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• Announcing Monthly Silverlight Giveaways on MichaelCrump.Net

  - by mbcrump

  I've been working with different companies to give away a set of Silverlight controls to my blog readers for the past few months. I’ve decided to setup this page and a friendly URL for everyone to keep track of my monthly giveaway. The URL to bookmark is: http://giveaways.michaelcrump.net. My main goal for giving away the controls is: I love for the Silverlight Community and giving away nice controls always sparks interest in Silverlight. To spread the word about a company and let the user decide if it meet their particular situation. I am a “control” junkie, it helps me solve my own personal business problems since I know what is out there. Provide some additional hits for my blog. Below is a grid that I will update monthly with the current giveaway. Feel free to bookmark this post and visit it monthly. Month Name Giveaway Description Blog Post Detailing Controls October 2010 Telerik Silverlight Controls –RadControls http://michaelcrump.net/archive/2010/10/15/win-telerik-radcontrols-for-silverlight-799-value.aspx November 2010 Mindscape Mindscape Mega-Pack http://michaelcrump.net/archive/2010/11/11/mindscape-silverlight-controls--free-mega-pack-contest.aspx December 2010 Infragistics Silverlight Controls + Silverlight Data Visualization http://michaelcrump.net/mbcrump/archive/2010/12/15/win-a-set-of-infragistics-silverlight-controls-with-data-visualization.aspx January 2011 Cellbi Cellbi Silverlight Controls http://michaelcrump.net/mbcrump/archive/2011/01/05/cellbi-silverlight-controls-giveaway-5-license-to-give-away.aspx February 2011 *BOOKED*     To Third Party Silverlight Companies: If you create any type of Silverlight control/application and would like to feature it on my blog then you may contact me at michael[at]michaelcrump[dot]net. Giving away controls has proven to be beneficial for both parties as I have around 4k twitter followers and average around 1000 page views a day. Contact me today and give back to the Silverlight Community.  Subscribe to my feed

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• The Cloud is STILL too slow!

  - by harry.foxwell(at)oracle.com

  If you've been in the computing industry sufficiently long enough to remember dialup modems and other "ancient" technologies, you might be tempted to marvel at today's wonderfully powerful multicore PCs, ginormous disks, and blazingly fast networks.  Wow, you're in Internet Nirvana, right!  Well, no, not by a long shot.Considering the exponentially growing expectations of what the Web, that is, "the Cloud", is supposed to provide, today's Web/Cloud services are still way too slow.Already we are seeing cloud-enabled consumer devices that are stressing even the most advanced public network services.  Like the iPad and its competitors, ever more powerful smart-phones, and an imminent hoard of special purpose gadgets such as the proposed "cloud camera" (see http://gdgt.com/discuss/it-time-cloud-camera-found-out-cnr/ ).And at the same time that the number and type of cloud services are growing, user tolerance for even the slightest of download delays is rapidly decreasing.  Ten years ago Web developers followed the "8-Second Rule", (average time a typical Web user would tolerate for a page to download and render).  Not anymore; now it's less than 3 seconds, and only a bit longer for mobile devices (see http://www.technologyreview.com/files/54902/GoogleSpeed_charts.pdf).  How spoiled we've become!Google, among others, recognizes this problem and is working to encourage the development of a faster Web (see http://www.technologyreview.com/web/32338/). They, along with their competitors and ISPs, will have to encourage and support significantly better Web performance in order to provide the types of services envisioned for the Cloud.  How will they do this? Through the development of faster components, better use of caching technologies, and the really tough one - exploiting parallelism. Not that parallel technologies like multicore processors are hard to build...we already have them.  It's just that we're not that good yet at using them effectively.  And if we don't get better, users will abandon cloud-based services...in less than 3 seconds.

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• Oracle SOA Suite customer panel: Successful Application Integration & SOA Projects

  - by Simone Geib

  At the recent SOA Suite customer panel, Roger Brown from UNS Energy, Fabio Ravagni from Cencosud and Paras Jain from Cisco discussed their recent SOA Suite implementations, business drivers and challenges, architecture and lessons learned. Roger started by describing how UNS redesigned their internet portal to improve their customer experience and reduce manual steps in their business processes. Through the use of Oracle Service Bus, Oracle BPEL Process Manager and Oracle Business Activity Monitoring, they provided more self-service functionality, automated their business processes and increased the use of their web site by 12.98% for number of visits and 33.58% for average visit duration. The screenshot below shows the UNS architecture: > Next Fabio described the challenges Cencosud faced through continuous expansion of their business, different standards and levels of expertise and large volumes of information. By introducing Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle Enterprise Repository, and with the help of Oracle Consulting, they significantly simplified their integration model, reduced their maintenance effort and increased their integration governance. The picture below shows the implemented solution with so far more than 400 services in production and more than 20 ongoing projects, which will make use of the new integration platform. > Last, but not least, Paras discussed the challenges the Webex division of Cisco faced with a highly manual service fulfillment process, multiple data sources and the resulting large room for errror and delay in customer time-to-service. Through a redesign of their order fulfillment process and the introduction of Oracle SOA Suite (see below), they significantly improved their SLAs, eliminated duplicate orders, provided higher visibility into the order process and aligned business and IT. For more information about Oracle OpenWorld SOA & BPM Session, please see the Focus on SOA and BPM document

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• Is there a measure of code rot?

  - by DarenW

  I'm dealing, again, with a messy C++ application, tons of classes with confusing names, objects have pointers into each other and all over, longwinded Boost and STL data types, etc. (Pause and consider your favorite terror of messy legacy code. We probably have it.) The phrase "code rot" oft comes to mind when I work on this project. Is there a quantitative way to measure code rot? I wouldn't expect anything highly meaningful or scientific, since no other measure of code productivity or quality is so fine. I'm not looking for a mere opposite of measures of code quality, but specifically a measure of how many bad things happened after a series of maintenance software "engineers" have had turns hacking at the code. A general measure applying to any language, or many languages, would be great. If there's no such thing, at least for C++, which is a better than average language for creating messes. Maybe something involving a measure of topology of how objects connect during runtime, a count of chunks of commented out code, how mane files a typical variable's usage is scattered over, I don't know... but surely now, a decade into the 21st Century, someone has attempted to define some sort of rot measure. It would be especially interesting to automate a series of svn checkouts, measure the "rottenosity" of each, and plot the decay over time.

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• How much system and business analysis should a programmer be reasonably expected to do?

  - by Rahul

  In most places I have worked for, there were no formal System or Business Analysts and the programmers were expected to perform both the roles. One had to understand all the subsystems and their interdependencies inside out. Further, one was also supposed to have a thorough knowledge of the business logic of the applications and interact directly with the users to gather requirements, answer their queries etc. In my current job, for ex, I spend about 70% time doing system analysis and only 30% time programming. I consider myself a good programmer but struggle with developing a good understanding of the business rules of a complex application. Often, this creates a handicap because while I can write efficient algorithms and thread-safe code, I lose out to guys who may be average programmers but have a much better understanding of the business processes. So I want to know - How much business and systems knowledge should a programmer have ? - How does one go about getting this knowledge in an immensely complex software system (e.g. trading applications) with several interdependent business processes but poorly documented business rules.

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• Managing Social Relationships for the Enterprise – Part 1

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  By Reggie Bradford, Senior Vice President, Oracle  Today, Mark Hurd, President of Oracle, Thomas Kurian, Executive Vice President of Oracle and I discussed the strategic importance of how social media is impacting the enterprise and how it is changing the way customers, prospects employees and investors interact with brands worldwide.  Oracle understands that the consumer is in control and as such, brands must evolve and change to meet growing needs. In addition, according to social media thought leader and Analyst from Altimeter Group, Jeremiah Owyang, companies now average 178 corporate-owned social media accounts. When Oracle added leading social marketing, listening analytics and development tools from Vitrue, Collective Intellect and Involver to its Oracle’s Cloud Services Suite we went beyond providing a single set of tools. We developed an entire framework to include a comprehensive social relationship management suite to help companies move beyond the social enterprise and achieve the social-enabled enterprise.  The fundamental shift from transaction to engagement means that enterprises need not only a social strategy, but should also ensure that the information and data received from social initiatives flow back to marketing, sales, support and service. Doing so enables companies to deliver a proactive and compelling experience and provides analytics to turn engagement into opportunity – and ultimately that opportunity into revenue.  On September 13, 2012, I am delighted to sit down with Jeremiah to further the discussion about how enterprises are addressing social media strategies and managing content.  In addition, we will be taking your questions after the webinar via Twitter (@Oracle, @ReggieBradford, @cfinn, @jowyang). Use #oracle and #socbiz to submit questions and follow the conversation. I look forward to speaking with you and answering your questions online.  For more information about becoming a social-enabled enterprise, visit www.oracle.com/social. And don’t miss the insights of other social business thought leaders at www.oracle.com/goto/socialbusiness.

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• As a C# developer, would you learn Java to develop for Android or use MonoDroid instead?

  - by Dan Tao

  I'd consider myself pretty well versed in C#. It's my language of choice at the moment, and it's where basically all my professional experience lies. Still, I'm puzzled by the existence of the MonoDroid project. My understanding has always been that C# and Java are very close. Like, if you know one, you can learn the other really quickly. So, as I've considered developing my first Android app, I just assumed I would familiarize myself with Java enough to get started and then just sort of learn as I go. Wouldn't this make more sense than using MonoDroid, which is likely to be less feature-rich than the Java Android SDK, and requires learning its own API (albeit a .NET API) anyway? I just feel like it would be better to learn a new language (and an extremely popular one at that) and get some experience in it—when it's so close to what you already know anyway—rather than stick with a technology you're experienced with, without gaining any more valuable skills. Maybe I'm grossly misrepresenting the average potential MonoDroid user. Maybe it's more for people who are experienced in Java and .NET and just prefer .NET. Or maybe (in fact it's likely) there are other factors I just haven't considered. I'm just wondering, why would you use MonoDroid instead of just developing for Android using Java?

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• Have programmers at your work not taken up or been averse to an offer of a second monitor?

  - by Chris Knight

  I'm putting together a business case for the developers in my company to get a second monitor. After my own experiences and research, this seems a no-brainer to me in terms of increasing productivity and morale/happiness. One question which has niggled me is if I should be pushing to get all developers onto a second monitor or let folk opt-in (i.e. they get one if they want one). Thoughts on this are welcome, but my specific question relates to a snippet on this site: But when the IT manager at Thibeault's company asked other employees if they wanted dual monitors last year, few jumped at the offer. Blinded by my own pre-judgement, this surprised me. Has anyone else experienced this? I fully appreciate that some people prefer a single larger monitor, but my general experience of researching the web suggests that most programmers prefer a dual (or more) setup. I'm guessing this should be tempered with the thought that those developers who contribute to such discussions might not be considered your average developer who might not care one way or the other. Anyway, if you have experienced the above have you tried to sell the concept of dual monitors to the masses? If everyone just got 2 monitors regardless if they wanted it or not, were there adverse reactions or negative effects? UPDATE: The developers are on a mixture of 17", 22", or 24" single monitors. The desks should be able to accommodate dual 22" monitors as I am proposing, though this will take some getting used to I imagine.

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• Case Study: Polystar Improves Telecom Networks Performance with Embedded MySQL

  - by Bertrand Matthelié

  Polystar delivers and supports systems that increase the quality, revenue and customer satisfaction of telecommunication services. Headquarted in Sweden, Polystar helps operators worldwide including Telia, Tele2, Telekom Malysia and T-Mobile to monitor their network performance and improve service levels. Challenges Deliver complete turnkey solutions to customers integrating a database ensuring high performance at scale, while being very easy to use, manage and optimize. Enable the implementation of distributed architectures including one database per server while maintaining a low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Avoid growing database complexity as the volume of mobile data to monitor and analyze drastically increases. Solution Evaluation of several databases and selection of MySQL based on its high performance, manageability, and low TCO. The MySQL databases implemented within the Polystar solutions handle on average 3,000 to 5,000 transactions per second. Up to 50 million records are inserted every day in each database. Typical installations include between 50 and 100 MySQL databases, up to 300 for the largest ones. Data is then periodically aggregated, with the original records being overwritten, as the need for detailed information becomes unnecessary to operators after a few weeks. The exponential growth in mobile data traffic driven by the proliferation of smartphones and usage of social media requires ever more powerful solutions to monitor, analyze and turn network data into actionable business intelligence. With MySQL, Polystar can deliver powerful, yet easy to manage, solutions to its customers. MySQL-based Polystar solutions enable operators to monitor, manage and improve the service levels of their telecom networks in over a dozen countries from a single location. The new and innovative MySQL features constantly delivered by Oracle help ensure Polystar that it will be able to meet its customer’s needs as they evolve. “MySQL has been a great embedded database choice for us. It delivers the high performance we need while remaining very easy to use, manage and tune. Power and simplicity at its best.” Mats Söderlindh, COO at Polystar.

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• MS Bing web crawler out of control causing our site to go down

  - by akaDanPaul

  Here is a weird one that I am not sure what to do. Today our companies e-commerce site went down. I tailed the production log and saw that we were receiving a ton of request from this range of IP's 157.55.98.0/157.55.100.0. I googled around and come to find out that it is a MSN Web Crawler. So essentially MS web crawler overloaded our site causing it not to respond. Even though in our robots.txt file we have the following; Crawl-delay: 10 So what I did was just banned the IP range in iptables. But what I am not sure to do from here is how to follow up. I can't find anywhere to contact Bing about this issue, I don't want to keep those IPs blocked because I am sure eventually we will get de-indexed from Bing. And it doesn't really seem like this has happened to anyone else before. Any Suggestions? Update, My Server / Web Stats Our web server is using Nginx, Rails 3, and 5 Unicorn workers. We have 4gb of memory and 2 virtual cores. We have been running this setup for over 9 months now and never had an issue, 95% of the time our system is under very little load. On average we receive 800,000 page views a month and this never comes close to bringing / slowing down our web server. Taking a look at the logs we were receiving anywhere from 5 up to 40 request / second from this IP range. In all my years of web development I have never seen a crawler hit a website so many times. Is this new with Bing?

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• What are the boundaries between the responsibilities of a web designer and a web developer?

  - by Beofett

  I have been hired to do functional development for several web site redesigns. The company I work for has a relatively low technical level, and the previous development of the web sites were completed by a graphic designer who is self taught as far as web development is concerned. My responsibilities have extended beyond basic development, as I have been also tasked with creating the development environment, and migrating hosting from external CMS hosting to internal servers incorporating scripting languages (I opted for PHP/MySQL). I am working with the graphic designer, and he is responsible for the creative design of the web. We are running into a bit of friction over confusion between the boundaries of our respective tasks. For example, we had some differences of opinion on navigation. I was primarily concerned with ease-of-use (the majority of our userbase are not particularly web-savvy), as well as meeting W3 WAI standards (many of our users are older, and we have a higher than average proportion of users with visual impairment). His sole concern was what looked best for the website, and I felt that the direction he was pushing for caused some functional problems. I feel color choices, images, fonts, etc. are clearly his responsibility, and my expectation was that he would simply provide me with the CSS pages and style classes and IDs to use, but some elements of page layout also seem to fall more under the realm of "usability", which to me translates as near-synonymous with "functionality". I've been tasked with selecting the tools we'll use, which include frameworks, scripting languages, database design, and some open source applications (Moodle for example, and quite probably Drupal in the future). While these tools are quite customizable, working directly with some of the interfaces is beyond his familiarity with CSS, HTML, and PHP. This limits how much direct control he has over the appearance, which has lead to some discussion about the tool choices. Is there a generally accepted dividing line between the roles of a web designer and a web developer? Does his relatively inexperienced background in web technologies influence that dividing line?

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• How can I create a square 10x10 grid using nested for loops in Java? [migrated]

  - by help

  I'm trying to create a 10x10 grid using for loops in Java. I'm able to create rows going up and down but not repeating. for(int i = 1; i < temperatures.length; i++) { temperatures[i] = (temperatures[i-1] + 12) / 2; //takes average of 12 and previous temp } } public void paint(Graphics g) { for(int y = 1; y < 9; y++) { g.setColor(Color.black); g.drawRect(10, 10, 10, 10); g.drawRect(10, 10, 10, 20); g.drawRect(10, 10, 10, 30); g.drawRect(10, 10, 10, 40); g.drawRect(10, 10, 10, 50); g.drawRect(10, 10, 10, 60); g.drawRect(10, 10, 10, 70); g.drawRect(10, 10, 10, 80); g.drawRect(10, 10, 10, 90); g.drawRect(10, 10, 10, 100); for(int x = 1; x < 9; x++) { g.setColor(Color.black); g.drawRect(10, 10, 10, 10); g.drawRect(10, 10, 20, 10); g.drawRect(10, 10, 30, 10); g.drawRect(10, 10, 40, 10); g.drawRect(10, 10, 50, 10); g.drawRect(10, 10, 60, 10); g.drawRect(10, 10, 70, 10); g.drawRect(10, 10, 80, 10); g.drawRect(10, 10, 90, 10); g.drawRect(10, 10, 100, 10); } } } }

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• The Hot-Add Memory Hogs

  - by Andrew Clarke

  One of the more difficult tasks, when virtualizing a server, is to determine the amount of memory that Hypervisor should assign to the virtual machine. This requires accurate monitoring and, because of the consequences of setting the value too low, there is a great temptation to err on the side of over-provisioning. This results in fewer guest VMs and, in fact, with more accurate memory provisioning, many virtual environments could support 30% more VMs. In order to achieve a better consolidation (aka VM density) ratio, Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 has introduced what Microsoft calls ‘Dynamic Memory’. This means that the start-up RAM VM memory assigned to guest virtual machines can be allowed to vary according to demand, changing dynamically while the VM is running, based on the workload of applications running inside. If demand outstrips supply, then memory can be rationed according to the ‘memory weight’ assigned to the guest VM. By this mechanism, memory becomes a shared resource that can be reallocated automatically as demand patterns vary. Unlike VMWare’s Memory Overcommit technology, the sum of all the memory allocations to each virtual machine will not exceed the total memory of the host computer. This is fine for applications that are self-regulating in their demands for memory, releasing memory back into the 'pool' when not under peak load. Other applications however, such as SQL Server Standard and Enterprise, are by nature, memory hogs under high workload; they can grab hot-add memory whilst running under load and then never release it. This requires more careful setting-up and the SQLOS team have provided some guidelines from for configuring SQL Server in virtual environments. Whereas VMWare’s Memory Overcommit is well-proven in a number of different configurations, Hyper-V’s ‘Dynamic Memory’ is new. So far, the indications are that it will improve the business case for virtualizing and it is probably a far more intuitive technology for the average IT professional to grasp. It is certainly worth testing to see whether it works for you.

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• How to Handle frame rates and synchronizing screen repaints

  - by David Kroukamp

  I would first off say sorry if the title is worded incorrectly. Okay now let me give the scenario I'm creating a 2 player fighting game, An average battle will include a Map (moving/still) and 2 characters (which are rendered by redrawing a varying amount of sprites one after the other). Now at the moment I have a single game loop limiting me to a set number of frames per second (using Java): Timer timer = new Timer(0, new AbstractAction() { @Override public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) { long beginTime; //The time when the cycle begun long timeDiff; //The time it took for the cycle to execute int sleepTime; //ms to sleep (< 0 if we're behind) int fps = 1000 / 40; beginTime = System.nanoTime() / 1000000; //execute loop to update check collisions and draw gameLoop(); //Calculate how long did the cycle take timeDiff = System.nanoTime() / 1000000 - beginTime; //Calculate sleep time sleepTime = fps - (int) (timeDiff); if (sleepTime > 0) {//If sleepTime > 0 we're OK ((Timer)e.getSource()).setDelay(sleepTime); } } }); timer.start(); in gameLoop() characters are drawn to the screen ( a character holds an array of images which consists of their current sprites) every gameLoop() call will change the characters current sprite to the next and loop if the end is reached. But as you can imagine if a sprite is only 3 images in length than calling gameLoop() 40 times will cause the characters movement to be drawn 40/3=13 times. This causes a few minor anomilies in the sprited for some charcters So my question is how would I go about delivering a set amount of frames per second in when I have 2 characters on screen with varying amount of sprites?

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• How can a non-technical person learn to write a spec for small projects?

  - by Joseph Turian

  How can a non-technical person learn to write specs for small projects? A friend of mine is trying to outsource some development on a statistics project. In particular, he does a lot of work in excel, and wants to outsource the creation of scripts to do what he now does by hand. However, my friend is extremely non-technical. He is poor at writing technical specs. When he does write a spec, it is written the way you would describe doing something in excel (go to this cell and then copy the value to that cell). It is also overly verbose, and does examples several times. I'm not sure if he properly describes corner cases. The first project he outsourced was a failure. I think he overdescribed some details, but underdescribed corner cases. That and/or the coder he hired didn't think through the corner cases and ask appropriate questions. I'm not sure. I got on IM with him and it took me half an hour to dig out a description that should have taken five minutes or less to describe. I wrote the scripts for him at the end, but didn't examine why his process with the coder failed. He has asked me for help. However, I refuse to get involved, because taking his spec and translating it into clear requirements is 10x more work than executing on a clearly written spec. What is the right way for him to learn? Are there resources he could use? Are there ways he can learn from small, low-pressure practice projects with coders? Most of his scripts are statistical and data processing oriented. e.g. take this column and run an average over it. Remove these rows under these conditions. So the challenge is different than spec'ing a web app.

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• Why doesn't Unity's OnCollisionEnter give me surface normals, and what's the most reliable way to get them?

  - by michael.bartnett

  Unity's on collision event gives you a Collision object that gives you some information about the collision that happened (including a list of ContactPoints with hit normals). But what you don't get is surface normals for the collider that you hit. Here's a screenshot to illustrate. The red line is from ContactPoint.normal and the blue line is from RaycastHit.normal. Is this an instance of Unity hiding information to provide a simplified API? Or do standard 3D realtime collision detection techniques just not collect this information? And for the second part of the question, what's a surefire and relatively efficient way to get a surface normal for a collision? I know that raycasting gives you surface normals, but it seems I need to do several raycasts to accomplish this for all scenarios (maybe a contact point/normal combination misses the collider on the first cast, or maybe you need to do some average of all the contact points' normals to get the best result). My current method: Back up the Collision.contacts[0].point along its hit normal Raycast down the negated hit normal for float.MaxValue, on Collision.collider If that fails, repeat steps 1 and 2 with the non-negated normal If that fails, try steps 1 to 3 with Collision.contacts[1] Repeat 4 until successful or until all contact points exhausted. Give up, return Vector3.zero. This seems to catch everything, but all those raycasts make me queasy, and I'm not sure how to test that this works for enough cases. Is there a better way?

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• How Can You Get More Productive In Life Sciences Sales?

  - by charles.knapp

  Only half of all doctors will meet with pharmaceutical sales reps, and that percentage continues to decrease. Furthermore, when reps are granted an opportunity to share information, the average interaction is only about a minute and a half. Concurrently, call quotas continue to increase. What does this matter? Sales reps need to spend less time on traditional planning and after-call reporting, more time making calls, and make more productive use of short presentation times. Fortunately for sales reps, Oracle offers the first life sciences CRM that is designed to double sales time and halve reporting time. In particular, our new Life Sciences Edition Offline Client is designed so that you can actually turn the screen around, so that your CRM is useful for presentations and not just reporting, whether you are connected to cloud or working offline such as in restricted clinical environments. Watch Piers Evans, Industry Strategy Director, show what this looks like in the day of a typical pharmaceutical sales representative. By use of this code snippet, I agree to the Brightcove Publisher T and C found at https://accounts.brightcove.com/en/terms-and-conditions/. -- This script tag will cause the Brightcove Players defined above it to be created as soon as the line is read by the browser. If you wish to have the player instantiated only after the rest of the HTML is processed and the page load is complete, remove the line. -- brightcove.createExperiences();

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• A bounce-rate attack to manipulate SEO ?

  - by Denis Volovik

  This is a question to experienced people that might help us shed some light on the issue. We noticed a very strange behavior on our site, in Google Analytics. Some dude from Finland, namely, from Kouvola city is hitting one of our pages - only one page on our site, 'bout a hundred times per day, all with an average bounce rate of 90%+... This is causing our overall bounce rate to go up by 1 to 3% per day... which is very disturbing.. since we're trying to do our best in order to keep it as low as possible. And obviously having it jumped from ~24% to 27%, just because of that crazy dude is not making us happy at all... We tried implementing a geo-targeted script in order to catch this particular visitor and deliver him a juicy message, and it seemed like it helped in the beginning, it has stopped for a day or two, but now he's back... The geo-targeted script was also logging all IP addresses for page requests originating from Finland in order to find out more details and (in order to block them on the server level, later).. but thing is, it was all mainly cable or DSL connections with various, but not constantly repeating IPs... we are all wondering what is he up to really ? I think that this page should be kept updated with ideas on how to combat this and perhaps someone could also shed light on what it might be ? What is the reason for doing this "bounce-rate attack", as I call it? There was a similar question asked on stackoverflow earlier, with no meaningful answer - here - How to stop bounce rate manipulation.

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• Understanding normal maps on terrain

  - by JohnB

  I'm having trouble understanding some of the math behind normal map textures even though I've got it to work using borrowed code, I want to understand it. I have a terrain based on a heightmap. I'm generating a mesh of triangles at load time and rendering that mesh. Now for each vertex I need to calculate a normal, a tangent, and a bitangent. My understanding is as follows, have I got this right? normal is a unit vector facing outwards from the surface of the triangle. For a vertex I take the average of the normals of the triangles using that vertex. tangent is a unit vector in the direction of the 'u' coordinates of the texture map. As my texture u,v coordinates follow the x and y coordinates of the terrain, then my understanding is that this vector is simply the vector along the surface in the x direction. So should be able to calculate this as simply the difference between vertices in the x direction to get a vector, (and normalize it). bitangent is a unit vector in the direction of the 'v' coordinates of the texture map. As my texture u,v coordinates follow the x and y coordinates of the terrain, then my understanding is that this vector is simply the vector along the surface in the y direction. So should be able to calculate this as simply the difference between vertices in the y direction to get a vector, (and normalize it). However the code I have borrowed seems much more complicated than this and takes into account the actual values of u, and v at each vertex which I don't understand the need for as they increase in exactly the same direction as x, and y. I implemented what I thought from above, and it simply doesn't work, the normals are clearly not working for lighting. Have I misunderstood something? Or can someone explain to me the physical meaning of the tangent and bitangent vectors when applied to a mesh generated from a hightmap like this, when u and v texture coordinates map along the x and y directions. Thanks for any help understanding this.

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• SQLAuthority News – Whitepaper Download – Using Star Join and Few-Outer-Row Optimizations to Improve Data Warehousing Queries

  - by pinaldave

  Size of the database is growing every day. Many organizations now a days have more than TB of the Data in their system. Performance is always part of the issue. Microsoft is really paying attention to the same and also focusing on improving performance for Data Warehousing. Microsoft has recently released whitepaper on the performance tuning subject of Data Warehousing. Here is the abstract about the whitepaper from official site: In this white paper we discuss two of the new features introduced in SQL Server 2008, Star Join and Few-Outer-Row optimizations. These two features are in SQL Server 2008 R2 as well.  We test the performance of SQL Server 2008 on a set of complex data warehouse queries designed to highlight the effect of these two features and observed a significant performance gain over SQL Server 2005 (without these two features). The results observed also apply to SQL Server 2008 R2.  On average, about 75 percent of the query execution time has been reduced, compared to SQL Server 2005. We also include data that shows a reduction in the number of rows processed and improved balance in parallel queries, both of which highlight the important role the Star Join and Few Outer-Row features played. I encouraged all of those interested in Data Warehouse to read it and see if they can learn the tricks. Using Star Join and Few-Outer-Row Optimizations to Improve Data Warehousing Queries Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Documentation, SQL Download, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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• How can a non-technical person can learn to write a spec for small projects?

  - by Joseph Turian

  How can a non-technical person learn to write specs for small projects? A friend of mine is trying to outsource some development on a statistics project. In particular, he does a lot of work in excel, and wants to outsource the creation of scripts to do what he now does by hand. However, my friend is extremely non-technical. He is poor at writing technical specs. When he does write a spec, it is written the way you would describe doing something in excel (go to this cell and then copy the value to that cell). It is also overly verbose, and does examples several times. I'm not sure if he properly describes corner cases. The first project he outsourced was a failure. I think he overdescribed some details, but underdescribed corner cases. That and/or the coder he hired didn't think through the corner cases and ask appropriate questions. I'm not sure. I got on IM with him and it took me half an hour to dig out a description that should have taken five minutes or less to describe. I wrote the scripts for him at the end, but didn't examine why his process with the coder failed. He has asked me for help. However, I refuse to get involved, because taking his spec and translating it into clear requirements is 10x more work than executing on a clearly written spec. What is the right way for him to learn? Are there resources he could use? Are there ways he can learn from small, low-pressure practice projects with coders? [edit: Most of his scripts are statistical and data processing oriented. e.g. take this column and run an average over it. Remove these rows under these conditions. So the challenge is different than spec'ing a web app.]

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• SEM & Adwords: How many click without a sale before i should pause a keyword

  - by Thomas Jönsson

  I wonder how many clicks I optimally should let pass through every new keyword I try in Adwords before I find out that it's not making a profit and it should be paused! It's actually four question. 1: At which likelihood percentile should I pause a word? 2: How many clicks should I let through before I pause a word for those word which do not generate any lead? 3: How many clicks should I let through after one sale to consider the word not to be profitable? 4: Does the likelihood of the word becoming profitable affect the above? Conditions: -The clicks is normally distributed. (correct?) -A CR of 1% is break even, everything above is profit (1 sale/100 clicks=break even) Cost per Click(cpc) = 4$ -Marginal (profit per sale) = 400$ -Paybacktime = 1 year -Average click per word = 0,333 per day (121 + 2/3 per year) Exampel: After 1 click and no sale the keyword still has a high probability to be profitable. After 500 clicks and no sale it has almost no likelihood to not be profitable and should probably be paused. Thanks in advance!

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• SEO Keyword Research Help

  - by James

  Hi Everyone, I'm new at SEO and keyword research. I am using Market Samurai as my research tool, and I was wondering if I could ask for your help to identify the best key word to target for my niche. I do plan on incorporating all of them into my site, but I wanted to start with one. If you could give me your input on these keywords, I would appreciate it. This is all new to me :) I'm too new to post pictures, but here are my keywords (Searches, SEO Traffic, and SEO Value / Day): Searches | SEO Traffic | PBR | SEO Value | Average PR/Backlinks of Current Top 10 1: 730 | 307 | 20% | 2311.33 | 1.9 / 7k-60k 2: 325 | 137 | 24% | 822.94 | 2.3 / 7k-60k 3: 398 | 167 | 82% | 589.79 | 1.6 / 7k-60k I'm wondering if the PBR (Phrase-to-broad) value of #1 is too low. It seems like the best value because the SEOV is crazy high. That is like $70k a month. #3 has the highest PBR, but also the lowest SEOV. #2 doesn't seem worth it because of the PR competetion. Might be a little too hard to get into the top page of Google. I'm wondering which keywords to target, and if I should be looking at any other metric to see if this is a profitable niche to jump into. Thanks.

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• B.S.in Computer Science, weak eyes => career change

  - by Prometheus

  So I am going to earn B.S. in Computer Science soon. I like computers. I like programming. The problem is that my eyes are very weak. Depending on their condition, I can only put in about 6 hours in front of computer a day. If I push myself, I have trouble even keeping my eyes open because of soreness/pain, consequently headaches. My eyes do not have medical conditions. I was just born with weak eyes. I tried many different approaches to work around this problem - better monitor, breaks every 10 minutes, supplements... I even memorized a lot of shortcuts to reduce my time on computers! But I am finally giving up. I do not think I can be a programmer for the rest of my life. I was the top of my class in high school because all works were paper-based, I did average in college due to the nature of my eyes and the difficulty of the material. So what do you recommend I do? Or, Is there a career that is similar to programming but requires interacting with computers less?

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• Suitability of ground fog using layered alpha quads?

  - by Nick Wiggill

  A layered approach would use a series of massive alpha-textured quads arranged parallel to the ground, intersecting all intervening terrain geometry, to provide the illusion of ground fog quite effectively from high up, looking down, and somewhat less effectively when inside the fog and looking toward the horizon (see image below). Alternatively, a shader-heavy approach would instead calculate density as function of view distance into the ground fog substrate, and output the fragment value based on that. Without having to performance-test each approach myself, I would like first to hear others' experiences (not speculation!) on what sort of performance impact the layered alpha texture approach is likely to have. I ask specifically due to the oft-cited impacts of overdraw (not sure how fill-rate bound your average desktop system is). A list of games using this approach, particularly older games, would be immensely useful: if this was viable on pre DX9/OpenGL2 hardware, it is likely to work fine for me. One big question is in regards to this sort of effect: (Image credit goes to Lume of lume.com) Notice how the vertical fog gradation is continuous / smooth. OTOH, using textured quad layers, I can only assume that layers would be mighty obvious when walking through them -- the more sparse they were, the more obvious this would be. This is in contrast to where fog planes are aligned to face the player every frame, where this coarseness would be much less obvious.

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