Search Results

Search found 5749 results on 230 pages for 'miles away'.

Page 32/230 | < Previous Page | 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39  | Next Page >

  • Book review (Book 6) - Wikinomics

    - by BuckWoody
    This is a continuation of the books I challenged myself to read to help my career - one a month, for year. You can read my first book review here. The book I chose for November 2011 was: Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, by Don Tapscott   Why I chose this Book: I’ve heard a lot about this book - was one of the “must read” kind of business books (many of which are very “fluffy”) and supposedly deals with collaborating using technology - so I want to see what it says about collaborative efforts and how I can leverage them. What I learned: I really disliked this book. I’ve never been a fan of the latest “business book”, and sadly that’s what this felt like to me. A “business book” is what I call a work that has a fairly simple concept to get across, and then proceeds to use various made-up terms, analogies and other mechanisms to fill hundreds of pages doing it. This perception is at my own – the book is pretty old, and these things go stale quickly. The author’s general point (at least what I took away from it) was: Open Source is good, proprietary is bad. Collaboration is the hallmark of successful companies. In my mind, you can save yourself the trouble of reading this work if you get these two concepts down. Don’t get me wrong – open source is awesome, and collaboration is a good thing, especially in places where it fits. But it’s not a panacea as the author seems to indicate. For instance, he continuously uses the example of MySpace to show a “2.0” company, which I think means that you can enter text as well as read it on a web page. All well and good. But we all know what happened to MySpace, and of course he missed the point entirely about this new web environment: low barriers to entry often mean low barriers to exit. And the open, collaborative company being the best model – well, I think we all know a certain computer company famous for phones and music that is arguably quite successful, and is probably one of the most closed, non-collaborative (at least with its customers) on the planet. So that sort of takes away that argument. The reality of business is far more complicated. Collaboration is an amazing tool, and should be leveraged heavily. However, at the end of the day, after you do your research you need to pick a strategy and stick with it. Asking thousands of people to assist you in building your product probably will not work well. Open Source is great – but some proprietary products are quite functional as well, have a long track record, are well supported, and will probably be upgraded. Everything has its place, so use what works where it is needed. There is no single answer, sadly. So did I waste my time reading the book? Did I make a bad choice? Not at all! Reading the opinions and thoughts of others is almost always useful, and it’s important to consider opinions other than your own. If nothing else, thinking through the process either convinces you that you are wrong, or helps you understand better why you are right.

    Read the article

  • T-SQL Tuesday - the swag

    - by Rob Farley
    This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Kendal van Dyke (@SQLDBA), and is on the topic of swag. He asks about the best SQL Server swag that we’ve ever received from a conference. I can’t say I ever focus on getting the swag at conferences, as I see some people doing. I know there are plenty of people that get around all the sponsors as soon as they’ve arrived, collecting whatever goodies they can, sometimes as token gifts for those at home, sometimes as giveaways for the user groups they attend. I remember a few years ago at my first PASS Summit, the SQLCAT team gave me a large pile of leftover SQL Server swag to give away to my user group – piles of branded things to stop your phone sliding off your car dashboard, and other things. The user group members thought it was great, and over the course of a few months, happily cleared me out of it all. I tend to consider swag to be something that you haven’t earned except by being at a conference, and there was no winning associated with it, it was simply a giveaway item at a sponsor booth. That means I don’t include the HP Mini laptop that was given away at TechEd Australia a few years ago to every attendee, or the SQL Server bag and Camelbak bottle that I was given as a thank-you for writing a guest blog post (which I use as my regular laptop bag and water bottle for work). I don’t even include the copy of Midtown Madness that I got as a door prize at my vey first TechEd event in 1999 (that was a really good game, and even meant that when I went to Chicago last year, I felt a strange familiarity about the place). I don’t want to include shirts in the mix either. I was given a nice SQL Server shirt about five years ago TechEd Australia. It’s a business shirt (buttons, cuffs, pocket on the chest), black with the SQL Server logo on it. It was such a nice shirt that I commented about it to the Product Marketing Manager for Australia (Christine, at the time), who unexpectedly arranged for me to get another one. That was certainly an improvement on the tent I was given at one of the MVP conference I attended. So when I consider these ‘rules’, two pieces of swag come to mind, and I think both were at PASS Summits (although I can’t be sure). One was a hand-warmer from HP, one of the “crystallisation-type” ones, which proved extremely popular when I got home, until one day when it didn’t survive being recharged – not overly SQL related, but still it was good swag. The other was an umbrella, from expressor, which was from the PASS Summit in 2010, my first PASS Summit. I remember it well – Blythe Morrow (now Gietz) (@blythemorrow) was working the booth, having stopped working for PASS some time before, but she’d been on my list of people to meet, as I’d had plenty of contact with her while she’d worked at PASS, my being a chapter leader and general volunteer. There had been an expressor dinner on one of the first evenings, which I’d been asked to be at, which is when I’d met lots of SQL people in person for the first time, including Ted Krueger (@onpnt), Jessica Moss (@jessicamoss) and Blythe. Anyway, at some point the next day I swung by their booth to say hello and thank them for the dinner, and Blythe says “Oh, we have the best swag – here!” and handed me an umbrella. And she was right. It’s excellent. @rob_farley

    Read the article

  • Bridging Two Worlds: Big Data and Enterprise Data

    - by Dain C. Hansen
    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;} The big data world is all the vogue in today’s IT conversations. It’s a world of volume, velocity, variety – tantalizing us with its untapped potential. It’s a world of transformational game-changing technologies that have already begun to alter the information management landscape. One of the reasons that big data is so compelling is that it’s a universal challenge that impacts every one of us. Whether it is healthcare, financial, manufacturing, government, retail - big data presents a pressing problem for many industries: how can so much information be processed so quickly to deliver the ‘bigger’ picture? With big data we’re tapping into new information that didn’t exist before: social data, weblogs, sensor data, complex content, and more. What also makes big data revolutionary is that it turns traditional information architecture on its head, putting into question commonly accepted notions of where and how data should be aggregated processed, analyzed, and stored. This is where Hadoop and NoSQL come in – new technologies which solve new problems for managing unstructured data. And now for some worst practices that I'd recommend that you please not follow: Worst Practice Lesson 1: Throw away everything that you already know about data management, data integration tools, and start completely over. One shouldn’t forget what’s already running in today’s IT. Today’s Business Analytics, Data Warehouses, Business Applications (ERP, CRM, SCM, HCM), and even many social, mobile, cloud applications still rely almost exclusively on structured data – or what we’d like to call enterprise data. This dilemma is what today’s IT leaders are up against: what are the best ways to bridge enterprise data with big data? And what are the best strategies for dealing with the complexities of these two unique worlds? Worst Practice Lesson 2: Throw away all of your existing business applications … because they don’t run on big data yet. Bridging the two worlds of big data and enterprise data means considering solutions that are complete, based on emerging Hadoop technologies (as well as traditional), and are poised for success through integrated design tools, integrated platforms that connect to your existing business applications, as well as and support real-time analytics. Leveraging these types of best practices translates to improved productivity, lowered TCO, IT optimization, and better business insights. Worst Practice Lesson 3: Separate out [and keep separate] your big data sandboxes from all the current enterprise IT systems. Don’t mix sand among playgrounds. We didn't tell you that you wouldn't get dirty doing this. Correlation between the two worlds is key. The real advantage to analyzing big data comes when you can correlate it with the existing data in your data warehouse or your current applications to make sense of the larger patterns. If you have not followed these worst practices 1-3 then you qualify for the first step of our journey: bridging the two worlds of enterprise data and big data. Over the next several weeks we’ll be discussing this topic along with several others around big data as it relates to data integration. We welcome you to join us in the conversation by following us on twitter on #BridgingBigData or download our latest white paper and resource kit: Big Data and Enterprise Data: Bridging Two Worlds.

    Read the article

  • Free tools versus paid tools.

    - by Dennis Vroegop
    We live in a strange world. Information should be free. Tools should be free. Software should be free (and I mean free as in free beer, not as in free speech). Of course, since I make my living (and pay my mortgage) by writing software I tend to disagree. Or rather: I want to get paid for the things I do in the daytime. Next to that I also spend time on projects I feel are valuable for the community, which I do for free. The reason I can do that is because I get paid enough in the daytime to afford that time. It gives me a good feeling, I help others and it’s fun to do. But the baseline is: I get paid to write software. I am sure this goes for a lot of other developers. We get paid for what we do during the daytime and spend our free time giving back. So why does everyone always make a fuzz when a company suddenly starts to charge for software? To me, this seems like a very reasonable decision. Companies need money: they have staff to pay, buildings to rent, coffee to buy, etc. All of this doesn’t come free so it makes sense that they charge their customers for the things they produce. I know there’s a very big Open Source market out there, where companies give away (parts of) their software and get revenue out of the services they provide. But this doesn’t work if your product doesn’t need services. If you build a great tool that is very easy to use, and you give it away for free you won’t get any money by selling services that no user of your tool really needs. So what do you do? You charge money for your tool. It’s either that or stop developing the tool and turn to other, more profitable projects. Like it or not, that’s simple economics at work. You have something other people want, so you charge them for it. This week it was announced that what I believe is the most used tool for .net developers (besides Visual Studio of course),namely Red Gates .net reflector, will stop being a free tool. They will charge you $35 for the next version. Suddenly twitter was on fire and everyone was mad about it. But why? The tool is downloaded by so many developers that it must be valuable to them. I know of no serious .net developer who hasn’t got it on his or her machine. So apparently the tool gives them something they need. So why do they expect it to be free? There are developers out there maintaining and extending the tool, building new and better versions of it. And the price? $35 doesn’t seem much. If I think of the time the tool saved me the 35 dollars were earned back in a day. If by spending this amount of money I can rely on great software that helps me do my job better and faster, I have no problems by spending it. I know that there is a great team behind it, (the Red Gate tools are a must have when developing SQL systems, for instance), and I do believe they are in their right to charge this. So.. there you have it. This is of course, my opinion. You may think otherwise. Please let me know in the comments what you think! Tags van Technorati: redgate,reflector,opensource

    Read the article

  • SQLAuthority News – Getting Ready to Learn SQL Server

    - by pinaldave
    If you have read my earlier blog post you must be aware of how I am always eager to learn new things. I have signed up for three days learning course at Koenig Solutions for End to End SQL Server Business Intelligence. You may wonder why I sign up for the course on SQL Server when it seems that I know a lot about it. Well, the belief is incorrect that I know a lot. I think there are plenty of things which I have been dreaming to learn. Why am I learning SQL Server? First of all – I do not know everything and second it is always a good idea to learn more. No matter how old we get or how much we think we know – there are always details which we can learn and refresh few concepts. Learning is never ending process philosophically but it is true as well in reality. SQL Server 2012 is already released earlier this year and there are plenty of enhancements released. Recently I was going over the list of the all the new feature and enhancement and I realized that there few things about SQL Server 2008 R2 I never got a chance to have a hand’s on experience and we have entered into the era of SQL Server 2012. I feel a bit bad about it and I decided to make it a priority for me to learn all the missing experiences. Quick Action – Registration The very same day I called up my friend who owns Koenig Solution and expressed my concern and requested his help. During my early career when I was a SQL Server Trainer, we had some good synergy between us and now they are very successful offshore training company by having a physical location in Delhi,  Goa, Dahradun, Shimla, Goa and Bangalore. I quickly visited their Bangalore Center and paid my fees for learning SQL Server Business Intelligence course. Very next second I got call from my friend suggesting that I learn this course from Delhi instead of Bangalore. As per him I should travel to Delhi and learn the course how other students are learning “Away from Home”. This made sense as I stay in Bangalore and if I return home after a long day of learning, I will be not able to practice for the next day as there will be “sweet distraction” of the family. Well I opted for Delhi. What Registration Fees Included I learned from registration processes that the following were included in the fees. 3 meals every day (hearty breakfast, lunch from premium restaurants and home cooked like dinner) Airport pick up and drop Hotel Stay Internet at hotel and at learning institute Unlimited coffee and snacks at learning institute Printed Learning Material Certification Fees (if applicable) Learning material … And of course classroom training I thought registration process was over when I paid fees. Well, I was in for a very nice surprise. Registration Experience – Bliss! Within few hours I received emails from Center Manager of Delhi with all the necessary details I need to know about my learning experience. The email contained following information in detail and it blew me away. Details of the pick up from airport – driver information Details of Delhi and important information List of all the important people and emergency contact details Internet connection details Detail of the trainer and all the training details and lots of other relevant information Well so far everything looks great. Tomorrow I will reach to Delhi and I will share how things go on. Any suggestion for things to do in Delhi? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Training, T SQL, Technology

    Read the article

  • Do MORE with WebCenter

    - by Michael Snow
    WEBCAST THURSDAY!! 03/22/12 Do you need to lower costs? Raise Productivity? Foster Innovation? Improve Online Engagement? But you’re still stuck with Documentum? Step away from the ledge – there is hope – let us help you. Top 4 Content Imperatives · Lower Costs - Reduce labor, maintenance fees, storage and electrical consumption · Raise Productivity - Automation and integration, communication, findability · Foster Innovation - Enable collaboration, expertise location · Improve Online Engagement – enable user-driven, dynamic marketing initiatives With the coming technology wave we see four content imperatives. Every organization has had to reduce costs, cost cutting has become a way of life. Everyone is working three jobs as positions are eliminated. And so we have to reduce labor, reduce maintenance, and reduce money we are wasting on things like storing content that is redundant or no longer useful. We also, to fill that gap, need to raise productivity. Knowledge workers represent the fastest growing segment of the workforce, accounting for 40%-75% of the employees at organizations in sectors like financial services, life sciences, healthcare and retail.  What’s more, their wages total 18 percent of the United States GDP. And so we can’t afford information systems that don’t let our top performers be the best they can be. We look to automate the content processes, provide ways to integrate that content into our processes, provide communication to make decisions, and to make content more findable so people can make the right decision and move the process forward. And really to get ourselves out of the current financial status, we can only cut costs so far. We have to innovate out of economic tough times – to find new products and new markets. And to enable the innovation process, we have to enable collaboration and expertise location. So much of innovation is about building on innovations that have come before. To solve problems, we have to be able to find what our organization has already created. We find that problems we need to solve have already been solved if we can find the right document, the right person. So we have to provide systems that enable us to stand on the shoulders of our organization’s accomplishments. Good content drives great marketing. Online engagement is growing as an absolute necessity for modern growing marketing organizations that require the business users be enabled for dynamic marketing content creation, updates and targeted content creation and management. Unfortunately – if you are currently stuck with Documentum, you are really lacking in your Web Experience Management capabilities. Documentum previously used FatWire for web publishing. Now FatWire is part of Oracle. Oracle provides powerful web engagement capabilities: Increase sales and loyalty by optimizing online engagement Create, manage and moderate contextually relevant, targeted and interactive online experiences Optimize customer engagement across, web, mobile and social channels Manage large scale multichannel global online presence with integration to enterprise applications Enable business users to control their content and make their own updates Publish content from native files – enable navigation of project documents, procedures, policy information Enable content display and updates from existing web applications – one click to drag and drop content management functionality So you get the ability to self-publish information and make it navigable, to move the process of publishing from IT to business users, and the ability to address a whole new area of user engagement with web experience management. So… if you are still stuck with Documentum and don’t know what to do – contact us – not only will Oracle help you step away from the ledge, but also with the MoveOff Documentum program, we are offering you a way – trade-in your Documentum licenses for a 100% credit on Oracle WebCenter. How’s that for a nice bonus? It’s time to stop maintaining Documentum, and to start innovating with Oracle WebCenter. Learn More Here! To learn more about what Oracle WebCenter can offer you today – join us for a webcast – your eyes will be opened to all that’s possible. Do More with WebCenter: Extend Beyond Content Management

    Read the article

  • A view from the call center for the Nashville Flood telethon

    - by Rob Foster
    I want to break away from my usual topic of something technical and talk about what I experienced tonight while working in the call center for the Nashville Flood telethon, which was broadcast on WSMV, CNN, and The Weather Channel.  We started receiving calls about 7pm local time and to be honest, I had no idea what to expect when going into this.  I mean, I'm a pretty good talker, but this is different...We had a good script of what to say and how we were supposed to say it, as well as paper forms and pens that we used to collect information from people who wanted to donate their money to help.  I took my first few calls pretty easily and it went pretty quick and easy.  Everyone was upbeat and happy to be in the call center as well as people happy to be donating money. Pizza, snacks, and soft drinks were flowing well.  Everyone is smiling and happy.  :) About 3 or 4 calls into my night, I got a call from a lady that had lost 2 family members in West Nashville who drowned in the floods.  She was crying when she called and I of course tried to console her.  She told me how bad her situation was, losing family members and much of her neighborhood.  After all this, she still just wanted to help other people.  She was donating all the money that she could to the telethon and I want to share a direct quote from her: "I want to donate this instead of buying flowers for my family members' funeral because people out there need help.". Please let me pause while I get myself together <again>.  That caught me so off guard (and still does). I had kids calling wanting to donate their allowance, open their piggy banks, whatever they could do.  These are kids.  Kids not much older than my boys.  Kids who should be focused on buying the next cool video game or toy or whatever but wanted to do something.  Everyone just seemed to want to help. I took calls from as far away as British Columbia as well and pretty much coast to coast.  how cool is that? Yet another thing that caught me off guard.  This kind lady that called from British Columbia told me how much she loved visiting Nashville and just hated to see this happen.  I belive that she said that she will be attending the CMA Fest this year too.  I was sure to tell her not to cancel her plans!  :) It felt like every call I took (and I took A LOT, as did everyone else) was very personal and heartfelt.  I've never had the privelage to do anything like this and fell lucky to have been able to help out with answering phones and logging donations.  Nashville will bounce back very quickly, people are out there day and night helping each other, and the spirits are very high here.  I hope that one day, my kids read this blog and better understand who they are, where they come from, and what the human spirt is and can be.  I love this city, I love the people here, I love the culture and even more than ever am proud to say that this is me.  This is us.  We are Nashville!

    Read the article

  • So You Want to Be a Social Media Director

    - by Mike Stiles
    Do you want to be a Social Media Director? Some say the title is already losing its relevance; that social should be a basic skill that is required and used no matter what your position is inside the enterprise. I suppose that’s visionary, and a fun thing for thought leaders to say. But in the vast majority of business organizations, we’re so far away from that reality that the thought of not having someone driving social’s implementation and guiding its proper usage conjures up images of anarchy. That said, social media has become so broad, so catch-all, and so extended across business functions, that today’s Social Media Director, depending on the size of their staff, must make jacks-of-all-trades look like one-trick-ponies. Just as the purview of the CMO has grown all-encompassing, the disciplines required of their heads of social are stacking up. Master of Content Every social pipeline you build must stay filled, with quantity and quality. Content takes time, and the job never stops. Never. And no, it’s not true that anybody can write. Master of Customer Experience You must have a passion for hearing from customers and making them really happy. Master of PR You must know how to communicate and leverage the trust you’ve built when crises strike. Couldn’t hurt to be a Master of Politics. Master of Social Technology So many social management tools on the market. You have to know what social tech ecosystem makes sense and avoid piecemeal point solutions. Master of Business Development Social for selling and prospecting is hot, and you have to know how to use social to do it. Master of Analytics Nothing else matters if you can’t prove social is helping the brand. That’s right, creative content guy has to also be a math and stats geek. Good luck with that. Master of Paid Media You’ve got to learn the language, learn the tactics, learn the vendors and learn how to measure results. Master of Education Guess who gets to teach everyone who has no clue how to use social for business. Master of Personal Likability You’ll be leading the voice, tone, image and personality of the brand. If you don’t instinctively know how to be liked by actual people, the brand will be starting from a deficit. How deep must you go in this parade of masteries? Again, that depends on your employer’s maturity level in social. Serious players recognize these as distinct disciplines requiring true experts for maximum effect. Less serious players will need you to execute personally in many of these areas. Do the best you can, and try to grow quickly at each. If you’re the sole person executing all social…well…you’re in the game of managing expectations and trying to socially educate your employer. The good news is, you should be making a certifiable killing. If you’re alone and your salary is modest, time to understand how many brands out there crave what you’ve mastered. Not to push back against thought leaders, but the need for brand social leadership has not gone away…not even a little bit. @mikestiles @oraclesocialPhoto: Stefan Wagner, freeimages.com

    Read the article

  • What Counts For A DBA: ESP

    - by Louis Davidson
    Now I don’t want to get religious here, and I’m not going to, but what I’m going to describe in this ‘What Counts for a DBA’ installment sometimes feels like magic. Often  I will spend hours thinking about the solution to a design issue or coding problem, working diligently to try to come up with a solution and then finally just give up with the feeling that I’m not even qualified to be a data entry clerk, much less a data architect.  At this point I often take a walk (or sometimes a nap), and then it hits me. I realize that I have the answer just sitting in my brain, ready to implement.  This phenomenon is not limited to walks either; it can happen almost any time after I stop my obsession about a problem. I call this phenomena ESP (or Extra-Sensory Programming.)  Another term for this could be ‘sleeping on it’, and while the idiom tends to mean to let time pass to actively think about a problem, sleeping on a problem also lets you relax and let your brain do the work. I first noticed this back in my college days when I would play video games for hours on end. We would get stuck deep in some dungeon unable to find a way out, playing for days on end until we were beaten down tired. Once we gave up and walked away, the solution would usually be there waiting for one of us before we came back to play the next day.  Sometimes it would be in the form of a dream, and sometimes it would just be that the problem was now easy to solve when we started to play again.  While it worked great for video games, it never occurred when I studied English Literature for hours on end, or even when I worked for the same sort of frustrating hours attempting to solve a homework problem in Calculus.  I believe that the difference was that I was passionate about the video game, and certainly far less so about homework where people used the word “thou” instead of “you” or x to represent a number. This phenomenon occurs somewhat more often in my current work as a professional data programmer, because I am very passionate about SQL and love those aspects of my career choice.  Every day that I get to draw a new data model to solve a customer issue, or write a complex SELECT statement to ferret out the answer to a complex data question, is a great day. I hope it is the same for any reader of this blog.  But, unfortunately, while the day on a whole is great, a heck of a lot of noise is generated in work life. There are the typical project deadlines, along with the requisite project manager sitting on your shoulders shouting slogans to try to make you to go faster: Add in office politics, and the occasional family issues that permeate the mind, and you lose the ability to think deeply about any problem, not to mention occasionally forgetting your own name.  These office realities coupled with a difficult SQL problem staring at you from your widescreen monitor will slowly suck the life force out of your body, making it seem impossible to solve the problem This is when the walk starts; or a nap. Maybe you hide from the madness under your desk like George Costanza hides from Steinbrenner on Seinfeld.  Forget about the problem. Free your mind from the insanity of the problem and your surroundings. Then let your training and education deep in your brain take over and see if it will passively do the rest for you. If you don’t end up with a solution, the worst case scenario is that you have a bit of exercise or rest, and you won’t have heard the phrase “better is the enemy of good enough” even once…which certainly will do your brain some good. Once you stop expecting whipping your brain for information, inspiration may just strike and instead of a humdrum solution you find a solution you hadn’t even considered, almost magically. So, my beloved manager, next time you have an urgent deadline and you come across me taking a nap, creep away quietly because I’m working, doing some extra-sensory programming.

    Read the article

  • Stuck with Documentum Still? Do MORE with Oracle WebCenter!

    - by Michael Snow
    WEBCAST TODAY!! 03/22/12 Do you need to lower costs? Raise Productivity? Foster Innovation? Improve Online Engagement? But you’re still stuck with Documentum? Step away from the ledge – there is hope – let us help you. Top 4 Content Imperatives · Lower Costs - Reduce labor, maintenance fees, storage and electrical consumption · Raise Productivity - Automation and integration, communication, findability · Foster Innovation - Enable collaboration, expertise location · Improve Online Engagement – enable user-driven, dynamic marketing initiatives With the coming technology wave we see four content imperatives. Every organization has had to reduce costs, cost cutting has become a way of life. Everyone is working three jobs as positions are eliminated. And so we have to reduce labor, reduce maintenance, and reduce money we are wasting on things like storing content that is redundant or no longer useful. We also, to fill that gap, need to raise productivity. Knowledge workers represent the fastest growing segment of the workforce, accounting for 40%-75% of the employees at organizations in sectors like financial services, life sciences, healthcare and retail.  What’s more, their wages total 18 percent of the United States GDP. And so we can’t afford information systems that don’t let our top performers be the best they can be. We look to automate the content processes, provide ways to integrate that content into our processes, provide communication to make decisions, and to make content more findable so people can make the right decision and move the process forward. And really to get ourselves out of the current financial status, we can only cut costs so far. We have to innovate out of economic tough times – to find new products and new markets. And to enable the innovation process, we have to enable collaboration and expertise location. So much of innovation is about building on innovations that have come before. To solve problems, we have to be able to find what our organization has already created. We find that problems we need to solve have already been solved if we can find the right document, the right person. So we have to provide systems that enable us to stand on the shoulders of our organization’s accomplishments. Good content drives great marketing. Online engagement is growing as an absolute necessity for modern growing marketing organizations that require the business users be enabled for dynamic marketing content creation, updates and targeted content creation and management. Unfortunately – if you are currently stuck with Documentum, you are really lacking in your Web Experience Management capabilities. Documentum previously used FatWire for web publishing. Now FatWire is part of Oracle. Oracle provides powerful web engagement capabilities: Increase sales and loyalty by optimizing online engagement Create, manage and moderate contextually relevant, targeted and interactive online experiences Optimize customer engagement across, web, mobile and social channels Manage large scale multichannel global online presence with integration to enterprise applications Enable business users to control their content and make their own updates Publish content from native files – enable navigation of project documents, procedures, policy information Enable content display and updates from existing web applications – one click to drag and drop content management functionality So you get the ability to self-publish information and make it navigable, to move the process of publishing from IT to business users, and the ability to address a whole new area of user engagement with web experience management. So… if you are still stuck with Documentum and don’t know what to do – contact us – not only will Oracle help you step away from the ledge, but also with the MoveOff Documentum program, we are offering you a way – trade-in your Documentum licenses for a 100% credit on Oracle WebCenter. How’s that for a nice bonus? It’s time to stop maintaining Documentum, and to start innovating with Oracle WebCenter. Learn More Here! To learn more about what Oracle WebCenter can offer you today – join us for a webcast – your eyes will be opened to all that’s possible. Do More with WebCenter: Extend Beyond Content Management

    Read the article

  • SQL SERVER – #TechEdIn – Presenting Tomorrow on Speed Up! – Parallel Processes and Unparalleled Performance at TechEd India 2012

    - by pinaldave
    Performance tuning is always a very hot topic when it is about SQL Server. SQL Server Performance Tuning is a very challenging subject that requires expertise in Database Administration and Database Development. I always have enjoyed talking about SQL Server Performance tuning subject. However, in India, it’s actually the very first time someone is presenting on this interesting subject, so this time I had the biggest challenge to present this session. Frequently enough, we get these two kind of questions: How to turn off parallelism as it is reducing performance? How to turn on parallelism as I want more performance? The reality is that not everyone knows what exactly is needed by their system. In this session, I have attempted to answer this very question. I’ve decided to provide a balanced view but stay away from theory, which leads us to say “It depends”. The session will have a clear message about this towards its end. Deck Details Slides: 45+ Demos: 7+ Bonus Quiz: 5 Images: 10+ Session delivery time: 52 Mins + 8 Mins of Q & A I have presented this session a couple of times to my friends and so far have received good feedback. Oftentimes, when people hear that I am going to present 45 slides, they all say it is too much to cover. However, when I am done with the session the usual reaction is that I truly gave justice to those slides. Action Item Here are a few of the action items for all of those who are going to attend this session: If you want to attend the session, just come early. There’s a good chance that you may not get a seat because right before me, there is a session from SQL Guru Vinod Kumar. He performs a powerful delivery of million concepts in just a little time. Quiz. I will be asking few questions during the session as well as before the session starts. If you get the correct answer, I will give unique learning material for you. You may not want to miss this learning opportunity at any cosst. Session Details Title: Speed Up! – Parallel Processes and Unparalleled Performance (Add to Calendar) Abstract: “More CPU, More Performance” – A  very common understanding is that usage of multiple CPUs can improve the performance of the query. To get a maximum performance out of any query, one has to master various aspects of the parallel processes. In this deep-dive session, we will explore this complex subject with a very simple interactive demo. Attendees will walk away with proper understanding of CX_PACKET wait types, MAXDOP, parallelism threshold and various other concepts. Date and Time: March 23, 2012, 12:15 to 13:15 Location: Hotel Lalit Ashok - Kumara Krupa High Grounds, Bengaluru – 560001, Karnataka, India. Add to Calendar Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Interview Questions and Answers, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

    Read the article

  • Oracle Employees Support New World Record for IYF Children's Hour

    - by Maria Sandu
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 960 students ‘crouched’, ‘touched’ and ‘set’ under the watchful eye of International Rugby Referee Alain Roland, and supported by Oracle employees, to successfully set a new world record for the World’s Largest Scrum to raise funds and awareness for the Irish Youth Foundation. Last year Oracle Employees supported the Irish Youth Foundation by donating funds from their payroll through the Giving Tree Appeal. We were the largest corporate donor to the IYF by raising €3075. To acknowledge our generosity the IYF asked Oracle Leadership in Society team members to participate in their most recent campaign which was to break the Guinness Book of Records by forming the World’s Largest Rugby Scrum. This was a wonderful opportunity for Oracle’s Leadership in Society to promote the charity, support education and to make a mark in the Corporate Social Responsibility field. The students who formed the scrum also gave up their lunch money and raised a total of €3000. This year we hope Oracle Employees will once again support the IYF with the challenge to match that amount. On the 24th of October the sun shone down on the streaming lines of students entering the field. 480 students were decked out in bright red Oracle T-Shirts against the other 480 in blue and white jerseys - all ready to form a striking scrum. Ryan Tubridy the host of the event made the opening announcement and with the blow of a whistle the Scum began. 960 students locked tight together with the Leinster players also at each side. Leinster Manager Matt O’Connor was there along with presenters Ryan Tubridy and George Hook to assist with getting the boys in line and keeping the shape of the scrum. In accordance with Guinness Book of Records rules, the ball was fed into the scrum properly by Ireland and Leinster scrum-half, Eoin Reddan, and was then passed out the line to his Leinster team mates including Ian Madigan, Brendan Macken and Jordi Murphy, also proudly sporting the Oracle T-Shirt. The new World Record was made, everyone gave a big cheer and thankfully nobody got injured! Thank you to everyone in Oracle who donated last year through the Giving Tree Appeal. Your generosity has gone a long way to support local groups both. Last year’s donation was so substantial that the IYF were able to spread it across two youth groups: The first being Ballybough Youth Project in Dublin. The funding gave them the chance to give 24 young people from their project the chance to get away from the inner city and the problems and issues they face in their daily life by taking a trip to the Cavan Centre to spend a weekend away in a safe and comfortable environment; a very rare holiday in these young people’s lives. The Rahoon Family Centre. Used the money to help secure the long term sustainability of their project. They act as an educational/social/fun project that has been working with disadvantaged children for the past 16 years. Their aim is to change young people’s future with fun /social education and supporting them so they can maximize their creativity and potential. We hope you can help support this worthy cause again this year, so keep an eye out for the Children’s Hour and Giving Tree Appeal! About the Irish Youth Foundation The IYF provides opportunities for marginalised children and young people facing difficult and extreme conditions to experience success in their lives. It passionately believes that achievement starts with opportunity. The IYF’s strategy is based on providing safe places where children can go after school; to grow, to learn and to play; and providing opportunities for teenagers from under-served communities to succeed and excel in their lives. The IYF supports innovative grassroots projects operated by dedicated professionals who understand young people and care about them. This allows the IYF to focus on supporting young people at risk of dropping out of school and, in particular, on the critical transition from primary to secondary school; and empowering teenagers from disadvantaged neighborhoods to become engaged in their local communities. Find out more here www.iyf.ie

    Read the article

  • AccelerometerInput XNA GameComponent

    - by Michael B. McLaughlin
    Bad accelerometer controls kill otherwise good games. I decided to try to do something about it. So I create an XNA GameComponent called AccelerometerInput. It’s still a beta project but you are welcome to try it, use it, modify it, etc. I’m releasing under the terms of the Microsoft Public License. Important info: First, it only supports tilt-style controls currently. I have not implemented motion-style controls yet (and make no promises as to when I might find time to do so). Second, I commented it heavily so that you can (hopefully) understand what it is doing. Please read the comments and examine the sample game for a usage overview. There are configurable parameters which I encourage you to make use of (both by modifying the default values where your testing shows it to be appropriate and also by implementing a calibration mechanism in your game that lets the user adjust those configurable values based on his or her own circumstances). Third, even with this code, accelerometer controls are still a fairly advanced topic area; you will likely find nothing but disappointment if you simply plunk this into some project without testing it on a device (or preferably on several devices). Fourth, if you do try this code and find that something doesn’t work as expected on your phone, please let me know as I want to improve it and can only do so with your help. Let me know what phone model it is, what you tried doing, what you expected, and what result you had instead. I may or may not be able to incorporate it into the code, but I can let others know at the very least so that they can make appropriate modifications to their games (I’m hopeful that all phones are reasonably similar in their workings and require, at most, a slight calibration change, but I simply don’t know). Fifth, although I’ll do my best to answer any questions you may have about it, I’m very busy with a number of things currently so it might take a little while. Please look through the code and examine the comments and sample game first before asking any questions. It’s likely that the answer is in there. If not, or if you just aren’t really sure, ask away. Sixth, there are differences between a portrait-mode game and a landscape mode game (specifically in the appropriate default tilt adjustment for toward the user/away from the user calculations). This is documented and the default is set for landscape. If you use this for a portrait game, make the appropriate change (look for the TODO: comment in AccelerometerInput.cs). Seventh, no provision whatsoever is made for disabling screen locking. It is up to you to implement that and to take appropriate measures to detect when the user has been idle for too long and timeout the game. That code is very game-specific. If you have questions about such matters, consult the relevant MSDN documentation and, if you still have questions, visit the App Hub forums and ask there. I answer questions there a lot and so I may even stumble across your question and answer it. But that’s a much better forum than the comments section here for questions of that sort so I would appreciate it if you asked idle detection-related questions there (or on some other suitable site that you may be more familiar and comfortable with). Eighth, this is an XNA GameComponent intended for XNA-based games on WP7. A sufficiently knowledgeable Silverlight developer should have no problem adapting it for use in a Silverlight game or app. I may create a Silverlight version at some point myself. Right now I do not have the time, unfortunately. Ok. Without further ado: http://www.bobtacoindustries.com/developers/utils/AccelerometerInput.zip Have a great St. Patrick’s Day!

    Read the article

  • Ask the Readers: Would You Be Willing to Give Windows Up and Use a Different O.S.?

    - by Asian Angel
    When it comes to computers, Windows definitely rules the desktop in comparison to other operating systems. What we would like to know this week is if you would actually be willing to give up using Windows altogether and move to a different operating system on your computers. Note: This week’s Ask the Readers post is posing a hypothetical situation, so please refrain from starting arguments or a flame war in the comments. Good reasoned discussion is always welcome. There is no doubt that Windows is the dominant operating system in use today. Everywhere you go or look it is easy to find computers with Windows installed such as at work, home, the library, government offices, and more. For many people it is the operating system that they know and are comfortable with, which makes changing to a different operating system less appealing. Adding to the preference for Windows (or dependency based on your view) is the custom software that many businesses use on a daily basis. Throw in the high volume of people who depend on and use Microsoft Office as a standard for their business documents and it is little wonder that Windows is so dominant. So what would you use if you did decide to take a break from or permanently move away from Windows? If your choice is Linux then you have a large and wonderful variety of distributions to choose from based on what you want out of your system. Want a distribution that is easy to work with? You could choose Ubuntu, Linux Mint, or others that are engineered to be ready to go “out of the box”. Like a challenge? Perhaps Arch Linux is more your style. One of the most attractive features of all about Linux is the price…it is very hard to beat free! Maybe Mac OS X sounds like the perfect choice. It has a certain mystique and elegance associated with it and many OS X fans refuse to use anything else if given a choice. Then there is the soon to be released Chrome OS with its’ emphasis on cloud computing. This is a system that is definitely focused on being as low-maintenance and hassle-free as possible. Quick on, quick off, minimalist, and made to be portable. All of the system’s updates will occur automatically leaving you free to work and play in the cloud. But it does have its’ limitations…no installing all of those custom apps that you love using on Windows or other systems…it is literally all about the browsing window and web apps. So there you have it. If the opportunity presented itself would you, could you give Windows up and use a different operating system? Would it be easy or hard for you to do? Perhaps it would not really matter so long as you could do what you needed or wanted to do on a computer. And maybe this is the perfect time to try something new and find out…that new favorite operating system could be just an install disc away. Let us know your thoughts in the comments! How-To Geek Polls require Javascript. Please Click Here to View the Poll. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials The 50 Best Registry Hacks that Make Windows Better The How-To Geek Holiday Gift Guide (Geeky Stuff We Like) LCD? LED? Plasma? The How-To Geek Guide to HDTV Technology The How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 8: Filters Improve Digital Photography by Calibrating Your Monitor The Brothers Mario – Epic Gangland Style Mario Brothers Movie Trailer [Video] Score Awesome Games on the Cheap with the Humble Indie Bundle Add a Colorful Christmas Theme to Your Windows 7 Desktop This Windows Hack Changes the Blue Screen of Death to Red Edit Images Quickly in Firefox with Pixlr Grabber Zoho Writer, Sheet, and Show Now Available in Chrome Web Store

    Read the article

  • ArchBeat Link-o-Rama Top 10 for October 7-13, 2012

    - by Bob Rhubart
    The Top 10 items shared via the OTN ArchBeat Facebook page for the week of October 7-13, 2012. OOW12: Oracle Business Process Management/Oracle ADF Integration Best Practices | Andrejus Baranovskis The Oracle OpenWorld presentations keep coming! Oracle ACE Director Andrejus Baranovskis shares the slides from "Oracle Business Process Management/Oracle ADF Integration Best Practices," co-presented with Danilo Schmiedel from Opitz Consulting. Oracle's Analytics, Engineered Systems, and Big Data Strategy | Mark Rittman Part 1 of 3 in Oracle ACE Director Mark Rittman's series on Oracle Exalytics, Oracle R Enterprise and Endeca. Adaptive ADF/WebCenter template for the iPad | Maiko Rocha Oracle Fusion Middleware A-Team member Maiko Rocha responds to a a customer request for information about how to create an adaptive iPad template for their WebCenter Portal application, "a specific template to streamline their workflow on the iPad." Following the Thread in OSB | Antony Reynolds Antony Reynolds recently led an Oracle Service Bus POC in which his team needed to get high throughput from an OSB pipeline. "Imagine our surprise when, on stressing the system, we saw it lock up, with large numbers of blocked threads." He shares the details of the problem and the solution in this extensive technical post. WebCenter Sites Gadget Development Concepts Quickstart | John Brunswick What are Gadgets? "At their most basic level they can be thought of as lightweight portlets that run largely on the client side of an architecture," says John Brunswick. "Gadgets provide a cross-platform container to run reusable UI modules that generally expose dynamic information to an end user, allowing for some level of end user customization." Oracle Fusion Middleware Security: OAM and OIM 11g Academies Looking for technical how-to content covering Oracle Access Manager and Oracle Identity Manager? The people behind the Oracle Middleware Security blog have indexed relevant blog posts into what they call Academies. "These indexes contain the articles we've written that we believe provide long lasting guidance on OAM and OIM. Posts covered in these series include articles on key aspects of OAM and OIM 11g, best practice architectural guidance, integrations, and customizations." Fusion Applications Technical Tips | Naveen Nahata "Setting memory parameters for Admin and Managed servers of various domains in Fusion Applications can be, let us say, a little daunting," says Oracle Fusion Middleware A-Team member Naveen Nahata. "While all this may look complicated and intimidating, it is actually relatively simple once you understand how it all works." Updated Agenda for OTN Architect Day Los Angeles (Oct 25) In less than two weeks Oracle Architect Day rolls into Los Angeles, with a full slate of sessions devoted to cloud computing, engineered systems, and SOA. Follow the link for the updated event agenda. ORCLville: OOW 2012 - A Not So Brief Recap Oracle ACE Director Floyd Teter, an Applications & Apps Technology specialists, shares his personal, frank, and and extensive recap or Oracle OpenWorld 2012. SOA Suite create partition in Enterprise Manager | Peter Paul van de Beek "In Oracle SOA Suite 10g, or more specific BPEL 10g, one could group functionality in domains," says Peter Paul van de Beek. "This feature has been away in the early versions of SOA Suite 11g. They have returned in more recent version and can be used for all SCA composites (instead of BPEL only). Nowadays these 10g domains are called partitions." Thought for the Day "I strive for an architecture from which nothing can be taken away." — Helmut Jahn Source: BrainyQuote.com

    Read the article

  • Handling Configuration Changes in Windows Azure Applications

    - by Your DisplayName here!
    While finalizing StarterSTS 1.5, I had a closer look at lifetime and configuration management in Windows Azure. (this is no new information – just some bits and pieces compiled at one single place – plus a bit of reality check) When dealing with lifetime management (and especially configuration changes), there are two mechanisms in Windows Azure – a RoleEntryPoint derived class and a couple of events on the RoleEnvironment class. You can find good documentation about RoleEntryPoint here. The RoleEnvironment class features two events that deal with configuration changes – Changing and Changed. Whenever a configuration change gets pushed out by the fabric controller (either changes in the settings section or the instance count of a role) the Changing event gets fired. The event handler receives an instance of the RoleEnvironmentChangingEventArgs type. This contains a collection of type RoleEnvironmentChange. This in turn is a base class for two other classes that detail the two types of possible configuration changes I mentioned above: RoleEnvironmentConfigurationSettingsChange (configuration settings) and RoleEnvironmentTopologyChange (instance count). The two respective classes contain information about which configuration setting and which role has been changed. Furthermore the Changing event can trigger a role recycle (aka reboot) by setting EventArgs.Cancel to true. So your typical job in the Changing event handler is to figure if your application can handle these configuration changes at runtime, or if you rather want a clean restart. Prior to the SDK 1.3 VS Templates – the following code was generated to reboot if any configuration settings have changed: private void RoleEnvironmentChanging(object sender, RoleEnvironmentChangingEventArgs e) {     // If a configuration setting is changing     if (e.Changes.Any(change => change is RoleEnvironmentConfigurationSettingChange))     {         // Set e.Cancel to true to restart this role instance         e.Cancel = true;     } } This is a little drastic as a default since most applications will work just fine with changed configuration – maybe that’s the reason this code has gone away in the 1.3 SDK templates (more). The Changed event gets fired after the configuration changes have been applied. Again the changes will get passed in just like in the Changing event. But from this point on RoleEnvironment.GetConfigurationSettingValue() will return the new values. You can still decide to recycle if some change was so drastic that you need a restart. You can use RoleEnvironment.RequestRecycle() for that (more). As a rule of thumb: When you always use GetConfigurationSettingValue to read from configuration (and there is no bigger state involved) – you typically don’t need to recycle. In the case of StarterSTS, I had to abstract away the physical configuration system and read the actual configuration (either from web.config or the Azure service configuration) at startup. I then cache the configuration settings in memory. This means I indeed need to take action when configuration changes – so in my case I simply clear the cache, and the new config values get read on the next access to my internal configuration object. No downtime – nice! Gotcha A very natural place to hook up the RoleEnvironment lifetime events is the RoleEntryPoint derived class. But with the move to the full IIS model in 1.3 – the RoleEntryPoint methods get executed in a different AppDomain (even in a different process) – see here.. You might no be able to call into your application code to e.g. clear a cache. Keep that in mind! In this case you need to handle these events from e.g. global.asax.

    Read the article

  • Any tips on getting hired as a software project manager straight out of college?

    - by MHarrison
    I graduated with a BS in compsci last September, and I've been trying (unsuccessfully) to find a job as a project manager ever since. I fell in love with software engineering (the formal practice behind it all, not just coding) in school, and I've dedicated the last 3-4 years of my life to learning everything I can about project management and gaining experience. I've managed several projects (with teams around 12 people) while in school, and I worked with my university's software engineering research lab. My résumé is also decent - I worked as a programmer before I went to school (I'm 27 now), and I did Google Summer of Code for 3 summers. I also have general "people management" experience via working as the photo editor for my university's newspaper for 2 years. My first problem with the job hunt is not getting enough interviews. I use careers.stackoverflow.com, which is awesome because I usually get contacted by non-HR people who know what they're talking about, but there's just not enough companies using it for me to get interviews on a regular basis. I've also tried sites like monster.com, and in a fit of desperation, I sent out no less than 60 applications to project management positions. I've gotten 3 automated rejection letters and that's it. At least careers.stackoverflow gets me a phone interview with 8/10 places I apply to. But the main (and extremely frustrating) problem is the matter of experience. I've successfully managed projects from start to finish (in my software engineering classes we had real customers come in with a real software need and we built it for them), but I've never had to deal with budgets and money (I know this is why HR people immediately turn me away). Most of these positions require 5+ years PM experience, and I've seen absurd things like 12+ years required. Interviews are also maddening. I've had so many places who absolutely loved me and I made it to the final round of interviews, and I left thinking things went extremely well and they'd consider me. However, when I check in with them a week later, they tell me "We really liked you and your qualifications are excellent, but we're hoping to find someone with more experience." The bad interviews I can understand - like the PM position that would have had me managing developers both locally and overseas - I had 3 interviews with them and the ENTIRE interview process was them asking me CS brainteasers and having me waste time on things like writing quicksort on paper or writing binary search trees. Even when I tried steering the discussion towards more relevant PM stuff, they gave me some vague generic replies and went back to the "We want to be Google/MS" crap. But when I have a GOOD interview, they say my "qualifications are excellent" but they want "more experience"...that makes me want to tear my hair out. What else can I DO? While I'm aiming for technically-involved PM positions (not just crunching budget numbers), I really don't want a straight development job because I like creating software from the very high-level vs. spending a lot of time debugging memory leaks. In fact, I can't even GET development positions that I'm qualified for because I make the mistake of telling them that my future career goals are as PM (which usually results in them saying something like "Well we already have PMs and this position isn't really set up to get you there." - which I take to mean "No, that's my job, stay away.") My apologies on the long rant, but I'm seriously hellbent on getting hired as a PM since it's both my career goal and the passion that keeps me awake at night. Any suggestions on what the heck else I can do? I'm currently writing a blog where I talk about my philosophies about software engineering, and I'm writing up specs for an iOS app which I will design, code, and show employers, but this takes an awful lot of time that I don't have.

    Read the article

  • Make the Time

    - by WonderOfItAll
    Took the little one to the pool tonight for swim lessons. Okay, Okay. They're not really lessons so much as they are "Hey, here's a few bucks, let me rent out a small section of your pool to swim around with my little one" Saw a dad at the pool. Bluetooth on, iPad in hand, and two year old somewhere around there. Saw a mom at the pool. Arguing with her five year old to NOT take a shower after swimming. Bluetooth on, iPad in hand, work laptop open on stadium seats. Her reasoning for not wanting the child to shower "Look, I have to get this stuff to the office by 6:30, we don't have time for you to shower. Let's go" Wait, isn't the whole point of this little experience called Mommy and Me (or, as in my case, Daddy and Me). Wherein Mommy/Daddy is supposed to spend time with little one. Not with the Bluetooth. Not with the work laptop. Dad (yeah, the same dad from earlier), in the pool. Bluetooth off (it's not waterproof or I'm sure he would've had it on), two year old in hand and iPad somewhere put away. Getting frustrated with kid because he won't 'perform' on command. Here's a little exchange Kid: "I don't wanna get in the water" Dad: "Well, we're here for 30 minutes, get in the water" Kid: "No, don't wanna" Dad: "Fine, I'm getting in" and, true to his word, in he goes, off to swim. Kid: Crying Dad: "Well, c'mon" Kid: Walking to stands Dad: Ignoring kid Kid: At stands Dad: Out of pool, drying off. Frustrated. Grabs bag, grabs kid, leaves How sad. It really seems like I am living in a generation of parents who view their children as one big scheduled distraction to another. It's almost like the dad was saying "Look, little 2 year old boy, I have a busy scheduled. Right now my Outlook Calendar tells me that I have 30 mins to spend with you, so, let's go kid: PERFORM because I have the time" Really? Can someone please tell me when the hell this happened? When did spending time with your kid, spending time with your family, spending time with your spouse, etc... become a distraction? I've seen people at work all day Tweeting throughout the day, checked in with Four Square, IM up and running constantly so they can 'stay in touch' only to see these same folks come home and be irritated because their kids or their spouse wants to connect with the. I've seen these very same people leave the house, go to the corner bar/store/you-name-the-place to be 'alone' only to find them there, plugged in, tweeting away, etc, etc, etc I LOVE technology. I love working with technology. But I also know that I am a human being. A person who, by very definition, is a social being. I needed social interactions and contact--and, no, I'm not talking about the Social Graph kind of connections, I'm talking about those interactions which, *GASP* involve eye to eye contact and human contact. A recent study found that the number one complaint of kids is that they feel they have to compete with technology for their parents time and attention. The number one wish from high school kids? That there parents would turn off the computer/tv/cell phone at dinner. This, coming from high school kids. Shouldn't that tell you a whole helluva lot? So, do yourself a favor tomorrow. Plug into technology all day. Throw yourself into it. Be passionate about what you do. When you walk through the door to your family, turn it all off for 30 mins and be there with your loved ones. If you can manage to play Angry Birds, I'm sure you can handle being disconnected for 30 minutes. Make the time

    Read the article

  • Do Great Work

    - by user12601034
    Have you ever attended an online conference and actually had a desire to attend all of it?? Yesterday I attended the first day of the Great Work MBA program, sponsored by Box of Crayons and hosted by Michael Bungay Stanier. The topic of the day was “Grounding Yourself,” and the day featured five speakers on five different topics. I have to admit that I started the first session with kind of a “blech” feeling that I didn’t really want to participate, but for some reason I did. So I listened to the first session, and I was hooked. I ended up listening to all of the sessions for the day, and I had some great take-aways from the sessions – my highlights included: The opposite of bravery isn’t fear, it’s settling. In essence, you need to be brave in order to accomplish anything. If you’re settling, you’re not being brave, and your accomplishments will likely be lackluster. Bravery requires confidence and permission. You need to work at being brave by taking small wins, build them up and then take slightly larger risks. Additionally, you need to “claim your own crown.” Nobody in the business world is going to give you permission to be a guru in X – you need to give yourself permission to become a guru in X and then do it. Fall in love with obstacles. Everyone is going to face some form of failure. One way to deal with this is to fall in love with solving the puzzle of obstacles. You don’t have to hit it if you can go around it. Understanding purpose brings out the best in people and the best people. As a leader, drawing in people who are passionate and highly motivated about their work creates velocity for your organization. Being clear about purpose is the first step in doing this. You must own your own story. Everything about you creates a “unique you” that is distinct from everyone else. As you take ownership of this, it becomes part of your strength. It’s not a strength if you’re running away from it. Focus on what’s right. Be aware of your tendency to interpret a situation a certain way and differentiate between helpful and unhelpful interpretations. Three questions for how to think differently: 1) Why? 2) Who says so? 3) What would happen if? These three questions can help you build alternative perspectives and options that can increase resiliency. Even though this first day was focused on “Grounding Yourself,” I see plenty of application in the corporate environment for both individuals and leaders of teams. To apply these highlights to my work environment, I would do the following: Understand the purpose – of my company, of my team and of my role on the team. If I know the purpose, I know what I need to bring to the table to make me, my team and my company successful. Declare your goals…your BEHAGS (big, hairy, audacious goals).Have the confidence to declare what you and/or your team is going to accomplish.Sure, you might have to re-state those goals down the line, but you can learn from that as well. Get creative about achieving your goals.Break down your obstacles by asking yourself what is going to stop you from achieving your goals and then, for each obstacles, ask those three questions:Why?Who says so? What would happen if? Focus on what’s right.I had a manager who asked us to write status reports every week.“Status” consisted of 1) What did I accomplish; 2) What will I accomplish next week; 3) How can my manager help me.The focus on our status report was always “what’s right”(“what’s wrong” was always a conversation at the point in time it was needed). I’m normally a skeptic of online webcasts/conferences, and I normally expect to take away maybe one or two ideas. I’m really glad, however, that I took the time to listen to all of the sessions yesterday, and I hope that my take-aways inspire you to think about how you might do great work also. --

    Read the article

  • Software and/(x)or Hardware Projects for Pre-School Kids

    - by haylem
    I offered to participate at my kid's pre-school for various activities (yes, I'm crazy like that), and one of them is to help them discover extra-curricular (big word for a pre-school, but by lack of a better one... :)) hobbies, which may or may not relate to a professional activity. At first I thought that it wouldn't be really easy to have pre-schoolers relate to programming or the internal workings of a computer system in general (and I'm more used to teaching middle-school to university-level students), but then I thought there must be a way. So I'm trying to figure out ways to introduce very young kids (3yo) to computer systems in a fun and preferably educational way. Of course, I don't expect them to start smashing the stack for fun and profit right away (or at least not voluntarily, though I could use the occasion for some toddler tests...), but I'm confident there must be ways to get them interested in both: using the systems, becoming curious about understanding what they do, interacting with the systems to modify them. I guess this setting is not really relevant after all, it's pretty much the same as if you were aiming to achieve the same for your own kids at home. Ideas Considering we're talking 3yo pre-schoolers here, and that at this age some kids are already quite confident using a mouse (some even a keyboard, if not for typing, at least to press some buttons they've come to associate with actions) while others have not yet had any interaction with computers of any kind, it needs to be: rather basic, demonstrated and played with in less then 5 or 10 minutes, doable in in groups or alone, scalable and extendable in complexity to accommodate their varying abilities. The obvious options are: basic smallish games to play with, interactive systems like LOGO, Kojo, Squeak and clones (possibly even simpler than that), or thngs like Lego Systems. I guess it can be a thing to reflect on both at the software and the hardware levels: it could be done with a desktop or laptop machine, a tablet, a smartphone (or a crap-phone, for that matter, as long as you can modify it), or even get down to building something from scratch (Raspberry Pi and Arduino being popular options at the moment). I can probably be in the form of games, funny visualizations (which are pretty much games) w/ Prototype, virtual worlds to explore. I also thought on the moment (and I hope this won't offend anyone) that some approaches to teaching pets could work (reward systems, haptic feedback and such things could quickly point a kid in the right direction to understanding how things work, in a similar fashion - I'm not suggesting to shock the kids!). Hmm, Is There an Actual Question in There? What type of systems do you think might be a good fit, both in terms of hardware and software? Do you have seen such systems, or have anything in mind to work on? Are you aware of some research in this domain, with tangible results? Any input is welcome. It's not that I don't see options: there are tons, but I have a harder time pinpointing a more concrete and definite type of project/activity, so I figure some have valuable ideas or existing ones. Note: I am not advocating that every kid should learn to program, be interested in computer systems, or that all of them in a class would even care enough to follow such an introduction with more than a blank stare. I don't buy into the "everybody would benefit from learning to program" thing. Wouldn't hurt, but not necessary in any way. But if I can walk out of there with a few of them having smiled using the thing (or heck, cried because others took them away from them), that'd be good enough. Related Questions I've seen and that seem to complement what I'm looking for, but not exactly for the same age groups or with the same goals: Teaching Programming to Kids Recommendations for teaching kids math concepts & skills for programming?

    Read the article

  • Taking a look at the Mindscape Phone Elements for WP7.

    - by mbcrump
    I recently heard that Mindscape HQ had released the Windows Phone 7 Controls and had to take a look at them. 100 FREE LICENSE GIVEAWAY! Before we get to the screenshots, you will be pleased to learn that my usergroup called “Allaboutxaml” has partnered with Mindscape HQ and are giving away 100 license. You can check out the site here to get your free controls. But please hurry as after the 100 are gone then I will not have any more to give away! A few links to read first: The official blog post from Mindscape HQ detailing the release. They also have the links to download the trial and get started. The phone elements official forum! So, let’s get started. After you download the controls go ahead and double click the .exe to get started installing them. After everything is installed then you will have the following program group. I’d recommend clicking on the Phone Elements Directory to get started: Let’s go over each element: Bin – Just the .DLL that’s required to use Mindscape HQ WP7 Controls in your project. Documentation – a .CHM File that will show you how to get your project up and running quickly. Resources – Just a few image files Samples – This is a full WP7 project that details every controls. The thing that I was most interested in was how the controls look and is it easy to use. I always believed if your paying for controls then you should hold my hand through using them. You will be pleased to know that Mindscape made it very easy to use. First, the WP7 project in the “Samples” folder just works. Double click on the solution file and you are in an emulator looking at the controls. Since you have the source code for every control, it’s a matter of copying/pasting the code in your project to get it to work. What I did, was play with the controls in the emulator until I found one I could use. Then I looked at the Visual Studio solution and found the Page that contained the control. Mindscape makes this very easy to do with their layout: So, the one that I was interested in was the Looping List Box.  Here is a demo of it: I wanted to see how they were populating the numbers 1-100 so I found the code behind and noticed it was just this one line. LoopingListBox1.DataSource = new NumericDataSource() { MinValue = 1, MaxValue = 100 }; In case you are wondering, the NumericDataSource was created by MindScape and you can view the Declaration to find out more about it:   So, the controls are pretty much that easy to use. Play with the emulator and find the control you want to use. Find the XAML file in the Sample Solution and copy/paste the code. Let’s go ahead and take a look at the controls available: They also have a great variety of Charting controls: Overall it’s a nice set of WP7 controls. Feel free to leave a comment below on anything you would like to see and I will make sure that Mindscape HQ get the message. Don’t forget if you are the first 100 people reading this article then you will get a free license.  Subscribe to my feed CodeProject

    Read the article

  • Fancybox Auto Close, but remain user control

    - by justinw
    Hi, i've searched through the forum yet i can't find the solution. i'm refering to this thread to do the auto close function: http://groups.google.com/group/fancybox/browse_thread/thread/d09438b7... I did follow JFK's solution which works just right: 'onComplete': function() { $("#fancybox-wrap, #fancybox-overlay").delay(3000).fadeOut(); } if you don't want the user to close the box, then add modal=true The scenario is I would like the user to have the option to close the modal when they click on the [close] button or click anywhere on the overlay. I'm using the latest version of FB and jQuery on Rails. Here's my script: <script type="text/javascript"> jQuery(document).ready(function() { jQuery("#link_post").fancybox({ 'autoDimensions':false, 'width':380, 'height':50, 'title':'This message box will automatically close in 10 seconds.', 'titlePosition':'outside', 'onComplete': function() { jQuery("#fancybox-wrap, #fancybox- overlay").delay(10000).fadeOut(); } }); }); </script> However, when i clicked on the close button, the title and close button will fade away, but the FB's content and overlay are still there! it will only fade away after 10 seconds. So, my question is how to overwrite the 'onComplete' function if user clicks on the close button before it automatically closes?

    Read the article

  • How can I use Window.ShowActivated = false with Maximized window?

    - by Anthony Brien
    I have an application that has a splash screen shown before I create my main window. I want to avoid the main window stealing the focus when it gets created if the user has focused another application while the splash screen was shown. My application's startup looks like this: private void Application_Startup(object sender, StartupEventArgs e) { SplashScreenService.Start(); // Initializing stuff... ... // Ready to open the main window. MainWindow mainWindow = MainWindow(); mainWindow.ShowActivated = SplashScreenService.HasFocus(); mainWindow.ShowDialog(); } To prevent the main window from getting activated, I'm setting Window.ShowActivated to false, only if the splash screen has lost the focus. But this causes an exception: InvalidOperationException: Cannot show Window when ShowActivated is false and WindowState is set to Maximized. Indeed, my MainWindow sets the WindowState to Maximized (restored from previous session settings). I don't understand why there is such a limitation with the ShowActivated feature. I couldn't find any documentation about this issue. I tried forcing WindowState to Normal when ShowActivated is false, and it prevents the exception, but it also activates the window! Maybe changing the window state actually causes an activation? Is there a trick I can use to work around this? I want to restore my main window in a maximized state, and not have the main window steal focus away from other applications if the user has focused away from my app during the splash screen.

    Read the article

  • ReSharper - Possible Null Assignment when using Microsoft.Contracts

    - by HVS
    Is there any way to indicate to ReSharper that a null reference won't occur because of Design-by-Contract Requires checking? For example, the following code will raise the warning (Possible 'null' assignment to entity marked with 'NotNull' attribute) in ReSharper on lines 7 and 8: private Dictionary<string, string> _Lookup = new Dictionary<string, string>(); public void Foo(string s) { Contract.Requires(!String.IsNullOrEmpty(s)); if (_Lookup.ContainsKey(s)) _Lookup.Remove(s); } What is really odd is that if you remove the Contract.Requires(...) line, the ReSharper message goes away. Update I found the solution through ExternalAnnotations which was also mentioned by Mike below. Here's an example of how to do it for a function in Microsoft.Contracts: Create a directory called Microsoft.Contracts under the ExternalAnnotations ReSharper directory. Next, Create a file called Microsoft.Contracts.xml and populate like so: <assembly name="Microsoft.Contracts"> <member name="M:System.Diagnostics.Contracts.Contract.Requires(System.Boolean)"> <attribute ctor="M:JetBrains.Annotations.AssertionMethodAttribute.#ctor"/> <parameter name="condition"> <attribute ctor="M:JetBrains.Annotations.AssertionConditionAttribute.#ctor(JetBrains.Annotations.AssertionConditionType)"> <argument>0</argument> </attribute> </parameter> </member> </assembly> Restart Visual Studio, and the message goes away!

    Read the article

  • using Quick Sequence Diagram Editor for sequence diagrams

    - by Jason S
    Anyone have experience with Quick Sequence Diagram Editor? The combination of instant display + text source code + Java implementation is very attractive to me, but I can't quite figure out how to make the syntax do what I want, and the documentation's not very clear. Here's a contrived example: al:Actor bill:Actor atm:ATM[a] bank:Bank[a] al:atm.give me $10 atm:al has $3=bank.check al's account balance al:atm.what time is it atm:al.it's now atm:al.stop bugging me atm:al.you only have $3 atm:bill.and don't you open your mouth bill:atm.who asked you? bill:atm.give me $20 al:atm.hey, I'm not finished! atm:bill has $765=bank.check bill's account balance atm:yes I'm sure, bill has $765=bank.hmm are you sure? atm:bill.here's $20, now go away atm:great, he's a cool dude=bank.I just gave Bill $20 al:atm.what about my $10? atm:al.read my lips: you only have $3 Here's the result from QSDE in single-threaded mode: and in multi-threaded mode: I guess I'm not clear what starts/ends those vertical bars. I have a situation which is single-threaded, but there's state involved, and all the messages are asynchronous. I guess that means I should use an external object to represent that state and its lifetime. What I want is for one timeline to represent the message sequence al:atm.give me $10 atm:bank.check al's account balance bank:atm.al has $3 atm:al.you only have $3 and another timeline to represent the message sequence bill:atm.give me $20 atm:bank.check bill's account balance bank:atm.bill has $765 atm:bank.hmm are you sure? bank:atm.yes I'm sure, bill has $765 atm:bill.here's $20, now go away atm:bank.I just gave Bill $20 bank:atm.great, he's a cool dude with the other "wisecracks" representing other miscellaneous messages that I don't care about right now. Is there a way to do this with QSDE?

    Read the article

< Previous Page | 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39  | Next Page >