DaNGeROuS KiLLeR

There are 2 different cracks 1. For single players 2. For online but if you want to play where they will play it's depened on your Call of Duty, and there are some option about non-steam games in server if there server allow that then you can play if they don't allow that you can't play If you can play online then you can only play on non-steam servers because your Call Of Duty is cracked Good Luck

Welcome To CsBlackDevil Enjoy Your Stay Have Fun

I don't understand why you wanna know that we can speak english or not ? What is the point ?

Hello, Just make a right-click on the game and choose properties. On the first tab there should be a button named "define start options" or something like that . In the newly opened window you have to type "-windowed" (without the quotes) and confirm it. The next time you try to start the game it will start in window mode and not in full screen. In the moment the only known way to play the game for those people who have this bug. Next time make a topic in Need Support! that is the right section if you have problem Good Luck

V4. Effect + Text + Pattern + Border.

Server hardware provider ASRock Rack announced the availability of its latest high performance server board, the EP2C612D24. Originally introduced at CeBIT 2015, the EP2C612D24 is now available through channel partners. The EP2C612D24 board is designed to handle large compute workflows such as big data analysis, machine learning, and high-performance and cloud computing. It's an SSI EEB form factor motherboard, measuring 12 x 13 inches. RAM on the board boasts an impressive 24 DIMM slots supporting up to quad DDR4 (2133 MHz) ECC RAM. There are two CPU sockets that support Intel Xeon fifth generation processors (the E5-2600/4600 and v3 series). Connectors are also packed onto the board, with ten SATA3 6.0 Gb/s connections for storage drives and two gigabit Ethernet ports using Intel i350 Ethernet controllers. Three PCIe 3.0 x8 slots and one ultra M.2 expansion slot are available on the EP2C612D24, as well. There is also a variation, the EP2C612D24-4L, which has four LAN connections instead of two. Controlling the device is possible through the ASPEED AST2400 advanced PCIe graphics and remote management processor. The AST2400 provides direct VGA connections as well as Video Over IP (VoIP). ASRock Rack was founded in 2013 as an offshoot of component manufacturer ASRock, supporting high performance computing (HPC), big data, and cloud computing infrastructure. ASRock Rack's product lines include barebone rack-mount servers, server and workstation motherboards, and accessories.

AMD announced on Wednesday the general availability of its Opteron A1100 series developer kit, and the inclusion of the company's very first 64-bit ARM-based processor, codenamed "Seattle." AMD began sampling out this chip earlier this year, which will take on Applied Micro's X-Gene in the server processor market. AMD boasts that it's currently the first to provide a standard ARM Cortex-A57-based server platform for software developers and integrators. "The journey toward a more efficient infrastructure for large-scale datacenters is taking a major step forward today with broader availability of our AMD Opteron A1100-Series development kit," said Suresh Gopalakrishnan, general manager and vice president, Server business unit, AMD. "After successfully sampling to major ecosystem partners such as firmware, OS, and tools providers, we are taking the next step in what will be a collaborative effort across the industry to reimagine the data center based on the open business model of ARM innovation." The development kit, priced at $2,999, is packaged in a micro-ATX form factor and includes the quad-core Seattle chip, 16 GB of DDR3 DRAM (2x Registered DIMMs), PCIe connectors configurable as a single x8 or dual x4 ports, eight SATA connectors, a standard UEFI boot environment, and the Fedora operating system environment. The kit is compatible with standard power supplies, and uses the standard Linux GNU tools. The new developer kit also comes packed with an Apache web server, a MySQL database engine, and PHP scripting language. Java 7 and 8 allows developers to work in a 64-bit ARM environment, the company reports. According to AMD, the new Opteron A1100 Series supports four and eight ARM Cortex-A57 cores. The series also supports up to 4 MB of shared L2 and 8 MB of shared L3 cache, up to 4 SODIMM, UDIMM or RDIMMs, and eight lanes of PCI-Express Gen 3 I/O. The chip can also handle eight SATA 3 ports, two 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports, and ARM TrustZone technology. "With this announcement, AMD becomes the only provider of 64-bit ARM server hardware with complete ARMv8 instruction set support to foster the development of the ecosystem for efficient storage, Web applications and hosting. AMD is the only provider to offer the standard ARM Cortex-A57 technology," the press release stated. Developers of hardware and software, as well as early adopters in large data centers, are eligible to use this new developer kit; you can apply at amd.com/arm. The launch of the development kit arrives several months after AMD introduced its Project Skybridge initiative back in May. Starting in 2015, AMD will be looking to make x86 and ARM-based chips pin-compatible so that both chips can run on the same motherboard. "The 64-bit ARM variant of 'Project SkyBridge' will be based on the ARM Cortex-A57 core and is AMD's first Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) platform for Android; the x86 variant will feature next-generation 'Puma+' CPU cores," AMD's press release stated. "The 'Project SkyBridge' family will feature full SoC integration, AMD Graphics Core Next technology, HSA, and AMD Secure Technology via a dedicated Platform Security Processor (PSP)." The company also plans to introduce products based on K12, a high-performance, low-power ARM-based core, in 2016.

Man, the used Ferrari market must not be as strong as people thought it was: This 1986 Ferrari Testarossa, an original car used in the legendary TV show Miami Vice, is going up for sale for a third time at Mecum's Monterey auction next month. The last time we checked in on this immaculate white vintage supercar, it was listed on eBay for a cool $1.75 million. That was in December, and apparently nobody took the bait, because it surfaced on eBay again in March at the same asking price. But just like crime in Miami, this 16,000-mile Testarossa just keeps popping up. A Mecum representative confirmed to R&T that this vehicle has the same VIN listed in the previous two eBay listings. As we told you last time, this is one of two bonafide Ferraris used in the making of the third, fourth and fifth seasons of the TV show; a third vehicle built from a rebodied DeTomaso Pantera handled the stuntwork. Originally painted black—for continuity with Crockett's (replica) '72 Ferrari Daytona—the producers eventually had the cars repainted white, the better to be seen in the show's trademark brooding nighttime shots. Funny story about how Miami Vice came to get that Testarossa: The original Daytona used in the first two seasons was a C3 Corvette-based replica built by McBurnie. Ferrari sued to shut McBurnie down, and offered to donate two brand-new Testarossas to take the place of Crockett's black droptop. Just one sti[CENSORED]tion: The knockoff Daytona had to be destroyed on the show—hence the scene in the first episode of Season 3, where a bunch of weapons dealers blow up the black Daytona. At any rate, this genuine Miami Vice Testarossa will cross the block at the Mecum Auctions Monterey on August 15th. Bring your pastel blazer and Ray-Bans.

For anyone still wondering, Tony Abbott has conclusively shown he has failed on his promise to be 'Prime Minister for Aboriginal Affairs,' (a promise he made during his 2013 election campaign). "Under an incoming Coalition government, Indigenous affairs will be handled within the department of prime minister and cabinet. There will be, in effect, a prime minister for Aboriginal affairs" – Tony Abbott, the Sydney Institute, March 2013 The Indigenous Social Justice Association's Ray Jackson, said "He terms himself as the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs. What he is in fact is the Minister for Aboriginal Despair." Mr Abbott's comments on Tuesday on the plight of Indigenous people inWestern Australia who are facing the closure of their communities showed, at the very least, a crass ignorance of the issue. Some have gone further, calling him a racist. About 150 remote Aboriginal communities in Western Australia are facing closure, putting the approximately 12,000 Aboriginal people in those communities on notice. The Prime Minister told a radio station in Kalgoorlie, "What we can't do is endlessly subsidise lifestyle choices if those lifestyle choices are not conducive to the kind of full participation in Australian society that everyone should have. "It is not the job of the taxpayer to subsidise lifestyle choices. It is the job of the taxpayer to provide reasonable services in a reasonable way." How is it just a lifestyle choice to live on your traditional homelands? The lands of your ancestors.How is it just a lifestyle choice to live on your traditional homelands? The lands of your ancestors. The lands you have had a continuous connection to for tens of thousands of years. The lands you have raised a family on and feel a duty to protect. Apparently, this does not satisfy Tony Abbott's definition of "full participation" in Australian society. A society which is only just over 200 years old, compared with 60,000 years of Indigenous history. Mr Abbott explained the very remoteness of those communities was affecting the Government's priorities in getting Indigenous children to school, adults to work and making those communities safer. ... the Federal Government effectively forced WA Premier Colin Barnett’s hand by refusing to continue essential servicing for those communities.To be clear, Tony Abbott is backing the WA Government’s move here. But, in the first place, the Federal Government effectively forced WA Premier Colin Barnett’s hand by refusing to continue essential servicing for those communities. In the interest of fairness, some Aboriginal people also support the moves. Notably, Kimberley leader Ian Trust supports the move. It seems incomprehensible that a man like [Abbott], with more Indigenous experience than many other politicians, can continue to offend.Back to yesterday, there are so many things wrong with Mr Abbott's comments. It would be easy to dismiss it if this was his first misstep. But it isn't. He has consistently adopted a bumbling and usually offensive approach to dealing with the First Nations of Australia. It seems incomprehensible that a man like himself, with more Indigenous experience than many other politicians, can continue to offend. Tony Abbott is backing the WA Government’s move but the Federal Government effectively forced WA Premier Colin Barnett’s hand in the first place. A history of gaffesLast year, Mr Abbott said Australia was "scarcely settled" before the arrival of the First Fleet. Then during a visit from the British Prime Minister, Mr Abbott said convicts on the First Fleet would have seen "nothing but bush" when they first landed on Australia’s shores. To put it simply, he implied the nomadic Indigenous cultures of Australia, with complex songlines and established methods of existence, were not as legitimate as the English colonials. Those remarks were amateurish and insulting to many Indigenous people. In 2015, with the Prime Minister promising to start "good government", how does he manage to continue putting his foot in his mouth? The Prime Minister made a choice to go to WA and surely he or his team would have expected a question on the emotive issue of community closures. If he had a scripted response, I hope it wasn't the one he gave last night because that would be a deliberate provocation.If it was a genuine, unplanned response from the Prime Minister, it does indeed show a failure to understand such basic topics as connection to country. It doesn't endear him to Indigenous people or left-leaning and moderate Australians. If he had a scripted response, I hope it wasn’t the one he gave last night because that would be a deliberate provocation. It does appear to have the support of the political right. Conservative commentators Alan Jones and Andrew Bolt have thrown their support behind the Prime Minister. Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull, Treasurer Joe Hockey and Education Minister Christopher Pyne have also defended Tony Abbott. Of course, it goes without saying Tony Abbott is passionate about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs. He has lived on and worked in remote communities for years and, when speaking to him in person, he is genuinely committed to improving the lives of First Nations peoples. But, he is the Prime Minister. All of that good will and best intentions mean nothing without the policy initiative and political guts to make real, positive change. Any Prime Minister, especially one who claims to work for Indigenous people, deserves to be held to a higher and harsher standard. Yes, he's working hard to change the Constitution to positively recognise Indigenous people. What reasonable Australian doesn’t support it? Yes, his political statements on Closing The Gap are powerful and expertly delivered. But, these two issues are too easy. They're politically safe. Of course, many Australians support the recognition movement and the idea of Indigenous people living longer. Essentially, it's a free kick whenever Tony Abbott speaks about it because how can you argue with him? Prime Minister Abbott must be judged on how he approaches the tougher issues.Prime Minister Abbott must be judged on how he approaches the tougher issues like treaties, outrageous Indigenous incarceration rates, numerous funding cuts to the Indigenous sector and the genuine concern from Aboriginal people facing exile from their remote WA communities. I believe anger is too easy at the moment. Indigenous people can't just be angry at Tony Abbott for the latest in a pattern of disrespect. Emotions should be channelled, the publicity must be used positively and the engagement must now be genuine if any resolution or compromise is to be reached. Next year, Indigenous people will have another "lifestyle choice": whether to vote Tony Abbott back into the Prime Ministership.

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras of Greece, center left, spoke with the European Central Bank President, Mario Draghi, on Tuesday. François Hollande and Angela Merkel also attended the talks. BRUSSELS — Frustrated European leaders gave Greece until Sunday to reach an agreement to save its collapsing economy from catastrophe after an emergency summit meeting here on Tuesday ended without the Athens government offering a substantive new proposal to resolve its debt crisis. “The situation is really critical and unfortunately we can’t exclude the black scenarios of no agreement,” said Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, warning that those possibilities included “the bankruptcy of Greece and the insolvency of its banking system” and great pain for the Greek people. Also looming ever larger was the prospect of Greece leaving the European currency union. Mr. Tusk said that the government of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras had until Thursday to deliver a new plan to Greece’s creditors. “Until now I have avoided talking about deadlines,” Mr. Tusk, a former prime minister of Poland, told reporters after a day of fruitless meetings. “But tonight I have to say it loud and clear — the final deadline ends this week.” “I have no doubt that this is the most critical moment in our history.” Deadlines have come and gone without serious consequences, but yet another emergency gathering, this one involving all 28 European Union leaders in Brussels on Sunday, might really be a crunch point. “This could be the last meeting about Greece,” Prime Minister Matteo Renzi of Italy told reporters on Tuesday night. And for the first time, “Grexit” — Greece’s exit from the euro — has surfaced as a serious option. Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm, said at a brief news conference late Tuesday night that his staff had drawn up plans for several possible outcomes. “We have a Grexit scenario prepared in detail,” he said. Mr. Juncker expressed fury at a barrage of verbal attacks on Greece’s European creditors by officials of Syriza, the left-wing party, led by Mr. Tsipras, that won Greek parliamentary elections in January on a platform of rejecting the austerity policies that were a condition of European bailouts. He singled out a remark by the recently departed finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, accusing creditors of “terrorism.” “Who are they and who do they think I am?” Mr. Juncker said, sputtering with rage. He asserted that he was “strongly against” Greece leaving the euro but “I cannot prevent it if the Greek government is not doing what we expect it to do to respect the dignity of the Greek people.” Amid concerns about the fiscal picture in Greece, European leaders held a meeting in Brussels on Tuesday, ahead of an emergency Euro Summit. At a separate news conference, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, made it clear that eurozone leaders were determined to set a very high bar for Athens before the Thursday deadline. “There are only a few days left for a discussion on what’s going to happen in the [CENSORED]ure,” she said. “What we now need is a multi-annual program that goes far beyond the program that we discussed only 10 days ago.” Asked if the eurozone would consider easing the debt burden on Greece — a key demand by Athens — Ms. Merkel emphasized that Greece would first be required to convince its lenders that it stood ready to meet the conditions for a new bailout. The decision by Mr. Tsipras to hold a referendum on whether to accept previous terms set by creditors only made matters worse, Ms. Merkel added. In comments to reporters after the meeting, Mr. Tsipras struck an almost sunny tone by contrast, saying that the talks had been held in “a positive climate” and that his government would continue efforts to secure “a final exit” from the crisis. “The process will be fast,” he said, “beginning in the coming hours with the aim of concluding by the end of the week, at the latest.” Tuesday’s efforts to break the deadlock got off to an inauspicious start when Greece’s new finance minister, Euclid Tsakalotos, on his second day in the job after replacing Mr. Varoufakis, failed to present a detailed plan at a meeting of finance ministers called to review Syriza’s demands after Greek voters rejected previous terms on offer. The failure to present concrete proposals turned what had been billed as a last-chance opportunity for Greece into another display of the substantive and stylistic gulf between Mr. Tsipras’s government and his country’s big creditors, starting with Germany and other European countries that use the euro. Still, it appears that no one wants to take the blame for a Greek departure from the eurozone. That means that all sides seem ready to keep talking even as the crisis, which began more than five years ago, reaches new levels of intensity, and even as Greece hurtles toward a July 20 deadline to make a payment of 3.5 billion euros, or about $3.8 billion, to the European Central Bank. Many analysts say Greece cannot miss that payment without leaving the eurozone. Nicolas Véron, a senior fellow at Bruegel, a research organization in Brussels, agreed that time was running out to keep Greece in the currency union. “If there is no progress whatsoever this week, the prospects for Greece staying in the eurozone would become grim,” Mr. Véron said. The continuation of emergency financing for Greek banks by the European Central Bank “is clearly dependent on the likelihood of an agreement between Greece and its creditors,” Mr. Véron said. But if that source of aid is “stopped and no agreement is in sight, it is difficult to imagine a scenario in which Greece stays in the eurozone for long,” he said. The day’s events continued what has become a pattern of crossed wires and mutual incomprehension between Greece and its creditors, frustrating expectations that the dismissal on Monday of Mr. Varoufakis, a combative former professor, might drain some of the poison or at least uncertainty from Greece’s tumultuous relations with the rest of Europe. Yet Mr. Tsakalotos surprised his peers by turning up for the emergency meeting with only a vague outline of Greece’s proposal for breaking the long standoff. A person with direct knowledge of the talks, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the closed-door meeting, said that Mr. Tsakalotos had at least struck a far less abrasive tone than his predecessor and seemed open to constructive discussion. Some of the finance ministers, summoned to Brussels on Tuesday for the sixth crisis meeting in three weeks, expressed deep frustration at what they considered a further delay by Greece. Late last month, Athens infuriated fellow European countries by calling off negotiations as they came close to yielding a deal and announcing a referendum on creditors’ terms that the Tsipras government then denounced as unacceptable and the work of “extremist conservative forces.” In Athens, a Greek government official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive diplomatic matter, said the Greek proposals, once they arrived in Brussels, would be a revised version of measures submitted early last week in a letter from Mr. Tsipras to creditors. Those proposals largely matched the ones Mr. Tsipras called on Greek voters to reject. But the official, without elaborating, said the revised offer would reflect the outcome of Sunday’s referendum. Shortly before meeting with Ms. Merkel and other leaders in Brussels, Mr. Tsipras spoke by telephone with President Obama and explained Greece’s position. The White House said that the president told the Greek prime minister that it was crucial that both sides reach “a mutually acceptable agreement.” Mr. Obama also spoke with Ms. Merkel on Tuesday and the White House said the two leaders agreed that a deal to keep Greece in the eurozone was “in everyone’s interest.” Greece’s departure from the euro would not necessarily destabilize other weaker members of the eurozone or spread havoc in global markets, which have so far reacted relatively calmly to Greece’s troubles. Yet it would upend one of the European Union’s fundamental principles, a commitment to “ever closer union” in place since 1957, and throw into reverse decades of steady integration. Finance ministers were in some cases even encouraging the idea that Greece should leave. Janis Reirs, finance minister of Latvia, a small Baltic nation that endured its own grinding austerity program and has now returned to economic growth, indicated that a Greek departure might even be beneficial. “If in a system there is an element that doesn’t work, the departure of this element won’t harm the system and in some cases can even be positive,” Mr. Reirs said in response to a question about whether Greece might have to give up the euro. Ms. Merkel said the leaders of all European Union member states would attend the meeting on Sunday because any decision would affect [CENSORED]ure members of the single currency. The presence of leaders from the full bloc could also be needed to approve European Union humanitarian aid for Greece in case a bailout deal for the country remains out of reach.

V3. Effect + Text + Smudge + Border.

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People with type 2 diabetes who have weight loss surgery are more likely to have significant improvements in their diabetes three years compared to diabetics who try lifestyle changes, a small new study suggests. "One of the most important things to take away is that there is durability of remission over time," said Dr. Anita Courcoulas of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, who led the research. Past studies have found that weight loss surgeries sometimes result in improvement for people with type 2 diabetes, but it remains to be seen if the surgeries are better at treating the condition than lifestyle interventions, the researchers write in JAMA Surgery. And few studies have examined the effectiveness of weight loss surgery for people with diabetes as well as class 1 or 2 obesity, which represents a body mass index (BMI) between 30 and 39. (BMI is a measure of weight in relation to height). Weight loss surgeries are typically used to treat people with a BMI of 40 or more, or with a lower BMI but other health conditions. Approximately 29 million Americans - about 9 percent of the U.S. po[CENSORED]tion - have diabetes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 30 percent of them are undiagnosed. Type 2 diabetes, the most common form, is often linked to obesity. In type 2 diabetes, the body doesn't make enough of the hormone insulin, which helps cells use glucose for fuel, or enough insulin is produced but cells are resistant to it. For the new research, the researchers studied 61 people, ages 25 to 55, with type 2 diabetes. About half had class 1 obesity and the rest were heavier. Participants were randomly assigned to receive one of three treatments. One was an intensive lifestyle intervention for one year to help them lose weight with diet, exercise and behavior changes, followed by a lower-intensity lifestyle intervention involving behavioral counseling a few times a month for two years. Alternatively, participants were assigned to one of two weight loss surgeries: either Roux-en-Y gastric bypass (RYGB), or laparoscopic adjustable gastric banding (LAGB). The surgeries were followed by the same low-intensity lifestyle intervention the non-surgery group got, for two years. After three years, 40 percent in the RYGB group, 29 percent in the LAGB group and no one in the lifestyle intervention group had at least a partial remission of their type 2 diabetes. Three people in the RYGB group and one person in the LAGB group had their diabetes disappear entirely, which did not occur for anyone in the lifestyle group. Researchers also found that blood sugar control improved more in the surgery groups, compared to the lifestyle intervention group. The surgery groups were also more likely to no longer need medication for their diabetes. While the new results are a from a randomized study, which is considered the "gold standard" of medical research, Courcoulas said they will need to follow more patients at several medical centers over a longer period of time to draw definite conclusions. The researchers are pooling their data with similar studies from across the country, she added. "We’ll be able to see what the remissions look like at five and seven years," Courcoulas said. "I think that’s the next step in this field." Dr. Osama Hamdy, who was not involved with the new study, cautioned that people with type 2 diabetes and their doctors should not get overly excited about the results. "Any study like this we need to be very cautious when reading them and read between the lines," said Hamdy, who is medical director of the Joslin Diabetes Center Obesity Clinical Program. For example, Hamdy pointed out, only a handful of people in the surgery groups had their diabetes disappear. What's more, he said, newer lifestyle-only interventions can be very effective. "I’m cautious about this and people have to weigh the risks and benefits," he said.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-gltfzO91g American Richard Norris: left, in high school in 1993; center, after suffering a gunshot injury; right, after face transplant surgery. Take your ear off for me, please," Rosie Seelaus says to Randy James, who is sitting on a black exam chair in a special room designed for viewing colors in the Craniofacial Center on the Near West Side of Chicago. He reaches up and detaches his right ear, which she created for him out of silicone seven years before. The ear is shabby, stained from skin oil and mottled by daily use. Viewed under various lights in the neutral, gray-walled room -- daylight, incandescent, fluorescent -- it remains a pasty beige. James is a doctor with the Department of Veterans Affairs in Las Vegas -- the fierce desert sunlight is also tough on his prosthetic ear. Seelaus is an anaplastologist, a clinician who sculpts artificial body parts for people who have lost them through injury or disease or, as with James, who never had them to begin with. He was born 58 years ago with Goldenhar syndrome, a genetic condition that distorts the fetal face, sometimes severely. Some children with Goldenhar, like James, are born missing an ear or part of an ear (he had only the right lobe). Some have bulging eyes, or no eyes at all. James's jaw was undersized and skewed. He underwent 35 surgeries, including one to construct his right cheekbone using bone shaved from his ribs. He pulls up his shirt to show off slashing scars across his ribcage. "I used to tell bullies I was mauled by a tiger at the zoo," he says. The first time I walked through the corridors of the Craniofacial Center, on the University of Illinois at Chicago's medical campus, I had to sit down. Not that I was going to faint, but the immediate possibility occurred to me. So I filled a paper cup with water and carefully lowered myself into a chair. Read: Waiting for a new face: The transplants giving people back their lives And that was before meeting any patients. Seeing the mute plaster molds of cleft faces, the blindly staring glass eyes and the little pyramids of false noses was enough. A baby's hand, made of silicone, grasped at the air. That was 15 years ago. I'm not sure whether I was more or less scared of people with disfigurements than is average. As a child I had been terrified. Even of the small square picture on page 289 in the American Heritage Dictionary illustrating "contortionist," an early-20th-century photograph of a circus acrobat, her chin propped against the back of a chair, her body twisted impossibly above it, a foot planted on either side of her disembodied head. I would turn the pages of the Cs very slowly, steeling myself. Most frightening of all, Cynthia Cowles, in Mrs Farmer's first grade class at Fairwood School, her eyes set too far apart, her nose flattened. We boys teased her relentlessly, so much that her mother phoned my mother, asking her to make me stop. "I felt helpless," my mother told me, years later. "The things you were upset about, you'd open your mouth about." MisperceptionsFear of people with facial disfigurements is a common phobia, yet, unlike other fears -- of height, of water, of the dark -- it is seldom discussed, perhaps because so much po[CENSORED]r culture, from The Iliad to Saw V, pivots upon this fear. Perhaps it is assumed: of course you are afraid of the man without a face. Who wouldn't be? Or perhaps because, unlike fear of high places, water or the dark, teratophobia -- fear of disfigured people or of giving birth to a disfigured baby, literally 'fear of monsters' -- has a living object: the injured, burnt, unusual-looking people themselves. Drawing attention to the flinching reaction they often receive, the stares and mockery that are a routine part of their daily lives, can seem an additional cruelty, the sort of vileness enjoyed by schoolyard bullies. Read: A beauty beyond skin deep Why are distorted faces so frightening? Freud classified certain objects as 'unheimlich,' a difficult-to-translate word akin to 'uncanny': strange, weird, unfamiliar. Waxwork dummies, dolls, mannequins can frighten us because we aren't immediately sure what we're looking at, whether it's human or not, and that causes anxiety. A surprisingly large part of the human brain is used to process faces. Identifying friend from foe at a distance was an essential survival skill on the savannah, and a damaged face is thought to somehow rattle this system. Read: Transplant recipient meets sister of man who gave him a new face The psychologist Irvin Rock demonstrated this in his landmark 1974 paper 'The perception of disoriented figures.' Rock showed that even photos of familiar faces -- famous people like Franklin D Roosevelt, for instance -- will look unsettling when flipped upside down. Just as, if you tip a square enough it stops being a square and starts becoming a diamond, so rotating a face makes it seem less like a face. The mind can't make immediate sense of the inverted features, and reacts with alarm. A bigger change, such as taking away the nose, transforms the face severely enough that it teeters on no longer seeming a human face at all, but something else. That isn't a theoretical example picked out of the air. On another visit to the Craniofacial Center, I enter Seelaus's examination room to be introduced to a patient. He turns in the chair, and is missing the middle part of his face. There arefour magnetic posts where his nose will go, and below it, a void revealing smooth yellow plastic. My eyes lock on his eyes, I shake his hand and say some words. A half-hour later, standing on the elevated train platform, I still feel ... what? 'Harrowed' is the word that eventually comes to mind. Why? There was no surprise. I'm no longer a child but an adult, a newspaper reporter who has spent hours watching autopsies, operations, dissections in gross pathology labs. I was expecting this; it's what I came here for. What about his face was so unsettling? Maybe seeing injured faces compels an observer to confront the random cruelty of life in a raw form. Maybe it's like peeling back the skin and seeing the skull underneath. Like glimpsing death. Maybe it touches some nameless atavistic horror. That's as far as I get before the train arrives and I get on. School daysRandall H James was born in Ohio in 1956. His first surgeries were done over the next couple of years at Cincinnati Children's Hospital by Dr Jacob Longacre, a pioneer in modern plastic surgery. "He was like a second father to me because I saw him so much," says James, who didn't celebrate a Christmas at home between the ages of 3 and 13. School holidays were for operations. Summers too. When little Randy began school, his teachers in the city of Hamilton made a common mistake, the sort of automatic connection between inner person and outer appearance that has been the default assumption since history began. "The teachers assumed I must be stupid," says James, who was put in a class with children who had learning disabilities -- until teachers realized that he was actually very bright, only shy, and missing an ear, which made it harder for him to hear. He was allowed to sit in the front of the room, where he could hear the teacher, and his grades soared. Doctors constructed him a large, puffy, vaguely earish appendage. It looked like a coil of dough, like a boxer's cauliflower ear. It wasn't much help. As a student at the University of Kentucky, James applied to be a residence hall adviser, someone who assists other students in navigating dorm life. The supervisor who rejected him candidly told him that his odd-looking ear could put others off. "'You might make the students nervous,'" James recalls him saying, then paused, the pain still obvious after 40 years. "These were my classmates." History concealedWe are a society where people thrive or fail -- in part, in large part -- because of appearance. The arrangement of your features goes far in deciding who you are attractive to, what jobs you get. Study after study shows that people associate good looks with good qualities, and impugn those who aren't attractive. Even babies do this, favoring large eyes, full lips, smooth skin. Billions of dollars are spent on plastic surgery by people who are in no way disfigured, just for that little extra boost they feel it gives to them, gilding the lilies of their attractiveness. How do people with unusual appearances fit into such a world? For most of recorded history, children born with disfigurements were wonders, portents or punishments. If they were allowed to live. "A couple hundred years ago, people born with craniofacial conditions, they were just putting them in a bucket of water," said Dr David Reisberg, an oral plastic surgeon at the Craniofacial Center. But even then, astute observers saw beyond externalities. Michel de Montaigne in 1595 encountered a child conjoined to the half-torso, arms and legs of an undeveloped twin (what we would now call a parasitic twin), displayed by its father for money. Montaigne noted: "Those that we call monsters are not so to God, who sees in the immensity of His work the infinite forms that He has comprehended therein." Read: Face transplant patients: Where are they now? Adults were another matter. Those who came upon their distinctive faces later in life were seen as having been dealt their due, either through heroism in battle -- dueling scars were so fashionable in 19th-century Germany that young men would intentionally wound themselves -- or through the outward manifestation of inner sin. Plastic surgery began its first, faltering steps as a separate field of medicine after Columbus brought back syphilis from the New World in the 1490s, the injurious effects of which include destruction of the nasal cartilage. Soon silversmiths were fashioning metallic noses, and surgeons were cutting triangular flaps from patients' foreheads and twisting them to form rudimentary new noses. Sometimes that even worked. The twin impulses, to conceal and to correct, have been competing ever since. Perhaps the most surprising thing about the history of plastic surgery is how old it is. The use of the term 'plastic' to describe a type of medical operation was po[CENSORED]rized in German surgical texts in the 1820s, long predating its 20th-century use for the synthetic material. British doctors in 19th-century India advanced plastic surgery while trying to repair the noses and lips local warlords cut off as a mark of disgrace. But plastic surgery truly entered the modern age after World War I. Trench warfare created facial injuries with a grim efficiency. The trench protected your body and the helmet protected your head, saving your life but not your face. Historians estimate that 20,000 British soldiers returned home with mutilated faces after the War. Society wrestled with contradictory impulses: to seek them out and to shun them. The scarred faces of soldiers were highlighted in books and exhibitions, both to show off what was possible through modern medical technology and to act as a cautionary tale of the horrors of war. Yet in Britain there were also schemes to segregate those with facial injuries in their own villages, to keep them out of sight. In the 1920s, almost every café in Paris had its pensioned veterans. "Croix de Guerre ribbons in their lapels and others also had the yellow and green of the Médaille Militaire," Ernest Hemingway notes in A Movable Feast. "I watched... the quality of their artificial eyes and the degree of skill with which their faces had been reconstructed. There was always an almost iridescent shiny cast about the considerably reconstructed face, rather like that of a well packed ski run, and we respected these clients." Sir Harold Gillies set up his famous hospital during World War I in Sidcup, a small English town, which soon found itself po[CENSORED]ted by servicemen having their faces rebuilt. Certain park benches were painted blue, as a code to the townspeople to brace themselves for the patients who might be sitting upon them, and thus not be startled as they approached. This "startle" reaction is a cause of much distress, both for people with disfigurements and for those they encounter, who must compress the lengthy adjustment period that recovering patients themselves go through into a moment, and tend not to do it well. Until not so long ago, those reluctant to see people whose appearances stray beyond the range of the usual actually had the law on their side. Many cities in the United States had 'ugly laws' designed primarily to reduce public begging. Chicago's law read: Any person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or in any way deformed, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, or an improper person to be allowed in or on the streets, highways, thoroughfares or public places in this city, shall not therein or thereon expose himself or herself to public view ... The law was not repealed until 1974. Survivors"So Randy, can I take your bar off?" says Rosie Seelaus. James has a white gold C-shaped armature permanently fixed to the side of his head, anchored to his skull with gold screws. The prosthetic ear snaps onto the bar. "I'll take your bar off so I can make the substructure. At lunch we can look at images we have." It is Monday. James is in Chicago for the entire week, having his new ear created. Seelaus removes the screws and lifts the metal structure from the side of his head, the first time it has been taken off in seven years, since he decided to replace the crude ear surgeons had created for him with a prosthetic. "If this were fitting well we could use the same mold and just replace the silicone," she says of James, who has lost 24 pounds, which threw off the fit of his ear. "But since it's not fitting well, we're going to be starting from scratch and redesigning ... Tomorrow will be mostly sculpting his ear." This involves a range of high-tech gear. A CT scan is taken of his left ear. A computer then creates a mirror image of that scan, which a milling machine uses to carve a right ear out of a block of dense blue wax. Seelaus takes this prototype and makes a second, skin-toned ear from softer dental wax, which she puts on James to adjust its form and fit. A colorimeter and a spectrophotometer are used to gauge exact color values. "Color is essential to having a successful prosthesis outcome," says Seelaus, who spends hours matching shades, then fitting James's ear to his head -- even the most perfect, natural looking ear will fail if there's a gap between it and the wearer's head. When she's done, the ear is then pressed into dental stone to create a mold that she fills with silicone to make the final ear. She mixes liquid pigments into splashes of clear silicone, colors she dabs into clear plastic, which she holds against James's head, trying to match his skin tone. Seelaus doesn't pour the colored silicone into the mold; she paints it in, layer by layer. To imitate tiny veins, she uses strands of red and purple yarn. Matching the appearance of each individual is crucial. She has, for instance, created ears that were partially burned, to match scarring on a burned face. "This is a full-life journey for these patients," says Seelaus, who has done this work for 16 years. "I'm still learning from patients about what their life experience is and how it changes. Being born with a facial difference becomes a life journey that has a lot to do with acceptance. I've learned with patients who are burn survivors -- not victims, survivors -- initially their relationship with the prosthesis changes, too, throughout their lives ... What I try to tell them is, they've been through a lot already, it will also take adapting to the new way they look." How people fare on this journey generally depends on what they start with. "It's about your self-perception before the incident," Seelaus says. And self-perception really matters. A Dutch study in 2012 looked at how well people with facial disfigurements functioned socially, finding that their satisfaction with their appearance was more important than the objective severity of the disfigurement. Not that living with a face that is far beyond the mainstream is ever easy, or purely a matter of confidence. It isn't. It's a struggle, Seelaus says, requiring courage and endurance. "People who sit in this chair are survivors," she says. "They don't come to me in this chair without having survived something, and often it's a lot. It takes resilience to get through the treatment. And what they've been through living day-to-day in society takes a resilience we may never understand if we don't go through that. Burn survivors have a resilience that is phenomenal. The reality is, it can happen to anyone. And so maybe that will bring about compassion." "A Face for Me"Is greater public compassion on the way? Stares and thoughtless comments are a daily part of life for people with disfigurements. But there are many groups that have long suffered abuse at the hands of society but are now better accepted. Is there any hint that those with damaged faces are traveling the same path that, say, people with Down's syndrome are taking towards being more fully welcomed and integrated by society? "People would really have to change a lot to make facial deformity the new normal," says Kim Teems, Communications and Program Director at FACES, the National Craniofacial Association. "It's a very hard thing to go through, not only being looked at strangely, but all the pain of surgeries." Based in Tennessee, FACES started in 1969 as the Debbie Fox Foundation. Fox has an important if forgotten role in the glacial social progress of people with disfigurements. She was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on 31 December 1955, with a massive cleft from her upper lip to her forehead, her eyes pushed to the sides of her head: basically a hole where her face should be. "Her parents resigned themselves to raising their youngest daughter as a hidden child -- secluded from outside eyes," a newspaper account noted. Fox said she had never seen her own face until she was eight years old and found a hand mirror. She screamed in terror. "So that was what I looked like," she wrote in her 1978 autobiography, A Face for Me. "That was why I couldn't play with the other children, go to school, go to church, run into the store to buy candy or ice cream. All these things had been forbidden to me." By third grade she attended school via telephone hookup, standing to recite the pledge of allegiance with classmates she'd never met. When, at age 13, she was driven to Atlanta for reconstructive surgery, it was the first time she had left her hometown, the first time she had eaten in a restaurant -- in the back, at off hours, but in a real restaurant. It was also when "the girl without a face" caught wider public attention. The magazine Good Housekeeping ran a story about Fox in 1970 that showed her only from the back, a squeamishness that the media still struggle to overcome. Seeing people different from oneself can be a helpful step towards accepting them, but for people with disfigurements, public visibility has been slow in coming. Some progress has been made, though. Esquire magazine put a soldier missing both legs and an arm on its cover in 2007, and in 2010 featured inside a straight-on photograph of the film critic Roger Ebert with most of his lower jaw removed because of salivary gland cancer. More on Roger Ebert and his remarkable life Educating the publicRandy James is not optimistic. As someone who not only wears an artificial ear and has sprays of scars under his jaw, but also is a doctor working with veterans whose faces have been damaged by war or illness, he doesn't see much improvement in how society views people with facial disfigurements. "In some ways it's worse," James says. "With the rise of social media, you can be an anonymous bully. If you're not attractive, in many ways you're not going to be successful in society. "I was working at St Mary's Medical Center in Huntington, West Virginia. I had just gotten my [prosthetic] ear right before I started there. Had I not had my new ear, which really changes my appearance, would they have made me one of their poster boys promoting their hospital? I can pretty much guarantee they wouldn't have done that if I had my old ear." Some disagree. Just as World War I injected people with disfigurements into the general po[CENSORED]tion, so have a dozen years of warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq, and this new generation of veterans is having an impact on how those with a wide variety of severe injuries are viewed. "With our current conflicts, we're seeing injures far more catastrophic than we used to see," says Captain Craig J Salt, a plastic surgeon at the U.S. Naval Medical Center in San Diego, California. "Massive tissue destruction, horrific burns ... The combination of the level of destruction with amazing lifesaving capability of the front lines gives you a patient po[CENSORED]tion who would not have survived in the Vietnam era ... We have people entering rehabilitation horrifically disfigured in significant numbers." Salt, who led the Navy's effort to begin treating facially wounded veterans with the same team approach used for treating cleft palates, says, "My impression is society is more accepting and more aware of the magnitude of injuries our soldiers and sailors, marines and airmen are coming back with. They're more accustomed to seeing disfigured patients because of media awareness, with social media ... people might be a little less shocked to see a disfigured patient." Soldiers in Britain echo Salt's sentiment. "Since I was injured five years ago, the profile of disability and injured service personnel has grown massively," says Joe Townsend, a Royal Marine who lost his legs to a bomb in Afghanistan. "Unfortunately, a lot of that's down to the growing number of guys and girls coming back from Afghanistan with life-changing injuries, but the progress made by charities and the awareness on the television has really helped to educate the general public ... Before, I'd walk down the street and I'd notice people looking at me, but it's pretty much an everyday occurrence to see someone injured now." Townsend says this in Wounded: The Legacy of War, a coffee table book of beautiful, fashion-style photographs of wounded British soldiers, taken by the rock singer Bryan Adams. Facial equalityIt is tempting to point books such as Wounded, and other po[CENSORED]r culture treatments of disfigurement, and aggregate them into a sign of progress. Wonder by R J Palacio is a young-adult book that tells the story of August, a ten-year-old with severe facial differences trying to adjust to school life for the first time. "If I found a magic lamp and I could have one wish, I would wish that I had a normal face that no one ever noticed at all," August confides, on the first page. And these works do have an impact. Wonder was on the New York Times bestseller list for 97 weeks. Even a decade ago, a child such as Mary Cate Lynch, three, might seldom have gone out in public. She was born with Apert syndrome, an extremely rare genetic condition that affects her head, face, feet and hands. But today, Mary Cate has her own cheery website, introducing her with photos and video. Her mother, Kerry Lynch, has taken her to 80 Chicago-area schools to present a program, often tied to the class reading Wonder, that explains Apert syndrome. "Every parent does what they think best," says Lynch, a nurse. "I thought the best thing I could do is to educate others so they wouldn't be afraid of it. Fear comes from the unknown. I just thought if I could tell others about it, show them that, yeah, she's a little bit different, but she's more similar. If I could explain what these differences are, be very candid about it, that's what I could do to help her in her life." Society takes a long time to accept people who look in any way different. Many Americans thought Irish immigrants, as a class, were ugly when they migrated in numbers to the USA in the 1850s, mocking them for their features, holding them up as signs of congenital inferiority. A few decades later, they marveled at how much these same Irish immigrants had somehow changed -- "even those born and brought up in Ireland often show a decided improvement in their physiognomy after having been here a few years," Samuel R Wells wrote in the 1870s, making the common error of confusing a shift in one's own perception with a change in the object being perceived. Irish faces didn't actually change; the American public's antipathy did, slowly and without their even being aware of it. Awareness of the challenges facing people with facial differences has not yet grown enough to smooth the path of any given adult walking into a restaurant or any given child showing up on a playground. But the seeds of improvement are definitely being planted. In Britain, the group Changing Faces put posters of disfigured people on the London Underground. Its founder, James Partridge, read the noon TV news in London for a week in 2009 to show that, while delivering information may be monopolized by the beautiful, it doesn't have to be. "Are things changing?" says Partridge. "I think it's very much about where you look ... In 2008 we launched our campaign for face equality. We started public awareness, putting posters up, saying, 'Have a look at these characters, they're okay.' "We definitely had an impact ... [though] outside of the confines of Britain, much less. Though in Taiwan there is a Facial Equality Day in May. In South Africa, the message of facial equality is very easy for them to pick up. I think it's such a simple concept, the prejudices we need to attack." Face to faceIn 1998, the Italian fashion company Benetton ran a series of ads featuring people with disabilities. The ads awakened the guilt I still felt about Cynthia Cowles. I realized we had some unfinished business. I tracked down her phone number and called her, writing about our conversation in a Chicago Sun-Times column published at the time. Talking to Cynthia was awkward for the first five seconds. Then we were old classmates, laughing and sharing stories. She said she had seen me interviewed on TV. "You still play with your shoelace when you're nervous," she said. I was nervous now. I told her I was sorry for being mean to her in grade school. "If you were mean to me, there were so many other people who were so much worse," she said. "I recall you as being one of the kinder people. You were the one in eighth grade who came to visit me in the hospital -- you told me your mother made you come, but you stayed a half-hour, very uncomfortably -- and brought a box of stationery." I have no memory of that, though spilling the beans about my mother's command was exactly the sort of dopey, over-honest thing I would say, then and now. She recalled feeling sorry for me. "You got teased for being fat, and got teased because you couldn't skip," she said, recounting how the gym teacher tried to drill me into skipping. After we caught up -- we both had got married -- I asked her something I had always wondered about. What exactly was the cause of her disfigurement? "I was basically born without bone in my nose, and the front of my forehead was not closed," she said. "I'm hydrocephalic, which means my head is bigger than it should be, which put pressure on my brain." She had more than 60 operations. "Now I'm done," she said. We laughed a lot, particularly when she told a story about dealing with her tormentors. "My mother always thought if you ignored it, it would go away," she said. But that only went so far, and one day she turned around and socked a kid who was teasing her, then was terrified because she realized the assistant principal had been standing right there and saw her. "But he just gave me the thumbs-up sign, and said, 'If you didn't, I was going to.'" A matter of perceptionOn Friday, Seelaus heats James's new ear in an Imperial V Laboratory Oven, then, wearing light green oven mitts, removes the cylindrical mold. After it has cooled, she pries the sections of the mold apart. "Look at that," she says, brushing away excess silicone, then almost sings, "I think that looks pretty goooood." She lifts out a startlingly human-looking ear. With a few trims and a touch of color here and there, she attaches it to James's head. From two feet away you can't tell it isn't a natural human ear. James is delighted. "It looks a lot better, huh hon?" he says to his wife, who has come to see the final result. She later pronounces the new ear "sexy". Seelaus gives him some practical care tips. Keep away from solvents, small children and pets -- animals like to chew silicone. The ear will sink. "If you go swimming, if you're in the ocean, wear your old ear," she says. "Don't put it on top of a radiator or toaster oven." I estimate the ear costs $10,000 -- its fabrication took up most of Seelaus's working week -- and she does not contradict me. I also observe that Seelaus must be one of the few artists who hopes that her work goes entirely unnoticed by the public, and she doesn't contradict me about that, either. Happy though he is with his improved appendage, when I ask James if I could take a picture of him wearing his new ear, he refuses. He says he is worried, not about the photo's appearance on Mosaic, but that it might later be lifted and included in some online "hall of monsters". I ask several times in several ways, reassuring him that in my view this is highly unlikely. His answer is always the same: No. A reminder that looks are always relative, always only part of the story, and that our reaction to them fills in the rest. There is no such reluctance with Seelaus's next patient, Victor Chukwueke, a Nigerian-born medical student with neurofibromatosis, a disease of rapidly growing tumours that crushed his jaw, distorted his face, and left his right eye an empty hollow. He is here to get a new false eye and surrounding socket, to help put his [CENSORED]ure patients at ease. Even without a prosthetic, however, with a scarred void where his right eye once was, he smiles and poses as I click away. Seeing people with disfigurements is important, because once a person, or a society, becomes familiar with them, apprehension fades. Just a couple of weeks before, I had needed to steel myself, sitting in my car in the parking lot of the Loyola University Medical Center, on my way to interview burn survivors, actually saying out loud, "If they can live it, I can see it," to gather my courage. But by the time I meet Chukwueke, that trepidation is gone. I had asked Seelaus to send me a photo of him, so I could prepare myself ahead of time, but she didn't, and I go in cold. Hurrying into the Craniofacial Center, I spot a man who is obviously him, plop into the chair next to him and introduce myself, and we immediately begin to talk. His speech is sometimes hard for me to understand, because of his damaged jaw, so I have to lean in very close, our noses inches apart, as we talk to each other. It seems the most normal thing in the world. Chukwueke puts his situation neatly into perspective. "We all have an issue," he says. "We all go through things in life, go through difficulties. You don't have to let your challenges bring you down or let you be sad and depressed. It's a matter of perception. How you see it."

V1. Effect + Text + Pattern.

Dan Wagner, the chief executive officer of U.K.-based mobile payments company Powa Technologies Ltd., poses a challenge for database giant Oracle Corp. Wagner’s company last year began shifting away from pricey products from Oracle and International Business Machines Corp., replacing them with open-source software, which is freely available and can be modified. Now, Wagner said the closely held company is converting virtually all of its operations to free database software. “They scale and operate extremely well and they don’t cost anything,” Wagner said. Other companies share Wagner’s view and are shifting to software whose code is public. While the threat to Oracle has been around for years, it’s becoming more intense with recent improvements that make open-source technology more reliable -- and appealing to a new generation of multibillion-dollar startups, said Terilyn Palanca, an analyst at Gartner Inc. “There was pessimism for a decade on whether those things could stand up. The question is largely resolved,” she said. “This open source, this open core model, is something we’re going to see growing and growing through the years.” Sales DeclineThe impact shows up in Oracle’s sales of new software licenses, which have declined for seven straight quarters compared with the period a year earlier. New licenses made up 25 percent of total revenue in fiscal 2014, down from 28 percent a year earlier -- a sign the company is becoming increasingly dependent on revenue from supporting and maintaining products at existing customers and having a harder time finding new business. Oracle reports fiscal fourth-quarter earnings next week. To blunt this, the Redwood City, California-based company is expanding efforts in cloud computing, which will let it sell packaged high-margin services to customers. That may help balance the slowdown in the basic business. It also operates an open-source database called MySQL. “Does the cloud-related business grow quickly enough to offset any long-term weakness in new software licenses? To us the answer is yes,” said Bill Kreher, an analyst at Edward Jones & Co., who has a buy rating on Oracle. “I would expect to see Oracle continue to gain market share within the cloud.” Deborah Hellinger, a spokeswoman for Oracle, declined to comment. Companies contemplating a move away from traditional database sellers such as Oracle have essentially two options: hire internal engineers to corral various free open-source databases, or pay the startups behind the free technologies for some must-have features. Licensing Oracle’s database can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on which of its numerous features customers choose to use. Free ProgramsOne of the open-source technologies is the Cassandra database, which was created last decade and has been widely used by companies such as Apple Inc. and Netflix Inc. Though some companies develop and run Cassandra themselves, others go to the main backer, the startup DataStax Inc., for technical features they may not have the expertise to develop themselves. DataStax, for example, has a customer that paid about $500,000 in Oracle software licenses and now spends $90,000 with DataStax for a similar project, said Matt Pfeil, DataStax’s co-founder. That price difference has started to have a major effect in the industry. “I think I’ve been in this industry too long to use Oracle,” says Kellan Elliott-McCrea, chief technology officer of Etsy Inc. “I saw so many of my peers in the late ’90s crashing and burning and spending all of their money on Oracle.” Instead, Etsy, an online marketplace for hand-crafted goods, runs on a hodge-podge of open-source databases, primarily MySQL. ‘Sweet Spot’Not all applications are well-suited to open source, as the systems made by Oracle and others still have capabilities far in excess of the free systems, Palanca said. “You’re still going to have a class of applications for which these open-source solutions are not yet ready, and that is the continued sweet spot for Oracle,” she said. Even some really big customers are finding ways to increase their reliance on upstarts. Open source is changing the type of technologies Goldman Sachs Group Inc. deploys in systems relating to messaging and databases, said Don Duet, the co-head of technology at Goldman Sachs. Many of these technologies became “standard parts” of Goldman’s computing infrastructure in the last two years, he said. “It’s hard not to go into our datacenter and see a tremendous amount of open source running our applications and middleware,” he said. Goldman Sachs recently invested in a funding round for MongoDB Inc., another open source database provider. Startups’ ShiftA Bloomberg survey of 20 startups valued at more than $1 billion supports the trend. The survey, which included companies such as Cloudflare Inc. and Pinterest Inc., found they placed open-source technologies at the heart of their businesses, with the exception of DocuSign, which had built around Microsoft’s SQL Server. None of the companies surveyed indicated they had a large Oracle database deployment for their main services, though many used bits of Oracle software to run aspects of their organizations. Uber Technologies Inc., the car service, has committed heavily to Oracle via a worldwide rollout of the company’s E-Business Suite software, but job listings and presentations by Uber employees indicate it relies on a customized version of the free MySQL for its software. “A lot of the startups now go with MySQL or less expensive options,” said David Wolff, the CEO of Database Specialists, a database consultancy. “The only thing that people complain about with Oracle is how much it costs.” Extra FeaturesCompanies can pay Oracle to get extra features of MySQL for $2,000 to $10,000 per computer it runs on, but none of the companies indicated this was the case. Others including Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Facebook Inc., and Google Inc. have even built on MySQL to create their own free variant called WebScaleSQL. Still, Oracle has its fans. Zach Nelson, the CEO of NetSuite Inc., a cloud enterprise resource planning company, described Oracle’s software as “the best transaction database,” and said it made sense to use it. “It only costs us 6 percent of revenue, and that’s nothing,” Nelson said. As open-source databases continue to improve, there may be less reason to pay for Oracle’s products. “I think more and more organizations are starting to realize the reason Oracle is charging that much is because there’s incredibly sophisticated technology in Oracle,” Palanca said. “Organizations are realizing they don’t need that for everything anymore.”

Welcome To CsBlackDevil Enjoy Your Stay Have Fun

Welcome To CsBlackDevil Enjoy Your Stay Have Fun

Like InfoWorld itself, InfoWorld's Technology of the Year Awards have always been about change. We keep an eye out for the platforms and tools pushing against the barriers in application development, mobile, cloud computing, and in other corners of information technology, and we bring them in for review. At the end of the year, we get together and decide which are the very best. It should be obvious to everyone that technology is evolving faster than ever, and we found ourselves working overtime in 2014 trying to keep up. New languages, frameworks, and platforms for building enterprise mobile apps -- invariably powered by Node.js -- demanded our attention. The arrival of Java 8 prompted refreshes of the major Java IDEs. The PaaS wars led us to the inevitable dilemma: Cloud Foundry or OpenShift? OpenShift took the crown this year, but keep an eye on IBM Bluemix in 2015. Little big ironEven data center hardware is evolving at a breakneck pace as the vendors work to shove more compute power, more IO, and more storage into smaller spaces. One of our hardware winners, HP Moonshot, packs a whopping 45 server cartridges -- ARM, Atom, Opteron, or Xeon -- into a 4.3U chassis. With energy-sipping cartridges designed for specific workloads such as virtual desktops and distributed data processing, Moonshot is a triumph of high density and high efficiency. Another winner, the Dell PowerEdge R730xd, brings together so much flash, disk, and elegance, it makes an ideal platform for software-defined storage solutions such as VMware's remarkable Virtual SAN (also a winner). The R730xd shows that innovation still lives in 2U, two-socket servers. It's fascinating what some vendors can do with commodity parts. The magic, of course, is in the software. In the Tintri VMstore, for example, the Tintri OS uses inline deduplication, compression, and other tricks to turn one part MLC flash and 10 parts SATA disk into something akin to an all-flash array for virtual machines. Lightning-fast flash delivers the IO, while disk provides the capacity. Managing storage with Tintri might seem magical because Tintri operates exclusively in terms of virtual machines and virtual disks, rather than intermediate concepts like LUNs and volumes. After all, isn't it high time we assumed that all machines are virtual machines? You might think so … until something better comes along -- say, like Linux containers, which offer the isolation of a virtual machine in a much lighter footprint. Think tiny, OS-less VMs with an instant-on button. Container crazeIt's a rare product that earns a Technology of the Year Award before reaching version 2. But have we ever seen anything like Docker? A new tool for building, running, and sharing Linux containers, Docker addresses so many pain points in application development and application lifecycle management, it would be difficult to overestimate its impact. Docker makes it easy to ensure that applications are built the same way every time and run exactly the same in development, testing, and production. Docker helps streamline and simplify devops. Developers own what's inside the container, and operators own what's on the outside. Docker is even changing how applications are designed (as loosely coupled containers running microservices) and how the operating system is conceived (as a minimalist runtime for containers). It's an ambitious project with big issues remaining to be solved (networking, security, orchestration), but it has broad industry support and a rapidly growing user base. It's exactly the sort of technology that the Technology of the Year Awards were made for. After so much experimentation in 2013, it was an oddly quiet year in mobile devices, with Apple's iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus the clear highlights. Apple impressed us even more with Handoff, a feature in the latest versions of OS X and iOS that allows you to begin a note or an email or another task on one device, and pick up right where you left off on another. Dubbed "liquid computing" by my InfoWorld colleague Galen Gruman, Handoff is the kind of innovation that really matters to users and an easy pick for a Technology of the Year Award. Something old, something newThe Technology of the Year winners circle is usually a gathering of both established products and young upstarts. We've seen the iPhone on this list before, and the same can be said for Node.js, the nimble JavaScript server, and GitHub, the new center of the universe for open source code. One of this year's winners, Microsoft Office for iOS, might count as both established product and upstart. It's certainly the first non-Windows Microsoft product to win our award -- another sign of how fast the technology landscape is changing. Technology of the Year veteran Hadoop has owned the big data stage for years, but the time has finally arrived for the elephant to share the spotlight. Recent versions of Hive, a companion Apache project, finally deliver on the promise of real-time, SQL-like queries of Hadoop data, moving us closer to the day when the open source big data stack can replace the traditional enterprise data warehouse. The push toward real-time and event stream processing is also shifting attention to projects such as Apache Spark and Apache Storm. Spark offers an ingenious way to do distributed processing in memory, and it can run on Hadoop or a stand-alone cluster. Storm is a distributed stream processing system that integrates with any message queue and any database, and work is underway to integrate it with Hadoop. So just as Hadoop has been freed from the bonds of MapReduce and batch processing, these fresh new options for distributed, real-time processing have emerged to take their place alongside it. They also take a place alongside 30 other 2015 Technology of the Year Award winners. To learn about all 32 of our winning products, see our slide show.

Welcome to our Windows 10 Tutorials page. Our free Windows 10 tutorials will help you quickly become an expert! Windows 10 will be faster, easier to use and more fascinating than any other version of Windows that has come before it. We’ve been tracking Windows 10 since the very beginning and here on Windows10update.com, we will bring you some great tutorials for this new operating system. Let’s get started. General Windows 10 Overview What is Windows 10? When will Windows 10 be released? What are the minimum hardware requirements for Windows 10? What are the minimum hardware requirements for Windows 10 mobile? What are the supported upgrade paths to Windows 10? Where can I find Windows 10 Tutorials? Where can I get Windows 10 Training? Inside the Operating System Windows 10 Tutorials 1 – Logging in to Windows 10 Windows 10 Tutorials 2 – The new Windows 10 Start Menu Windows 10 Tutorials 3 – the Windows 10 Taskbar Windows 10 Tutorials 4 – Cortana in Windows 10 Windows 10 Tutorials 5 – File Explorer Windows 10 Tutorials 6 – The Windows Store Windows 10 Tutorials 7 – Keyboard Windows 10 Tutorials 8 – Task View Windows 10 Tutorials 9 – Notifications Windows 10 Tutorials 10 – Windows Update Windows 10 Tutorials 11 – Privacy Settings Windows 10 Tutorials 12 – Devices Windows 10 Tutorials 13 – Ease of Access Windows 10 Tutorials 14 – Accounts Windows 10 Tutorials 15 – Network & Internet Windows 10 Tutorials 16 – System Windows 10 Tutorials 17 – Time & Language Windows 10 Tutorials 18 – Lock Screen Personalization Windows 10 Tutorials 19 – Windows Accessories Windows 10 Tutorials 20 – Windows System Windows 10 Tutorials 21 – Windows Ease Of Access Windows 10 Tutorials 22 – All Apps Windows 10 Tutorials 23 – Account Types Windows 10 Tutorials 24 – Local Account Windows 10 Tutorials 25 – Microsoft Account Windows 10 Tutorials 26 – Power & Sleep Windows 10 Tutorials 27 – Power Settings Windows 10 Tutorials 28 – Power Plans Windows 10 Tutorials 29 – Installing Windows Updates Windows 10 Tutorials 30 – Installing Preview Builds Windows 10 Tutorials 31 – Backup Windows 10 Tutorials 32 – Recovery Windows 10 Tutorials 33 – Touchscreen Desktop Windows 10 Tutorials 34 – Changing The Display Resolution Windows 10 Tutorials 35 – WinX Menu Windows 10 Tutorials 36 – How to Access The Task Manager Windows 10 Tutorials 37 – How to Rename Your PC Windows 10 Tutorials 38 – How to Change Your Desktop Background Windows 10 Tutorials 39 – How to Open Control Panel Windows 10 Tutorials 40 – Universal Windows Apps And How to Re-size Them Windows 10 Tutorials 41 – How to Change Account Picture Windows 10 Tutorials 42 – Action Center Windows 10 Tutorials 43 – How To Show Or Hide Notifications Windows 10 Tutorials 44 – How to Setup Picture Password Windows 10 Tutorials 45 – Create a Shortcut to Clear Clipboard Windows 10 Tutorials 46 – Create a USB Recovery Drive Windows 10 Tutorials 47 – How to Boot to Advanced Startup Options Windows 10 Tutorials 48 – How to Start Windows 10 in Safe Mode Windows 10 Tutorials 49 – Disk Cleanup Windows 10 Tutorials 50 – Create a Shortcut to Boot to Advanced Startup Options Windows 10 Tutorials 51 – How to Enable Energy Saver Mode Windows 10 Tutorials 52 – Create a Password Reset USB Drive Windows 10 Tutorials 53 – How to Change Password of Your Local Account Windows 10 Tutorials 54 – How to Turn Cortana On or Off Windows 10 Tutorials 55 – How to Enable Jump Lists in Start Menu Windows 10 Tutorials 56 – Enable or Disable Disk Write Protection Windows 10 Tutorials 57 – Sign in to User Account Automatically Windows 10 Tutorials 58 – How to Pin to and Unpin Apps From Taskbar Windows 10 Tutorials 59 – How to Open an Elevated Command Prompt Windows 10 Tutorials 60 – How to Enable or Disable Hibernate Windows 10 Tutorials 61 – Group Policy for Specific User or Group Windows 10 Tutorials 62 – Automatic Maintenance Windows 10 Tutorials 63 – Aero Shake Windows 10 Tutorials 64 – How to Turn Battery Saver Mode On or Off Windows 10 Tutorials 65 – Create a Shortcut to Battery Saver Setting Windows 10 Tutorials 66 – How to Enable or Disable Fast Startup Windows 10 Tutorials 67 – How to Set a Display as Main Display Windows 10 Tutorials 68 – Hide or Show Frequent Folders in Quick Access Windows 10 Tutorials 69 – Changing SmartScreen Settings Windows 10 Tutorials 70 – Using Task View in Windows 10 Windows 10 Tutorials 71 – Change Theme of Your Account Windows 10 Tutorials 72 – Turn System Tray Icons On or Off Windows 10 Tutorials 73 – Default Apps Windows 10 Tutorials 74 – How to Unblock a File Windows 10 Tutorials 75 – Configure File Explorer to Open With This PC View Windows 10 Tutorials 76 – How to Pin to Start and Unpin from Start Windows 10 Tutorials 77 – Enable Aero Glass Transparency With Blur Windows 10 Tutorials 78 – Turn Aero Snap On or Off Windows 10 Tutorials 79 – Change DPI Scaling Level for Displays Windows 10 Tutorials 80 – How to Rebuild Icon Cache Windows 10 Tutorials 81 – Change the Number of Recent Items to Display in Jump Lists Windows 10 Tutorials 82 – Hide Specific File or Folder From Quick Access Windows 10 Tutorials 83 – Add or Remove Quick Launch Toolbar Windows 10 Tutorials 84 – How to Disable UAC Windows 10 Tutorials 85 – How to Disable the AutoRun Feature

Welcome To CsBlackDevil Enjoy Your Stay Have Fun

Welcome To CsBlackDevil Enjoy Your Stay Have Fun