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• 7 Steps To Cut Recruiting Costs & Drive Exceptional Business Results

  - by Oracle Accelerate for Midsize Companies

  By Steve Viarengo, Vice President Product Management, Oracle Taleo Cloud Services  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 In good times, trimming operational costs is an ongoing goal. In tough times, it’s a necessity. In both good times and bad, however, recruiting occurs. Growth increases headcount in good times, and opportunistic or replacement hiring occurs in slow business cycles. By employing creative recruiting strategies in tandem with the latest technology developments, you can reduce recruiting costs while driving exceptional business results. Here are some critical areas to focus on. 1.  Target Direct Cost Savings Total recruiting process expenses are the sum of external costs plus internal labor costs. Most organizations can reduce recruiting expenses with direct cost savings. While additional savings on indirect costs can be realized from process improvement and efficiency gains, there are direct cost savings and benefits readily available in three broad areas: sourcing, assessments, and green recruiting. 2. Sourcing: Reduce Agency Costs Agency search firm fees can amount to 35 percent of a new employee’s annual base salary. Typically taken from the hiring department budget, these fees may not be visible to HR. By relying on internal mobility programs, referrals, candidate pipelines, and corporate career Websites, organizations can reduce or eliminate this agency spend. And when you do have to pay third-party agency fees, you can optimize the value you receive by collaborating with agencies to identify referred candidates, ensure access to candidate data and history, and receive automatic notifications and correspondence. 3. Sourcing: Reduce Advertising Costs You can realize significant cost reductions by placing all job positions on your corporate career Website. This will allow you to reap a substantial number of candidates at minimal cost compared to job boards and other sourcing options. 4.  Sourcing: Internal Talent Pool Internal talent pools provide a way to reduce sourcing and advertising costs while delivering improved productivity and retention. Internal redeployment reduces costs and ramp-up time while increasing retention and employee satisfaction. 5.  Sourcing: External Talent Pool Strategic recruiting requires identifying and matching people with a given set of skills to a particular job while efficiently allocating sourcing expenditures. By using an e-recruiting system (which drives external talent pool management) with a candidate relationship database, you can automate prescreening and candidate matching while communicating with targeted candidates. Candidate relationship management can lower sourcing costs by marketing new job opportunities to candidates sourced in the past. By mining the talent pool in this fashion, you eliminate the need to source a new pool of candidates for each new requisition. Managing and mining the corporate candidate database can reduce the sourcing cost per candidate by as much as 50 percent. 6.  Assessments: Reduce Turnover Costs By taking advantage of assessments during the recruitment process, you can achieve a range of benefits, including better productivity, superior candidate performance, and lower turnover (providing considerable savings). Assessments also save recruiter and hiring manager time by focusing on a short list of qualified candidates. Hired for fit, such candidates tend to stay with the organization and produce quality work—ultimately driving revenue.  7. Green Recruiting: Reduce Paper and Processing Costs You can reduce recruiting costs by automating the process—and making it green. A paperless process informs candidates that you’re dedicated to green recruiting. It also leads to direct cost savings. E-recruiting reduces energy use and pollution associated with manufacturing, transporting, and recycling paper products. And process automation saves energy in mailing, storage, handling, filing, and reporting tasks. Direct cost savings come from reduced paperwork related to résumés, advertising, and onboarding. Improving the recruiting process through sourcing, assessments, and green recruiting not only saves costs. It also positions the company to improve the talent base during the recession while retaining the ability to grow appropriately in recovery. /* 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:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} 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:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";}

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• Webcor Builders Coordinates Construction Schedules and Mitigates Potential Delays More Efficiently with Integrated Project Management

  - by Sylvie MacKenzie, PMP

  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:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} With more than 40 years of commercial construction experience, Webcor Builders is a leading builder of distinguished, high-profile projects, including high-rise condominiums and hotels, laboratories, healthcare centers, and public works projects. Webcor is also known for its award-winning concrete, interior construction, historic restoration, and seismic renovation work. The company has completed more than 50 million square feet of projects to date. Considering the variety and complexity of the construction projects Webcor undertakes, an integrated project management solution is critical to ensuring optimal efficiency and completing client projects on time and on budget. The company previously used a number of scheduling systems for its various building projects. These packages provided different levels of schedule detail and required schedulers, engineers, and other employees to learn multiple systems. From an IT cost and complexity perspective, the company had to manage multiple scheduling systems and pay for multiple sets of licenses. The company looked to standardize on an enterprise project management system, and selected Oracle’s Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management. Webcor uses the solution’s advanced capabilities to schedule complex projects, analyze delays, model and propose multiple scenarios to demonstrate and mitigate delays and cost overruns, and process that information efficiently to deliver the scheduling precision that public and private projects require. In fact, the solution was instrumental in helping the company’s expansion into public sector projects during the recent economic downturn, and with Primavera P6 in place, it can deliver the precise schedule reporting required for large public projects. With Primavera P6 in place, the company could deliver the precise scheduling and milestone reporting capabilities required for large public projects. The solution is in managing the high-profile University of California – Berkeley Memorial Stadium project. Webcor was hired as construction manager and general contractor for the stadium renovation project, which is a fast-paced project located near the seismically active Hayward Fault Zone. Due to the University of California’s football schedule, meeting the Universities deadline for the coming season placed Webcor in a situation where risk awareness and early warnings of issues would be paramount. Webcor and the extended project team needed a solution that could instantly analyze alternate scenarios to mitigate potential delays; Primavera would deliver those answers.The team would also need to enable multiple stakeholders to use an internet-based platform to access the schedule from various locations, and model complicated sequencing requirements where swift decisions would be made to keep the project on track. The schedule is an integral part of Webcor’s construction management process for the stadium project. Rather than providing the client with the industry-standard monthly update, Webcor updates the critical path method (CPM) schedule on a weekly basis. The project team also reviews the schedule and updates weekly to confirm that progress and forecasted performance are accurate. Hired by the University for their ability to deliver in high risk environments The Webcor team was hit recently with a design supplement that could have added up to 70 days to the project. Using Oracle Primavera P6 the team sprung into action analyzing multiple “what if” scenarios to review mitigation means and methods.  Determined to make sure the Bears could take the field in the coming season the project team nearly eliminated the impact with their creative analysis in working the schedule. The total time from the issuance of the final design supplement to an agreed mitigation response was less than one week; leveraging the Oracle Primavera solution Webcor was able to deliver superior customer value With the ability to efficiently manage projects and schedules, Webcor can ensure it completes its projects on time and on budget, as well as inform clients about what changes to plans will mean in terms of delays and additional costs. Read the complete customer case study at :  http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/customers/customersearch/webcor-builders-1-primavera-ss-1639886.html

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• Impressions and Reactions from Alliance 2012

  - by user739873

  Alliance 2012 has come to a conclusion.  What strikes me about every Alliance conference is the amazing amount of collaboration and cooperation I see across higher education in the sharing of best practices around the entire Oracle PeopleSoft software suite, not just the student information system (Oracle’s PeopleSoft Campus Solutions).  In addition to the vibrant U.S. organization, it's gratifying to see the growth in the international attendance again this year, with an EMEA HEUG organizing to complement the existing groups in the Netherlands, South Africa, and the U.K.  Their first meeting is planned for London in October, and I suspect they'll be surprised at the amount of interest and attendance. In my discussions with higher education IT and functional leadership at Alliance there were a number of instances where concern was expressed about Oracle's commitment to higher education as an industry, primarily because of a lack of perceived innovation in the applications that Oracle develops for this market. Here I think perception and reality are far apart, and I'd like to explain why I believe this to be true. First let me start with what I think drives this perception. Predominately it's in two areas. The first area is the user interface, both for students and faculty that interact with the system as "customers", and for those employees of the institution (faculty, staff, and sometimes students as well) that use the system in some kind of administrative role. Because the UI hasn't changed all that much from the PeopleSoft days, individuals perceive this as a dead product with little innovation and therefore Oracle isn't investing. The second area is around the integration of the higher education suite of applications (PeopleSoft Campus Solutions) and the rest of the Oracle software assets. Whether grown organically or acquired, there is an impressive array of middleware and other software products that could be leveraged much more significantly by the higher education applications than is currently the case today. This is also perceived as lack of investment. Let me address these two points.  First the UI.  More is being done here than ever before, and the PAG and other groups where this was discussed at Alliance 2012 were more numerous than I've seen in any past meeting. Whether it's Oracle development leveraging web services or some extremely early but very promising work leveraging the recent Endeca acquisition (see some cool examples here) there are a lot of resources aimed at this issue.  There are also some amazing prototypes being developed by our UX (user experience team) that will eventually make their way into the higher education applications realm - they had an impressive setup at Alliance.  Hopefully many of you that attended found this group. If not, the senior leader for that team Jeremy Ashley will be a significant contributor of content to our summer Industry Strategy Council meeting in Washington in June. In the area of integration with other elements of the Oracle stack, this is also an area of focus for the company and my team.  We're making this a priority especially in the areas of identity management and security, leveraging WebCenter more effectively for content, imaging, and mobility, and driving towards the ultimate objective of WebLogic Suite as our platform for SOA, links to learning management systems (SAIP), and content. There is also much work around business intelligence centering on OBI applications. But at the end of the day we get enormous value from the HEUG (higher education user group) and the various subgroups formed as a part of this community that help us align and prioritize our investments, whether it's around better integration with other Oracle products or integration with partner offerings.  It's one of the healthiest, mutually beneficial relationships between customers and an Education IT concern that exists on the globe. And I can't avoid mentioning that this kind of relationship between higher education and the corporate IT community that can truly address the problems of efficiency and effectiveness, institutional excellence (which starts with IT) and student success.  It's not (in my opinion) going to be solved through community source - cost and complexity only increase in that model and in the end higher education doesn't ultimately focus on core competencies: educating, developing, and researching.  While I agree with some of what Michael A. McRobbie wrote in his EDUCAUSE Review article (Information Technology: A View from Both Sides of the President’s Desk), I take strong issue with his assertion that the "the IT marketplace is just the opposite of long-term stability...."  Sure there has been healthy, creative destruction in the past 2-3 decades, but this has had the effect of, in the aggregate, benefiting education with greater efficiency, more innovation and increased stability as larger, more financially secure firms acquire and develop integrated solutions. Cole

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• Investigating Strategies For Functional Decomposition

  - by Liam McLennan

  Introducing Functional Decomposition Before I begin I must apologise. I think I am using the term ‘functional decomposition’ loosely, and probably incorrectly. For the purpose of this article I use functional decomposition to mean the recursive splitting of a large problem into increasingly smaller ones, so that the one large problem may be solved by solving a set of smaller problems. The justification for functional decomposition is that the decomposed problem is more easily solved. As software developers we recognise that the smaller pieces are more easily tested, since they do less and are more cohesive. Functional decomposition is important to all scientific pursuits. Once we understand natural selection we can start to look for humanities ancestral species, once we understand the big bang we can trace our expanding universe back to its origin. Isaac Newton acknowledged the compositional nature of his scientific achievements: If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants   The Two Strategies For Functional Decomposition of Computer Programs Private Methods When I was working on my undergraduate degree I was taught to functionally decompose problems by using private methods. Consider the problem of painting a house. The obvious solution is to solve the problem as a single unit: public void PaintAHouse() { // all the things required to paint a house ... } We decompose the problem by breaking it into parts: public void PaintAHouse() { PaintUndercoat(); PaintTopcoat(); } private void PaintUndercoat() { // everything required to paint the undercoat } private void PaintTopcoat() { // everything required to paint the topcoat } The problem can be recursively decomposed until a sufficiently granular level of detail is reached: public void PaintAHouse() { PaintUndercoat(); PaintTopcoat(); } private void PaintUndercoat() { prepareSurface(); fetchUndercoat(); paintUndercoat(); } private void PaintTopcoat() { fetchPaint(); paintTopcoat(); } According to Wikipedia, at least one computer programmer has referred to this process as “the art of subroutining”. The practical issues that I have encountered when using private methods for decomposition are: To preserve the top level API all of the steps must be private. This means that they can’t easily be tested. The private methods often have little cohesion except that they form part of the same solution. Decomposing to Classes The alternative is to decompose large problems into multiple classes, effectively using a class instead of each private method. The API delegates to related classes, so the API is not polluted by the sub-steps of the problem, and the steps can be easily tested because they are each in their own highly cohesive class. Additionally, I think that this technique facilitates better adherence to the Single Responsibility Principle, since each class can be decomposed until it has precisely one responsibility. Revisiting my previous example using class composition: public class HousePainter { private undercoatPainter = new UndercoatPainter(); private topcoatPainter = new TopcoatPainter(); public void PaintAHouse() { undercoatPainter.Paint(); topcoatPainter.Paint(); } } Summary When decomposing a problem there is more than one way to represent the sub-problems. Using private methods keeps the logic in one place and prevents a proliferation of classes (thereby following the four rules of simple design) but the class decomposition is more easily testable and more compatible with the Single Responsibility Principle.

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• Eloqua Experience 2013: Mystique, Modern Marketing and Masterful Engagement

  - by Mike Stiles

  The following is a guest post from Erick Mott, a social business leader at Oracle Eloqua. There’s a growing gap between 20th century marketing and a modern marketing way of doing business. I can’t think of a better example of modern marketing in action than what more than 2,000 people experienced in San Francisco at #EE13; customer-obsession, multichannel content, and real-time engagement all coming together at one extraordinary event. This was my first Eloqua Experience as a new Oracle Eloqua employee. In weeks prior, I heard about the mystique but didn’t know what to expect. What I’ve come to understand with more clarity is everything we do revolves around customer success, and we operate and educate at all times with these five tenets in mind: 1. Targeting: Really Know Your Buyer 2. Engagement: Create a 1:1 Relationship 3. Conversion: Visualize Guided Thinking 4. Analysis: Learn What’s Working 5. Marketing Technology: Enable and Extend the Cloud Product News from Eloqua Experience 2013 We made some announcements that John Stetic, VP of Products, Oracle Eloqua covers in this brief ‘Modern Marketing Minute’ video recorded after Wednesday’s keynote; summarized below, too: Oracle Eloqua AdFocus: While understanding the impact of a specific marketing channel was formerly relegated to marketers’ wish lists, the channels we now focus on are digital, social, and mobile. AdFocus gives marketers a single platform to dynamically create, manage and measure display ads alongside owned and earned media. AdFocus enables marketers to target only key accounts or prospects you want to reach with display ads, as well as provide creative content or personalized ad copy based on their persona and activities. Oracle Eloqua Profiler: The details of what we now know about customers have expanded into a universal customer profile, which can be used to create highly targeted segments. Marketers now can take data that’s not even stored in Eloqua to help targeted and score prospects for a complete, multichannel view of the customer. Profiler gives sales reps one, detailed view of the prospect to extend views beyond Oracle Eloqua asset activity (emails, forms, page views) to any external assets stored in Oracle Eloqua. Marketing Resource Management: New capabilities create more secure and controlled access to marketing resources and data. New integrations provide greater insight into campaign resources and management through a central marketing calendar and simplify resource management. Integrated Sales and Marketing Funnel: An integrated sales and marketing funnel view gives marketing and sales users, cross-functional teams, and executive management a consistent and clear view of pipeline performance. It also quickly provides users with historical metrics across different time spans and conditions. Eloqua AppCloud: More than 20 new AppCloud partners have been added to the community, which now includes 100+ apps. Eloqua AppCloud now provides modern marketers with an even broader range of marketing applications that help expand and enrich sales and marketing efforts; easily accessible in the Topliners Community. Social Capabilities: Recent integration between Oracle Eloqua and Oracle Social Relationship Management (SRM) deliver a comprehensive, scalable and integrated modern marketing solution. New capabilities include better tracking of social activities for a more complete customer profile. Engage Facebook custom audiences with AdFocus to deliver ads and meaningful experiences through trusted social networks. Biggest and Best Eloqua Experience. There’s a lot of talk in the industry about the Marketing Cloud. At Oracle Eloqua, we have been on a mission of delivering the most advanced and integrated modern marketing technology on the planet. It’s not just a concept but reality with proven execution, as seen first-hand this week in San Francisco. In this video, Kevin Akeroyd, SVP of Oracle Eloqua, provides some highlights of what made this year’s Eloqua Experience, exceptional, including Steve Woods’ presentation about the journey of modern marketers and Andrea Ward’s conversation with Vince Gilligan, creator of the Breaking Bad television series. The 2013 Markie Awards The Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud was best exemplified for me as 19 Markies were awarded to customers for their exceptional creativity and results as modern marketers. Wow, what a night to remember with so many committed and talented people working to create an extraordinary experience! To learn more about how to become a modern marketer, check out these resources. We look forward to seeing you next year at Eloqua Experience. More on Erick: 20 years experience at Oracle, Ektron, Sitecore, Lyris, Habeas, Nokia, creatorbase, Mark Monitor, Cisco Systems, GlobalFluency, Sun Microsystems, Philips NV, Elm Products and CBS TV. Patent holder with agency, Fortune 500, media, and startup company expertise. @mikestiles

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• Cream of the Crop

  - by KemButller

  JD Edwards has been working hard to ensure that you shouldn't have to work so hard! Yet there are still JD Edwards customers that may not be up to speed on all the new and or improved tools and utilities we have delivered, all designed to make your life easier. So today, I want to share what I consider to be the cream of the crop….those items that every customer should know about and leverage to make ERP life just a little bit (or A LOT) easier! These are my top picks, the cream of a very good crop! Explore and enjoy, and gain some of your time back to do with as you please. · www.runjde.com It’s where to go when you need to know! The Resource Kits available on www.runjde.com provide comprehensive Resource Kits (guides) by user type. The guides provide brief descriptions of the wide array of resources that are available to JD Edwards’s eco system and links to each of those resources. · My Oracle Support (MOS) Information Centers This link will take you to an index that is designed to provide you with simple and quick navigation to the available EnterpriseOne Information Centers. This index provides links to: · EnterpriseOne Application specific Information Centers · EnterpriseOne Tools and Technology Information Centers · EnterpriseOne Performance Information Center · EnterpriseOne 9.1 and 9.0 Information Centers Information Centers give Oracle the ability to aggregate content for a given focus area and present this content in categories for easy browsing by our customers. Information Centers offer a variety of focused dynamic content organized around one or more of the following tasks. · Overview · Use · Troubleshooting · Patching and Maintenance · Install and Configure · Upgrade · Optimize Performance · Security · Certify JD Edwards Newsletters Be in the know by reading the Global Customer Support Product Newsletters. They are PACKED with news and information covering a wide range of topics and news. It is a must read if you want to know what’s happening in the JD Edwards universe! Read the latest EntepriseOne newsletter Read the latest World newsletter Learn How to receive notification when a new newsletter edition is published Oracle Learning Library – (OLL) Oracle Learn Library is the place to go for easy access to JD Edwards Application and Tools training. For a comprehensive view of the training available for a specific product/functional area, explore the Knowledge Paths For Net Change (new feature) training, explore the TOI sessions (TOI stands for Transfer Of Information). Tip: Be sure to experiment with the search filters! · www.upgradejde.com The site designed to help customers and partners with the process of upgrading JD Edwards. The site is a wealth of information, tools and resources designed to assist in the evaluation, planning and execution steps required when upgrading. Of note is the wildly successful upgrade strategy known as “The Art of the Possible” wherein JD Edwards and many of our partners hold free workshops to teach customers how to conduct upgrades in 100 days or less. Equally important is the fact that on www.upgradejde.com, customers can gain visibility into planned enhancements using the Product and Technology Feature Catalogs. The catalogs are great for creating customer specific reports about the net change between older releases and current or planned releases. Examples of other key resources on www.upgradejde.com are the product data base changes between releases, extensibility guides, (formerly known as programmer’s guides), whitepapers, ROI calculators and much more!

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• HERMES Medical Solutions Helps Save Lives with MySQL

  - by Bertrand Matthelié

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} HERMES Medical Solutions was established in 1976 in Stockholm, Sweden, and is a leading innovator in medical imaging hardware/software products for health care facilities worldwide. HERMES delivers a plethora of different medical imaging solutions to optimize hospital workflow. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} HERMES advanced algorithms make it possible to detect the smallest changes under therapies important and necessary to optimize different therapeutic methods and doses. Challenges Fighting illness & disease requires state-of-the-art imaging modalities and software in order to diagnose accurately, stage disease appropriately and select the best treatment available. Selecting and implementing a new database platform that would deliver the needed performance, reliability, security and flexibility required by the high-end medical solutions offered by HERMES. Solution Decision to migrate from in-house database to an embedded SQL database powering the HERMES products, delivered either as software, integrated hardware and software solutions, or via the cloud in a software-as-a-service configuration. Evaluation of several databases and selection of MySQL based on its high performance, ease of use and integration, and low Total Cost of Ownership. On average, between 4 and 12 Terabytes of data are stored in MySQL databases underpinning the HERMES solutions. The data generated by each medical study is indeed stored during 10 years or more after the treatment was performed. MySQL-based HERMES systems also allow doctors worldwide to conduct new drug research projects leveraging the large amount of medical data collected. Hospitals and other HERMES customers worldwide highly value the “zero administration” capabilities and reliability of MySQL, enabling them to perform medical analysis without any downtime. Relying on MySQL as their embedded database, the HERMES team has been able to increase their focus on further developing their clinical applications. HERMES Medical Solutions could leverage the Oracle Financing payment plan to spread its investment over time and make the MySQL choice even more valuable. “MySQL has proven to be an excellent database choice for us. We offer high-end medical solutions, and MySQL delivers the reliability, security and performance such solutions require.” Jan Bertling, CEO.

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• IE9, LightSwitch Beta 2 and Zune HD: A Study in Risk Management?

  - by andrewbrust

  Photo by parl, 'Risk.’ Under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License This has been a busy week for Microsoft, and for me as well.  On Monday, Microsoft launched Internet Explorer 9 at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, TX.  That evening I flew from New York to Seattle.  On Tuesday morning, Microsoft launched Visual Studio LightSwitch, Beta 2 with a Go-Live license, in Redmond, and I had the privilege of speaking at the keynote presentation where the announcement was made.  Readers of this blog know I‘m a fan of LightSwitch, so I was happy to tell the app dev tools partners in the audience that I thought the LightSwitch extensions ecosystem represented a big opportunity – comparable to the opportunity when Visual Basic 1.0 was entering its final beta roughly 20 years ago.  On Tuesday evening, I flew back to New York (and wrote most of this post in-flight). Two busy, productive days.  But there was a caveat that impacts the accomplishments, because Monday was also the day reports surfaced from credible news agencies that Microsoft was discontinuing its dedicated Zune hardware efforts.  While the Zune brand, technology and service will continue to be a component of Windows Phone and a piece of the Xbox puzzle as well, speculation is that Microsoft will no longer be going toe-to-toe with iPod touch in the portable music player market. If we take all three of these developments together (even if one of them is based on speculation), two interesting conclusions can reasonably be drawn, one good and one less so. Microsoft is doubling down on technologies it finds strategic and de-emphasizing those that it does not.  HTML 5 and the Web are strategic, so here comes IE9, and it’s a very good browser.  Try it and see.  Silverlight is strategic too, as is SQL Server, Windows Azure and SQL Azure, so here comes Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta 2 and a license to deploy its apps to production.  Downloads of that product have exceeded Microsoft’s projections by more than 50%, and the company is even citing analyst firms’ figures covering the number of power-user developers that might use it. (I happen to think the product will be used by full-fledged developers as well, but that’s a separate discussion.) Windows Phone is strategic too…I wasn’t 100% positive of that before, but the Nokia agreement has made me confident.  Xbox as an entertainment appliance is also strategic.  Standalone music players are not strategic – and even if they were, selling them has been a losing battle for Microsoft.  So if Microsoft has consolidated the Zune content story and the ZunePass subscription into Xbox and Windows Phone, it would make sense, and would be a smart allocation of resources.  Essentially, it would be for the greater good. But it’s not all good.  In this scenario, Zune player customers would lose out.  Unless they wanted to switch to Windows Phone, and then use their phone’s battery for the portable media needs, they’re going to need a new platform.  They’re going to feel abandoned.  Even if Zune lives, there have been other such cul de sacs for customers.  Remember SPOT watches?  Live Spaces?  The original Live Mesh?  Microsoft discontinued each of these products.  The company is to be commended for cutting its losses, as admitting a loss isn’t easy.  But Redmond won’t be well-regarded by the victims of those decisions.  Instead, it gets black marks. What’s the answer?  I think it’s a bit like the 1980’s New York City “don’t block the box” gridlock rules: don’t enter an intersection unless you see a clear path through it.  If the light turns red and you’re blocking the perpendicular traffic, that’s your fault in judgment.  You get fined and get points on your license and you don’t get to shrug it off as beyond your control.  Accountability is key.  The same goes for Microsoft.  If it decides to enter a market, it should see a reasonable path through success in that market. Switching analogies, Microsoft shouldn’t make investments haphazardly, and it certainly shouldn’t ask investors to buy into a high-risk fund that is sold as safe and which offers only moderate returns.  People won’t continue to invest with a fund manager with a track record of over-zealous, imprudent, sub-prime investments.  The same is true on the product side for Microsoft, and not just with music players and geeky wrist watches.  It’s true of Web browsers, and line-of-business app dev tools, and smartphones, and cloud platforms and operating systems too.  When Microsoft is casual about its own risk, it raises risk for its customers, and weakens its reputation, market share and credibility.  That doesn’t mean all risk is bad, but it does mean no product team’s risk should be taken lightly. For mutual fund companies, it’s the CEO’s job to give his fund managers autonomy, but to make sure they’re conforming to a standard of rational risk management.  Because all those funds carry the same brand, and many of them serve the same investors. The same goes for Microsoft, its product portfolio, its executive ranks and its product managers.

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• On a BPM Mission with Process Accelerators. Part 1: BPM as an ATV

  - by Cesare Rotundo

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* 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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; 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;} Part 1: BPM as an ATV It’s always exciting to talk to customers that are in the middle of a BPM transformational journey. Their thirst for new processes to improve with BPM makes them explorers in a landscape of opportunities. They have discovered that with BPM the can “go places” they couldn’t reach before. In a way, learning how to generate value with BPM is like adopting a new mean of transportation. Apps are like regular cars: very efficient, but to be used on paved roads: the road/process has been traced, and there are fixed paths to follow to get from “opportunity to quote” or from “quote to cash”. Getting off the road is risky, and laying down new asphalt is slow and expensive. Custom development is like running: you can go virtually anywhere, following any path you like, yet it’s slow, and a lot of sweat. BPM allows you to go “off the beaten path” laid out by packaged apps, yet make fast progress compared to custom development. BPM is therefore more like an All-Terrain Vehicle (ATV): less efficient than a car, but much faster than running, with a powerful enough engine that can get you places. The similarities between BPM and ATVs don’t stop here: you must learn to ride it even if you already know how to drive a car; you can reach places but figuring out the path to your destination is harder. Ultimately, with BPM as with an ATV, you reach places that you thought you could never reach, and you discover new destinations that provide great benefit to you … and that you didn’t even know existed! That’s where the sense of accomplishment that we heard from our BPM customers comes from, as well as the desire to share their experience, or even, as in the case of a County, the willingness to contribute their BPM solutions to help other agencies that face the same challenges. The question we wanted to answer is how can we teach organizations to drive ATV/BPM, thus leading them to deeper success with BPM, while increasing their awareness of the potential for reaching new targets, and finally equip them with the right tools. Like with ATVs, getting from point A to point B is more of a work of art than cruising on the highway by car. There is a lot we can do: after all many sought after destinations are common: someone else has been on the same path before. If only you could learn from their experience …

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• Create Custom Speech Bubbles in Silverlight.

  - by mbcrump

  I had a reader email me the following question: “How do you create Speech Bubbles in Silverlight/WPF without adding any extra .dlls? Right off the bat, I know at least two ways to create the speech bubbles that look just like the ones in comic books. Using the Callout Shapes included with Blend 4. Using the free 3rd party control named FreeBubbles (I used this before Blend 4). Unfortunately, we cannot use either of these as they will both add extra .dll’s to the project. So why wouldn’t you want to use one of those? I can think of a few reasons: You do not want to increase the size of your .XAP by including extra .dll’s. You do not have Expression Blend or the license to the use the .dll’s. You want a custom Speech Bubble that is not included in the four “Callout” Controls with Blend. Instead of using one of these methods, we will create a Speech Bubble in Blend 4 using Path element and a TextBlock. Before we get started, lets look at the Callout Shapes included with Blend 4. Using Blend 4 you can simply drag/drop these controls onto your Silverlight application and you are ready to go. We can create all of these Speech Bubbles and even some of the modern bubbles used in recent comic books. Lets get started. Start up Expression Blend 4 and select the Pen Tool. On the Art Board, start connecting the dots like I did below. You can add a color if you wish. …keep going …complete Let’s go ahead and add some text to the Speech Bubble. Drag a TextBlock from the Panel and put it directly inside the Speech Bubble. Go ahead and set the TextAlignment to Center for the TextBlock. and give it some text. At this point, you could go ahead and create a user control if you want to reuse the Speech Bubble you created. Select both the Path and the TextBlock by clicking then while holding down CTRL and then Right Click them. Select Make Into User Control. Give it a name and then Build your project. Lets create another one using the Ellipse for the older comic book style of Speech Bubbles. Drag an Ellipse to the Artboard and give it a color. Now, grab the Pen and drag a triangle like I did below. Simply drag it over a corner of the Ellipse. Select Combine then Unite and you will have a Path. At this point, you can go ahead and add a TextBlock like we did earlier. Lets go ahead and create a rounded rectangle one by adding a Rectangle to the Artboard. Go ahead and set the RadiuX and RadiusY to 25 to give it rounded edges. Let’s create another path and drag it right on top of our rounded rectangle like we did earlier. …looking good Select Combine then Unite and you will have a Path. At this point, you can go ahead and add a TextBlock like we did earlier. So let’s look at what we’ve created today using the path element and TextBlock. As you can tell, it required more work but meets the requirements. This was actually fun to do and I encourage anyone that visits my blog to send in request like this.  Subscribe to my feed

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• Rules engine for spatial and temporal reasoning?

  - by John

  I have an application that receives a number of datums that characterize spatial / temporal processes. It then filters these datums and creates actions which are then sent to processes that perform the actions. Rinse and repeat. At present, I have a collection of custom filters that perform a lot of complicated spatial/temporal calculations. Many times as I discuss my system to individuals in my company, they ask if I'm using a rules engine. I have yet to find a rules engine that is able to reason well temporally and spatially. (Things like When are two entities ever close? Is entity A ever in region B? If entity C is near entity D but oriented backwards relative to C then perform action D.) I have looked at Drools, Cyc, Jess in the past (say 3-4 years ago). It's time to re-examine the state of the art. Any suggestions? Any standards that you know of that support this kind of reasoning? Any defacto standards? Any applications? Thanks!

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• Ruby on rails generates tests for you. Do those give a false sense of a safety net?

  - by Hamish Grubijan

  Disclaimer: I have not used RoR, and I have not generated tests. But, I will still dare to post this question. Quality Assurance is theoretically impossible to get 100% right in general (Undecidable problem ;), and it is hard in practice. So many developers do not understand that writing good automated tests is an art, and it is hard. When I hear that RoR generates the tests for you, I get very skeptical. It cannot be that easy. Testing is a general concept; it applies across languages. So does the concept of code contracts, it is similar for languages that support it. Code contracts do not generate themselves. The programmer must add the requirements and the promises manually, after doing some thinking about the algorithm / function. If a human gets it wrong, then the tools will propagate the error. Similarly with testing - it takes human judgement about what should happen. Tests do not write themselves, and we are far from the day when a business analyst can just have a conversation with a computer and tell it informally what the requirements are and have the computer do all the work. There is no magic ... how can RoR generate good tests for you? Please shed some light on this. Opinions are ok, for this is a community wiki. Thanks!

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• Excel export displaying '#####...'

  - by Cypher

  I'm trying to export an Excel database into .txt (Tab Delimited), but some of my cells are quite large. When I export into a txt some of the cells are exported as '#######....' which is surprisingly useless. Has this happened to anyone else? Do you know an easy fix? Data from one cell of my column: Accounting, African Studies, Agricultural/Bioresource Engineering, Agricultural Economics, Agricultural Science, Anatomy/Cell Biology, Animal Biology, Animal Science, Anthropology, Applied Zoology, Architecture, Art History, Atmospheric/Oceanic Science, Biochemistry, Biology, Botanical Sciences, Canadian Studies, Chemical Engineering, Chemistry/Bio-Organic/Environmental/Materials,ChurchMusicPerformance, Civil Engineering/Applied Mechanics, Classics, Composition, Computer Engineering,ComputerScience, ContemporaryGerman Studies, Dietetics, Early Music Performance, Earth/Planetary Sciences, East Asian Studies, Economics, Electrical Engineering, English Literature/ Drama/Theatre/Cultural Studies, Entrepreneurship, Environment, Environmental Biology, Finance, Food Science, Foundations of Computing, French Language/Linguistics/Literature/Translation, Geography, Geography/ Urban Systems, German, German Language/Literature/Culture, Hispanic Languages/Literature/Culture,History,Humanistic Studies, Industrial Relations, Information Systems, International Business, International Development Studies, Italian Studies/Medieval/Renaissance, Jazz Performance, Jewish Studies, Keyboard Studies, Kindergarten/Elementary Education, Kindergarten/Elementary Education/Jewish Studies,Kinesiology, Labor/Management Relations, Latin American/Caribbean Studies, Linguistics, Literature/Translation, Management Science, Marketing, Materials Engineering,Mathematics,Mathematics/Statistics,Mechanical Engineering, Microbiology, Microbiology/Immunology, Middle Eastern Studies, Mining Engineering, Music, Music Education, MusicHistory,Music Technology,Music Theory,North American Studies, Nutrition,OperationsManagement,OrganizationalBehavior/Human Resources Management, Performing Arts, Philosophy, Physical Education, Physics, Physiology, Plant Sciences, Political Science, Psychology, Quebec Studies, Religious Studies/Scriptures/Interpretations/World Religions,ResourceConservation,Russian, Science for Teachers,Secondary Education, Secondary Education/Music, Secondary Education/Science, SocialWork, Sociology, Software Engineering, Soil Science, Strategic Management, Teaching of French/English as a Second Language, Theology, Wildlife Biology, Wildlife Resources, Women’s Studies.

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• How do I keep a CALayer, sublayer of a CATiledLayer, from changing it's scale after a zoom ?

  - by David

  I have a CATiledLayer that is used to display a PDF page (this CATiledLayer is the layer type of my UIView which is a subview of a UIScrollView). I want to add overlay markers on this page. So I add a sublayer to my CATiledLayer. This sublayer again hosts the different marker's layers and acts as a grouping layer. So graphically, I have: (keep in mind that I have multiple markers which are CALayers also, this is ascii art after all) pdf page (CATiledLayer) ---------------------- | CALayer | | +---------+ | | | +----+ | | | | |mker| | | | | +----+ | | | +---------+ | | | ---------------------- I have set up the canonical drawLayer:inContext: in my view for drawing the pdf. When I zoom to have more detail, the pdf gets rendered correctly, but the markers get scaled. No matter what I do to the bounds of the CALayer, my markers always become bigger and appear jagged. I would like to have the markers always the same size, as when they were initialized and first shown when the view was drawn. Is this possible ? or am I using a wrong approach ? Should I do special drawing for my contained CALayer in the drawLAyer:inContext: message ? As you see, there are things that I am missing to resolve my problem. Thank you for any help you provide.

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• Creating a shim Stream

  - by spender

  A decompression API that I am using has the following API: Decode(Stream inStream,Stream outStream) I'd like to create a wrapper around this API, such that I can create my own Stream class which offers up the decoded data. Stream decodedStream=new BlaDecodeStream(inStream); So that I can than use this stream as a parameter to the XmlReader constructor in the same way one might use the System.IO.Compression.GZipStream. As far as I can tell, the only other option is set outStream stream to a MemoryStream or to a FileStream and go in two hops. The files I am dealing with are enormous, so neither of these options are particularly attractive. Before I go reinventing the wheel, is there any prior art that I might be able to draw from, or something in the BCL I might have missed? The CircularStream implementation here would go some of the way to helping, but I'm really looking for something similar that would block (as opposed to over/underrun) when the Stream's internal buffer is 'empty' when reading from it and block when the internal buffer is full when writing to it. In this way it could serve as parameter outStream and simultaneously (i.e. from another thread) could be read from by the XmlReader.

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• Variable-width inline underline effects in CSS

  - by sidereal

  I need to simulate the look of a typical paper form in CSS. It consists of a two-column table of fields. Each field consists of a field name (of variable width) followed by an underline that continues to the end of the column. The field might be populated, in which case there is some text centered above the line, or it may be blank. If that isn't clear, he's a rough idea in manky ASCII art: Name: _______Foo_______ Age: _____17______ Location: __Melbourne__ Handedness: _Left_ (except that the underline would continue under any text) To implement the underline without text, I assume I should use a border-bottom rather than a text-decoration: underline. Additionally, I need the bordered element to take up the full available space. Both of those argue for a block-level element. However, I can't find any way to get the block level element (either a div, an li, or a span set to display: block or inline-block) to remain on the same line as the label. As soon as I give it a width: 100%, it newlines. I've tried various combinations of floats, and I'm not inclined to do anything ridiculous with absolute positioning. Any recommendations?

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• Project ideas for automated deduction/automated theorem proving?

  - by wsh

  Dear Stack Overflow brethren, I'm a second-semester junior who will embark upon my thesis soon, and I have an interest in automated deduction and automated theorem provers. As in, I'd like to advance the art in some way (I don't mean that pretentiously, but I do want to do something productive). I've Googled pretty far and wide and so far few promising ideas have emerged. There are a few student project idea pages, but most seem either horribly outdated or too advanced (I was originally going to attempt to synthesize postmodernist thought (hahaha) and abstract its logical content, build a complete and consistent model (if possible, of course), and attempt to automate it, grounding said model as possible in a nonstandard logic a la these. My advisor thought that gave postmodernist thought too much credit (a while ago I reimplemented the Postmodernism Generator in Haskell with Parsec, so that is in part where the idea came from); I am tempted to concur.) So, yeah. Does anyone have ideas? I apologize if there is some obvious gap in my approach here/if I haven't appropriately done my homework (and if there is one, please tell me!), but in large part I don't even know where to start, and thank you for reading all that.

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• Lucene HTMLFormatter skipping last character

  - by Midhat

  I have this simple Lucene search code (Modified from http://www.lucenetutorial.com/lucene-in-5-minutes.html) class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { StandardAnalyzer analyzer = new StandardAnalyzer(); Directory index = new RAMDirectory(); IndexWriter w = new IndexWriter(index, analyzer, true, IndexWriter.MaxFieldLength.UNLIMITED); addDoc(w, "Table 1 <table> content </table>"); addDoc(w, "Table 2"); addDoc(w, "<table> content </table>"); addDoc(w, "The Art of Computer Science"); w.Close(); String querystr = "table"; Query q = new QueryParser("title", analyzer).Parse(querystr); Lucene.Net.Search.IndexSearcher searcher = new Lucene.Net.Search.IndexSearcher(index); Hits hitsFound = searcher.Search(q); SimpleHTMLFormatter formatter = new SimpleHTMLFormatter("*", "*"); Highlighter highlighter = null; highlighter = new Highlighter(formatter, new QueryScorer(searcher.Rewrite(q))); for (int i = 0; i < hitsFound.Length(); i++) { Console.WriteLine(highlighter.GetBestFragment(analyzer, "title", hitsFound.Doc(i).Get("title"))); // Console.WriteLine(hitsFound.Doc(i).Get("title")); } Console.ReadKey(); } private static void addDoc(IndexWriter w, String value) { Document doc = new Document(); doc.Add(new Field("title", value, Field.Store.YES, Field.Index.ANALYZED)); w.AddDocument(doc); } } The highlighted results always seem to skip the closing '' of my last table tag. Any suggestions?

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• "Work stealing" vs. "Work shrugging (tm)"?

  - by John

  Why is it that I can find lots of information on "work stealing" and nothing on a "work shrugging(tm)" as a load-balancing strategy? I am surprised because work-stealing seems to me to have an inherent weakness when implementating efficient fine-grained load-balancing. Vis:- Relying on consumer processors to implement distribution (by actively stealing) begs the question of what these processors do when they find no work? None of the work-stealing references and implementations I have come across so far address this issue satisfactorarily for me. They either:- 1) Manage not to disclose what they do with idle processors! [Cilk] (?anyone know?) 2) Have all idle processors sleep and wake periodically and scatter messages to the four winds to see if any work has arrived [e.g. JAWS] (= way too latent & inefficient for me). 3) Assume that it is acceptable to have processors "spinning" looking for work ( = non-starter for me!) Unless anyone thinks there is a solution for this I will move on to consider a "Work Shrugging(tm)" strategy. Having the task-producing processor distribute excess load seems to me inherently capable of a much more efficient implementation. However a quick google didn't show up anything under the heading of "Work Shrugging" so any pointers to prior-art would be welcome. tx Tags I would have added if I was allowed to [work-stealing]

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• TLS with SNI in Java clients

  - by ftrotter

  There is an ongoing discussion on the security and trust working group for NHIN Direct regarding the IP-to-domain mapping problem that is created with traditional SSL. If an HISP (as defined by NHIN Direct) wants to host thousands of NHIN Direct "Health Domains" for providers, then it will an "artificially inflated cost" to have to purchase an IP for each of those domains. Because Apache and OpenSSL have recently released TLS with support for the SNI extension, it is possible to use SNI as a solution to this problem on the server side. However, if we decide that we will allow server implementations of the NHINDirect transport layer to support TLS+SNI, then we must require that all clients support SNI too. OpenSSL based clients should do this by default and one could always us stunnel to implement an TLS+SNI aware client to proxy if your given programming language SSL implementation does not support SNI. It appears that native Java applications using OpenJDK do not yet support SNI, but I cannot get a straight answer out of that project. I know that there are OpenSSL Java libraries available but I have no idea if that would be considered viable. Can you give me a "state of the art" summary of where TLS+SNI support is for Java clients? I need a Java implementers perspective on this.

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• how to better (inambiguaously) use the terms CAPTCHA and various types of interactions?

  - by vgv8

  I am working on survey of state-of-the-art and trends of spam prevention techniques. I observe that non-intrusive, transparent to visitor spam prevention techniques (like context-based filtering or honey traps) are frequently called non-captcha. Is it correct understanding of term CAPTCHA which is "type of challenge-response [ 2 ]test used in computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a compute" [ 1 ] and challenge-response does not seem to imply obligatory human involvement. So, which understanding (definition) of term and classification I'd better to stick with? How would I better call CAPTCHA without direct human interaction in order to avoid ambiguity and confusion of terms understnding? How would I better (succinctly and unambiguously) coin the term for captchas requiring human interaction but without typing into textbox? How would I better (succinctly and unambiguously) coin the terms to mark the difference between human interaction with images (playing, drag&dropping, rearranging, clicking with images) vs. just recognizing them (and then typing into a textbox the answer without interaction with images)? PS. The problem is that recognition of a wiggled word in an image or typing the answer to question is also interaction and when I start to use the terms "interaction", "interactive", "captcha", "protection", "non-captcha", "non-interactive", "static", "dynamic", "visible", "hidden" the terms overlap ambiguously with which another (especailly because the definitions or their actual practice of usage are vague or contradictive). [ 1 ] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA

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• Hiring a programmer: looking for the "right attitude"

  - by Totophil

  It's actually two questions in one: What is the right attitude for a programmer? How do you (or would you) look for one when interviewing or during hiring process? Please note this question is not about personality or traits of a candidate, it is about their attitude towards what they do for living. This is also not about reverse of programmers pet peeves. The question has been made community wiki, since I am interested in a good answer rather than reputation. I disagree that the question is purely subjective and just a matter of opinion: clearly some attitudes make a better programmer than others. Consecutively, there might quite possibly exist an attitude that is common to the most of the better programmers. Update: After some deliberation I came up with the following attitude measurement scales: identifies themselves with the job ? fully detached perceives code as a collection of concepts ? sees code as a sequence of steps thinks of creating software as an art ? takes 100% rational approach to design and development Answers that include some sort of a comment on the appropriateness of these scales are greatly appreciated. Definition of "attitude": a complex mental state involving beliefs and feelings and values and dispositions to act in certain ways; "he had the attitude that work was fun" The question came as a result of some reflection on the top voted answer to "How do you ensure code quality?" here on Stack Overflow.

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• PCA extended face recognition

  - by cMinor

  The state of the art says that we can use PCA to perform face recognition. like this, this or this I am working with a project that involves training a classifier to detect a person who is wearing glasess or hats or even a mustache. The purpose of doing this is to detect when a person that has robbed a bank, store, or have commeted some sort of crime(s) (we have their image in a database), enters a certain place ( historically we know these guys have robbed, so we should take care to avoid problems). We came first to have a distributed database with all images of criminals, then I thought to have a layer of them clasifying these criminals using accesories like hats, mustache or anything that hides their face etc... Then, to apply that knowledge to detect when a particular or a suspect person enters a comercial place. ( In practice when someone is going to rob not all the times they are using an accesorie...) What do you think about this idea of doing PCA to first detect principal components of the face and then the components of an accesory. I was thinking that maybe a probabilistic approach is better so we can compute the probability the criminal is the person that entered a place and call the respective authorities.

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• OpenGL - drawing 2D polygons shapes with texture

  - by plonkplonk

  I am trying to make a few effects in a C+GL game. So far I draw all my sprites as a quad, and it works. However, I am trying to make a large ring appear at times, with a texture following that ring, as it takes less memory than a quad with the ring texture inside. The type of ring I want to make is not a round-shaped GL mesh ring (the "tube" type) but a "paper" 2D ring. That way I can modify the "width" of the ring, getting more of the effect than a simple quad+ring texture. So far all my attempts have been...kind of ridiculous, as I don't understand GL's coordinates too well (and I can't really understand the available documentation...I am just a designer with no coder help or background. A n00b, basically). glBegin(GL_POLYGON); for(i = 0;i < 360; i += 10){ glTexCoord2f(0, 0); glVertex2f(Cos(i)*(H-10),Sin(i)H); glTexCoord2f(0, HP); glVertex2f(Sin(i)(H-10),Cos(i)*(H-10)); glTexCoord2f(WP, HP); glVertex2f(Cos(i)H,Sin(i)(H-10)); glTexCoord2f(WP, 0); glVertex2f(Sin(i)*H,Cos(i)*H); } glEnd(); This is my last attempt, and it seems to generate a "sunburst" from the right edge of the circle instead of a ring. It's an amusing effect but definitely not what I want. Other results included the circle looking exactly the same as the quad textured (aka drawing a sprite literally) or something that looked like a pop-art filter, by working on this train of thought. Seems like my logic here is entirely flawed, so, what would be the easiest way to obtain such a ring? No need to reply in code, just some guidance for a non-math-skilled user...

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• Instantiate type variable in Haskell

  - by danportin

  EDIT: Solved. I was unware that enabling a language extension in the source file did not enable the language extension in GHCi. The solution was to :set FlexibleContexts in GHCi. I recently discovered that type declarations in classes and instances in Haskell are Horn clauses. So I encoded the arithmetic operations from The Art of Prolog, Chapter 3, into Haskell. For instance: fac(0,s(0)). fac(s(N),F) :- fac(N,X), mult(s(N),X,F). class Fac x y | x -> y instance Fac Z (S Z) instance (Fac n x, Mult (S n) x f) => Fac (S n) f pow(s(X),0,0) :- nat(X). pow(0,s(X),s(0)) :- nat(X). pow(s(N),X,Y) :- pow(N,X,Z), mult(Z,X,Y). class Pow x y z | x y -> z instance (N n) => Pow (S n) Z Z instance (N n) => Pow Z (S n) (S Z) instance (Pow n x z, Mult z x y) => Pow (S n) x y In Prolog, values are insantiated for (logic) variable in a proof. However, I don't understand how to instantiate type variables in Haskell. That is, I don't understand what the Haskell equivalent of a Prolog query ?-f(X1,X2,...,Xn) is. I assume that :t undefined :: (f x1 x2 ... xn) => xi would cause Haskell to instantiate xi, but this gives a Non type-variable argument in the constraint error, even with FlexibleContexts enabled.

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