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• Commerce, Anyway You Want It

  - by David Dorf

  I believe our industry is finally starting to realize the importance of letting consumers determine how, when, and where to interact with retailers.  Over the last few months I've seen several articles discussing the importance of removing the barriers between existing channels. Paula Rosenblum of RSR first brought the term omni-channel to my attention back in September. She stated, "omni-channel retail isn’t the merging of channels – rather, it’s the use of all possible channels (present and future) to enhance the customer experience in a profitable way." I added to her thoughts in this blog posting in which I said, "For retailers to provide an omni-channel experience, there needs to be one logical representation of products, prices, promotions, and customers across all channels. The only thing that varies is the presentation of the content based on the delivery mechanism (e.g. shelf labels, mobile phone, web site, print, etc.) and often these mechanisms can be combined in various ways." More recently Brian Walker of Gartner suggested we stop using the term multi-channel and begin thinking more about consumer touch-points. "It is time for organizations to leave their channel-oriented ways behind, and enter the era of agile commerce--optimizing their people, processes and technology to serve today's empowered, ever-connected customers across this rapidly evolving set of customer touch points." Now Jason Goldberg, better known as RetailGeek, says we should start breaking down the channel silos by re-casting the VP of E-Commerce as the VP of Digital Marketing, and change his/her focus to driving sales across all channels using digital media. This logic is based on the fact that consumers switch between channels, or touch-points as Brian prefers, as part of their larger buying process. Today's smart consumer leverages the Web, mobile, and stores to provide the best shopping experience, so retailers need to make this easier. Regardless of what we call it, the key take-away is that "multi-channel" is not only an antiquated term but also an idea who's time has passed.  Today, retailers must look at e-commerce, m-commerce, f-commerce, catalogs, and traditional store sales collectively and through the consumers' eyes.  The goal is not to drive sales through each channel but rather to just drive sales -- using whatever method the customer prefers.  There really should be just one cart.

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• SQL SERVER – QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON/OFF Explanation and Example – Question on Real World Usage

  - by Pinal Dave

  This is a follow up blog post of SQL SERVER – QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON/OFF and ANSI_NULL ON/OFF Explanation. I wrote that blog six years ago and I had plans that I will write a follow up blog post of the same. Today, when I was going over my to-do list and I was surprised that I had an item there which was six years old and I never got to do that. In the earlier blog post I wrote about exploitation of the Quoted Identifier and ANSI Null. In this blog post we will see a quick example of Quoted Identifier. However, before we continue this blog post, let us see a refresh what both of Quoted Identifider do. QUOTED IDENTIFIER ON/OFF This option specifies the setting for use of double quotes. When this is on, double quotation mark is used as part of the SQL Server identifier (object name). This can be useful in situations in which identifiers are also SQL Server reserved words. In simple words when we have QUOTED IDENTIFIER ON, anything which is wrapped in double quotes becomes an object. E.g. -- The following will work SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON GO CREATE DATABASE "Test1" GO -- The following will throw an error about Incorrect syntax near 'Test2'. SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER OFF GO CREATE DATABASE "Test2" GO This feature is particularly helpful when we are working with reserved keywords in SQL Server. For example if you have to create a database with the name VARCHAR or INT or DATABASE you may want to put double quotes around your database name and turn on quoted identifiers to create a database with the such name. Personally, I do not think so anybody will ever create a database with the reserve keywords intentionally, as it will just lead to confusion. Here is another example to give you further clarity about how Quoted Idenifier setting works with SELECT statement. -- The following will throw an error about Invalid column name 'Column'. SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON GO SELECT "Column" GO -- The following will work SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER OFF GO SELECT "Column" GO Personally, I always use the following method to create database as it works irrespective of what is the quoted identifier’s status. It always creates objects with my desire name whenever I would like to create. CREATE DATABASE [Test3] I believe the future of the quoted identifier on or off is useful in the real world when we have script generated from another database where this setting was ON and we have to now execute the same script again in our environment again. Question to you - I personally have never used this feature as I mentioned earlier. I believe this feature is there to support the scripts which are generated in another SQL Database or generate the script for other database. Do you have a real world scenario where we need to turn on or off Quoted Identifiers. Click to Download Scripts Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Where Are You on the Visualization Maturity Curve?

  - by Celine Beck

  The old phrase “A picture is worth a thousand words” is as true now as ever. Providing the right users with access to the right product data, at the right time, can provide significant benefits to a business. This is especially evident with increasing technical and product complexities, elongated supply chains, and growing pressure to bring innovative products to market faster. With this in mind, it is easy to understand why visualization is an integral part of any successful product lifecycle management (PLM) strategy. At a bare minimum, knowledge workers use multiple individual documents of different formats and structure, and leverage visualization solutions to access information; but the real value of visualization can be fully reaped when it is connected to enterprise applications like PLM and tied to the appropriate business context. The picture below illustrates this visualization maturity curve, as we presented during the last Oracle Open World and the transformational effect that visualization can have on PLM processes and performance (check out the post about AutoVue Key Highlights from Oracle Open World 2012 for more information). Organizations are likely to see greater positive impact on business performance when visualization is connected to enterprise systems, allowing access to information coming from multiple sources, such as PLM, supply chain management (SCM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP). This allows organizations to reach higher levels of collaboration and optimize decision-making capacity as users can benefit from in-context access to visual information. For instance, within a PLM system, a design engineer can access a product assembly and review digital annotations added by other users specific to the engineering change request he is reviewing rather than all historical annotations. The last stage on the curve is what we call augmented business visualization (ABV).  ABV is an innovative framework which lets structured data (from Oracle’s Agile PLM for instance) interact with unstructured data (documents, design, 3D models, etc). With this new level of integration, information coming from multiple sources can be presented in a highly visual fashion; color displays can be used in order to identify parts with specific characteristics (for example pending quality issues) and you can take actions directly from within the context of documents and designs, maximizing user productivity. Those who had the chance to attend our PLM session during Oracle Open World already got a sneak peek of our latest augmented business visualization for Oracle’s Agile PLM. The solution generated a lot of wows. Stephen Porter, CEO at Zero Wait State, indicated in a post entitled “The PLM State: the Manhattan Project-Oracle’s Next Big Secret Weapon” that “this kind of synergy between visualization and PLM could qualify as a powerful weapon differentiating Agile PLM from other solutions.” If you are interested in learning more about ABV for Oracle’s Agile PLM and hear about real examples of usage of visualization at all stages of the visualization maturity curve, don’t miss our Visual Decision Making to Optimize New Product Development and Introduction session during the Oracle Value Chain Summit (Feb. 4-6, 2013, San Francisco). We look forward to seeing you there!

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• Business Choices and Evony

  - by Robert May

  Recently, I’ve been playing a game called Evony, and I finally decided to quit the game and thought I should warn others who might be tempted.  I also find a lot of insight with this game as an example.  A few of the companies that I’ve worked with or worked for have been like this and they are NOT good places to be. Evony is a joke designed to milk as much money out of people as possible.  As a professional software developer who mentors teams on how to build better software, here's what I see: They obviously offshore all development and have little oversight over that offshore development, and they probably have a small team at that.  Evidenced by the poor grammar throughout the game. They're seeking to maximize revenue and pushing to do as little development as possible, which would mean a small team. They're horribly understaffed in the customer support department as evidenced by never replying to this forum and never responding to bug reports or help requests (I've had one open with no response AT ALL for over a month . . .) They have way inadequate testing, no CI, and probably no automated unit tests.  You can see this by the poor grammar throughout the game and the type of bugs that show up. They aren't following a formal development process (no Agile, Waterfall, or anything else) as evidenced by their lack of predictable release cycle and lack of visibility. I'm guessing that the internal code base is terrible, otherwise, there wouldn't be an "Age II" that had nothing more than a new visual interface and a few rule tweaks.  This is also evidenced by the itty bitty scope of bug fixes and their inability to really fix bugs. Their Architect sucks.  Really, 42k user is all you can handle on a single server?  Could you REALLY not come up with a better way to scale to handle users?  They've built isolated worlds, instead of a single continuous world. Back to milking people for money--to really progress, you have to spend money. All of this adds up to knowing, deliberate actions on the part of management.  They CHOOSE to do this (like AOL choosing to send more discs instead of improve quality). So, what can we learn? This game will never really improve, since the bosses don't care, they're only in it for the money. The game will never have good support.  Again, the owners don't care. Giving them money only perpetuates this scam (and yes, I've given them money, way too much money. :() They don't care if you quit.  There's a new sucker born every day. Don't EVER go to work for them.  I've worked both with and for people like this and the culture is NEVER good. Ah well. Technorati Tags: Evony

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• box2d resize bodies arround point

  - by philipp

  I have a compound object, consisting of a b2Body, vector-graphics and a list polygons which describe the b2body's shapes. This object has its own transformation matrix to centralize the storage of transformations. So far everything is working quiet fine, even scaling works, but not if i scale around a point. In the initialization phase of the object it is scaled around a point. This happens in this order: transform the main matrix transform the vector graphics and the polygons recreate the b2Body After this function ran, the shapes and all the graphics are exactly where they should be, BUT: after the first steps of the b2World the graphical stuff moves away from the body. When I ran the debugger I found out that the position of the body is 0/0 the red dot shows the center of scaling. the first image shows the basic setup and the second the final position of the graphics. This distance stays constant for the rest of the simulation. If I set the position via myBody.SetPosition( sx, sy ); the whole scenario just plays a bit more distant for the origin. Any Idea how to fix this? EDIT:: I came deeper down to the problem and it lies in the fact that i must not scale the transform matrix for the b2body shapes around the center, but set the b2body's position back to the point after scaling. But how can I calculate that point? EDIT 2 :: I came ever deeper down to it, even solved it, but this is a slow solution and i hope that there is somebody who understands what formula I need. assuming to have a set polygons relative to an origin as basis shapes for a b2body: scaling the whole object around a certain point is done in the following steps: i scale everything around the center except the polygons i create a clone of the polygons matrix i scale this clone around the point i calculate dx, dy as difference of clone.tx - original.tx and clone.ty - original.ty i scale the original polygon matrix NOT around the point i recreate the body i create the fixture i set the position of the body to dx and dy done! So what i an interested in is a formula for dx and dy without cloning matrices, scaling the clone around a point, getting dx and dy and finally scale the vertex matrix.

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• SCVMM – Round 2 – How to create a Private Cloud using PowerShell

  - by Waclaw Chrabaszcz

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Wchrabaszcz/archive/2013/06/28/scvmm--round-2--how-to-create-a-private.aspxHave you ever seen "A Bridge too far" movie? To not to wake up a click too far, it is good to script some tasks. Yes of course we can follow wizards, but some of us want to be warriorsJ. A small tip, take a look on credentials and system GUID examples. I don't know how about you, but for me it will be really useful in the future.    # credents$credential = Get-CredentialNew-SCRunAsAccount -Name "TESTDOMAIN\Administrator" -Credential $credential #storage $opsMgrServerCredential = Get-SCRunAsAccount -Name "TESTDOMAIN\Administrator"New-SCStorageClassification -Name "Bronze" -Description "" –RunAsynchronouslyNew-SCStorageClassification -Name "Silver" -Description "" –RunAsynchronouslyNew-SCStorageClassification -Name "Gold" -Description "" –RunAsynchronously # add a shared storageFind-SCComputer -ComputerName "dc.TESTDOMAIN.net"Add-SCStorageProvider -AddWindowsNativeWmiProvider -Name "dc.TESTDOMAIN.net" -RunAsAccount $opsMgrServerCredential -ComputerName "dc.TESTDOMAIN.net"$fileServer = Get-SCStorageFileServer "dc.TESTDOMAIN.net"$fileShares = @()$fileShares += Get-SCStorageFileShare -Name "VMMLibrary"Set-SCStorageFileServer -StorageFileServer $fileServer -AddStorageFileShareToManagement $fileShares –RunAsynchronously #fabric network$logicalNetwork = New-SCLogicalNetwork -Name "TESTDOMAIN-Service-Network" -LogicalNetworkDefinitionIsolation $false -EnableNetworkVirtualization $true -UseGRE $true -IsPVLAN $false$allHostGroups = @()$allHostGroups += Get-SCVMHostGroup -Name "All Hosts"$allSubnetVlan = @()$allSubnetVlan += New-SCSubnetVLan -Subnet "10.0.0.0/24" -VLanID 0New-SCLogicalNetworkDefinition -Name "TESTDOMAIN-Service-Network_0" -LogicalNetwork $logicalNetwork -VMHostGroup $allHostGroups -SubnetVLan $allSubnetVlan #IP pool$logicalNetwork = Get-SCLogicalNetwork -Name "TESTDOMAIN-Service-Network"$logicalNetworkDefinition = Get-SCLogicalNetworkDefinition -LogicalNetwork $logicalNetwork -Name "TESTDOMAIN-Service-Network_0" # Gateways$allGateways = @()$allGateways += New-SCDefaultGateway -IPAddress "10.0.0.1" –Automatic# DNS servers $allDnsServer = @("10.0.0.1")# DNS suffixes$allDnsSuffixes = @("TESTDOMAIN.net")# WINS servers$allWinsServers = @()New-SCStaticIPAddressPool -Name "TESTDOMAIN-Service-Network" -LogicalNetworkDefinition $logicalNetworkDefinition -Subnet "10.0.0.0/24" -IPAddressRangeStart "10.0.0.51" -IPAddressRangeEnd "10.0.0.75" -DefaultGateway $allGateways -DNSServer $allDnsServer -DNSSuffix "" -DNSSearchSuffix $allDnsSuffixes –RunAsynchronously #Hyper-V Virtual Networks$logicalNetwork = Get-SCLogicalNetwork -Name "TESTDOMAIN-Service-Network" $vmNetwork = New-SCVMNetwork -Name "TESTDOMAIN-VMN" -LogicalNetwork $logicalNetwork -IsolationType "WindowsNetworkVirtualization" -CAIPAddressPoolType "IPV4" -PAIPAddressPoolType "IPV4"Write-Output $vmNetwork$subnet = New-SCSubnetVLan -Subnet "10.0.0.0/24"New-SCVMSubnet -Name "Con-SN" -VMNetwork $vmNetwork -SubnetVLan $subnet # bind VLAN with the Network Adapter$vmHost = Get-SCVMHost -ComputerName "VMM01.TESTDOMAIN.net"$vmHostNetworkAdapter = Get-SCVMHostNetworkAdapter -VMHost $vmHost #-Name "Intel 21140-Based PCI Fast Ethernet Adapter (Emulated)"Set-SCVMHostNetworkAdapter -VMHostNetworkAdapter $vmHostNetworkAdapter -Description "" -AvailableForPlacement $true -UsedForManagement $true $logicalNetwork = Get-SCLogicalNetwork -Name "TESTDOMAIN-Service-Network" Set-SCVMHostNetworkAdapter -VMHostNetworkAdapter $vmHostNetworkAdapter -AddOrSetLogicalNetwork $logicalNetworkSet-SCVMHost -VMHost $vmHost -RunAsynchronously -NumaSpanningEnabled $true #Create a Private Cloud$Guid = [System.Guid]::NewGuid()Set-SCCloudCapacity -JobGroup $Guid -UseCustomQuotaCountMaximum $false -UseMemoryMBMaximum $false -UseCPUCountMaximum $false -UseStorageGBMaximum $false -UseVMCountMaximum $false -CustomQuotaCount 10 -MemoryMB 10240 -CPUCount 10 -StorageGB 386 -VMCount 10$resources = @()$resources += Get-SCLogicalNetwork -Name "TESTDOMAIN-Service-Network"$resources += Get-SCLoadBalancer -Manufacturer "Microsoft"$readonlyLibraryShares = @()$readonlyLibraryShares += Get-SCLibraryShare | where { $_.LibraryServer.Name -eq "dc.TESTDOMAIN.net" -and $_.Name -eq "VMMLibrary" }$addCapabilityProfiles = @()$addCapabilityProfiles += Get-SCCapabilityProfile -Name "Hyper-V"$Guid2 = [System.Guid]::NewGuid()Set-SCCloud -JobGroup $Guid2 -RunAsynchronously -AddCloudResource $resources -AddReadOnlyLibraryShare $readonlyLibraryShares -AddCapabilityProfile $addCapabilityProfiles$hostGroups = @()$hostGroups += Get-SCVMHostGroup -Name "TESTDOMAIN"New-SCCloud -VMHostGroup $hostGroups -Name "TESTDOMAIN-Cloud" -Description "" –RunAsynchronously

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• Stop trying to be perfect

  - by Kyle Burns

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

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• Do we need to adopt a black-box asset our project is inheriting from its predecessor?

  - by Tom Anderson

  Our client has an eCommerce site which was developed by an in-house team, and is now showing its age. I work for a firm brought in as external contractors to build a replacement. Part of the current site is a Flash viewer applet which displays media about the product - zoom-able images, 360-degree views, movies, and so on. We need to show the same media the current site does, so we are simply reusing the viewer. The viewer is embedded on a page in the usual way, and told what media to show by means of an XML file it loads from our server, which is pretty simple for us to generate. We've got this working; it was pretty straightforward. But what else do we need to do? The thing is, as far as we're concerned, the viewer is a binary blob which is served from the client's content-distribution network. We embed it, feed it some XML, and it does its job, but we have no power over its internals. It's completely opaque to us - a black box. We can use it to do what it does, but we can't change it, so if we ever need to do something different, we're stuffed. We're building this site for the client, and when we're done, we'll hand it over for them to maintain. We won't be doing the maintenance ourselves. There's a small team within the client who are working as part of our team, and who will be the ones doing the maintenance. That team only includes one person from the team that built the old site, and it's not someone who knows the image viewer. The people who do know the image viewer are not slated to join our team when our system replaces theirs - they'll be moved to other projects. The documentation on the viewer is extremely thin, and as far as i know doesn't cover the internals at all. My worry is that if someone doesn't take some positive action, all knowledge of the internal workings of the viewer - even down to where the source code for it is - will be lost. It's possible it already has been. Is this something to worry about? If so, whose job is it to worry about it? What should they do about it once they've got worried?

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• How to keep balance / Unlock items / achievement rules

  - by Mark Knol

  I'm working on an engine for a game, too learn javascript and just because its fun. I'm a flashdeveloper, I know how to build websites. Now making games is a different challenge, javascript is a challenge, but I'd love to learn how to structure code and what patterns are common. I dont mind if the game ever finish, I'm mostly interested in the programming part of it. I dont have a particular endresult in mind, so I'll see where it takes me. I currently have a system where you can buy items. The items cost a specified amount of gold, silver, diamonds etc. When you have selected and bought the item, it takes time before getting rewarded. When time is over, you are getting rewarded with other properties (gold, energy, diamonds). For example, you can buy an apple for 50gold, It takes a minute, you get rewarded with 75energy. Or if you take a run, it cost 50energy, it takes 5minutes, reward is 25gold and 25silver. These definitions is what i call actions. Currently I already have a system where this already works and I can define as much actions with as much properties as I want. The definitions I have kinda looks like this: {id:101, category:544, onInit:{gold:-75}, onComplete:{energy:75}, time:2000, name:"Apple", locked: false} {id:102, category:544, onInit:{gold:-135}, onComplete:{energy:145}, time:2000, name:"Banana", locked: false} {id:106, category:302, onInit:{energy:-50, power: -25}, onComplete:{gold:100, diamonds:2}, time:10000, name:"Run", locked: false} {id:107, category:302, onInit:{energy:-70, silver: -55}, onComplete:{gold:100}, time:10000, name:"Dance", locked: false} {id:108, category:302, onInit:{energy:-230, power: -355}, onComplete:{gold:70, silver:70}, time:10000, name:"Fitness", locked: false} Now, I would love to add a system where I can lock/unlock the actions using achievement rules. Lets say, if you buy 10 apples, you unlock a new action, like bananas which cost more, and reward more. In the future I maybe want to restrict achievements and actions to levels. I am kinda stuck how to structure this. I have 2 questions: Which patterns are used to define achievements? How/where are they defined? Should it be part of the action, or should it be a separate controller? Is it a good idea to register all completed actions to it? I think I want multiple types of achievement rules, Id love to hear some ideas how to develop it. How do you create/find a good balance, so the user does not get stuck or can cheat by repeat a pattern of actions to get too much rewards. I know there is not a simple answer and i'm lacking of a good game-concept, but I wonder if anyone created such a game and how you dealed and played with it.

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• 6 Ways to Modernize Your Customer Experience

  - by Mike Stiles

  If customers have changed, if the way they research and shop have changed, if their expectations have changed, if their ability to act on dissatisfaction has changed, but your customer experience has NOT changed, what was once “good enough” may now be crippling. Well, the customer has changed, and why wouldn’t they? You’ve probably changed too in your role as consumer. There’s more info available, it’s easier to get, there’s more choice, you’re more mobile, you’re more connected, it’s easier to buy, and yes, it’s easier to switch brands if experiences don’t meet your now higher expectations. Thanks to technological advances, we as marketers can increasingly work borderline miracles. But if we’re still not adamantly adopting customer centricity, and if we aren’t making the customer experience paramount amongst business goals, the tech is wasted. A far more modern customer experience is called for. Here are 6 ways to get there: 1. Modern Marketing: Marketing data is aggregated and targeted to the right customers, who are getting personal, relevant communications. In return, you’re getting insight that finally properly attributes revenue to your marketing efforts. 2. Modern Selling: Demand is being driven across all channels with modern selling tools. Productivity is up thanks to coordinated communication and selling, and performance is ever optimized using powerful analytics. 3. Modern CPQ: You’re cross-selling and upselling more effectively since reps and channel partners have been empowered with the ability to quickly, automatically generate 100% accurate, customer-friendly quotes complete with price controls and automated approvals. 4. Modern Commerce: You’re leveraging data and delivering personalized, targeted digital experiences to everyone. You’re attracting more visitors, and you’re able to scale and keep up with the market and control the experience. 5. Modern Service: You’re better serving your customers by making it easier for them to engage with your brand, plus you’re lowering your costs by increasing agent and tech support efficiencies. 6. Modern Social: You’re getting faster, deeper, more accurate insights from social and turning content around faster, which then goes out to the right people at the right time in the right place. You’ve also gotten proactive in your service, and customers love that. For far too many brands, the buying journey of Need, Research, Select, Buy, Use, Recommend across the multiple connect points of Social, Mobile, Store, Call Center, Site, Ecommerce is a disconnected mess. Oracle’s approach to CX is to connect every interaction your customer has with your brand, avoiding the revenue losses lousy customer experiences bring. How important is the experience to customers? 94% are willing to pay more of their hard-earned money to have better ones, while a meager 1% say they get the good, consistent experiences they expect. Brands, your words aren’t as loud anymore, so your actions as they relate to customer experience are going to have to do the talking. @mikestiles @oraclesocialPhoto: Julien Tromeur, freeimages.com

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• Stuff I learned at Innovate 2011

  - by David Dorf

  After returning from the NRF Innovate 2011 conference, I picked up few nuggets I thought I'd share here.  These thoughts are a bit random, but I hope they're useful nonetheless.Kevin Kelly opened the conference with six verbs that represent the future.  They were Screening, Interacting, Sharing, Accessing, Flowing, and Generating.  It struck me that these are all ways in which we merge the digital and physical worlds.  The internet of things continues to gain momentum.Some buzzwords:  deal economy, subscription commerce, discovery (instead of search), curationThat last one, curation, came up over and over.  Retailers, especially those in fashion, are finding value in helping their customers organize and present their own collections.  Social media has made sharing such collections easy, and mobile lets them take those ideas into the stores.  Mannequins are becoming less relevant.I heard from both HauteLook and Gilt Groupe (flash sale retailers) that a large percentage of their visits come from mobile devices, and most of those are iOS devices.  I find it interesting that even though Android has passed iPhone in units shipped (and will eventually pass iOS as a whole), its still the Apple crowd that leads the way.RadioShack mentioned their Holiday Heroes campaigned was very successful.  They asked their Foursquare users to check-in at a gym, coffee shop, and transportation hub as part of being a hero.  For this feat, customers were awarded a special badge that was worth 20% off at their next store visit. They claim a 3.5x increase in ticket size vs. regular check-in customers, and a 5x increase vs those that don't check-in at all.I also learned of RadioShack's #28 campaign, which is apparently one of the largest Twitter trends ever.  Their partnership with LIVESTRONG has gotten them followers, impressions, and credit for supporting the fight against cancer.The guys at Invodo showed the importance of video to e-commerce.  They gave compelling examples of how video can show customers the value of products better than just words.The highlight of the show was Guy Kawasaki's talk on innovation, which was not only informative but also peppered with humor and personality.  Back in the early days of the internet boom, Guy turned down the CEO position at Yahoo! because the commute was too long.  By his calculation, that was a $2B mistake.There are other good accounts of the conference at the NRF Blog.

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• Sometimes keyboard & touchpad work... sometimes not

  - by Voyagerfan5761

  When I first ran Ubuntu from CD on this Dell Inspiron 2650, it worked for about ten to fifteen minutes, then it hung (I was probably trying to do too much at once from a Live CD). The next time, my mouse and keyboard didn't work. I rebooted three times and finally got them working. I then installed Ubuntu alongside Windows XP. After installing, selecting the OS in GRUB worked, but my touchpad and keyboard were again not working. I rebooted, and they worked. (I fortunately had a USB mouse with which to reboot.) Booting Ubuntu and then rebooting to enable my keyboard and touchpad has become a routine ever since. Often several reboots are required; at one point I had to reboot over a dozen times in a row before getting a session where everything worked properly. (My installation has been in place for about three days a week now.) I've looked around for a device manager equivalent to no avail. Sometimes the hardware is properly detected, and sometimes it's not. Once or twice I've had the keyboard detected properly but the touchpad not. Plugging in my wireless card also sometimes requires a plug, unplug, and plug again to get it working. So is there some solution? I'm without an Internet connection at home, and this "laptop" is really a wall wart on my desk, so suggestions for packages may take a while to test. Xorg logs I captured two three four sample Xorg logs: one from a startup where the devices worked; one from when they didn't; one from a session where Ubuntu thought my touchpad was a normal mouse; and one from a session where my keyboard worked but the touchpad didn't. See this gist. Updated 2010-12-15 01:50 UTC with Xorg.0.log.keyboardonly file illustrating the case where the keyboard worked but not the touchpad. Updated 2011-01-11 04:10 UTC with Xorg.0.log.touchpadregmouse to illustrate a case where the touchpad was detected as a regular mouse (no "Touchpad" tab in mouse prefs).

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• Correct way to handle path-finding collision matrix

  - by Xander Lamkins

  Here is an example of me utilizing path finding. The red grid represents the grid utilized by my A* library to locate a distance. This picture is only an example, currently it is all calculated on the 1x1 pixel level (pretty darn laggy). I want to make it so that the farther I click, the less accurate it will be (split the map into larger grid pieces). Edit: as mentioned by Eric, this is not a required game mechanic. I am perfectly fine with any method that allows me to make this accurate while still fast. This isn't the really the topic of this question though. The problem I have is, my current library uses a two dimensional grid of integers. The higher the number in a cell, the more resistance for that grid tile. Currently I'm setting all unwalkable spots to Integer Max. Here is an example of what I want: I'm just not sure how I should set up the arrays of integers of the grid. Every time an element is added/removed to/from the game, it's collision details are updated in the table. Here is a picture of what the map looks like on my collision layer: I probably shouldn't be creating new arrays every time I have to do a path find because my game needs to support tons of PF at the same time. Should I have multiple arrays that are all updated when the dynamic elements are updated (a building is built/a building is destroyed). The problem I see with this is that it will probably make the creation and destruction of buildings a little more laggy than I would want because it would be setting the collision grid for each built in accuracy level. I would also have to add more/remove some arrays if I ever in the future changed the map size. Should I generate the new array based on an accuracy value every time I need to PF? The problem I see with this is that it will probably make any form of PF just as laggy because it will have to search through a MapWidth x MapHeight number of cells to shrink it all down. Or is there a better way? I'm certainly not the best at optimizing really anything. I've just started dealing with XNA so I'm not used to having optimization code really doing much of an affect until now... :( If you need code examples, please ask. I'll add it as an edit. EDIT: While this doesn't directly relate to the question, I figure the more information I provide, the better. To keep your units from moving as accurately to the players desired position, I've decided that once the unit PFs over to the less accurate grid piece, it will then PF on a more accurate level to the exact position requested.

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• How is programming affected by spatial aptitude?

  - by natli

  The longer I work on a project, the less clear it becomes. It's like I cannot seperate various classes/objects anymore in my head. Everything starts mixing up, and it's extremely hard to take it all apart again. I start putting functions in classes where they really don't belong, and make silly mistakes such as writing code that I later find was 100% obsolete; things are no longer clearly mappable in my head. It isn't until I take a step back for several hours (or days somtimes!) that I can actually see what's going on again, and be productive. I usually try to fight through this, I am so passionate about coding that I wouldn't for the life of me know what else I could be doing. This is when stuff can get really weird, I get so up in my head that I sort of lose touch with reality (to some extent) in that various actions, such as pouring a glass of water, no longer happen on a concious level. It happens on auto pilot, during which pretty much all of my concious concentration (is that even a thing?) is devoted to borderline pointless problem solving (trying to seperate elements of code). It feels like a losing battle. So I took an IQ test a while ago (Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale I believe it was) and it turned out my Spatial Aptitude was quite low. I still got a decent score, just above average, so I won't have to poke things with a stick for a living, but I am a little worried that this is such a handicap when writing/engineering computer programs that I won't ever be able to do it seriously or professionally. I am very much interested in what other people think of this.. could a low spatial aptitude be the cause of the above described problems? Maybe I should be looking more along the lines of ADD or something similar, because I did get diagnosed with ADD at the age of 17 (5 years ago) but the medicine I received didn't seem to affect me that much so I never took it all that serious. Sorry if I got a little off topic there, I know this is not a mental help board, the question should be clear; How is programming affected by spatial aptitude? As far as I know people are born with low/med/high spatial aptitude, so I think it's interesting to find out if the more fortunate are better programmers by birth right.

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• Two interfaces with identical signatures

  - by corsiKa

  I am attempting to model a card game where cards have two important sets of features: The first is an effect. These are the changes to the game state that happen when you play the card. The interface for effect is as follows: boolean isPlayable(Player p, GameState gs); void play(Player p, GameState gs); And you could consider the card to be playable if and only if you can meet its cost and all its effects are playable. Like so: // in Card class boolean isPlayable(Player p, GameState gs) { if(p.resource < this.cost) return false; for(Effect e : this.effects) { if(!e.isPlayable(p,gs)) return false; } return true; } Okay, so far, pretty simple. The other set of features on the card are abilities. These abilities are changes to the game state that you can activate at-will. When coming up with the interface for these, I realized they needed a method for determining whether they can be activated or not, and a method for implementing the activation. It ends up being boolean isActivatable(Player p, GameState gs); void activate(Player p, GameState gs); And I realize that with the exception of calling it "activate" instead of "play", Ability and Effect have the exact same signature. Is it a bad thing to have multiple interfaces with an identical signature? Should I simply use one, and have two sets of the same interface? As so: Set<Effect> effects; Set<Effect> abilities; If so, what refactoring steps should I take down the road if they become non-identical (as more features are released), particularly if they're divergent (i.e. they both gain something the other shouldn't, as opposed to only one gaining and the other being a complete subset)? I'm particularly concerned that combining them will be non-sustainable as soon as something changes. The fine print: I recognize this question is spawned by game development, but I feel it's the sort of problem that could just as easily creep up in non-game development, particularly when trying to accommodate the business models of multiple clients in one application as happens with just about every project I've ever done with more than one business influence... Also, the snippets used are Java snippets, but this could just as easily apply to a multitude of object oriented languages.

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• Becoming the well-integrated content company (and combating AIUTLVFS)

  - by Lance Shaw

  Every single day, each of us create more and more content. Sometimes it is brand new material and many times it is iterations of existing content, but no one would argue that information and content growth is growing at an almost exponential rate. With all this content being created and stored, a number of problems naturally arise. One of the most common issues that users run into is "Am I Using The Latest Version of this File Syndrome", or AIUTLVFS. This insidious syndrome is all too common and results in ineffective, poor or downright wrong business decisions being made.  When content or files are unavailable or incorrect within the scope of key business processes, the chance for erroneous and costly business decisions is magnified even further. For many companies, the ideal scenario is to be able to connect multiple business systems, both old and new, into one common content repository.  Not only does this reduce content duplication, it also helps guarantee that everyone in various departments is working off the proverbial "same page".  Sounds simple - but for many organizations, the proliferation of file shares, SharePoint sites, and other storage silos of content keep the dream of a more efficient business a distant one. We've created some online assets to help you in your evaluation and eventual improvement of your current content management and delivery systems. Take a few minutes to check out our Online Assessment Tool.  It's quick, easy and just might provide you with insights into how you can improve your current content ecosystem. While you are there, check out our new Infographic that outlines common issues faced by companies today. Feel free to save our informative Infographic PDF and share it with business colleagues and your management to help them understand the business costs and impact of inaction. Together we can stop AIUTLVFS in its tracks and run our businesses more effectively than ever. Additionally, we hope you will take a few minutes to visit our new and informative webpages dedicated to the value of a well connected, fully integrated content management system. It's a great place to learn more about how integrating WebCenter Content into your infrastructure can lower your operational costs while boosting process and worker efficiency.

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• It's Here! Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET 4.0 Ship

  Today Microsoft released Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET 4.0. I've been using the RC version of Visual Studio 2010 quite a bit for the past couple of months and have really grown to like it. It has a host of features and enhancements that improve developer productivity, from improved IntelliSense to better multiple monitor support. Plus there's something about the user experience that, to me, makes it feel better than Visual Studio 2008. I don't know if it's the new blue color motif or what, but the IDE seems more modern looking and more responsive to my mouse movements and other input. Anyway, if you've not yet downloaded Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET 4.0, why not? As with previous versions of Visual Studio there's a free Express Edition and VS2010 and ASP.NET 4.0 runs side-by-side with earlier versions of Visual Studio and ASP.NET. And with Visual Studio 2010's multi-targeting you can even use VS2010 as your development editor for ASP.NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 3.5 web applications. (Although be forewarned if you have multiple developers working on the application that the project files in VS2010 and earlier versions of Visual Studio differ.) This week's article on 4Guys explores my favorite new features of Visual Studio 2010. Here's an excerpt: The Visual Studio 2010 user experience is noticeably different than with previous versions. Some of the changes are cosmetic - gone is the decades-old red and orange color scheme, having been replaced with blues and purples - while others are more substantial. For instance, the Visual Studio 2010 shell was rewritten from the ground up to use Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). In addition to an updated user experience, Visual Studio introduces an array of new features designed to improve developer productivity. There are new tools for searching for files, types, and class members; it's now easier than ever to use IntelliSense; the Toolbox can be searched using the keyboard; and you can use a single editor - Visual Studio 2010 - to work on. This article explores some of the new features in Visual Studio 2010. It is not meant to be an exhaustive list, but rather highlights those features that I, as an ASP.NET developer, find most useful in my line of work. Read on to learn more! And, in closing, here are some helpful VS2010 and ASP.NET 4.0 links: One click installation for ASP.NET 4.0, Visual Web Developer 2010, .NET Framework 4.0, and ASP.NET MVC 2 Eight Quick Hit videos showing some of the cool new VS2010 features VS2010 and ASP.NET 4.0 Release Announcement with some great info/links from none other than Scott Guthrie Happy Programming!Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• TouchDevelop: The Fast Path to Windows 8 and Phone Apps

  - by Clint Edmonson

  Are you looking for a little extra cash for the upcoming holidays? Then you might be interested in creating some cool apps to sell in the Windows Store. Or maybe you’re simply curious and want to try your hand at developing for Windows 8 and Windows Phone. In either case, the newly released TouchDevelop Web App is for you. TouchDevelop Web App is a development environment to create apps on your tablet or smartphone, without requiring a separate PC. Scripts written by using TouchDevelop can access data, media, and sensors on the phone, tablet, and PC. The script can interact with cloud services, including storage, computing, and social networks. TouchDevelop lets you quickly create fun games and useful tools, turning your scripts into true Windows Phone and Windows 8 apps. A year ago, Microsoft Research released TouchDevelop for Windows Phone, which is being used by enthusiasts, students, and researchers to program their phones in fun, inventive, and interesting ways. These scripts are available at TouchDevelop for anyone to download and use. Ever since we released TouchDevelop, we’ve been eyeing the tablet form factor and working on a version for the browser. Now, with the release of TouchDevelop Web App, the wait is over: the tablet version is ready, so go play around with it. All TouchDevelop scripts that are developed on the smartphone can be downloaded to the tablet and run (if hardware allows). Any script that is developed on the tablet can also be accessed on the phone. And scripts can be converted to Windows Phone or Windows 8 apps and submitted to the Windows Phone Store or Windows Store, respectively. TouchDevelop Web App’s editor and programming language have been designed for tablet devices with touchscreens, but you can also use a keyboard and a mouse. So grab your web-enabled device and give the TouchDevelop Web App a try. It’s fun and easy, and could even put a little cash in your holiday-depleted wallet. Or at least give you bragging rights at family get-togethers. Are you interested in further tips on Windows 8 development?  Sign up for the 30 to launch program which will help you build a Windows Store application in 30 days.  You will receive a tip per day for 30 days, along with potential free design consultations and technical support from a Windows 8 expert. As always, stay tuned to my twitter feed for Windows 8, Windows Azure and other Microsoft announcements, updates, and links: @clinted

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• Ubuntu 12.04 share the internet over WiFi from wvdial?

  - by Sour Lemon

  I have just installed Ubuntu 12.04 on a separate partition on my hard drive so I can dual boot to either Windows 7 or Ubuntu. I am living in Japan and so I'm using a mobile broadband USB device called "Softbank C02LC". By default it seems that this device isn't recognised so I did the following: Terminal: sudo su nano /usr/bin/usbModemScript Nano: #!/bin/bash echo 1c9e 9900 > /sys/bus/usb-serial/drivers/option1/new_id Terminal: chmod +x /usr/bin/usbModemScript nano /etc/udev/rules.d/option.rules Nano: ATTRS{idVendor}=="1c9e", ATTRS{idProduct}=="9900", RUN+="/usr/bin/usbModemScript" ATTRS{idVendor}=="1c9e", ATTRS{idProduct}=="9900", RUN+="/sbin/modprobe option" which made the device visible from the network manager etc. However even though I set up my details correctly when I created a new connection (Correct username, APN etc) as soon as I try to connect it almost immediately disconnects. Because of this I then followed the instructions at this site: http://debugitos.main.jp/index.php?Ubuntu%2F%A5%E2%A5%D0%A5%A4%A5%EB%A5%A4%A5%F3%A5%BF%A1%BC%A5%CD%A5%C3%A5%C8 And I ended up using the c02lc_connect script at the bottom of the page to connect to the internet. The file contains the following bash script: #!/bin/sh usbinterfece=/dev/ttyUSB2 VID=1c9e PID=9900 WRONG_PID=f000 LSUSB=/usr/sbin/lsusb GREP=/bin/grep MODPROBE=/sbin/modprobe SWITCH=/usr/sbin/usb_modeswitch SWITCH_D=/etc/usb_modeswitch.d WVDIAL=/usr/bin/wvdial SLEEP=/bin/sleep SUDO=/usr/bin/sudo WHICH=/usr/bin/which switch_config="$SWITCH_D/$VID:$WRONG_PID" if ! [ -x $WVDIAL -a -x $SWITCH ]; then echo "Install wvdial and usb_modeswitch." exit 0 fi check_usb() { local vid="$1" local pid="$2" ($LSUSB | $GREP "$vid:$pid") } if ! (check_usb "$VID" "$PID"); then echo "Cannot find modem device..." if (check_usb "$VID" "$WRONG_PID") && ( [ -f "$switch_config" ] ); then echo "The device is attached but its mode is wrong." echo "Try usb_modeswitch..." $SUDO $SWITCH -c "$switch_config" $SLEEP 1 if (check_usb "$VID" "$PID"); then echo "Successfully switched the mode." else echo "Failed to switch the mode..." exit 1 fi else exit 1 fi fi if [ ! -c "$usbinterface" ]; then $SUDO $MODPROBE usbserial vendor=0x$VID product=0x$PID $SLEEP 2 fi $SUDO $WVDIAL which works completely fine - no problems what-so-ever. But we also have 1 more laptop here which I need to share the internet connection with. In Windows 7 I do this with the Connectify program, and in Ubuntu I have seen that you can do things like set up hotspots etc. But because I am using WvDial I am not sure how I would share the internet. I am only beginning to use Ubuntu but unfortunately until I can figure out how to share the internet over WiFi when connected via WvDial I have to stick with Windows. If you have any ideas on how to do this it would be much appreciated!

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• It's All In The Cloud

  - by Natalia Rachelson

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

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• How exactly is Google Webmaster Tools measuring "Site Performance"?

  - by Rémi

  I've been working for two months now on improving our response time (mainly server side) on a new forum (a brand new product on a technical point of view) we've launched in Germany a few month ago and I'm a lot surprised by the results I get. I monitor our response time using Apache logs and our own implementation of Boomerang beacon. Using my stats, I can see that our new product responds in about 680 ms where our old product was responding in about 1050 ms. On the other side, Google Webmaster Tool tells us that our pages have an average reponse time of about 1500 ms today where it was 700 three months ago with our old product. I've figured that GWT was taking client side metrics into account so I've added some measures on our Boomerang beacon and everything looks just fine. I've also ran some random pages on ySlow and Google's Page Speed and everything looks better than it was before. We event have a 82% on Google's Page Speed tool which is quite cool for a site with some ads in it :) Lately, we have signed a deal with Akamai to use two of their products : CDN for our static files (we were using another CDN before but it wasn't very effective) and RMA to improve Networks routes. We have also introduced a new agressive cache mecanism to ensure that most of the pages served to crawlers are cached by our memcache grid. After checking my metrics, it seems that this changes have improved from 650ms to about 500ms, which is good (still not great but it is definitly an improvement). But webmaster tools continues to report an increasing average response time where we see it decreasing in the same time. Have you ever had the same kind of wierd behavior on your sites while doing performance improvements ? Do you have any idea how to monitor the same thing Google does with Site Performance in Google Webmaster Tools so that we could improve our site and constantly check if it is what Google wants ? Edit 2011/07/26 : Thanks for your answers guys ! Nevertheless, I was not precise enough. The main issue we have is not with the Site Performance page but with the Crawl Stats one for now. We probably found an issue on our side with some very slow pages (around 3000 ms !!) and we are trying to fix them. I'll keep you posted as soon I'll have some infos. Thanks again !

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• Is there a pedagogical game engine?

  - by K.G.

  I'm looking for a book, website, or other resource that gives modern 3D game engines the same treatment as Operating Systems: Design and Implementation gave operating systems. I have read Jason Gregory's Game Engine Architecture, which I enjoyed. However, by intent the author treated components of the architecture as atomic units, whereas what I'm interested in is the plumbing between those units that makes a coherent whole out of ideally loosely coupled parts. In books such as these, one usually reads that "that's academic," but that's the point! I have also read Julian Gold's Object-oriented Game Development, which likewise was good, but I feel is beginning to show its age. Since even mobile platforms these days are multicore and have fast video memory, those kinds of things (concurrency, display item buffering) would ideally be covered. There are other resources, such as the Doom 3 source code, which is highly instructive for its being a shipped product. The problem with those is as follows: float Q_rsqrt( float number ) { long i; float x2, y; const float threehalfs = 1.5F; x2 = number * 0.5F; y = number; i = * ( long * ) &y; // evil floating point bit level hacking i = 0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 ); // what the f***? y = * ( float * ) &i; y = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) ); // 1st iteration // y = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) ); // 2nd iteration, this can be removed return y; } To wit, while brilliant, this kind of source requires more enlightenment than I can usually muster upon first read. In summary, here's my white whale: For an adult reader with experience in programming. I wish I could save all the trees killed by every. Single. Game Programming book ever devoting the first two chapters to "Now just what is a variable anyway?" In C or C++, very preferably C++. Languages that are more concise are fantastic for teaching, except for when what you want to learn is how to cope with a verbose language. There is also the benefit of the guardrails that C++ doesn't provide, such as garbage collection. Platform agnostic. I'm sincerely afraid that this book is out there and it's Visual C++/DirectX oriented. I'm a Linux guy, and I'd do what it takes, but I would very much like to be able to use OpenGL. Thanks for everything! Before anyone gets on my case about it, Fast inverse square root was from Quake III Arena, not Doom 3!

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• Harnessing Business Events for Predictive Decision Making - part 1 / 3

  - by Sanjeev Sharma

  Businesses have long relied on data mining to elicit patterns and forecast future demand and supply trends. Improvements in computing hardware, specifically storage and compute capacity, have significantly enhanced the ability to store and analyze mountains of data in ever shrinking time-frames. Nevertheless, the reality is that data growth is outpacing storage capacity by a factor of two and computing power is still very much bounded by Moore's Law, doubling only every 18 months.Faced with this data explosion, businesses are exploring means to develop human brain-like capabilities in their decision systems (including BI and Analytics) to make sense of the data storm, in other words business events, in real-time and respond pro-actively rather than re-actively. It is more like having a little bit of the right information just a little bit before hand than having all of the right information after the fact. To appreciate this thought better let's first understand the workings of the human brain.Neuroscience research has revealed that the human brain is predictive in nature and that talent is nothing more than exceptional predictive ability. The cerebral-cortex, part of the human brain responsible for cognition, thought, language etc., comprises of five layers. The lowest layer in the hierarchy is responsible for sensory perception i.e. discrete, detail-oriented tasks whereas each of the above layers increasingly focused on assembling higher-order conceptual models. Information flows both up and down the layered memory hierarchy. This allows the conceptual mental-models to be refined over-time through experience and repetition. Secondly, and more importantly, the top-layers are able to prime the lower layers to anticipate certain events based on the existing mental-models thereby giving the brain a predictive ability. In a way the human brain develops a "memory of the future", some sort of an anticipatory thinking which let's it predict based on occurrence of events in real-time. A higher order of predictive ability stems from being able to recognize the lack of certain events. For instance, it is one thing to recognize the beats in a music track and another to detect beats that were missed, which involves a higher order predictive ability.Existing decision systems analyze historical data to identify patterns and use statistical forecasting techniques to drive planning. They are similar to the human-brain in that they employ business rules very much like mental-models to chunk and classify information. However unlike the human brain existing decision systems are unable to evolve these rules automatically (AI still best suited for highly specific tasks) and  predict the future based on real-time business events. Mistake me not,  existing decision systems remain vital to driving long-term and broader business planning. For instance, a telco will still rely on BI and Analytics software to plan promotions and optimize inventory but tap into business events enabled predictive insight to identify specifically which customers are likely to churn and engage with them pro-actively. In the next post, i will depict the technology components that enable businesses to harness real-time events and drive predictive decision making.

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• Wrapping REST based Web Service

  - by PaulPerry

  I am designing a system that will be running online under Microsoft Windows Azure. One component is a REST based web service which will really be a wrapper (using proxy pattern) which calls the REST web services of a business partner, which has to do with BLOB storage (note: we are not using azure storage). The majority of the functionality will be taking a request, calling our partner web service, receiving the request and then passing that back to the client. There are a number of reasons for doing this, but one of the big ones is that we are going to support three clients: our desktop application (win and mac), mobile apps (iOS), and a web front end. Having a single API which we then send to our partner protects us if that partner ever changes. I want our service to support both JSON and XML for the data transfer format, JSON for web and probably XML for the desktop and mobile (we already have an XML parser in those products). Our partner also supports both of these formats. I was planning on using ASP.NET MVC 4 with the Web API. As I design this, the thing that concerns me is the static type checking of C#. What if the partner adds or removes elements from the data? We can probably defensively code for that, but I still feel some concern. Also, we have to do a fair amount of tedious coding, to setup our API and then to turn around and call our partner’s API. There probably is not much choice on it though. But, in the back of my mind I wonder if maybe a more dynamic language would be a better choice. I want to reach out and see if anybody has had to do this before, what technology solutions they have used to (I am not attached to this one, these days Azure can host other technologies), and if anybody who has done something like this can point out any issues that came up. Thanks! Researching the issue seems to only find solutions which focus on connecting a SOAP web service over a proxy server, and not what I am referring to here. Note: Cross posted (by suggestion) from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11906802/wrapping-rest-based-web-service Thank you!

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• What should filenames and URLs of images contain for SEO benefit?

  - by Baumr

  We know that good site architecture usually looks like this: example-company.com/ example-company.com/about/ example-company.com/contact/ example-company.com/products/ example-company.com/products/category/ example-company.com/products/category/productname/ Now, when it comes to Google Image search, it is clear that the img alt tag, filename/URL, and surrounding text (captions, headings, paragraphs) have an effect on ranking. I want to ask about the filename of the images that we should use (e.g. product-photo.jpg). ...but first about the URL: Often web developers stick all images in a single folder in the root: example-company.com/img/ — and I have stopped doing that. (I don't want to get into it, but basically, it seems more semantic for images which make up part of the content at each sub-directory) However, when all images appear in a folder, I feel that their filename needs to reflect what they are a bit more than usual, for example: example-company.com/img/example-company-productname-category.jpg It's a longer filename than just product.png, but as long as it's relevant, I see no problem with regards to SEO (unless you're keyword stuffing), and it could even help rank for keywords: "example company" "productname" "category" So no questions there. But what about when we have places images in the site architecture we outlined at the beginning? In other words, what if image URL paths look like this: example-company.com/products/category/productname/productname.jpg My question is, should the URL be kept short like above and only have the "productname" (and some descriptive keywords) as part of it's filename? Or, should it also include the "example-company" and "category"? Like so: example-company.com/products/category/productname/example-company-category-productname.jpg That seems much longer, and redundant when we look at the URL, but here are a few considerations. Images are often downloaded onto computers, and, to the average user, they lose their original URL and thus — it isn't clear where they came from. Also, some social networks, forums, and other platforms leave the filename intact when uploaded. (Many others rewrite it, for example, Pinterest and Facebook.) Another consideration, will this really help (even if ever so slightly) rank in Google Image Search, or at least inform Google that the product is something specific to the "example-company"? For example, what if this product can only be bought at this store and is the flagship product? In addition to an abundance of internal links to this product page, would having the "example company" name and "category" help it appear in "example company" searches? In other words, is less more?

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