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• Update

  - by Jeff Certain

  This blog has been pretty quiet for a year now. There's a few reasons for that. Probably the biggest reason is that I view this as a space where I talk about .NET things. Or software development. While I've been doing the latter for the past year, I haven't been doing the former.Yes, I took a trip to the dark side. I started with Ning 11 months ago, in Palo Alto, CA. I had the chance to work with an incredibly talented group of software engineers... in PHP and Java.That was definitely an eye-opening experience, in terms of technology, process, and culture. It was also a pretty good example of how acquisitions can get interesting. I'll talk more about this, I'm sure.Last week, I started with a company called Dynamic Signal. I'm a "Back End Engineer" now. Also a very talented team of people, and I'm delighted to be working with them. We're a Microsoft shop. After a year away, I'm very happy to be back. Coming back to .NET is an easy transition, and one that has me being fairly productive straight out of the gate.(Some of you may have noticed, my last post was more than a year ago. Yes, it's safe to infer that I didn't get renewed as an MVP. Fair deal; I didn't do nearly as much this year as I have in the past. I'll be starting to speak again shortly, and hope to be re-awarded soon.)At any rate, now that I'm back in the .NET space, you can expect to hear more from me soon!

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• Today's Links (6/28/2011)

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Connecting People, Processes, and Content: An Online Event | Brian Dirking Dirking shares information on an Oracle Online Forum coming up on July 19. Social Relationships don't count until they count | Steve Jones "It's actually the interactions that matter to back up the social experience rather than the existence of a social link," says Jones. ORACLENERD: KScope 11: Cary Millsap Commenting on Cary Millsap's KScope presentation on Agile, Oracle ACE Chet Justice says, "I fight with methodology on a daily basis, mostly resulting in me hitting my head against the closest wall." The Sage Kings of Antiquity | Richard Veryard "Given that the empirical evidence for enterprise architecture is fairly weak, anecdotal and inconclusive, we are still more dependent than we might like on the authority of experts," says Veryard, "whether this be semi-anonymous committees (such as TOGAF) or famous consultants (such as Zachman)." Oracle Business Intelligence Blog: New BI Mobile Demos "These are short videos that showcase some of the capabilities in our mobile app," says Abhinav Agarwal. "One focuses on the Oracle BI platform, while the other showcases what is possible with the mobile app accessing Oracle Business Intelligence Applications, like Financial Analytics." MySQL HA Events in the UK, Germany & France | Oracle's MySQL Blog Oracle is running MySQL High Availability breakfast seminars in London (June 29), Düsseldorf (July 13) and Paris (September 7). "During these free seminars, we will review the various options and technologies at your disposal to implement highly available and highly scalable MySQL infrastructures, as well as best practices in terms of architectures," says Bertrand Matthelié. VENNSTER BLOG: User Experience in Fusion apps "When I heard about the Fusion Applications User Experience efforts, I was skeptical," says Oracle ACE Director Lonneke Dikmans of Vennster "My view of Oracle and User Experience has changed drastically today." Power Your Cloud with Oracle Fusion Middleware Running in over 50 cities across the globe, this event is aimed at Architects, IT Managers, and technical leaders like you who are using Fusion Middleware or trying to learn more about middleware in the context of Cloud computing.

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• How do you compare job offers from companies in different countries?

  - by Danny Tuppeny

  This isn't really a programmer-specific question, but I'm not sure of a more appropriate place, and I think the users of this site are best able to answer the question in the context of programmers. Relocating to the US seems fairly common in the programming industry. I live in the UK, and maybe one day, I might do it too. So, if that day comes - how would you go about comparing job offers? Benefits are fairly easy to compare, but given the differences in cost of living, how would you go about comparing salaries and the quality of living you'll have? In a country where the cost of living is lower, you might be able to accept a lower salary (based on exchange rate) and still have the same quality of living. But what can you do to ensure this? In some cases, you may even take a "pay rise" in terms of exchange rate, but end up far worse off. How can you compare job offers across different countries to get an idea of the salary you would need in order to not feel you've gone "backwards"?

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• Oracle has some very helpful and free code...I think

  - by Casey

  I found that some of the code that Oracle uses is very useful so I don't have to re-invent the wheel. Given this is at the top of the file where the code in question is: /* * Copyright (c) 1997, 2006, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. * DO NOT ALTER OR REMOVE COPYRIGHT NOTICES OR THIS FILE HEADER. * * This code is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it * under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 only, as * published by the Free Software Foundation. Oracle designates this * particular file as subject to the "Classpath" exception as provided * by Oracle in the LICENSE file that accompanied this code. * * This code is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT * ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or * FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License * version 2 for more details (a copy is included in the LICENSE file that * accompanied this code). * * You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License version * 2 along with this work; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, * Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA. * * Please contact Oracle, 500 Oracle Parkway, Redwood Shores, CA 94065 USA * or visit www.oracle.com if you need additional information or have any * questions. */ If I leave the text intact, put it in my C++ header, and credit oracle for each method, and package the source into a static library...is it still a no-no?

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• Welcome to the newly merged JCP EC!

  - by Heather VanCura

  As part of the JCP.Next effort, the second JSR as part of the JCP program reforms, JSR 355, Executive Committee (EC) Merge, will take effect on Tuesday as JCP 2.9. The first in the effort was JSR 348, which took effect as JCP 2.8 in October 2011. EC members guide the evolution of the Java technologies by approving and voting on all technology proposals (Java Specification Requests, or JSRs). They are also responsible for defining the JCP's rules of governance and the legal agreement between members and the organization. They provide guidance to the Program Management Office (PMO) and they represent the interests of the JCP to the broader community. Starting on Tuesday, 13 November, JCP 2.9 is in effect, and the EC is merged from two ECs -- one representing Java SE/EE and one representing Java ME -- to one merged EC. IBM and Oracle each gave up one of their two seats (one per EC) and the terms expired for four members who did not run for re-election: AT&T, Deutsch Telekom, Siemens and Vodafone. All four remain JCP members. In addition, the seat occupied by RIM was forfeited due to lack of participation in October 2012. The JCP values the organizations and representatives for their contribution to the JCP EC, and looks forward to their continued participation in the JCP Program. The complete listing of the EC, 24 members total at the moment, is now available. We asked the two newcomers to the EC, Cinterion and CloudBees, and the re-elected London Java Community, to comment on their plans for their term in the EC. Read about their plans in the article published on JCP.org, "JCP 2.9 with a Merged EC Takes Effect 13 November". Also, plan to attend the public (open to all community members) EC Meeting planned for 20 November at 15:00 PST.  Details will be posted here and on the JCP.org home page next week.

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• Software Design Idea for multi tier architecture

  - by Preyash

  I am currently investigating multi tier architecture design for a web based application in MVC3. I already have an architecture but not sure if its the best I can do in terms of extendability and performance. The current architecure has following components DataTier (Contains EF POCO objects) DomainModel (Contains Domain related objects) Global (Among other common things it contains Repository objects for CRUD to DB) Business Layer (Business Logic and Interaction between Data and Client and CRUD using repository) Web(Client) (which talks to DomainModel and Business but also have its own ViewModels for Create and Edit Views for e.g.) Note: I am using ValueInjector for convering one type of entity to another. (which is proving an overhead in this desing. I really dont like over doing this.) My question is am I having too many tiers in the above architecure? Do I really need domain model? (I think I do when I exposes my Business Logic via WCF to external clients). What is happening is that for a simple database insert it (1) create ViewModel (2) Convert ViewModel to DomainModel for Business to understand (3) Business Convert it to DataModel for Repository and then data comes back in the same order. Few things to consider, I am not looking for a perfect architecure solution as it does not exits. I am looking for something that is scalable. It should resuable (for e.g. using design patterns ,interfaces, inheritance etc.) Each Layers should be easily testable. Any suggestions or comments is much appriciated. Thanks,

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• JSON Support in Azure

  - by kaleidoscope

  Please find how we call JavaScript Object Notation in cloud applications. As we all know how client script is useful in web applications in terms of performance.           Same we can use JQuery in Asp.net using Cloud  computing which will  asynchronously pull any messages out of the table(cloud storage)  and display them in the     browser by invoking a method on a controller that returns JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) in a well-known shape. Syntax : Suppose we want to write a  JQuery function which return some notification while end user interact with our application so use following syntax : public JsonResult GetMessages() {      if (User.Identity.IsAuthenticated)      {     UserTextNotification[] userToasts =           toastRepository.GetNotifications(User.Identity.Name);          object[] data =          (from UserTextNotification toast in userToasts          select new { title = toast.Title ?? "Notification",          text = toast.MessageText }).ToArray();           return Json(data, JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet);      }         else            return Json(null); } Above function is used to check authentication and display message if user is not exists in Table. Plateform :   ASP.NET 3.5  MVC 1   Under Visual Studio 2008  . Please find below link for more detail : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee335721.aspx   Chandraprakash, S

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• Do support sites like stackoverflow upset the paid-support open source model?

  - by ajax81

  In order to stay relevant in the marketplace, I'm researching new business models for my software company. The open source model with paid support seems like a good fit for our product, but I have concerns about whether or not a paid support model is viable in an era where top-notch help is readily available for free on sites like those in the StackExchange network. Case in point -- I moved my employees to Ubuntu last year because I didn't want to pay for Win 7 licenses and new hardware (plus, the mono platform was highly attractive). My staff had no Linux experience, but were able to achieve relative competency in about 120 days with the help of AskUbuntu, StackOverflow, and a few "For Dummies" books. We did employ an Ubuntu consultant for 7 days to provide training and support, but beyond that spent $0.00 on any kind of paid expertise. In regards to my due diligence, I ran a 3 month beta of the freemium-paid-support model with one of our smaller customers, and achieved mediocre results. I'd like to think its because our software is so stable and easy to use that the customer didn't need much paid support, but I suspect that they circumvented the terms of our SLA in the same manner that we did with the move to Ubuntu. Does anyone out there has any thoughts, advice, or experience relevant to the move I'm considering? What worked, what didn't, etc? Thanks in advance!

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• Remote Working & Relocation

  - by James Burgess

  Sorry if this question is a duplicate, I did some extensive searching and found nothing on quite the same topic (though a couple on partially-overlapping topics). Recently, whilst on holiday in Munich, Germany, I was taken aback by the sheer number of programming-related posts available in the city that I easily qualify for (both in terms of knowledge, and experience). The advertised working environments seemed good and the pay seemed to be at least as good as what I'd expect here in the UK. Probably 80% of the advertisements I saw on the underground were for IT-related jobs, and a good 60% of those I was easily qualified for. At the moment, I work as a freelancer mostly on web and small software projects, but seeing the vast availability of jobs in Munich versus my local area has me thinking about remote working. I'm unable to relocate for a job for the next 3 years (my wife has a contract to continue being a doctor at her current hospital for that time) but would almost certainly be open to it after that (after all, my wife and I both love Munich). In the meanwhile, I would be very interested in remote-working. So, my question is thus do companies ever take on remote workers (even with semi-frequent trips to the office) from abroad, with a view to later relocation? And, if so, how do you go about broaching the topic with a recruiter when getting in contact about a job posting? Language isn't a barrier for me, here, as 90% of the jobs I've looked up in Munich don't require German speakers (seems they have a big recruiting market abroad). I'm also under no illusions about the disadvantages of remote working, but I'm more interested in the viability of the scenario rather than the intricacies (at least at this point). I'd really appreciate any contributions, especially from those who have experience with working in such a scenario!

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• Deferred Rendering With Diffuse,Specular, and Normal maps

  - by John

  I have been reading up on deferred rendering and I am trying to implement a renderer using the Sponza atrium model, which can be found here, as my sandbox.Note I am also using OpenGL 3.3 and GLSL. I am loading the model from a Wavefront OBJ file using Assimp. I extract all geometry information including tangents and bitangents. For all the aiMaterials,I extract the following information which essentially comes from the sponza.mtl file. Ambient/Diffuse/Specular/Emissive Reflectivity Coefficients(Ka,Kd,Ks,Ke) Shininess Diffuse Map Specular Map Normal Map I understand that I must render vertex attributes such as position ,normals,texture coordinates to textures as well as depth for the second render pass. A lot of resources mention putting colour information into a g-buffer in the initial render pass but do you not require the diffuse,specular and normal maps and therefore lights to determine the fragment colour? I know that doesnt make since sense because lighting should be done in the second render pass. In terms of normal mapping, do you essentially just pass the tangent,bitangents, and normals into g-buffers and then construct the tangent matrix and apply it to the sampled normal from the normal map. Ultimately, I would like to know how to incorporate this material information into my deferred renderer.

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• How do I implement movement in a WPF Adventure game?

  - by ZeroPhase

  I'm working on making a short WPF adventure game. The only major hurdle I have right now is how to animate objects on the screen correctly. I've experimented with DoubleAnimation and ThicknessAnimation both enable movement of the character, but the speed is a bit erratic. The objects I'm trying to move around are labels in a grid, I'm checking the mouse's position in terms of the canvas I have the grid in. Does anyone have any suggestions for coding the movement, while still allowing mouse clicks to pick up items when needed? It would be nice if I could continue using the Visual Studio GUI Editor. By the way, I'm fine with scrapping labels in a grid for a more ideal object to manipulate. Here's my movement code: ThicknessAnimation ta = new ThicknessAnimation(); The event handling movement: private void Hansel_MouseLeftButtonDown(object sender, MouseButtonEventArgs e) { ta.FillBehavior = FillBehavior.HoldEnd; ta.From = Hansel.Margin; double newX = Mouse.GetPosition(PlayArea).X; double newY = Mouse.GetPosition(PlayArea).Y; if (newX < Convert.ToDouble(Hansel.Margin.Left)) { //newX = -1 * newX; ta.To = new Thickness(0, newY, newX, 0); } else if (newY < Convert.ToDouble(Hansel.Margin.Top)) { newY = -1 * newY; } else { ta.To = new Thickness(newX, newY, 0, 0); } ta.Duration = new Duration(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(2)); Hansel.BeginAnimation(Grid.MarginProperty, ta); } ScreenShot with annotations: http://i1118.photobucket.com/albums/k608/sealclubberr/clickToMove_zps9d4a33cc.png ScreenShot with example movement: http://i1118.photobucket.com/albums/k608/sealclubberr/clickToMove_zps51f2359f.jpg

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• What exactly does the condition in the MIT license imply?

  - by Yannbane

  To quote the license itself: Copyright (C) [year] [copyright holders] Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. I am not exactly sure what the bold part implies. Lets say that I'm creating some library, and I license it under the MIT license. Someone decides to fork that library and to create a closed-source, commercial version. According to the license, he should be free to do that. However, what does he additionally need to do under those terms? Credit me as the creator? I guess the "above copyright notice" refers to the "Copyright (C) [..." part, but, wouldn't that list me as the author of his code (although I technically typed out the code)? And wouldn't including the "permission notice" in what is now his library practically license it under the same conditions that I licensed my own library in? Or, am I interpreting this incorrectly? Does that refer to my obligations to include the copyright and the permission notice?

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• Requesting quality analysis test cases up front of implementation/change

  - by arin

  Recently I have been assigned to work on a major requirement that falls between a change request and an improvement. The previous implementation was done (badly) by a senior developer that left the company and did so without leaving a trace of documentation. Here were my initial steps to approach this problem: Considering that the release date was fast approaching and there was no time for slip-ups, I initially asked if the requirement was a "must have". Since the requirement helped the product significantly in terms of usability, the answer was "If possible, yes". Knowing the wide-spread use and affects of this requirement, had it come to a point where the requirement could not be finished prior to release, I asked if it would be a viable option to thrash the current state and revert back to the state prior to the ex-senior implementation. The answer was "Most likely: no". Understanding that the requirement was coming from the higher management, and due to the complexity of it, I asked all usability test cases to be written prior to the implementation (by QA) and given to me, to aid me in the comprehension of this task. This was a big no-no for the folks at the management as they failed to understand this approach. Knowing that I had to insist on my request and the responsibility of this requirement, I insisted and have fallen out of favor with some of the folks, leaving me in a state of "baffledness". Basically, I was trying a test-driven approach to a high-risk, high-complexity and must-have requirement and trying to be safe rather than sorry. Is this approach wrong or have I approached it incorrectly? P.S.: The change request/improvement was cancelled and the implementation was reverted back to the prior state due to the complexity of the problem and lack of time. This only happened after a 2 hour long meeting with other seniors in order to convince the aforementioned folks.

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• System in low-graphics mode

  - by Artem Moskalev

  I am totally new to Linux, and Ubuntu. I bought ASUS X53E Notebook, erased Windows and installed Ubuntu. First it worked ok. Then when I started working with it, i opened the terminal, entered sudo chmod 666 usr and then all the icons from the main panel disappeared + the whole system stopped responding. I decided to restart the system. When restarted, a message appears: the system is running in low graphics mode and below it: Your screen, graphics card and input device setting could not be detected correctly. You will need to configure it yourself. But the "OK" button is disabled and if I press any buttons nothing happens. If I enter Ctrl-Alt-F2 it opens the bash terminal. But there commands sudo or apt-get are not found and it says that permission denied if i try to enter any folder like cd /usr If I enter the su command it asks for the password I don't know. When encountering this problem first, I reinstalled the whole Ubuntu. but today it happened again just the same. What shall I do? maybe there is something wrong with the hardware? If I need to install another distribution of Linux could you recommend one? but I'd rather stick to Debian releases like Ubuntu. so how do I fix the problem? PS: Please give answers in simple terms because am a newbie so i don't know what goes where yet.

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• Get Started with JavaFX 2 and Scene Builder

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  Up on otn/java is a very useful article by Oracle Java/Middleware/Core Tech Engineer Mark Heckler, titled, “How to Get Started (FAST!) with JavaFX 2 and Scene Builder.”  Heckler, who has development experience in numerous environments, shows developers how to develop a JavaFX application using Scene Builder “in less time than it takes to drink a cup of coffee, while learning your way around in the process”. He begins with a warning and a reassurance: “JavaFX is a new paradigm and can seem a bit imposing when you first take a look at it. But remember, JavaFX is easy and fun. Let's give it a try.” Next, after showing readers how to download and install JDK/JavaFX and Scene Builder, he informs the reader that they will “create a simple JavaFX application, create and modify a window using Scene Builder, and successfully test it in under 15 minutes.” Then readers download some NetBeans files:“EasyJavaFX.java contains the main application class. We won't do anything with this class for our example, as its primary purpose in life is to load the window definition code contained in the FXML file and then show the main stage/scene. You'll keep the JavaFX terms straight with ease if you relate them to the theater: a platform holds a stage, which contains scenes. SampleController.java is our controller class that provides the ‘brains’ behind the graphical interface. If you open the SampleController, you'll see that it includes a property and a method tagged with @FXML. This tag enables the integration of the visual controls and elements you define using Scene Builder, which are stored in an FXML (FX Markup Language) file. Sample.fxml is the definition file for our sample window. You can right-click and Edit the filename in the tree to view the underlying FXML -- and you may need to do that if you change filenames or properties by hand - or you can double-click on it to open it (visually) in Scene Builder.” Then Scene Builder enters the picture and the task is soon done. Check out the article here.

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• Fake links cause crawl error in Google Webmaster Tools

  - by Itai

  Google reported Crawl Errors last week on my largest site though Webmaster Tools. Here is the message: Google detected a significant increase in the number of URLs that return a 404 (Page Not Found) error. Investigating these errors and fixing them where appropriate ensures that Google can successfully crawl your site's pages. The Crawl Errors list is now full of hundreds of fake links like these causing 16,519 errors so far: Note that my site does not even have a search.html and is not related to any of the terms shown in the above image. Inspecting sources for one of those links, I can see this is not simply an isolated source but a concerted effort: Each of the links has a few to a dozen sources all from different, seemingly unrelated sites. It is completely baffling as to why would someone to spending effort doing this. What are they hoping to achieve? Is this an attack? Most importantly: Does this have a negative effect on my side? Could it negatively impact my ranking? If so, what to do about it? The few linking pages I looked at are full of thousands of links to tons of sites and have no contact information and do not seem like the kind of people who would simply stop if asked nicely! According to Google Webmaster Tools, these errors have appeared in a span of 11 days. No crawl errors were being reported previously.

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• Website Ethics / legal issues, image copyrights

  - by RailsN00b

  Ignoring the technical implementation of a website for a second, assume a website that is similar to twitter but with pictures. A user say something and puts a picture of whatever they said. As the nature of the internet, the images will most likely not be his/hers image. There are 2 options that I see for dealing with this: 1. The user will post a URL of the picture and the website will pull the picture from that URL everytime someone enters that page 2. The website will save the image in its own database of images and display the image to the visitors 'locally' The problem with option #1, while it saved storage, I see an issue with 'stealing' other websites bandwidth and if my website has many many visitors it could cost the image-hosting websites a lot and possible even crash it if the server can't handle the load. The problem with opion #2, while it saves the load to other websites, it practically takes pictures that could have copyright on them. Which option is better to implement in terms of legal issues and ethics? When do I need to contact another website to request permission to use the images from that site? Does anyone really care about that anymore. Where can I read about this?

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• Why do memory-managed languages retain the `new` keyword?

  - by Channel72

  The new keyword in languages like Java, Javascript, and C# creates a new instance of a class. This syntax seems to have been inherited from C++, where new is used specifically to allocate a new instance of a class on the heap, and return a pointer to the new instance. In C++, this is not the only way to construct an object. You can also construct an object on the stack, without using new - and in fact, this way of constructing objects is much more common in C++. So, coming from a C++ background, the new keyword in languages like Java, Javascript, and C# seemed natural and obvious to me. Then I started to learn Python, which doesn't have the new keyword. In Python, an instance is constructed simply by calling the constructor, like: f = Foo() At first, this seemed a bit off to me, until it occurred to me that there's no reason for Python to have new, because everything is an object so there's no need to disambiguate between various constructor syntaxes. But then I thought - what's really the point of new in Java? Why should we say Object o = new Object();? Why not just Object o = Object();? In C++ there's definitely a need for new, since we need to distinguish between allocating on the heap and allocating on the stack, but in Java all objects are constructed on the heap, so why even have the new keyword? The same question could be asked for Javascript. In C#, which I'm much less familiar with, I think new may have some purpose in terms of distinguishing between object types and value types, but I'm not sure. Regardless, it seems to me that many languages which came after C++ simply "inherited" the new keyword - without really needing it. It's almost like a vestigial keyword. We don't seem to need it for any reason, and yet it's there. Question: Am I correct about this? Or is there some compelling reason that new needs to be in C++-inspired memory-managed languages like Java, Javascript and C#?

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• Perfomance of 8 bit operations on 64 bit architechture

  - by wobbily_col

  I am usually a Python / Database programmer, and I am considering using C for a problem. I have a set of sequences, 8 characters long with 4 possible characters. My problem involves combining sets of these sequences and filtering which sets match a criteria. The combinations of 5 run into billions of rows and takes around an hour to run. So I can represent each sequence as 2 bytes. If I am working on a 64 bit architechture will I gain any advantage by keeping these data structures as 2 bytes when I generate the combinations, or will I be as well storing them as 8 bytes / double ? (64 bit = 8 x 8) If I am on a 64 bit architecture, all registers will be 64 bit, so in terms of operations that shouldn´t be any faster (please correct me if I am wrong). Will I gain anything from the smaller storage requirements - can I fit more combinations in memory, or will they all take up 64 bits anyway? And finally, am I likley to gain anything coding in C. I have a first version, which stores the sequence as a small int in a MySQL database. It then self joins the tabe to itself a number of times in order to generate all the possible combinations. The performance is acceptable, depending on how many combinations are generated. I assume the database must involve some overhead.

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• Customer retention - why most companies have it wrong

  - by Michel Adar

  At least in the US market it is quite common for service companies to offer an initially discounted price to new customers. While this may attract new customers and robe customers from competitors, it is my argument that it is a bad strategy for the company. This strategy gives an incentive to change companies and a disincentive to stay with the company. From the point of view of the customer, after 6 months of being a customer the company rewards the loyalty by raising the price. A better strategy would be to reward customers for staying with the company. For example, by lowering the cost by 5% every year (compound discount so it does never get to zero). This is a very rational thing to do for the company. Acquiring new customers and setting up their service is expensive, new customers also tend to use more of the common resources like customer service channels. It is probably true for most companies that the cost of providing service to a customer of 10 years is lower than providing the same service in the first year of a customer's tenure. It is only logical to pass these savings to the customer. From the customer point of view, the competition would have to offer something very attractive, whether in terms of price or service, in order for the customer to switch. Such a policy would give an advantage to the first mover, but would probably force the competitors to follow suit. Overall, I would expect that this would reduce the mobility in the market, increase loyalty, increase the investment of companies in loyal customers and ultimately, increase competition for providing a better service. Competitors may even try to break the scheme by offering customers the porting of their tenure, but that would not work that well because it would disenchant existing customers and would be costly, assuming that it is costlier to serve a customer through installation and first year. What do you think? Is this better than using "save offers" to retain flip-floppers?

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• Using AdSense to show ads to logged-in users

  - by John

  I know that you can grant authorization permissions to Google AdSense so that it can 'log in' and see what other logged in users can see (e.g. in a private forum), so that the ads it displays are better targetted. Extending this principle further: I am making a site which will show completely different content for each individual user (i.e. not 'common' content like a forum in which everybody sees essentially the same thing). You could think of this content as similar to the way each Facebook user has a different news feed, but it is the 'same' page. Complicating things further, the URLs for this site will be simple, e.g. '/home' and '/somepage', and will not usually include unique identifiers to differentiate between users (e.g. '/home?user=32i42'). My questions are: Is creating an account purely for AdSense to log in to the site with worth it in this case, seeing as it will be seeing it's own 'personalized' version and not any other user's? More importantly: is that against the Google AdSense Terms of Service? (I can't seem to figure that one out) How would you go about this problem?

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• An experiment: unlimited free trial

  - by Alex.Davies

  The .NET Demon team have just implemented an experiment that is quite a break from Red Gate's normal business model. Instead of the tool expiring after the trial period, it now continues to work, but with a new message that appears after the tool has saved you a certain amount of time. The rationale is that a user that stops using .NET Demon because the trial expired isn't doing anyone any good. We'd much rather people continue using it forever, as long as everyone that finds it useful and can afford it still pays for it. Hopefully the message appearing is annoying enough to achieve that, but not for people to uninstall it. It's true that many companies have tried it before with mixed results, but we have a secret weapon. The perfect nag message? The neat thing for .NET Demon is that we can easily measure exactly how much time .NET Demon has saved you, in terms of unnecessary project builds that Visual Studio would have done. When you press F5, the message shows you the time saved, and then makes you wait a shorter time before starting your application. Confronted with the truth about how amazing .NET Demon is, who can do anything but buy it? The real secret though, is that while you wait, .NET Demon gives you entertainment, in the form of a picture of a cute kitten. I've only had time to embed one kitten so far, but the eventual aim is for a random different kitten to appear each time. The psychological health benefits of a dose of kittens in the daily life of the developer are obvious. My only concern is that people will complain after paying for .NET Demon that the kittens are gone.

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• How do I get others to see past my prior inexperience?

  - by Kevin

  My core question is how do I proceed from the following predicament. I will be honest with you, I wasted my College Experience. I slacked off and didn't take any of my comp sci classes that seriously, somehow i still got out with a 3.25 GPA. But truth be told I learned nothing. I befriended most of my professors who went pretty lenient on me in terms of grading. However, I basically came out of College knowing how to program a simple calculator in VB.Net. I was (to my great surprise) hired by a very large respected company in Denver as a Junior developer. Well the long and the short of it is that I knew so little about programming that I quickly became the office pariah and was almost fired due to my incompetence. It has been 8 months now and I feel I have learned some basic things and I am not as picked on as I used to be by the other developers. However, everyone hates me and the first few months have given the other developers a horrible perception of me. I am no longer afraid of code or learning, but I have put my self in the precarious position of being the scapegoat of our department. I hate going to work every day because no one there is my friend and pretty much everyone is hostile to me. What should I do? Any advice?

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• Implicit OAuth2 endpoint vs. cookies

  - by Jamie

  I currently have an app which basically runs two halves of an API - a restful API for the web app, and a synchronisation API for the native clients (all over SSL). The web app is completely javascript based and is quite similar to the native clients anyway - except it currently does not work offline. What I'm hoping to do is merge the fragmented APIs into a single restful API. The web app currently authenticates by issuing a cookie to the client whereas the native clients work using a custom HMAC access token implementation. Obviously a public/private key scenario for a javascript app is a little pointless. I think the best solution would be to create an OAuth2 endpoint on the API (like Instagram, for example http://instagram.com/developer/authentication/) which is used by both the native apps and the web app. My question is, in terms of security how does an implicit OAuth2 flow compare (storing the access token in local storage) to "secure" cookies? Presumably although SSL solves man in the middle attacks, the user could theoretically grab the access token from local storage and copy it to another machine?

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• What Should I Do? [closed]

  - by Laxmidi

  What is a reasonable goal in terms of traffic for my Flex 3 site: www.brainpinata.com Since I began a couple of months ago, I've gotten roughly 5500 ad views and 280 ad clicks. And the ad revenue is a whopping $4.80. (I don't use Google Adsense). I advertise my site using Google Adwords to try to build traffic. My budget is $10/day. What should I do? a) Push the marketing. Add a blog. Try to get backlinks, contact blogs, start a Facebook page, tweet, etc. b) Google is only indexing the static content in the SWF. The questions/answers are pulled from a mySQL database. So, Google doesn't index 99% of the content. Should I re-do the site in HTML/Javascript and hard-code the questions for each puzzle? (This would be a challenge as I don't know javascript worth squat.) Or should I hard-code the questions in XML and put them in the Flex app? If I put the questions in an XML file it's roughly 500 KB. Other ideas? c) Should I switch ad networks? (I currently get about 100 visitors a day). My ad network pays so little that if I were to make even $500/month, I would need 550,000 ad views/month, which seems impossible. If I go ahead and switch ad networks, I need to find one that allows iFrames as I've got a Flex website. Which ad networks permit their ads to be shown in iFrames? d) Should I cut and run? I put a lot of work into this project and it would really stink to get nothing out of it. I'm looking for some good advice. Looking forward to your suggestions. Thank you. -Laxmidi

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