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• DIY Arcade Build Packed into an IKEA Console Table

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  If you checked out the Raspberry Pi-powered arcade table we shared earlier this week but want an all-in-one solution that doesn’t require as much configuration, this table uses a pre-programmed board that comes loaded with arcade classics. Courtesy of tinker Casper36, we’re treated to a compact build hidden inside an IKEA console table. One of the most polished aspects of this build is how well hidden the flush-mounted screen is under the dark glass tabletop–when the screen it just looks like the table has a patterned glass insert. Hit up the link below for the full photo build-log. IKEA Console Arcade Build [via Make] 6 Ways Windows 8 Is More Secure Than Windows 7 HTG Explains: Why It’s Good That Your Computer’s RAM Is Full 10 Awesome Improvements For Desktop Users in Windows 8

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• IKEA Lamps Hacked into Flexible Speaker Mounts

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  This simple hack combines the swing arms of two IKEA work lamps with a set of computer speakers for flexible and easily adjustable sound. IKEAHackers reader Bill Dwyer wanted an easy way to get the speakers off his desk but still be able to easily adjust them. By hacking apart two IKEA work lamps (he removed the light assembly and snipped the wires off) he was able to attach his computer speakers to the arms and, in the process, get them off the desk. The arms make it super simple to adjust the speakers exactly where he wants them, including towards other parts of his office/apartment. Hit up the link below to check out more pictures and read Bill’s instructions. Very Flexible Computer Speaker Mounts [IKEAHackers] Use Your Android Phone to Comparison Shop: 4 Scanner Apps Reviewed How to Run Android Apps on Your Desktop the Easy Way HTG Explains: Do You Really Need to Defrag Your PC?

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• Compact DIY Office-in-a-Cart Packs Away Into a Closet

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Many geeks know the pain of losing a home office when a new baby comes along, but not many of them go to such lengths to miniaturize their offices like this. With a little ingenuity an entire home office now fits inside a heavily modified IKEA work table. Ian, an IKEAHacker reader and Los Angeles area geek, explains the motivation for the build: I had to surrender my home office to make room for my new baby boy ;) I took an Ikea stainless steel kitchen “work table”, some Ikea computer tower desk trays, two steel tabletops, and two grated steel shelves to make an “office” that I could pack away into a closet. Hit up the link below to check out the full photo set, the build includes quite a few clever design choices like mounted monitors, a ventilation system, and more. Home Office In A Box [IKEAHacker] HTG Explains: How Antivirus Software Works HTG Explains: Why Deleted Files Can Be Recovered and How You Can Prevent It HTG Explains: What Are the Sys Rq, Scroll Lock, and Pause/Break Keys on My Keyboard?

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• Filter data in sheets from a master sheet

  - by sam

  I have a 'master sheet' with lots of furniture data in it, in column A there are the suppliers names. What I would like is to be able to have my master sheet with all the info and then sub sheets named by supplier; in these sub sheets I would like to reference the master sheet and pull out all of the items that are from that supplier. For example: I would have a sheet called 'Ikea' which would look in the master sheet and search the A column for all entries of 'Ikea'. If present, copy or reference that row 1:12 in the 'ikea' sheet. I would like to do it all dynamically using references rather than copying the data. Also, I would like it to auto update rather than having to run a macro to recalculate it each time. Can this be done with formulars rather than macros?

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• Selling Solutions, Not Products

  - by David Dorf

  When I think about next-generation retailers, the names that come to mind are Apple, Whole Foods, Lulu Lemon, and IKEA.  They may not be the biggest retailers, but they are certainly growing fast. Success is never defined by just one dimension, and these retailers execute well across many dimensions, but the one that stands out for me is customer experience.  These stores feel...approachable...part of the community...local.  Customers are not intimidated to ask questions, and staff seem to go out of their way to help. What's makes these retailers stand out in the industry?  These retailers aren't selling products -- they're selling solutions.  Think about that.  You think you're going to the Apple store to buy a phone, but you're actually buying a communications solution that handles much, much more.  If you carry an iPhone, your life has changed.  The way you do things is different.  The impacts go much beyond a simple phone. Solutions start with a problem, which is why these retailers greet customers with "what brought you in today," or "can I answer any questions for you?"  Good retailers establish a relationship, even if it lasts only a few minutes. You don't walk into Whole Foods looking for cans of soup.  You are looking for meals: healthy snacks, interesting lunches, exotic dinners.  Its a learning experience where you might discover solutions to problems you didn't know you had.  Mention what foods you like, and you'll get a list of similar items you had not considered.  I didn't know I needed a closet organizer until I visited an IKEA and learned about all the options.  They were able to customize the solution to meet my needs, and now I'm much more organized. One of the differences between selling products and selling solutions is training.  Visit any of these retailers' sites and you'll see a long list of in-store events for the benefit of customers.  You can buy exercise clothing from Lulu Lemon, and also learn new yoga techniques, meet like-minded people, and branch off to other fitness regimes via their ambassadors.  You can visit the Geek Bar at Apple, eat lunch at IKEA, and learn to cook at Whole Foods. These retailers are making an investment in a relationship with their customers.  They are showing loyalty to their customers before asking for it back.  In the long-run, this strategic approach will outlive any scan-and-bag mentality.

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• Project Kapros: A Custom-Built Workstation Featuring an In-Desk Computer

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  While we’ve seen our fair share of case mods, it’s infrequent we see one as polished and built-in as this custom built work station. What started as an IKEA Galant desk, ended as a stunningly executed desk-as-computer build. High gloss paint, sand-blasted plexiglass windows, custom lighting, and some quality hardware all come together in this build to yield a gorgeous setup with plenty of power and style to go around. Hit up the link below for a massive photo album build guide detailing the process from start to finish. Project Kapros: IKEA Galant PC Desk Mod [via Kotaku] How to Stress Test the Hard Drives in Your PC or Server How To Customize Your Android Lock Screen with WidgetLocker The Best Free Portable Apps for Your Flash Drive Toolkit

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• Remote Control Holder Mod Stores Tablet Close At Hand

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  If you spend most of your iPad time lounging on your couch or in bed, this simple IKEA hack will keep your favorite tablet stowed right at your finger tips. IKEA’s inexpensive remote control holder, the $4.99 Flort, is easy to hack from a remote holster into an tablet holder. You simply flip it around, sew up the edge of the back flap, and holster your tablet in it–your tablet fits all the way inside, in the above image the iPad is tucked in semi-precariously to demonstrate it sliding inside. Hit up the link below for step-by-step pictures. Smartest Way to Store Your iPad for $4.99 [IKEAHackers] HTG Explains: When Do You Need to Update Your Drivers? How to Make the Kindle Fire Silk Browser *Actually* Fast! Amazon’s New Kindle Fire Tablet: the How-To Geek Review

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• Inverted LACK Table Serves as a Perfect Gear Rack [DIY]

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  We’ve seen IKEA gear hacked to hold audio and computer gear before, but this mod adds in a simple and effective twist. LACK end tables are, conveniently, the same width as a standard server rack. This makes it super simple for DIYers to mount their gear right into the legs of the table with no modification necessary. In this case, however, Winston Smith included a clever update to the mod. Rather than leave it like a standard table, he flipped the table upside down for increased stability and a stronger connection between the legs of his improvised audio rack and the table-top-turned-floor-plate. He then finished it with a matching LACK shelf piece to serve as a turn-table stand. His gear is stored cleanly, off the floor, and in a sturdy container all for about $25–a definite bargain when it comes to storage racks. Hit up the link below for more information and pictures. LACK Rack & EXPEDIT Desktop [IKEA Hackers] HTG Explains: How Windows Uses The Task Scheduler for System Tasks HTG Explains: Why Do Hard Drives Show the Wrong Capacity in Windows? Java is Insecure and Awful, It’s Time to Disable It, and Here’s How

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• Mod a Swing Arm Lamp into an Adjustable Camera Stand

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  If you’re looking for a simple way to get a bird’s eye view to record your DIY projects or other table-based activities like gaming or tinkering, this simple modification to a swing-arm lamp offers a highly flexible camera mount on the cheap. IKEAHacker reader Stef needed an adjustable arm for his iPhone camera so he could record in a top-down-view for some drawing tutorials he was working on. Rather than shell out big bucks for a custom boom arm, he scrounged up a swing arm lamp with a broken shade in the as-is bin at his local IKEA. To mount the iPhone he simply attached a car mount for the iPhone to the swing arm and called it good. Hit up the link below for more pictures; even if you don’t have an IKEA nearby, swing arm lamps are cheap and easy to acquire. Forsa Camera Stand [IKEAHackers] How to Make Your Laptop Choose a Wired Connection Instead of Wireless HTG Explains: What Is Two-Factor Authentication and Should I Be Using It? HTG Explains: What Is Windows RT and What Does It Mean To Me?

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• Bar Table Modded Into Standing Desk

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  This polished looking standing desk combines a stand alone bar-height counter with extra storage, cable management, and monitor riser. The end result looks like a $$$$ standing desk at a fraction of the price. Courtesy of IKEA hacker Marc Marton, the build combines the Billsta Bar Table, the Ekby Alex Shelf, and Besta legs to raise the shelf up off the desk and create a keyboard storage area. For more information about the build hit up the link below. Billsta Bar Table into Standing Work Station [IKEAHacker] 8 Deadly Commands You Should Never Run on Linux 14 Special Google Searches That Show Instant Answers How To Create a Customized Windows 7 Installation Disc With Integrated Updates

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• Obsolete Computer Parts as Art [DIY]

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  If you’re like most geeks, you’ve got a box of aging computer equipment you just haven’t got around to hauling to your city’s haz-mat drop off site. This simple tutorial turns cast off circuit boards into wall art. While the author of the tutorial opted to use motherboards, you could easily use smaller frames/mats and use old expansion boards too. The process involves inexpensive IKEA frames with mats, popping the I/O ports off the boards to make them thinner, and drilling small mount holes in the backer board to mount the boards in place. Hit up the link below for more details. Motherboard Art [via IKEAHackers] How to Use an Xbox 360 Controller On Your Windows PC Download the Official How-To Geek Trivia App for Windows 8 How to Banish Duplicate Photos with VisiPic

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• Stand-Up Desk 2012 Update

  - by BuckWoody

  One of the more popular topics here on my technical blog doesn't have to do with technology, per-se - it's about the choice I made to go to a stand-up desk work environment. If you're interested in the history of those, check here: Stand-Up Desk Part One Stand-Up Desk Part Two I have made some changes and I was asked to post those here.Yes, I'm still standing - I think the experiment has worked well, so I'm continuing to work this way. I've become so used to it that I notice when I sit for a long time. If I'm flying, or driving a long way, or have long meetings, I take breaks to stand up and move around. That being said, I don't stand as much as I did. I started out by standing the entire day - which did not end well. As you can read in my second post, I found that sitting down for a few minutes each hour worked out much better. And over time I would say that I now stand about 70-80% of the day, depending on the day. Some days I don't even notice I'm standing, so I don't sit as often. Other days I find that I really tire quickly - so I sit more often. But in both cases, I stand more than I sit. In the first post you can read about how I used a simple coffee-table from Ikea to elevate my desktop to the right height. I then adjusted the height where I stand by using a small plastic square and some carpet. Over time I found this did not work as well as I'd like. The primary reason is that the front of these are at the same depth - so my knees would hit the desk or table when I sat down. Also, the desk was at a certain height, and I had to adjust, rather than the other way around.  Also, I like a lot of surface area on top of a desk - almost more of a table. Routing cables and wiring was a pain, and of course moving it was out of the question.   So I've changed what I use. I found a perfect solution for what I was looking for - industrial wire shelving: I bought one, built only half of it (for the right height I wanted) and arranged the shelves the way I wanted. I then got a 5'x4' piece of wood from Lowes, and mounted it to where the top was balanced, but had an over-hang  I could get my knees under easily.My wife sewed a piece of fake-leather for the top. This arrangement provides the following benefits: Very strong Rolls easily, wheels can lock to prevent rolling Long, wide shelves Wire-frame allows me to route any kind of wiring and other things all over the desk I plugged in my UPS and ran it's longer power-cable to the wall outlet. I then ran the router's LAN connection along that wire, and covered both with a large insulation sleeve. I then plugged in everything to the UPS, and routed all the wiring. I can now roll the desk almost anywhere in the room so that I can record, look out the window, get closer to or farther away from the door and more. I put a few boxes on the shelves as "drawers" and tidied that part up. Even my printer fits on a shelf. Laser-dog not included - some assembly required In the second post you can read about the bar-stool I purchased from Target for the desk. I cheaped-out on this one, and it proved to be a bad choice. Because I had to raise it so high, and was constantly sitting on it and then standing up, the gas-cylinder in it just gave out. So it became a very short stool that I ended up getting rid of. In the end, this one from Ikea proved to be a better choice: And so this arrangement is working out perfectly. I'm finding myself VERY productive this way. I hope these posts help you if you decide to try working at a stand-up desk. Although I was skeptical at first, I've found it to be a very healthy, easy way to code, design and especially present over a web-cam. It's natural to stand to speak when you're presenting, and it feels more energetic than sitting down to talk to others.

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• Repurpose a Wire Basket as a Game Controller Organizer

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  If you’re looking for an easy way to organize your console controllers, this simple repurposing hack turns an IKEA wire basket intended for managing cable clutter into a game controller stand. You won’t need a Dremel tool to install this hack; all you need to do to follow in the foot steps of IKEAHackers reader Leslie is to install a SIGNUM cable basket (or similar cable organizer) upside down so loom curves up instead of down. Instant wire cradle for your controllers (or possibly an open air charging station for your small electronics). Check out the link below for more details. Game Controller Management System [IKEAHackers] How To Make a Youtube Video Into an Animated GIFHTG Explains: What Are Character Encodings and How Do They Differ?How To Make Disposable Sleeves for Your In-Ear Monitors

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• Preventing RSI (Repetitive Strain Injuries)

  - by nightcracker

  I am 16 years old and I love to program and playing the piano. It's not uncommon that I'm bashing away on my mouse and keyboard all day long. I do not feel any pains doing so. Yet I am still worried, because I often hear from people that they can never type for longer then 10 minutes again without getting severe pains. Given my two hobbies, programming and playing the piano that worries me a lot. My current situation is this: G15 keyboard and G5 mouse A chair that looks like this (the back of the chair is surprisingly supportive): http://www.ikea.com/nl/nl/images/products/torbjorn-bureaustoel__0084333_PE210956_S4.JPG In my "normal sitting position" the table is around the height of my bellybutton. A LG Flatron L194wt screen (too small IMO, getting a new one soon) Should I be worrying about RSI/similar health issues? If yes, what can/should I do about it?

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• Convert Your Workspace to Standing Height for $22

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  If you’d love to try out a standing workstation but you don’t want to shell out $$$ to buy or build one, this simple $22 project will raise up your workspace surface on the cheap. All you need is a LACK side table, some shelf brackets, a shelf, and some screws. The side table goes on your desk, the monitors go on the side table, and the keyboard and mouse go on the shelf (mounted to the brackets that have been positioned at the perfect height for your forearms). Hit up the link below for more pictures, tips, and a downloadable build guide. IKEA Standing Desk for $22 [via Unpluggd] How to Banish Duplicate Photos with VisiPic How to Make Your Laptop Choose a Wired Connection Instead of Wireless HTG Explains: What Is Two-Factor Authentication and Should I Be Using It?

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• How to Avoid Your Next 12-Month Science Project

  - by constant

  While most customers immediately understand how the magic of Oracle's Hybrid Columnar Compression, intelligent storage servers and flash memory make Exadata uniquely powerful against home-grown database systems, some people think that Exalogic is nothing more than a bunch of x86 servers, a storage appliance and an InfiniBand (IB) network, built into a single rack. After all, isn't this exactly what the High Performance Computing (HPC) world has been doing for decades? On the surface, this may be true. And some people tried exactly that: They tried to put together their own version of Exalogic, but then they discover there's a lot more to building a system than buying hardware and assembling it together. IT is not Ikea. Why is that so? Could it be there's more going on behind the scenes than merely putting together a bunch of servers, a storage array and an InfiniBand network into a rack? Let's explore some of the special sauce that makes Exalogic unique and un-copyable, so you can save yourself from your next 6- to 12-month science project that distracts you from doing real work that adds value to your company. Engineering Systems is Hard Work! The backbone of Exalogic is its InfiniBand network: 4 times better bandwidth than even 10 Gigabit Ethernet, and only about a tenth of its latency. What a potential for increased scalability and throughput across the middleware and database layers! But InfiniBand is a beast that needs to be tamed: It is true that Exalogic uses a standard, open-source Open Fabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) InfiniBand driver stack. Unfortunately, this software has been developed by the HPC community with fastest speed in mind (which is good) but, despite the name, not many other enterprise-class requirements are included (which is less good). Here are some of the improvements that Oracle's InfiniBand development team had to add to the OFED stack to make it enterprise-ready, simply because typical HPC users didn't have the need to implement them: More than 100 bug fixes in the pieces that were not related to the Message Passing Interface Protocol (MPI), which is the protocol that HPC users use most of the time, but which is less useful in the enterprise. Performance optimizations and tuning across the whole IB stack: From Switches, Host Channel Adapters (HCAs) and drivers to low-level protocols, middleware and applications. Yes, even the standard HPC IB stack could be improved in terms of performance. Ethernet over IB (EoIB): Exalogic uses InfiniBand internally to reach high performance, but it needs to play nicely with datacenters around it. That's why Oracle added Ethernet over InfiniBand technology to it that allows for creating many virtual 10GBE adapters inside Exalogic's nodes that are aggregated and connected to Exalogic's IB gateway switches. While this is an open standard, it's up to the vendor to implement it. In this case, Oracle integrated the EoIB stack with Oracle's own IB to 10GBE gateway switches, and made it fully virtualized from the beginning. This means that Exalogic customers can completely rewire their server infrastructure inside the rack without having to physically pull or plug a single cable - a must-have for every cloud deployment. Anybody who wants to match this level of integration would need to add an InfiniBand switch development team to their project. Or just buy Oracle's gateway switches, which are conveniently shipped with a whole server infrastructure attached! IPv6 support for InfiniBand's Sockets Direct Protocol (SDP), Reliable Datagram Sockets (RDS), TCP/IP over IB (IPoIB) and EoIB protocols. Because no IPv6 = not very enterprise-class. HA capability for SDP. High Availability is not a big requirement for HPC, but for enterprise-class application servers it is. Every node in Exalogic's InfiniBand network is connected twice for redundancy. If any cable or port or HCA fails, there's always a replacement link ready to take over. This requires extra magic at the protocol level to work. So in addition to Weblogic's failover capabilities, Oracle implemented IB automatic path migration at the SDP level to avoid unnecessary failover operations at the middleware level. Security, for example spoof-protection. Another feature that is less important for traditional users of InfiniBand, but very important for enterprise customers. InfiniBand Partitioning and Quality-of-Service (QoS): One of the first questions we get from customers about Exalogic is: “How can we implement multi-tenancy?” The answer is to partition your IB network, which effectively creates many networks that work independently and that are protected at the lowest networking layer possible. In addition to that, QoS allows administrators to prioritize traffic flow in multi-tenancy environments so they can keep their service levels where it matters most. Resilient IB Fabric Management: InfiniBand is a self-managing network, so a lot of the magic lies in coming up with the right topology and in teaching the subnet manager how to properly discover and manage the network. Oracle's Infiniband switches come with pre-integrated, highly available fabric management with seamless integration into Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center. In short: Oracle elevated the OFED InfiniBand stack into an enterprise-class networking infrastructure. Many years and multiple teams of manpower went into the above improvements - this is something you can only get from Oracle, because no other InfiniBand vendor can give you these features across the whole stack! Exabus: Because it's not About the Size of Your Network, it's How You Use it! So let's assume that you somehow were able to get your hands on an enterprise-class IB driver stack. Or maybe you don't care and are just happy with the standard OFED one? Anyway, the next step is to actually leverage that InfiniBand performance. Here are the choices: Use traditional TCP/IP on top of the InfiniBand stack, Develop your own integration between your middleware and the lower-level (but faster) InfiniBand protocols. While more bandwidth is always a good thing, it's actually the low latency that enables superior performance for your applications when running on any networking infrastructure: The lower the latency, the faster the response travels through the network and the more transactions you can close per second. The reason why InfiniBand is such a low latency technology is that it gets rid of most if not all of your traditional networking protocol stack: Data is literally beamed from one region of RAM in one server into another region of RAM in another server with no kernel/drivers/UDP/TCP or other networking stack overhead involved! Which makes option 1 a no-go: Adding TCP/IP on top of InfiniBand is like adding training wheels to your racing bike. It may be ok in the beginning and for development, but it's not quite the performance IB was meant to deliver. Which only leaves option 2: Integrating your middleware with fast, low-level InfiniBand protocols. And this is what Exalogic's "Exabus" technology is all about. Here are a few Exabus features that help applications leverage the performance of InfiniBand in Exalogic: RDMA and SDP integration at the JDBC driver level (SDP), for Oracle Weblogic (SDP), Oracle Coherence (RDMA), Oracle Tuxedo (RDMA) and the new Oracle Traffic Director (RDMA) on Exalogic. Using these protocols, middleware can communicate a lot faster with each other and the Oracle database than by using standard networking protocols, Seamless Integration of Ethernet over InfiniBand from Exalogic's Gateway switches into the OS, Oracle Weblogic optimizations for handling massive amounts of parallel transactions. Because if you have an 8-lane Autobahn, you also need to improve your ramps so you can feed it with many cars in parallel. Integration of Weblogic with Oracle Exadata for faster performance, optimized session management and failover. As you see, “Exabus” is Oracle's word for describing all the InfiniBand enhancements Oracle put into Exalogic: OFED stack enhancements, protocols for faster IB access, and InfiniBand support and optimizations at the virtualization and middleware level. All working together to deliver the full potential of InfiniBand performance. Who else has 100% control over their middleware so they can develop their own low-level protocol integration with InfiniBand? Even if you take an open source approach, you're looking at years of development work to create, test and support a whole new networking technology in your middleware! The Extras: Less Hassle, More Productivity, Faster Time to Market And then there are the other advantages of Engineered Systems that are true for Exalogic the same as they are for every other Engineered System: One simple purchasing process: No headaches due to endless RFPs and no “Will X work with Y?” uncertainties. Everything has been engineered together: All kinds of bugs and problems have been already fixed at the design level that would have only manifested themselves after you have built the system from scratch. Everything is built, tested and integrated at the factory level . Less integration pain for you, faster time to market. Every Exalogic machine world-wide is identical to Oracle's own machines in the lab: Instant replication of any problems you may encounter, faster time to resolution. Simplified patching, management and operations. One throat to choke: Imagine finger-pointing hell for systems that have been put together using several different vendors. Oracle's Engineered Systems have a single phone number that customers can call to get their problems solved. For more business-centric values, read The Business Value of Engineered Systems. Conclusion: Buy Exalogic, or get ready for a 6-12 Month Science Project And here's the reason why it's not easy to "build your own Exalogic": There's a lot of work required to make such a system fly. In fact, anybody who is starting to "just put together a bunch of servers and an InfiniBand network" is really looking at a 6-12 month science project. And the outcome is likely to not be very enterprise-class. And it won't have Exalogic's performance either. Because building an Engineered System is literally rocket science: It takes a lot of time, effort, resources and many iterations of design/test/analyze/fix to build such a system. That's why InfiniBand has been reserved for HPC scientists for such a long time. And only Oracle can bring the power of InfiniBand in an enterprise-class, ready-to use, pre-integrated version to customers, without the develop/integrate/support pain. For more details, check the new Exalogic overview white paper which was updated only recently. P.S.: Thanks to my colleagues Ola, Paul, Don and Andy for helping me put together this article! var flattr_uid = '26528'; var flattr_tle = 'How to Avoid Your Next 12-Month Science Project'; var flattr_dsc = 'While most customers immediately understand how the magic of Oracle's Hybrid Columnar Compression, intelligent storage servers and flash memory make Exadata uniquely powerful against home-grown database systems, some people think that Exalogic is nothing more than a bunch of x86 servers, a storage appliance and an InfiniBand (IB) network, built into a single rack.After all, isn't this exactly what the High Performance Computing (HPC) world has been doing for decades?On the surface, this may be true. And some people tried exactly that: They tried to put together their own version of Exalogic, but then they discover there's a lot more to building a system than buying hardware and assembling it together. IT is not Ikea.Why is that so? Could it be there's more going on behind the scenes than merely putting together a bunch of servers, a storage array and an InfiniBand network into a rack? Let's explore some of the special sauce that makes Exalogic unique and un-copyable, so you can save yourself from your next 6- to 12-month science project that distracts you from doing real work that adds value to your company.'; var flattr_tag = 'Engineered Systems,Engineered Systems,Infiniband,Integration,latency,Oracle,performance'; var flattr_cat = 'text'; var flattr_url = 'http://constantin.glez.de/blog/2012/04/how-avoid-your-next-12-month-science-project'; var flattr_lng = 'en_GB'

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• Derniers témoignages de partenaires EMEA (Octobre)

  - by swalker

  Gagnez en notoriété grâce aux témoignages de partenaires Faites la promotion de votre expertise des produits et des secteurs d'activité d'Oracle par le biais des témoignages de partenaires publiés sur Oracle.com et profitez du trafic dont bénéficie notre portail. Pour participer, il vous suffit de remplir un formulaire et de nous informer d'un projet mis en œuvre avec succès. Si votre témoignage est sélectionné, nous vous contacterons en vue d'un entretien. Cliquez ici pour accéder au formulaire et proposer votre témoignage. Les derniers témoignages de partenaires mis en ligne sur Oracle.com : Telefónica Germany IKEA France Niederelbe Schiffahrtsgesellschaft mbH &Co. KG (Reederei NSB) Mobile TeleSystems BT Luzerner Kantonsspital  Luzerner Kantonsspital (2) Edifer ??? «????????? ???????????»/Mobile TeleSystems OJSC (MTS)  Astelit LLC Akbank T.A.S. Home Credit Group Kromberg & Schubert MATERNA GmbH Nykredit LH Dienstbekleidungs GmbH BT LHD Gruppe Niederelbe Schiffahrtsgesellschaft mbH &Co. KG (Reederei NSB) (1) Niederelbe Schiffahrtsgesellschaft mbH &Co. KG (Reederei NSB) (2) TCC Italy Champion Europe SpA LH Dienstbekleidungs GmbH McKesson Pour en savoir plus sur les collaborations fructueuses entre nos partenaires et leurs clients, parcourez les nombreux témoignages EMEA issus de tous les secteurs d’activité ici.

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• read/write_attribure on associations

  - by artemave

  read/write_attribute is a great way to enhance default accessors generated by ActiveRecord. Like this for example: def price read_attribute(:price) or "This item is priceless and you are by the way #{User.current.login}" end The same however does not seem to be working with associations. Demonstration: class Product < ActiveRecord::Base has_and_belongs_to_many :stores end Then >> a = Product.first => #<Product id: 1, name: "awesome product", created_at: "2010-05-07 12:11:00", updated_at: "2010-05-07 12:11:00"> >> a.stores => [#<Store id: 1, name: "ikea", created_at: "2010-05-07 12:11:28", updated_at: "2010-05-07 12:11:28">] >> a.read_attribute(:stores) => nil >> So, is there some sort of read/write_association? Or, if not, is there a reason not to have one?

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• Forbes Announcing The World’s Top 20 Billionaires

  - by Suganya

  Forbes company recently conducted a survey to figure out the world’s Billionaires list and has released it listing the top 20 names of the Billionaires. The company says that for the third time in the last three years the world has a new richest man for this year. So it means that Bill Gates was beaten up by someone else in world. Who is the new richest man in the world?   Forbes.Com announced the richest man in world and this time it is not Bill Gates. But it is Carlos Slim Helu who is into Telecom industry. Carlos lives in Mexico and he had the third richest man’s place last year. Having shown a Net worth of $ 53.5 Billion, Carlos has increased $18.5 Billion in a year. Carlos swooped on the privatization of Mexico’s national telephone service during the last decade and now has achieved the world’s first richest man. Following Carlos, in the second position is Bill Gates with the Nett worth of $53 Billion. As Bill Gates requires no great introduction, lets move on to the next place. The third place is occupied by Warren Buffett followed by Mukesh Ambani and Lakshmi Mittal in fourth and fifth places respectively. The top 20 names of world’s richest people, their occupation and the Nett worth that they hold are S.No Name Nett Worth (in $ Billion) Source of Income 1 Carlos Slim Helu 53.5 Telecom 2 Bill Gates 53 Microsoft 3 Warren Buffett 47 Investments 4 Mukesh Ambani 29 Petrochemical, Oil and Gas 5 Lakshmi Mittal 28.7 Steel 6 Lawrence Ellison 28 Oracle 7 Bernard Arnault 27.5 Luxury Goods 8 Eike Batista 27 Mining, Oil 9 Amancio Ortega 25 Fashion, Retail 10 Karl Albrecht 23.5 Supermarkets 11 Ingvar Kamprad and Family 23 IKEA 12 Christy Walton and Family 22.5 Wal-Mart 13 Stefan Persson 22.4 H & M 14 Li Ka-shing 21 Diversified 15 Jim C. Walton 20.7 Wal-Mart 16 Alice Walton 20.6 Wal-Mart 17 Liliane Bettencourt 20 L’Oreal 18 S. Robson Walton 19.8 Wal-Mart 19 Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Alsaud 19.4 Diversified 20 David Thomson and Family 19 Thomson Reuters   Source: Forbes and Image Credit : kevindooley Join us on Facebook to read all our stories right inside your Facebook news feed.

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• Going Inside the Store

  - by David Dorf

  Location was the first "killer-tech" for smartphones, and innovators have found several ways to use it. For retail, apps exist to find nearby stores, provide coupons, and give directions to the front door. But once you enter the store, location-finding ceases to work. That's because your location is usually found by finding GPS satellites in they sky, and the store's roof blocks the signal. But it won't take technology long to solve that problem. The first problem to solve is a lack of indoor maps. Navteq and others provide very accurate maps of the outdoors, enabling navigation for cars and pedestrians. Micello is building a business creating digital maps of indoor locations like malls, convention centers, office buildings. They have over 500 live maps, including maps of IKEA stores. They claim it took them only four hours to create a map of the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto with its 1.4 million square feet and 140 retail stores. And within stores, retailers are producing more accurate plan-o-grams. I'm always impressed watching demos of our space planning from AVT. It uses CAD software to allow you to walk the virtual store and see products on the shelves. The second problem is being able to determine location inside the store so it can be overlayed on the map. There are several goals for this endeavor. Your smartphone might direct you straight to particular products, it might summon a sales associate to your location for immediate assistance, and it might send you coupons based on the aisle you're viewing. Companies like Nearbuy, ZuluTime, and Skyhook are working to master indoor location using a combination of GPS signals, WiFi, and cell tower positioning to calculate a location. (Skyhook calls this WPS, as depicted in the chart.) Today they can usually hit 10 meters accuracy, but that number is improving all the time. When it gets inside 3 meters some the goals mentioned earlier will be in easy reach. I for one can't wait until the time my iPhone leads me directly to the sprinkler heads in Lowes and Home Depot.

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• How do I nicely manage many localhost web site URIs with IIS7

  - by Simeon

  I'm having trouble setting up a clean development environment with all the web sites I'm working on. I'm working on up to 40 different web sites, and at least 5 of them simultaneously. I need them all to be in a site root, for URL management to work with all CMSes. My first attempt was to use increasing port numbers for them, beginning with localhost:1000 and working upwards. Unfortunately, it took a great deal of looking up which port belonged to which web site, and it was very irritating. My second try was mapping the irritating ports to real words using the hosts file. So I ended up with localhost.tele2, localhost.ikea, localhost.volvo etc. Unfortunately, this takes a long time to set up (cleaning and adding to the hosts file, setting web site with highest port number in IIS etc.) and regularly I have to flush the DNS cache in order to get some sites working that I've added/removed from the hosts file. So how do I organize a lot of web sites in IIS7 nicely? Perhaps I've missed a very clever method that you're using.

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• Solutions to cubefarm lighting

  - by Khorkrak

  So with our recent move to the cubefarm out from our developer friendly shared office, we've altered the environment to reproduce our more programming conducive workspace as much as possible. Fortunately, we we're planted into the same aisle as QA. They're quiet and it's made it easier to pair up to review a problem. They've already unscrewed some of the fluorescent bulbs. We unscrewed the rest. Now the facilities coordinator and HR are wondering what to do. They want the office to have an open, bright and elegant feel to it as does the founder - think IKEA. Fortunately he's usually in the NYC office and rarely stops up where we work. There's some natural light from nearby windows and translucent office walls that ring the farm. So the facility coordinator doesn't understand - do you guys want incandescents overhead or... no we just don't want overhead lights. How to solve this while avoiding having a weird looking office space with a dark spot in the middle. Are there any better solutions - no we can't have an office as that's considered a management only perk.

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• What’s Your Tax Strategy? Automate the Tax Transfer Pricing Process!

  - by tobyehatch

  Does your business operate in multiple countries? Well, whether you like it or not, many local and international tax authorities inspect your tax strategy.  Legal, effective tax planning is perceived as a “moral” issue. CEOs are being asked to testify on their process of tax transfer pricing between multinational legal entities.  Marc Seewald, Senior Director of Product Management for EPM Applications specializing in all tax subjects and Product Manager for Oracle Hyperion Tax Provisioning, and Bart Stoehr, Senior Director of Product Strategy for Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management joined me for a discussion/podcast on this interesting subject.  So what exactly is “tax transfer pricing”? Marc defined it this way. “Tax transfer pricing is a profit allocation methodology required to be used by multinational corporations. Specifically, the ultimate goal of the transfer pricing is to ensure that the global multinational pays their fair share of income tax in each of their local markets. Specifically, it prevents companies from unfairly moving profit from ‘high tax’ countries to ‘low tax’ countries.” According to Marc, in today’s global economy, profitability can be significantly impacted by goods and services exchanged between the related divisions within a single multinational company.  To ensure that these cost allocations are done fairly, there are rules that govern the process. These rules ensure that intercompany allocations fairly represent the actual nature of the businesses activity- as if two divisions were unrelated - and provide a clear audit trail of how the costs have been allocated to prove that allocations fall within reasonable ranges.  What are the repercussions of improper tax transfer pricing? How important is it? Tax transfer pricing allocations can materially impact the amount of overall corporate income taxes paid by a company worldwide, in some cases by hundreds of millions of dollars!  Since so much tax revenue is at stake, revenue agencies like the IRS, and international regulatory bodies like the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) are pushing to reform and clarify reporting for tax transfer pricing. Most recently the OECD announced an “Action Plan for Base Erosion and Profit Shifting”. As Marc explained, the times are changing and companies need to be responsive to this issue. “It feels like every other week there is another company being accused of avoiding taxes,” said Marc. Most recently, Caterpillar was accused of avoiding billions of dollars in taxes. In the last couple of years, Apple, GE, Ikea, and Starbucks, have all been accused of tax avoidance. It’s imperative that companies like these have a clear and auditable tax transfer process that enables them to justify tax transfer pricing allocations and avoid steep penalties and bad publicity. Transparency and efficiency are what is needed when it comes to the tax transfer pricing process. Bart explained that tax transfer pricing is driving a deeper inspection of profit recognition specifically focused on the tax element of profit.  However, allocations needed to support tax profitability are nearly identical in process to allocations taking place in other parts of the finance organization. For example, the methods and processes necessary to arrive at tax profitability by legal entity are no different than those used to arrive at fully loaded profitability for a product line. In fact, there is a great opportunity for alignment across these two different functions.So it seems that tax transfer pricing should be reflected in profitability in general. Bart agreed and told us more about some of the critical sub-processes of an overall tax transfer pricing process within the Oracle solution for tax transfer pricing.  “First, there is a ton of data preparation, enrichment and pre-allocation data analysis that is managed in the Oracle Hyperion solution. This serves as the “data staging” to the next, critical sub-processes.  From here, we leverage the Oracle EPM platform’s ability to re-use dimensions and legal entity driver data and financial data with Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management (HPCM).  Within HPCM, we manage the driver data, define the legal entity to legal entity allocation rules (like cost plus), and have the option to test out multiple, simultaneous tax transfer pricing what-if scenarios.  Once processed, a tax expert can evaluate the effectiveness of any one scenario result versus another via a variance analysis configured with HPCM’s pre-packaged reporting capability known as Oracle Hyperion SmartView for Office.”   Further, Bart explained that the ability to visibly demonstrate how a cost or revenue has been allocated is really helpful and auditable.  “HPCM’s Traceability Maps are that visual representation of all allocation flows that have been executed and is the tax transfer analyst’s best friend in maintaining clear documentation for tax transfer pricing audits. Simply click and drill as you inspect the chain of allocation definitions and results. Once final, the post-allocated tax data can be compared to the GL to create invoices and journal entries for posting to your GL system of choice.  Of course, there is a framework for overall governance of the journal entries, allocation percentages, and reporting to include necessary approvals.” Lastly, Marc explained that the key value in using the Oracle Hyperion solution for tax transfer pricing is that it keeps everything in alignment in one single place. Specifically, Oracle Hyperion effectively becomes the single book of record for the GAAP, management, and the tax set of books. There are many benefits to having one source of the truth. These include EFFICIENCY, CONTROLS and TRANSPARENCY.So, what’s your tax strategy? Why not automate the tax transfer pricing process!To listen to the entire podcast, click here.To learn more about Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management (HPCM), click here.

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• Using SQL Execution Plans to discover the Swedish alphabet

  - by Rob Farley

  SQL Server is quite remarkable in a bunch of ways. In this post, I’m using the way that the Query Optimizer handles LIKE to keep it SARGable, the Execution Plans that result, Collations, and PowerShell to come up with the Swedish alphabet. SARGability is the ability to seek for items in an index according to a particular set of criteria. If you don’t have SARGability in play, you need to scan the whole index (or table if you don’t have an index). For example, I can find myself in the phonebook easily, because it’s sorted by LastName and I can find Farley in there by moving to the Fs, and so on. I can’t find everyone in my suburb easily, because the phonebook isn’t sorted that way. I can’t even find people who have six letters in their last name, because also the book is sorted by LastName, it’s not sorted by LEN(LastName). This is all stuff I’ve looked at before, including in the talk I gave at SQLBits in October 2010. If I try to find everyone who’s names start with F, I can do that using a query a bit like: SELECT LastName FROM dbo.PhoneBook WHERE LEFT(LastName,1) = 'F'; Unfortunately, the Query Optimizer doesn’t realise that all the entries that satisfy LEFT(LastName,1) = 'F' will be together, and it has to scan the whole table to find them. But if I write: SELECT LastName FROM dbo.PhoneBook WHERE LastName LIKE 'F%'; then SQL is smart enough to understand this, and performs an Index Seek instead. To see why, I look further into the plan, in particular, the properties of the Index Seek operator. The ToolTip shows me what I’m after: You’ll see that it does a Seek to find any entries that are at least F, but not yet G. There’s an extra Predicate in there (a Residual Predicate if you like), which checks that each LastName is really LIKE F% – I suppose it doesn’t consider that the Seek Predicate is quite enough – but most of the benefit is seen by its working out the Seek Predicate, filtering to just the “at least F but not yet G” section of the data. This got me curious though, particularly about where the G comes from, and whether I could leverage it to create the Swedish alphabet. I know that in the Swedish language, there are three extra letters that appear at the end of the alphabet. One of them is ä that appears in the word Västerås. It turns out that Västerås is quite hard to find in an index when you’re looking it up in a Swedish map. I talked about this briefly in my five-minute talk on Collation from SQLPASS (the one which was slightly less than serious). So by looking at the plan, I can work out what the next letter is in the alphabet of the collation used by the column. In other words, if my alphabet were Swedish, I’d be able to tell what the next letter after F is – just in case it’s not G. It turns out it is… Yes, the Swedish letter after F is G. But I worked this out by using a copy of my PhoneBook table that used the Finnish_Swedish_CI_AI collation. I couldn’t find how the Query Optimizer calculates the G, and my friend Paul White (@SQL_Kiwi) tells me that it’s frustratingly internal to the QO. He’s particularly smart, even if he is from New Zealand. To investigate further, I decided to do some PowerShell, leveraging the Get-SqlPlan function that I blogged about recently (make sure you also have the SqlServerCmdletSnapin100 snap-in added). I started by indicating that I was going to use Finnish_Swedish_CI_AI as my collation of choice, and that I’d start whichever letter cam straight after the number 9. I figure that this is a cheat’s way of guessing the first letter of the alphabet (but it doesn’t actually work in Unicode – luckily I’m using varchar not nvarchar. Actually, there are a few aspects of this code that only work using ASCII, so apologies if you were wanting to apply it to Greek, Japanese, etc). I also initialised my $alphabet variable. $collation = 'Finnish_Swedish_CI_AI'; $firstletter = '9'; $alphabet = ''; Now I created the table for my test. A single field would do, and putting a Clustered Index on it would suffice for the Seeks. Invoke-Sqlcmd -server . -data tempdb -query "create table dbo.collation_test (col varchar(10) collate $collation primary key);" Now I get into the looping. $c = $firstletter; $stillgoing = $true; while ($stillgoing) { I construct the query I want, seeking for entries which start with whatever $c has reached, and get the plan for it: $query = "select col from dbo.collation_test where col like '$($c)%';"; [xml] $pl = get-sqlplan $query "." "tempdb"; At this point, my $pl variable is a scary piece of XML, representing the execution plan. A bit of hunting through it showed me that the EndRange element contained what I was after, and that if it contained NULL, then I was done. $stillgoing = ($pl.ShowPlanXML.BatchSequence.Batch.Statements.StmtSimple.QueryPlan.RelOp.IndexScan.SeekPredicates.SeekPredicateNew.SeekKeys.EndRange -ne $null); Now I could grab the value out of it (which came with apostrophes that needed stripping), and append that to my $alphabet variable.   if ($stillgoing)   {  $c=$pl.ShowPlanXML.BatchSequence.Batch.Statements.StmtSimple.QueryPlan.RelOp.IndexScan.SeekPredicates.SeekPredicateNew.SeekKeys.EndRange.RangeExpressions.ScalarOperator.ScalarString.Replace("'","");     $alphabet += $c;   } Finally, finishing the loop, dropping the table, and showing my alphabet! } Invoke-Sqlcmd -server . -data tempdb -query "drop table dbo.collation_test;"; $alphabet; When I run all this, I see that the Swedish alphabet is ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVXYZÅÄÖ, which matches what I see at Wikipedia. Interesting to see that the letters on the end are still there, even with Case Insensitivity. Turns out they’re not just “letters with accents”, they’re letters in their own right. I’m sure you gave up reading long ago, and really aren’t that fazed about the idea of doing this using PowerShell. I chose PowerShell because I’d already come up with an easy way of grabbing the estimated plan for a query, and PowerShell does allow for easy navigation of XML. I find the most interesting aspect of this as the fact that the Query Optimizer uses the next letter of the alphabet to maintain the SARGability of LIKE. I’m hoping they do something similar for a whole bunch of operations. Oh, and the fact that you know how to find stuff in the IKEA catalogue. Footnote: If you are interested in whether this works in other languages, you might want to consider the following screenshot, which shows that in principle, it should work with Japanese. It might be a bit harder to run this in PowerShell though, as I’m not sure how it translates. In Hiragana, the Japanese alphabet starts ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ...

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• And What's Your Brand Worth? ...anything?

  - by [email protected]

  100 Best Global Brands from Business Week Story: The Great Trust Offensive Slide Show: Top Brands 2009 Methodology: Picking the Winners The recession has presented marketing executives around the world with the toughest test of their careers. Some brands have prospered amid the hard times--or at least held their own. Others have slipped a surprising number of places on our ninth annual ranking, compiled by consultancy Interbrand. But for seven brands, impressive performances saw them race up the charts to take their place on this year's list. Here are the numbers behind the rankings Rank 2009 Rank 2008 Employer 2009 Brand value($millions) 2008 Brand value($millions) Percent change(%) Country of Ownership 1 1 Coca-Cola  68,734  66,667  3 U.S. 2 2 IBM  60,211  59,031  2 U.S. 3 3 Microsoft  56,647  59,007  -4 U.S. 4 4 GE  47,777  53,086  -10 U.S. 5 5 Nokia  34,864  35,942  -3 Finland 6 8 McDonald's  32,275  31,049  4 U.S. 7 10 Google  31,980  25,590  25 U.S. 8 6 Toyota  31,330  34,050  -8 Japan 9 7 Intel  30,636  31,261  -2 U.S. 10 9 Disney  28,447  29,251  -3 U.S. 11 12 Hewlett-Packard  24,096  23,509  2 U.S. 12 11 Mercedes-Benz  23,867  25,577  -7 Germany 13 14 Gillette  22,841  22,069  4 U.S. 14 17 Cisco  22,030  21,306  3 U.S. 15 13 BMW  21,671  23,298  -7 Germany 16 16 Louis Vuitton  21,120  21,602  -2 France 17 18 Marlboro  19,010  21,300  -11 U.S. 18 20 Honda  17,803  19,079  -7 Japan 19 21 Samsung  17,518  17,689  -1 S. Korea 20 24 Apple  15,443  13,724  12 U.S. 21 22 H&M  15,375  13,840  11 Sweden 22 15 American Express  14,971  21,940  -32 U.S. 23 26 Pepsi  13,706  13,249  3 U.S. 24 23 Oracle  13,699  13,831  -1 U.S. 25 28 Nescafe  13,317  13,055  2 Switzerland 26 29 Nike  13,179  12,672  4 U.S. 27 31 SAP  12,106  12,228  -1 Germany 28 35 Ikea  12,004  10,913  10 Sweden 29 25 Sony  11,953  13,583  -12 Japan 30 33 Budweiser  11,833  11,438  3 Belgium 31 30 UPS  11,594  12,621  -8 U.S. 32 27 HSBC  10,510  13,143  -20 Britain 33 36 Canon  10,441  10,876  -4 Japan 34 39 Kellogg's  10,428  9,710  7 U.S. 35 32 Dell  10,291  11,695  -12 U.S. 36 19 Citi  10,254  20,174  -49 U.S. 37 37 JPMorgan  9,550  10,773  -11 U.S. 38 38 Goldman Sachs  9,248  10,331  -10 U.S. 39 40 Nintendo  9,210  8,772  5 Japan 40 44 Thomson Reuters  8,434  8,313  1 Canada 41 45 Gucci  8,182  8,254  -1 Italy 42 43 Philips  8,121  8,325  -2 Netherlands 43 58 Amazon  7,858  6,434  22 U.S. 44 51 L'Oreal  7,748  7,508  3 France 45 47 Accenture  7,710  7,948  -3 U.S. 46 46 eBay  7,350  7,991  -8 U.S. 47 48 Siemens  7,308  7,943  -8 Germany 48 56 Heinz  7,244  6,646  9 U.S. 49 49 Ford  7,005  7,896  -11 U.S. 50 62 Zara  6,789  5,955  14 Spain   Valuations do not represent a guarantee of future performance of the brands or companies. Data: Interbrand, BusinessWeek

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