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• PASS Summit 2012: keynote and Mobile BI announcements #sqlpass

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  Today at PASS Summit 2012 there have been several announcements during the keynote. Moreover, other news have not been highlighted in the keynote but are equally if not more important for the BI community. Let’s start from the big news in the keynote (other details on SQL Server Blog): Hekaton: this is the codename for in-memory OLTP technology that will appear (I suppose) in the next release of the SQL Server relational engine. The improvement in performance and scalability is impressive and it enables new scenarios. I’m curious to see whether it can be used also to improve ETL performance and how it differs from using SSD technology. Updates on Columnstore: In the next major release of SQL Server the columnstore indexes will be updatable and it will be possible to create a clustered index with Columnstore index. This is really a great news for near real-time reporting needs! Polybase: in 2013 it will debut SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW), which will include the Polybase technology. By using Polybase a single T-SQL query will run queries across relational data and Hadoop data. A single query language for both. Sounds really interesting for using BigData in a more integrated way with existing relational databases. And, of course, to load a data warehouse using BigData, which is the ultimate goal that we all BI Pro have, right? SQL Server 2012 SP1: the Service Pack 1 for SQL Server 2012 is available now and it enable the use of PowerPivot for SharePoint and Power View on a SharePoint 2013 installation with Excel 2013. Power View works with Multidimensional cube: the long-awaited feature of being able to use PowerPivot with Multidimensional cubes has been shown by Amir Netz in an amazing demonstration during the keynote. The interesting thing is that the data model behind was based on a many-to-many relationship (something that is not fully supported by Power View with Tabular models). Another interesting aspect is that it is Analysis Services 2012 that supports DAX queries run on a Multidimensional model, enabling the use of any future tool generating DAX queries on top of a Multidimensional model. There are still no info about availability by now, but this is *not* included in SQL Server 2012 SP1. So what about Mobile BI? Well, even if not announced during the keynote, there is a dedicated session on this topic and there are very important news in this area: iOS, Android and Microsoft mobile platforms: the commitment is to get data exploration and visualization capabilities working within June 2013. This should impact at least Power View and SharePoint/Excel Services. This is the type of UI experience we are all waiting for, in order to satisfy the requests coming from users and customers. The important news here is that native applications will be available for both iOS and Windows 8 so it seems that Android will be supported initially only through the web. Unfortunately we haven’t seen any demo, so it’s not clear what will be the offline navigation experience (and whether there will be one). But at least we know that Microsoft is working on native applications in this area. I’m not too surprised that HTML5 is not the magic bullet for all the platforms. The next PASS Business Analytics conference in 2013 seems a good place to see this in action, even if I hope we don’t have to wait other six months before seeing some demo of native BI applications on mobile platforms! Viewing Reporting Services reports on iPad is supported starting with SQL Server 2012 SP1, which has been released today. This is another good reason to install SP1 on SQL Server 2012. If you are at PASS Summit 2012, come and join me, Alberto Ferrari and Chris Webb at our book signing event tomorrow, Thursday 8 2012, at the bookstore between 12:00pm and 12:30pm, or follow one of our sessions!

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• Microsoft Certifications &ndash; how to prep? and why?

  - by Kelly Jones

  I often get asked by my colleagues, “how do you prepare for Microsoft exams?” Well, the answer for me is a little complicated, so I thought I’d write up here what I do. The first thing I do is go to Microsoft’s website to find the exam that I need to take.  If you’re looking to get a particular certification, then their site lists the exam or exams that you’ll need to pass.  If you’ve already taken an exam, you can log onto the MCP website and use their certification planner.  This little tool tells you what tests you need, based on the exams you’ve already passed.  It is very helpful with the certifications that are multiple tests and especially ones that have electives. Once you’ve identified the test, you can use Microsoft’s website to see the topics that it covers.  This is a good outline to follow when you study.  I’ll keep this handy to reference back throughout my studying to make sure that I’m covering all the topics I need to know. The next step is probably where I am a little different from others.  IF the exam outline covers material that I’ve already been working with, then I’ll skip a lot of the studying and go directly to the practice tests.  However, if I’m looking at the outline and wondering how in the world do you do that? – then it’s time to hit the books. So, where to find study materials?  Try typing in the exam number into any search engine.  You’ll typically find a ton of resources.  If you’re lucky, you’ll find books that others recommend based on their studying and exam experience.  As a Sogeti employee, I have access to three really good resources: an internal company list of all of the consultants who have passed particular tests (on our Connex website), Books 24x7, and Transcender practice exams. Once my studying is done (either through books or experience), I’ll go through the practice exams.  I find them really helpful in getting my knowledge lined up to the thinking process that the exam writers use.  If I’m relying on my experience, then this really helps me to identify gaps in my knowledge that I’ll need to fill. That’s about it.  If I’m doing ok on the practice exams, then I’ll take the real thing.  I’ve found that the practice exams are usually more difficult than then real thing. Oh – one other thing I do related to Microsoft exams – I try to take any beta exams that Microsoft makes available that fall into my skill set.  Microsoft has started a blog to announce these and the seats usually fill up really quick.  The blog is at http://blogs.technet.com/betaexams/ . You don’t get your results instantly, like a normal exam, instead you have to wait for everyone to finish taking the beta exams and for Microsoft to determine which questions they are using and which they are dropping.  So, be prepared to wait six to eight weeks for your results.

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• Blink-Data vs Instinct?

  - by Samantha.Y. Ma

  In his landmark bestseller Blink, well-known author and journalist Malcolm Gladwell explores how human beings everyday make seemingly instantaneous choices --in the blink of an eye--and how we “think without thinking.”  These situations actually aren’t as simple as they seem, he postulates; and throughout the book, Gladwell seeks answers to questions such as: 1.    What makes some people good at thinking on their feet and making quick spontaneous decisions?2.    Why do some people follow their instincts and win, while others consistently seem to stumble into error?3.    Why are some of the best decisions often those that are difficult to explain to others?In Blink, Gladwell introduces us to the psychologist who has learned to predict whether a marriage will last, based on a few minutes of observing a couple; the tennis coach who knows when a player will double-fault before the racket even makes contact with the ball; the antiquities experts who recognize a fake at a glance. Ultimately, Blink reveals that great decision makers aren't those who spend the most time deliberating or analyzing information, but those who focus on key factors among an overwhelming number of variables-- i.e., those who have perfected the art of "thin-slicing.” In Data vs. Instinct: Perfecting Global Sales Performance, a new report sponsored by Oracle, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) explores the roles data and instinct play in decision-making by sales managers and discusses how sales executives can increase sales performance through more effective  territory planning and incentive/compensation strategies.If you are a sales executive, ask yourself this:  “Do you rely on knowledge (data) when you plan out your sales strategy?  If you rely on data, how do you ensure that your data sources are reliable, up-to-date, and complete?  With the emergence of social media and the proliferation of both structured and unstructured data, how do you know that you are applying your information/data correctly and in-context?  Three key findings in the report are:•    Six out of ten executives say they rely more on data than instinct to drive decisions. •    Nearly one half (48 percent) of incentive compensation plans do not achieve the desired results. •    Senior sales executives rely more on current and historical data than on forecast data. Strikingly similar to what Gladwell concludes in Blink, the report’s authors succinctly sum up their findings: "The best outcome is a combination of timely information, insightful predictions, and support data."Applying this insight is crucial to creating a sound sales plan that drives alignment and results.  In the area of sales performance management, “territory programs and incentive compensation continue to present particularly complex challenges in an increasingly globalized market," say the report’s authors. "It behooves companies to get a better handle on translating that data into actionable and effective plans." To help solve this challenge, CRM Oracle Fusion integrates forecasting, quotas, compensation, and territories into a single system.   For example, Oracle Fusion CRM provides a natural integration between territories, which define the sales targets (e.g., collection of accounts) for the sales force, and quotas, which quantify the sales targets. In fact, territory hierarchy is a core analytic dimension to slice and dice sales results, using sales analytics and alerts to help you identify where problems are occurring. This makes territoriesStart tapping into both data and instinct effectively today with Oracle Fusion CRM.   Here is a short video to provide you with a snapshot of how it can help you optimize your sales performance.  

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• How much is a subscriber worth?

  - by Tom Lewin

  This year at Red Gate, we’ve started providing a way to back up SQL Azure databases and Azure storage. We decided to sell this as a service, instead of a product, which means customers only pay for what they use. Unfortunately for us, it makes figuring out revenue much trickier. With a product like SQL Compare, a customer pays for it, and it’s theirs for good. Sure, we offer support and upgrades, but, fundamentally, the sale is a simple, upfront transaction: we’ve made this product, you need this product, we swap product for money and everyone is happy. With software as a service, it isn’t that easy. The money and product don’t change hands up front. Instead, we provide a service in exchange for a recurring fee. We know someone buying SQL Compare will pay us $X, but we don’t know how long service customers will stay with us, or how much they will spend. How do we find this out? We use lifetime value analysis. What is lifetime value? Lifetime value, or LTV, is how much a customer is worth to the business. For Entrepreneurs has a brilliant write up that we followed to conduct our analysis. Basically, it all boils down to this equation: LTV = ARPU x ALC To make it a bit less of an alphabet-soup and a bit more understandable, we can write it out in full: The lifetime value of a customer equals the average revenue per customer per month, times the average time a customer spends with the service Simple, right? A customer is worth the average spend times the average stay. If customers pay on average $50/month, and stay on average for ten months, then a new customer will, on average, bring in $500 over the time they are a customer! Average spend is easy to work out; it’s revenue divided by customers. The problem comes when we realise that we don’t know exactly how long a customer will stay with us. How can we figure out the average lifetime of a customer, if we only have six months’ worth of data? The answer lies in the fact that: Average Lifetime of a Customer = 1 / Churn Rate The churn rate is the percentage of customers that cancel in a month. If half of your customers cancel each month, then your average customer lifetime is two months. The problem we faced was that we didn’t have enough data to make an estimate of one month’s cancellations reliable (because barely anybody cancels)! To deal with this data problem, we can take data from the last three months instead. This means we have more data to play with. We can still use the equation above, we just need to multiply the final result by three (as we worked out how many three month periods customers stay for, and we want our answer to be in months). Now these estimates are likely to be fairly unreliable; when there’s not a lot of data it pays to be cautious with inference. That said, the numbers we have look fairly consistent, and it’s super easy to revise our estimates when new data comes in. At the very least, these numbers give us a vague idea of whether a subscription business is viable. As far as Cloud Services goes, the business looks very viable indeed, and the low cancellation rates are much more than just data points in LTV equations; they show that the product is working out great for our customers, which is exactly what we’re looking for!

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• Recieving and organizing results without server side script (JavaScript)

  - by Aaron

  I have been working on a very large form project for the past few days. I finally managed to get tables to work properly within a javascript file that opens a new display window. Now the issue at hand is that I can't seem to get CSS code to work within the javascript that I have created. Before everyone starts thinking "just use server side script idiot" I have a few conditions and info about the file: The file is only being ran local due to confidential information risks. Once again no option for server access. The intranet the computers are on are already top security and this wouldn't exactly be a company wide program The code below is obviously just a demo with a simple form... The real file has six pages of highly confidential information Only certain fields on this form will actually be gathered (example: address doesnt appear in the results) The display page will contain data compiled into tables for easier viewing I need to be able to create css commands to easily detect certain information if it applies and along with matching design of the original form Here is the code: <html> <head> <title>Form Example</title> <script LANGUAGE="JavaScript" type="text/javascript"> function display() { DispWin = window.open('','NewWin', 'toolbar=no,status=no,width=800,height=600') message = "<body>"; message += "<table border=1 width=100%>"; message += "<tr>"; message += "<th colspan=2 align=center><font face=stencil color=black><h1>Results</h1><h4>one</h4></font>"; message += "</th>"; message += "</tr>"; message += "<td width=50% align=left>"; message += "<ul><li><b><font face=calibri color=red>NAME:</font></b> " + document.form1.yourname.value + "</UL>" message += "</td>"; message += "<td width=50% align=left>"; message += "<li><b>PHONE: </b>" + document.form1.phone.value + "</ul>"; message += "</td>"; message += "</table>"; message += "<body>"; DispWin.document.write(message); DispWin.document.body.style.cssText = 'color:#blue;'; } </script> </head> <body> <h1>Form Example</h1> Enter the following information: <form name="form1"> <p><b>Name:</b> <input TYPE="TEXT" SIZE="20" NAME="yourname"> </p> <p><b>Address:</b> <input TYPE="TEXT" SIZE="30" NAME="address"> </p> <p><b>Phone: </b> <input TYPE="TEXT" SIZE="15" NAME="phone"> </p> <p><input TYPE="BUTTON" VALUE="Display" onClick="display();"></p> </form> </body> </html> >

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• WF4 &ndash; Guess the number game!

  - by MarkPearl

  I posted yesterday how really good WF4 was looking. Today I thought I would show some real basics that I was able to figure out. This will be a simple example, I am going to make a flowchart workflow – which will prompt the user to guess the number until they guess the right number. Lets begin… Make a new project and make it a Workflow console Application. Then select the Workflow file and drag a FlowChart (2) to point 3. This will now show a green start circle in the designer form. We are going to work with primitives to start with. We are now going to drag a few objects onto the Workflow, We drag the WriteLine, Assign & Decision items onto the designer. Once they are dragged onto the designer we will want to link them up. The order that they are linked is critical since this will determine the order of the solution. In this case, we want the system to first ask “Guess a number”, then to wait for the user to input some code, and then to display “You got it” if they got it right, and “Try again” if they got it wrong. So we now link the arrows to the objects. This is done by moving the mouse pointer over the start objects and clicking on one of the toggles and then dragging it to the next object and releasing the button over one of the toggles. This will place an arrow from the source object to the target object. Okay… pretty simple stuff – now we just need these primitive objects to do stuff. Lets start with the WriteLine primitive. We place the text in inverted commas in the Text field. Because this field accepts any valid VB expression we could have put variables etc. in there if we wanted to. The next thing we want to do is allow the user to input a number. This brings up an interesting problem, if a user were to type in a number, there would need to be someway to declare a variable to hold that value for the life of the workflow. We can achieve this by declaring a variable. To declare a variable, move your cursor over the variables tab at the bottom of the workflow, and then type the name of the new variable in the “Create Variable” field and set it as shown in the image above. Now that we have a variable, we want to call the Console.Readline method and assign the inputted value from the Console to that variable. The code that cannot be seen is actually this – Convert.ToInt32(Console.ReadLine()) We now have a workflow that first prompts the user for a number, then allows the user to type in a number. We are almost done, we just need to make the system react to the value inputted. There are a few ways we could do this, I am going to use the Decision item. So select the Decision object on the designer and then view its properties (F4 for me), and in the condition field place a condition. For simplicity sake I have decided that if the user guesses 10, they will have guessed the number. This is now the completed workflow. Its really easy to understand and shows some really powerful principles for Business applications. You can run the application and see what it does. Imagine writing business solutions that do not worry about the exact flow of objects, but simply allows a business analyst or someone to configure the solution to work exactly as the business rules would dictate. And if the rules changed six months later all they would need to do is re-drag some of the flows. Now I do not know if WF4 will allow for this, but it feels like it is a step in the right direct.

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• Intern Screening - Software 'Quiz'

  - by Jeremy1026

  I am in charge of selecting a new software development intern for a company that I work with. I wanted to throw a little 'quiz' at the applicants before moving forth with interviews so as to weed out the group a little bit to find some people that can demonstrate some skill. I put together the following quiz to send to applicants, it focuses only on PHP, but that is because that is what about 95% of the work will be done in. I'm hoping to get some feedback on A. if its a good idea to send this to applicants and B. if it can be improved upon. # 1. FizzBuzz # Write a small application that does the following: # Counts from 1 to 100 # For multiples of 3 output "Fizz" # For multiples of 5 output "Buzz" # For multiples of 3 and 5 output "FizzBuzz" # For numbers that are not multiples of 3 nor 5 output the number. <?php ?> # 2. Arrays # Create a multi-dimensional array that contains # keys for 'id', 'lot', 'car_model', 'color', 'price'. # Insert three sets of data into the array. <?php ?> # 3. Comparisons # Without executing the code, tell if the expressions # below will return true or false. <?php if ((strpos("a","abcdefg")) == TRUE) echo "True"; else echo "False"; //True or False? if ((012 / 4) == 3) echo "True"; else echo "False"; //True or False? if (strcasecmp("abc","ABC") == 0) echo "True"; else echo "False"; //True or False? ?> # 4. Bug Checking # The code below is flawed. Fix it so that the code # runs properly without producing any Errors, Warnings # or Notices, and returns the proper value. <?php //Determine how many parts are needed to create a 3D pyramid. function find_3d_pyramid($rows) { //Loop through each row. for ($i = 0; $i < $rows; $i++) { $lastRow++; //Append the latest row to the running total. $total = $total + (pow($lastRow,3)); } //Return the total. return $total; } $i = 3; echo "A pyramid consisting of $i rows will have a total of ".find_3d_pyramid($i)." pieces."; ?> # 5. Quick Examples # Create a small example to complete the task # for each of the following problems. # Create an md5 hash of "Hello World"; # Replace all occurances of "_" with "-" in the string "Welcome_to_the_universe." # Get the current date and time, in the following format, YYYY/MM/DD HH:MM:SS AM/PM # Find the sum, average, and median of the following set of numbers. 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10. # Randomly roll a six-sided die 5 times. Store the 5 rolls into an array. <?php ?>

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• CFOs: Do You Have a Playbook for Growth?

  - by Oracle Accelerate for Midsize Companies

  by Jim Lein, Oracle Midsize Programs In most global markets, CFOs are optimistic about their company's growth opportunities. Deloitte's CFO Signals Report, "Time to Accelerate" found that: In the U.K. business optimism is at its highest level in three-and-a-half years Optimism in North America rose from a strong +42% last quarter (Q2 to Q3 2013) to an even stronger +54%. The inaugural Southeast Asia survey, 44% of CFOs reported a positive outlook despite worries over the Chinese economy and political uncertainty. Sustainable and profitable business growth doesn't usually happen by accident. Company's need a playbook for growth that's owned by the CFO. And today, that playbook must leverage the six enabling technologies--Social, Big Data, Mobile, Cloud, Analytics, and The Internet of Things (or, as Oracle president Mark Hurd explains, "The Internet of the People"). On Monday June 9 at  2:00 pm Eastern, CFO.com is hosting a webcast, "The CFO Playbook on Growth: How CFOs Can Boost Efficiency and Performance with Automation". Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} “Investing in technology begins with a business metric driven business case with clear tangible business results expected," says John Lieblang, Affiliate Partner with Waterstone Management Group. "The progressive CFO has learned how to forge a partnership with the CIO to align everyone in the 'result value chain' to be accountable for the business results not just for functional technology.” Click HERE to register  Looking for more news and information about Oracle Solutions for Midsize Companies? Read the latest Oracle for Midsize Companies Newsletter Sign-up to receive the latest communications from Oracle’s industry leaders and experts Jim Lein I evangelize Oracle's enterprise solutions for growing midsize companies. I recently celebrated 15 years with Oracle, having joined JD Edwards in 1999. I'm based in Evergreen, Colorado and love relating stories about creativity and innovation whether they be about software, live music, or the mountains. The views expressed here are my own, and not necessarily those of Oracle.

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• The five steps of business intelligence adoption: where are you?

  - by Red Gate Software BI Tools Team

  When I was in Orlando and New York last month, I spoke to a lot of business intelligence users. What they told me suggested a path of BI adoption. The user’s place on the path depends on the size and sophistication of their organisation. Step 1: A company with a database of customer transactions will often want to examine particular data, like revenue and unit sales over the last period for each product and territory. To do this, they probably use simple SQL queries or stored procedures to produce data on demand. Step 2: The results from step one are saved in an Excel document, so business users can analyse them with filters or pivot tables. Alternatively, SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) might be used to generate a report of the SQL query for display on an intranet page. Step 3: If these queries are run frequently, or business users want to explore data from multiple sources more freely, it may become necessary to create a new database structured for analysis rather than CRUD (create, retrieve, update, and delete). For example, data from more than one system — plus external information — may be incorporated into a data warehouse. This can become ‘one source of truth’ for the business’s operational activities. The warehouse will probably have a simple ‘star’ schema, with fact tables representing the measures to be analysed (e.g. unit sales, revenue) and dimension tables defining how this data is aggregated (e.g. by time, region or product). Reports can be generated from the warehouse with Excel, SSRS or other tools. Step 4: Not too long ago, Microsoft introduced an Excel plug-in, PowerPivot, which allows users to bring larger volumes of data into Excel documents and create links between multiple tables.  These BISM Tabular documents can be created by the database owners or other expert Excel users and viewed by anyone with Excel PowerPivot. Sometimes, business users may use PowerPivot to create reports directly from the primary database, bypassing the need for a data warehouse. This can introduce problems when there are misunderstandings of the database structure or no single ‘source of truth’ for key data. Step 5: Steps three or four are often enough to satisfy business intelligence needs, especially if users are sophisticated enough to work with the warehouse in Excel or SSRS. However, sometimes the relationships between data are too complex or the queries which aggregate across periods, regions etc are too slow. In these cases, it can be necessary to formalise how the data is analysed and pre-build some of the aggregations. To do this, a business intelligence professional will typically use SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) to create a multidimensional model — or “cube” — that more simply represents key measures and aggregates them across specified dimensions. Step five is where our tool, SSAS Compare, becomes useful, as it helps review and deploy changes from development to production. For us at Red Gate, the primary value of SSAS Compare is to establish a dialog with BI users, so we can develop a portfolio of products that support creation and deployment across a range of report and model types. For example, PowerPivot and the new BISM Tabular model create a potential customer base for tools that extend beyond BI professionals. We’re interested in learning where people are in this story, so we’ve created a six-question survey to find out. Whether you’re at step one or step five, we’d love to know how you use BI so we can decide how to build tools that solve your problems. So if you have a sixty seconds to spare, tell us on the survey!

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• No Customer Left Behind

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by David Vap, Group Vice President, Oracle Applications Product Development What does customer experience mean to you? Is it a strategy for your executives? A new buzz word and marketing term? A bunch of CRM technology with social software added on? For me, customer experience is a customer-centric worldview that produces a deeper understanding of your business and what it takes to achieve sustainable, differentiated success. It requires you to prioritize and examine the journey your customers are on with your brand, so you can answer the question, "How can we drive greater value for our business by delivering a better customer experience?" Businesses that embrace a customer-centric worldview understand their business at a much deeper level than most. They know who their customers are, what their value is, what they do, what they say, what they want, and ultimately what that means to their business. "Why Isn't Everyone Doing It?" We're all consumers who have our own experiences with many brands. Good or bad, some of those experiences stay with us. So viscerally we understand the concept of customer experience from the stories we share. One that stands out in my mind happened as I was preparing to leave for a 12-month job assignment in Europe. I wanted to put my cable television subscription on hold. I wasn't leaving for another vendor. I wasn't upset. I just had a situation where it made sense to put my $180 per month account on pause until I returned. Unfortunately, there was no way for this cable company to acknowledge that I was a loyal customer with a logical request - and to respond accordingly. So, ultimately, they lost my business. Research shows us that it costs six to seven times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. Heavily funding the efforts of getting new customers and underfunding the efforts of serving the needs of your existing (who are your greatest advocates) is a vicious and costly cycle. "Hey, These Guys Suck!" I love my Apple iPad because it's so easy to use. The explosion of these types of technologies, combined with new media channels, has raised our expectations and made us hyperaware of what's going on and what's available. In addition, social media has given us a megaphone to share experiences both positive and negative with greater impact. We are now an always-on culture that thrives on our ability to access, connect, and share anywhere anytime. If we don't get the service, product, or value we expect, it is easy to tell many people about it. We also can quickly learn where else to get what we want. Consumers have the power of influence and choice at a global scale. The businesses that understand this principle are able to leverage that power to their advantage. The ones that don't, suffer from it. Which camp are you in?Note: This is Part 1 in a three-part series. Stop back for Part 2 on November 19.

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• A programmer who doesn't get to program - where to turn? [closed]

  - by Just an Anon

  I'm in my mid 20's, and have been working as a full time programmer / developer for the last ~6 years, with several years of part-time freelancing before this, and three straight years of freelancing in the middle of this short career. I work mostly with PHP and the Drupal framework. By and large, I focus on programming custom pieces of functionality; these, of course, vary greatly from project to project. I've got years of solid experience with OOP (have done some Java & C# years ago, too) including intensive experience with front-end development, and even some design work. I've lead small teams (2-4 people) of developers. And of course, given the large amount of freelancing, I've got decent project- & client-management skills. My problem is staying motivated at any place of employment. In the time mentioned I've worked (full-time) at six local companies. The longest I've stayed at any company was just over a year. I find that I'll get hired and be very excited and motivated for the first few months, but the work quickly gets "stale." By that I mean that the interesting components (ie. the programming) get done, and the rest of the work turns into boring cleanup (move a button, add text, change colours, add a field). I don't get challenged, and I don't feel like I'm learning anything new. This happens repeatedly time and time again, and I always end up leaving for either a new opportunity, or to freelance. I'm wondering if perhaps I've painted myself into a corner with the rather niche work market (although with very high demand and good compensation) and need to explore other career choices. Another possibility is that I may be choosing the wrong places of employment, mostly small agencies, and need to look into working for a larger, more established firm. I find programming, writing code, and architecting solutions very rewarding. When I'm working on an interesting problem I lose all sense of time and 14-16 hours can fly by like minutes. I get the same exciting feeling when I'm doing high-level planning of a complex system, breaking up the work and figuring out how everything will tie-in together. I absolutely hate doing small, "stupid" changes that pose no challenge, yet seem to make up more and more of my work. I want to find a workplace where I will get to work on such tasks, be challenged, and improve in all areas of product development. This maybe a programming job, management, architecture of desktop apps, or may be managing a taco stand on a beach in Mexico - I don't know, and I need some advice and real-world feedback. What are some job areas worth exploring? The requirements are fairly simple: working with computers interacting with others challenging decent pay (I'm making just short of 90k / year with a month of vacation & some benefits, and would like to stay in this range, but am willing to take a temporary cut in pay for a more interesting position) Any advice would be much appreciated!

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• Conditionally add htmlAttributes to ASP.NET MVC Html.ActionLink

  - by macca1

  I'm wondering if it's possible to conditionally add a parameter in a call to a method. For example, I am rendering a bunch of links (six total) for navigation in my Site.Master: <%= Html.ActionLink("About", "About", "Pages") %> | <%= Html.ActionLink("Contact", "Contact", "Pages") %> <%-- etc, etc. --%> I'd like to include a CSS class of "selected" for the link if it's on that page. So in my controller I'm returning this: ViewData.Add("CurrentPage", "About"); return View(); And then in the view I have an htmlAttributes dictionary: <% Dictionary<string,object> htmlAttributes = new Dictionary<string,object>(); htmlAttributes.Add("class","selected");%> Now my only question is how do I include the htmlAttributes for the proper ActionLink. I could do it this way for each link: <% htmlAttributes.Clear(); if (ViewData["CurrentPage"] == "Contact") htmlAttributes.Add("class","selected");%> <%= Html.ActionLink("Contact", "Contact", "Pages", htmlAttributes) %> But that seems a little repetitive. Is there some way to do something like this psuedo code: <%= Html.ActionLink("Contact", "Contact", "Pages", if(ViewData["CurrentPage"] == "Contact") { htmlAttributes }) %> That's obviously not valid syntax, but is there a correct way to do that? I'm open to any totally different suggestions for rendering these links. I'd like to stay with something like ActionLink that takes advantage of using my routes though instead of hard coding the tag.

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• SQLite vs Firebird

  - by rwallace

  The scenario I'm looking at is "This program uses Postgres. Oh, you want to just use it single-user for the moment, and put off having to deal with installing a database server? Okay, in the meantime you can use it with the embedded single-user database." The question is then which embedded database is best. As I understand it, the two main contenders are SQLite and Firebird; so which is better? Criteria: Full SQL support, or as close as reasonably possible. Full text search. Easy to call from C# Locks, or allows you to lock, the database file to make sure nobody tries to run it multiuser and ends up six months down the road with intermittent data corruption in all their backups. Last but far from least, reliability. As I understand it, the disadvantages of SQLite are, No right outer join. Workaround: use left outer join instead. Not much integrity checking. Workaround: be really careful in the application code. No decimal numbers. Workaround: lots of aspirin. None of the above are showstoppers. Are there any others I'm missing? (I know it doesn't support some administrative and code-within-database SQL features, that aren't relevant for this kind of use case.) I don't know anything much about Firebird. What are its disadvantages?

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• How to program a neural network for chess?

  - by marco92w

  Hello! I want to program a chess engine which learns to make good moves and win against other players. I've already coded a representation of the chess board and a function which outputs all possible moves. So I only need an evaluation function which says how good a given situation of the board is. Therefore, I would like to use an artificial neural network which should then evaluate a given position. The output should be a numerical value. The higher the value is, the better is the position for the white player. My approach is to build a network of 385 neurons: There are six unique chess pieces and 64 fields on the board. So for every field we take 6 neurons (1 for every piece). If there is a white piece, the input value is 1. If there is a black piece, the value is -1. And if there is no piece of that sort on that field, the value is 0. In addition to that there should be 1 neuron for the player to move. If it is White's turn, the input value is 1 and if it's Black's turn, the value is -1. I think that configuration of the neural network is quite good. But the main part is missing: How can I implement this neural network into a coding language (e.g. Delphi)? I think the weights for each neuron should be the same in the beginning. Depending on the result of a match, the weights should then be adjusted. But how? I think I should let 2 computer players (both using my engine) play against each other. If White wins, Black gets the feedback that its weights aren't good. So it would be great if you could help me implementing the neural network into a coding language (best would be Delphi, otherwise pseudo-code). Thanks in advance!

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• mootools element is null using calendar EightySix plugin

  - by I Like PHP

  i m using mootools Eighty six calendar from this link i download the code and customize according to my need , it's working good on single HTML page but when i embed this code with my php page then it display below error element is null [Break on this error] element.appendChild(context);\n (on line 1712 of js/mootools-1.2.4-core.js) i m unable to debug this kind of error... please tell me where is the problem and how to solve it? one more thing: it was working fine with mootools v 1.2 i m using Jquery on header file of that php page, but also written jQuery.noConflict() in header.php file my basic code is here <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/calendar-eightysix-default.css" media="screen" /> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/mootools-1.2.4-core.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/mootools-1.2.4.2-more.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/calendar-eightysix-v1.0.1.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> window.addEvent('domready', function() { new CalendarEightysix('myCalendar',{ 'format': '%a %D %B %Y', 'theme': 'default red', 'defaultDate': 'today', 'minDate': 'tomorrow', 'offsetY': -4 }) }); </script> and later <input id="myCalendar" name="myCalendar" type="text" maxlength="10" > please take intrest and help me Thanks always

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• Help/Questions About New Team Foundation Server 2010 Installation

  - by user579218

  Hello. Before starting down the TFS2010 installation process, I have a few questions I'm hoping the community can help me with. We're planning on a single-server installation of TFS2010. Initially, we want version/source control and build services, but not reporting or SharePoint. We may add reporting and SharePoint capabilities later. Our environment will be Windows Server 2008 R2 (x64), SQL Server 2008 R2 (x64), Office 2010 (x86), Visual Studio 6 and 2010, and, of course, Team Foundation Server 2010. Can I install TFS2010 on a server that is on our domain? It's not a domain controller, it's just a member server on the domain. Should I install TFS2010 before or after putting the server on the domain? We have six developers that will be logging into their local development computers (which are also on the same domain) using their domain user accounts, do I add each domain user to the TFS2010 server's security groups? If so, which one(s)? Can I or should I use a domain user account as the TFS2010 service account? Or, should I just use Network Service? The TFS2010 install guide notes that none of the service accounts should belong to the Administrators security group, so which security group(s) are recommended for the service account(s)? We're planning on using a local instance of SQL Server 2008 R2 Standard with TFS2010, what service account should we use? Should we use the same domain account as TFS2010 or Local System or ?? The TFS2010 install guide isn't very specific on this. Since we're planning on this server being both the version/source control and build server, should we install our development environments (VS6, VS2010, Access2010) before installing TFS2010? Or does it matter? Thanks in advance for answering these questions.

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• CSS div/overflow Question: Why does the first HTML file work but not the second?

  - by kidvid

  Notice how the first HTML/CSS works when you re-size the browser horizontally. It will shrink no further than around 800 pixels, but it will expand as far as you drag the right edge of the browser. It will also correctly overflow the table at the top and scroll it horizontally. The thing I don't like about the first code snippet is where the scrollbar is. I want it to show up within the borders of the fieldset, so even if I narrow the browser down to 800 pixels wide, I can see both the left and right sides of the fieldset's border. The second code snippet is exactly the same as the first except I add another div tag to the mix, inside of the field set and around the grid. Notice how the top fieldset's width won't correctly shrink when you make the viewport of your browser narrower. Any ideas on why it doesn't work, what I can do to get it to work like the first code snippet? I don't think I'm describing this clearly, but if you run the two side by side, and expand and contract the horizontal edge of your browser windows, you'll see the differences between the two. I'm pretty new to CSS and HTML layout, so my understanding of why CSS handles sizing the way it does in some situations is still really confusing to me. Thanks, Adrian Working HTML file: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> <html> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/> <meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css"></meta> <style type="text/css"> #divBody { margin-top: 5px; top:24px; margin-top: 10px; } #divContainer { top: 5px; position:relative; min-height:100%; #width:expression(document.body.clientWidth < 830? "800": "90%" ); width:90%; min-width: 800px; padding-bottom:70px; } #divMasterGrid { position:relative; margin:5px; top:5px; width:99%; margin:0 auto; overflow-x:scroll; } #divRadioButtonArea { position:relative; top:20px; height:51px; font-size: 12px; width:99%; margin:5px; } </style> <title>TEST TEST</title> </head> <body id="divBody"> <div id="divContainer" class="gridRegion"> <div id="divMasterGrid"> <fieldset style="margin: 5px;"> <legend style="font-size: 12px; color: #000;">Numbers</legend> <table border="1px"> <tr> <td>One </td> <td>Two </td> <td>Three </td> <td>Fout </td> <td>Five </td> <td>Six </td> <td>Seven </td> <td>Eight </td> <td>Nine </td> <td>Ten </td> <td>Eleven </td> <td>Twelve </td> <td>Thirteen </td> <td>Fourteen </td> <td>Fifteen </td> <td>Sixteen </td> <td>Seventeen </td> <td>Eighteen </td> <td>Nineteen </td> <td>Twenty </td> </tr> </table> </fieldset> </div> <div id="divRadioButtonArea"> <fieldset style=" padding-left: 5px;"> <legend style="color: #000; height:auto">Colors</legend> <table style="width:100%;padding-left:5%;padding-right:5%;"> <tr> <td> <input type="radio" name="A" value="Y"/><label>Red</label> </td> <td> <input type="radio" name="O" value="O"/><label>White</label> </td> <td> <input type="radio" name="W"/><label>Blue</label> </td> </tr> </table> </fieldset> </div> </div> </body> </html> Broken HTML file: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> <html> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/> <meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css"></meta> <style type="text/css"> #divBody { margin-top: 5px; top:24px; margin-top: 10px; } #divContainer { top: 5px; position:relative; min-height:100%; #width:expression(document.body.clientWidth < 830? "800": "90%" ); width:90%; min-width: 800px; padding-bottom:70px; } #divTopFieldSet { position:relative; margin:5px; top:5px; width:99%; } #divRadioButtonArea { position:relative; top:20px; height:51px; font-size: 12px; width:99%; margin:5px; } #divTable { position:relative; width:99%; margin:5px auto; overflow-x:scroll; } </style> <title>TEST TEST</title> </head> <body id="divBody"> <div id="divContainer" class="gridRegion"> <div id="divTopFieldSet"> <fieldset style="margin: 5px;"> <legend style="font-size: 12px; color: #000;">Numbers</legend> <div id="divTable"> <table border="1px"> <tr> <td>One </td> <td>Two </td> <td>Three </td> <td>Fout </td> <td>Five </td> <td>Six </td> <td>Seven </td> <td>Eight </td> <td>Nine </td> <td>Ten </td> <td>Eleven </td> <td>Twelve </td> <td>Thirteen </td> <td>Fourteen </td> <td>Fifteen </td> <td>Sixteen </td> <td>Seventeen </td> <td>Eighteen </td> <td>Nineteen </td> <td>Twenty </td> </tr> </table> </div> </fieldset> </div> <div id="divRadioButtonArea"> <fieldset style=" padding-left: 5px;"> <legend style="color: #000; height:auto">Colors</legend> <table style="width:100%;padding-left:5%;padding-right:5%;"> <tr> <td> <input type="radio" name="A" value="Y"/><label>Red</label> </td> <td> <input type="radio" name="O" value="O"/><label>White</label> </td> <td> <input type="radio" name="W"/><label>Blue</label> </td> </tr> </table> </fieldset> </div> </div> </body> </html>

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• Contact-to-hire from the perspective of the headhunter agency?

  - by jamieb

  I operate a small IT consulting firm. One of my clients has expressed an interest in having an ASP.Net programmer on-site at their location for a six-month contract, with an option to hire. I've never really operated my company as a body shop (renting out talent for the long term) and an unfamiliar with how to price my quote. Assume I were to bring on a new developer as a 1099'ed contractor and then contract that person out to my client for the duration of the project. If I'm billing my client $X per hour for this developer's time, what should I be compensating this developer? $X/2 per hour? What's the typical ratio? If the client decides to hire this person at the end of the contract, what should I be compensated? Is it a flat finders fee, or maybe a function of the developer's annual salary? Would there be any advantage to actually hiring the person as a 1040'd employee rather than a 1099 contractor even if I can't offer him benefits? I know other body shops (like Robert Half) do this and never understood why.

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• Mapping a child collection without indexing based on database primary key or using bag

  - by Colin Bowern

  I have a existing parent-child relationship I am trying to map in Fluent Nhibernate: [RatingCollection] -- [Rating] Rating Collection has: ID (database generated ID) Code Name Rating has: ID (database generated id) Rating Collection ID Code Name I have been trying to figure out which permutation of HasMany makes sense here. What I have right now: HasMany<Rating>(x => x.Ratings) .WithTableName("Rating") .KeyColumnNames.Add("RatingCollectionId") .Component(c => { c.Map(x => x.Code); c.Map(x => x.Name); ); It works from a CRUD perspective but because it's a bag it ends up deleting the rating contents any time I try to do a simple update / insert to the Ratings property. What I want is an indexed collection but not using the database generated ID (which is in the six digit range right now). Any thoughts on how I could get a zero-based indexed collection (so I can go entity.Ratings[0].Name = "foo") which would allow me to modify the collection without deleting/reinserting it all when persisting?

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• How to determine the (natural) language of a document?

  - by Robert Petermeier

  I have a set of documents in two languages: English and German. There is no usable meta information about these documents, a program can look at the content only. Based on that, the program has to decide which of the two languages the document is written in. Is there any "standard" algorithm for this problem that can be implemented in a few hours' time? Or alternatively, a free .NET library or toolkit that can do this? I know about LingPipe, but it is Java Not free for "semi-commercial" usage This problem seems to be surprisingly hard. I checked out the Google AJAX Language API (which I found by searching this site first), but it was ridiculously bad. For six web pages in German to which I pointed it only one guess was correct. The other guesses were Swedish, English, Danish and French... A simple approach I came up with is to use a list of stop words. My app already uses such a list for German documents in order to analyze them with Lucene.Net. If my app scans the documents for occurrences of stop words from either language the one with more occurrences would win. A very naive approach, to be sure, but it might be good enough. Unfortunately I don't have the time to become an expert at natural-language processing, although it is an intriguing topic.

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• Read large file into sqlite table in objective-C on iPhone

  - by James Testa

  I have a 2 MB file, not too large, that I'd like to put into an sqlite database so that I can search it. There are about 30K entries that are in CSV format, with six fields per line. My understanding is that sqlite on the iPhone can handle a database of this size. I have taken a few approaches but they have all been slow 30 s. I've tried: 1) Using C code to read the file and parse the fields into arrays. 2) Using the following Objective-C code to parse the file and put it into directly into the sqlite database: NSString *file_text = [NSString stringWithContentsOfFile: filePath usedEncoding: NULL error: NULL]; NSArray *lineArray = [file_text componentsSeparatedByString:@"\n"]; for(int k = 0; k < [lineArray count]; k++){ NSArray *parts = [[lineArray objectAtIndex:k] componentsSeparatedByString: @","]; NSString *field0 = [parts objectAtIndex:0]; NSString *field2 = [parts objectAtIndex:2]; NSString *field3 = [parts objectAtIndex:3]; NSString *loadSQLi = [[NSString alloc] initWithFormat: @"INSERT INTO TABLE (TABLE, FIELD0, FIELD2, FIELD3) VALUES ('%@', '%@', '%@');",field0, field2, field3]; if (sqlite3_exec (db_table, [loadSQLi UTF8String], NULL, NULL, &errorMsg) != SQLITE_OK) { sqlite3_close(db_table); NSAssert1(0, @"Error loading table: %s", errorMsg); } Am I missing something? Does anyone know of a fast way to get the file into a database? Or is it possible to translate the file into a sqlite format that can be read directly into sqlite? Or should I turn the file into a plist and load it into a Dictionary? Unfortunately I need to search on two of the fields, and I think a Dictionary can only have one key? Jim

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• Crystal Reports .Net Guidance

  - by Ken Ray

  We have been using .Net and Visual Studio for the last six years, and early on developed a number of web based reporting applications using the .Net version of Crystal Reports that was bundled with Visual Studio. My overall opinion of that product has been, to say the least, rather unimpressed. It seemed to be incredibly difficult and convoluted to use, we had to make security changes, install various extra software, and so on. Now, we are moving to VS2008 and version 3.5 of the .Net framework, and the time has come to redevelop some of these old applications. The developers who used (and somehow mastered) Crystal .Net have long gone, and I am facing a decision - do we stick with Crystal Reports or move to something else. We also have the "full" version of Crystal Reports XI at our disposal. The way we use the product is to product pdf versions of data extracted from various databases. While some apps use the inbuilt Crystal Reports viewer as well, this seems to be redundant now with the flexibility of grid views - but there is still the need to produce a pdf version of the data in teh grid for printing, or in Excel format to download. What is the concensus? Is Crystal Reports .Net worth persisting with, or should we work out how to use version XI? Alternatively, is there a simple and low cost way to generate pdf reports without using Crystal? What good sources of "how to" information have others found and recommend? Are there suitable books, designed for VS2008 / .Net 3.5 development that you have used and found of benefit? Thanks in advance.

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• What's wrong with this regex (VBScript/Javascript flavor)

  - by OtherMichael

  I'm trying to run a regular expression in VBA code that uses Microsoft VBScript Regular Expressions 5.5 (should be the same as JavaScript regex) regex: ^[0-9A-Z]?[0-9A-Z]{3}[A-Z]?([0-9A-Z]{6})-?([0-9])?$ input: X123A1234567 match: 123456 the six characters I'm interested in give a good match of 123456, ignoring the last (check) digit. Perfect. (The check digit is captured, but it's not a major concern to me). But when BOTH the optional portions are gone (they are optional) the match grabs the last digit GOOD input: 123A1234567 match: 123456 Leave in the optional middle alpha, take out the optional leading alpha, and we still get the good match of 123456 GOOD input: X1231234567 match: 123456 Leave in the optional leading alpha, take out the middle optional alpha, and we still get a good match of 123456 BAD input: 1231234567 match: 234567 Take out BOTH optional alphas, and we get a bad match of 234567 Have a looksee @ the regex testers on http://www.regular-expressions.info/javascriptexample.html or http://www.regular-expressions.info/vbscriptexample.html What am I missing, here? How can I get the regex to ignore the last digit when both optional alphas are missing? The regex is used to feed a lookup system, so that no matter what format the input data, we can match to a complete value.

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• Are web-safe colors still relevant?

  - by Gavin Miller

  Since the vast majority of monitors are 16-bit color or more, including mobile devices, does it make sense to even consider web-safe colors when choosing color schemes? Or is it something that ought to be relegated to history as a piece of trivia? For those of you that don't know what web-safe colors are: Another set of 216 color values is commonly considered to be the "web-safe" color palette, developed at a time when many computer displays were only capable of displaying 256 colors. A set of colors was needed that could be shown without dithering on 256-color displays; the number 216 was chosen partly because computer operating systems customarily reserved sixteen to twenty colors for their own use; it was also selected because it allows exactly six shades each of red, green, and blue (6 × 6 × 6 = 216). The list of colors is often presented as if it has special properties that render them immune to dithering. In fact, on 256-color displays applications can set a palette of any selection of colors that they choose, dithering the rest. These colors were chosen specifically because they matched the palettes selected by the then leading browser applications. [Wikipedia]

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• Project Euler: Programmatic Optimization for Problem 7?

  - by bmucklow

  So I would call myself a fairly novice programmer as I focused mostly on hardware in my schooling and not a lot of Computer Science courses. So I solved Problem 7 of Project Euler: By listing the first six prime numbers: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, and 13, we can see that the 6th prime is 13. What is the 10001st prime number? I managed to solve this without problem in Java, but when I ran my solution it took 8 and change seconds to run. I was wondering how this could be optimized from a programming standpoint, not a mathematical standpoint. Is the array looping and while statements the main things eating up processing time? And how could this be optimized? Again not looking for a fancy mathematical equation..there are plenty of those in the solution thread. SPOILER My solution is listed below. public class PrimeNumberList { private ArrayList<BigInteger> primesList = new ArrayList<BigInteger>(); public void fillList(int numberOfPrimes) { primesList.add(new BigInteger("2")); primesList.add(new BigInteger("3")); while (primesList.size() < numberOfPrimes){ getNextPrime(); } } private void getNextPrime() { BigInteger lastPrime = primesList.get(primesList.size()-1); BigInteger currentTestNumber = lastPrime; BigInteger modulusResult; boolean prime = false; while(!prime){ prime = true; currentTestNumber = currentTestNumber.add(new BigInteger("2")); for (BigInteger bi : primesList){ modulusResult = currentTestNumber.mod(bi); if (modulusResult.equals(BigInteger.ZERO)){ prime = false; break; } } if(prime){ primesList.add(currentTestNumber); } } } public BigInteger get(int primeTerm) { return primesList.get(primeTerm - 1); } }

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