Search Results

Search found 16560 results on 663 pages for 'far'.

Page 212/663 | < Previous Page | 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219  | Next Page >

• PASS Location fixed for the next 2 years - Are they listening?

  - by simonsabin

  I've just received the PASS connector newsletter with details of the decision of where to locate the next summits. To me it shows you how you can spin statistics they way you want to. I am very suprised by the numbers 81% said that they would like an east coast event. The spin is that "When we look at responses from only 2008 and 2009 Summit attendees (our most successful ones by far), the number who want a future Summit outside of Seattle drops to 69%." Wow the number drops thats bad. We must stay in Seattle then. My take however is that 69% of those willing to travel to Seattle want an event NOT in Seattle. Doesn't that suggest that people would like an event not in Seattle. I appreciate the comment about the launch years however 2012 isn't going to be a launch year because they need to get SQL out of the door before then to meet the 3 year software assurance cycle. So sticking 2012 in Seattle is IMHO a bad decision. It might keep the cost down for the PASS org, Microsoft and the attendees that live near Seattle but does it keep the cost down for the rest of the SQL Community? They do mention a possibility of an event on the East Coast and I do hope that its not just lip service. Flights for me to the East coast look ~30% cheaper than to Seattle and I've never been to the East Coast. Come on PASS show you are listening to the community.

  Read the article

• Remove iTunes on Mac OS X permanently: no Software Update

  - by ShreevatsaR

  Somewhat predictably, removing iTunes on Mac OS X is a long arduous process, described at http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1224 — which I have followed. As far as I can tell, I have purged every trace of the accursed iTunes from my system. Yet Software Update repeatedly prompts me with updates for iTunes, which I don't want anything to do with, despite my saying "Not now" each time. How can I convince Software Update to leave me alone, and never bother me with mention of iTunes again? I'm on Mac OS X 10.6.4 Build 10F569, and the update being offerred is iTunes 9.2.1. (Note: Not a duplicate of OS X: why Software Update suggests to update removed application?, whose accepted answer is simply to follow the instructions I mentioned above.)

  Read the article

• What are the advantages of programming to under an OS as opposed to bare metal executive?

  - by gby

  Assume you are presented with an embedded system application to program, in C, on a multi-core environment (think a Cavium or Tilera) and need to choose between two environments: Code the application under Linux in SMP mode or code the application under a thin bare metal executive (something like a very minimal RTOS), perhaps with a single core running UP Linux that can serve control tasks. For the purpose of this question, assume that both environment provide the same level of performance guarantees in any measurable aspects of run time performance, including number of meaningful action per second, jitter, latency, real time considerations - the works. (and yes, I realize this is by far not a trivial assumption at all, bare with me). How would you justify going with a Linux SMP based solution rather then a bare metal thin executive solution? The question may seems silly. It certainly seems obvious to me - but I have to convince someone that does not think the same. Could you help make a list of arguments in favor of choosing a real SMP aware OS (Linux) vs. a bare metal executive assuming performance guarantees are NOT an issue? Many thanks

  Read the article

• Excel: making line charts so the line goes through all data points

  - by Mike

  Hi I've got data based on over 50+ years for various products. Unfortunately not all products have data for each year. I've created a line chart to show the movement (quantity sold) of these products over the years. It works well, except where the data points are too far apart i.e. 1965 and then 1975. For some reason there is no line. It's not perfect data because of the missing years, but I can live with that, I just want to see the trend, and not just sporadic dots; squares or crosses. Any help or links greatly appreciated. Mike

  Read the article

• How Can I Effectively Interview an Oracle Candidate?

  - by Tim Medora

  First, I browsed through SO for matching questions and didn't find one, but please point me in the right direction if this exact question has already been asked. I work with and around programmers of various skill levels on various platforms. I would consider my skills to be strong in terms of relational database design, query development, and basic performance tuning and administration. I'm mid-level when it comes to database theory. My team is looking to me to ensure that we have the best talent on staff, in this case, an engineer experienced in Oracle administration. To me, a well-rounded database administrator, regardless of platform, should also be competent in developing against the database so that is also a requirement. However my database skills are centralized around SQL Server 200x with experience in a few other products like SAP MaxDB, Access, and FoxPro. How can I thoroughly assess the skills of an Oracle engineer? I can ask high-level database theory questions and talk about routine tasks that are common across platforms, but I want to dig deep enough that I can be confident in the people I hire. Normally, I would alternate very specific questions that have a right/wrong answer with architectural questions that might have several valid answers. Does anyone have an interview template, specific questions, or any other knowledge that they can share? Even knowing the meaningful Oracle-related certifications would be a help. Thank you. EDIT: All the answers have been very helpful so far and I have given upvotes to everyone. I'm surprised that there are already 3 close votes on this question as "off topic". To be clear, I am specifically asking how a MS SQL Server engineer (like myself) can effectively interview a person with different but symbiotic skills. The question has already received specific, technical answers which have improved my own database design and programming skills. If this is more appropriate as a community wiki, please convert it.

  Read the article

• I Blame SNMP!

  - by brendonpage

  Anyone who has been reading my blog would have noticed that I have deviated slightly from my original post plan! This post was meant to be on uploading files in Silverlight, so what happened you may ask? Well last weekend I had some friends over for a LAN and one of them brought a managed switch with, which he had just been purchased for work. He proceeded show me how cool it was, how he planned on improving his work network and how it can be monitored remotely via SNMP. After this explanation he started to google for a free SNMP graphing tool. After a few hours of hearing disgruntled mutterings from him I asked what was wrong, he proceeded to rant about how he couldn’t find any tools that suited his needs. It was at this point I though the most dangerous thing a programmer can ever think “I wonder how hard it would be to make one”, of course the answer at the time is always “It can’t be that hard”, and so started my journey into SNMP. I am still in the early stages of this journey so I don’t have to much to report yet, but once I have finished the first version of my SNMP graphing tool I will definitely be posting about it! For now if there are any of you who are interested in doing any SNMP development in C# I would recommend looking at the #Sharp project on CodePlex (http://sharpsnmplib.codeplex.com/), it is the SNMP library I have decided to use and thus far it works beautifully.

  Read the article

• GLSL billboard move center of rotation

  - by Jacob Kofoed

  I have successfully set up a billboard shader that works, it can take in a quad and rotate it so it always points toward the screen. I am using this vertex-shader: void main(){ vec4 tmpPos = (MVP * bufferMatrix * vec4(0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0)) + (MV * vec4( vertexPosition.x * 1.0 * bufferMatrix[0][0], vertexPosition.y * 1.0 * bufferMatrix[1][1], vertexPosition.z * 1.0 * bufferMatrix[2][2], 0.0) ); UV = UVOffset + vertexUV * UVScale; gl_Position = tmpPos; BufferMatrix is the model-matrix, it is an attribute to support Instance-drawing. The problem is best explained through pictures: This is the start position of the camera: And this is the position, looking in from 45 degree to the right: Obviously, as each character is it's own quad, the shader rotates each one around their own center towards the camera. What I in fact want is for them to rotate around a shared center, how would I do this? What I have been trying to do this far is: mat4 translation = mat4(1.0); translation = glm::translate(translation, vec3(pos)*1.f * 2.f); translation = glm::scale(translation, vec3(scale, 1.f)); translation = glm::translate(translation, vec3(anchorPoint - pos) / vec3(scale, 1.f)); Where the translation is the bufferMatrix sent to the shader. What I am trying to do is offset the center, but this might not be possible with a single matrix..? I am interested in a solution that doesn't require CPU calculations each frame, but rather set it up once and then let the shader do the billboard rotation. I realize there's many different solutions, like merging all the quads together, but I would first like to know if the approach with offsetting the center is possible. If it all seems a bit confusing, it's because I'm a little confused myself.

  Read the article

• How to build a "traffic AI"?

  - by Lunikon

  A project I am working on right now features a lot of "traffic" in the sense of cars moving along roads, aircraft moving aroun an apron etc. As of now the available paths are precalculated, so nodes are generated automatically for crossings which themselves are interconnected by edges. When a character/agent spawns into the world it starts at some node and finds a path to a target node by means of a simply A* algorithm. The agent follows the path and ultimately reaches its destination. No problem so far. Now I need to enable the agents to avoid collisions and to handle complex traffic situations. Since I'm new to the field of AI I looked up several papers/articles on steering behavior but found them to be too low-level. My problem consists less of the actual collision avoidance (which is rather simple in this case because the agents follow strictly defined paths) but of situations like one agent leaving a dead-end while another one wants to enter exactly the same one. Or two agents meeting at a bottleneck which only allows one agent to pass at a time but both need to pass it (according to the optimal route found before) and they need to find a way to let the other one pass first. So basically the main aspect of the problem would be predicting traffic movement to avoid dead-locks. Difficult to describe, but I guess you get what I mean. Do you have any recommendations for me on where to start looking? Any papers, sample projects or similar things that could get me started? I appreciate your help!

  Read the article

• Lenova B460e laptop Unknown filesystem

  - by Dinesh

  I got Lenova B460e laptop yesterday (by TN Govt). It has WINDOWS 7 Proff….. Setup it up the way I liked it... all software drivers and all. I wanted extra drives, so I entered the WINDOWS diskadmin and changed my partition setup, by splitting and I did the partition setup in the installing proces, so I splitted my harddisk into 4 parts. So far so good. When I rebooted, I entered GRUB RESCUE MODE. In this mode I know the only command “ls”. Which gives like (hd0) (hd0,msdos5) (hd0,msdos4) (hd0,msdos2) (hd0,msdos1). In this Lap I do not have CD drive also, otherwise I could have done Format the OS and installed new OS using WINDOWS 7 CD. Now I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. Anyone an idea how to fix this?

  Read the article

• Why can't I create direct3d objects?

  - by quakkels

  I've been programming professionally for years using languages like VBScript, JavaScript, and C#. As a hobby, I'm getting into some c/c++ and games programming with DirectX. I am running into an issue where I cannot create direct3d objects. I am using Visual C++ 2010 Express. After I installed vc++2010express I then installed the June 2010 release of DirectX. I am trying to include DirectX via #pragma statements. This is the code I have so far in my winmain.cpp source file: #include <Windows.h> #include <d3d11.h> #include <time.h> #include <iostream> using namespace std; #pragma comment(lib, "d3d11.lib") #pragma comment(lib, "d3dx11.lib") // program settings const string AppTitle = "Direct3D in a Window"; const int ScreenWidth = 1024; const int ScreenHeight = 768; // direct3d objects LPDIRECT3D11 d3d = NULL; // this line is showing an error The type LPDIRECT3D11 is showing an error: Error: Identifier "LPDIRECT3D11" is undefined Am I missing something here to get VC++2010Express to recognize and load the DirectX libs? Thanks for any help.

  Read the article

• App to make a video from photos?

  - by chtfn

  I was wondering what could be a good app (with a GUI ;) ) for making a video from a bunch of photos or images, to create a time-lapse video, or a stop-motion animation, or even a video like this one. The idea is to set a really small time between each photo, but also to be able to change this time every so often, or add some effects, to make the succession smoother in particular. What would be perfect is a function that allows automatic cropping of the photos as well as exposure adjustment so they all have the same background and so the time-lapse video looks smoother. I know about the slide show app "Imagination" but the interval can not go under one second. Cheers! Edit: here is my progress, also thanks to the first answer: I tried Luciole, it is really simple and promessing, but pretty buggy, and I only could export an average video in .dv format (mpg2 and avi don't work). Apparently, it has difficulties when changing the fps. I also tried StopMotion: also pretty buggy, I had to go into preferences and modify the encoding commands to get a result, but it's the best result I got so far. But none of those has effects to make transitions smoother... I tried several diaporama apps: Imagination doesn't handle more than 1 image per second; PhotoFilmStrip (repo version and latest version from website): same problem even though you can go down to 0.1 second per image, it still behaves wierdly (going back to 1 second automatically); Videoporama: doesn't start at all on 12.04. Any other idea, folks?

  Read the article

• Simple collision detection for pong

  - by Dave Voyles

  I'm making a simple pong game, and things are great so far, but I have an odd bug which causes my ball (well, it's a box really) to get stuck on occasion when detecting collision against the ceiling or floor. It looks as though it is trying to update too frequently to get out of the collision check. Basically the box slides against the top or bottom of the screen from one paddle to the other, and quickly bounces on and off the wall while doing so, but only bounces a few pixels from the wall. What can I do to avoid this problem? It seems to occur at random. Below is my collision detection for the wall, as well as my update method for the ball. public void UpdatePosition() { size.X = (int)position.X; size.Y = (int)position.Y; position.X += speed * (float)Math.Cos(direction); position.Y += speed * (float)Math.Sin(direction); CheckWallHit(); } // Checks for collision with the ceiling or floor. // 2*Math.pi = 360 degrees // TODO: Change collision so that ball bounces from wall after getting caught private void CheckWallHit() { while (direction > 2 * Math.PI) { direction -= 2 * Math.PI; } while (direction < 0) { direction += 2 * Math.PI; } if (position.Y <= 0 || (position.Y > resetPos.Y * 2 - size.Height)) { direction = 2 * Math.PI - direction; } }

  Read the article

• Is dependency injection by hand a better alternative to composition and polymorphism?

  - by Drake Clarris

  First, I'm an entry level programmer; In fact, I'm finishing an A.S. degree with a final capstone project over the summer. In my new job, when there isn't some project for me to do (they're waiting to fill the team with more new hires), I've been given books to read and learn from while I wait - some textbooks, others not so much (like Code Complete). After going through these books, I've turned to the internet to learn as much as possible, and started learning about SOLID and DI (we talked some about Liskov's substitution principle, but not much else SOLID ideas). So as I've learned, I sat down to do to learn better, and began writing some code to utilize DI by hand (there are no DI frameworks on the development computers). Thing is, as I do it, I notice it feels familiar... and it seems like it is very much like work I've done in the past using composition of abstract classes using polymorphism. Am I missing a bigger picture here? Is there something about DI (at least by hand) that goes beyond that? I understand the possibility of having configurations not in code of some DI frameworks having some great benefits as far as changing things without having to recompile, but when doing it by hand, I'm not sure if it's any different than stated above... Some insight into this would be very helpful!

  Read the article

• How can I reduce the amount of time it takes to fully regression test an application ready for release?

  - by DrLazer

  An app I work on is being developed with a modified version of scrum. If you are not familiar with scrum, it's just an alternative approach to a more traditional watefall model, where a series of features are worked on for a set amount of time known as a sprint. The app is written in C# and makes use of WPF. We use Visual C# 2010 Express edition as an IDE. If we work on a sprint and add in a few new features, but do not plan to release until a further sprint is complete, then regression testing is not an issue as such. We just test the new features and give the app a good once over. However, if a release is planned that our customers can download - a full regression test is factored in. In the past this wasn't a big deal, it took 3 or 4 days and the devs simply fix up any bugs found in the regression phase, but now, as the app is getting larger and larger and incorporating more and more features, the regression is spanning out for weeks. I am interested in any methods that people know of or use that can decrease this time. At the moment the only ideas I have are to either start writing Unit Tests, which I have never fully tried out in a commercial environment, or to research the possibilty of any UI Automation API's or tools that would allow me to write a program to perform a series of batch tests. I know literally nothing about the possibilities of UI automation so any information would be valuable. I don't know that much about Unit testing either, how complicated can the tests be? Is it possible to get Unit tests to use the UI? Are there any other methods I should consider? Thanks for reading, and for any advice in advance. Edit: Thanks for the information. Does anybody know of any alternatives to what has been mentioned so far (NUnit, RhinoMocks and CodedUI)?

  Read the article

• Windows service running as network service - how does it authenticate? Breaking change in W2K8?

  - by Max

  A Windows service running as "Network Service" talks to services on other machines (here: SQL Server and Analysis Services), using Windows authentication. For authentication, we have to grant permissions to the machine account of the service. E.g. if service runs on server MYSERVER in domain MYDOMAIN, it'll authenticate itself as "MYDOMAIN\MYSERVER$". - Am I correct, so far? Now here's my question: does this still apply when talking to a service on the SAME machine? Or will it authenticate with something like "NT AUTHORITY\Network Service" instead when connecting to a local service? And: is there any chance this is a breaking change from Windows 2003 to Windows 2008? We're having an actual issue in our system where the account was able to connect to local services with only the machine account having permissions in W2K3. In W2K8, this doesn't seem to work anymore: authentication to local services now fails, but still works to remote machines.

  Read the article

• What requirements does an IT department work space need?

  - by Rob

  Hello all, i need to provide a list of workspace requirements to the IT director for my network operations team. So far I got Secure workspace - so nothing gets stolen and people cant come up to us asking for support (they need a ticket from the helpdesk) Quite area - so that we can work and not be disturbed by the loud project managers who play soccer in the office sometimes. A large table or desk where we can setup and or config systems and servers if needed. What else do we need? Thanks in advance.

  Read the article

• Doing a passable 4X game AI

  - by Extrakun

  I am coding a rather "simple" 4X game (if a 4X game can be simple). It's indie in scope, and I am wondering if there's anyway to come up with a passable AI without having me spending months coding on it. The game has three major decision making portions; spending of production points, spending of movement points and spending of tech points (basically there are 3 different 'currency', currency unspent at end of turn is not saved) Spend Production Points Upgrade a planet (increase its tech and production) Build ships (3 types) Move ships from planets to planets (costing Movement Points) Move to attack Move to fortify Research Tech (can partially research a tech i.e, as in Master of Orion) The plan for me right now is a brute force approach. There are basically 4 broad options for the player - Upgrade planet(s) to its his production and tech output Conquer as many planets as possible Secure as many planets as possible Get to a certain tech as soon as possible For each decision, I will iterate through the possible options and come up with a score; and then the AI will choose the decision with the highest score. Right now I have no idea how to 'mix decisions'. That is, for example, the AI wishes to upgrade and conquer planets at the same time. I suppose I can have another logic which do a brute force optimization on a combination of those 4 decisions.... At least, that's my plan if I can't think of anything better. Is there any faster way to make a passable AI? I don't need a very good one, to rival Deep Blue or such, just something that has the illusion of intelligence. This is my first time doing an AI on this scale, so I dare not try something too grand too. So far I have experiences with FSM, DFS, BFS and A*

  Read the article

• How to hide the mouse cursor

  - by MvG

  I'm building a kiosk using Ubuntu Precise on a touch screen. Now I'm looking for the appropriate way to make the mouse cursor disappear. As people know where they are pointing, displaying an arrow under their finger is useless, and having an error where they last pointed even more so. My best bet would be some kind of cursor theme consisting only of transparent cursors. I'm a bit surprised to find no UI to switch and maybe install cursor themes the default Unity UI, but as I won't be using Unity, that's not much of a problem. It appears that the alternatives listed in update-alternatives --list x-cursor-theme all refer to .theme files, so I searched the package list for those. The resulting list does not list any likely candidates, i.e. no packages containing “invisible” or “transparent” in their name. So far, some googled result yielding a readme for “XCursor Transparent Theme” is my best bet. That would mean compiling those sources myself, perhaps putting them into my PPA. I'm also a bit sceptical about that result as said readme is dated from 2003. And I'm not sure that I'm not making things overly complicated. After all, there is quite some support in Precise for touch devices, so I don't believe I'm the first one who wants to get rid of his mouse cursor. Is there another way which doesn't involve user-compiled binary code? Is there a theme package for transparent cursors which I've overlooked? Is there some other mechanism to make the cursor disappear without changing the cursor theme? I'll be using Matchbox WM, Firefox and Java applets, so I'll be happy with any solution working under such a setup. I'm not interested in any solutions twiddling with Gnome or Compiz, as I'll not be running either.

  Read the article

• Broad topics needed for teaching game development

  - by livingtech

  I am going to be doing a presentation on game development to an iPhone user group in the near(ish) future. My audience are iPhone developers, but not necessarily very experienced ones, and this is meant to be an introduction. My question is, what broad topics are needed to understand game development? I acknowledge that this is fairly subjective, but I really am hoping for a comprehensive list of high-level topics that apply to a broad enough swath of games that anyone interested in the topic SHOULD know about them. I would be ecstatic with some pointers to any resources that attempt to make a list such as this this. (I have looked, but my google-fu is failing me tonight.) Here's what I have so far: The Game Loop a sub-note about event driven games 2D Animation sprites/texture maps 3D Animation importance of frameworks modeling software Particles and particle effects hit detection AI Obviously I will not be covering all these topics with any depth, more like simply defining them so that after my talk, the audience will (hopefully) be able to wrap their heads around how any given game might be developed. What am I missing?

  Read the article

• Is ActionScript 3 used by Serious Indie Developers?

  - by Puedes

  This question is for dedicated independent game developers: My dream is to be a game developer. I am a senior in high school who has taken Computer Science for all four years. I have used Java the whole time, but last year I started using PHP and ActionScript 3 (with Flixel). I also used Game Maker for a brief period. I apologize for this, I wanted to get that out of the way and clarify the fact that I have experience of some kind with game development. I am stuck at the moment because I don't quite know what language to use to develop games at a professional level. I am seriously interested in becoming a dedicated game developer, but this issue is really bothering me. I would like to know what the best option would be for my case, based on your experiences. Any advice is appreciated. Things to consider: I am only interested in making 2D games (I am not worried about 3D support) It would be ideal to use something that can be ported to multiple platforms (so as not to run into this problem later) I can't seem to figure out what the industry likes to use So far, this is what I have: I can't decide if it would be wise to stick with ActionScript 3, or move to C++ I know Flash would be for browser games, but what if I want to make a downloadable game, like Plants Vs. Zombies or Super Crate Box? Would Flash be a smart choice for standalone games, or did they use something else? Thank you for reading this, as I would like to stop worrying about this and make some games! Also, I hope this wasn't all over the place :) tl;dr Should I move ahead with AS3 or use something else i.e. C++

  Read the article

• Slow download speeds on MacBook Pro

  - by Austin

  Just as the title says, I am getting very low download speeds on my MacBook Pro. I did a speed test at speedtest.net, and am getting 7 MbPS down, .5 up. However, I can only seem to get 270 KB PS max (averaging 100 K), whether on my school's network or on my home network, wired or wireless. I am on Mac OS X 10.5.8, with Google Chrome. My ethernet settings (under System Preferences - Network - Ethernet Connection - Advanced - Ethernet) are set to "Configure Automatically", "Speed: 100TX", "Duplex: full-duplex, flow-control", and "MTU: Standard (1500)". As far as I can tell, there are no throttles or anything between here and the ISP, so... Any ideas on why I'm getting such low download speeds?

  Read the article

• Initializing entities vs having a constructor parameter

  - by Vee

  I'm working on a turn-based tile-based puzzle game, and to create new entities, I use this code: Field.CreateEntity(10, 5, Factory.Player()); This creates a new Player at [10; 5]. I'm using a factory-like class to create entities via composition. This is what the CreateEntity method looks like: public void CreateEntity(int mX, int mY, Entity mEntity) { mEntity.Field = this; TileManager.AddEntity(mEntity, true); GetTile(mX, mY).AddEntity(mEntity); mEntity.Initialize(); InvokeOnEntityCreated(mEntity); } Since many of the components (and also logic) of the entities require to know what the tile they're in is, or what the field they belong to is, I need to have mEntity.Initialize(); to know when the entity knows its own field and tile. The Initialize(); method contains a call to an event handler, so that I can do stuff like this in the factory class: result.OnInitialize += () => result.AddTags(TDLibConstants.GroundWalkableTag, TDLibConstants.TrapdoorTag); result.OnInitialize += () => result.AddComponents(new RenderComponent(), new ElementComponent(), new DirectionComponent()); This works so far, but it is not elegant and it's very open to bugs. I'm also using the same idea with components: they have a parameterless constructor, and when you call the AddComponent(mComponent); method in an entity, it is the entity's job to set the component's entity to itself. The alternative would be having a Field, int, int parameters in the factory class, to do stuff like: new Entity(Field, 10, 5); But I also don't like the fact that I have to create new entities like this. I would prefer creating entities via the Field object itself. How can I make entity/component creation more elegant and less prone to bugs?

  Read the article

• ASP.NET Session Management

  - by geekrutherford

  Great article (a little old but still relevant) about the inner workings of session management in ASP.NET: Underpinnings of the Session State Management Implementation in ASP.NET.   Using StateServer and the BinaryFormatter serialization occuring caused me quite the headache over the last few days. Curiously, it appears the w3wp.exe process actually consumes more memory when utilizing StateServer and storing somewhat large and complex data types in session.   Users began experiencing Out Of Memory exceptions in the production environment. Looking at the stack trace it related to serialization using the BinaryFormatter. Using remote debugging against our QA server I noted that the code in the application functioned without issue. The exception occured outside the context of the application itself when the request had completed and the web server was trying to serialize session state into the StateServer.   The short term solution is switching back to the InProc method. Thus far this has proven to consume considerably less memory and has caused no issues. Long term the complex object stored in session will be off-loaded into a web service used to access the information directly from the database outside the context of the object used to encapsulate it.

  Read the article

• Windows Vista MAK keys and Volume Licensing..

  - by Physikal

  So when I go into the Volume Licensing Service Center and review our current used/available MAK activations, it says #/50. (the # being the number of our currently used). What I'm curious about, so far we only put vista on like 10 of our boxes. But over time, if we format a machine for some reason, then activate it, I'm assuming it will then in a way consume 2 keys? So what happens when we max the 50? Does that mean we have to fork over some more cash to M$? If so that's pretty lame.

  Read the article

• Self Service Reporting With PowerPivot

  - by blakmk

  There are so many cool new features in Sql 2008 release 2 it was difficult for me to pick a topic for T-SQL Tuesday . But the one that I am now a secret fan of, I once resented for its creation. Let me explain, for years I have encountered reporting systems cobbled together in tools like Access and Excel built by "database hobbyists" who had no formal training in database design or best practices. They would take their monstrosities as far as they could go before ultimatley it stopped working or the person that wrote it left the company. At that point it would become the resident DBA's problem to support it as a Live application. So when I first heard of Power Pivot, a sense of Deja Vu overtook me and I felt like the guy in the Ausin Powers movie , knowing the inevitable is coming but somehow unsure how to get out of the way. But when I eventually saw it in action, I quickly realised that it is a very powerful tool. It has a much smaller "time to market" than traditional BI architectures. Combined with the new features of Excel, some pretty impressive dashboards can be produced.Of course PowerPivot is not a magic bullet and along with potential scalability issues there are the usual issues such as master data management and data quality that cannot be overcome easily with power pivot. As a tool though, it has potential. Traditional BI is expensive, both in terms of time and the amount of resources it takes to deliver the system. The time lag between an analyst or a commercial accountant requesting reports and the report being delivered can make a huge commercial difference. I have observed companies where empowered end users become extremely productive when allowed to plough in to various disperate datasets. It may not be the correct way or the most sustainable but its cheap and quick. In these times when budgets are being slashed and we are forced to deliver more with less, why not empower the end user in a tool that is designed for exactly this task.... @blakmk  

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219  | Next Page >