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• Five things SSIS should drop

  - by jamiet

  There’s a current SQL Server meme going round entitled Five things SQL Server should drop and, whilst no-one tagged me to write anything, I couldn’t resist doing the same for SQL Server Integration Services. So, without further ado, here are five things that I think should be dropped from SSIS.Data source connectionsSeriously, does anyone use these? I know why they’re there. Someone sat in a meeting back in the early part of the last decade and said “Ooo, Reporting Services and Analysis Services have these things called Data Sources. If we used them in Integration Services then we’d have a really cool integration story.” Errr….no.Web Service TaskDitto. If you want to do anything useful against anything but the simplest of SOAP web services steer well clear of this peculiar SSIS additionActiveX Script TaskAnother task that I suspect has never seen the light of day in a SSIS package. It was billed as a way of running upgraded DTS2000 ActiveX scripts in SSIS – sounds good except for one thing. Anytime one of those scripts would try to talk to the DTS object model (which they all do – otherwise what’s the point) then they will error out. This one has always been a real head scratcher.Slow Changing Dimension wizardI suspect I may get some push back on this one but I’m mentioning it anyway. Some people like the SCD wizard; I am not one of those people! Everything that the SCD component does can easily be reproduced using other components and from a performance point of view its much more beneficial to use those alternatives.Multifile Connection ManagerImagining buying a house that came with a set of keys that didn’t open any of the doors. Sounds ridiculous right? How about a SSIS Connection Manager that doesn’t get used by any of the tasks or components. Ah, that’ll be the Multifile Connection Manager then!Comments are of course welcome. Diatribes are assumed :)@Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Automated Penetration Testing Toolkit Released

  Fuzz testing tools in the spotlight Penetration test - Security - Consultants - Programming - Software Testing

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• Why do programmers write applications and then make them free?

  - by Ken

  As an entrepreneur/programmer who makes a good living from writing and selling software, I'm dumbfounded as to why developers write applications and then put them up on the Internet for free. You've found yourself in one of the most lucrative fields in the world. A business with 99% profit margin, where you have no physical product but can name your price; a business where you can ship a buggy product and the customer will still buy it. Occasionally some of our software will get a free competitor, and I think, this guy is crazy. He could be making a good living off of this but instead chose to make it free. Do you not like giant piles of money? Are you not confident that people would pay for it? Are you afraid of having to support it? It's bad for the business of programming because now customers expect to be able to find a free solution to every problem. (I see tweets like "is there any good FREE software for XYZ? or do I need to pay $20 for that".) It's also bad for customers because the free solutions eventually break (because of a new OS or what have you) and since it's free, the developer has no reason to fix it. Customers end up with free but stale software that no longer works and never gets updated. Customer cries. Developer still working day job cries in their cubical. What gives? PS: I'm not looking to start an open-source/software should be free kind of debate. I'm talking about when developers make a closed source application and make it free.

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• Pre-built Oracle VirtualBox Images

  - by james.bayer

  I’m thrilled to see that Justin Kestelyn has a post that pre-built Oracle VirtualBox images are now available on OTN.  There are VMs for various Oracle software stacks including one for Database, one for Java with Glassfish, and one for SOA and BPM products that includes WebLogic Server. This is just one example of the synergy of a combined Oracle and Sun delivering improvements for customers.  These VMs make it even more straight-forward to get started with Oracle software in a development environment without having to worry about initial software installation and configuration. I’ve been a bit quiet lately on the blogging front, but I’m currently working on another area leveraging the best of Oracle and Sun.  Oracle is uniquely positioned to deliver engineered systems that optimize the entire stack of software and hardware.  You’ve probably seen the announcements about Exalogic and I’m excited about the potential to deliver major advancements for middleware.  More to come…

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• How can QA prevent defects?

  - by user970696

  Also according to Software Testing By Srinisvasan Desikan, Gopalaswamy Ramesh or ISTQB text books. Quality assurance is e.g. reviewing products, inspections, walkthroughs to see if all standards are being followed. This is preventive activity. I cannot see how this can be preventive? For the references: defect prevention (Quality Assurance) Software Testing By Srinisvasan Desikan, Gopalaswamy Ramesh Quality Assurance (QA) tries to go one step further. Instead of concentrating on post- facto defect detection and correction, it focusses on the prevention of defects from the very start. Managing Global Software Projects - Page 110 QA deals with prevention of defects in the product being developed. Software Testing and Quality Assurance

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• List of drivers for Samsung NP300E5Z-S08IN

  - by deostroll

  I am looking for a list of drivers for my samsung model mentioned in the title. For specs please visit the website. The laptop came with a version of free-dos installed. I overwrote that one with windows 7 entirely. The laptop also had shipped with it a software cd which had some driver software. Below are the list of software; I want to know the list of equivalent software I can get for ubuntu from the repo. Would want the list for Ubuntu 12.04 Chipset driver Intel ME Interface Driver Intel Rapid Storate Technology Graphics Driver NVidia graphics driver sound driver Lan driver wireless lan driver bluetooth driver touchpad driver Ps: don't forget to check the website for the specs

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• The platform-independent code with Mono: Client-server application sample

  This article shows how we can develop the platform-independent software with Mono usage

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• Update Error: Require Installation Of Untrusted Packages

  - by One Zero

  I have googled and found out Updates don't install because of "untrusted packages". It didn't fixed the error. So, how do I fix my GUI update? Updated sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade < working The following packages will be upgraded: ambiance-colors radiance-colors 2 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 5,029 kB of archives. After this operation, 7,614 kB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y WARNING: The following packages cannot be authenticated! ambiance-colors radiance-colors Install these packages without verification [y/N]? Working but when I update from GUI or try to install software from Ubuntu Software Center I got same error as shown in above picture. For every software I have to install it from command line because I got same error when install software from Ubuntu Software Center.

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• Opportunities in Development in our Swedish office

  - by anca.rosu

  Hi everyone, my name is Henrik and I joined the JRockit group in 2004. Before that my background was Microsoft, as both a Test Competence lead and as a Program Manager. As an Engineering Manager at Oracle I lead a team of 11 developers. I focus on people management and the daily operations of the department with a heavy focus on interaction and dependencies between the groups and departments here at the Stockholm development site. I also make sure my team deliver on our commitments. I would like to give you a brief summary of the Oracle JRockit team: -The development group in Stockholm delivers several products for the Oracle Fusion Middleware stack. Our main products are JRockitVE which allows you to run a Java Virtual Machine without an operating system, the JRockit Java Virtual Machine which is the default jvm for all Oracle middleware products, and the JRockit MissionControl, a set of tools that allows developers to monitor their applications at runtime and perform advanced latency analysis as well as in-production memory leak detection etc. -The office has several departments focusing on different aspects of the product development process, not only to build features and test them but everything from building the infrastructure needed to automatically build and test the products to sustaining engineering that tracks down bugs in customer systems and provide them with patches. Some inspirational lines around what the Oracle JRockit group can offer you in terms of progress, development and learning: - It is a unique chance to get insight and experience building enterprise class software for one of the worlds largest software companies. Here there are almost unlimited possibilities for the right candidate to learn about silicon features and how to implement support for this in software, and to compile optimizations. The position will also give insight into the processes needed to produce software at this level in the industry. If you have any questions related to this article feel free to contact  [email protected].  You can find our job opportunities via http://campus.oracle.com. Technorati Tags: Development,Sweden,Jrockit,Java,Virtual Machine,Oracle Fusion Middleware,software

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• The value of money

  - by ambreesh

  A dictionary definition of money is "any circulating medium of exchange, including coins, paper money, anddemand deposits". If you ask an economist for a definition of money, you will be introduced to terms like M1, M2, M3, all of which denote tangible assets - currency, and anything that is liquid enough to be used as currency; checks, stamps and now mobile minutes being examples. The macroeconomic theory of money is fascinating - the effect of money supply on exchange rates and interest rates, the concept of the "money multiplier" (if I deposit $10 into a bank, the bank will likely loan $8 of it to someone else, who will then give it to someone else in exchange for goods and services, who will then likely deposit it again, which will result in the bank loaning it again and so on - making that $10 of money supply worth a lot more ($10+$8+$x+...)).  But all this depends on money supply - in other words, money that is printed by the mint. The Treasury Department spends a lot of time figuring out how much money to print, there is lot being written on QE2 now-a-days, which is intended to increase the money supply. Money is used to purchase goods and services, and yes it is saved too but that is so one can purchase goods and services later. Completely unrelated, there is a sea change occurring in the web world, dominated by, I believe, Facebook. With 500M active users and growing, FB has the ability to introduce a "money supply" which is completely unrelated to today's "money". Using today's money, a FB user can buy a certain number of FB$s, and then use the FB$s within FB to purchase goods and services - with the money multiplier kicking in. I remember talking with a colleague about this a few years ago, the true way to monetize the web is to introduce an alternative system to the existing, and FB has the ability to do just that. There is enough momentum, enough mass for FB to start to monetize its user base. And completely screw up the economists at the Treasury, not to mention disintermediating the banks completely. The only other ubiquitous asset is mobile minutes. People exchanging mobile minutes for tangible goods and services happens today, the big difference however is the demographic. While Safaricom offers this ability in Kenya today, FB has the 15-40 year middle class user as their user. And the next generation is growing up with FB as a standard channel for communicating with their peers. Virtual flowers when going in for the kill? If your target is an avid FB user, why not? It certainly is a lot more green - no pun intended!

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• Oracle CRM For Public Sector, Commercial Business, Education

  - by michael.seback

  Chongqing Transport Commission Improves Management of Transport Projects The Chongqing Transport Commission is responsible for public passenger, road, and waterway transport in urban and rural areas of Chongqing. The commission administers the region's road and water industry; oversees the construction of transport infrastructure; and manages civil aviation, railroads, roads, waterways, ports, and wharves. "After studying the IT initiatives of other provincial transport commissions, we decided to use Siebel Public Sector to build our integrated transport service system. The Siebel software offers powerful functions that allow us to integrate information and improve the management of our road, rail, and waterway infrastructure projects." - Chen Xiaoming, Vice Director, Information Center, Chongqing Transport Commission. Read more here. Siemens Information Services Increases Productivity by 20% Siemens Information Services Pvt, Ltd. provides back-office account processing services to Siemens' vendors. The company works with Siemens' healthcare, energy, and industry divisions in Europe, the United States, and parts of the Asia-Pacific region. It approves financial services such as processing payroll, accounts data, purchase orders, invoices, and payments, and also creates service catalogs for customers and internal teams. "Oracle CRM ON Demand provides us with a complete view of each customer's data from the moment they log a request to the time we close it. This has eliminated manual requests, and improved the service we offer to our clients across the Asia-Pacific region." -Sunil Zutshi, General Manager, IT, Siemens Information Services Pvt, Ltd. Read more here. China Distance Education Holdings Improves Call Center Productivity by 24% China Distance Education Holdings Limited is a leading provider of online education. The organization offers 174 courses through 16 Web sites, including accounting, healthcare, law, and engineering. In 2010, 215,000 students were enrolled. "Online education is a fast growing sector in China. To maintain our competitiveness, we implemented Oracle Contact Center Anywhere to make it easier and faster for our call center staff to respond to student enquiries. As a result, their productivity increased by 24%." - Qin Songjiang, Chief Technology Officer, China Distance Education Holdings Limited. Read more here.

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• Are there serious companies that don't use version-control and continuous integration? Why?

  - by daramarak

  A colleague of mine was under the impression that our software department was highly advanced, as we used both a build server with continuous integration, and version control software. This did not match my point of view, as I only know of one company I which made serious software and didn't have either. However, my experience is limited to only a handful of companies. Does anyone know of any real company (larger than 3 programmers), which is in the software business and doesn't use these tools? If such a company exists, are there any good reason for them not doing so?

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• Graduate expectations versus reality

  - by Bobby Tables

  When choosing what we want to study, and do with our careers and lives, we all have some expectations of what it is going to be like. Now that I've been in the industry for almost a decade, I've been reflecting a bit on what I thought (back when I was studying Computer Science) programming working life was going to be like, and how it's actually turning out to be. My two biggest shocks (or should I say, broken expectations) by far are the sheer amount of maintenance work involved in software, and the overall lack of professionalism: Maintenance: At uni, we were all told that the majority of software work is maintenance of existing systems. So I knew to expect this in the abstract. But I never imagined exactly how overwhelming this would turn out to be. Perhaps it's something I mentally glazed over, and hoped I'd be building cool new stuff from scratch a lot more. But it really is the case that most jobs are overwhelmingly maintenance, bug fixing, and support oriented. Lack of professionalism: At uni, I always had the impression that commercial software work is very process-oriented and stringently engineered. I had images of ISO processes, reams of technical documentation, every feature and bug being strictly documented, and a generally professional environment. It came as a huge shock to realise that most software companies operate no differently to a team of students working on a large semester-long project. And I've worked in both the small agile hack shop, and the medium sized corporate enterprise. While I wouldn't say that it's always been outright "unprofessional", it definitely feels like the software industry (on the whole) is far from the strong engineering discipline that I expected it to be. Has anyone else had similar experiences to this? What are the ways in which your expectations of what our profession would be like were different to the reality?

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• How could we rewrite the 'No Evil' license to make it 'free'?

  - by passcod

  I did not find the lawyers' SE site, so I thought it best to post here. /* * ...subject to the following conditions: * * The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all * copies or substantial portions of the Software. * * The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil. * * THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS"... */ This is the 'non-free', Crockford, No-Evil, MIT-style, license. This license is considered non-free because of this phrase: "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil." How could we rewrite this to become a 'free' license, while retaining the original spirit of the sentence?

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• LibrePlanet 2010 Completes Its Orbit

  <b>Bradley M. Kuhn:</b> "I met so many young people excited about software freedom. I can only imagine to be only 19 or 20 years old and have the opportunity meet other Free Software developers in person. At that age, I considered myself lucky to simply have Usenet access so that I could follow and participate in online discussions about Free Software..."

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• How Service Component Architecture (SCA) Can Be Incorporated Into Existing Enterprise Systems

  After viewing Rob High’s presentation “The SOA Component Model” hosted on InfoQ.com, I can foresee how Service Component Architecture (SCA) can be incorporated in to an existing enterprise. According to IBM’s DeveloperWorks website, SCA is a set of conditions which outline a model for constructing applications/systems using a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). In addition, SCA builds on open standards such as Web services. In the future, I can easily see how some large IT shops could potently divide development teams or work groups up into Component/Data Object Groups, and Standard Development Groups. The Component/Data Object Group would only work on creating and maintaining components that are reused throughout the entire enterprise. The Standard Development Group would work on new and existing projects that incorporate the use of various components to accomplish various business tasks. In my opinion the incorporation of SCA in to any IT department will initially slow down the number of new features developed due to the time needed to create the new and loosely-coupled components. However once a company becomes more mature in its SCA process then the number of program features developed will greatly increase. I feel this is due to the fact that the loosely-coupled components needed in order to add the new features will already be built and ready to incorporate into any new development feature request. References: BEA Systems, Cape Clear Software, IBM, Interface21, IONA Technologies PLC, Oracle, Primeton Technologies Ltd, Progress Software, Red Hat Inc., Rogue Wave Software, SAP AG, Siebel Systems, Software AG, Sun Microsystems, Sybase, TIBCO Software Inc. (2006). Service Component Architecture. Retrieved 11 27, 2011, from DeveloperWorks: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/specification/ws-sca/ High, R. (2007). The SOA Component Model. Retrieved 11 26, 2011, from InfoQ: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/rob-high-sca-sdo-soa-programming-model

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 2012-06-21

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Software Architects Need Not Apply | Dustin Marx "I think there is a place for software architecture," says Dustin Marx, "but a portion of our fellow software architects have harmed the reputation of the discipline." For another angle on this subject, check out Out of the Tower, Into the Trenches from the Nov/Dec edition of Oracle Magazine. Oracle Data Integrator 11g - Faster Files | David Allan David Allan illustrates "a big step for regular file processing on the way to super-charging big data files using Hadoop." 2012 Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Awards - Win a FREE Pass to Oracle OpenWorld 2012 in SF Share your use of Oracle Fusion Middleware solutions and how they help your organization drive business innovation. You just might win a free pass to Oracle Openworld 2012 in San Francisco. Deadline for submissions in July 17, 2012. WLST Domain creation using dry-run | Michel Schildmeijer What to do "if you want to browse through your domain to check if settings you want to apply satisfy your requirements." Cloud opens up new vistas for service orientation at Netflix | Joe McKendrick "Many see service oriented architecture as laying the groundwork for cloud. But at one well-known company, cloud has instigated the move to SOA." How to avoid the Portlet Skin mismatch | Martin Deh Detailed how-to from WebCenter A-Team blogger Martin Deh. Internationalize WebCenter Portal - Content Presenter | Stefan Krantz Stefan Krantz explains "how to get Content Presenter and its editorials to comply with the current selected locale for the WebCenter Portal session." Oracle Public Cloud Architecture | Tyler Jewell Tyler Jewell discusses the multi-tenancy model and elasticity solution implemented by Oracle Cloud in this QCon presentation. A Distributed Access Control Architecture for Cloud Computing The authors of this InfoQ article discuss a distributed architecture based on the principles from security management and software engineering. Thought for the Day "Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs. Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to to, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do." — Donald Knuth Source: Quotes for Software Engineers

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• Default values - are they good or evil?

  - by Andrew

  The question about default values in general - default return function values, default parameter values, default logic for when something is missing, default logic for handling exceptions, default logic for handling the edge conditions etc. For a long time I considered default values to be a "pure evil" thing, something that "cloaks the catastrophe" and results in a very hard do find bugs. But recently I started to think about default values as some sort of a technical debt ... which is not a straight bad thing but something that could provide some "short term financing" get us to survive the project (how many of us could afford to buy a house without taking out the mortgage?). When I say a "short term" - I don't mean - "do something quickly first and do refactor it out later before it hits the production". No - I am talking about relying on a hardcoded default values in a production software. Granted - it could cause some issues, but what if it only going to cause a single trouble in a whole year. Again - I am talking about the "average" mainstream software here (not a software for a nuclear power station) - the average web site or a UI application for the accounting software, meaning that people lives are not at stake, nor millions of dollars. Again, from my experience, business users would rather live with the software which "works somehow", rather then wait for a perfect one. And the use of default values helps a lot if you develop a software in a RAD style. But again - the longest debug sessions I have spent were because of the bugs introduced by a default value which either stopped being "a default" along the way or because a small subsystem has recently been upgraded and as a result of this upgrade it does not handle the default correctly (e.g. empty list vs null, or null string vs empty string). So my question is - are the default values good or evil. And if they are a technical debt - how do measure up how much you can borrow so you can afford the repayments? Would really appreciate any input. Cheers. EDIT: If I am using the default values as a way to cut the corners during the development - and if the corners cutting results in a bugs and issues - what is the methodology to recover from these issues?

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• Enterprise Service Bus (ESB): Important architectural piece to a SOA or is it just vendor hype?

  Is an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) an important architectural piece to a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), or is it just vendor hype in order to sell a particular product such as SOA-in-a-box? According to IBM.com, an ESB is a flexible connectivity infrastructure for integrating applications and services; it offers a flexible and manageable approach to service-oriented architecture implementation. With this being said, it is my personal belief that ESBs are an important architectural piece to any SOA. Additionally, generic design patterns have been created around the integration of web services in to ESB regardless of any vendor. ESB design patterns, according to Philip Hartman, can be classified in to the following categories: Interaction Patterns: Enable service interaction points to send and/or receive messages from the bus Mediation Patterns: Enable the altering of message exchanges Deployment Patterns: Support solution deployment into a federated infrastructure Examples of Interaction Patterns: One-Way Message Synchronous Interaction Asynchronous Interaction Asynchronous Interaction with Timeout Asynchronous Interaction with a Notification Timer One Request, Multiple Responses One Request, One of Two Possible Responses One Request, a Mandatory Response, and an Optional Response Partial Processing Multiple Application Interactions Benefits of the Mediation Pattern: Mediator promotes loose coupling by keeping objects from referring to each other explicitly, and it lets you vary their interaction independently Design an intermediary to decouple many peers Promote the many-to-many relationships between interacting peers to “full object status” Examples of Interaction Patterns: Global ESB: Services share a single namespace and all service providers are visible to every service requester across an entire network Directly Connected ESB: Global service registry that enables independent ESB installations to be visible Brokered ESB: Bridges services that are reluctant to expose requesters or providers to ESBs in other domains Federated ESB: Service consumers and providers connect to the master or to a dependent ESB to access services throughout the network References: Mediator Design Pattern. (2011). Retrieved 2011, from SourceMaking.com: http://sourcemaking.com/design_patterns/mediator Hartman, P. (2006, 24 1). ESB Patterns that "Click". Retrieved 2011, from The Art and Science of Being an IT Architect: http://artsciita.blogspot.com/2006/01/esb-patterns-that-click.html IBM. (2011). WebSphere DataPower XC10 Appliance Version 2.0. Retrieved 2011, from IBM.com: http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wdpxc/v2r0/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.ibm.websphere.help.glossary.doc%2Ftopics%2Fglossary.html Oracle. (2005). 12 Interaction Patterns. Retrieved 2011, from Oracle® BPEL Process Manager Developer's Guide: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/B31017_01/integrate.1013/b28981/interact.htm#BABHHEHD

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• It's All In The Cloud

  - by Natalia Rachelson

  People turned out in droves for Steve Miranda's Apps Cloud General Session. Steve, as engaging as ever, covered our Apps strategy in the cloud and reinforced that Oracle has a complete set of cloud services including: •    Human Capital Management•    Talent Management•    Sales and Marketing•    Customer Service and Support•    Financial Management•    Procurement, Sourcing, and Inventory•    Project Portfolio Management•    Governance, Risk, and Compliance... all delivered on top of the Social, Platform, and Common Infrastructure.Steve talked about Fusion being the centerpiece of our Cloud Services. The fact that Fusion is 100 percent standards based is a big, big deal! In addition, our ERP Cloud Service is the most complete cloud service on the market. And email marketing is dead -- social marketing is where the action is. It's also where Oracle is investing heavily from a Sales & Marketing Cloud perspective. Steve covered the strategic acquisitions Oracle has made to enhance our organic Cloud offering. Specifically, Oracle bought RightNow to make our Customer Service and Support Cloud service complete. We also bought Taleo to add Recruiting and Learning capabilities to our Talent Management Cloud. Steve talked about our customers and how they are benefiting from the use of a variety of our Cloud Services. Red Robin is driving lower labor and food costs with Oracle ERP Cloud Service. He used Elizabeth Arden as the profile customer for HCM and Talent Management Service, UBS for HCM and Talent Management Service, and Brocade for Talent Management. All these customers are benefiting from a comprehensive and fully integrated HR platform that aligns compensation with performance and enhances workforce motivation and retention. At the same time, Hitachi Data Systems is using Oracle Taleo Performance Management Cloud to recruit the right competencies, pinpoint areas of improvement, and develop and monitor employee goals to support the global account organization. KLM and Overstock.com are gaining the benefits of Oracle's Customer Service and Support Service from RightNow by better engaging and serving customer needs online and through call centers. And last but not least, Graco and Key Energy are leveraging mobility features and sales forecasting and territory management capabilities within the Oracle Sales and Marketing Service. They expect to gain better visibility to sales information and drive more efficient sales campaigns and empower their sales force with data they need to make sales. Overall, Oracle Apps Cloud Services are enjoying a significant momentum in the marketplace. Steve projected an air of confidence and enthusiasm highlighting Oracle's latest successes with Cloud services.

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• The Iron Bird Approach

  - by David Paquette

  It turns out that designing software is not so different than designing commercial aircraft.  I just finished watching a video that talked about the approach that Bombardier is taking in designing the new C Series aircraft.  I was struck by the similarities to agile approaches to software design.  In the video, Bombardier describes how they are using an Iron Bird to work through a number of design questions in advance of ever having a version of the aircraft that can ever be flown.  The Iron Bird is a life size replica of the plane.  Based on the name, I would assume the plane is built in a very heavy material that could never fly.  Using this replica, Bombardier is able to valid certain assumptions such as the length of each wire in the electric system.  They are also able to confirm that some parts are working properly (like the rudders).  They even go as far as to have a complete replica of the cockpit.  This allows Bombardier to put pilots in the cockpit to run through simulated take-off and landing sequences. The basic tenant of the approach seems to be Validate your design early with working prototypes Get feedback from users early, well in advance of finishing the end product   In software development, we tend to think of ourselves as special.  I often tell people that it is difficult to draw comparisons to building items in the physical world (“Building software is nothing like building a sky scraper”).  After watching this video, I am wondering if designing/building software is actually a lot like designing/building commercial aircraft.   Watch the video here (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/video/video-selling-the-c-series/article4400616/)

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• SharePoint 2010 Hosting :: How to Enable Office Web Apps on SharePoint 2010

  - by mbridge

  Office Web App is the online version of Microsoft Office 2010 which is very helpful if you are going to use SharePoint 2010 in your organization as it allows you to do basic editing of word document without installing the Office Suite in the client machine. Prerequisites : - Microsoft Server 2008 R2 - Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 or Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 - Microsoft Office Web Apps. If you have installed all the above products, just follow this steps: 1. Go to Central Administration > Click on Manage Service Application. 2. All the menus are not displayed in ribbon Menu format which was first introduced in Office 2007. Click on New > Word Viewing Services ( You can choose PowerPoint or Excel also, steps are same ). This will open a pop window. Adding Services for Office Web Apps 3. Give a Proper Name which can have your companies or project name. 4. Under Application Pool select : SharePoint Web Services Default. 5. Next keep the check box checked which says : Add this service application’s proxy to the farm’s default proxy list. Click Ok Adding Word Viewer as Service Application Office Web Apps as Services in Sharepoint 2010 6. This will install all the Office Web App services required. You can see the name as you gave in the above step. How to Activate Office Web Apps in Site Collection? 1. Go to the site for which you want to activate this feature. 2. Click on Site Action > Site Settings > Site Collection Administrator > Site Collection Features 3. Activate Office Web Apps. Activate Office Web Apps Feature in Site Collection How to make sure Office Web Apps is working for your site collection? 1. Locate any office document you have and click on the smart menu which appears when you hover your mouse on it. Dont double-click as this will launch the document in Office Client if its installed. This feature can be changed. 2. If you see View or Edit in Browser as menu item, your Office Web Apps is configured correctly. View Edit Office Document in Browser Editing Office Document in Browser Another post related SharePoint 2010: 1. How to Configure SharePoint Foundation 2010 for SharePoint Workspace 2010 2. Integrating SharePoint 2010 and SQL 2008 R2

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• Stop trying to be perfect

  - by Kyle Burns

  Yes, Bob is my uncle too.  I also think the points in the Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship (manifesto.softwarecraftsmanship.org) are all great.  What amazes me is that tend to confuse the term “well crafted” with “perfect”.  I'm about to say something that will make Quality Assurance managers and many development types as well until you think about it as a craftsman – “Stop trying to be perfect”. Now let me explain what I mean.  Building software, as with building almost anything, often involves a series of trade-offs where either one undesired characteristic is accepted as necessary to achieve another desired one (or maybe stave off one that is even less desirable) or a desirable characteristic is sacrificed for the same reasons.  This implies that perfection itself is unattainable.  What is attainable is “sufficient” and I think that this really goes to the heart both of what people are trying to do with Agile and with the craftsmanship movement.  Simply put, sufficient software drives the greatest business value.   I've been in many meetings where “how can we keep anything from ever going wrong” has become the thing that holds us in analysis paralysis.  I've also been the guy trying way too hard to perfect some function to make sure that every edge case is accounted for.  Somewhere in there, something a drill instructor said while I was in boot camp occurred to me.  In response to being asked a question by another recruit having to do with some edge case (I can barely remember the context), he said “What if grasshoppers had machine guns?  Would the birds still **** with them?”  It sounds funny, but there's a lot of wisdom in those words.   “Sufficient” is different for every situation and it’s important to understand what sufficient means in the context of the work you’re doing.  If I’m writing a timesheet application (and please shoot me if I am), I’m going to have a much higher tolerance for imperfection than if you’re writing software to control life support systems on spacecraft.  I’m also likely to have less need for high volume performance than if you’re writing software to control stock trading transactions.   I’d encourage anyone who has read this far to instead of trying to be perfect, try to create software that is sufficient in every way.  If you’re working to make a component that is sufficient “better”, ask yourself if there is any component left that is not yet sufficient.  If the answer is “yes” you’re working on the wrong thing and need to adjust.  If the answer is “no”, why aren’t you shipping and delivering business value?

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• Best Language for the job? Database | C++, .NET, Java

  - by Randy E

  Ok, quick overview. I'm pretty brand new to software design. I have experience reading and editing/customizing PHP things for online scripts/software; Such as CMS, Wordpress, some forum solutions. I'm about to begin my degree in Software Design, the school I'm going to will allow us to kind of focus on an area, C++, Java, or .NET. I've played around a little with VB over the past week, mostly just trying to get a slight feel for it, however nothing extensive. I've been through Herbert Schildt's "C++, A Beginner's Guide." but I was mainly reading it, not doing anything with it beyond a couple basic Console Apps (and getting frustrated with auto-close :/ ). Now, where I decide to focus more in with my degree will depend on what the best language for the job is for my first piece of software I want to develop on my own. Assume I haven't looked at any of the languages at all, please help with the following: My first piece of software will be a database program. Everything has to do with users inputting and retrieving data, and calling that data to help with another function of the software, automatically calculating billing information based on information inputted in the other portion of the program. I won't go into too many details as I'm targeting a niche that doesn't have too much competition, but the competition that is there is established. I want to offer more features, scalable solutions, and the ability to port it to an online version. Ok, basically, it is a complete case management with integrated billing for Private Investigators. I would like the case management to be able to check the Database to see if certain information has been inputted before (such as Names/SSN's), and then the billing will pull hours inputted in the case portion for investigative work, multiplying by an already inputted amount for the fee, and then calculate sales tax. I also want to provide potential clients with an easily scalable solution, that is, a basic option for start ups that costs the least amount, with no additional users, ran on one machine. A middle option with the ability to create users and place them in two groups (User or Admin), as well as adding a few additional features, ran on one machine, but this will allow it to be accessed after being mapped on a network drive. And a third option to allow the placement into 4 different groups (Investigators, Billing, Managers, Admins) and more features. And then, a couple of years after launch, a 4th option that is browser based allowing the same 4 groups to login, as well as clients (view things concerning their case, with some admin customizable objects that can be added for clients view), over the internet. The only licensing security I would like to employ right off the bat will be serial key generated after ordering online (received in an email after the successful purchase). The program will access a database stored on a server periodically to verify license. I would like it to be able to check to make sure it's the most updated version and automatically update if not.

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• KISS principle applied to programming language design?

  - by Giorgio

  KISS ("keep it simple stupid", see e.g. here) is an important principle in software development, even though it apparently originated in engineering. Citing from the wikipedia article: The principle is best exemplified by the story of Johnson handing a team of design engineers a handful of tools, with the challenge that the jet aircraft they were designing must be repairable by an average mechanic in the field under combat conditions with only these tools. Hence, the 'stupid' refers to the relationship between the way things break and the sophistication available to fix them. If I wanted to apply this to the field of software development I would replace "jet aircraft" with "piece of software", "average mechanic" with "average developer" and "under combat conditions" with "under the expected software development / maintenance conditions" (deadlines, time constraints, meetings / interruptions, available tools, and so on). So it is a commonly accepted idea that one should try to keep a piece of software simple stupid so that it easy to work on it later. But can the KISS principle be applied also to programming language design? Do you know of any programming languages that have been designed specifically with this principle in mind, i.e. to "allow an average programmer under average working conditions to write and maintain as much code as possible with the least cognitive effort"? If you cite any specific language it would be great if you could add a link to some document in which this intent is clearly expressed by the language designers. In any case, I would be interested to learn about the designers' (documented) intentions rather than your personal opinion about a particular programming language.

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