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• Traditional POS is Dead

  - by David Dorf

  Traditional POS is dead -- I've heard that one before. Here's an excerpt from Joe Skorupa's blog over at RIS where he relayed ten trends that were presented at NRF. 7. Mobile POS signals death of traditional POS. Shoppers don't love self-checkout, but they prefer it to long queues or dealing with associates. Fixed POS is expensive and bulky. Mobile POS frees floor space for other purposes and converts associates from being cashiers to being sales assistants that provide new levels of customer service and incremental basket sales. In addition to unplugging the POS, new alternatives are starting to take hold - thin client, POS as a service, and replacing POS software with e-commerce platforms. I'll grant that in some situations for some retailers there might be an opportunity to to ditch the traditional POS, but for the majority of retailers that's just not practical. Take it from a guy that had to wake up at 3am after every Thanksgiving to monitor POS systems across the US on Black Friday. If a retailer's website goes down on Black Friday, they will take a significant hit. If a retailer's chain-wide POS system goes down on Black Friday, that retailer will cease to exist. Mobile POS works great for Apple because the majority of purchases are one or two big-ticket items that don't involve cash. There's still a traditional POS in every store to fall back on (its just hidden). Try this at home: Choose your favorite e-commerce site and add an item to the cart while timing how long it takes. Now multiply that by 15 to represent the 15 items you might buy at store like Target. The user interface isn't optimized for bulk purchases, and that's how it should be. The webstore and POS are designed for different purposes. Self-checkout is a great addition to POS and so is mobile checkout. But they add capabilities to POS, not replace it. Centralized architectures, even those based in the cloud, are quite viable as long as there's resiliency in the registers. You cannot assume perfect access to the network, so a POS must always be able to sell regardless of connectivity. Clearly the different selling channels should be sharing common functionality. Things like calculating tax, accepting coupons, and processing electronic payments can be shared, usually through a service-oriented architecture. This lowers costs and providers greater consistency, both of which help retailers. On paper these technologies look really good and we should continue to push boundaries, but I'm not ready to call the patient dead just yet.

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• From Transactions To Engagement

  - by David Dorf

  I've mentioned in the past that Oracle has invested quite a bit in acquiring social companies to build out its Social Relationship Management suite.  The concept is to shift away from transactions and towards engagement.  Social media represents a great opportunity to engage with customers, learn what they want, and personalize the shopping experience for them. I look at SRM as the bridge between traditional CRM and CX.  If you're looking for ideas, check out Five Social Retailing Suggestions and Social Analytics and the Customer.  There are lots of ways to leverage social media to enhance the customer experience and thus drive more sales. My friends over at 8th Bridge have just released their Social IQ report in which they rate retailers on their social capabilities.  They also produced a nice infographic so you can consume the data quickly, but I'd still encourage you to download the full report. Retailers interested in upping their SRM abilities should definitely stop by the Oracle booth at NRF in January.

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• Adding tolerance to a point in polygon test

  - by David Gouveia

  I've been using this method which was taken from Game Coding Complete to detect whether a point is inside of a polygon. It works in almost every case, but is failing on a few edge cases, and I can't figure out the reason. For example, given a polygon with vertices at (0,0) (0,100) and (100,100), the algorithm is returning: True for any point strictly inside the polygon False for any of the vertices False for (0, 50) which lies on one of the edges of the polygon True (?) for (50,50) which is also on one of the edges of the polygon I'd actually like to relax the algorithm so that it returns true in all of these cases. In other words, it should return true for points that are strictly inside, for the vertices themselves, and for points on the edges of the polygon. If possible I'd also like to give it enough tolerance so that it always tend towards "true" in face of floating point fluctuations. For example, I have another method, that given a line segment and a point, returns the closest location on the line segment to the given point. Currently, given any point outside the polygon and one of its edges, there are cases where the result is categorized as being inside by the method above, while other points are considered outside. I'd like to give it enough tolerance so that it always returns true in this situation. The way I've currently solved the problem is an hack, which consists of using an external library to inflate the polygon by a few pixels, and performing the tests on the inflated polygon, but I'd really like to replace this with a proper solution.

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• Ubuntu scrollbars don't render on Cygwin X server

  - by David M. Karr

  I have an ubuntu 12.0.4 desktop. I have a Win7 laptop running Cygwin. I can display windows from the Ubuntu box on the Win7 laptop using the Cygwin X server, but the window is somewhat "degraded". Specifically, scrollbars are not rendering properly. I've used Ubuntu before, but this is the first time I've seen these odd scrollbar popups that are used in 12.04. I'm guessing the Cygwin X server is having trouble rendering that for some reason. In the Cygwin view, I see the slightly thicker vertical bar, but when I hover the mouse over it, nothing happens. I'd really prefer to get conventional scrollbars. Can I configure Ubuntu 12.0.4 to do this, which might result in Cygwin being able to display them?

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• Trying to Integrate Five9 and Apptivio [on hold]

  - by David Mitchell

  Five9 is a calling system application and Apptivio will be used to store client information for purchased products. Specifically what I need is an example code that will allow me to access Five9's CRM system using the access key and transfer a persons first and last name, for example, to Apptivio. The issue is I have never dealt with this type of system and I cannot find any information for it other than the Web2Campaign that was sent to me by Five9. Lets say this is the code from Five9 F9key=first_name&F9key=last_name&first_name=jon&last_name=smith Once this information is placed into Five9 I must update Apptivio with this information. I am lost as to how to send this information to Apptivio.

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• where to define variable for a for each loop?

  - by David

  can you please advise me why my first code attempt didn't work : public void listAllFiles() { for(String filename : files) { int position = 0; System.out.println(position + ": " + filename); position = position + 1; } } it kept printing position at 0 without iterating position but it seems to work after i did it this way: public void listAllFiles() { int position = 0; for(String filename : files) { System.out.println(position + ": " + filename); position = position + 1; } } I don't understand why the position + 1 was not being executed, is it because we are not meant to define variables inside for loops or am i missing something in my code.

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• Cross-Channel Survey Report

  - by David Dorf

  The folks at Retail Touchpoints surveyed 84 retailers on the topic of cross-channel and have published the results in Completing the Cross-Channel Challenge.  Below is an overview video that summarizes the findings and cites retailer examples. One thing is clear: customers demand Commerce Anywhere, the ability to shop when, where, and the way they want.  So retailers are doing what it takes to revamp their business to meet their customers' demands.

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• Why do the GNOME symbolic icons appear darker in a running application?

  - by David Planella

  I'm creating an application that uses symbolic icons from the default theme. However, there are a few icons that I need that cannot be represented by those from the default theme, so I'm creating my own ones. What I did was to simply go to /usr/share/icons/gnome/scalable/actions/, copied a few locally into my app's source tree that could serve as a basis, and started editing them. So far so good. But I've noticed the following: all symbolic icons are of a light grey color when looking at the original .svg file, but when they are put onto a widget, they become darker. Here's an example, using the /usr/share/icons/gnome/scalable/actions/view-refresh-symbolic.svg icon from the default theme: Here's what it looks like when opening the original with Inkscape: And here's what it looks like on a toolbar on a running application: Notice the icon being much darker at runtime. That happens both with the Ambiance and Radiance themes. I wouldn't mind much, but I noticed it affects my custom icon, whereby parts of it become darker (the inner fill), whereas parts of it remain the same color as the original (the stroke). So what causes the default symbolic icons to darken and how should implement that for my custom icons?

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• What actions should I not rely on the packaged functionality of my language for?

  - by David Peterman

  While talking with one of my coworkers, he was talking about the issues the language we used had with encryption/decryption and said that a developer should always salt their own hashes. Another example I can think of is the mysql_real_escape_string in PHP that programmers use to sanitize input data. I've heard many times that a developer should sanitize the data themselves. My question is what things should a developer always do on their own, for whatever reason, and not rely on the standard libraries packaged with a language for it?

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• Hello PCI Council, are you listening?

  - by David Dorf

  Mention "PCI" to any retailer and you'll instantly see them take a deep breath and start looking for the nearest exit.  Nobody wants to be insecure, but few actually believe that PCI does anything more than focus blame directly on retailers.  I applaud PCI for making retailers more aware of the importance of security, but did you have to make them PAINFULLY aware?  POS vendors aren't immune to this pain either as we have to undergo lengthy third-party audits in addition to the internal secure programming programs.  There's got to be a better way. There's a timely article over at StorefrontBacktalk that discusses the inequity of PCI's rules, and also mentions that the PCI Council is accepting comments until April 15th. As a vendor, my biggest issue with PCI is that they require vendors to disclose the details of any breaches, in effect "ratting out" customers.  I don't think its a vendor's place to do this.  I'd rather have the trust of my customers so we can jointly solve the problem. Mary Ann Davidson, Oracle's Chief Security Officer, has an interesting blog posting on this very topic.  Its a bit of a long read, but I found it very entertaining and thought-provoking.  Here's an excerpt: ...heading up the list of “you must be joking” regulations are recent disturbing developments in the Payment Card Industry (PCI) world. I’d like to give [the] PCI kahunas the benefit of the doubt about their intentions, except that efforts by Oracle among others to make them aware of “unfortunate side effects of your requirements” – which is as tactful I can be for reasons that I believe will become obvious below - have gone, to-date, unanswered and more importantly, unchanged. I encourage you to read the entire posting, Pain Comes Instantly, and then provide feedback to the PCI Council.

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• Can someone explain how a GUI works and when I should start using one?

  - by David

  I've been learning C++ for about a month now, and before I go any further, I'd like to clear up this tedious question I keep on having. I know what a GUI is, but I don't really know how it works, and maybe examples of popular ones...? Although I know command line programming is the bare fundamentals, I think it'd be fun messing around with a GUI. Although I have around 3 million other questions, I'll save them :D

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• Showrooming: What's the big deal?

  - by David Dorf

  There's been lots of chatter recently on how retailers will combat showrooming this holiday season.  Best Buy and Target, for example, plan to price-match certain online sites.  But from my perspective, the whole showrooming concept is overblown.  Yes, mobile phones make is easier to comparison-shop, but consumers have been doing that all along.  Retailers have to work hard to merchandise their stores with the right products at the right price with the right promotions.  Its Retail 101. Yeah ok, many websites don't have to charge tax so they have an advantage, but they also have to cover shipping costs. Brick-and-mortar stores have the opportunity to provide expertise, fit, and instant gratification all of which are pretty big advantages. I see lots of studies that claim a large percentage of shoppers are showrooming.  Now I don't do much shopping, but when I do I rarely see anyone scanning UPC codes in the aisles.  If you dig into those studies, the question is usually something like, "have you used your mobile phone to price compare while shopping in the last year."  Well yeah, I did it once -- out of the 20 shopping trips.  And by the way, the in-store price was close enough to just buy the item.  Based on casual observation and informal surveys of friends, showrooming is not the modus-operandi for today's busy shoppers. I never see people showrooming in grocery stores, and most people don't bother for fashion.  For big purchases like appliances and furniture, I bet most people do their research online before entering the store.  The cases where I've done it was to see if a promotion was in fact a good deal.  Or even to make sure the in-store price is the same as the online price for the same brand. So, if you think you're a victim of showrooming, I suggest you look at the bigger picture.  Are you providing an engaging store experience?  Are you allowing customers to shop the way they want to shop, using various touchpoints?  Are you monitoring the competition to ensure prices are competitive?  Are your promotions attracting the right customers? Hubert Jolly, CEO of Best Buy, recently commented that showrooming might just get more people into his stores. "Once customers are in our stores, they're ours to lose."

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• Oracle Database 12c

  - by David Allan

  Exciting day today as Oracle Database 12c is released. You can find lots of information on the release on OTN here. With this release comes another milestone on Oracle's Data Integration roadmap - OWB is no longer shipped with the database. You will notice that the OWB documentation is no longer included with the Oracle Database documentation, you can compare and contrast the 11.2 and 12.1 documentation below. OWB 11gR2 is still supported with Oracle Database 12c, you will need 11.2.0.3 plus at least CP2 which has been certified with Oracle Database 12c. The 11.2.0.4 release will wrapper this into one install.

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• Tic-Tac-Toe game AI

  - by David Jones

  I'm looking into creating a simple tic tac toe/noughts and crosses game in Actionscript3 and am trying to understand the ideas behind the AI used in a game like this. I've seen some simplistic examples online but from what I've read a game tree or something like minimax is the best way to go about this. Can anyone help explain or reference any good examples of this? I've seen that there is a library called as3ds - data structures for game developers which has a number of classes that might help tie this together? Any info/examples or help is much appreciated.

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• How to keep a data structure synchronized over a network?

  - by David Gouveia

  Context In the game I'm working on (a sort of a point and click graphic adventure), pretty much everything that happens in the game world is controlled by an action manager that is structured a bit like: So for instance if the result of examining an object should make the character say hello, walk a bit and then sit down, I simply spawn the following code: var actionGroup = actionManager.CreateGroup(); actionGroup.Add(new TalkAction("Guybrush", "Hello there!"); actionGroup.Add(new WalkAction("Guybrush", new Vector2(300, 300)); actionGroup.Add(new SetAnimationAction("Guybrush", "Sit")); This creates a new action group (an entire line in the image above) and adds it to the manager. All of the groups are executed in parallel, but actions within each group are chained together so that the second one only starts after the first one finishes. When the last action in a group finishes, the group is destroyed. Problem Now I need to replicate this information across a network, so that in a multiplayer session, all players see the same thing. Serializing the individual actions is not the problem. But I'm an absolute beginner when it comes to networking and I have a few questions. I think for the sake of simplicity in this discussion we can abstract the action manager component to being simply: var actionManager = new List<List<string>>(); How should I proceed to keep the contents of the above data structure syncronized between all players? Besides the core question, I'm also having a few other concerns related to it (i.e. all possible implications of the same problem above): If I use a server/client architecture (with one of the players acting as both a server and a client), and one of the clients has spawned a group of actions, should he add them directly to the manager, or only send a request to the server, which in turn will order every client to add that group? What about packet losses and the like? The game is deterministic, but I'm thinking that any discrepancy in the sequence of actions executed in a client could lead to inconsistent states of the world. How do I safeguard against that sort of problem? What if I add too many actions at once, won't that cause problems for the connection? Any way to alleviate that?

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• Maximizing the Value of Software

  - by David Dorf

  A few years ago we decided to increase our investments in documenting retail processes and architectures.  There were several goals but the main two were to help retailers maximize the value they derive from our software and help system integrators implement our software faster.  The sale is only part of our success metric -- its actually more important that the customer realize the benefits of the software.  That's when we actually celebrate. This week many of our customers are gathered in Chicago to discuss their successes during our annual Crosstalk conference.  That provides the perfect forum to announce the release of the Oracle Retail Reference Library.  The RRL is available for free to Oracle Retail customers and partners.  It contains 1000s of hours of work and represents years of experience in the retail industry.  The Retail Reference Library is composed of three offerings: Retail Reference Model We've been sharing the RRM for several years now, with lots of accolades.  The RRM is a set of business process diagrams at varying levels of granularity. This release marks the debut of Visio documents, which should make it easier for retailers to adopt and edit the diagrams.  The processes represent an approximation of the Oracle Retail software, but at higher levels they are pretty generic and therefore usable with other software as well.  Using these processes, the business and IT are better able to communicate the expectations of the software.  They can be used to guide customization when necessary, and help identify areas for optimization in the organization. Retail Reference Architecture When embarking on a software implementation project, it can be daunting to start from a blank sheet of paper.  So we offer the RRA, a comprehensive set of documents that describe the retail enterprise in terms of logical architecture, physical deployments, and systems integration.  These documents and diagrams describe how all the systems typically found in a retailer enterprise work together.  They serve as a way to jump-start implementations using best practices we've captured over the years. Retail Semantic Glossary Have you ever seen two people argue over something because they're using misaligned terminology?  Its a huge waste and happens all the time.  The Retail Semantic Glossary is a simple application that allows retailers to define terms and metrics in a centralized database.  This initial version comes with limited content with the goal of adding more over subsequent releases.  This is the single source for defining key performance indicators, metrics, algorithms, and terms so that the retail organization speaks in a consistent language. These three offerings are downloaded from MyOracleSupport separately and linked together using the start page above.  Everything is navigated using a Web browser.  See the Oracle Retail Documentation blog for more details.

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• How to programmatically fetch a list of applications from the Software Center

  - by David Planella

  Im writing a PyGI app where I'd like to show a list of matching applications from the Ubuntu Software Centre in an auto-completion text entry or dropdwon. I haven't yet figured out the best way to present the information, I just want to make it easier for the user to type the name of an application. But before that, I'd like to figure out how to get the data. Is there an API to get a list of all applications from the Software Centre, or indirectly through the Applications Dash in Unity?

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• Resources for a fighting game

  - by David

  As the title says, I need resources for a 2D fighting game for the PC. The game is being made by me and two close friends. I'm thinking of using the FlatRedBall engine and either Allegro Sprite Editor or Amiga DPaint for the sprites, but I don't know is there is anything better for a more or less beginner in video game making. So my questions are as follows, what would be the best engine to use so that we could also sell the game later on, (I don't really care what language I'd have to use) and what would be the best thing to use for sprite creating? I would really appreciate any help given.

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• Windows 8 Store App Crash Logs

  - by David Paquette

  I was recently working on a Windows 8 app, and the application was crashing occasionally.  When resuming the application, the app would crash and close immediately without providing any feedback or information on what went wrong.  The crash was very difficult to reproduce, and I could never get the crash to occur when I was debugging through Visual Studio.  My app was crashing, and I had no idea what was going wrong!  HELP!!! After doing some digging, I found that when a Windows 8 Store App crashes, an error is logged in Windows Administrative Events.  You can view the details of any app crash by launching the Event Viewer and selecting Administrative Events under Custom Views.  The Source of the error will be listed as AppHost.  AppHost is the process that runs your Windows 8 Store App.  The error details contain all the information you would expect to find, including a stack trace and line numbers.   Windows 8 Tip:  A shortcut for launching the Event Viewer in Windows 8.  Right click on the bottom left corner of your desktop (where you normally click to go to the Start Screen).  A menu will appear with shortcuts to a number of common system tasks such as Event Viewer, Task Manager, Command Prompt, and Device Manager.

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• How mature is FreeBASIC?

  - by David

  A friend of mine is considering using FreeBASIC in a critical production environment. They currently use GWBasic, and they want to make a soft transition towards more modern languages. I am just worried that there might be undetected bugs in the software. I see that their version number is 0.22.0, which indicates, that it is not quite mature yet. I also read this discussion, without being able to conclude. Also on their Sourceforge pages there is no indication of whether it is Alpha or Beta (which anyways is not a very good indicator). Does anyone have own experience about the maturity, ideas on how to judge the maturity, or know of companies using FreeBASIC in a critical production environment?

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• My Only Gripe With Programming

  - by David Espejo

  Is that im having trouble practicing problems. Even if I decide to practice the problems from my C++ book, they dont give any idea of the way the solution(program) should look like, so that I may compare to see if my program is similar in anyway. My book gives me to many generic "Write a program to do "this" " projects without really showing a concrete example of what "this" really is. In other words How Do I Know That I did "that". One problem in my book said to write a program that calculates the sales tax on a given item????? First of all slase tax differs on state(whats the state,) whats the item(a house, a dog,) How can I check this to see if im right. Programming books dont have answer keys! I know that there is no ABSOLUTE answer, thats just silly, programs can be written in many ways, but a sample of what one would look like based of the difficulty of the problem would really help! Is there a solution to this, maby a book that has worked out examples for the problems they give , or online sources that do something similar.(is there such thing as a programming book with an answer key?)

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• Issues with nVidia GeForce 210 while watching movies

  - by David ???

  Ever since 10.04 I have been trying to resolve an issue with my graphics card - nVidia GeForce 210. I'm having issues when I watch movies - they are jumping all the time, even with Compiz disabled and when that is the only thing I am doing. I have tried the solution to How to get NVidia GeForce GT 210 drivers working on Lucid Lynx? but it didn't work. How can I fix this? Here are the steps I took: apt-get --purge remove xserver-xorg-video-nouveau edit /etc/default/grub to add the line GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="nouveau.modeset=0" sudo update-grub Reboot Download official Linux drivers from nVidia site. sh filename-of-downloaded-driver-package

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• Which social sign-in (Google, twitter, fb, etc) is most often used (if I could only choose one, which would statistically retain the most users)?

  - by David

  I am working with a startup which is about to do it's launch in maybe 2-3 weeks. In order to see the primary features of the site, the user has to register or sign in if they have already registered. We quickly decided we wanted to incorporate social plugins as alternatives to a conventional sign up, just like stackexchange does. But seeing that we are strapped for time and fairly amateur developers, I'm trying to justify just choosing one or two social sign-ins to start with for the launch and then maybe add more later. Based on my experience as a user, I'm guessing that twitter and google (in no particular order of importance) would probably be the most important social sign-ins in order to retain as many users as possible, but have absolutely no statistics to back that up other than my own anecdotal experience. This question hasn't been visibly asked on the internet, so I figured I'd hop on stackexchange and give it a punt. Thanks.

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• Blockbuster Time Machine

  - by David Dorf

  In another example of clinging to the core business much too long, DISH announced its closing the remaining 300 Blockbuster stores.  This reminds us that we must always be looking over our shoulders for the next big thing.  Blockbuster had the opportunity to buy Netflix, but it passed just as Barnes & Noble decided it didn't need to partner with Amazon.  Its so tempting to stick with a profitable business instead of taking a risk on a new idea.  Nevertheless, Blockbuster is history -- and this video from The Onion seals it. Historic ‘Blockbuster’ Store Offers Glimpse Of How Movies Were Rented In The Past

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• Bitmap Font Displays in Center Always Without Coding it Manually (Fix Coordinate Problem onText)

  - by David Dimalanta

  Is there a way on how to stay the texts in center without manually coding it or something, especially when making an update? I'm making a display for the highest score. Let's say that the score is 9. However, if the score is 9,999,999, the text displays still only at the fixed X and Y coordinate. Is there really a way to stay the text in center especially when there is changes when a player beats the new world record? Here's my code inside Sprite Batch: font.setScale(1.5f); font.draw(batch, "HIGHEST SCORE:", (900/10)*1 + 60, (1280/16)*10); font.draw(batch, "" + 9999999 + "", (900/10)*4, (1280/16)*8); batch.draw(grid_guide, 0, 0, 900, 1280); // --> For testing purpose only. // Where 9999999 is a new record score for example. Here's the image shown as example. I add it some red grid so that I could check if the display of score when updated will always display on center no matter how many digits takes place in. However, it is fixed, so I have to figure it out how to display it automatically on center regardless of the number of digits while updating for the new highscore. I have used the LibGDX preferences very well though to save and load records for the highscore.

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