Nvidia’s game streaming service, GeForce Now, is moving to a new library opt-in system, one who will hand videogame developers ultimate control over whether their videogames are supported on the platform or not.

It appears as though Nvidia’s dream of an open gaming PC in the sky is well and truly over—big publishers have kicked up such a fuss that it is now relinquishing any control it once had over which games make it onto the GeForce Now service. From here on out, it’s up to publishers and developers to opt-in and allows their videogames to be beamed from one of Nvidia’s datacentres.

In turn, that means some videogames will leave the GeForce Now platform, at least for the time being. The reason for which, Nvidia cites in a blog post, is that “some publishers are still figuring out their cloud strategies.” These changes may take place from May 31.

It’s a troubling sign for cloud gaming services. You can call me naive, and perhaps I’m turning a blind eye to the specifics of EULAs. Still, I don’t see what difference there is between the gaming PC sat under your desk and one which you’re renting from Nvidia—either way you’re still buying the games through the same channels as before: Steam, Origin, Epic Games Store, GOG, etc.

That’s what separates Nvidia GeForce Now from a service such as Google Stadia. Whereas Stadia has a store and requires studios to develop their games specially for the service, GeForce Now is more or less a promise of compatible and capable hardware. The machine you receive (either for free or for a small fee) is conceptually the same as any gaming PC and maintains the equal access to the full range of digital libraries. For example, it’s just made up of a sliver of a server rack instead of individual components.

Whether you play the videogames that you’ve already purchased via a rented server or a home-built PC shouldn’t matter. And it’s not like anyone seems to care about the eleventy other streaming services that offer the same thing as GeForce Now….

What is GeForce?

GeForce is a brand of GPUs or graphics processing units designed by Nvidia. As of the GeForce 20 Superseries, there have been sixteen iterations of the design. Later diversification of the product line covered every tier of the PC graphics market, ranging from cost-sensitive. GPUs integrated on motherboards to mainstream add-in local boards.

Most recently, GeForce technology has been introduced into Nvidia’s line of embedded application processors, designed for electronic handhelds and mobile handsets.
The first GeForce products were discrete GPUs designed for add-on graphics boards, intended for the high-margin PC gaming market.

Concerning discrete GPUs, found in add-in graphics-boards, Nvidia’s GeForce and AMD’s Radeon GPUs are the only remaining competitors in the high-end market. Along with its nearest competitor, the AMD Radeon, the GeForce architecture is moving toward general-purpose graphics processor unit (GPGPU).

GPGPU is expected to expand GPU functionality beyond the traditional rasterization of 3D graphics, to turn it into a high-performance computing device able to execute arbitrary programming code. It is in the same way a CPU does, but with different strengths (highly parallel execution of straightforward calculations) and weaknesses (worse performance for complex branching code).

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Why Do We Need Ansible?

It is of utmost importance to understand problems that were faced before Ansible.

Previously, system administrators managed servers by hand, changing configurations, installing software, and administering services on individual servers.

Data centers grew, and hosted applications became complex, administrators realized they could not scale manual systems management as fast as the applications they were enabling. It hampered the developers’ velocity since the development team was agile and releasing software frequently. Still, IT operations were spending time configuring the systems.

That is why server provisioning and configuration management tools came to grow. Consider the busy routine of administering a server fleet. We always need to keep pushing changes, updating, copying files on them, etc. These tasks make things very complicated and time-consuming.

Before explaining to you all about Ansible, let’s get you familiarized with Ansible terminologies.

• Controller Machine: The machine on which Ansible is installed is responsible for running the provisioning on the servers you are managing.
• Inventory: An initialization file that consists of information about the servers that we are managing.
• Playbook: It is an entry point for Ansible provisioning, where tasks with YAML format define the automation.
• Task: Defines a single procedure to be executed to install a package.
• A module abstracts a system task, such as dealing with packages, creating or changing files. Ansible has a multitude of built-in modules to create custom ones.
• Role: A pre-defined way to organize playbooks and other files to facilitate sharing and reusing portions of provisioning.
• Play: A provisioning executed from very start to finish is called a match. In simple words, the execution of a playbook is called a game.
• Facts: Global variables that contain information about the system, such as network interfaces or operating system.
• Handlers: To trigger service status changes, i.e., restarting or stopping a service.

Advantages

• Simple: It uses a simple syntax written in YAML called playbooks. YAML is a human-readable, data serialization language. It is extraordinarily simple. No special coding skills are required. People, even in your IT organization, who do not know what Ansible is, can likely read a playbook and understand what is happening. Ansible always executes tasks in order. It is simple to install, too. The simplicity makes sure that you can get started quickly.
• Agentless: Finally, Ansible is entirely agentless. There are no agents or any software or additional firewall ports that you need to install on the client systems or hosts you want to automate. You do not have to set up a management infrastructure separately, which includes managing your entire operations, network, and storage. Ansible reduces the effort required for the team to start automating right away.
• Powerful & Flexible: Ansible’s powerful features that can enable to model even the most complex IT workflows. In this aspect, Ansible’s batteries included approach can manage the infrastructure, networks, operating systems, and services that you are already using, as Ansible provides with hundreds of modules to manage them. Together Ansible’s capabilities orchestrate the entire application environment regardless of where it is deployed.
• Efficient: No extra software on the servers means more resources for applications. As Ansible modules work via JSON, Ansible is extensible with modules are written in a programming language already known. Ansible introduces modules as essential building blocks for the software. We can even customize it as per our needs.

What Can Ansible Do?

Ansible is generally grouped along with other Configuration Management tools like Puppet, Chef, SaltStack, etc. Ansible is not limited to Configuration Management but can also be used in many different ways.

Provisioning: The apps have to live somewhere. If you have PXE (Preboot eXecution Environment) booting and kick-starting bare-metal servers and Virtual Machines, or cloud instances from templates, or creating virtual or Ansible & Ansible Tower is there for the help to streamline this process. In case we want to test the debug version of an application that is built with Visual C++, we ought to meet some prerequisite requirements like having Visual C++ library DLLs (msvcr100d.dll). We will also need Visual Studio installed on our computer. This is when Ansible makes sure that the required packages are downloaded and installed to provision the application.

Configuration Management: It maintains and establishes consistency of the product performance by recording and updating detailed information that describes hardware and software better. It includes the updates and versions that have been applied to installed software packages and the locations and network addresses of hardware devices. If we want to install the new version of Tomcat on all of the machines present in your enterprise, it is not feasible for us to manually go and update each device. We can install Tomcat in one go on all of the machines with Ansible playbooks and inventory are written most straightforwardly.

Application Deployment: When defining our application with Ansible and manage to deploy with Ansible Tower, teams can effectively manage the entire application life cycle from development to production.

Orchestration: Configurations alone don’t define your environment. You need to determine how multiple configurations interact and ensure the disparate pieces can be managed. Out of complexity and chaos, Ansible brings order.

Ansible provides Orchestration to align the business request with the applications, data, and infrastructure. It defines the policies and service levels through automated workflows, provisioning, and change management. This creates an application-aligned foundation that can be scaled up or down based on the needs of each application.

Consider the situation where we want to deploy a new website in place of the existing one. For that, we will remove the current site, and implement our new website, and restart the load balancer or the web cluster if needed. Users would notice downtime because we have not removed traffic going live to the said machines via the load balancer. So, we require some pre-task, where we tell the load balancer to put this webserver into maintenance mode so that we might disable traffic temporarily from going to it, as it gets upgraded. We added a block up here, which means a pre-task will be to disable the web node in the load balancer.

So, this is the pre-task, where we can disable traffic, then down here, we can upgrade the node using these various tasks. Finally, we require some type of post-task, which will enable traffic to the web node again by taking it out of maintenance mode. These tasks might be written in Ansible playbooks, and hence it helps to orchestrate the environment.

The post Ansible : Open-source IT Management & Orchestration Tool appeared first on TheFabWeb.

Nobody likes a phone that doesn’t stop ringing and emails coming in like crazy, but what can you do about it you may ask. Well, you can take action and let Wix Answers ease your problems and clean up whatever mess you may be struggling with. You’re going to understand how and why it’s so easy in no time.

First things first, there’s something else you should know and get familiar with: the one of a kind knowledge base software that aims to share valuable information with your clients exactly when they need it.

Now, let’s detail both of them so that you can see exactly why it’s worth it. Here’s a tip: IT’S FREE!

The help desk and customer support channel

Wix Answers is exactly the tool you need to keep in touch with your customers and provide all the information they need, when they need it. It comes with features such as a knowledge base, built-in call center and a multi-channel ticketing system. Of course, there’s more to it so let’s detail everything so that you can better understand why your customers are going to love your business even more:

You’ll get an amazing help center that can be set up in only a few minutes. You basically choose a template, customize it, add articles and click publish. Let’s not forget that you can create and manage FAQs. Nonetheless, everything is recorded and comes with insights that will let you get to know your customers at a higher level.

The multi-channel ticketing system lets you manage, track and prioritize support tickets, no matter the channels they come from. Regardless of how your clients get in touch with you (emails, phone, and social media) you will be able to see everything in one place. No confusions and no wasted time. Send them articles from your knowledge base and keep them connected at all times.

Customer retention is highly important, and most of them choose to call you as they want to speak to an actual person rather than read an email. With the built-in call center you are able to provide phone support, make and take calls from your own number and allow people to request a callback. There’s basically no chance of you ever missing a client!

We know that your website is already functioning well and good looking, but what about a website widget (or more) to help your customers get in touch in just a few clicks, regardless of the page they’re on. Embed a widget into any part of the website and see how clients find the solutions they need in no time.

As a business owner, team manager or part of a project you definitely understand how important it is to be able to measure results and compare them. This is why Wix Answers offers actionable insights that will let you keep an eye on everything. Here you can check your team’s performance and measure ticket response times. By doing so, you never miss an opportunity to get better.

The help desk and customer support channel goes hand in hand with the knowledge base, creating a relationship that will scale up your business. Let’s understand more about why having a knowledge base is important.

Wix Answers knowledge base – step up the game

Information is key and content is a king, so you need to make sure that both are present on your website. With the knowledge base offered by Wix, you get a completely branded help center for which you can choose a template you like, change the logo and customize the colors to meet your brand identity. There’s also JavaScript available so that you can create custom interactions and edit the CSS.

But what if you don’t have everything organized? Wix covers this through the Add and organize content feature. You can create categories for your articles and use the content editor to add images and videos so that your customers don’t get lost on the way.

Just as you’d wish, you can also manage your team and get valuable insights so make sure everything works seamlessly.

Here’s an extra tip: make sure to play around with the pre-designed templates, mobile optimization feature, privacy settings and the built-in search option as even the smallest detail can create an amazing effect and bring results you’d never expect.

Are you ready to finally put everything together and see your customers happy? No more complaints, wasted time and energy. In just a few clicks you get to set up an entire help center, with complex features and valuable information that your clients will appreciate. Get started today with Wix!

The post Wix Answers Features for Limitless Customer Support Experiences appeared first on TheFabWeb.

Why Do You Need Ecommerce Software on Your Business Website?

If you are wondering why ecommerce software is so essential to the success of your new business site, consider this: These are the elements that enable you to do business with the public. You no longer have to depend on having a physical location to do all of your business from. Even if you do own a brick and mortar store, you will still very likely do the bulk of your business with the public over the web. For this reason, you need to have a web store and shopping cart to enable your customers to buy goods from you with the ultimate convenience. And what better way to start than from where it begins? The internet! Start by researching on some dropshipping websites that give you full support in your business endeavours. It’s a bona fide money maker.

Your Shopping Cart Can Save and Create a Whole Slew of Future Sales

The shopping cart on your site is the place where your visitors can store items that catch their eye. They can place them in the cart and then finish browsing around the rest of your site. When they are finished, they can then retrieve the item from their cart and take it to checkout. Even if they should decide to log out without buying that item, you can still send them a reminder email about it. Maybe all they need is a few days to save up some money or a little bit of “cooling off” time. Your reminder email, delivered in a timely fashion, may just end up making the sale for you.

Get in Touch with a Web Hosting Services Provider for More Info

There is no time like the present to build a state of the art official website for your new business. Even if you are already a veteran in your industry, it never hurts to upgrade your site. The best thing you can do for your business is to give your site regular upgrades with all of the latest modern ecommerce features. If you want to succeed in business, you’ll do it by keeping your audience happy.

The post Make a Positive Leap Forward with Modern Shopping Cart Software appeared first on TheFabWeb.