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• Are HDMI to VGA Adapters Really Device-Specific?

  - by allquixotic

  There are a lot of devices on the market right now (especially mobile devices) with a Micro-HDMI or Mini-HDMI port and no VGA or D-Sub output. Most manufacturers of said devices sell a cable that looks something like this: I have yet to find a cable like this that claims to work on a wide array of devices. In general, these cables claim to work with one specific device only. The way these cables work, I think, is that analog VGA signals are sent from the HDMI port on the device. This should work for devices that have special hardware on the motherboard/GPU capable of driving this. Is it the case that these cables have to be custom designed for each device? Or, is it rather that any device which possesses this special "signaling of analog VGA over the HDMI port" can be made to work with a cable that is physically compatible (i.e. the HDMI end plugs into the device and the VGA end accepts a VGA monitor cable)? Note that I am not looking for a product recommendation, just a conceptual clarification on what exactly these devices are doing. Also, a few remarks: The cables like the one depicted here are not digital to analog converters. I know about these: they are expensive, and they are the ONLY solution if your device only outputs a digital signal and is incapable of driving analog VGA over the HDMI port. The cables like the one depicted here are not straight crossover cables from VGA to HDMI, either. The crossover cables are designed to send a digital HDMI signal over the VGA port's wires; that is, the wire protocol is HDMI (digital) but the physical pinout is the same as VGA, even though nothing analog is happening. Once again, this is not the behavior that, I believe, the devices which I'm talking about in this question are doing. The cabling and devices that this question is about transmit the analog VGA data over the HDMI port (the HDMI port is in the device outputting the data, and the VGA side is the monitor/projector).

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• OS Analytics with Oracle Enterprise Manager (by Eran Steiner)

  - by Zeynep Koch

  Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center provides a feature called "OS Analytics". This feature allows you to get a better understanding of how the Operating System is being utilized. You can research the historical usage as well as real time data. This post will show how you can benefit from OS Analytics and how it works behind the scenes. The recording of our call to discuss this blog is available here: https://oracleconferencing.webex.com/oracleconferencing/ldr.php?AT=pb&SP=MC&rID=71517797&rKey=4ec9d4a3508564b3Download the presentation here See also: Blog about Alert Monitoring and Problem Notification Blog about Using Operational Profiles to Install Packages and other content Here is quick summary of what you can do with OS Analytics in Ops Center: View historical charts and real time value of CPU, memory, network and disk utilization Find the top CPU and Memory processes in real time or at a certain historical day Determine proper monitoring thresholds based on historical data Drill down into a process details Where to start To start with OS Analytics, choose the OS asset in the tree and click the Analytics tab. You can see the CPU utilization, Memory utilization and Network utilization, along with the current real time top 5 processes in each category (click the image to see a larger version):  In the above screen, you can click each of the top 5 processes to see a more detailed view of that process. Here is an example of one of the processes: One of the cool things is that you can see the process tree for this process along with some port binding and open file descriptors. Next, click the "Processes" tab to see real time information of all the processes on the machine: An interesting column is the "Target" column. If you configured Ops Center to work with Enterprise Manager Cloud Control, then the two products will talk to each other and Ops Center will display the correlated target from Cloud Control in this table. If you are only using Ops Center - this column will remain empty. The "Threshold" tab is particularly helpful - you can view historical trends of different monitored values and based on the graph - determine what the monitoring values should be: You can ask Ops Center to suggest monitoring levels based on the historical values or you can set your own. The different colors in the graph represent the current set levels: Red for critical, Yellow for warning and Blue for Information, allowing you to quickly see how they're positioned against real data. It's important to note that when looking at longer periods, Ops Center smooths out the data and uses averages. So when looking at values such as CPU Usage, try shorter time frames which are more detailed, such as one hour or one day. Applying new monitoring values When first applying new values to monitored attributes - a popup will come up asking if it's OK to get you out of the current Monitoring Policy. This is OK if you want to either have custom monitoring for a specific machine, or if you want to use this current machine as a "Gold image" and extract a Monitoring Policy from it. You can later apply the new Monitoring Policy to other machines and also set it as a default Monitoring Profile. Once you're done with applying the different monitoring values, you can review and change them in the "Monitoring" tab. You can also click the "Extract a Monitoring Policy" in the actions pane on the right to save all the new values to a new Monitoring Policy, which can then be found under "Plan Management" -> "Monitoring Policies". Visiting the past Under the "History" tab you can "go back in time". This is very helpful when you know that a machine was busy a few hours ago (perhaps in the middle of the night?), but you were not around to take a look at it in real time. Here's a view into yesterday's data on one of the machines: You can see an interesting CPU spike happening at around 3:30 am along with some memory use. In the bottom table you can see the top 5 CPU and Memory consumers at the requested time. Very quickly you can see that this spike is related to the Solaris 11 IPS repository synchronization process using the "pkgrecv" command. The "time machine" doesn't stop here - you can also view historical data to determine which of the zones was the busiest at a given time: Under the hood The data collected is stored on each of the agents under /var/opt/sun/xvm/analytics/historical/ An "os.zip" file exists for the main OS. Inside you will find many small text files, named after the Epoch time stamp in which they were taken If you have any zones, there will be a file called "guests.zip" containing the same small files for all the zones, as well as a folder with the name of the zone along with "os.zip" in it If this is the Enterprise Controller or the Proxy Controller, you will have folders called "proxy" and "sat" in which you will find the "os.zip" for that controller The actual script collecting the data can be viewed for debugging purposes as well: On Linux, the location is: /opt/sun/xvmoc/private/os_analytics/collect If you would like to redirect all the standard error into a file for debugging, touch the following file and the output will go into it: # touch /tmp/.collect.stderr   The temporary data is collected under /var/opt/sun/xvm/analytics/.collectdb until it is zipped. If you would like to review the properties for the Analytics, you can view those per each agent in /opt/sun/n1gc/lib/XVM.properties. Find the section "Analytics configurable properties for OS and VSC" to view the Analytics specific values. I hope you find this helpful! Please post questions in the comments below. Eran Steiner

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• Identity R2 - Experts Podcast Series

  - by Tanu Sood

  To follow up on the Identity Management R2 launch, a series of podcasts were recorded with subject matter experts from customer organizations, our partners and Oracle’s PM team to discuss key trends, R2 capabilities, implementation best practices and more. Below is a roll-up of the podcast series that is available on Fusion Middleware radio. R2 Podcasts:   ·         Designing the Next-Generation Identity Platform Vadim Lander, Oracle Highlights: Common architecture model, integration, interoperability and the driving factors behind R2 innovation IT Departments are shifting their Identity Management strategy to be able to support mobile, cloud and social applications. Oracle has anticipated this shift and has built a product roadmap to take advantage of this focus. Join Vadim as he discusses the design strategy behind the latest 11gR2 release and talks about how IDM services have to evolve to meet this new challenge.   ·         BETA Customer Perspective on R2 Ravi Meduri, Kaiser Permanente Highlights: R2 scalability and high availability In this podcast Ravi discusses the new features in 11gR2 that he is most interested in, including High Availability options for Access Management, multi-datacenter architecture, and what it was like working with the Oracle product team during the BETA program.   ·         Partner Perspective on R2 Rex Thexton, PricewaterhouseCoopers Highlights: Usability Enhancements for Users and Administrators A lot of new usability features went into the 11gR2 release making this the most business friendly IDM release to date. In this podcast Rex Thexton, Managing Director from PwC, talks about some of the new UI changes for both end users and administrators, and also about the new connector creation framework.   Access Request Updates in R2 Marc Boroditsky, Oracle Highlights: Access request User Interface innovations A lot of changes have been made to the Access Request user interface in the latest version of Oracle Identity Manager 11gR2. A real focus has been put on making the request process more business user friendly, and a lot of new customization capability has been added for the IT administrators. Hear Marc discuss the updated UI, and explain how administrators will be able to customize OIM to meet their company's requirements   ·         Oracle Optimized System for Oracle Unified Directory (OOS4OUD) Nick Kloski, Oracle Highlights: New Optimized System configuration for Unified Directory One of the new features in 11gR2 is the availability of an Optimized System configuration for Oracle Unified Directory. Oracle engineers installed the OUD software onto off the shelf hardware and then created a performance tuned configuration. Join us as we talk to Nick Kloski, Infrastructure Solutions Manager, all about the testing process and the resulting performance metrics.   Privileged Account Management Mark Wilcox, Oracle Highlights: Oracle Privileged Account Manager key capabilities, use cases The new release of Oracle Identity Management 11g R2 includes the capability to manage privileged accounts. Privileged accounts, if compromised, create a risk for fraud in the enterprise and as a result controlling access to privileged accounts is critical. Hear what Mark Wilcox, Principal Product Manager of Oracle Privileged Account Manager has to say about the capabilities of the offering in this podcast.   ·         Browser-based User Interface (UI) Customization Clayton Donley, Oracle Highlights: Benefits of Durable UI Configuration framework Business users need user interfaces that are not only friendly but also easily customizable. However the downside of any customization project is the cost and complexity involved in developing, testing, deploying and managing custom code. In this podcast, we examine how a new capability in Oracle Identity Management around browser based UI customization can reduce costs and complexity of customization while simplifying self service integration with corporate portal strategies.   ·         Simplifying Mobile and Social Sign-On Dan Killmer, Oracle Highlights: Secure mobile sign-on and consumption of social identities with Oracle Access Management The proliferation of mobile devices has spurred a new trend where employees tend to bring their own mobile devices to work and access corporate applications the same way they would access from a desktop or laptop. In this podcast, we examine how Oracle's latest innovation in Identity Management around Mobile and Social Sign On can simplify security and access management challenges posed by the widespread adoption of mobile devices in the enterprise. ·         Enabling Your Business with IDM R2 Scott Bonnell, Oracle Highlights: Self service, mobile access, personalization Gone are the days when Identity Management was just about stopping unauthorized users in their tracks. Identity Management if done right, can also enable your business. Join Scott Bonnell as he discusses how the IDM 11gR2 release enables the enterprise by providing self service, personalization and mobile access to corporate resources.

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• Java EE at JavaOne - A Few Picks from a Very Rich Line-up

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  A rich and diverse set of sessions cast a spotlight on Java EE at this year’s JavaOne, ranging from the popular Web Framework Smackdown, to Java EE 6 and Spring, to sessions exploring Java EE 7, and one on the implications of HTML5. Some of the world’s best EE architects and developers will be sharing their insight and expertise. If only I could be at ten places at once!BOF4149 - Web Framework Smackdown 2012    Markus Eisele - Principal IT Architect, msg systems ag    Graeme Rocher - Senior Staff Engineer, VMware    James Ward - Developer Evangelist, Heroku    Ed Burns - Consulting Member of Technical Staff, Oracle    Santiago Pericasgeertsen - Software Engineer, Oracle* Monday, Oct 1, 8:30 PM - 9:15 PM - Parc 55 - Cyril Magnin II/III Much has changed since the first Web framework smackdown, at JavaOne 2005. Or has it? The 2012 edition of this popular panel discussion surveys the current landscape of Web UI frameworks for the Java platform. The 2005 edition featured JSF, Webwork, Struts, Tapestry, and Wicket. The 2012 edition features representatives of the current crop of frameworks, with a special emphasis on frameworks that leverage HTML5 and thin-server architecture. Java Champion Markus Eisele leads the lively discussion with panelists James Ward (Play), Graeme Rocher (Grails), Edward Burns (JSF) and Santiago Pericasgeertsen (Avatar).CON6430 - Java EE and Spring Framework Panel Discussion    Richard Hightower - Developer, InfoQ    Bert Ertman - Fellow, Luminis    Gordon Dickens - Technical Architect, IT101, Inc.    Chris Beams - Senior Technical Staff, VMware    Arun Gupta - Technology Evangelist, Oracle* Tuesday, Oct 2, 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM - Parc 55 - Cyril Magnin II/III In the age of Java EE 6 and Spring 3, enterprise Java developers have many architectural choices, including Java EE 6 and Spring, but which one is right for your project? Many of us have heard the debate and seen the flame wars—it’s a topic with passionate community members, and it’s a vibrant debate. If you are looking for some level-headed discussion, grounded in real experience, by developers who have tried both, then come join this discussion. InfoQ’s Java editors moderate the discussion, and they are joined by independent consultants and representatives from both Java EE and VMWare/SpringSource.BOF4213 - Meet the Java EE 7 Specification Leads   Linda Demichiel - Consulting Member of Technical Staff, Oracle   Bill Shannon - Architect, Oracle* Tuesday, Oct 2, 5:30 PM - 6:15 PM – Parc 55 - Cyril Magnin II/III This is your chance to meet face-to-face with the engineers who are developing the next version of the Java EE platform. In this session, the specification leads for the leading technologies that are part of the Java EE 7 platform discuss new and upcoming features and answer your questions. Come prepared with your questions, your feedback, and your suggestions for new features in Java EE 7 and beyond.CON10656 - JavaEE.Next(): Java EE 7, 8, and Beyond    Ian Robinson - IBM Distinguished Engineer, IBM    Mark Little - JBoss CTO, NA    Scott Ferguson - Developer, Caucho Technology    Cameron Purdy - VP Development, Oracle*Wednesday, Oct 3, 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Parc 55 - Cyril Magnin II/IIIIn this session, hear from a distinguished panel of industry and open source luminaries regarding where they believe the Java EE community is headed, starting with Java EE 7. The focus of Java EE 7 and 8 is mostly on the cloud, specifically aiming to bring platform as a service (PaaS) providers and application developers together so that portable applications can be deployed on any cloud infrastructure and reap all its benefits in terms of scalability, elasticity, multitenancy, and so on. Most importantly, Java EE will leverage the modularization work in the underlying Java SE platform. Java EE will, of course, also update itself for trends such as HTML5, caching, NoSQL, ployglot programming, map/reduce, JSON, REST, and improvements to existing core APIs.CON7001 - HTML5 WebSocket and Java    Danny Coward - Java, Oracle*Wednesday, Oct 3, 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Parc 55 - Cyril Magnin IThe family of HTML5 technologies has pushed the pendulum away from rich client technologies and toward ever-more-capable Web clients running on today’s browsers. In particular, WebSocket brings new opportunities for efficient peer-to-peer communication, providing the basis for a new generation of interactive and “live” Web applications. This session examines the efforts under way to support WebSocket in the Java programming model, from its base-level integration in the Java Servlet and Java EE containers to a new, easy-to-use API and toolset that are destined to become part of the standard Java platform.

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• Five Things Learned at the BSR Conference in San Francisco on Nov 2nd-4th

  - by Evelyn Neumayr

  The BSR Conference 2011—“Redefining Leadership”—held from Nov 2nd to Nov 4th in San Francisco, with Oracle as one of the main sponsors, saw senior business executives, civil society representatives, and other experts from around the world gathering to share strategies and insights on the future of sustainability. The general conference sessions kicked off on November 2nd with a plenary address by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore. Other sessions were presented by CEOs of the caliber of Carl Bass (Autodesk), Brian Dunn (Best Buy), Carlos Brito (Anheuser-Busch InBev) and Ofra Strauss (Strauss Group). Here are five key highlights from the conference: 1.      The main leadership challenge is integrating sustainability into core business functions and overcoming short-termism. The “BSR GlobeScan State of Sustainable Business Poll 2011” - a survey of nearly 500 business leaders from 300 member companies - shows that 84% of respondents are optimistic that global businesses will embrace CSR/sustainability as part of their core strategies and operations in the next five years but consider integrating sustainability into their core business functions the key challenge. It is still difficult for many companies that are committed to the sustainability agenda to find investors that understand the long-term implications and as Al Gore said “Many companies are given the signal by the investors that it is the short term results that matter and that is a terribly debilitating force in the market.” 2.      Companies are required to address increasing compliance requirements and transparency in their supply chain, especially in relation with conflict minerals legislation and water management. The Dodd-Frank legislation, OECD guidelines, and the upcoming Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rules require companies to monitor upstream the sourcing of tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold, but given the complexity of this issue companies need to collaborate and partner with peer companies in their industry as well as in other industries to understand how to address conflict minerals in their supply chains. The Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs’ (IPE) China Water Pollution Map enables the public to access thousands of environmental quality, discharge, and infraction records released by various government agencies. Empowered with this information, the public has the opportunity to place greater pressure on polluting companies to comply with environmental standards and create solutions to improve their performance. 3.      A new standard for reporting on supply chain greenhouse gas emissions is available. The New “Scope 3” Supply Chain Greenhouse Gas Inventory Standard, released on October 4th 2011, is the only international greenhouse gas emissions standard that accounts for the full lifecycle of a company’s products. It provides a framework for companies to account for indirect emissions outside of energy use, such as transportation, manufacturing, and distribution, and it incorporates both upstream and downstream impacts of a product. With key investors now listing supplier vulnerability to rising energy prices and disruptions of service as a key concern, greenhouse gas (GHG) management isn’t just for leading companies but a necessity for any business. 4.      Environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) reporting is becoming increasingly important to investors and other stakeholders. While European investors have traditionally driven the ESG agenda, U.S. investors are increasingly including ESG data in their analyses. This trend will likely increase as stakeholders continue to demand that an ESG lens be applied to their investments. Investors are increasingly looking to partner on sustainability, as they see the benefits of ESG providing significant returns on investment. 5.      Software companies are offering an increasing variety of solutions to help drive changes and measure performance internally, in supply chains, and across peer companies. The significant challenge is how to integrate different software systems to facilitate decision-making based on a holistic understanding of trade-offs. Jon Chorley, Chief Sustainability Officer and Vice President, Supply Chain Management Product Strategy at Oracle was a panelist in the “Trends in Sustainability Software” session and commented that, “How we think about our business decisions really comes down to how we think about cost. And as long as we don’t assign a cost to things that have an environmental impact or social impact, then we make decisions based on incomplete information. If we could include that in the process that determines ‘Is this product profitable? we would then have a much better decision.” For more information on BSR visit www.brs.org. You can also view highlights of the plenary session at http://www.bsr.org/en/bsr-conference/session-summaries/2011. Oracle is proud to be a sponsor of this BSR conference. By Elena Avesani, Principal Product Strategy Manager, Oracle          

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• Bare-metal virtualisation for the desktop

  - by Andrew Taylor

  Hi, Does anyone have any knowledge about bare-metal virtualisation products? I'm interested in building a new desktop machine for home, I've been looking at the Intel Quad Core processors and I'd like to put 8GB of RAM in there, but, it got me thinking about making the most out of the available resources. I thought if I could get a good 64bit machine, put some bare-metal virtualisation on, then have a primary system, I'd also be able to bring up some extra virtualised systems as and when I needed. I know most of the bare metal systems are designed for the server market, but, is there anything out there that works well for a desktop. What are the caveats? I presume I won't be able to make the most out of any video cards I could buy, what about just getting a decent screen resolution, will this be a problem? I run a single 24" screen. What about DVD/CD writing, is this possible? I'd like to re-rip my CD collection, I was hoping the quad 64Bit goodness would help me out with the encoding. I currently use a Mac and couldn't go back to windows so that leaves Linux, I was thinking a primary OS of ubuntu. Does this make a difference? Thanks Andrew

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• Trying to understand Wireless N vs Wireless AC

  - by EGHDK

  Whenever a new wireless standard gets approved you expect faster speeds and longer range. From everything that I've read about it, it seems that AC will only transfer over the 5GHz band and up to 3Gbps. Studying the new AC routers on the market, it seems that they will transfer over 5GHz and 2.4GHz. And 5GHz will only transfer at 1.3Gbps. Which isn't what AC is supposed to be. I know there is a difference between what the standard actually says, and what products will actually do, but is there any reason for this? Is there any other main differences between AC and N? I've heard people discussing AC and saying that it's finally "fixing" what N was supposed to fix... what do they mean by that? Any security benefits? I have seen this image online: Will AC really do that? Will that require an AC network card in my laptop for that to actually happen? Lastly, will the router only be able to communicate with AC devices if I have beamforming technology on? I know it's a ton of questions, but most articles online seem to be outdated, and don't provide too much reliability.

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• Recommendations for colocation in the US

  - by Emil

  Hello serverfault I work for a European media company and we are currently looking for colocation in the US. I know the European market quite well unfortunately that is not the case for the US. I'm hoping for you guys to help me out a bit with a few questions, it would be much appreciated! I am looking for a data center that can deliver a high level of availability (tier 3 or better). The installation will be fairly large so capacity is important. Good internet connectivity/carrier presence. However most important is good customer support, skilled dedicated and responsive technical staff, since we won't have tech staff close by. I'm looking for a small and fast moving company that target internet businesses rather than big old enterprise hosting. What locations should we go for given that we want to reach all of the US from a single site and still maintain decent latency? (do we need east and west coast?) Where are the main internet hubs and should you try and get as close as possible? Are there any good online resources I should look at? Where do the large scale internet/media services colocate? Lastly I would be very happy to get some actual recommendations for companies to talk to P.S I'm happy to return the favor if anyone has question regarding data centers and colocation in Europe.

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• Access Services in SharePoint Server 2010

  - by Wayne

  Another SharePoint Server 2010 feature which cannot go unnoticed is the Access Services. Access Services is a service in SharePoint Server 2010 that allows administrators to view, edit, and configure a Microsoft access application within a Web Browser. Access Services settings support backup and recovery, regardless of whether there is a UI setting in Central Administration. However, backup and recovery only apply to service-level and administrative-level settings; end-user content from the Access application is not backed up as part of this process. Access Services has Windows PowerShell functionality that can be used to provide the service that uses settings from a previous backup; configure and manage macro and query setting; manage and configure session management; and configure all the global settings of the service. Key Benefits of SharePoint Server Access Services Easier Access to right tools: The enhanced, customizable Ribbon in Access 2010 makes it easy to uncover more commands so you can focus on the end product. The new Microsoft Office BackstageTM view is yet another feature that can help you easily analyze and document your database, share, publish, and customize your Access 2010 experience, all from one convenient location. Helps build database effortlessly and quickly: Out-of-the box templates and reusable components make Access Services the fastest, simplest database solution available. It helps find new pre-built templates which you can start using without customization or select templates created by your peers in the Access online community and customize them to meet your needs. It builds your databases with new modular components. New Application Parts enable you to add a set of common Access components, such as a table and form for task management, to your database in a few simple clicks. Database navigation is now simplified. It creates Navigation Forms and makes your frequently used forms and reports more accessible without writing any code or logic. Create Impactful forms and reports: Whether it's an inventory of your assets or customer sales database, Access 2010 brings the innovative tools you'd expect from Microsoft Office. Access Services easily spot trends and add emphasis to your data. It quickly create coordinating database forms and reports and bring the Web into your database. Obtain a centralized landing pad for your data: Access 2010 offers easy ways to bring your data together and help increase work quality. New technologies help break down barriers so you can share and work together on your databases, making you or your team more efficient and productive. Add automation and complex expressions: If you need a more robust database design, such as preventing record deletion if a specific condition is met or if you need to create calculations to forecast your budget, Access 2010 empowers you to be your own developer. The enhanced Expression Builder greatly simplifies your expression building experience with IntelliSense®. With the revamped Macro Designer, it's now even easier for you to add basic logic to your database. New Data Macros allow you to attach logic to your data, centralizing the logic on the table, not the objects that update your data. Key features of Access Services 2010 - Access database content through a Web browser: Newly added Access Services on Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 enables you to make your databases available on the Web with new Web databases. Users without an Access client can open Web forms and reports via a browser and changes are automatically synchronized. - Simplify how you access the features you need: The Ribbon, improved in Access 2010, helps you access commands even more quickly by enabling you to customize or create your own tabs. The new Microsoft Office Backstage view replaces the traditional File menu to provide one central, organized location for all of your document management tasks. - Codeless navigation: Use professional looking web-like navigation forms to make frequently used forms and reports more accessible without writing any code or logic. - Easily reuse Access items in other databases: Use Application Parts to add pre-built Access components for common tasks to your database in a few simple clicks. You can also package common database components, such as data entry forms and reports for task management, and reuse them across your organization or other databases. - Simplified formatting: By using Office themes you can create coordinating professional forms and reports across your database. Simply select a familiar and great looking Office theme, or design your own, and apply it to your database. Newly created Access objects will automatically match your chosen theme.

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• Defining Your Online Segmentation and Targeting Strategy

  - by Christie Flanagan

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} A lot of times, companies will put online segmentation and targeting on the back burner because they don’t know where to start. Often, I’ve heard web managers say that their segments aren’t well understood yet, so they can’t really deliver personalized online experiences that are meaningful. This lack of complete understanding means that they don't really bother to try. But, I don’t think you necessarily need to have an elaborate segmentation and targeting strategy already in place to start delivering a more relevant online customer experience. Sometimes it helps to think of how segmentation and targeting might solve some of the challenges your sites visitors are currently experiencing on your web presence, rather than doing nothing and waiting until a fully baked segmentation strategy lands in your inbox.  For example, perhaps you have a broad and varied service offering that makes it difficult for site visitors to easily find the solutions that are most relevant for them.  How can segmentation and targeting help solve this problem?  Or maybe it’s like the airline I described in Monday’s post where the special deals featured on the home page are only relevant to site visitors from a couple of cities.  Couldn’t segmentation and targeting help them to highlight offers on their home page that are relevant to a larger share of their site visitors? Your early segmentation and targeting efforts do not need to be complicated.  There are simple ways to start delivering a more relevant online customer experience, even if you’re dealing with anonymous site visitors.  These include targeting content to site visitors based on: Referral: Deliver targeted content to your site visitors that is based on where they came from or the search term they used to find your site Behavior:  Deliver content to your site visitors that is related or similar to content they’ve clicked on already Location:  Deliver content your site visitors that is most relevant for their geographic location (this would solve that pesky airline home page problem described above) So as you can see, there really are some very simple ways in which you can start improving your online customer experience using very basic segmentation and targeting methods.  One thing to keep in mind as you start to define you segmentation and targeting strategy is that there are many different types of attributes or combinations of attributes upon which you can base your segmentation and targeting strategy.  In addition to referral, behavior and location, other attributes that you should consider are: Profile Information:  What profile information do you know about this customer already?  Perhaps they provided some information on their interests and preferences when they first registered with your site. Time:  What time is it and how does that impact what my site visitors are looking for or trying to do? Demographics: What are my site visitors’ ages, incomes or ethnicities? Which attributes you select to include in your segmentation strategy will depend on your unique business needs and objectives.  Attributes such as behavior or referral may not be the most important targeting criteria depending on your situation. For example, if you’re a newspaper you might know that certain visitors are sports fans based on their profile information.  You can create a segment for sports fans and target sports related content to that segment of your readership online.  Or perhaps, a reader is browsing stories that are related to politics; you can use that visitor’s behavior to assign him or her to a segment for those interested in politics. From there you can recommend more stories to that visitor based on their interest in politics. For an airline, the visitor’s location may be a more important attribute. By detecting the visitor’s location, you can assign them to an appropriate segment and then target special flights and offers to them based on their likely departure airport. As you can see, there are many practical ways that you can start improving the experience your customers receive on your web presence using fairly basic segmentation and targeting techniques. If you want to learn more about segmentation and targeting using Oracle’s web experience management solution, check out this helpful video that demonstrates these powerful capabilities in Oracle WebCenter Sites. ***** On Demand Webcast Featuring Brian Solis of Altimeter Group Trends such as the mobile web, social media, gamification and real-time are changing customer behavior and expectations. In this new environment, many businesses will struggle. Some will fall by the wayside, while others learn to adapt and thrive. Watch this on demand webcast with Altimeter Group digital analyst and author, Brian Solis, and discover what your organization needs to know about how to compete in the new era of Digital Darwinism. View now.

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• The Customer Experience Imperative: A Game Changer for Brands

  - by Jeri Kelley

  By Anthony Lye, SVP, Cloud Applications Strategy, Oracle We know that customer experience has emerged as a primary differentiator for businesses today.  I’ve talked a lot about the new age of the empowered consumer. At Oracle we’ve spent a lot of time developing technologies and practices that our customers can implement to greatly improve their customer experience strategies. Of course I’m biased, but I think that we have created a portfolio of the best solutions on the planet to help organizations deal with the challenges of providing great customer experiences. We’ve done this because we started to witness some trends over the last few years. As the average person began to utilize social and mobile technologies more frequently and products commoditized, customer experience truly remained the only sustainable differentiator for businesses.In fact, we have seen that customer experience is often driving the success or the failure of a product or a brand. And as end customers have become more vocal about their experiences with companies on social and mobile channels, they now have the power to decide which brands will win and which brands will lose. To address this customer experience imperative, I believe that business today must do three things really well:Connect with your customers. You have to connect with customers whenever, wherever and however they want. Organizations must provide a great experience on their existing channels— the call center, the brick and mortar store, the field sales organizations, the websites and social properties. Businesses must also be great at managing and delivering journeys on these channels, while quickly adapting to embrace the new channels that emerge. You have to understand mobile. You have to understand social. You have to understand kiosks. These are all new routes to market, new channels where your customers may or may not show up. You have to interact with them where they are. You have to present information in a way that's meaningful to them. As well as providing what we would call a multichannel experience. We have to recognize that customers may start their experience on one channel, but end it on a different channel. It’s important that an organization’s technology solutions enable, not just a multichannel strategy, but a strategy that can power new channels and create customer journeys that cross these channels.Get to know your customers. Next, companies need to get to know the customer as intimately as the customer will allow. Today most customer interactions are anonymous, but it’s important for brands to know which customers drive value. Customers want to provide feedback. They want to share their opinions, but they want to know that those opinions are being heard and acted upon. For this to occur, we need to know much more about the customer and then reward them for their loyalty and for their advocacy.Enable connections. The last thing is to enable people to connect or transact with your brand. We've got to make it really, really simple for customers to do business with us. We can't make them repeat the steps; we can't make them tell us their identity for the fifth time as they move between organizations. These silos can no longer sustain or deliver a good customer experience. It's extremely important that companies be where customers want them to be—that we create profitable journeys for us and for them.Organizations have to make sure that there is a single source of truth that defines the customer. We have to make sure that the technology applications that we rely on understand not just the dimensions of multichannel, but of cross-channel too. We have to enable social at the very core of the overall architecture. We have to use historical analytics, real-time decisioning as well as predictive analytics to help personalize and drive an experience. And these are all technologies that IT needs, that IT is familiar with, but needs to enable for the line of business that in turn can enable for the end customer.  This means that we've got to make our solutions available to the customers in the cloud.In this new age of the empowered consumer, businesses have to focus on delivery mechanisms that reduce the overall TCO, while driving a rapid rate of innovation and a more rapid rate of deployment. At the Oracle Customer Experience Summit @ OpenWorld, I’ll discuss these issues and more. I hope that you can join us for what promises to be an unforgettable experience.

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• Is UPS worthwhile for home equipment?

  - by Jon Skeet

  Over the years, I've had to throw away a quite a few bits of computing equipment (and the like): Several ADSL routers with odd symptoms (losing wireless connections, losing wired connections, DHCP failures, DNS symptoms etc) Two PVRs spontaneously rebooting and corrupting themselves (despite the best efforts of the community to diagnose and help) One external hard disk still claiming to function, but corrupting data One hard disk as part of a NAS raid array "going bad" (as far as the NAS was concerned) (This is in addition to various laptops and printers dying in ways unrelated to this question.) Obviously it'll be impossible to tell for sure from such a small amount of information, but might these be related to power issues? I don't currently have a UPS for any of this equipment. Everything on surge-protected gang sockets, but there's nothing to smooth a power cut. Is home UPS really viable and useful? I know there are some reasonably cheap UPSes on the market, but I don't know how useful they really are. I'm not interested in keeping my home network actually running during a power cut, but I'd like it to power down a bit more gracefully if the current situation is putting my hardware in jeopardy.

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• Options for small windows network setup without dedicated server?

  - by Mitch

  I'm very weak on networking and hope someone can point me in the right direction: I have written some windows client/server software which incorporates a database which is located on a windows server. I have a test installation running at a customer's office where the server has a static IP address. In this case its easy for the clients to access the database because of the fixed IP address. Also, customers with network servers generally have specialist support staff to set up my software, so its not such a problem for me. However I also need to offer the software to customers who have small offices with less than 10 PCs and no dedicated network server. In this case I want the customer to be able to nominate one PC as the database "server" and install my software and have the clients access it. But in this situation I believe the "server" PC may not have a dedicated IP address. Q1: What is the best way to set this up simply and make it work? Can I reliably reference the "server" by using its name, or is there a way to assign dummy fixed IP addresses? Ideally this needs to be workable on small networks running a mixture of XP/Vista/Windows7 as my target market may well have mixed OSes etc. I guess this would be akin to home networking? Many thanks Mitch

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• Designing a software based load balancer

  - by Kishore pandey

  Hello to all Server fault users, I am new to this website but have constantly been using the mother website, stackover flow. Well to begin with, i would like to design a load balancer for the organization i am working for. As i am very new to this whole, idea about load balancing and networks. I am finding it very difficult to start my project. I did a lot of research on already existing load balancer and found some(HAPROXY,NGINX) that could solve my problems, but the point is, I am still in a dilemma if they could answer the following requirements of mine: The client and server in my architecture are distributed. The load balancer should take care of the firewall. LB server should balance the load among all servers present in WWW cloud. The LB server should have some sort of configuration file, with the help of which it is possible to configure the servers. Heart beat: With the help of which it would be possible to check if any server is down, if any server is down the request should be passed to some other server. Various load balancing algorithms of the incoming requests. Easy error handling. It should be fairly possible to prioritize the incoming requests. Is there any already available load balncer solution on the market that could satisfy these requirements? If not is there any base code available with the help of which i could develop my own load balncer. If not where should i start from scratch? I am practically new to everything. Any help from a load balancer expert is very much appreciated. Thanx a ton in advance. Cheers and regards. Kishore

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• About to go live: virtual dedicated server or cloud?

  - by morpheous

  I am about to launch my startup company, and we will be going live in a few weeks time. We have really tight budgetary constraints, since we are bootstrapping - and would prefer not to raise external capital. I cant use shared hosting because I need more control of the server machine (for technical reasons - e.g. using proprietary extensions to PHP, Apache and in the database layer as well) - but want to control costs and dont want to go fully private server route, until we have determined the market size etc. So the only real alternatives AFAIK is between virtual server and the cloud. At the moment, cloud services seem a bit "vague" to me. My understanding is that they allow an entity to outsource its IT infrastructure, which in my mind (at least), is indistinguishable from what a hosting provider provides (at least from a functional point of view) - I would like to seek some clarification on exactly what the difference between the two is. Back to my original question, my requirements are: IT infrastructure that can scale with growth Ability to have control of the machine (for e.g. to install our internally developed libraries etc) Backup software that is flexible and comprehensive enough (yet simple to use), that allows a (secured) backup strategy to be implemented. On this issue, I have always wondered where the actual backed up data was stored (since the physical machines are remote, and one cant get access to any actual tapes etc backed onto). I would also like some advice and recommendations in this area. Regarding data size, I am expecting the dataset to be increasing by a few megabytes of data (originally, say 10Mb, in about a years time, possibly 50Mb) every day. As an aside, I have decided to deploy on a Debian server (most of my additional libraries etc were compiled and built on a Debian machine). Mindful of all of the above, I would like some advice (and reason) as to which route to take. I would also like some advice on which backup software to use, from people who have walked a similar path.

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• XenServer 5.5 running WHS.. trying to add local or network printer/scanner/copier

  - by ProstheticHead

  Hi guys. Just wondering if anyone has prior experience in sharing a multifunction printer across a (mostly windows) network? My situation at the minute is complicated.. I DID have the printer attached directly to a Windows Home Server box and was able to scan to a share and print across the network from my other computers. Compatibility problems have forced me to virtualize WHS on XenServer 5.5... This is actually quite useful because I can now run other things on the same box, but the problem is that now WHS doesn't get direct hardware access so it doesn't see a USB attached PSC... Grrrr! So now I have a choice to make. I've read somewhere that I can buy an add in PCI USB controller and somehow set up a passthrough to one VM at a time. To me, this sound complicated but if it's likely to work reliably I'd prefer this method. I've read about another approach, which I'm not sure about either, but I guess sounds plausible. A Network USB server, (NOT a print server) that can somehow make a USB port accessible across a network. My worry here is that it likely needs some kind of 3rd party software to work.. so not ideal. If there are any other methods you can suggest I'd be happy to hear them... I need your help guys. I'm also in the market for a PCI express SATA controller, nothing flashy, just need up to 8 ports, JBOD and 100% compatability.. Any suggestions? Regards Kevin

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• 7-Eleven Improves the Digital Guest Experience With 10-Minute Application Provisioning

  - by MichaelM-Oracle

  By Vishal Mehra - Director, Cloud Computing, Oracle Consulting Making the Cloud Journey Matter There’s much more to cloud computing than cutting costs and closing data centers. In fact, cloud computing is fast becoming the engine for innovation and productivity in the digital age. Oracle Consulting Services contributes to our customers’ cloud journey by accelerating application provisioning and rapidly deploying enterprise solutions. By blending flexibility with standardization, our Middleware as a Service (MWaaS) offering is ensuring the success of many cloud initiatives. 10-Minute Application Provisioning Times at 7-Eleven As a case in point, 7-Eleven recently highlighted the scope, scale, and results of a cloud-powered environment. The world’s largest convenience store chain is rolling out a Digital Guest Experience (DGE) program across 8,500 stores in the U.S. and Canada. Everyday, 7-Eleven connects with tens of millions of customers through point-of-sale terminals, web sites, and mobile apps. Promoting customer loyalty, targeting promotions, downloading digital coupons, and accepting digital payments are all part of the roadmap for a comprehensive and rewarding customer experience. And what about the time required for deploying successive versions of this mission-critical solution? Ron Clanton, 7-Eleven's DGE Program Manager, Information Technology reported at Oracle Open World, " We are now able to provision new environments in less than 10 minutes. This includes the complete SOA Suite on Exalogic, and Enterprise Manager managing both the SOA Suite, Exalogic, and our Exadata databases ." OCS understands the complex nature of innovative solutions and has processes and expertise to help clients like 7-Eleven rapidly develop technology that enhances the customer experience with little more than the click of a button. OCS understood that the 7-Eleven roadmap required careful planning, agile development, and a cloud-capable environment to move fast and perform at enterprise scale. Business Agility Today’s business-savvy technology leaders face competing priorities as they confront the digital disruptions of the mobile revolution and next-generation enterprise applications. To support an innovation agenda, IT is required to balance competing priorities between development and operations groups. Standardization and consolidation of computing resources are the keys to success. With our operational and technical expertise promoting business agility, Oracle Consulting's deep Middleware as a Service experience can make a significant difference to our clients by empowering enterprise IT organizations with the computing environment they seek to keep up with the pace of change that digitally driven business units expect. Depending on the needs of the organization, this environment runs within a private, public, or hybrid cloud infrastructure. Through on-demand access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources, IT delivers the standard tools and methods for developing, integrating, deploying, and scaling next-generation applications. Gold profiles of predefined configurations eliminate the version mismatches among databases, application servers, and SOA suite components, delivered both by Oracle and other enterprise ISVs. These computing resources are well defined in business terms, enabling users to select what they need from a service catalog. Striking the Balance between Development and Operations As a result, development groups have the flexibility to choose among a menu of available services with descriptions of standard business functions, service level guarantees, and costs. Faced with the consumerization of enterprise IT, they can deliver the innovative customer experiences that seamlessly integrate with underlying enterprise applications and services. This cloud-powered development and testing environment accelerates release cycles to ensure agile development and rapid deployments. At the same time, the operations group is relying on certified stacks and frameworks, tuned to predefined environments and patterns. Operators can maintain a high level of security, and continue best practices for applications/systems monitoring and management. Moreover, faced with the challenges of delivering on service level agreements (SLAs) with the business units, operators can ensure performance, scalability, and reliability of the infrastructure. The elasticity of a cloud-computing environment – the ability to rapidly add virtual machines and storage in response to computing demands -- makes a difference for hardware utilization and efficiency. Contending with Continuous Change What does it take to succeed on the promise of the cloud? As the engine for innovation and productivity in the digital age, IT must face not only the technical transformations but also the organizational challenges of the cloud. Standardizing key technologies, resources, and services through cloud computing is only one part of the cloud journey. Managing relationships among multiple department and projects over time – developing the management, governance, and monitoring capabilities within IT – is an often unmentioned but all too important second part. In fact, IT must have the organizational agility to contend with continuous change. This is where a skilled consulting services partner can play a pivotal role as a trusted advisor in the successful adoption of cloud solutions. With a lifecycle services approach to delivering innovative business solutions, Oracle Consulting Services has expertise and a portfolio of services to help enterprise customers succeed on their cloud journeys as well as other converging mega trends .

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• Multi monitor setup with a tv as well?

  - by jasondavis

  I have always had a dual monitor setup for my pc's for years now. I am now in the market to build a new PC and get some new stuff. I need some help or advice on how to run 3 monitors WITH a 4th display which will be a lcd/plasma tv. So I am thinking I can get 2 video cards and that will give me all the hookups to run 3 monitors instead of 2. I will mount all 3 monitors in a row side by side and above them on the wall I would like to mount a larger 30-40+ inch lcd or plasma tv. I would then like to hook up my atelite/cable to this tv just as I would normally hook up a tv but I would like to also be able to have an option to view my PC o this tv as well. I know that is possible but would it be possible to view my PC on that tv and also still view my 3 other monitors and have the TV be a 4th display, where I could dock a different app/window in windows in all 4 displays (3 monitors + tv) ?? Please tell me any tips/advice on how to do this including what cables/software if any/converters/ you name it. Thanks for any help

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• Xmonad on windows laptop

  - by Kevin L.

  I'm a Linux developer in the market for a laptop. 90% of my time is spent in Emacs, the terminal, and Google Chrome, and I want to use them within the excellent Xmonad tiling windows manager. Given these constraints, I can only see two options: Run Linux on a laptop Run Windows on the laptop, and spend all of my time working within a Linux VM. Years of experience suggest that the first option will take many frustrating hours and probably be suboptimal w.r.t. battery life, wifi, and fn keys like screen brightness or audio adjustment. For the second option, what would be the ideal setup? I've had a lot of luck with Cooperative Linux on my Samsung NC-10 netbook (Windows XP), but I would have to setup the X11 server myself. What about using VirtualBox (which includes the guest VM's GUI)? Has anyone tried this? Hardware-wise, I'm looking for something in the "Macbook Air killer" category; Samsung Series 9 laptop, Lenovo IdeaPad U300s, &c. (i.e., matte screen, 5h+ battery life, 3ish pound weight). Price is not a consideration; any suggestions?

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• Scaling databases with cheap SSD hard drives

  - by Dennis Kashkin

  Hey guys! I hope that many of you are working with high traffic database-driven websites, and chances are that your main scalability issues are in the database. I noticed a couple of things lately: Most large databases require a team of DBAs in order to scale. They constantly struggle with limitations of hard drives and end up with very expensive solutions (SANs or large RAIDs, frequent maintenance windows for defragging and repartitioning, etc.) The actual annual cost of maintaining such databases is in $100K-$1M range which is too steep for me :) Finally, we got several companies like Intel, Samsung, FusionIO, etc. that just started selling extremely fast yet affordable SSD hard drives based on SLC Flash technology. These drives are 100 times faster in random read/writes than the best spinning hard drives on the market (up to 50,000 random writes per second). Their seek time is pretty much zero, so the cost of random I/O is the same as sequential I/O, which is awesome for databases. These SSD drives cost around $10-$20 per gigabyte, and they are relatively small (64GB). So, there seems to be an opportunity to avoid the HUGE costs of scaling databases the traditional way by simply building a big enough RAID 5 array of SSD drives (which would cost only a few thousand dollars). Then we don't care if the database file is fragmented, and we can afford 100 times more disk writes per second without having to spread the database across 100 spindles. . Is anybody else interested in this? I've been testing a few SSD drives and can share my results. If anybody on this site has already solved their I/O bottleneck with SSDs, I would love to hear your war stories! PS. I know that there are plenty of expensive solutions out there that help with scalability, for example the time proven RAM-based SANs. I want to be clear that even $50K is too expensive for my project. I have to find a solution that costs no more than $10K and does not take much time to implement.

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• CS, SE, HCI, Information Science, Please recommendation for further education of the former performing art manager seeking career in IT industries? [on hold]

  - by Baek Seungjoo

  IT specialists there J Thank you very much for your collective efforts here, and I got huge help reading your professional comments and advices on each questions I have searched so far! This time, I would like to ask for your practical advices or recommendation on what I am struggling on at this moment. I am currently seeking higher education for my career transition from performing art manager and director to “IT software and/or service development and management specialist”. However, as this field is quite new to me, and there are lots of different work positions, I have no idea which grad major I better pursue in order to get qualification. Of course I know this question could sounds wired as it is kind of personal choice. But my lack of understanding on how IT software companies work in general, your practical and experience-based advice will be great help to me, who spent more than two months of self-research on net. OK. Before my question, here is my plan and history, which are quite different from those currently in IT industry I think… 1) Target Firstly, get career transition into IT service or products companies and get experiences. Eventually, pursue IT entrepreneurship in combination with my arts and cultural production and business expertise. 2) Background Career: performing arts director and manager in theatre-based scale opera and musical Art education in youth BA in literature and Chinese studies (Art & Humanities) MA in Cultural & Creative Industries (Art & Humanities) – dissertation with focus on digital prosumption and the lived experience of the prosumer. (a qualitative research on the agents in the digital world) 2) Personally Huge interest in IT hardware and software, and their trend. Skills to build up, repair, tune PCs -of course this is no more than personal hobby, but shows my interests in this field. 4) Problem Encounter a question “So, what do you think you can contribute practically in this position”. This question turn me down everytime I go through job interviews, and I decided more education in the relevant area. Here are my questions. 1) In terms of work positions in IT software companies, I wonder if I can put the comparison of what “Artists” is to “Arts Manager or Director” is what “Developer” is to “Product Manager”. (Of course, this stereotypical division of Artist-Art Manager is out of sense because the domain overlaps to some extent, and is blurring at least in my field, and they are in different contexts, but just speaking easily.) Normally, artist comes with special arts educations, and they live in their own world of artistic inspiration and creation, and they feel alive in practice and on stages. Meanwhile, from the point of staging and managing productions, the role of art manager is critical as well. Our role cares how the production appeals to the audience in effective way, how to make profit and future sustainable management through that, how to set up future strategy in consideration of the external conditions such as political and social circumstances, audience trend and level, other production trends from on-going and historical perspectives, how and what the production make voice to the society from political, economic, humanitarian stances. So, we need keen eyes on economic, political, and societal environment, have to understand human-being and their desires, must know how to make presentation and attract investors, must have sense in managing and fighting over the limited financial resource, how to extend networking and so on. It is common that the two agents create productions in collaboration (normally not in that ideal way but in conflict and fight though J ). So, we need to know each other’s expertise to some extent, for better production. What are the work positions in IT software industries equivalent to the role of “art manager” in performing arts? From my view, considering developers come with special education in the world of computer science, software engineering, or others (self-education sometimes), and they express themselves with the arts of coding, computer languages on the black screen, and make sort of their artistic production online to the audience, I guess there might be someone who collaborate with developers in creating, managing, and launching IT services or products. 2) Which education among CS, SE, HCI, Information Science, is needed for those seeking such work position? Especially for person like me. (At this moment, Information Science has the highest possibility to get in, since I lack Calculus and Math in undergrad educaiton. But please let me know irrespective of this concern, I think there are ways to back it up if CS or SE education needed in my case) 3) Which field between Information Science and HCI can be more practical background regarding job hungting? And which of them have more demands in job market? AS I checked, HCI is more close to CS than IS in its focus of study area. Thank you very much for your patience reading such a long inquiry, and I appreciate to your efforts in advance. Have a nice day in this beautiful summer.

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• Important hardware components to avoid bottlenecks/improve speed on a laptop?

  - by joelhaus

  Looking for a powerful general use (including web development) laptop running Windows. Price points seem to be all over the place. Many less powerful machines are priced much higher than machines with better specs. How does one navigate this market? Are there any unpublished/under-publicized specs/bottlenecks you look for? Understanding that hardware improves over time, is there an efficient ratio that can be used (or something similar, like Windows Experience Index?) which will indicate how powerful a system is? Thanks in advance! P.S. Here is an example from a laptop released on September 17, 2010. Can anyone pick apart these specs? Is there missing information you would be looking for? OS: Win 7 Display: 16.4" LED backlit Processor: Intel Core i7-740QM, 6MB L3 Cache RAM: 6GB DDR3 1333MHz (8GB max.) Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GT 425M (1 GB of dedicated DDR3) HDD: 500GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive Removable Disc: Blue-ray with DVD±R/RW Misc: webcam/mic/speakers/bluetooth (via Sony Vaio VPC-F137FX/B)

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• Oracle Cloud Applications: The Right Ingredients Baked In

  - by yaldahhakim

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Oracle Cloud Applications: The Right Ingredients Baked In Eggs, flour, milk, and sugar. The magic happens when you mix these ingredients together. The same goes for the hottest technologies fast changing how IT impacts our organizations today: cloud, social, mobile, and big data. By themselves they’re pretty good; combining them with a great recipe is what unlocks real transformation power. Choosing the right cloud can be very similar to choosing the right cake. First consider comparing the core ingredients that go into baking a cake and the core design principles in building a cloud-based application. For instance, if flour is the base ingredient of a cake, then rich functionality that spans complete business processes is the base of an enterprise-grade cloud. Cloud computing is more than just consuming an "application as service", and having someone else manage it for you. Rather, the value of cloud is about making your business more agile in the marketplace, and shortening the time it takes to deliver and adopt new innovation. It’s also about improving not only the efficiency at which we communicate but the actual quality of the information shared as well. Data from different systems, like ingredients in a cake, must also be blended together effectively and evaluated through a consolidated lens. When this doesn’t happen, for instance when data in your sales cloud doesn't seamlessly connect with your order management and other “back office” applications, the speed and quality of information can decrease drastically. It’s like mixing ingredients in a strainer with a straw – you just can’t bring it all together without losing something. Mixing ingredients is similar to bringing clouds together, and co-existing cloud applications with traditional on premise applications. This is where a shared services  platform built on open standards and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is critical. It’s essentially a cloud recipe that calls for not only great ingredients, but also ingredients you can get locally or most likely already have in your kitchen (or IT shop.) Open standards is the best way to deliver a cost effective, durable application integration strategy – regardless of where your apps are deployed. It’s also the best way to build your own cloud applications, or extend the ones you consume from a third party. Just like using standard ingredients and tools you already have in your kitchen, a standards based cloud enables your IT resources to ensure a cloud works easily with other systems. Your IT staff can also make changes using tools they are already familiar with. Or even more ideal, enable business users to actually tailor their experience without having to call upon IT for help at all. This frees IT resources to focus more on developing new innovative services for the organization vs. run and maintain. Carrying the cake analogy forward, you need to add all the ingredients in before you bake it. The same is true with a modern cloud. To harness the full power of cloud, you can’t leave out some of the most important ingredients and just layer them on top later. This is what a lot of our niche competitors have done when it comes to social, mobile, big data and analytics, and other key technologies impacting the way we do business. The transformational power of these technology trends comes from having a strategy from the get-go that combines them into a winning recipe, and delivers them in a unified way. In looking at ways Oracle’s cloud is different from other clouds – not only is breadth of functionality rich across functional pillars like CRM, HCM, ERP, etc. but it embeds social, mobile, and rich intelligence capabilities where they make the most sense across business processes. This strategy enables the Oracle Cloud to uniquely deliver on all three of these dimensions to help our customers unlock the full power of these transformational technologies.

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• Is reliability reputation of mechanical keyboards overblown?

  - by Rarst

  A while back I worked up to finally buying mechanical keyboard (~$100 range, "black" switches) and was initially quite content with purchase. However just outside first year (read it - as soon as warranty expired) it started to develop repeat issues (press once, get chain of letter repeated) on multiple keys. It doesn't react to generic cleaning (up to compressed air) and searching Internet shows noticeable amount of people with similar-to-identical issues, spanning years. This makes me severely hesitant to buy another mechanical keyboard, considering: every other keyboard I ever owned, including ultra-cheap crap managed to last longer than that typing experience is nice, but not lifechanging-fan-forever nice for me my choice of mechanical keyboards is severely limited not many brands represented in local market and primarily crazy looking gamer models russian (not to mention russian and ukrainian if possible) layout excludes international ordering price tag for a meek year of use I got our of it is plain demoralizing It is obvious mechanical keyboards have their fans, but shopping around for "best fit" or getting into multiple hundreds price tags is probably not something I am highly interested in. Considering my constraints and bad experience with reliability, is it practical for me to sink more money into buying mechanical keyboard(s) again? In other words - manufacturers are beaming about how crazy reliable mechanical keyboards are. Are active long time users of such keyboards confidently of same opinion?

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• Troubleshooting an overheating CPU

  - by Jeff Fry

  I & my father just recently put together a new PC. Specs below. From the very beginning, on boot it will often complain that the CPU is too hot. If I sit in BIOS and watch the CPU, it'll drop back down from red to blue (<72C), at which point I've tended to just boot into Windows...and haven't had any problems. In fact, I've played a couple hours straight of Skyrim at max settings, and not had any visible issues. That said, I've occasionally walked away & come back to find that it's crashed. Yesterday, it crashed (while idle) twice in 12 hours, which shifted the balance from busy-with-life to nervous-I'm-about-to-melt-something. I just installed Core Temp which is showing my 4 cores fluxuating between 70-98C. I'm guessing at this point that the CPU fan may be incorrectly installed or defective. My first thought is to either (a) add water cooling (which the case supports) and / or (b) replace the CPU fan with an after-market one. That said, I'm very open to suggestions. A note, while I certainly don't want to burn money here, I have a baby coming any day now and am still unpacking from a recent move so if I have a choice between an option that costs money and another that takes a while...I'll happily spend a bit extra. Side question: Should I be nervous to even have this on at this point? Let me know if there's something useful I could add to my report. Otherwise, I'm looking forward to your suggestions! Thanks. CPU Intel i7-2600 CPU w/ stock fan Other HW ASUS P8Z68-V Pro motherboard 64G SSD boot drive 4 older SATA HDs GIGABYTE ATI Radeon HD6950 1 GB DDR5 8G Kingston T1 Series RAM Corsair 650W Gold Certified power supply Antec P280 case

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