Search Results

Search found 2736 results on 110 pages for 'semantic meaning'.

Page 84/110 | < Previous Page | 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91  | Next Page >

• My search what the Cloud will mean for my Work, part 2

  - by Kay Sellenrode

  My experience with the cloud and why work will change and not disappear. Until now I have multiple experiences with the cloud, for the most good. i have worked on multiple cloud solutions in the past but let me describe them as 0.x versions. For me the 1st real serious cloud experience was a bit more than 1 year ago, when our company switched from an in house server to Microsoft BPOS as a complete replacement. Since we are a small consultancy firm and don’t have that much else to do than consulting, our IT requirements are quite simple. We need Mail and Storage space for our documents. With the in house server we had multiple outages during a year, mostly by lack of administering. Being consultants in the field and hardly having time to maintain a server, BPOS was and still is for us the right solution. Since the migration we have less outages and a much more robust solution. Have we run into issues with BPOS for our own environment? No not that I’m aware of. Based on this experience I made a stance about deploy ability of BPOS and cloud solutions, they are suitable for MKB (Dutch for Medium and Small Businesses). Most Small businesses don’t have the amount of work to hire a full time it admin. Hiring a service provider to maintain their own server might be even more costly than hiring an admin. So seeing the capabilities of BPOS and the needs of most businesses I see it as a great solution that gives the business a complete Server replacement solution for a fixed price per user. resulting in a clear budget for IT spending, something most small businesses were looking for, for a long time. So right now I’m deploying BPOS with a customer, and I run into some of the Cloud 1.0 issues. In my opinion BPOS is a good working Cloud version 1.0 solution. What do I mean with 1.0? Well 1.0 is mostly a tested solution (unlike 0.x versions) but still have quite some limitations caused by too few market experience. in my opnion this is also the reason why we don’t see that much BPOS customers yet and why I think Office 365 will make a huge difference. What I have seen of 365 shows me it is a Cloud 2.0 version, meaning it has all needed features and is much more flexible to the customer. This is also why I see changes happen in my work field, changes and not unemployment due to Cloud solutions. Cloud 1.0 solutions gave me the idea that if every customer would adopt them I would be out of work. But in reality Cloud 1.0 solutions are here just to set the market needs. The Cloud 2.0 and higher versions will give the customer much more flexibility, but also require the need for a consultant. Where the 1.0 versions are simple to setup and maintain, the 2.0 solution needs more thought upfront and afterwards. ie. BPOS in its 1.0 version brings you a very simplified Exchange 2007 solution, Suitable for some customers. Looking at Office 365 you receive almost a full blown Exchange 2010 solution. I expect this to be even more customizable in the next version. In my search for the changes to my work I try to regulary write a post with my thought around the Cloud and the impact on my work as a consultant. I'm also planning to present around this topic, so if anyone is interested to see me present around this topic, you're more than welcome to contact me.

  Read the article

• Why Ultra-Low Power Computing Will Change Everything

  - by Tori Wieldt

  The ARM TechCon keynote "Why Ultra-Low Power Computing Will Change Everything" was anything but low-powered. The speaker, Dr. Johnathan Koomey, knows his subject: he is a Consulting Professor at Stanford University, worked for more than two decades at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and has been a visiting professor at Stanford University, Yale University, and UC Berkeley's Energy and Resources Group. His current focus is creating a standard (computations per kilowatt hour) and measuring computer energy consumption over time. The trends are impressive: energy consumption has halved every 1.5 years for the last 60 years. Battery life has made roughly a 10x improvement each decade since 1960. It's these improvements that have made laptops and cell phones possible. What does the future hold? Dr. Koomey said that in the past, the race by chip manufacturers was to create the fastest computer, but the priorities have now changed. New computers are tiny, smart, connected and cheap. "You can't underestimate the importance of a shift in industry focus from raw performance to power efficiency for mobile devices," he said. There is also a confluence of trends in computing, communications, sensors, and controls. The challenge is how to reduce the power requirements for these tiny devices. Alternate sources of power that are being explored are light, heat, motion, and even blood sugar. The University of Michigan has produced a miniature sensor that harnesses solar energy and could last for years without needing to be replaced. Also, the University of Washington has created a sensor that scavenges power from existing radio and TV signals.Specific devices designed for a purpose are much more efficient than general purpose computers. With all these sensors, instead of big data, developers should focus on nano-data, personalized information that will adjust the lights in a room, a machine, a variable sign, etc.Dr. Koomey showed some examples:The Proteus Digital Health Feedback System, an ingestible sensor that transmits when a patient has taken their medicine and is powered by their stomach juices. (Gives "powered by you" a whole new meaning!) Streetline Parking Systems, that provide real-time data about available parking spaces. The information can be sent to your phone or update parking signs around the city to point to areas with available spaces. Less driving around looking for parking spaces!The BigBelly trash system that uses solar power, compacts trash, and sends a text message when it is full. This dramatically reduces the number of times a truck has to come to pick up trash, freeing up resources and slashing fuel costs. This is a classic example of the efficiency of moving "bits not atoms." But researchers are approaching the physical limits of sensors, Dr. Kommey explained. With the current rate of technology improvement, they'll reach the three-atom transistor by 2041. Once they hit that wall, it will force a revolution they way we do computing. But wait, researchers at Purdue University and the University of New South Wales are both working on a reliable one-atom transistors! Other researchers are working on "approximate computing" that will reduce computing requirements drastically. So it's unclear where the wall actually is. In the meantime, as Dr. Koomey promised, ultra-low power computing will change everything.

  Read the article

• Tyrus 1.8

  - by Pavel Bucek

  Another version of Tyrus, the reference implementation of JSR 356 – Java API for WebSocket is out! Complete list of fixes and features is below, but let me describe some of the new features in more detail. All information presented here is also available in Tyrusdocumentation. What’s new? First to mention is that JSR 356 Maintenance review Ballot is over and the change proposed for 1.1 release was accepted. More details about changes in the API can be found in this article. Important part is that Tyrus 1.8 implements this API, meaning you can use Lambda expressions and some features of Nashorn without the need for any workarounds. Almost all other features are related to client side support, which was significantly improved in this release. Firstly – I have to admit, that Tyrus client contained security issue – SSL Hostname verification was not performed when connecting to “wss” endpoints. This was fixed as part of TYRUS-339 and resulted in some changes in the client configuration API. Now you can control whether HostnameVerification should be performed (SslEngineConfigurator#setHostnameVerificationEnabled(boolean)) or even set your own HostnameVerifier (please use carefully): #setHostnameVerifier(…). Detailed description can be found in Host verification chapter. Another related enhancement is support for Http Basic and Digest authentication schemes. Tyrus client now enables users to provide credentials and underlying implementation will take care of everything else. Our implementation is strictly non pre-emptive, so the login information is sent always as a response to 401 Http Status Code. If the Basic and Digest are not good enough and there is a need to use some custom scheme or something which is not yet supported in Tyrus, custom Authenticator can be registered and the authentication part of the handshake process will be handled by it. Please seeClient HTTP Authentication chapter in the user guide for more details. There are other features, like fine-grain threadpool configuration for JDK client container, build-in Http redirect support and some reshuffling related to unifying the location of client configuration classes and properties definition – every property should be now part of ClientProperties class. All new features are described in the user guide – in chapterTyrus proprietary configuration. Update – Tyrus 1.8.1 There was another slightly late reported issue related to running in environments with SecurityManager enabled, so this version fixes that. Another noteworthy fixes are TYRUS-355 and TYRUS-361; the first one is about incorrect thread factory used for shared container timeout, which resulted in JVM waiting for that thread and not exiting as it should. The other issue enables relative URIs in Location header when using redirect feature. Links Tyrus homepage mailing list JIRA Complete list of changes: Bug [TYRUS-333] – Multiple endpoints on one client [TYRUS-334] – When connection is closed by a peer, periodic heartbeat pong is not stopped [TYRUS-336] – ReaderBuffer.getNextChars() keeps blocking a server thread after client has closed the session [TYRUS-338] – JDK client SSL filter needs better synchronization during handshake phase [TYRUS-339] – SSL hostname verification is missing [TYRUS-340] – Test PathParamTest are not stable with JDK client [TYRUS-341] – A control frame inside a stream of continuation frames is treated as the part of the stream [TYRUS-343] – ControlFrameInDataStreamTest does not pass on GF [TYRUS-345] – NPE is thrown, when shared container timeout property in JDK client is not set [TYRUS-346] – IllegalStateException is thrown, when using proxy in JDK client [TYRUS-347] – Introduce better synchronization in JDK client thread pool [TYRUS-348] – When a client and server close connection simultaneously, JDK client throws NPE [TYRUS-356] – Tyrus cannot determine the connection port for a wss URL [TYRUS-357] – Exception thrown in MessageHandler#OnMessage is not caught in @OnError method [TYRUS-359] – Client based on Java 7 Asynchronous IO makes application unexitable Improvement [TYRUS-328] – JDK 1.7 AIO Client container – threads – (setting threadpool, limits, …) [TYRUS-332] – Consolidate shared client properties into one file. [TYRUS-337] – Create an SSL version of Basic Servlet test New Feature [TYRUS-228] – Add client support for HTTP Basic/Digest Task [TYRUS-330] – create/run tests/servlet/basic via wss [TYRUS-335] – [clustering] – introduce RemoteSession and expose them via separate method (not include remote sessions in the getOpenSessions()) [TYRUS-344] – Introduce Client support for HTTP Redirect

  Read the article

• An Unusual UpdatePanel

  - by João Angelo

  The code you are about to see was mostly to prove a point, to myself, and probably has limited applicability. Nonetheless, in the remote possibility this is useful to someone here it goes… So this is a control that acts like a normal UpdatePanel where all child controls are registered as postback triggers except for a single control specified by the TriggerControlID property. You could basically achieve the same thing by registering all controls as postback triggers in the regular UpdatePanel. However with this, that process is performed automatically. Finally, here is the code: public sealed class SingleAsyncTriggerUpdatePanel : WebControl, INamingContainer { public string TriggerControlID { get; set; } [TemplateInstance(TemplateInstance.Single)] [PersistenceMode(PersistenceMode.InnerProperty)] public ITemplate ContentTemplate { get; set; } public override ControlCollection Controls { get { this.EnsureChildControls(); return base.Controls; } } protected override void CreateChildControls() { if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(this.TriggerControlID)) throw new InvalidOperationException( "The TriggerControlId property must be set."); this.Controls.Clear(); var updatePanel = new UpdatePanel() { ID = string.Concat(this.ID, "InnerUpdatePanel"), ChildrenAsTriggers = false, UpdateMode = UpdatePanelUpdateMode.Conditional, ContentTemplate = this.ContentTemplate }; updatePanel.Triggers.Add(new SingleControlAsyncUpdatePanelTrigger { ControlID = this.TriggerControlID }); this.Controls.Add(updatePanel); } } internal sealed class SingleControlAsyncUpdatePanelTrigger : UpdatePanelControlTrigger { private Control target; private ScriptManager scriptManager; public Control Target { get { if (this.target == null) { this.target = this.FindTargetControl(true); } return this.target; } } public ScriptManager ScriptManager { get { if (this.scriptManager == null) { var page = base.Owner.Page; if (page != null) { this.scriptManager = ScriptManager.GetCurrent(page); } } return this.scriptManager; } } protected override bool HasTriggered() { string asyncPostBackSourceElementID = this.ScriptManager.AsyncPostBackSourceElementID; if (asyncPostBackSourceElementID == this.Target.UniqueID) return true; return asyncPostBackSourceElementID.StartsWith( string.Concat(this.target.UniqueID, "$"), StringComparison.Ordinal); } protected override void Initialize() { base.Initialize(); foreach (Control control in FlattenControlHierarchy(this.Owner.Controls)) { if (control == this.Target) continue; bool isApplicableControl = false; isApplicableControl |= control is INamingContainer; isApplicableControl |= control is IPostBackDataHandler; isApplicableControl |= control is IPostBackEventHandler; if (isApplicableControl) { this.ScriptManager.RegisterPostBackControl(control); } } } private static IEnumerable<Control> FlattenControlHierarchy( ControlCollection collection) { foreach (Control control in collection) { yield return control; if (control.Controls.Count > 0) { foreach (Control child in FlattenControlHierarchy(control.Controls)) { yield return child; } } } } } You can use it like this, meaning that only the B2 button will trigger an async postback: <cc:SingleAsyncTriggerUpdatePanel ID="Test" runat="server" TriggerControlID="B2"> <ContentTemplate> <asp:Button ID="B1" Text="B1" runat="server" OnClick="Button_Click" /> <asp:Button ID="B2" Text="B2" runat="server" OnClick="Button_Click" /> <asp:Button ID="B3" Text="B3" runat="server" OnClick="Button_Click" /> <asp:Label ID="LInner" Text="LInner" runat="server" /> </ContentTemplate> </cc:SingleAsyncTriggerUpdatePanel>

  Read the article

• What Counts For a DBA: Replaceable

  - by Louis Davidson

  Replaceable is what every employee in every company instinctively strives not to be. Yet, if you’re an irreplaceable DBA, meaning that the company couldn’t find someone else who could do what you do, then you’re not doing a great job. A good DBA is replaceable. I imagine some of you are already reaching for the lighter fluid, about to set the comments section ablaze, but before you destroy a perfectly good Commodore 64, read on… Everyone is replaceable, ultimately. Anyone, anywhere, in any job, could be sitting at their desk reading this, blissfully unaware that this is to be their last day at work. Morbidly, you could be about to take your terminal breath. Ideally, it will be because another company suddenly offered you a truck full of money to take a new job, forcing you to bid a regretful farewell to your current employer (with barely a “so long suckers!” left wafting in the air as you zip out of the office like the Wile E Coyote wearing two pairs of rocket skates). I’ve often wondered what it would be like to be present at the meeting where your former work colleagues discuss your potential replacement. It is perhaps only at this point, as they struggle with the question “What kind of person do we need to replace old Wile?” that you would know your true worth in their eyes. Of course, this presupposes you need replacing. I’ve known one or two people whose absence we adequately compensated with a small rock, to keep their old chair from rolling down a slight incline in the floor. On another occasion, we bought a noise-making machine that frequently attracted attention its way, with unpleasant sounds, but never contributed anything worthwhile. These things never actually happened, of course, but you take my point: don’t confuse replaceable with expendable. Likewise, if the term “trained seal” comes up, someone they can teach to follow basic instructions and push buttons in the right order, then the replacement discussion is going to be over quickly. What, however, if your colleagues decide they’ll need a super-specialist to replace you. That’s a good thing, right? Well, usually, in my experience, no it is not. It often indicates that no one really knows what you do, or how. A typical example is the “senior” DBA who built a system just before 16-bit computing became all the rage and then settled into a long career managing it. Such systems are often central to the company’s operations and the DBA very skilled at what they do, but almost impossible to replace, because the system hasn’t evolved, and runs on processes and routines that others no longer understand or recognize. The only thing you really want to hear, at your replacement discussion, is that they need someone skilled at the fundamentals and adaptable. This means that the person they need understands that their goal is to be an excellent DBA, not a specialist in whatever the-heck the company does. Someone who understands the new versions of SQL Server and can adapt the company’s systems to the way things work today, who uses industry standard methods that any other qualified DBA/programmer can understand. More importantly, this person rarely wants to get “pigeon-holed” and so documents and shares the specialized knowledge and responsibilities with their teammates. Being replaceable doesn’t mean being “dime a dozen”. The company might need four people to take your place due to the depth of your skills, but still, they could find those replacements and those replacements could step right in using techniques that any decent DBA should know. It is a tough question to contemplate, but take some time to think about the sort of person that your colleagues would seek to replace you. If you think they would go looking for a “super-specialist” then consider urgently how you can diversify and share your knowledge, and start documenting all the processes you know as if today were your last day, because who knows, it just might be.

  Read the article

• Cloud Backup: Getting the Users' Backs Up

  - by Tony Davis

  On Wednesday last week, Microsoft announced that as of July 1, all data transfers into its Microsoft Azure cloud will be free (though you have to pay for transferring data out). On Thursday last week, SQL Azure in Western Europe went down. It was a relatively short outage, but since SQL Azure currently provides no easy way to take a standard backup of a database and store it locally, many people had no recourse but to wait patiently for their cloud-based app to resume. It seems that Microsoft are very keen encourage developers to move their data onto their cloud, but are developers ready to do it, given that such basic backup capabilities are lacking? Recently on Simple-Talk, Mike Mooney described a perfect use case for the Microsoft Cloud. They had a simple web-based application with a SQL Server backend; they could move the application to Windows Azure, and the data into SQL Azure and in the process free themselves from much of the hassle surrounding management and scaling of the hardware, network and so on. It was a great fit and yet it nearly didn't happen; lack of support for the BACKUP command almost proved a show-stopper. Of course, backups of Azure databases are always and have always been taken automatically, for disaster recovery purposes, but these are strictly on-cloud copies and as of now it is not possible to use them to them to restore a database to a particular point in time. It seems that none of those clever Microsoft people managed to predict the need to perform basic backups of Azure databases so that copies could be stored locally, outside the Azure universe. At the very least, as Mike points out, performing a local backup before a new deployment is more or less mandatory. Microsoft did at least note the sound of gnashing teeth and, as a stop-gap measure, offered SQL Azure Database Copy which basically allows you to create an online clone of your database, but this doesn't allow for storing local archives of the data. To that end MS has provided SQL Azure Import/Export, to package up and export a database and its data, using BACPACs. These BACPACs do not guarantee transactional consistency; for example, if a child table is modified after the parent is copied, then the copied database will be in inconsistent state (meaning, to add to the fun, BACPACs need to be created from a database copy). In any event, widespread problems with BACPAC's evil cousin, the DACPAC have been well-documented, and it seems likely that many will also give BACPAC the bum's rush. Finally, in a TechEd 2011 presentation tagged "SQL Azure Advanced Administration", it was announced that "backup and restore" were coming in the next SQL Azure CTP. And yet this still doesn't mean that we'll get simple backups as DBAs know and love them. What it does mean, at least, is the ability to restore any given database to a point in time within a 2-week window. For the time being, if you want a local copy of your data and don't want to brave the BACPAC, one is left with SSIS or BCP, creative use of schema and data comparison tools, or use of SQL Azure Backup (currently in beta) in order to perform this simple but vital task. Cheers, Tony.

  Read the article

• How to recover after embarrassing yourself and your company?

  - by gaearon

  I work in an outsourcing company in Russia, and one of our clients is a financial company located in USA. For the last six months I have been working on several projects for this particular company, and as I was being assigned a larger project, I was invited to work onsite in USA in order to understand and learn the new system. Things didn't work out as well as I hoped because the environment was messy after original developers, and I had to spent quite some time to understand the quirks. However we managed to do the release several days ago, and it looks like everything's going pretty smooth. From technical perspective, my client seems to be happy with me. My solutions seem to work, and I always try to add some spark of creativity to what I do. However I'm very disorganized in a certain sense, as I believe many of you fellas are. Let me note that my current job is my first job ever, and I was lucky enough to get a job with flexible schedule, meaning I can come in and out of the office whenever I want as long as I have 40 hours a week filled. Sometimes I want to hang out with friends in the evening, and days after that I like to have a good sleep in the morning—this is why flexible schedule (or lack of one) is ideal fit for me. [I just realized this paragraph looks too serious, I should've decorated it with some UNICORNS!] Of course, after coming to the USA, things changed. This is not some software company with special treatment for the nerdy ones. Here you have to get up at 7:30 AM to get to the office by 9 AM and then sit through till 5 PM. Personally, I hate waking up in the morning, not to say my productivity begins to climb no sooner than at 5 o'clock, i.e. I'm very slow until I have to go, which is ironic. Sometimes I even stay for more than 8 hours just to finish my current stuff without interruptions. Anyway, I could deal with that. After all, they are paying for my trip, who am I to complain? They need me to be in their working hours to be able to discuss stuff. It makes perfect sense that fixed schedule doesn't make any sense for me. But it does makes sense that it does make sense for my client. And I am here for client, therefore sense is transferred. Awww, you got it. I was asked several times to come exactly at 9 AM but out of laziness and arrogance I didn't take these requests seriously enough. This paid off in the end—on my last day I woke up 10 minutes before final status meeting with business owner, having overslept previous day as well. Of course this made several people mad, including my client, as I ignored his direct request to come in time for two days in the row, including my final day. Of course, I didn't do it deliberately but certainly I could've ensured that I have at least two alarms to wake me up, et cetera...I didn't do that. He also emailed my boss, calling my behavior ridiculous and embarrassing for my company and saying “he's not happy with my professionalism at all”. My boss told me that “the system must work both in and out” and suggested me to stay till late night this day working in a berserker mode, fixing as many issues as possible, and sending a status email to my client. So I did, but I didn't receive the response yet. These are my questions to the great programmers community: Did you have situations where your ignorance and personal non-technical faults created problems for your company? Were you able to make up for your fault and stay in a good relationship with your client or boss? How? How would you act if you were in my situation?

  Read the article

• Sitting Pretty

  - by Phil Factor

  Guest Editorial for Simple-Talk IT Pro newsletter'DBAs and SysAdmins generally prefer an expression of calmness under adversity. It is a subtle trick, and requires practice in front of a mirror to get it just right. Too much adversity and they think you're not coping; too much calmness and they think you're under-employed' I dislike the term 'avatar', when used to describe a portrait photograph. An avatar, in the sense of a picture, is merely the depiction of one's role-play alter-ego, often a ridiculous bronze-age deity. However, professional image is important. The choice and creation of online photos has an effect on the way your message is received and it is important to get that right. It is fine to use that photo of you after ten lagers on holiday in an Ibiza nightclub, but what works on Facebook looks hilarious on LinkedIn. My splendid photograph that I use online was done by a professional photographer at great expense and I've never had the slightest twinge of regret when I remember how much I paid for it. It is me, but a more pensive and dignified edition, oozing trust and wisdom. One gasps at the magical skill that a professional photographer can conjure up, without digital manipulation, to make the best of a derisory noggin (ed: slang for a head). Even if he had offered to depict me as a semi-naked, muscle-bound, sword-wielding hero, I'd have demurred. No, any professional person needs a carefully cultivated image that looks right. I'd never thought of using that profile shot, though I couldn't help noticing the photographer flinch slightly when he first caught sight of my face. There is a problem with using an avatar. The use of a single image doesn't express the appropriate emotion. At the moment, it is weird to see someone with a laughing portrait writing something solemn. A neutral cast to the face, somewhat like a passport photo, is probably the best compromise. Actually, the same is true of a working life in IT. One of the first skills I learned was not to laugh at managers, but, instead, to develop a facial expression that promoted a sense of keenness, energy and respect. Every profession has its own preferred facial cast. A neighbour of mine has the natural gift of a face that displays barely repressed grief. Though he is characteristically cheerful, he earns a remarkable income as a pallbearer. DBAs and SysAdmins generally prefer an expression of calmness under adversity. It is a subtle trick, and requires practice in front of a mirror to get it just right. Too much adversity and they think you're not coping; too much calmness and they think you're under-employed. With an appropriate avatar, you could do away with a lot of the need for 'smilies' to give clues as to the meaning of what you've written on forums and blogs. If you had a set of avatars, showing the full gamut of human emotions expressible in writing: Rage, fear, reproach, joy, ebullience, apprehension, exasperation, dissembly, irony, pathos, euphoria, remorse and so on. It would be quite a drop-down list on forums, but given the vast prairies of space on the average hard drive, who cares? It would cut down on the number of spats in Forums just as long as one picks the right avatar. As an unreconstructed geek, I find it hard to admit to the value of image in the workplace, but it is true. Just as we use professionals to tidy up and order our CVs and job applications, we should employ experts to enhance our professional image. After all you don't perform surgery or dentistry on yourself do you?

  Read the article

• Consumer Oriented Search In Oracle Endeca Information Discovery – Part 1

  - by Bob Zurek

  Information Discovery, a core capability of Oracle Endeca Information Discovery, enables business users to rapidly search, discover and navigate through a wide variety of big data including structured, unstructured and semi-structured data. One of the key capabilities, among many, that differentiate our solution from others in the Information Discovery market is our deep support for search across this growing amount of varied big data. Our method and approach is very different than classic simple keyword search that is found in may information discovery solutions. In this first part of a series on the topic of search, I will walk you through many of the key capabilities that go beyond the simple search box that you might experience in products where search was clearly an afterthought or attempt to catch up to our core capabilities in this area. Lets explore. The core data management solution of Oracle Endeca Information Discovery is the Endeca Server, a hybrid search-analytical database that his highly scalable and column-oriented in nature. We will talk in more technical detail about the capabilities of the Endeca Server in future blog posts as this post is intended to give you a feel for the deep search capabilities that are an integral part of the Endeca Server. The Endeca Server provides best-of-breed search features aw well as a new class of features that are the first to be designed around the requirement to bridge structured, semi-structured and unstructured big data. Some of the key features of search include type a heads, automatic alphanumeric spell corrections, positional search, Booleans, wildcarding, natural language, and category search and query classification dialogs. This is just a subset of the advanced search capabilities found in Oracle Endeca Information Discovery. Search is an important feature that makes it possible for business users to explore on the diverse data sets the Endeca Server can hold at any one time. The search capabilities in the Endeca server differ from other Information Discovery products with simple “search boxes” in the following ways: The Endeca Server Supports Exploratory Search.  Enterprise data frequently requires the user to explore content through an ad hoc dialog, with guidance that helps them succeed. This has implications for how to design search features. Traditional search doesn’t assume a dialog, and so it uses relevance ranking to get its best guess to the top of the results list. It calculates many relevance factors for each query, like word frequency, distance, and meaning, and then reduces those many factors to a single score based on a proprietary “black box” formula. But how can a business users, searching, act on the information that the document is say only 38.1% relevant? In contrast, exploratory search gives users the opportunity to clarify what is relevant to them through refinements and summaries. This approach has received consumer endorsement through popular ecommerce sites where guided navigation across a broad range of products has helped consumers better discover choices that meet their, sometimes undetermined requirements. This same model exists in Oracle Endeca Information Discovery. In fact, the Endeca Server powers many of the most popular e-commerce sites in the world. The Endeca Server Supports Cascading Relevance. Traditional approaches of search reduce many relevance weights to a single score. This means that if a result with a good title match gets a similar score to one with an exact phrase match, they’ll appear next to each other in a list. But a user can’t deduce from their score why each got it’s ranking, even though that information could be valuable. Oracle Endeca Information Discovery takes a different approach. The Endeca Server stratifies results by a primary relevance strategy, and then breaks ties within a strata by ordering them with a secondary strategy, and so on. Application managers get the explicit means to compose these strategies based on their knowledge of their own domain. This approach gives both business users and managers a deterministic way to set and understand relevance. Now that you have an understanding of two of the core search capabilities in Oracle Endeca Information Discovery, our next blog post on this topic will discuss more advanced features including set search, second-order relevance as well as an understanding of faceted search mechanisms that include queries and filters.  

  Read the article

• Social Targeting: This One's Just for You

  - by Mike Stiles

  Think of social targeting in terms of the archery competition we just saw in the Olympics. If someone loaded up 5 arrows and shot them straight up into the air all at once, hoping some would land near the target, the world would have united in laughter. But sadly for hysterical YouTube video viewing, that’s not what happened. The archers sought to maximize every arrow by zeroing in on the spot that would bring them the most points. Marketers have always sought to do the same. But they can only work with the tools that are available. A firm grasp of the desired target does little good if the ad products aren’t there to deliver that target. On the social side, both Facebook and Twitter have taken steps to enhance targeting for marketers. And why not? As the demand to monetize only goes up, they’re quite motivated to leverage and deliver their incredible user bases in ways that make economic sense for advertisers. You could target keywords on Twitter with promoted accounts, and get promoted tweets into search. They would surface for your followers and some users that Twitter thought were like them. Now you can go beyond keywords and target Twitter users based on 350 interests in 25 categories. How does a user wind up in one of these categories? Twitter looks at that user’s tweets, they look at whom they follow, and they run data through some sort of Twitter secret sauce. The result is, you have a much clearer shot at Twitter users who are most likely to welcome and be responsive to your tweets. And beyond the 350 interests, you can also create custom segments that find users who resemble followers of whatever Twitter handle you give it. That means you can now use boring tweets to sell like a madman, right? Not quite. This ad product is still quality-based, meaning if you’re not putting out tweets that lead to interest and thus, engagement, that tweet will earn a low quality score and wind up costing you more under Twitter’s auction system to maintain. That means, as the old knight in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” cautions, “choose wisely” when targeting based on these interests and categories to make sure your interests truly do line up with theirs. On the Facebook side, they’re rolling out ad targeting that uses email addresses, phone numbers, game and app developers’ user ID’s, and eventually addresses for you bigger brands. Why? Because you marketers asked for it. Here you were with this amazing customer list but no way to reach those same customers should they be on Facebook. Now you can find and communicate with customers you gathered outside of social, and use Facebook to do it. Fair to say such users are a sensible target and will be responsive to your message since they’ve already bought something from you. And no you’re not giving your customer info to Facebook. They’ll use something called “hashing” to make sure you don’t see Facebook user data (beyond email, phone number, address, or user ID), and Facebook can’t see your customer data. The end result, social becomes far more workable and more valuable to marketers when it delivers on the promise that made it so exciting in the first place. That promise is the ability to move past casting wide nets to the masses and toward concentrating marketing dollars efficiently on the targets most likely to yield results.

  Read the article

• Dallas First Regionals 2012&ndash; For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology

  - by T

  Wow!  That is all I have to say after the last 3 days. Three full fun filled days in a world that fed the geek, sparked the competitor, inspired the humanitarian, encouraged the inventor, and continuously warmed my heart.  As part of the Dallas First Regionals, I was awed by incredible students who teach as much as they learn, inventive and truly caring mentors that make mentoring look easy, and completely passionate and dedicated volunteers that bring meaning to giving all that you have and making events fun and safe for all.  If you have any interest in innovation, robotics, or highly motivated students, I can’t recommend anything any higher than visiting a First Robotics event. This is my third year with First and I was honored enough to serve the Dallas First Regionals as both a Web Site evaluator and as the East Field Volunteer Coordinator.  This was also the first year my daughter volunteered with me.  My daughter and I both recognize how different the First program is from other team events.  The difference with First is that everyone is a first class citizen.   It is a difference we can feel through experiencing and observing interactions between executives, respected engineers, students, and event staff.  Even with a veracious competition, you still find a lot of cooperation and we never witnessed any belittling between teams or individuals. First Robotics coined the term “Gracious Professionalism”.   It's a way of doing things that encourages high-quality work, emphasizes the value of others, and respects individuals and the community.1 I was introduced to this term as the Volunteer Coordinator when I was preparing the volunteer instructional speech.  Through the next few days, I discovered it is truly core to everything that First does.  One of the ways First accomplishes Gracious Professionalism is by utilizing another term they came up with which is “CoopertitionTM”. At FIRST, CoopertitionTM is displaying unqualified kindness and respect in the face of fierce competition.1   One of the things I never liked about sports was the need to “destroy” the other team.  First has really found a way to integrate CoopertitionTM  into the rules so teams can be competitive and part of that competition rewards cooperation. Oh and did I mention it has ROBOTS!!!  This year it had basket ball playing Kinect connected, remote controlled, robots!  There are not words for how exciting these games are.  You HAVE to check out this years game, Rebound Rumble, on youtube or you can view live action on Dallas First Video (as of this posting, the recording haven’t posted yet but should be there soon).  There are also some images below. Whatever it is, these students get it and exemplify it and these mentors ooze with it.  I am glad that First supports these events so we can all learn and be inspired by these exceptional students and mentors.  I know that no matter how much I give, it will never compare to what I gain volunteering at First.  Even if you don’t have time to volunteer, you owe it to yourself to go check out one of these events.  See what the future holds, be inspired, be encouraged, take some knowledge, leave some knowledge and most of all, have FUN.  That is what First is all about and thanks to First, I get it.   First Dallas Regionals 2012 VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL 1.  USFirst http://www.usfirst.org/aboutus/gracious-professionalism

  Read the article

• Investigating on xVelocity (VertiPaq) column size

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

    In January I published an article about how to optimize high cardinality columns in VertiPaq. In the meantime, VertiPaq has been rebranded to xVelocity: the official name is now “xVelocity in-memory analytics engine (VertiPaq)” but using xVelocity and VertiPaq when we talk about Analysis Services has the same meaning. In this post I’ll show how to investigate on columns size of an existing Tabular database so that you can find the most important columns to be optimized. A first approach can be looking in the DataDir of Analysis Services and look for the folder containing the database. Then, look for the biggest files in all subfolders and you will find the name of a file that contains the name of the most expensive column. However, this heuristic process is not very optimized. A better approach is using a DMV that provides the exact information. For example, by using the following query (open SSMS, open an MDX query on the database you are interested to and execute it) you will see all database objects sorted by used size in a descending way. SELECT * FROM $SYSTEM.DISCOVER_STORAGE_TABLE_COLUMN_SEGMENTS ORDER BY used_size DESC You can look at the first rows in order to understand what are the most expensive columns in your tabular model. The interesting data provided are: TABLE_ID: it is the name of the object – it can be also a dictionary or an index COLUMN_ID: it is the column name the object belongs to – you can also see ID_TO_POS and POS_TO_ID in case they refer to internal indexes RECORDS_COUNT: it is the number of rows in the column USED_SIZE: it is the used memory for the object By looking at the ration between USED_SIZE and RECORDS_COUNT you can understand what you can do in order to optimize your tabular model. Your options are: Remove the column. Yes, if it contains data you will never use in a query, simply remove the column from the tabular model Change granularity. If you are tracking time and you included milliseconds but seconds would be enough, round the data source column to the nearest second. If you have a floating point number but two decimals are good enough (i.e. the temperature), round the number to the nearest decimal is relevant to you. Split the column. Create two or more columns that have to be combined together in order to produce the original value. This technique is described in VertiPaq optimization article. Sort the table by that column. When you read the data source, you might consider sorting data by this column, so that the compression will be more efficient. However, this technique works better on columns that don’t have too many distinct values and you will probably move the problem to another column. Sorting data starting from the lower density columns (those with a few number of distinct values) and going to higher density columns (those with high cardinality) is the technique that provides the best compression ratio. After the optimization you should be able to reduce the used size and improve the count/size ration you measured before. If you are interested in a longer discussion about internal storage in VertiPaq and you want understand why this approach can save you space (and time), you can attend my 24 Hours of PASS session “VertiPaq Under the Hood” on March 21 at 08:00 GMT.

  Read the article

• The battle between Java vs. C#

  The battle between Java vs. C# has been a big debate amongst the development community over the last few years. Both languages have specific pros and cons based on the needs of a particular project. In general both languages utilize a similar coding syntax that is based on C++, and offer developers similar functionality. This being said, the communities supporting each of these languages are very different. The divide amongst the communities is much like the political divide in America, where the Java community would represent the Democrats and the .Net community would represent the Republicans. The Democratic Party is a proponent of the working class and the general population. Currently, Java is deeply entrenched in the open source community that is distributed freely to anyone who has an interest in using it. Open source communities rely on developers to keep it alive by constantly contributing code to make applications better; essentially they develop code by the community. This is in stark contrast to the C# community that is typically a pay to play community meaning that you must pay for code that you want to use because it is developed as products to be marketed and sold for a profit. This ties back into my reference to the Republicans because they typically represent the needs of business and personal responsibility. This is emphasized by the belief that code is a commodity and that it can be sold for a profit which is in direct conflict to the laissez-faire beliefs of the open source community. Beyond the general differences between Java and C#, they also target two different environments. Java is developed to be environment independent and only requires that users have a Java virtual machine running in order for the java code to execute. C# on the other hand typically targets any system running a windows operating system and has the appropriate version of the .Net Framework installed. However, recently there has been push by a segment of the Open source community based around the Mono project that lets C# code run on other non-windows operating systems. In addition, another feature of C# is that it compiles into an intermediate language, and this is what is executed when the program runs. Because C# is reduced down to an intermediate language called Common Language Runtime (CLR) it can be combined with other languages that are also compiled in to the CLR like Visual Basic (VB) .Net, and F#. The allowance and interaction between multiple languages in the .Net Framework enables projects to utilize existing code bases regardless of the actual syntax because they can be compiled in to CLR and executed as one codebase. As a software engineer I personally feel that it is really important to learn as many languages as you can or at least be open to learn as many languages as you can because no one language will work in every situation.  In some cases Java may be a better choice for a project and others may be C#. It really depends on the requirements of a project and the time constraints. In addition, I feel that is really important to concentrate on understanding the logic of programming and be able to translate business requirements into technical requirements. If you can understand both programming logic and business requirements then deciding which language to use is just basically choosing what syntax to write for a given business problem or need. In regards to code refactoring and dynamic languages it really does not matter. Eventually all projects will be refactored or decommissioned to allow for progress. This is the way of life in the software development industry. The language of a project should not be chosen based on the fact that a project will eventually be refactored because they all will get refactored.

  Read the article

• News From EAP Testing

  - by Fatherjack

  There is a phrase that goes something like “Watch the pennies and the pounds/dollars will take care of themselves”, meaning that if you pay attention to the small things then the larger things are going to fare well too. I am lucky enough to be a Friend of Red Gate and once in a while I get told about new features in their tools and have a test copy of the software to trial. I got one of those emails a week or so ago and I have been exploring the SQL Prompt 6 EAP since then. One really useful feature of long standing in SQL Prompt is the idea of a code snippet that is automatically pasted into the SSMS editor when you type a few key letters. For example I can type “ssf” and then press the tab key and the text is expanded to SELECT * FROM. There are lots of these combinations and it is possible to create your own really easily. To create your own you use the Snippet Manager interface to define the shortcut letters and the code that you want to have put in their place. Let’s look at an example. Say I am writing a blog about something and want to have the demo code create a temporary table. It might looks like this; The first time you run the code everything is fine, a lovely set of dates fill the results grid but run it a second time and this happens.   Yep, we didn’t destroy the temporary table so the CREATE statement fails when it finds the table already exists. No matter, I have a snippet created that takes care of this.   Nothing too technical here but you will see that in the Code section there is $CURSOR$, this isn’t a TSQL keyword but a marker for SQL Prompt to place the cursor in that position when the Code is pasted into the SSMS Editor. I just place my cursor above the CREATE statement and type “ifobj” – the shortcut for my code to DROP the temporary table – which has been defined in the Snippet Manager as below. This means I am right-away ready to type the name of the offending table. Pretty neat and it’s been very useful in saving me lots of time over many years.   The news for SQL Prompt 6 is that Red Gate have added a new Snippet Command of $PASTE$. Let’s alter our snippet to the following and try it out   Once again, we will type type “ifobj” in the SSMS Editor but first of all, highlight the name of the table #TestTable and copy it to your clipboard. Now type “ifobj” and press Tab… Wherever the string $PASTE$ is placed in the snippet, the contents of your clipboard are merged into the pasted TSQL. This means I don’t need to type the table name into the code snippet, it’s already there and I am seeing a fully functioning piece of TSQL ready to run. This means it is it even easier to write TSQL quickly and consistently. Attention to detail like this from Red Gate means that their developer tools stay on track to keep winning awards year after year and help take the hard work out of writing neat, accurate TSQL. If you want to try out SQL Prompt all the details are at http://www.red-gate.com/products/sql-development/sql-prompt/.

  Read the article

• Investigating on xVelocity (VertiPaq) column size

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

    In January I published an article about how to optimize high cardinality columns in VertiPaq. In the meantime, VertiPaq has been rebranded to xVelocity: the official name is now “xVelocity in-memory analytics engine (VertiPaq)” but using xVelocity and VertiPaq when we talk about Analysis Services has the same meaning. In this post I’ll show how to investigate on columns size of an existing Tabular database so that you can find the most important columns to be optimized. A first approach can be looking in the DataDir of Analysis Services and look for the folder containing the database. Then, look for the biggest files in all subfolders and you will find the name of a file that contains the name of the most expensive column. However, this heuristic process is not very optimized. A better approach is using a DMV that provides the exact information. For example, by using the following query (open SSMS, open an MDX query on the database you are interested to and execute it) you will see all database objects sorted by used size in a descending way. SELECT * FROM $SYSTEM.DISCOVER_STORAGE_TABLE_COLUMN_SEGMENTS ORDER BY used_size DESC You can look at the first rows in order to understand what are the most expensive columns in your tabular model. The interesting data provided are: TABLE_ID: it is the name of the object – it can be also a dictionary or an index COLUMN_ID: it is the column name the object belongs to – you can also see ID_TO_POS and POS_TO_ID in case they refer to internal indexes RECORDS_COUNT: it is the number of rows in the column USED_SIZE: it is the used memory for the object By looking at the ration between USED_SIZE and RECORDS_COUNT you can understand what you can do in order to optimize your tabular model. Your options are: Remove the column. Yes, if it contains data you will never use in a query, simply remove the column from the tabular model Change granularity. If you are tracking time and you included milliseconds but seconds would be enough, round the data source column to the nearest second. If you have a floating point number but two decimals are good enough (i.e. the temperature), round the number to the nearest decimal is relevant to you. Split the column. Create two or more columns that have to be combined together in order to produce the original value. This technique is described in VertiPaq optimization article. Sort the table by that column. When you read the data source, you might consider sorting data by this column, so that the compression will be more efficient. However, this technique works better on columns that don’t have too many distinct values and you will probably move the problem to another column. Sorting data starting from the lower density columns (those with a few number of distinct values) and going to higher density columns (those with high cardinality) is the technique that provides the best compression ratio. After the optimization you should be able to reduce the used size and improve the count/size ration you measured before. If you are interested in a longer discussion about internal storage in VertiPaq and you want understand why this approach can save you space (and time), you can attend my 24 Hours of PASS session “VertiPaq Under the Hood” on March 21 at 08:00 GMT.

  Read the article

• At what point does "constructive" criticism of your code become unhelpful?

  - by user15859

  I recently started as a junior developer. As well as being one of the least experienced people on the team, I'm also a woman, which comes with all sorts of its own challenges working in a male-dominated environment. I've been having problems lately because I feel like I am getting too much unwarranted pedantic criticism on my work. Let me give you an example of what happened recently. Team lead was too busy to push in some branches I made, so he didn't get to them until the weekend. I checked my mail, not really meaning to do any work, and found that my two branches had been rejected on the basis of variable names, making error messages more descriptive, and moving some values to the config file. I don't feel that rejecting my branch on this basis is useful. Lots of people were working over the weekend, and I had never said that I would be working. Effectively, some people were probably blocked because I didn't have time to make the changes and resubmit. We are working on a project that is very time-sensitive, and it seems to me that it's not helpful to outright reject code based on things that are transparent to the client. I may be wrong, but it seems like these kinds of things should be handled in patch type commits when I have time. Now, I can see that in some environments, this would be the norm. However, the criticism doesn't seem equally distributed, which is what leads to my next problem. The basis of most of these problems was due to the fact that I was in a codebase that someone else had written and was trying to be minimally invasive. I was mimicking the variable names used elsewhere in the file. When I stated this, I was bluntly told, "Don't mimic others, just do what's right." This is perhaps the least useful thing I could have been told. If the code that is already checked in is unacceptable, how am I supposed to tell what is right and what is wrong? If the basis of the confusion was coming from the underlying code, I don't think it's my responsibility to spend hours refactoring a whole file that someone else wrote (and works perfectly well), potentially introducing new bugs etc. I'm feeling really singled out and frustrated in this situation. I've gotten a lot better about following the standards that are expected, and I feel frustrated that, for example, when I refactor a piece of code to ADD error checking that was previously missing, I'm only told that I didn't make the errors verbose enough (and the branch was rejected on this basis). What if I had never added it to begin with? How did it get into the code to begin with if it was so wrong? This is why I feel so singled out: I constantly run into this existing problematic code, that I either mimic or refactor. When I mimic it, it's "wrong", and if I refactor it, I'm chided for not doing enough (and if I go all the way, introducing bugs, etc). Again, if this is such a problem, I don't understand how any code gets into the codebase, and why it becomes my responsibility when it was written by someone else, who apparently didn't have their code reviewed. Anyway, how do I deal with this? Please remember that I said at the top that I'm a woman, and I'm sure these guys don't usually have to worry about decorum when they're reviewing other guys' code, but honestly that doesn't work for me, and it's causing me to be less productive. I'm worried that if I talk to my manager about it, he'll think I can't handled the environment, etc.

  Read the article

• Bios Memory settings and Virtualization + Ubuntu (Unofficial Answers Welcome) [closed]

  - by TardisGuy

  Attempting to optimize my (Main Windowless) Ubuntu system for my uses I will detail questions below, I understand this might be the wrong place to ask these questions. If so, my apologies and I thank you so much for your patience. Thanks to all the volenteers that have helped me learn ubuntu over the years (Since 5.10) This is a "short" list of questions I have been trying to figure out for some time. If you feel you can answer one but not another, that's already more than I could ask for. I have wrote this up in a format for easy navigation to important points Hopefully to less annoy your eyes. You're welcome :) or i'm sorry i annoy you. :( If you would be so kind, Please format answers as follows: question 1: _ _ _ _ _ or question 1-a: _ _ _ _ _ If you want to simply link me to relevant information, rather than type up something really detailed; that would be more than awesome! Memory Specific Questions Goal: Maximizing memory bandwith to better perform in Virtualization, and Large file compression. (Possible conflict?) Ganged vs Unganged "which is better?"** is relative, i know. But what about ganged vs unganged - With or without Bank/channel interleaving? a: Speculation - If i understand correctly, "channel interleaving has something to do with using both channels to read or write in a kind of "striping" pattern, as opposed to a standard half duplex operation.(probably wrong) but wouldn't ganged channels make this irrelevant? Memory Interleaving(bank). Does it have a down side? Does it require a ratio of clocks? (If I run 4x4gig ddr3) a. If im reading correctly(trying to learn), this is designed to spread operations between latency cycles to work around the higher latency of "normal" operation. b. However it seems to me that it has to be: divisible by fractions of a master clock? So if i run memory at 1333mhz, then the mean between 2 (physical) banks would operate every (roughly) 600Mhz? Warning! Possibly utter nonsense: (1333/2 interleaving to act like 1 memory module per 2 sticks of a total of 4 sticks, meaning 2x channels@4) c. which makes me wonder if there would be left over clock cycles the system would have to... "truncate/balance" or something? But I'm certain theres a feature somewhere i don't understand. Virtualization Questions AMD-V - Option of IOMMU Turned it on, why do i have extra option of "64MB"? If IOMMU is on, but "64MB" is "disabled", Is it on? (have scoured google, I still dont know) a. I think i understand that its supposed to (kind of) "set aside" a part of ram to act as a faster interactive zone for "stuff" (usb, Graphics, and... what?) b. I am using Nvidia graphics on AMD (Used kernel option "iommu=pt iommu=1, pt "passthrough"? No idea what they do, found it on google to solve boot up issue) c. Will this option help me use low latency sound hardware, like my midi keyboard? Can you recommend any additional tweaks? a. sysctl settings? b. swap settings? Grats, youve reached the end. Thanks for Reading.

  Read the article

• What common interface would be appropriate for these game object classes?

  - by Jefffrey

  Question A component based system's goal is to solve the problems that derives from inheritance: for example the fact that some parts of the code (that are called components) are reused by very different classes that, hypothetically, would lie in a very different branch of the inheritance tree. That's a very nice concept, but I've found out that CBS is often hard to accomplish without using ugly hacks. Implementations of this system are often far from clean. But I don't want to discuss this any further. My question is: how can I solve the same problems a CBS try to solve with a very clean interface? (possibly with examples, there are a lot of abstract talks about the "perfect" design already). Context Here's an example I was going for before realizing I was just reinventing inheritance again: class Human { public: Position position; Movement movement; Sprite sprite; // other human specific components }; class Zombie { Position position; Movement movement; Sprite sprite; // other zombie specific components }; After writing that I realized I needed an interface, otherwise I would have needed N containers for N different types of objects (or to use boost::variant to gather them all together). So I've thought of polymorphism (move what systems do in a CBS design into class specific functions): class Entity { public: virtual void on_event(Event) {} // not pure virtual on purpose virtual void on_update(World) {} virtual void on_draw(Window) {} }; class Human : public Entity { private: Position position; Movement movement; Sprite sprite; public: virtual void on_event(Event) { ... } virtual void on_update(World) { ... } virtual void on_draw(Window) { ... } }; class Zombie : public Entity { private: Position position; Movement movement; Sprite sprite; public: virtual void on_event(Event) { ... } virtual void on_update(World) { ... } virtual void on_draw(Window) { ... } }; Which was nice, except for the fact that now the outside world would not even be able to know where a Human is positioned (it does not have access to its position member). That would be useful to track the player position for collision detection or if on_update the Zombie would want to track down its nearest human to move towards him. So I added const Position& get_position() const; to both the Zombie and Human classes. And then I realized that both functionality were shared, so it should have gone to the common base class: Entity. Do you notice anything? Yes, with that methodology I would have a god Entity class full of common functionality (which is the thing I was trying to avoid in the first place). Meaning of "hacks" in the implementation I'm referring to I'm talking about the implementations that defines Entities as simple IDs to which components are dynamically attached. Their implementation can vary from C-stylish: int last_id; Position* positions[MAX_ENTITIES]; Movement* movements[MAX_ENTITIES]; Where positions[i], movements[i], component[i], ... make up the entity. Or to more C++-style: int last_id; std::map<int, Position> positions; std::map<int, Movement> movements; From which systems can detect if an entity/id can have attached components.

  Read the article

• Proving What You are Worth

  - by Ted Henson

  Here is a challenge for everyone. Just about everyone has been asked to provide or calculate the Return on Investment (ROI), so I will assume everyone has a method they use. The problem with stopping once you have an ROI is that those in the C-Suite probably do not care about the ROI as much as Return on Equity (ROE). Shareholders are mostly concerned with their return on the money the invested. Warren Buffett looks at ROE when deciding whether to make a deal or not. This article will outline how you can add more meaning to your ROI and show how you can potentially enhance the ROE of the company.   First I want to start with a base definition I am using for ROI and ROE. Return on investment (ROI) and return on equity (ROE) are ways to measure management effectiveness, parts of a system of measures that also includes profit margins for profitability, price-to-earnings ratio for valuation, and various debt-to-equity ratios for financial strength. Without a set of evaluation metrics, a company's financial performance cannot be fully examined by investors. ROI and ROE calculate the rate of return on a specific investment and the equity capital respectively, assessing how efficient financial resources have been used. Typically, the best way to improve financial efficiency is to reduce production cost, so that will be the focus. Now that the challenge has been made and items have been defined, let’s go deeper. Most research about implementation stops short at system start-up and seldom addresses post-implementation issues. However, we know implementation is a continuous improvement effort, and continued efforts after system start-up will influence the ultimate success of a system.   Most UPK ROI’s I have seen only include the cost savings in developing the training material. Some will also include savings based on reduced Help Desk calls. Using just those values you get a good ROI. To get an ROE you need to go a little deeper. Typically, the best way to improve financial efficiency is to reduce production cost, which is the purpose of implementing/upgrading an enterprise application. Let’s assume the new system is up and running and all users have been properly trained and are comfortable using the system. You provide senior management with your ROI that justifies the original cost. What you want to do now is develop a good base value to a measure the current efficiency. Using usage tracking you can look for various patterns. For example, you may find that users that are accessing UPK assistance are processing a procedure, such as entering an order, 5 minutes faster than those that don’t.  You do some research and discover each minute saved in processing a claim saves the company one dollar. That translates to the company saving five dollars on every transaction. Assuming 100,000 transactions are performed a year, and all users improve their performance, the company will be saving $500,000 a year. That $500,000 can be re-invested, used to reduce debt or paid to the shareholders.   With continued refinement during the life cycle, you should be able to find ways to reduce cost. These are the type of numbers and productivity gains that senior management and shareholders want to see. Being able to quantify savings and increase productivity may also help when seeking a raise or promotion.

  Read the article

• With a little effort you can &ldquo;SEMI&rdquo;-protect your C# assemblies with obfuscation.

  - by mbcrump

  This method will not protect your assemblies from a experienced hacker. Everyday we see new keygens, cracks, serials being released that contain ways around copy protection from small companies. This is a simple process that will make a lot of hackers quit because so many others use nothing. If you were a thief would you pick the house that has security signs and an alarm or one that has nothing? To so begin: Obfuscation is the concealment of meaning in communication, making it confusing and harder to interpret. Lets begin by looking at the cartoon below:     You are probably familiar with the term and probably ignored this like most programmers ignore user security. Today, I’m going to show you reflection and a way to obfuscate it. Please understand that I am aware of ways around this, but I believe some security is better than no security.  In this sample program below, the code appears exactly as it does in Visual Studio. When the program runs, you get either a true or false in a console window. Sample Program. using System; using System.Diagnostics; using System.Linq;   namespace ObfuscateMe {     class Program     {                static void Main(string[] args)         {               Console.WriteLine(IsProcessOpen("notepad")); //Returns a True or False depending if you have notepad running.             Console.ReadLine();         }             public static bool IsProcessOpen(string name)         {             return Process.GetProcesses().Any(clsProcess => clsProcess.ProcessName.Contains(name));         }     } }   Pretend, that this is a commercial application. The hacker will only have the executable and maybe a few config files, etc. After reviewing the executable, he can determine if it was produced in .NET by examing the file in ILDASM or Redgate’s Reflector. We are going to examine the file using RedGate’s Reflector. Upon launch, we simply drag/drop the exe over to the application. We have the following for the Main method:   and for the IsProcessOpen method:     Without any other knowledge as to how this works, the hacker could export the exe and get vs project build or copy this code in and our application would run. Using Reflector output. using System; using System.Diagnostics; using System.Linq;   namespace ObfuscateMe {     class Program     {                static void Main(string[] args)         {               Console.WriteLine(IsProcessOpen("notepad"));             Console.ReadLine();         }             public static bool IsProcessOpen(string name)         {             return Process.GetProcesses().Any<Process>(delegate(Process clsProcess)             {                 return clsProcess.ProcessName.Contains(name);             });         }       } } The code is not identical, but returns the same value. At this point, with a little bit of effort you could prevent the hacker from reverse engineering your code so quickly by using Eazfuscator.NET. Eazfuscator.NET is just one of many programs built for this. Visual Studio ships with a community version of Dotfoscutor. So download and load Eazfuscator.NET and drag/drop your exectuable/project into the window. It will work for a few minutes depending if you have a quad-core or not. After it finishes, open the executable in RedGate Reflector and you will get the following: Main After Obfuscation IsProcessOpen Method after obfuscation: As you can see with the jumbled characters, it is not as easy as the first example. I am aware of methods around this, but it takes more effort and unless the hacker is up for the challenge, they will just pick another program. This is also helpful if you are a consultant and make clients pay a yearly license fee. This would prevent the average software developer from jumping into your security routine after you have left. I hope this article helped someone. If you have any feedback, please leave it in the comments below.

  Read the article

• Cloud Adoption Challenges

  - by Herve Roggero

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/hroggero/archive/2013/11/07/cloud-adoption-challenges.aspxWhile cloud computing makes sense for most organizations and countless projects, I have seen customers significantly struggle with cloud adoption challenges. This blog post is not an attempt to provide a generic assessment of cloud adoption; rather it is an account of personal experiences in the field, some of which may or may not apply to your organization. Cloud First, Burst? In the rush to cloud adoption some companies have made the decision to redesign their core system with a cloud first approach. However a cloud first approach means that the system may not work anymore on-premises after it has been redesigned, specifically if the system depends on Platform as a Service (PaaS) components (such as Azure Tables). While PaaS makes sense when your company is in a position to adopt the cloud exclusively, it can be difficult to leverage with systems that need to work in different clouds or on-premises. As a result, some companies are starting to rethink their cloud strategy by designing for on-premises first, and modify only the necessary components to burst when needed in the cloud. This generally means that the components need to work equally well in any environment, which requires leveraging Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or additional investments for PaaS applications, or both.  What’s the Problem? Although most companies can benefit from cloud computing, not all of them can clearly identify a business reason for doing so other than in very generic terms. I heard many companies claim “it’s cheaper”, or “it allows us to scale”, without any specific metric or clear strategy behind the adoption decision. Other companies have a very clear strategy behind cloud adoption and can precisely articulate business benefits, such as “we have a 500% increase in traffic twice a year, so we need to burst in the cloud to avoid doubling our network and server capacity”. Understanding the problem being solved through by adopting cloud computing can significantly help organizations determine the optimum path and timeline to adoption. Performance or Scalability? I stopped counting the number of times I heard “the cloud doesn’t scale; our database runs faster on a laptop”.  While performance and scalability are related concepts, they are nonetheless different in nature. Performance is a measure of response time under a given load (meaning with a specific number of users), while scalability is the performance curve over various loads. For example one system could see great performance with 100 users, but timeout with 1,000 users, in which case the system wouldn’t scale. However another system could have average performance with 100 users, but display the exact same performance with 1,000,000 users, in which case the system would scale. Understanding that cloud computing does not usually provide high performance, but instead provides the tools necessary to build a scalable system (usually using PaaS services such as queuing and data federation), is fundamental to proper cloud adoption. Uptime? Last but not least, you may want to read the Service Level Agreement of your cloud provider in detail if you haven’t done so. If you are expecting 99.99% uptime annually you may be in for a surprise. Depending on the component being used, there may be no associated SLA at all! Other components may be restarted at any time, or services may experience failover conditions weekly ( or more) based on current overall conditions of the cloud service provider, most of which are outside of your control. As a result, for PaaS cloud environments (and to a certain extent some IaaS systems), applications need to assume failure and gracefully retry to be successful in the cloud in order to provide service continuity to end users. About Herve Roggero Herve Roggero, Windows Azure MVP, is the founder of Blue Syntax Consulting (http://www.bluesyntax.net). Herve's experience includes software development, architecture, database administration and senior management with both global corporations and startup companies. Herve holds multiple certifications, including an MCDBA, MCSE, MCSD. He also holds a Master's degree in Business Administration from Indiana University. Herve is the co-author of "PRO SQL Azure" and “PRO SQL Server 2012 Practices” from Apress, a PluralSight author, and runs the Azure Florida Association.

  Read the article

• C# Dev Challenge Part 1 of n &ndash; Beginner Edition

  - by mbcrump

  I developed this challenge to test one’s knowledge of C Sharp. I am planning on creating several challenges with different skill sets, so don’t get mad if this challenge doesn’t well challenge you... I noticed that most people like short quizzes so this one only contains 5 questions. All of the challenges are clear and concise of what I am asking you to do. No smoke and mirrors here, meaning that none of the code has syntax errors. The purpose of this exercise is to test several OOP concepts and see how much of the C# language you really know. Question #1 – Lets start off Easy… Will the following code snippet compile successfully? What does this question test? - Can this compile without a namespace? Do you have to have an entry point of “static void Main()”? class Test { static int Main() { System.Console.WriteLine("Developer Challenge"); return 0; } } Answer (select text in box below): Yes, it will compile successfully. Question #2 – What is the value of the Console.WriteLine statements? What does this question test? – Do I understand reference types/value types? If a variable is declared with the @ symbol and its not a reserved keyword does the application compile successfully? using System; internal struct MyStruct { public int Value; } internal class MyClass { public int Value; } class Test { static void Main() { MyStruct @struct1 = new MyStruct(); MyStruct @struct2 = @struct1; @struct2.Value = 100; MyClass @ref1 = new MyClass(); MyClass @ref2 = @ref1; @ref2.Value = 100; Console.WriteLine("Value Type: {0} {1}", @struct1.Value, @struct2.Value); Console.WriteLine("Reference Type: {0} {1}", @ref1.Value, @ref2.Value); } } Answer (select text in box below): Value Type: 0 100 Reference Type: 100 100 Question #3 – What is the value of the Console.WriteLine statements? What does this question test? – Can 2 objects reference the same point in memory? using System; class Test { static void Main() { string s1 = "Testing2"; string t1 = s1; Console.WriteLine(s1 == t1); Console.WriteLine((object)s1 == (object)t1); } } Answer (select text in box below): True True Question #4 – What is the value of the Console.WriteLine statements? What does this question test? – How does the “Stack” work – LIFO or FIFO?   using System; using System.Collections; class Test { static void Main() { Stack a = new Stack(5); a.Push("1"); a.Push("2"); a.Push("3"); a.Push("4"); a.Push("5"); foreach (var o in a) { Console.WriteLine(o); } } } Answer (select text in box below): 5 4 3 2 1 Question #5 – What is the value of the Console.WriteLine statements? What does this question test? – Array and General Looping Knowledge. using System; namespace ConsoleApplication5 { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { int[] J_LIST = new int[5] { 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 }; int K = 10; int L = 5; foreach (var J in J_LIST) { K = K - J; L = K + 2 * J; Console.WriteLine("J = {0, 5} K = {1, 5} L = {2, 5}", J, K, L); } Console.ReadLine(); } } } Answer (select text in box below): J = 1 K = 9 L = 11 J = 2 K = 7 L = 11 J = 3 K = 4 L = 10 J = 4 K = 0 L = 8 J = 5 K = -5 L = 5 Stay Tuned for more challenges!

  Read the article

• iPhone: how to use performSelector:onThread:withObject:waitUntilDone: method?

  - by Michael Kessler

  Hi all, I am trying to use a separate thread for working with some API. The problem is that I am not able to use performSelector:onThread:withObject:waitUntilDone: method with a thread that I' instantiated for this. My code: @interface MyObject : NSObject { NSThread *_myThread; } @property(nonatomic, retain) NSThread *myThread; @end @implementation MyObject @synthesize myThread = _myThread; - (NSThread *)myThread { if (_myThread == nil) { NSThread *myThreadTemp = [[NSThread alloc] init]; [myThreadTemp start]; self. myThread = myThreadTemp; [myThreadTemp release]; } return _myThread; } - (id)init { if (self = [super init]) { [self performSelector:@selector(privateInit:) onThread:[self myThread] withObject:nil waitUntilDone:NO]; } return self; } - (void)privateInit:(id)object { NSLog(@"MyObject - privateInit start"); } - (void)dealloc { [_myThread release]; _myThread = nil; [super dealloc]; } @end "MyObject - privateInit start" is never printed. What am I missing? I tried to instantiate the thread with target and selector, tried to wait for method execution completion (waitUntilDone:YES). Nothing helps. UPDATE: I don't need this multithreading for separating costly operations to another thread. In this case I could use the performSelectorInBackground as mentioned in few answers. The main reason for this separate thread is the need to perform all the actions in the API (TTS by Loquendo) from one single thread. Meaning that I have to create an instance of the TTS object and call methods on that object from the same thread all the time.

  Read the article

• Css code for the table

  - by Hulk

  Can some one please tell me how to make this table look better <table> <tr><th>Name</th><th>Address</th><th>occupation</th></tr> <tr><td><textarea rows=10 cols=15></td><td><textarea rows=10 cols=15></td><td><textarea rows=10 cols=15></td></tr> <tr><td><textarea rows=10 cols=15></td><td><textarea rows=10 cols=15></td><td><textarea rows=10 cols=15></td></tr> <tr><td><textarea rows=10 cols=15></td><td><textarea rows=10 cols=15></td><td><textarea rows=10 cols=15></td></tr> </table> This table is dynamically generated and meaning there could me more rows with td containing textarea. Can any one please sugesst a a css code to beautify this table or may be a link Thanks..

  Read the article

• How can I beta test web Perl modules under Apache/mod_perl on production web server?

  - by DVK

  We have a setup where most code, before being promoted to full production, is deployed in BETA mode - meaning, it runs in full production environment (using production database - usually production data; and production web server). We call that stage BETA testing. One of the main requirements is that BETA code promotion to production must be a simple "cp" command from beta to production directory - no code/filename changes. For non-web Perl code, achieving seamless BETA test is quite doable (see details here): Perl programs live in a standard location under production root (/usr/code/scripts) with production perl modules living under the same root (/usr/code/lib/perl) The BETA code has 100% same code paths except under beta root (/usr/code/beta/) A special module manipulates @INC of any script based on whether the script was called from /usr/code/scripts or /usr/code/test/scripts, to include beta libraries for beta scripts. This setup works fine up till we need to beta test our web Perl code (the setup is EmbPerl and Apache/mod_perl). The hang-up is as follows: if both a production Perl module and BETA Perl module have the same name (e.g. /usr/code/lib/perl/MyLib1.pm and /usr/code/beta/lib/perl/MyLib1.pm), then mod_perl will only be able to load ONE of these modules into memory - and there's no way we are aware of for a particular web page to affect which version of the module is currently loaded due to concurrency issues. Leaving aside the obvious non-programming solution (get a bloody BETA web server) which for political/organizational reasons is not feasible, is there any way we can somehow hack around this problem in either Perl or mod_perl? I played around with various approaches to unloading Perl modules that %INC has listed, but the problem remains that another user might load a beta page at just the right (or rather wrong) moment and have the beta module loaded which will be used for my production page.

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91  | Next Page >