry, termination, contract violation penalty, etc. ·       Initiate direct debit to collect payment against an invoice outstanding. ·       Send notification to Middleware on different events; for example, payment receipt, pre-suspension, threshold exceed, etc.   Billing systems typically get usage data from mediation systems for rating and billing. They get provisioning requests from order management systems and inquiries from CRM systems. Convergent and real-time billing systems can directly get usage details from network elements.   3. Mediation   Mediation systems transform/translate the Raw or Native Usage Data Records into a general format that is acceptable to billing for their rating purposes.   The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Mediation system in the end-to-end solution.   ·       Collect Usage Data Records from different data sources – like network elements, routers, servers – via different protocol and interfaces. ·       Process Usage Data Records – Mediation will process Usage Data Records as per the source format. ·       Validate Usage Data Records from each source. ·       Segregates Usage Data Records coming from each source to multiple, based on the segregation requirement of end Application. ·       Aggregates Usage Data Records based on the aggregation rule if any from different sources. ·       Consolidates multiple Usage Data Records from each source. ·       Delivers formatted Usage Data Records to different end application like Billing, Interconnect, Fraud Management, etc. ·       Generates audit trail for incoming Usage Data Records and keeps track of all the Usage Data Records at various stages of mediation process. ·       Checks duplicate Usage Data Records across files for a given time window.   4. Fulfillment   This area is responsible for providing customers with their requested products in a timely and correct manner. It translates the customer's business or personal need into a solution that can be delivered using the specific products in the enterprise's portfolio. This process informs the customers of the status of their purchase order, and ensures completion on time, as well as ensuring a delighted customer. These processes are responsible for accepting and issuing orders. They deal with pre-order feasibility determination, credit authorization, order issuance, order status and tracking, customer update on customer order activities, and customer notification on order completion. Order management and provisioning applications fall into this category.   The key functionalities provided by these applications are   ·       Issuing new customer orders, modifying open customer orders, or canceling open customer orders; ·       Verifying whether specific non-standard offerings sought by customers are feasible and supportable; ·       Checking the credit worthiness of customers as part of the customer order process; ·       Testing the completed offering to ensure it is working correctly; ·       Updating of the Customer Inventory Database to reflect that the specific product offering has been allocated, modified, or cancelled; ·       Assigning and tracking customer provisioning activities; ·       Managing customer provisioning jeopardy conditions; and ·       Reporting progress on customer orders and other processes to customer.   These applications typically get orders from CRM systems. They interact with network elements and billing systems for fulfillment of orders.   5. Enterprise Management   This process area includes those processes that manage enterprise-wide activities and needs, or have application within the enterprise as a whole. They encompass all business management processes that   ·       Are necessary to support the whole of the enterprise, including processes for financial management, legal management, regulatory management, process, cost, and quality management, etc.;   ·       Are responsible for setting corporate policies, strategies, and directions, and for providing guidelines and targets for the whole of the business, including strategy development and planning for areas, such as Enterprise Architecture, that are integral to the direction and development of the business;   ·       Occur throughout the enterprise, including processes for project management, performance assessments, cost assessments, etc.     (i) Enterprise Risk Management:   Enterprise Risk Management focuses on assuring that risks and threats to the enterprise value and/or reputation are identified, and appropriate controls are in place to minimize or eliminate the identified risks. The identified risks may be physical or logical/virtual. Successful risk management ensures that the enterprise can support its mission critical operations, processes, applications, and communications in the face of serious incidents such as security threats/violations and fraud attempts. Two key areas covered in Risk Management by telecom operators are:   ·       Revenue Assurance: Revenue assurance system will be responsible for identifying revenue loss scenarios across components/systems, and will help in rectifying the problems. The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Revenue Assurance system in the end-to-end solution. o   Identify all usage information dropped when networks are being upgraded. o   Interconnect bill verification. o   Identify where services are routinely provisioned but never billed. o   Identify poor sales policies that are intensifying collections problems. o   Find leakage where usage is sent to error bucket and never billed for. o   Find leakage where field service, CRM, and network build-out are not optimized.   ·       Fraud Management: Involves collecting data from different systems to identify abnormalities in traffic patterns, usage patterns, and subscription patterns to report suspicious activity that might suggest fraudulent usage of resources, resulting in revenue losses to the operator.   The key roles and responsibilities of the system component are as follows:   o   Fraud management system will capture and monitor high usage (over a certain threshold) in terms of duration, value, and number of calls for each subscriber. The threshold for each subscriber is decided by the system and fixed automatically. o   Fraud management will be able to detect the unauthorized access to services for certain subscribers. These subscribers may have been provided unauthorized services by employees. The component will raise the alert to the operator the very first time of such illegal calls or calls which are not billed. o   The solution will be to have an alarm management system that will deliver alarms to the operator/provider whenever it detects a fraud, thus minimizing fraud by catching it the first time it occurs. o   The Fraud Management system will be capable of interfacing with switches, mediation systems, and billing systems   (ii) Knowledge Management   This process focuses on knowledge management, technology research within the enterprise, and the evaluation of potential technology acquisitions.   Key responsibilities of knowledge base management are to   ·       Maintain knowledge base – Creation and updating of knowledge base on ongoing basis. ·       Search knowledge base – Search of knowledge base on keywords or category browse ·       Maintain metadata – Management of metadata on knowledge base to ensure effective management and search. ·       Run report generator. ·       Provide content – Add content to the knowledge base, e.g., user guides, operational manual, etc.   (iii) Document Management   It focuses on maintaining a repository of all electronic documents or images of paper documents relevant to the enterprise using a system.   (iv) Data Management   It manages data as a valuable resource for any enterprise. For telecom enterprises, the typical areas covered are Master Data Management, Data Warehousing, and Business Intelligence. It is also responsible for data governance, security, quality, and database management.   Key responsibilities of Data Management are   ·       Using ETL, extract the data from CRM, Billing, web content, ERP, campaign management, financial, network operations, asset management info, customer contact data, customer measures, benchmarks, process data, e.g., process inputs, outputs, and measures, into Enterprise Data Warehouse. ·       Management of data traceability with source, data related business rules/decisions, data quality, data cleansing data reconciliation, competitors data – storage for all the enterprise data (customer profiles, products, offers, revenues, etc.) ·       Get online update through night time replication or physical backup process at regular frequency. ·       Provide the data access to business intelligence and other systems for their analysis, report generation, and use.   (v) Business Intelligence   It uses the Enterprise Data to provide the various analysis and reports that contain prospects and analytics for customer retention, acquisition of new customers due to the offers, and SLAs. It will generate right and optimized plans – bolt-ons for the customers.   The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Business Intelligence system at the Enterprise Level:   ·       It will do Pattern analysis and reports problem. ·       It will do Data Analysis – Statistical analysis, data profiling, affinity analysis of data, customer segment wise usage patterns on offers, products, service and revenue generation against services and customer segments. ·       It will do Performance (business, system, and forecast) analysis, churn propensity, response time, and SLAs analysis. ·       It will support for online and offline analysis, and report drill down capability. ·       It will collect, store, and report various SLA data. ·       It will provide the necessary intelligence for marketing and working on campaigns, etc., with cost benefit analysis and predictions.   It will advise on customer promotions with additional services based on loyalty and credit history of customer   ·       It will Interface with Enterprise Data Management system for data to run reports and analysis tasks. It will interface with the campaign schedules, based on historical success evidence.   (vi) Stakeholder and External Relations Management   It manages the enterprise's relationship with stakeholders and outside entities. Stakeholders include shareholders, employee organizations, etc. Outside entities include regulators, local community, and unions. Some of the processes within this grouping are Shareholder Relations, External Affairs, Labor Relations, and Public Relations.   (vii) Enterprise Resource Planning   It is used to manage internal and external resources, including tangible assets, financial resources, materials, and human resources. Its purpose is to facilitate the flow of information between all business functions inside the boundaries of the enterprise and manage the connections to outside stakeholders. ERP systems consolidate all business operations into a uniform and enterprise wide system environment.   The key roles and responsibilities for Enterprise System are given below:   ·        It will handle responsibilities such as core accounting, financial, and management reporting. ·       It will interface with CRM for capturing customer account and details. ·       It will interface with billing to capture the billing revenue and other financial data. ·       It will be responsible for executing the dunning process. Billing will send the required feed to ERP for execution of dunning. ·       It will interface with the CRM and Billing through batch interfaces. Enterprise management systems are like horizontals in the enterprise and typically interact with all major telecom systems. E.g., an ERP system interacts with CRM, Fulfillment, and Billing systems for different kinds of data exchanges.   6. External Interfaces/Touch Points   The typical external parties are customers, suppliers/partners, employees, shareholders, and other stakeholders. External interactions from/to a Service Provider to other parties can be achieved by a variety of mechanisms, including:   ·       Exchange of emails or faxes ·       Call Centers ·       Web Portals ·       Business-to-Business (B2B) automated transactions   These applications provide an Internet technology driven interface to external parties to undertake a variety of business functions directly for themselves. These can provide fully or partially automated service to external parties through various touch points.   Typical characteristics of these touch points are   ·       Pre-integrated self-service system, including stand-alone web framework or integration front end with a portal engine ·       Self services layer exposing atomic web services/APIs for reuse by multiple systems across the architectural environment ·       Portlets driven connectivity exposing data and services interoperability through a portal engine or web application   These touch points mostly interact with the CRM systems for requests, inquiries, and responses.   7. Middleware   The component will be primarily responsible for integrating the different systems components under a common platform. It should provide a Standards-Based Platform for building Service Oriented Architecture and Composite Applications. The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Middleware component in the end-to-end solution.   ·       As an integration framework, covering to and fro interfaces ·       Provide a web service framework with service registry. ·       Support SOA framework with SOA service registry. ·       Each of the interfaces from / to Middleware to other components would handle data transformation, translation, and mapping of data points. ·       Receive data from the caller / activate and/or forward the data to the recipient system in XML format. ·       Use standard XML for data exchange. ·       Provide the response back to the service/call initiator. ·       Provide a tracking until the response completion. ·       Keep a store transitional data against each call/transaction. ·       Interface through Middleware to get any information that is possible and allowed from the existing systems to enterprise systems; e.g., customer profile and customer history, etc. ·       Provide the data in a common unified format to the SOA calls across systems, and follow the Enterprise Architecture directive. ·       Provide an audit trail for all transactions being handled by the component.   8. Network Elements   The term Network Element means a facility or equipment used in the provision of a telecommunications service. Such terms also includes features, functions, and capabilities that are provided by means of such facility or equipment, including subscriber numbers, databases, signaling systems, and information sufficient for billing and collection or used in the transmission, routing, or other provision of a telecommunications service.   Typical network elements in a GSM network are Home Location Register (HLR), Intelligent Network (IN), Mobile Switching Center (MSC), SMS Center (SMSC), and network elements for other value added services like Push-to-talk (PTT), Ring Back Tone (RBT), etc.   Network elements are invoked when subscribers use their telecom devices for any kind of usage. These elements generate usage data and pass it on to downstream systems like mediation and billing system for rating and billing. They also integrate with provisioning systems for order/service fulfillment.   9. 3rd Party Applications   3rd Party systems are applications like content providers, payment gateways, point of sale terminals, and databases/applications maintained by the Government.   Depending on applicability and the type of functionality provided by 3rd party applications, the integration with different telecom systems like CRM, provisioning, and billing will be done.   10. Service Delivery Platform   A service delivery platform (SDP) provides the architecture for the rapid deployment, provisioning, execution, management, and billing of value added telecom services. SDPs are based on the concept of SOA and layered architecture. They support the delivery of voice, data services, and content in network and device-independent fashion. They allow application developers to aggregate network capabilities, services, and sources of content. SDPs typically contain layers for web services exposure, service application development, and network abstraction.   SOA Reference Architecture   SOA concept is based on the principle of developing reusable business service and building applications by composing those services, instead of building monolithic applications in silos. It’s about bridging the gap between business and IT through a set of business-aligned IT services, using a set of design principles, patterns, and techniques.   In an SOA, resources are made available to participants in a value net, enterprise, line of business (typically spanning multiple applications within an enterprise or across multiple enterprises). It consists of a set of business-aligned IT services that collectively fulfill an organization’s business processes and goals. We can choreograph these services into composite applications and invoke them through standard protocols. SOA, apart from agility and reusability, enables:   ·       The business to specify processes as orchestrations of reusable services ·       Technology agnostic business design, with technology hidden behind service interface ·       A contractual-like interaction between business and IT, based on service SLAs ·       Accountability and governance, better aligned to business services ·       Applications interconnections untangling by allowing access only through service interfaces, reducing the daunting side effects of change ·       Reduced pressure to replace legacy and extended lifetime for legacy applications, through encapsulation in services   ·       A Cloud Computing paradigm, using web services technologies, that makes possible service outsourcing on an on-demand, utility-like, pay-per-usage basis   The following section represents the Reference Architecture of logical view for the Telecom Solution. The new custom built application needs to align with this logical architecture in the long run to achieve EA benefits.   Packaged implementation applications, such as ERP billing applications, need to expose their functions as service providers (as other applications consume) and interact with other applications as service consumers.   COT applications need to expose services through wrappers such as adapters to utilize existing resources and at the same time achieve Enterprise Architecture goal and objectives.   The following are the various layers for Enterprise level deployment of SOA. This diagram captures the abstract view of Enterprise SOA layers and important components of each layer. Layered architecture means decomposition of services such that most interactions occur between adjacent layers. However, there is no strict rule that top layers should not directly communicate with bottom layers.   The diagram below represents the important logical pieces that would result from overall SOA transformation. @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoCaption, li.MsoCaption, div.MsoCaption { margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; font-size: 9pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(79, 129, 189); font-weight: bold; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Figure 3. Enterprise SOA Reference Architecture 1.          Operational System Layer: This layer consists of all packaged applications like CRM, ERP, custom built applications, COTS based applications like Billing, Revenue Management, Fulfilment, and the Enterprise databases that are essential and contribute directly or indirectly to the Enterprise OSS/BSS Transformation.   ERP holds the data of Asset Lifecycle Management, Supply Chain, and Advanced Procurement and Human Capital Management, etc.   CRM holds the data related to Order, Sales, and Marketing, Customer Care, Partner Relationship Management, Loyalty, etc.   Content Management handles Enterprise Search and Query. Billing application consists of the following components:   ·       Collections Management, Customer Billing Management, Invoices, Real-Time Rating, Discounting, and Applying of Charges ·       Enterprise databases will hold both the application and service data, whether structured or unstructured.   MDM - Master data majorly consists of Customer, Order, Product, and Service Data.     2.          Enterprise Component Layer:   This layer consists of the Application Services and Common Services that are responsible for realizing the functionality and maintaining the QoS of the exposed services. This layer uses container-based technologies such as application servers to implement the components, workload management, high availability, and load balancing.   Application Services: This Service Layer enables application, technology, and database abstraction so that the complex accessing logic is hidden from the other service layers. This is a basic service layer, which exposes application functionalities and data as reusable services. The three types of the Application access services are:   ·       Application Access Service: This Service Layer exposes application level functionalities as a reusable service between BSS to BSS and BSS to OSS integration. This layer is enabled using disparate technology such as Web Service, Integration Servers, and Adaptors, etc.   ·       Data Access Service: This Service Layer exposes application data services as a reusable reference data service. This is done via direct interaction with application data. and provides the federated query.   ·       Network Access Service: This Service Layer exposes provisioning layer as a reusable service from OSS to OSS integration. This integration service emphasizes the need for high performance, stateless process flows, and distributed design.   Common Services encompasses management of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data such as information services, portal services, interaction services, infrastructure services, and security services, etc.   3.          Integration Layer:   This consists of service infrastructure components like service bus, service gateway for partner integration, service registry, service repository, and BPEL processor. Service bus will carry the service invocation payloads/messages between consumers and providers. The other important functions expected from it are itinerary based routing, distributed caching of routing information, transformations, and all qualities of service for messaging-like reliability, scalability, and availability, etc. Service registry will hold all contracts (wsdl) of services, and it helps developers to locate or discover service during design time or runtime.   • BPEL processor would be useful in orchestrating the services to compose a complex business scenario or process. • Workflow and business rules management are also required to support manual triggering of certain activities within business process. based on the rules setup and also the state machine information. Application, data, and service mediation layer typically forms the overall composite application development framework or SOA Framework.   4.          Business Process Layer: These are typically the intermediate services layer and represent Shared Business Process Services. At Enterprise Level, these services are from Customer Management, Order Management, Billing, Finance, and Asset Management application domains.   5.          Access Layer: This layer consists of portals for Enterprise and provides a single view of Enterprise information management and dashboard services.   6.          Channel Layer: This consists of various devices; applications that form part of extended enterprise; browsers through which users access the applications.   7.          Client Layer: This designates the different types of users accessing the enterprise applications. The type of user typically would be an important factor in determining the level of access to applications.   8.          Vertical pieces like management, monitoring, security, and development cut across all horizontal layers Management and monitoring involves all aspects of SOA-like services, SLAs, and other QoS lifecycle processes for both applications and services surrounding SOA governance.     9.          EA Governance, Reference Architecture, Roadmap, Principles, and Best Practices:   EA Governance is important in terms of providing the overall direction to SOA implementation within the enterprise. This involves board-level involvement, in addition to business and IT executives. At a high level, this involves managing the SOA projects implementation, managing SOA infrastructure, and controlling the entire effort through all fine-tuned IT processes in accordance with COBIT (Control Objectives for Information Technology).   Devising tools and techniques to promote reuse culture, and the SOA way of doing things needs competency centers to be established in addition to training the workforce to take up new roles that are suited to SOA journey.   Conclusions   Reference Architectures can serve as the basis for disparate architecture efforts throughout the organization, even if they use different tools and technologies. Reference architectures provide best practices and approaches in the independent way a vendor deals with technology and standards. Reference Architectures model the abstract architectural elements for an enterprise independent of the technologies, protocols, and products that are used to implement an SOA. Telecom enterprises today are facing significant business and technology challenges due to growing competition, a multitude of services, and convergence. Adopting architectural best practices could go a long way in meeting these challenges. The use of SOA-based architecture for communication to each of the external systems like Billing, CRM, etc., in OSS/BSS system has made the architecture very loosely coupled, with greater flexibility. Any change in the external systems would be absorbed at the Integration Layer without affecting the rest of the ecosystem. The use of a Business Process Management (BPM) tool makes the management and maintenance of the business processes easy, with better performance in terms of lead time, quality, and cost. Since the Architecture is based on standards, it will lower the cost of deploying and managing OSS/BSS applications over their lifecycles.

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  • Why do programmers use or recommend Mac OS X?

    - by codingbear
    I've worked on both Mac and Windows for awhile. However, I'm still having a hard time understanding why programmers enthusiastically choose Mac OS X over Windows and Linux? I know that there are programmers who prefer Windows and Linux, but I'm asking the programmers who would just use Mac OS X and nothing else, because they think Mac OS X is the greatest fit for programmers. Some might argue that Mac OS X got the beautiful UI and is nix based, but Linux can do that. Although Windows is not nix based, you can pretty much develop on any platform or language, except Cocoa/Objective-C. Is it the softwares that offer only on Mac OS X? Does that really worth using Mac? Is it to develop iPhone apps? Is it because you need to buy new Windows every 2 years (less backwards compatible)? I understand why people, who are working in multimedia/entertainment industry, would use Mac OS X; however, I don't have strong merits of Mac OS X over Windows. If you develop daily on Mac and prefer Mac over anything else, can you give me a merit that Mac has over Windows/Linux? Maybe something you can do on Mac that cannot be done in Windows/Linux with the same level of ease? I'm not trying to do another Mac vs. Windows here. I tried to find things that I do on Mac that cannot be done on Windows with the same level of ease, but I couldn't. So, I'm asking for some help.

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  • Finalized Ubuntu 13.10 Releases are now Available for Download

    - by Akemi Iwaya
    The long wait for the latest stable version of Ubuntu is finally over. Now you can download your favorite UI version of Ubuntu 13.10, try out the Phone Edition, and grab a copy of the official manual using the compiled set of download links we have put together for your convenience. Download Links Ubuntu 13.10 Unity Edition (Desktop) Note: You made need to scroll down the page part way to find the download link. Ubuntu 13.10 GNOME Edition (Desktop) Ubuntu 13.10 Kubuntu Edition (Desktop) Ubuntu 13.10 Xubuntu Edition (Desktop) Ubuntu 13.10 Lubuntu Edition (Desktop) Ubuntu 13.10 Server Edition Note: You made need to scroll down the page part way to find the download link. Phone Edition For those who are adventurous and want to give the Phone Edition a try, you can learn more details about it and download it via the links below. Keep in mind that this particular release is still focused more towards developers, industry partners, and enthusiasts versus general usage at this time. Instructions for Installing Ubuntu on a Phone Note: Also lists the two devices currently supported for installing the system on. Download the Ubuntu 13.10 Phone Edition [Ubuntu Phone Edition Reference via The Next Web] Bonus! You can download the official manual for the new release as well! When you visit the download page, use the three options/choices to get the particular version of the manual you want. Download the ‘Getting Started with Ubuntu 13.10′ Manual [Ubuntu Manual Reference via Softpedia]     

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  • SQLAuthority News – Download Whitepaper – Understanding and Controlling Parallel Query Processing in SQL Server

    - by pinaldave
    My recently article SQL SERVER – Reducing CXPACKET Wait Stats for High Transactional Database has received many good comments regarding MAXDOP 1 and MAXDOP 0. I really enjoyed reading the comments as the comments are received from industry leaders and gurus. I was further researching on the subject and I end up on following white paper written by Microsoft. Understanding and Controlling Parallel Query Processing in SQL Server Data warehousing and general reporting applications tend to be CPU intensive because they need to read and process a large number of rows. To facilitate quick data processing for queries that touch a large amount of data, Microsoft SQL Server exploits the power of multiple logical processors to provide parallel query processing operations such as parallel scans. Through extensive testing, we have learned that, for most large queries that are executed in a parallel fashion, SQL Server can deliver linear or nearly linear response time speedup as the number of logical processors increases. However, some queries in high parallelism scenarios perform suboptimally. There are also some parallelism issues that can occur in a multi-user parallel query workload. This white paper describes parallel performance problems you might encounter when you run such queries and workloads, and it explains why these issues occur. In addition, it presents how data warehouse developers can detect these issues, and how they can work around them or mitigate them. To review the document, please download the Understanding and Controlling Parallel Query Processing in SQL Server Word document. Note: Above abstract has been taken from here. The real question is what does the parallel queries has made life of DBA much simpler or is it looked at with potential issue related to degradation of the performance? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL White Papers, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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  • NorthWest Arkansas TechFest

    - by dmccollough
    David Walker is taking Tulsa TechFest on the road to NorthWest Arkansas When Thursday, July 8th 2010 Where Center for Nonprofits @St. Mary’s 1200 West Walnut Street Rogers, Ar 72756 479-936-8218 Map it with Bing! What is NorthWest Arkansas TechFest ? It is a technical conference with a primary focus to provide training/teaching sessions that are immediately beneficial to the broadest range of IT professionals in their day-to-day jobs. We can accomplish this with numerous national and international speakers delivering 75 minute sessions. A charitable non-profit event organized by local area volunteers. Even though it its a free event, we ask that you support the community and PLEASE bring TWO CANS or TWO BUCKS. All canned food will be donated to the NWA Food Bank and all proceeds will be donated to the The Jones Center. Since our first event in the Tulsa area back in 1996, many other communities have been following our example by hosting their own TechFest events: Vancouver TechFest, Houston TechFest, Dallas TechFest, Alberta TechFest and Indy TechFest. We are very PROUD to now bring the event to NorthWest Arkansas! Who should Attend? Every IT Professional IT Job seekers and IT Recruiters and Hiring Managers Developers of all languages Graphic and Web Designers Infrastructure, IT and System Administrators eMarketing Professionals Project Managers Compliance Managers IT Directors and Mangers Chief Compliance Officers Chief Security Officers CIOs/CTOs CEOs/Executive Officers With this many hours of training, anyone in the or wanting to get into the IT Industry will definitely find interesting and instructional presentations by professional speakers. Want to keep informed? More information can be found here.

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  • Web application development over C++ development..

    - by learnerforever
    Hi, I am CS undergrad and CS grad. In college I used to program in C/C++/java and have pretty much stuck to the same skill set in industry with 3 years experience. I like thinking,reading,applying logic etc, designing data structures, but I have little patience with debugging large C++ code. And having to deal with low level stuff like memory fault,memory corruption,compilation/linking issues. My confidence in programming is getting down due to this, but I like being in technical field. Does web application development like LAMP suit (Linux,apache,mysql,php),CSS,scripting (AMONG OTHER WEB DEVELOPMENT RELATED SKILLS) etc need lesser patience with debugging,and understanding of low level stuff, but your analysis/logical skills also get used? Also opportunities in web application development look more. Things like scalability, most of the stuff that Google does fascinates me, but for patience needed for dealing with C++ debugging. I make blunders while coding. How does the field look like outside C++? I am beginning to wonder if as a female, by moving to web application development, I can better manage work life balance. I have seen relatively lesser females in C++ than in Java/.net. Not very sure about web related stuff though. Also, what are the other hot technologies being used in web application development? lamp,css is something I know vaguely. Not in touch with keywords going on in this area. Please help!!.

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  • Why do programmers use or recommend Mac OS X? [closed]

    - by codingbear
    I've worked on both Mac and Windows for awhile. However, I'm still having a hard time understanding why programmers enthusiastically choose Mac OS X over Windows and Linux? I know that there are programmers who prefer Windows and Linux, but I'm asking the programmers who would just use Mac OS X and nothing else, because they think Mac OS X is the greatest fit for programmers. Some might argue that Mac OS X got the beautiful UI and is nix based, but Linux can do that. Although Windows is not nix based, you can pretty much develop on any platform or language, except Cocoa/Objective-C. Is it the softwares that offer only on Mac OS X? Does that really worth using Mac? Is it to develop iPhone apps? Is it because you need to buy new Windows every 2 years (less backwards compatible)? I understand why people, who are working in multimedia/entertainment industry, would use Mac OS X; however, I don't have strong merits of Mac OS X over Windows. If you develop daily on Mac and prefer Mac over anything else, can you give me a merit that Mac has over Windows/Linux? Maybe something you can do on Mac that cannot be done in Windows/Linux with the same level of ease? I'm not trying to do another Mac vs. Windows here. I tried to find things that I do on Mac that cannot be done on Windows with the same level of ease, but I couldn't. So, I'm asking for some help.

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  • Want to learn/dive into Java Web Development—where to start?

    - by ernesto che
    Hi folks, I want to dive into Java Web Development, but I don’t know where to start because I am overwhelmed with Frameworks, JSRs, modules and the like. Coming from a PHP and Ruby (on Rails) background, it may seem awkward to go the other way ’round—still there are a lot of places where Java is (and probably will be) prevalent. I know basic Java concepts, syntax and OOP, and I have done (too much) nonsense in existing projects in JSP. I am already using SVN and GIT, but like coding PHP and Ruby mostly via VIM, i’ve also done versioning from the command line. But this time I want to learn to build a new project from the ground up, in a more, let’s say, academic way (instead of the hackery to date). Looking at e. g. Eclipse frightens me. Then there is Struts, Spring, JPA, Hibernate, Seam, just to throw in some buzzwords, that I cannot put into clear relation to each other. Can you point me to some tutorials or books that could help me? What are the technologies you absolutely have to know, the JSRs that are widely implemented in the industry? Or, if you are an employer: What does a “Junior Java Web developer” have to know? Thanks for your suggestions!

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