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• Career advice: stay with PHP or start a new career in something else ( .Net?)

  - by Christian P

  I'm planning on moving to NY in 6-12 months tops, so I'm forced to find a new job. When I'm planing to start my life in another city it's also probably a good time to think about career changes. I've found a lot of different opinions about PHP vs .Net vs Java and this is not topic here. I don't want to start a new fight about which language is better. Knowing programming language is not the most important thing for being a software developer. To be a really good developer you need to know OOP, design patterns, testing... and language is just a tool to make things happen. So back to my question. I have mixed experience in IT - 1 year as an IT support guy (Windows administration and support), around 2 years of experience in embedded programming (VB.Net 2005) and for the last 2 years I'm working with PHP/MySQL. I have worked with Magento web shop, assisted in some projects in Symfony, modified few Drupal sites. My main concerns are following: Do I continue to improve my skills in PHP e.g. to start learning some major PHP framework like Zend, Symfony maybe get some PHP certification. Or do I start learning .NET or Java. I'm more familiar to .NET so I'll probably choose it if choice falls between .NET and Java ( or you could convince me to choose Java :). Career-wise, I don't know what is the best choice. Learning new framework and language is more time consuming then improving my existing skills in PHP. But with .NET you have a lot of possibilities (Windows 7 Phone development, Silverlight, WPF) and possibly bigger chances to find better jobs. PHP jobs are less payed then .NET, at least, according to my researches (correct me if I'm wrong). But if I start now with .NET I'm just a beginner and my salary will be low. I need at least 2+ years of experience in some language to even try to find some job that is paying higher than $50-60k in NY. My main goal in next 2-3 years is to try to find a job in a $60-80k category. Don't get me wrong, I'm not just chasing money, but money is an important factor when you're trying to start a family. I'm 27 years old and I feel that there isn't a lot of room for wrong decisions regarding my career, so any advice will be very welcome. Update Thank you all for spending time to help me with my problem. All of the answers and comments have been very helpful. I have decided to stick with PHP but also to learn C# and Silverlight 4. We'll see where the life will take me.

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• RTS Game Style Application [closed]

  - by Daniel Wynand van Wyk

  My question may seem somewhat odd, but I hope that my specifications will clarify EXACTLY what it is that I am after. I need some help choosing the right tooling for a particular endeavour. My background is in desktop application development and large back-end systems. I have worked primarily on the Microsoft stack using C# and the .Net framework. My goal is to develop a 2D, RTS style, interactive office simulation. The simulation will model various office spaces, office equipment, employees and their interactions with one another. The idea is to abstract the concept of an office completely. Under the hood the application will do many things that are nothing like a game. This includes P2P networking, VPN tunnelling, streaming video, instant messaging, document collaboration, remote screen sharing, file-sharing, virus scanning, VOIP, document scanning, faxing, emailing, distributed computing, content management and much more! A somewhat similar thing has been attempted by IBM, where they created a virtual office in second life. If their attempt was a game, the game-play would be notably horrible, to say the least! The users/players will drive and control my application through the various objects modelled in the simulation. A single application capable of performing all of these various tasks would be a nightmare to navigate for even the most expert user. Using the concept of a game, I can easily separate functionality by assigning them to objects that relate 1-1 with their real world counter-parts. This can greatly simplify computing for novice users, with many added benefits in terms of visibility, transparency of process and centralized configuration. My hope is to make complex computing tasks accessible to all kinds of users and to greatly reduce the cognitive load associated with using the many different utilities and applications inside office settings. The complexity is therefore limited to the complexity of the space in which you find yourself. I want the application to target as many platforms as possible and run on computers that have no accelerated graphics capabilities. The simulation won't contain any of the fancy eye-candy you find in modern games, to the contrary, my "game" will purposefully be clean and simple. The closest thing I could imagine would be an old game like "Theme Hospital" or the first instalment of "The Sims". All the content will be pre-created and not user-generated like Second Life. New functionality will be added via a plugin system. Given my background and nature of my "game", I would like to spend most of my time writing code that does not have to do with the simulated office, as the "game" is really just a glorified application menu. I have done much reading about existing engines, frameworks and tools. I need the help of an experienced game developer who has tried and tested various products over the years who can guide me in the right direction given my very particular needs. I would appreciate any help I can get!

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• Achieving decoupling in Model classes

  - by Guven

  I am trying to test-drive (or at least write unit tests) my Model classes but I noticed that my classes end up being too coupled. Since I can't break this coupling, writing unit tests is becoming harder and harder. To be more specific: Model Classes: These are the classes that hold the data in my application. They resemble pretty much the POJO (plain old Java objects), but they also have some methods. The application is not too big so I have around 15 model classes. Coupling: Just to give an example, think of a simple case of Order Header - Order Item. The header knows the item and the item knows the header (needs some information from the header for performing certain operations). Then, let's say there is the relationship between Order Item - Item Report. The item report needs the item as well. At this point, imagine writing tests for Item Report; you need have a Order Header to carry out the tests. This is a simple case with 3 classes; things get more complicated with more classes. I can come up with decoupled classes when I design algorithms, persistence layers, UI interactions, etc... but with model classes, I can't think of a way to separate them. They currently sit as one big chunk of classes that depend on each other. Here are some workarounds that I can think of: Data Generators: I have a package that generates sample data for my model classes. For example, the OrderHeaderGenerator class creates OrderHeaders with some basic data in it. I use the OrderHeaderGenerator from my ItemReport unit-tests so that I get an instance to OrderHeader class. The problem is these generators get complicated pretty fast and then I also need to test these generators; defeating the purpose a little bit. Interfaces instead of dependencies: I can come up with interfaces to get rid of the hard dependencies. For example, the OrderItem class would depend on the IOrderHeader interface. So, in my unit tests, I can easily mock the behaviour of an OrderHeader with a FakeOrderHeader class that implements the IOrderHeader interface. The problem with this approach is the complexity that the Model classes would end up having. Would you have other ideas on how to break this coupling in the model classes? Or, how to make it easier to unit-test the model classes?

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• C# Preprocessor Directives

  - by MarkPearl

  Going back to my old c++ days at university where we had all our code littered with preprocessor directives - I thought it made the code ugly and could never understand why it was useful. Today though I found a use in my C# application. The scenario – I had made various security levels in my application and tied my XAML to the levels by set by static accessors in code. An example of my XAML code for a Combobox to be enabled would be as follows… <ComboBox IsEnabled="{x:Static security:Security.SecurityCanEditDebtor}" />   And then I would have a static method like this… public static bool SecurityCanEditDebtorPostalAddress { get { if (SecurityCanEditDebtorPostalAddress) { return true; } else { return false; } } } My only problem was that my XAML did not like the if statement – which meant that while my code worked during runtime, during design time in VS2010 it gave some horrible error like… NullReferenceException was thrown on “StatiucExtension”: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation… If however my C# method was changed to something like this… public static bool SecurityCanEditDebtorPostalAddress { get { return true; } }   My XAML viewer would be happy. But of course this would bypass my security… <Drum Roll> Welcome preprocessor directives… what I wanted was during my design experience to totally remove the “if” code so that my accessor would return true and not have any if statements, but when I release my project to the big open world, I want the code to have the is statement. With a bit of searching I found the relevant MSDN sample and my code now looks like this… public static bool SecurityCanEditDebtorPostalAddress { get { #if DEBUG return true; #else if (Settings.GetInstance().CurrentUser.SecurityCanEditDebtorPostalAddress) { return true; } else { return false; } #endif } }   Not the prettiest beast, but it works. Basically what is being said here is that during my debug mode compile my code with just the code between the #if … #else block, but what I can now do is if I want to universally switch everything to the “if else” statement, I just go to my project properties –> Build and change the “Debug” flag as illustrated in the picture below. Also note that you can define your own conditional compilation symbols, and if you even wanted to you could skip the whole properties page and define them in code using the #define & #undef directives. So while I don’t like the way the code works and would like to look more into AOP and compare it to this method, it works for now.

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• Running a program on boot without login, using the screen

  - by configurator

  Preface: I have a server running on an old laptop. The screen is always on with a login prompt, but because its keyboard is in pretty bad shape, I use it exclusively via ssh. The screen is in a good position, though; I want to use it to display a clock and some stats about what my server is doing. I have scripts to display all those things, but I want to always show them on the monitor screen. My question is, how do I get my script (called HUD) to run on /dev/tty1, instead of the login prompt. Hopefully, it should be possible to accept keyboard input as well as display its output, so that it can use the keyboard to show more info where needed in a future version. I'd also like tty2 etc. to remain active as login screens, in face I actually do need to login locally. For a start, I tried creating a script that I can run from ssh to start the HUD. It goes something like this: ( flock -n 9 watch --interval 0.2 --precise --color --notitle --exec /path/to/script & disown ) 9> /var/lock/hud > /dev/tty1 2> /dev/tty1 < /dev/tty1 (I had to use & disown instead of nohup because nohup recognized the tty and redirects output to nohup.out instead.) This sort-of works. However, it has a few issues: It doesn't steal the terminal's keyboard input, so you can't ctrl+c to get out of it (nor change the script to actually use the keyboard input), and if you press enter it show it and scrolls the display, never refreshing it correctly afterwards. Oddly, if I disconnect the ssh session which created it, it stops working and shows a message: exec: No such file or directory. If I reconnect to ssh, it resumes functioning properly. It feels hackish. Is there a better way to do this? How?

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• 2D Collision in Canvas - Balls Overlapping When Velocity is High

  - by kushsolitary

  I am doing a simple experiment in canvas using Javascript in which some balls will be thrown on the screen with some initial velocity and then they will bounce on colliding with each other or with the walls. I managed to do the collision with walls perfectly but now the problem is with the collision with other balls. I am using the following code for it: //Check collision between two bodies function collides(b1, b2) { //Find the distance between their mid-points var dx = b1.x - b2.x, dy = b1.y - b2.y, dist = Math.round(Math.sqrt(dx*dx + dy*dy)); //Check if it is a collision if(dist <= (b1.r + b2.r)) { //Calculate the angles var angle = Math.atan2(dy, dx), sin = Math.sin(angle), cos = Math.cos(angle); //Calculate the old velocity components var v1x = b1.vx * cos, v2x = b2.vx * cos, v1y = b1.vy * sin, v2y = b2.vy * sin; //Calculate the new velocity components var vel1x = ((b1.m - b2.m) / (b1.m + b2.m)) * v1x + (2 * b2.m / (b1.m + b2.m)) * v2x, vel2x = (2 * b1.m / (b1.m + b2.m)) * v1x + ((b2.m - b1.m) / (b2.m + b1.m)) * v2x, vel1y = v1y, vel2y = v2y; //Set the new velocities b1.vx = vel1x; b2.vx = vel2x; b1.vy = vel1y; b2.vy = vel2y; } } You can see the experiment here. The problem is, some balls overlap each other and stick together while some of them rebound perfectly. I don't know what is causing this issue. Here's my balls object if that matters: function Ball() { //Random Positions this.x = 50 + Math.random() * W; this.y = 50 + Math.random() * H; //Random radii this.r = 15 + Math.random() * 30; this.m = this.r; //Random velocity components this.vx = 1 + Math.random() * 4; this.vy = 1 + Math.random() * 4; //Random shade of grey color this.c = Math.round(Math.random() * 200); this.draw = function() { ctx.beginPath(); ctx.fillStyle = "rgb(" + this.c + ", " + this.c + ", " + this.c + ")"; ctx.arc(this.x, this.y, this.r, 0, Math.PI*2, false); ctx.fill(); ctx.closePath(); } }

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• I didn't mean to become a database developer, but now I am. Should I stop or try to get better?

  - by pretlow majette

  20 years ago I couldn't afford even a cheap POS program when I opened my first surf shop in the Virgin Islands. I bought a copy of Paradox (remember that?) in 1990 and spent months in a back room scratching out a POS application. Over many iterations, including a switch to Access (2000)/SQL Server (2003), I built a POS and backoffice solution that runs four stores with multiple cash registers, a warehouse and office. Until recently, all my stores were connected to the same LAN (in a small shopping center) and performance wasn't an issue. Now that we've opened a location in the States that's changed. Connecting to my local server via the internet has slowed that locations application to a crawl. This is partly due to the slow and crappy dsl service we have in the Virgin Islands, and partly due to my less-than-professional code and sql. With other far-away stores in the works, I need a better solution. I like my application. My staff knows it well, and I'm not inclined to take on the expense of a proper commercial solution. So where does that leave me? I should probably host my sql online to sidestep the slow dsl here. I think I can handle cleaning up my SQL querries to speed that up a bit. What about Access? My version seems so old, but I don't like the newer versions with the 'ribbon'. There are so many options... Should I be learning Visual Studio with an eye on moving completely to the web? Will my VBA skills help me at all there? I don't have the luxury of a year at the keyboard to figure it out anymore. What about dotnetnuke, sharepoint, or lightswitch? They all seem like possibilities, but even understanding their capabilities is daunting. I'm pretty deep into it, but maybe I should bail and hire a consultant or programmer. That sounds expensive tho, and there's no guarantee there either... Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Or, if anybody is interested in buying a small chain of surf shops...

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• Our own Daily WTF

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/dvroegop/archive/2014/08/20/our-own-daily-wtf.aspxIf you're a developer, you've probably heard of the website the DailyWTF. If you haven't, head on over to http://www.thedailywtf.com and read. And laugh. I'll wait. Read it? Good. If you're a bit like me probably you've been wondering how on earth some people ever get hired as a software engineer. Most of the stories there seem to weird to be true: no developer would write software like that right? And then you run into a little nugget of code one of your co-workers wrote. And then you realize: "Hey, it happens everywhere!" Look at this piece of art I found in our codebase recently: public static decimal ToDecimal(this string input) {     System.Globalization.CultureInfo cultureInfo = System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InstalledUICulture;     var numberFormatInfo = (System.Globalization.NumberFormatInfo)cultureInfo.NumberFormat.Clone();     int dotIndex = input.IndexOf(".");     int commaIndex = input.IndexOf(",");     if (dotIndex > commaIndex)         numberFormatInfo.NumberDecimalSeparator = ".";     else if (commaIndex > dotIndex)         numberFormatInfo.NumberDecimalSeparator = ",";     decimal result;     if (decimal.TryParse(input, System.Globalization.NumberStyles.Float, numberFormatInfo, out result))         return result;     else         throw new Exception(string.Format("Invalid input for decimal parsing: {0}. Decimal separator: {1}.", input, numberFormatInfo.NumberDecimalSeparator)); }  Me and a collegue have been looking long and hard at this and what we concluded was the following: Apparently, we don't trust our users to be able to correctly set the culture in Windows. Users aren't able to determine if they should tell Windows to use a decimal point or a comma to display numbers. So what we've done here is make sure that whatever the user enters, we'll translate that into whatever the user WANTS to enter instead of what he actually did. So if you set your locale to US, since you're a US citizen, but you want to enter the number 12.34 in the Dutch style (because, you know, the Dutch are way cooler with numbers) so you enter 12,34 we will understand this and respect your wishes! Of course, if you change your mind and in the next input field you decide to use the decimal dot again, that's fine with us as well. We will do the hard work. Now, I am all for smart software. Software that can handle all sorts of input the user can think of. But this feels a little uhm, I don't know.. wrong.. Or am I too old fashioned?

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• Ubuntu 13.XX unable to mount USB HDD. Tried everything. I/O error boot sector/file system

  - by XaviGG

  I know that there are many posts related but none of them helped me. I will jump to the last test because it is the one that should work, but it does not. An external HDD with single partition slow NTFS formatted in Windows, empty and clean. Checked for errors, it tells that not errors where found. Moving to Ubutnu 13.04... Gparted throws the first error when trying to read the disk: Input/output error It appears as unknown the content of the disk. Unable to create partition table or format it, getting the same error when trying. If I try to mount it in the terminal it tells me the same, specifying that also there is an I/O error reading the boot sector. I have this problem since I upgraded (always with fresh install) to 13.04. I thought it will be solved by the 13.10 but it has the same behavior. I tried with two different HDD (HD and SSHD) that work perfectly in Windows 7. In 13.04 at least I got a trying of mounting where the icon of the drive started showing and disappearing until finally it disappeared. But now it doesn't even try. Possible causes: -The HDD was my old main HDD, so it had WIN,RECOVERY,SYSTEM,UBU,SWAP partitions. Maybe the way or place where the partition table is defined is not the best for an external HDD but I don't know a lot in that topic. I would appreciate a lot if someone can give me a guideline to convert one of these HDD in a working external HDD. No files to recover, nothing to care about. Just format completely the disk and be able to use it for storing backups without having to move the files first to the windows partition, load windows and then copy them to the external HDD. Because I want to use a file comparator for the backups. Thanks a lot Edit 1: I found an option in Windows to convert it to a dynamic HDD that warns me that I wont be able to run O.S. after changing. I suppose that is what I need because in the current mode I cannot safely extract it. But it tells me an error that it couldn't change the mode.

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• Some Early Considerations

  - by Chris Massey

  Following on from my previous post, I want to say "thank you" to everyone who has got in touch and got involved – you are pioneers! An update on where we are right now: paper prototypes v1 To be more specific, we’ve picked two of the ideas that seem to have more pros than cons, turned them into Balsamiq mockups, and are getting them fleshed out with realistic content. We’ll initially make these available to the aforementioned pioneers (thank you again), roll in the feedback, and then open up to get more data on what works and what doesn’t. If you’ve got any questions about this (or what we’re working on right now), feel free to ask me in the comments below. I’ve had a few people express an interest in the process we’re going through, and I’m more than happy to share details more frequently as we go along – not least because you, dear reader, will help us stay on target and create something Good. To start with, here’s a quick flashback to bring you all up to speed. A Brief Retrospective As you may already know, we’re creating a new publishing asset specifically focused on providing great content for web developers. We don’t yet know exactly what this thing will look like, or exactly how it will work, but we know we want to create something that is useful different. For my part, I’m seriously excited at the prospect of building a genuinely digital publishing system (as opposed to what most publishing is these days, which is print-style publishing which just happens to be on the web). The main challenge at this point is working out our build-measure-assess loop to speed up our experimental turn-around, and that’ll get better as we run more trials. Of course, there are a few things we’ve been pondering at this early conceptual stage: Do we publishing about heterogeneous technology stacks from day 1, or do we start with ASP.NET (which we’re familiar with) & branch out later? There are challenges with either approach. What publishing "modes" are already being well-handled? For example, the likes of Pluralsight, TekPub, and Treehouse have pretty much nailed video training (debate about price, if you like), and unless we think we can do it faster / better / cheaper (unlikely, for the record), we should leave them to it. Where should we base whatever we create? Should we create a completely new asset under a new name, graft something onto Simple-Talk (like the labs), or just build something directly into Simple-Talk? It sounds trivial, but it does have at least some impact on infrastructure and what how we manage the different types of content we (will) have. Are there any obvious problems or niches that we think could address really well, or should we just throw ideas out and see what readers respond to? What kind of users do we want to provide for? This actually deserves a little bit of unpacking… Why are you here? We currently divide readers into (broadly) the categories: Category 1: I know nothing about X, and I’d like to learn about it. Category 2: I know something about X, but I’d like to learn how to do something specific with it. Category 3: Ah man, I have a problem with X, and I need to fix it now. Now that I think about it, I might also include a 4th class of reader: Category 4: I’m looking for something interesting to engage my brain. These are clearly task-based categorizations, and depending on which task you’re performing when you arrive here, you’re going to need different types of content, or will have specific discovery needs. One of the questions that’s at the back of my mind whenever I consider a new idea is “How many of the categories will this satisfy?” As an example, typical video training is very well suited to categories 1, 2, and 4. StackOverflow is very well suited to category 3, and serves as a sign-posting system to the rest. Clearly it’s not necessary to satisfy every category need to be useful and popular, but being aware of what behavior readers might be exhibiting when they arrive will help us tune our ideas appropriately. < / Flashback > We don’t have clean answers to most of these considerations – they’re things we’re aware of, and each idea we look at is going to be best suited to a different mix of the options I’ve described. Our first experimental loop will be coming full circle in the next few days, so we should start to see how the different possibilities vary between ideas. Free to chime in with questions and suggestions about anything I’ve just brain-dumped, or at any stage as we go along. If you see anything that intrigued or enrages you, or just have an idea you’d like to share, I’d love to hear from you.

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• How far should an entity take care of its properties values by itself?

  - by Kharlos Dominguez

  Let's consider the following example of a class, which is an entity that I'm using through Entity Framework. - InvoiceHeader - BilledAmount (property, decimal) - PaidAmount (property, decimal) - Balance (property, decimal) I'm trying to find the best approach to keep Balance updated, based on the values of the two other properties (BilledAmount and PaidAmount). I'm torn between two practices here: Updating the balance amount every time BilledAmount and PaidAmount are updated (through their setters) Having a UpdateBalance() method that the callers would run on the object when appropriate. I am aware that I can just calculate the Balance in its getter. However, it isn't really possible because this is an entity field that needs to be saved back to the database, where it has an actual column, and where the calculated amount should be persisted to. My other worry about the automatically updating approach is that the calculated values might be a little bit different from what was originally saved to the database, due to rounding values (an older version of the software, was using floats, but now decimals). So, loading, let's say 2000 entities from the database could change their status and make the ORM believe that they have changed and be persisted back to the database the next time the SaveChanges() method is called on the context. It would trigger a mass of updates that I am not really interested in, or could cause problems, if the calculation methods changed (the entities fetched would lose their old values to be replaced by freshly recalculated ones, simply by being loaded). Then, let's take the example even further. Each invoice has some related invoice details, which also have BilledAmount, PaidAmount and Balance (I'm simplifying my actual business case for the sake of the example, so let's assume the customer can pay each item of the invoice separately rather than as a whole). If we consider the entity should take care of itself, any change of the child details should cause the Invoice totals to change as well. In a fully automated approach, a simple implementation would be looping through each detail of the invoice to recalculate the header totals, every time one the property changes. It probably would be fine for just a record, but if a lot of entities were fetched at once, it could create a significant overhead, as it would perform this process every time a new invoice detail record is fetched. Possibly worse, if the details are not already loaded, it could cause the ORM to lazy-load them, just to recalculate the balances. So far, I went with the Update() method-way, mainly for the reasons I explained above, but I wonder if it was right. I'm noticing I have to keep calling these methods quite often and at different places in my code and it is potential source of bugs. It also has a detrimental effect on data-binding because when the properties of the detail or header changes, the other properties are left out of date and the method has no way to be called. What is the recommended approach in this case?

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• How do you conquer the challenge of designing for large screen real-estate?

  - by Berin Loritsch

  This question is a bit more subjective, but I'm hoping to get some new perspective. I'm so used to designing for a certain screen size (typically 1024x768) that I find that size to not be a problem. Expanding the size to 1280x1024 doesn't buy you enough screen real estate to make an appreciable difference, but will give me a little more breathing room. Basically, I just expand my "grid size" and the same basic design for the slightly smaller screen still works. However, in the last couple of projects my clients were all using 1080p (1920x1080) screens and they wanted solutions to use as much of that real estate as possible. 1920 pixels across provides just under twice the width I am used to, and the wide screen makes some of my old go to design approaches not to work as well. The problem I'm running into is that when presented with so much space, I'm confronted with some major problems. How many columns should I use? The wide format lends itself to a 3 column split with a 2:1:1 split (i.e. the content column bigger than the other two). However, if I go with three columns what do I do with that extra column? How do I make efficient use of the screen real estate? There's a temptation to put everything on the screen at once, but too much information actually makes the application harder to use. White space is important to help make sense of complex information, but too much makes related concepts look too separate. I'm usually working with web applications that have complex data, and visualization and presentation is key to making sense of the raw data. When your user also has a large screen (at least 24"), some information is out of eye sight and you need to move the pointer a long distance. How do you make sure everything that's needed stays within the visual hot points? Simple sites like blogs actually do better when the width is constrained, which results in a lot of wasted real estate. I kind of wonder if having the text box and the text preview side by side would be a big benefit for the admin side of that type of screen? (1:1 two column split). For your answers, I know almost everything in design is "it depends". What I'm looking for is: General principles you use How your approach to design has changed I'm finding that i have to retrain myself how to work with this different format. Every bump in resolution I've worked through to date has been about 25%: 640 to 800 (25% increase), 800 to 1024 (28% increase), and 1024 to 1280 (25% increase). However, the jump from 1280 to 1920 is a good 50% increase in space--the equivalent from jumping from 640 straight to 1024. There was no commonly used middle size to help learn lessons more gradually.

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• So Much Happening at Devoxx

  - by Tori Wieldt

  Devoxx, the premier Java conference in Europe, has been sold out for a while. The organizers (thanks Stephan and crew!) cap the attendance to make sure all attendees have a great experience, and that speaks volumes about their priorities. The speakers, hackathons, labs, and networking are all first class. The Oracle Technology Network will be there, and if you were smart/lucky enough to get a ticket, come find us and join the fun: IoT Hack Fest Build fun and creative Internet of Things (IoT) applications with Java Embedded, Raspberry Pi and Leap Motion on the University Days (Monday and Tuesday). Learn from top experts Yara & Vinicius Senger and Geert Bevin at two Raspberry Pi & Leap Motion hands-on labs and hacking sessions. Bring your computer. Training and equipment will be provided. Devoxx will also host an Internet of Things shop in the exhibition floor where attendees can purchase Arduino, Raspberry PI and Robot starter kits. Bring your IoT wish list! Video Interviews Yolande Poirier and I will be interviewing members of the Java Community in the back of the Expo hall on Wednesday and Thursday. Videos are posted on Parleys and YouTube/Java. We have a few slots left, so contact me (you can DM @Java) if you want to share your insights or cool new tip or trick with the rest of the developer community. (No commercials, no fluff. Keep it techie and keep it real.)  Oracle Keynote Wednesday morning Mark Reinhold, Chief Java Platform Architect, and Brian Goetz, Java Language Architect will provide an update on Java 8 and beyond. Oracle Booth Drop by the Oracle booth to see old and new friends.  We'll have Java in Action demos and the experts to explain them and answer your questions. We are raffling off Raspberry Pi's each day, so be sure to get your badged scanned. We'll have beer in the booth each evening. Look for @Java in her lab coat.  See you at Devoxx! 

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• Why is everything crashing?

  - by Kopkins

  I've been using Ubuntu for a while now and I love it, I wouldn't think of using another OS unless I can't fix this issue. The install I'm on is only around a month and a half old. I'm running 12.04 64bit on a 8,1 MBP. Up until around 2 weeks ago everything was running smoothly. Around then applications started crashing and weird things started happening. At first I thought it was just certain applications. The first thing to start giving me trouble was compiz. Occasionally compiz will stop decorating windows and lost many other functionalities. running compiz --replace fixes this, but I don't feel like doing it usually once a day. The other thing with this is that after running compiz --replace, my conky window gets lost somewhere and so I run killall conky && conky -c .conkyrc. But this isn't with just a couple applications, it seems like it is proliferating through my system. Last week fontforge started crashing while doing whatever task. So I ended up unable to finish what I was working on to completeness. Didn't find a fix. Today rhythmbox started crashing. Whenever I try to play anything, Rhythmbox becomes unresponsive and needs to be forced to close. When I try to do certain things with the disk utility, it crashes. I get the Ubuntu has experienced an internal error message much more often than I would like. Frequently applications stop appearing in the launcher. Wine almost never does anymore. After not being active for a little while, thunderbird can only fetch my mail after restarting wireless, sudo rmmod b43 && sudo modprobe b43 Occasionally some of my startup apps don't start. What is my best option here? Could they be bugs? I don't want to submit a ton of vague bug reports. Reinstall? switch OS? Thank you to anyone who responds. Kopkins

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• Speed up your Silverlight Debugging for large projects

  - by Aligned

  I'm working on a 5+ year old ASP.NET project that has 74+ projects and we've been adding new Silverlight applications to run in the ASP.NET page islands. My machine at work isn't the most powerful, so I find myself waiting a lot for the whole thing to build. I'm using Visual Studio 2010, so that takes up a lot of resources as well. This causes me to get distracted and I start looking at the news... I need to combat that more :-). I can't get a new machine, that's up to someone else, so I've found a few tricks to help. 1. Only build the Silverlight project you're working with. This will build all referenced projects (you can see these by right clicking and clicking Project Dependencies) and package a new XAP (you can see all the actions in your output build window). Then refresh your page with the Silverlight app and it's up-to-date. 2. I was working with a co-worker (thanks Jordan) who was using the the Debug -> attach to processes window. In the Attach to: row there is a "Select..." button. In the dialog, click "Debug these code types:" and select Silverlight. Hit ok. Then all you need to do is find your process (you might need to click the refresh button). I'm usually debugging in IE, so I select the first one and push "i" on the keyboard. That brings me to the IE windows open. Find the one with type of Silverlight, x86. It is usually directly above one with type of x86 that has the page title for "title". Click attach and watch your output window spit out messages about loading debug symbols and your breakpoints enabled (if this doesn't happen you chose the wrong process, hit stop and try again). Now you can debug the client code as normal, server code requires a full F5 or attaching to the correct process. To improve this even further, bind the menu item to a key stroke. I chose ctrl + x, x. (Tools -> Options -> Keyboard, search for Debug.AttachToProcess, set the shortcut keys globaly and assign). Most of the time I build the project, then hit ctrl + x, x then i, then enter and I'm debugging. The process I want is usually the first IE in the list.

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• RadioButtons and Lambda Expressions

  - by MightyZot

  Radio buttons operate in groups. They are used to present mutually exclusive lists of options. Since I started programming in Windows 20 years ago, I have always been frustrated about how they are implemented. To make them operate as a group, you put your radio buttons in a group box. Conversely, to group radio buttons in HTML, you simply give them all the same name. Radio buttons with the same name or ID in HTML operate as one mutually exclusive group of options. In C#, all your radio buttons must have unique names and you use group boxes to group them. I’m in the process of converting some old code to C# and I’m tasked with creating a user control with groups of radio buttons on it. I started out writing the traditional switch…case statements to check the appropriate radio button based upon value, loops to uncheck them all, etc. Then it occurred to me that I could stick the radio buttons in a Dictionary or List and use Lambda expressions to make my code a lot more maintainable. So, here is what I ended up with: Here is a dictionary that contains my list of radio buttons and their values. I used their values as the keys, so that I can select them by value. Now, instead of using loops and switch…case statements to control the radio buttons, I use the lambda syntax and extension methods. Selecting a Radio Button by Value This code is inside of a property accessor, so “value” represents the value passed into the property accessor. The “First” extension method uses the delegate represented by the lambda expression to select the radio button (actually KeyValuePair) that represents the passed in value. Finally, the resulting checkbox is checked. Since the radio buttons are in the same group, they function as a group, the appropriate radio button is selected while the others are unselected. Reading the Value This is the get accessor for the property that returns the value of the checked radio button. Now, if you’re using binding, this code is likely not necessary; however, I didn’t want to use binding in this case, so I think this is a good alternative to the traditional loops and switch…case statements.

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• How quickly to leave contract-to-hire gig where you don't want to be hired? [closed]

  - by nono

  So you move to a big new city with tons of software development opportunity, having taken a six month contract-to-hire job. The company treats you really well and has a good team and work environment. However, the recruiter assured you when offering the gig that it would be a good position in which you can advance your learning from more senior developers (a primary concern of yours) but you're starting to realize that a job recruiter isn't going to understand that the team in question isn't very up on modern software practices (you start to sympathize with this guy and read his post over and over again: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1586166/career-killer-nhibernate-oop-design-patterns-domain-driven-design-test-driv) and that much of the company's software is very old and very very poorly architected, and the company (like so many others) seems to be only concerned with continually extending the software without investing in any structural improvements. You're absolutely dismayed at how long it takes your team (including) to fulfill simple feature requests (maybe 500-1000% longer than with better designed software that you've worked on in the past), but no one else there seems to think anything of it. You find that the work and the company's business are intensely uninteresting to you, but due to the convoluted design of their various software systems, fulfilling the work will require as much mental engagement as any other development position. You feel a bit naive about not having asked the right questions during your interview process, and for not having anticipated that your team at your former podunk company might possibly be light-years ahead of any team in Big Shiny City, but you know you don't want to stay at this place, and (were it not for your personal, after-hours studying and personal programming efforts) fear that you might actually give a worse interview after completing your 6 months than you did when you started at the place. You read about how hard of a time local companies are having filling their positions with qualified software development candidates. You read all sorts of fabulous sounding job postings online and feel like you're really missing out. In spite of the comfortable environment you feel like you would willingly accept a somewhat more demanding or aggressive lifestyle to feel like you are learning and progressing and producing something meaningful. My questions are: how quickly do you leave and how do you go about giving a polite reason for departing? The contract is written to allow them to "can" you and to allow you to leave with 2 weeks notice. Do you ethically owe the 6 months? Upon taking the position, the company told you they were not interested in candidates who were intending to only stay for 6 months and then leave (you were not intending to bail after 6 months, at that time), so perhaps they might be fine if you split now, knowing that you don't want to stick around for the full time hire?

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• Upgrading Oracle Enterprise Manager: 12c to 12c Release 2

  - by jorge_neidisch

  1 - Download the OEM 12c R2. It can be downloaded here: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/oem/grid-control/downloads/index.html  Note: it is a set of three huge zips. 2 - Unzip the archives 3 - Create a directory (as the oem-owner user) where the upgraded Middleware should be installed. For instance: $ mkdir /u01/app/oracle/Middleware12cR2 4 - Back up OMS (Middleware home and inventory), Management Repository and Software Library. http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E24628_01/doc.121/e24473/ha_backup_recover.htm#EMADM10740 5 - Ensure that the Management tables don't have snapshots:  SQL> select master , log_table from all_mview_logs where log_owner='<EM_REPOS_USER>If there are snapshots drop them:  SQL> Drop snapshot log on <master> 6 - Copy emkey  from existing OMS:  $ <OMS_HOME>/bin/emctl config emkey -copy_to_repos [-sysman_pwd <sysman_pwd>]To verify whether the emkey is copied, run the following command: $ <OMS_HOME>/bin/emctl status emkeyIf the emkey is copied, then you will see the following message:The EMKey  is configured properly, but is not secure.Secure the EMKey by running "emctl config emkey -remove_from_repos". 7 - Stop the OMS and the Agent $ <OMS_HOME>/bin/emctl stop oms $ <AGENT_HOME>/bin/emctl stop agent 8 - from the unzipped directory, run $ ./runInstaller 8a - Follow the wizard: Email / MOS; Software Updates: disable or leave empty. 8b - Follow the wizard:  Installation type: Upgrade -> One System Upgrade. 8c - Installation Details: Middleware home location: enter the directory created in step 3. 8d - Enter the DB Connections Details. Credentials for SYS and SYSMAN. 8e - Dialog comes: Stop the Job Gathering: click 'Yes'. 8f- Warning comes: click 'OK'. 8g - Select the plugins to deploy along with the upgrade process 8h- Extend Weblogic: enter the password (recommended, the same password for the SYSMAN user). A new directory will be created, recommended: /u01/app/oracle/Middleware12cR2/gc_inst 8i - Let the upgrade proceed by clicking 'Install'. 8j - Run the following script (as root) and finish the 'installation':  $ /u01/app/oracle/Middleware12R2/oms/allroot.sh 9 - Turn on the Agent:  $ <AGENT_HOME>/bin/emctl start agent  Note that the $AGENT_HOME might be located in the old Middleware directory:  $ /u01/app/oracle/Middleware/agent/agent_inst/bin/emctl start agent 10 - go to the EM UI. Select the WebLogic Target and choose the option "Refresh WebLogic Domain" from the menu. 11 - Update the Agents: Setup -> Manage Cloud Control -> Upgrade Agents -> Add (+) Note that the agents may take long to show up. ... and that's it! Or that should be it !

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• How / Where can I host my Java web application? [closed]

  - by Huliax

  Possible Duplicate: How to find web hosting that meets my requirements? In case you want to skip to the crux of my inquiry just read the bold type. I just finished my CS degree (at 39 years old :-)). For my final project I designed and built a system that can provide local positioning / location awareness to mobile wifi devices (only have Android client thus far). The server receives data from clients, processes it, and responds to the clients with a messages containing information about their respective locations. I would like to continue the project (perhaps release as open source but that is a different discussion). Thus far my server application has been running on the CS department's hardware where I could pretty much do whatever I wanted. I'm getting kicked off that system in a few weeks so I have to find a new home for my server application. I need a host that will let me run my Java server (along w/ mySQL db) -- preferably on the cheap since I haven't yet got a job. I have very little experience with the "real world" of web development / hosting. I'm having trouble figuring out what kind of hosting service will let me run my application as is. If that turns out to be a tall order then I need to know what my options are for changing thing so that I can get up and running with some hosting. As an aside, I'm also researching whether or not I should rewrite this in a different language. Trying to figure out if there is a substantially better (for whatever reason) one for what I'm doing. This might also potentially have a bearing on my hosting needs. One possibility is to write the server in something more widely accepted by hosting services. I have been searching for answers to my question and haven't found quite what I'm looking for. Part of the problem might be that I don't know exactly what terminology to use. If there is a good answer to this question elsewhere please feel free to point me towards it. Thanks for help / advice.

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• Is multiple domain names and links from same IP causing poor search engine rankings?

  - by John

  I have an ecommerce website which is not doing so well in Google. I am trying to improve this of course, and am looking at some possibilities for why it isn't doing well. The website has four domain names, all of which have been indexed by Google. A few months ago I applied 301 redirects to any requests for two of the domain names so now it is down to two domain names (one is a .net, the other is a .com.au, the others were .net.au and .com). I prefer to use my main domain name (the .com.au), but one of the names has been around for a long time and has more inbound links. According to a PageRank tool, both are PR2. It is a Classic ASP site and up until recently had a lot of querystring parameters. In the last week or so I added URL rewriting so there is now no parameters for most pages. I don't do 301 redirects from the old URLs but instead I add the META canonical tag indicating the preferred new URL. At the same time I redesigned the site and improved title tags, META descriptions, and H tags but it hasn't been long enough yet for Google to index many of these yet. I also looked at what pages Google has indexed and strangely it has some strange pages in the index, there are a lot of pages which are actual keyword searches (more a bunch of random letters than an actual word). What I mean is that it is as if they had typed in something to search for in my search box - there are no links to pages like this and the only way of getting this is to type something in to the search box). So I added a META robots tag with noindex,nofollow anytime that I render pages like this. Years ago I set up a fake price comparison site which lists all my products and links back to my site. It has a different keyword rich domain name but is on the same server and same IP address. It's a completely different layout but does have the same product categories and product descriptions (although I have stripped formatting out of them so they are not identical except in text). I also have a few blog sites which again are on the same server/IP and all have advertising for the website. My questions are: What should I do with the multiple domains, just use one, or continue with two or more? Should I add 301 redirects, not just the META canonical tag? Any idea about Google indexing my search results page, and did I do the right thing with the META robots tag? Is the fake price comparison site likely to be causing problems? Are all the links to the site from other domain names but the same IP address likely to be causing problems? Thanks for any help. Sorry for so many questions in one.

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• "Expecting A Different Result?" (2 of 3 in 'No Customer Left Behind' Series)

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by David Vap, Group Vice President, Oracle Applications Product Development Many companies already have some type of customer experience initiative in process or one that could be framed as such. The challenge is that the initiatives too often are started in a department silo, don't have the right level of executive sponsorship, or have been initiated without the necessary insight and strategic business alignment. You can't keep doing the same things, give it a customer experience name, and expect a different result. You can't continue to just compete on price or features - that is not sustainable in commoditized markets. And ultimately, investing in technology alone doesn't solve customer experience problems; it just adds to the complexity of them. You need a customer experience strategy and approach on how to execute a customer-centric worldview within your business. To develop this, you must take an outside in journey on how your customers are interacting with your business to establish a benchmark of your customers' experiences. Then you must get cross-functional alignment on what you are trying to achieve, near, mid, and long term. Your execution of that strategy should be based on a customer experience approach: Understand your customer: You need to capture the insights across interactions, channels (including social), and personas to better understand whom to serve, how to serve them, and when to serve them. Not all experiences or customers are equal, so leverage this insight to understand the strategic business objectives you need to address. Then determine which experiences can be improved immediately and which over time to get the result you need. Empower your ecosystem: You need to align your front-line employees with your strategy and give them the power, insight, and tools that allow them to cultivate a culture around strengthening the relationships with your customers. You also need to provide the transparency, access, and collaboration that enable your customers and partners to self serve and self solve and to share with ease. Adapt your business: You need to enable the discipline of agility within your organization and infrastructure so that you can innovate, tailor, and personalize experiences. This needs to be done both reactively from insight and proactively in real time so you can stay ahead of shifting market trends and evolving consumer behaviors. No longer will the old approaches provide the same returns. To compete, differentiate, and win in a world where the customer has the power, you must execute a strategy that is sure to deliver a better brand experience for your customers. Note: This is Part 2 in a three-part series. Part 1 is here. Stop back for Part 3 on November 28.

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• How to do proper Alpha in XNA?

  - by Soshimo

  Okay, I've read several articles, tutorials, and questions regarding this. Most point to the same technique which doesn't solve my problem. I need the ability to create semi-transparent sprites (texture2D's really) and have them overlay another sprite. I can achieve that somewhat with the code samples I've found but I'm not satisfied with the results and I know there is a way to do this. In mobile programming (BREW) we did it old school and actually checked each pixel for transparency before rendering. In this case it seems to render the sprite below it blended with the alpha above it. This may be an artifact of how I'm rendering the texture but, as I said before, all examples point to this one technique. Before I go any further I'll go ahead and paste my example code. public void Draw(SpriteBatch batch, Camera camera, float alpha) { int tileMapWidth = Width; int tileMapHeight = Height; batch.Begin(SpriteSortMode.Texture, BlendState.AlphaBlend, SamplerState.PointWrap, DepthStencilState.Default, RasterizerState.CullNone, null, camera.TransformMatrix); for (int x = 0; x < tileMapWidth; x++) { for (int y = 0; y < tileMapHeight; y++) { int tileIndex = _map[y, x]; if (tileIndex != -1) { Texture2D texture = _tileTextures[tileIndex]; batch.Draw( texture, new Rectangle( (x * Engine.TileWidth), (y * Engine.TileHeight), Engine.TileWidth, Engine.TileHeight), new Color(new Vector4(1f, 1f, 1f, alpha ))); } } } batch.End(); } As you can see, in this code I'm using the overloaded SpriteBatch.Begin method which takes, among other things, a blend state. I'm almost positive that's my problem. I don't want to BLEND the sprites, I want them to be transparent when alpha is 0. In this example I can set alpha to 0 but it still renders both tiles, with the lower z ordered sprite showing through, discolored because of the blending. This is not a desired effect, I want the higher z-ordered sprite to fade out and not effect the color beneath it in such a manner. I might be way off here as I'm fairly new to XNA development so feel free to steer me in the correct direction in the event I'm going down the wrong rabbit hole. TIA

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• F# and the useful infinite Sequence (I think)

  - by MarkPearl

  So I have seen a few posts done by other F# fans on solving project Euler problems. They looked really interesting and I thought with my limited knowledge of F# I would attempt a few and the first one I had a look at was problem 5. Which said : “2520 is the smallest number that can be divided by each of the numbers from 1 to 10 without any remainder. What is the smallest number that is evenly divisible by all of the numbers from 1 to 20?” So I jumped into coding it and straight away got stuck – the C# programmer in me wants to do a loop, starting at one and dividing every number by 1 to 20 to see if they all divide and once a match is found, there is your solution. Obviously not the most elegant way but a good old brute force approach. However I am pretty sure this would not be the F# way…. So after a bit of research I found the Sequences and how useful they were. Sequences seemed like the beginning of an approach to solve my problem. In my head I thought - create a sequence, and then start at the beginning of it and move through it till you find a value that is divisible by 1 to 20. Sounds reasonable? So the question is begged - how would you create a sequence that you are sure will be large enough to hold the solution to the problem? Well… You can’t know! Some more googling and I found what I would call infinite sequences – something that looks like this… let nums = 1 |> Seq.unfold (fun i -> Some (i, i + 1))   My interpretation of this would be as follows… create a sequence, and whenever it is called add 1 to its size (I would appreciate someone helping me on wording this right functionally). Something that I don’t understand fully yet is the forward pipe operator (|>) which I think plays a key role in this code. With this in hand I was able to code a basic optimized solution to this problem. I’m going to go over it some more before I post the full code just in case!

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• Boot error aftter clean Ubuntu 13.04 install: [Reboot and select proper boot device]

  - by IcarusNM

  I am having the same problem as this guy where a fresh Ubuntu install completes beautifully but will not boot. I get the ASUS (?) "Reboot and select proper boot device" error, first with Xubuntu 13.10 and after finally giving up there, and Xubuntu 13.4, I am back to regular Ubuntu 13.4. ASUS motherboard Z77, Intel chipset. Standard internal SATA 500GB HD. 64-bit. All-new hardware less than 3 months old. It was running Ubuntu 12.04LTC great until I tried this upgrade. I have re-installed from scratch every which way: with LVM, without LVM; with the default partitions, with my own partitions. With ext3 or ext4. Alongside; replace; upgrade. No difference. On the last two tries, I have booted afterward from the same USB stick, downloaded and run boot-repair, and now I guess I am off to the boot-repair support email with my URLs from that. It did all kinds of cool stuff but ultimately made no difference. I never got anything like this with Ubuntu 12.04. I've now probably re-installed Ubuntu 13.04 ten times slightly different ways. I finally found how to skip the language packs, so at least that sped things up! :) This starts from the ubuntu-13.04-desktop-amd64.iso and UNetbootin as suggested on the official instructions for USB thumb drive creation from OSX. That part all works fine (booting the USB on the PC and trying Ubuntu and/or installing from there on the PC HD.) I have no CD drive on this PC, but I suppose I could get one. I would rather find some Linux install that works from USB like I've always done. After running boot-repair twice, in the ASUS BIOS I now see three different UEFI boot options in the priority list, and they are all labeled exactly the same: ubuntu (P6: WDC WD5000AAKX-00U6AA0) Then there's a non-UEFI option: P6: WDC WD5000AAKX-00U6AA0 (476940MB) And a fifth option appeared after the first boot-repair: Windows Boot Manager (P6: WDC WD5000AAKX-00U6AA0) I have tried all 5 of these, and I get exactly the same error. I have never had Windows installed on this HD. ASUS is calling it Windows Boot Manaer but I presume that's a mistaken label for whatever boot-repair did. I can boot on USB and run GParted and it looks great. The partitions all look normal. I found another case of this online with no solution posted. I can't find much about it online. Needs a Master Boot Record wipe/redo?? I'm not sure how.

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• Developing web sites that imitate desktop apps. How to fight that paradigm? [closed]

  - by user1598390

  Supposse there's a company where web sites/apps are designed to resemble desktop apps. They struggle to add: Splash screens Drop-down menus Tab-pages Pages that don't grow downward with content, context is inside scrollable area so page is of a fixed size, as if resembling the one-screen limitation of desktop apps. Modal windows, pop-ups, etc. Tree views Absolutely no access to content unless you login-first, even with non-sensitive content. After splash screen desapears, you are presented with a login screen. No links - just simulated buttons. Fixed page-size. Cannot open a linked in other tab Print button that prints directly ( not showing printable page so the user can't print via the browser's print command ) Progress bars for loading content even when the browser indicates it with its own animation Fonts and color amulate a desktop app made with Visual Basic, PowerBuilder etc. Every app seems almost as if were made in Visual Basic. They reject this elements: Breadcrumbs Good old underlined links Generated/dynamic navigation, usage-based suggestions Ability to open links in multiple tabs Pagination Printable pages Ability to produce a URL you can save or share that links to an item, like when you send someone the link to an especific StackExchange question. The only URL is the main one. Back button To achieve this, tons of javascript code is needed. Lots and lots of Javascript and Ajax code for things not related with the business but with the necessity to hide/show that button, refresh this listbox, grey-out that label, etc. The coplexity generated by forcing one paradigm into another means most lines of code are dedicated to maintain the illusion of a desktop app. What is the best way to change this mindset, and make them embrace the web, and start producing modern, web apps instead of desktop imitations ? EDIT: These sites are intranet sites. Users hate these apps. They constantly whine about them, but they have to use them to do their daily work. These sites are in-house solutions, the end-users have no choice but to use them. They are a "captive audience". Also, substitution will not happen because of high costs. But at least if that mindset is changed, new developments would be more web-like.

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