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• Constituent Experience Counts In Public Sector

  - by Michael Seback

    Businesses and government organizations are operating in an era of the empowered customer where service  and communication channels are challenged every day.  Consumers in the private sector have high expectations from purchasing gifts online, reading reviews on social sites, and expecting the companies they do business with to know and reward them.   In the Public Sector, constituents also expect government organizations to provide consistent and timely service across agencies and touch points.  Examples include requesting critical city services, applying for social assistance or reviewing insurance plans for a health insurance exchange. If an individual does not receive the services they need at the right time and place, it can create a dire situation – involving housing, food or healthcare assistance. Government organizations need to deliver a fast, reliable and personalized experience to constituents. Look at a few recent statistics from a Government focused survey: How do you define good customer service? 70 % improved services, 48% shortest time to provide information, 44% shortest time to resolve complaints What are ways/opportunities to improve customer service? 69% increased collaboration across agencies and 41% increased customer service channels Are you using data collected to make informed decisionsto improve customer service efforts? 39% data collection is limited, not used to improve decision making Source: Re-Imagining Customer Service in Government, 2012 Click here to see the highlights.  Would you like to get started – read Eight Steps to great constituent experiences for government.

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• Should Developers Perform All Tasks or Should They Specialize?

  - by Bob Horn

  Disclaimer: The intent of this question isn't to discern what is better for the individual developer, but for the system as a whole. I've worked in environments where small teams managed certain areas. For example, there would be a small team for every one of these functions: UI Framework code Business/application logic Database I've also worked on teams where the developers were responsible for all of these areas and more (QA, analsyt, etc...). My current environment promotes agile development (specifically scrum) and everyone has their hands in every area mentioned above. While there are pros and cons to each approach, I'd be curious to know if there are more pros and cons than I list below, and also what the generally feeling is about which approach is better. Devs Do It All Pros 1. Developers may be more well-rounded 2. Developers know more of the system Cons 1. Everyone has their hands in all areas, increasing the probability of creating less-than-optimal results in that area 2. It can take longer to do something with which you are unfamiliar (jack of all trades, master of none) Devs Specialize Pros 1. Developers can create policies and procedures for their area of expertise and more easily enforce them 2. Developers have more of a chance to become deeply knowledgeable about their specific area and make it the best it can be 3. Other developers don't cross boundaries and degrade another area Cons 1. As one colleague put it: "Why would you want to pigeon-hole yourself like that?" (Meaning some developers won't get a chance to work in certain areas.) It's easy to say how wonderful agile is, and that we should do it all, but I'm somewhat of a fan of having areas of expertise. Without that expertise, I've seen code degrade, database schemas become difficult to manage, hack UI code, etc... Let's face it, some people make careers out of doing just UI work, or just database work. It's not that easy to just fill in and do as good of a job as an expert in that area.

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• Sys Admins are kind of like gods, aren't they? [closed]

  - by user75798

  A systems administrator has root access to the entire system. There is nothing they cannot do. They are omnipotent. Their power is absolute. Nothing dan stand before them. Like Sauron, the Dark Lord, they do not share power. There can be but one root. Else contradiction at the most fundamental level is possible, and that can not be tolerated. The sys admin's power is unconditional and non-negotiable. To be a sys admin is like being a god. (And if they are a god, what is the religion?) There is an old saying that absolute power corrupts absolutely. I wonder whether being a sys admin has ended up warping an individual. Perhaps a sys admin has become crazed or even gone berserk? Surely sys admins must need to be very level headed people. For example, imagine being 'the' sys admin for the NSA. (What an awesome job that would be!) Think about the access to data, the encryption keys, the secrets... Perhaps one day a sys admin might go bonkers, turn up for work and 'uninstall the entire NSA'! :) But you would have the same sorts of responsibilities working at a bank or other organization. I wonder whether much emphasis is put on ensuring that sys admins are level headed in the first place and kept sweet in the second. Do they get paid well? I am sure they do not receive half of what they are worth, considering all the hard earned knowledge they have had to gain and the massive responsibility they have.

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• Hyper-V Manager version 6.2, an experience in virtual switch setup

  - by Kevin Shyr

  The version number of Hyper-V manager is 6.2.9200.16384   This is what came with my Windows 8 work laptop (by enabling Windows features) The blogs I read indicated that I need an external switch for my guest OS to access internet, and an internal one for them to share folder with my Host OS.  I proceeded to create an external virtual switch, and here is the screenshot. After setting up the network adapters on the guest OS, I peeked into host OS networking, and saw that Network Bridge was already created.  GREAT!  So I fired up my guest OS and darn, no internet.  Then I noticed that my host internet was gone, too.  I looked further and found that even though I have a network bridge, no connection has the status "Bridged"Once I removed the bridge (by removing individual connection from the bridge, I know, weird, since none of them say "Bridged" in status)  I re-selected the connection that I want and add them to the bridge to create a new network bridge.  Once my wireless connection status shows "Bridged", I was able to get to internet from my guest OS.Two things I noticed after I got internet for everyone ( my host and guest OS):My network adapters in the host OS no longer shows "Bridged", but everyone can still get to the internetThe virtual switch that I set up for "External" is now showing to be "Internal", and I was able to create shared folder between host and guest OS.  This means I didn't have to create the other "Internal" virtual switch.

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• How do I draw a dotted or dashed line?

  - by Gagege

  I'm trying to draw a dashed or dotted line by placing individual segments(dashes) along a path and then separating them. The only algorithm I could come up with for this gave me a dash length that was variable based on the angle of the line. Like this: private function createDashedLine(fromX:Float, fromY:Float, toX:Float, toY:Float):Sprite { var line = new Sprite(); var currentX = fromX; var currentY = fromY; var addX = (toX - fromX) * 0.0075; var addY = (toY - fromY) * 0.0075; line.graphics.lineStyle(1, 0xFFFFFF); var count = 0; // while line is not complete while (!lineAtDestination(fromX, fromY, toX, toY, currentX, currentY)) { /// move line draw cursor to beginning of next dash line.graphics.moveTo(currentX, currentY); // if dash is even if (count % 2 == 0) { // draw the dash line.graphics.lineTo(currentX + addX, currentY + addY); } // add next dash's length to current cursor position currentX += addX; currentY += addY; count++; } return line; } This just happens to be written in Haxe, but the solution should be language neutral. What I would like is for the dash length to be the same no matter what angle the line is. As is, it's just adding 75 thousandths of the line length to the x and y, so if the line is and a 45 degree angle you get pretty much a solid line. If the line is at something shallow like 85 degrees then you get a nice looking dashed line. So, the dash length is variable, and I don't want that. How would I make a function that I can pass a "dash length" into and get that length of dash, no matter what the angle is? If you need to completely disregard my code, be my guest. I'm sure there's a better solution.

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• Why should I use MSBuild instead of Visual Studio Solution files?

  - by Sid

  We're using TeamCity for continuous integration and it's building our releases via the solution file (.sln). I've used Makefiles in the past for various systems but never msbuild (which I've heard is sorta like Makefiles + XML mashup). I've seen many posts on how to use msbuild directly instead of the solution files but I don't see a very clear answer on why to do it. So, why should we bother migrating from solution files to an MSBuild 'makefile'? We do have a a couple of releases that differ by a #define (featurized builds) but for the most part everything works. The bigger concern is that now we'd have to maintain two systems when adding projects/source code. UPDATE: Can folks shed light on the lifecycle and interplay of the following three components? The Visual Studio .sln file The many project level .csproj files (which I understand an "sub" msbuild scripts) The custom msbuild script Is it safe to say that the .sln and .csproj are consumed/maintained as usual from within the Visual Studio IDE GUI while the custom msbuild script is hand-written and usually consumes the already existing individual .csproj "as-is"? That's one way I can see reduce overlap/duplicate in maintenance... Would appreciate some light on this from other folks' operational experience

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• PDFtk Password Protection Help

  - by Dave W.

  I am using Ubuntu 11.10 and am looking for a solution to password protect a bunch of pdf files in a directory in batch. I came across PDFtk and it looks like it might do what I need, but I've reviewed the command line PDFtk examples and can't figure out if there is a way to do it in batch without having to individually specify the output file name for every file. I'm hoping a command-line guru can take a look at the PDFtk syntax and tell me if there is some trick / command that will allow me to password protect a directory of pdf files (e.g., *.pdf) and overwrite the existing files using the same name, or consistently rename the individual output files without having to specify each output name individually. Here's a link to the PDFtk command line examples page: http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/ Thanks for your help. I think I've answered my own question. Here's a bash script that appears to do the trick. I'd welcome help evaluating why the code I've commented out doesn't work... #!/bin/bash # Created by Dave, 2012-02-23 # This script uses PDFtk to password protect every PDF file # in the directory specified. The script creates a directory named "protected_[DATE]" # to hold the password protected version of the files. # # I'm using the "user_pw" parameter, # which means no one will be able to open or view the file without # the password. # # PDFtk must be installed for this script to work. # # Usage: ./protect_with_pdftk.bsh [FILE(S)] # [FILE(S)] can use wildcard expansion (e.g., *.pdf) # This part isn't working.... ignore. The goal is to avoid errors if the # directory to be created already exists by only attempting to create # it if it doesn't exists # #TARGET_DIR="protected_$(date +%F)" #if [ -d "$TARGET_DIR" ] #then #echo # echo "$TARGET_DIR directory exists!" #else #echo # echo "$TARGET_DIR directory does not exist!" #fi # mkdir protected_$(date +%F) for i in *pdf ; do pdftk "$i" output "./protected_$(date +%F)/$i" user_pw [PASSWORD]; done echo "Complete. Output is in the directory: ./protected_$(date +%F)"

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• Combining pathfinding with global AI objectives

  - by V_Programmer

  I'm making a turn-based strategy game using Java and LibGDX. Now I want to code the AI. I haven't written the AI code yet. I've simply designed it. The AI will have two components, one focused in tactics and resource management (create troops, determine who have strategical advantage, detect important objectives, etc) and a individual component, focused in assign the work to each unit, examine its possibilites and move the unit. Now I'm facing an important problem. The map where the action take place is a grid-based map. Each terrain has different movement cost. I read about pathfinding and I think A* is a very good option to determine a good route between two points. However, imagine I have an unit with movement = 5 (i.e, it can move 5 tiles of movement cost = 1). My tactical AI has found an objective at a distance d = 20 tiles (Manhattan distance) from my unit. My problem is the following: the unit won't be able to reach the objective in one turn. So the AI will have to store a list of position and execute them in various turns. I don't know how to solve this. PS. In my unit code, I have a list called "selectionMarks" which stores all the possible places where the unit can go in this turn. This places are calculed recursively using a "getSelectionMarks" function. Any help is appreciated :D

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• People != Resources

  - by eddraper

  Ken Tabor’s blog post “They Are not Resources – We Are People” struck a chord with me.  I distinctly remember hearing the term “resources” within the context of “people” for the first time back in the late 90’s.  I was in a meeting at Compaq and a manager had been faced with some new scope for an IT project he was managing.  His response was that he needed more “resources” in order to get the job done.  As I knew the timeline for the project was fixed and the process for acquiring additional funding would almost certainly extend beyond his expected delivery date, I wondered what he meant.  After the meeting, I asked him what he meant… his response was that he needed some more “bodies” to get the job done.  For a minute, my mind whirred… why is it so difficult to simply say “people?”  This particular manager was neither a bad person nor a bad manager… quite the contrary.  I respected him quite a bit and still do.  Over time, I began to notice that he was what could be termed an “early adopter” of many “Business speak” terms – such as “sooner rather than later,” “thrown a curve,” “boil the ocean” etcetera.  Over time, I’ve discovered that much of this lexicon can actually be useful, though cliché and overused.  For example, “Boil the ocean” does serve a useful purpose in distilling a lot of verbiage and meaning into three simple words that paint a clear mental picture.  The term “resources” would serve a similar purpose if it were applied to the concept of time, funding, or people.  The problem is that this never happened.  “Resources”, “bodies”, “ICs” (individual contributors)… this is what “people” have become in the IT business world.  Why?  We’re talking about simple word choices here.  Why have human beings been deliberately dehumanized and abstracted in this manner? What useful purpose does it serve other than to demean and denigrate?

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• Storing data offline with javascript

  - by Walker

  My question is about storing data offline and potentially whether I will need to bring in an outside programmer or could this be learned within a few weeks? The website I am working on will have an interface where users will login and go through a series of quizzes in the form of checkbox, drop down menus, and others. Each page/quiz area could have 20-100 total checkboxes in a series of 3-5 rows because of the comprehensive nature of course. This I can do - I know how to code the quiz and return a correct or incorrect answer based on each individual checkbox and present a cumulative score (ie: you got 57% correct). The issue lies in the fact that I would like to save the users results and keep them informed of their progress. When they complete all of the quizzes, I would like to have a visual output of their performance in each area. Storing the output from their results offline is where I think I may run into a problem with my lack of coding experience. I would also like to have a sidebar with their progress of each section (10-15) with a green percentage completion bar or a % correct which would draw from this. I have never had to code something that stores information like this offline - so back to my question - would it be better to learn the language needed or bring in a coder/developer for the back end stuff.

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• What are some efficient ways to set up my environment when working on a remote site?

  - by Prefix

  Hello fellow Programmers, I am still a relatively new programmer and have recently gotten my first on-campus programming position. I am the sole dev responsible for 8 domains as well as 3 small sized PHP web apps. The campus has its web environment divided into staging and live servers -- we develop on the staging via SFTP and then push the updates to the live server through a web GUI. I use Sublime Text 2 and the Sublime SFTP plugin currently for all my dev work (its my preferred editor). If I am just making an edit to a page I'll open that individual file via the ftp browser. If I am working on the PHP web app projects, I have the app directory mapped to a local folder so that when I save locally the file is auto-uploaded through Sublime SFTP. I feel like this workflow is slow and sub-optimal. How can I improve my workflow for working with remote content? I'd love to set up a local environment on my machine as that would eliminate the constant SFTP upload/download, but as I said there are many sites and the space required for a local copy of the entire domain would be quite large and complex; not to mention keeping it updated with whatever the latest on the staging server is would be a nightmare. Anyone know how I can improve my general web dev workflow from what I've described? I'd really like to cut out constantly editing over FTP but I'm not sure where to start other than ripping the entire directory and dumping it into XAMP.

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• Why does my VertexDeclaration apparently not contain Position0?

  - by Phil

  I'm trying to get my code from calling each individual draw call down to using at least a VertexBuffer, and preferably an indexBuffer, but now that I'm attempting to test my code, I'm getting the error: The current vertex declaration does not include all the elements required by the current vertex shader. Position0 is missing. Which makes absolutely no sense to me, as my VertexDeclaration is: public readonly static VertexDeclaration VertexDeclaration = new VertexDeclaration( new VertexElement(0, VertexElementFormat.Vector3, VertexElementUsage.Position, 0), new VertexElement(sizeof(float) * 3, VertexElementFormat.Color, VertexElementUsage.Color, 0), new VertexElement(sizeof(float) * 3 + 4, VertexElementFormat.Vector3, VertexElementUsage.Normal, 0) ); Which clearly contains the information. I am attempting to draw with the following lines: VertexBuffer vb = new VertexBuffer(GraphicsDevice, VertexPositionColorNormal.VertexDeclaration, c.VertexList.Count, BufferUsage.WriteOnly); IndexBuffer ib = new IndexBuffer(GraphicsDevice, typeof(int), c.IndexList.Count, BufferUsage.WriteOnly); vb.SetData<VertexPositionColorNormal>(c.VertexList.ToArray()); ib.SetData<int>(c.IndexList.ToArray()); GraphicsDevice.DrawIndexedPrimitives(PrimitiveType.TriangleList, 0, 0, vb.VertexCount, 0, c.IndexList.Count/3); Where c is a Chunk class containing an 8x8x8 array of boxes. Full code is available at https://github.com/mrbaggins/Box/tree/ProperMeshing/box/box. Relevant locations are Chunk.cs (Contains the VertexDeclaration) and Game1.cs (Draw() is in Lines 230-250). Not much else of relevance to this problem anywhere else. Note that large commented sections are from old version of drawing.

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• JCP 2012 Award Nominations are now open!

  - by heathervc

  The 10th JCP Annual Awards Nominations are now open until 16 July 2012. Submit nominations to [email protected] or use form here. The Java Community Process (JCP) program celebrates success. Members of the community nominate worthy participants, Spec Leads, and Java Specification Requests (JSRs) in order to cheer on the hard work and creativity that produces ground-breaking results for the community and industry in the Java Standard Edition (SE), Java Enterprise Edition (EE), or Java Micro Edition (ME) platforms. The community gets together every year at the JavaOne conference to applaud in person the winners of three awards: JCP Member/Participant of the Year, Outstanding Spec Lead, and Most Significant JSR. This year’s unveiling will occur Tuesday evening, 2 October, at the Annual JCP Community Party held in San Francisco.  Nominate today...descriptions of the award categories for this year: JCP Member/Participant Of The Year - This award recognizes the corporate or individual member (either Member or Participant) who has made the most significant positive impact on the community in the past year. Leadership, investment in the community, and innovation are some of the qualities that EC Members look for in voting for this award. Outstanding Spec Lead - The role of Spec Lead is not an easy one, and the person who takes that responsibility must be, among other things, technically savvy, able to build consensus in spite of diverse corporate goals, and focused on efficiency and execution. This award recognizes the person who has brought together these qualities the best in the past year, in leading a JSR for the Java community (Java SE, Java EE or Java ME). Most Significant JSR - Specification development is key to the success of the JCP program and helps ensure we remain a fresh and vibrant community. This award recognizes the Spec Lead and Expert Group that have contributed (either in progress or final) the most significant JSR for the Java community (Java SE, Java EE or Java ME) in the past year.

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• Microsoft Press Deal of the Day 11/Oct/2012 - CLR via C#, 3rd Edition

  - by TATWORTH

  Today's Deal of the Day from Microsoft Press at http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780735627048.do?code=MSDEAL is CLR via C#, 3rd EditionThe deal expires probably 23:59 PT, today 11/Oct/2012. Remember to use the code MSDEAL at checkout."Dig deep and master the intricacies of the common language runtime (CLR) and the .NET Framework 4.0. Written by a highly regarded programming expert and consultant to the Microsoft® .NET team, this guide is ideal for developers building any kind of application-including Microsoft® ASP.NET, Windows® Forms, Microsoft® SQL Server®, Web services, and console applications. You'll get hands-on instruction and extensive C# code samples to help you tackle the tough topics and develop high-performance applications." This is a very through book about Dot Net that I have completed reviewing. I commend it to all C# development teams and to individual developers with at least a year's worth of C# experience. The only drawback is that there should be a VB.NET equivalent book for the benefit of the many programming shops that have chosen VB.NET.For further details about the book see: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780735627048The author has made some useful source available athttp://www.wintellect.com/Resources/Downloads/PushPin

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• When does a programmer know when a new job is not right?

  - by Mysterion

  I believe that the interview process is a selling of both parties - what can the employee offer the employer and vice versa. Assuming an individual has been careful in selecting their new employer (via thorough questioning in the interview process), however when they arrive at the job they find the employer has not been honest about certain aspects of the job. Examples of this dishonesty could include: The employee making it clear that technical excellence is an important factor, which is promised by the employer, but is not fully delivered or a good technical structure does not exist. The employee states they want to work on well architected and short (lets say less than 1 yr) long projects, yet when they start they find they are placed on a poorly architected older project. The employee being told of a pair programming environment to get him up to speed on the project, but being left to his own devices/questioning on arrival. The employee is promised a culture that encourages innovation and technical excellence but finds that this is not the case (eg. using technology for knowledge retention is laughed at). I know that a lot of famous developers feel that you make the place you work at. Is it realistic for a new employee with limited experience in the industry (say less than 5 years) to be able to join the company and change attitudes or even challenge the employer on the perceived dishonesty? Should they stay in this job or cut their losses?

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• What's hot in Oracle Premier Support News for Solaris, Storage and Systems - How to Patch!

  - by user12244613

  Struggling with locating patches for Sun products? Can't find your Oracle System Drivers? This question has been raised many times by customers and was the source of a short video in the Oracle System Support Newsletter in February 2012. The transition between SunSolve and My Oracle Support is to change how you think about the type of patch your looking for. For example, in SunSolve you might have typed e1000g if looking for an Enternet Driver.. but entering e1000g will not find anything in My Oracle Support - Patches and Update Menu. As you need to use the Product (Advanced) search which is driven of the Product Name, therefore you need to type "Ethernet" and select the ethernet product you are looking for to locate the patches for this product. Just to recap that video: If you are looking for the e1000g Ethernet Driver - You need to use Advance Search and search for Enternet 1. Log into My Oracle Support - Select Patches and Updates - Select Product or Family (Advanced Search). 2. In the product line enter: Ethernet and select the product name from the menu. 3. Check remove supersede patches - that ensure you only get relevant current patches in the results. 4. Select Search and the results are displayed. Now you have more options to include the platform (Solaris,Linux etc.) if want to further narrow the search. Need more information? Log into My Oracle Support and what a short 90sec video I put together. View the 7 minute Video using Firefox/chrome – It shows searching for individual patches, Solaris, Firmware etc. If you are not receiving the Oracle System Support Newsletter: Option (a) Within My Oracle Support, make document id: 1363390.1 a favourite and revisit it on the 2nd of each month for the latest content. Option (b) By default the Newsletter  is sent to all customers who have logged a Service Request on an Oracle Systems Hardware Product during the last 12months, unless you have opted out to receiving Oracle Communications on your profile on http://oracle.com

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• Architecture of a "website generator" web application

  - by Resorath

  What is the most maintainable and efficient way to architect a web application who's purpose is to host and generate websites which can be customized to a certain degree? There are a lot of these style of applications in the wild that generate all kinds of sites, from sites that host World of Warcraft guilds like guildlaunch to other sites like my wedding for wedding site hosting. My question is, what is the basic architecture that these sites operate on? I imagine there are two ways of thinking about this. A central set of code that all sites on the host run against, and it acts differently based on which site was visited. In this manner, when the base code is updated all sites are updated simultaneously. Or, the code for an individual site exists in a silo, and is simply replicated to a new directory each time a site is created. When an update needs to be applied, the code is pushed out to each site silo. In my case, I am working in PHP with the CodeIgniter framework, however the answer need not be limited to this case. Which method (if any) creates a more maintainable and efficient architecture to manage this style of web application?

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• What tools and knowledge do I need to create an application which generates bespoke automated e-mails? [on hold]

  - by Seraphina

  I'd like some suggestions as to how to best go about creating an application which can generate bespoke automated e-mails- i.e. send a personalized reply to a particular individual, interpreting the context of the message as intelligently as possible... (This is perhaps too big a question to be under one title?) What would be a good starting point? What concepts do I need to know? I'd imagine that the program needs to be able trawl through e-mails as and when they come in, and search for keywords in e-mail content, in order to write an appropriate reply. So there needs to be some form of automated response embedded in the code. Machine learning and databases come to mind here, as I'm aware that google incorporates machine learning already in gmail etc. It is quite tricky to google the above topic, and find the perfect tutorial. But there are some interesting articles and papers out there: Machine Learning in Automated Text Categorization (2002) by Fabrizio Sebastiani , Consiglio Nazionale Delle Ricerche However, this is not exactly a quick start guide. I intend to add to this question, and no doubt other questions will spark off this one. I look forward to suggestions.

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• How does the new google maps make buildings and cityscapes 3D?

  - by Aerovistae

  Anyone who's seen the new Google maps has no doubt taken note of the incredible amount of three-dimensional detail in select American cities such as Boston, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. They've even modeled the trees, bridges and some of the boats in the harbor! Minor architectural details are present. It's crazy. Looking at it up close, I've found there's a rectangular area around each of those cities, and anything within them is 3Dified, but it cuts off hard and fast at the edge, even if it's in the middle of a building. The edge of the rectangle is where the 3D stops. This leads me to think it's being done algorithmically (which would make sense, given the scale of the project, how many trees and buildings and details there are), and yet I can't imagine how that's possible. How could an algorithm model all these things without extensive data on their shapes and contours? How could it model the individual wires of a bridge, or the statues in a park? It must be done by hand, and yet how could it be for so much detail! Does anyone have any insight on this?

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• Pair Programming, for or against? [on hold]

  - by user1037729

  I believe it has many advantages over individual programming: Pros By pairing senior with relatively junior staff, the more junior can get up to speed with both project and computing experience, and the senior will re-think the problem in order to communicate with the junior, thus re-checking his own thinking (rubber duck principle!). At least 2 people will know about any single piece of work, if one person is away the other can cover, or if some one leaves a project knowledge transfer is easier. Two brains on a complex task is more effective, communication keeps the work free flowing and provides redundancy in decision making. Code is effectively reviewed as its being written, no need for a separate reviewing phase which requires a context switch as someone who has not been working on the piece in question would be required to understand and review the related code. Reviewing code on your own which you haven't written or architected is not fun, hence counter productive. Cons Less bandwith for performing tasks, lets say we have 4 devs, pair programming requires 2 devs per task, so we would be doing 2 tasks concurrently as a posed to 4. I believe this "Con" does not stand up as the pair programmed task would complete sooner and comes with a review built in for free! Ie the pair programming task would be more efficient and thus free up resources earlier. Less flexibility to chop and change tasks as two developers are tied into a task, when flexibility is required this could be a problem.

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• GUI based backup utility [closed]

  - by Chethan S.

  Possible Duplicate: Comparison of backup tools I have read favorable reviews for 'Back In Time' for the purpose stated above. Still I am posting this question as I have some demands in my mind. Few years back I was using ThinkVantage Rescue and Recovery by IBM on my Lenovo PC under Windows. That provided me nice features like compressed backups, boot time options - OS Repair, Restore entire OS, restore entire system to an older date, restore individual files etc. Out of these the feature I liked the most was compressed backups. Similar features are available in software like Norton Ghost too. In Back In Time I was surprised to see that the snapshot takes up same amount of space as that of the original contents, no compression at all. Furthermore, I was not able to find options to change the compression ratio etc. under settings. According to me compression of backups is a must have feature. Therefore, can anyone suggest me any other utility which can serve the purpose. I insist on GUI based tool since I don't want to mess up with backups!

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• EE vs Computer Science: Effect on Developers' Approaches, Styles?

  - by DarenW

  Are there any systematic differences between software developers (sw engineers, architect, whatever job title) with an electronics or other engineering background, compared to those who entered the profession through computer science? By electronics background, I mean an EE degree, or a self-taught electronics tinkerer, other types of engineers and experimental physicists. I'm wondering if coming into the software-making professions from a strong knowledge of flip flops, tristate buffers, clock edge rise times and so forth, usually leads to a distinct approach to problems, mindsets, or superior skills at certain specialties and lack of skills at others, when compared to the computer science types who are full of concepts like abstract data types, object orientation, database normalization, who speak of "closures" in programming languages - things that make little sense to the soldering iron crowd until they learn enough programming. The real world, I'm sure, offers a wild range of individual exceptions, but for the most part, can you say there are overall differences? Would these have hiring implications e.g. (to make up something) "never hire an electron wrangler to do database design"? Could knowing about any differences help job seekers find something appropriate more effectively? Or provide enlightenment or some practical advice for those who find themselves misfits in a particular job role? (Btw, I've never taken any computer science classes; my impression of exactly what they cover is fuzzy. I'm an electronics/physics/art type, myself.)

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• Working with Active Directory and Windows Small Business Server 2008

  - by AreYouSerious

  I have to say that in most of my time as a network engineer I have had the opportunity to play with servers, but mostly it's been to put our management software on, and that was about it. I have been a Systems Network Engineer for about three months now, and as such I have been respnosible for the configuration of our test devices... this being said, I have had to start working through how to configure and apply such things as GPO through a new forest, domain and OU. This being said I have configured about three different GPO's and applied them to different locations. The first laptop that I brought into the domain took the default Domain group Policy... this was cool, I got excited... then When I tried to bring in the second Laptop, it didn't take the policy. I looked at the configuration, and the default domain policy was applied to domain computers, however since the laptop resides in the SBS Computers of the OU that was created, SBS created individual policies for XP and Vista for that OU, which I was unaware of. So the default policy for that ou overrode the domain policy and none of the options that were defined in the Domain policy were applied... this being said, I am now working on putting the default Domain as an applicable policy in the OU, thus I won't have to reconfigure another policy to mirror the Domain Policy... here goes nothing!!!.... More to follow Later.

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• Centrally managing 100+ websites without bankrupting a small company

  - by palintropos

  I'm mainly interested in opinions on the trade-offs between having a single central server all the websites connect to as opposed to each website mirroring a subset of the master database with all the products in it. For example, will I run into severe performance issues (or even security issues, or restrictions) making queries to an offsite database? Will we hit scalability issues we can't handle early on from the sheer bandwidth required to maintain this? If we do go with something like a script that keeps smaller databases (each containing a subset of the central master data) in sync, what sorts of issues will we likely encounter there? I would really like the opinions of people far more knowledgeable than I am regarding the pros and cons of both setups and what headaches we are likely to encounter. CLARIFICATION: This should not be viewed as a question about whether we should implement one database vs multiple databases. This question has been answered numerous times. The question is regarding the pros and cons for a deployment like this having the ability to manage all the websites centrally (one server) vs trying to keep them all in sync if they each have their own db (multiple servers). REAL-WORLD EXAMPLE: We are a t-shirt company, and we have individual websites for our different kinds of t-shirts, but we're looking at a central order management integrated with our single shopping cart (which is ColdFusion + MySQL). Now, let's say we have a t-shirt that's on 10 of our websites and we change an image for it. Ideally we would change that in one place and the change would propagate, but how would we set this up?

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• Architectural approaches to creating a game menu/shell overlay on PC/Linux?

  - by Ghopper21

  I'm am working on a collection of games for a custom digital tabletop installation (similar to Microsoft Surface tables). Each game will be an individual executable that runs full-screen. In addition, there needs to be a menu/shell overlay program running simultaneously. The menu/shell will allow users to pause games, switch to other games, check their game history, etc. Some key requirements of the shell: it intercepts all user input (mainly multitouch) first before passing it on to the currently running game (so that it can, for instance, know to pop-up at a "pause" command); can reveal on arbitrary portions of the screen, with the currently running (but presumably paused) game still showing underneath, ideally with its shape/size being dynamic, to allow for creation of an animated in/out drawer effect over the game. I'm currently looking into different architectural approaches to this problem, including Fraps and DirectX overlays, but I'm sure I'm missing some ways to think about this. What are the main approaches I should be considering? (Note the table is currently being run by Windows PC, but it could potentially be a Linux box instead.)

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