Search Results

Search found 13104 results on 525 pages for 'non blocking'.

Page 463/525 | < Previous Page | 459 460 461 462 463 464 465 466 467 468 469 470  | Next Page >

• Windows Azure Recipe: Consumer Portal

  - by Clint Edmonson

  Nearly every company on the internet has a web presence. Many are merely using theirs for informational purposes. More sophisticated portals allow customers to register their contact information and provide some level of interaction or customer support. But as our understanding of how consumers use the web increases, the more progressive companies are taking advantage of social web and rich media delivery to connect at a deeper level with the consumers of their goods and services. Drivers Cost reduction Scalability Global distribution Time to market Solution Here’s a sketch of how a Windows Azure Consumer Portal might be built out: Ingredients Web Role – this will host the core of the solution. Each web role is a virtual machine hosting an application written in ASP.NET (or optionally php, or node.js). The number of web roles can be scaled up or down as needed to handle peak and non-peak traffic loads. Database – every modern web application needs to store data. SQL Azure databases look and act exactly like their on-premise siblings but are fault tolerant and have data redundancy built in. Access Control (optional) – if identity needs to be tracked within the solution, the access control service combined with the Windows Identity Foundation framework provides out-of-the-box support for several social media platforms including Windows LiveID, Google, Yahoo!, Facebook. It also has a provider model to allow integration with other platforms as well. Caching (optional) – for sites with high traffic with lots of read-only data and lists, the distributed in-memory caching service can be used to cache and serve up static data at higher scale and speed than direct database requests. It can also be used to manage user session state. Blob Storage (optional) – for sites that serve up unstructured data such as documents, video, audio, device drivers, and more. The data is highly available and stored redundantly across data centers. Each entry in blob storage is provided with it’s own unique URL for direct access by the browser. Content Delivery Network (CDN) (optional) – for sites that service users around the globe, the CDN is an extension to blob storage that, when enabled, will automatically cache frequently accessed blobs and static site content at edge data centers around the world. The data can be delivered statically or streamed in the case of rich media content. Training Labs These links point to online Windows Azure training labs where you can learn more about the individual ingredients described above. (Note: The entire Windows Azure Training Kit can also be downloaded for offline use.) Windows Azure (16 labs) Windows Azure is an internet-scale cloud computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services which can be used individually or together. It gives developers the choice to build web applications; applications running on connected devices, PCs, or servers; or hybrid solutions offering the best of both worlds. New or enhanced applications can be built using existing skills with the Visual Studio development environment and the .NET Framework. With its standards-based and interoperable approach, the services platform supports multiple internet protocols, including HTTP, REST, SOAP, and plain XML SQL Azure (7 labs) Microsoft SQL Azure delivers on the Microsoft Data Platform vision of extending the SQL Server capabilities to the cloud as web-based services, enabling you to store structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Windows Azure Services (9 labs) As applications collaborate across organizational boundaries, ensuring secure transactions across disparate security domains is crucial but difficult to implement. Windows Azure Services provides hosted authentication and access control using powerful, secure, standards-based infrastructure. See my Windows Azure Resource Guide for more guidance on how to get started, including links web portals, training kits, samples, and blogs related to Windows Azure.

  Read the article

• Convert old AVI files to a modern format

  - by iWerner

  Hi, we have a collection of old home videos that were saved in AVI format a long time ago. I want to convert these files to a more modern format because the Totem Movie Player that comes with Ubuntu 10.4 seems to be the only program capable of playing them. The files seem to be encoded with a MJPEG codec, and playing them in VLC or Windows Media Player plays only the sound but there is no video. Avidemux was able to open the files, but the quality of the video is severely degraded: The video skips frames and is interlaced (it's not interlaced when playing it in Totem). Neither ffmpeg nor mencoder seems to be able to read the video stream. mencoder reports that it is using ffmpeg's codec. Here's a section from its output: ========================================================================== Opening video decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg's libavcodec codec family [mjpeg @ 0x92a7260]mjpeg: using external huffman table [mjpeg @ 0x92a7260]mjpeg: error using external huffman table, switching back to internal Unsupported PixelFormat -1 Selected video codec: [ffmjpeg] vfm: ffmpeg (FFmpeg MJPEG) while running ffmpeg produces the following: $ ffmpeg -i input.avi output.avi FFmpeg version SVN-r0.5.1-4:0.5.1-1ubuntu1, Copyright (c) 2000-2009 Fabrice Bellard, et al. configuration: --extra-version=4:0.5.1-1ubuntu1 --prefix=/usr --enable-avfilter --enable-avfilter-lavf --enable-vdpau --enable-bzlib --enable-libgsm --enable-libschroedinger --enable-libspeex --enable-libtheora --enable-libvorbis --enable-pthreads --enable-zlib --disable-stripping --disable-vhook --enable-runtime-cpudetect --enable-gpl --enable-postproc --enable-swscale --enable-x11grab --enable-libdc1394 --enable-shared --disable-static libavutil 49.15. 0 / 49.15. 0 libavcodec 52.20. 1 / 52.20. 1 libavformat 52.31. 0 / 52.31. 0 libavdevice 52. 1. 0 / 52. 1. 0 libavfilter 0. 4. 0 / 0. 4. 0 libswscale 0. 7. 1 / 0. 7. 1 libpostproc 51. 2. 0 / 51. 2. 0 built on Mar 4 2010 12:35:30, gcc: 4.4.3 [avi @ 0x87952c0]non-interleaved AVI Input #0, avi, from 'input.avi': Duration: 00:00:15.24, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 22447 kb/s Stream #0.0: Video: mjpeg, yuvj422p, 720x544, 25 tbr, 25 tbn, 25 tbc Stream #0.1: Audio: pcm_s16le, 44100 Hz, stereo, s16, 1411 kb/s Output #0, avi, to 'output.avi': Stream #0.0: Video: mpeg4, yuv420p, 720x544, q=2-31, 200 kb/s, 90k tbn, 25 tbc Stream #0.1: Audio: mp2, 44100 Hz, stereo, s16, 64 kb/s Stream mapping: Stream #0.0 -> #0.0 Stream #0.1 -> #0.1 Press [q] to stop encoding frame= 0 fps= 0 q=0.0 Lsize= 143kB time=15.23 bitrate= 76.9kbits/s video:0kB audio:119kB global headers:0kB muxing overhead 20.101777% So the problem is that output does not contain any video, as evidenced by the video:0kB at the end. In all of the above cases the audio comes out fine. So my question is: What can I do to convert these files to a more modern format with more modern codecs?

  Read the article

• Heading out to Dallas GiveCamp 2011

  - by dotgeek

  The day has finally arrived for twelve local charities here in the Dallas area, when they’ll get some help from various local Developers with their website initiative needs at this years Dallas GiveCamp. I’m really looking forward to helping out at this year event and what I hope will be the start of many more GiveCamps to follow. Similar to Habitat for Humanity, where people gather to help build and improve homes for people in need, GiveCamp brings together programmers and equips them with the virtual tools they need to build and improve their existing websites. Tonight is when things will kickoff for this weekends events and teams will start working on their various projects. The building continues on through the night then and all the way through until Sunday afternoon. The end goal for the teams and charities is to have a completed and working website for each charity to begin using and turn over all the production code and digital assets to them. None of this would be possible with out the great sponsors we have returning once again and their donations of various products to help these charities out with their projects, like Telerik's CMS product Sitefinity 4.0, paired with a year of hosting from Verio to mention just a few of them. Just like the skilled builders who might help train volunteers in the use of a nail gun in building a house. Training is also available here on site for the Developers and these local Charities. Giving them all the skills in how to manage and use these products, from site development and then into actual production is a key to the success of this weekends event.     Tonight's training sessions will kick off with a real treat from Giovanni Gallucci, as he speaks about Social Media for NPOs and then later Gabe Sumner from Telerik will begin a training session on Sitefinity for Developers. These training sessions will continue through out the weekend with .Net Nuke and Mojo Portal sessions also planned as well. If you’re a developer and would like to help out in the future, then check in your area and with your local User Groups to find out if you already have a GiveCamp near you to help out. If you don’t have one available, then consider starting up a local GiveCamp and then you too can help Code it Forward. About GiveCamp GiveCamp is a weekend-long event where software developers, designers, and database administrators donate their time to create custom software for non-profit organizations. This custom software could be a new website for the nonprofit organization, a small data-collection application to keep track of members, or a application for the Red Cross that automatically emails a blood donor three months after they’ve donated blood to remind them that they are now eligible to donate again. The only limitation is that the project should be scoped to be able to be completed in a weekend. During GiveCamp, developers are welcome to go home in the evenings or camp out all weekend long. There are usually food and drink provided at the event. There are sometimes even game systems set up for when you and your need a little break! Overall, it’s a great opportunity for people to work together, developing new friendships, and doing something important for their community. At GiveCamp, there is an expectation of “What Happens at GiveCamp, Stays at GiveCamp”. Therefore, all source code must be turned over to the charities at the end of the weekend (developers cannot ask for payment) and the charities are responsible for maintaining the code moving forward (charities cannot expect the developers to maintain the codebase).

  Read the article

• Determining explosion radius damage - Circle to Rectangle 2D

  - by Paul Renton

  One of the Cocos2D games I am working on has circular explosion effects. These explosion effects need to deal a percentage of their set maximum damage to all game characters (represented by rectangular bounding boxes as the objects in question are tanks) within the explosion radius. So this boils down to circle to rectangle collision and how far away the circle's radius is from the closest rectangle edge. I took a stab at figuring this out last night, but I believe there may be a better way. In particular, I don't know the best way to determine what percentage of damage to apply based on the distance calculated. Note : All tank objects have an anchor point of (0,0) so position is according to bottom left corner of bounding box. Explosion point is the center point of the circular explosion. TankObject * tank = (TankObject*) gameSprite; float distanceFromExplosionCenter; // IMPORTANT :: All GameCharacter have an assumed (0,0) anchor if (explosionPoint.x < tank.position.x) { // Explosion to WEST of tank if (explosionPoint.y <= tank.position.y) { //Explosion SOUTHWEST distanceFromExplosionCenter = ccpDistance(explosionPoint, tank.position); } else if (explosionPoint.y >= (tank.position.y + tank.contentSize.height)) { // Explosion NORTHWEST distanceFromExplosionCenter = ccpDistance(explosionPoint, ccp(tank.position.x, tank.position.y + tank.contentSize.height)); } else { // Exp center's y is between bottom and top corner of rect distanceFromExplosionCenter = tank.position.x - explosionPoint.x; } // end if } else if (explosionPoint.x > (tank.position.x + tank.contentSize.width)) { // Explosion to EAST of tank if (explosionPoint.y <= tank.position.y) { //Explosion SOUTHEAST distanceFromExplosionCenter = ccpDistance(explosionPoint, ccp(tank.position.x + tank.contentSize.width, tank.position.y)); } else if (explosionPoint.y >= (tank.position.y + tank.contentSize.height)) { // Explosion NORTHEAST distanceFromExplosionCenter = ccpDistance(explosionPoint, ccp(tank.position.x + tank.contentSize.width, tank.position.y + tank.contentSize.height)); } else { // Exp center's y is between bottom and top corner of rect distanceFromExplosionCenter = explosionPoint.x - (tank.position.x + tank.contentSize.width); } // end if } else { // Tank is either north or south and is inbetween left and right corner of rect if (explosionPoint.y < tank.position.y) { // Explosion is South distanceFromExplosionCenter = tank.position.y - explosionPoint.y; } else { // Explosion is North distanceFromExplosionCenter = explosionPoint.y - (tank.position.y + tank.contentSize.height); } // end if } // end outer if if (distanceFromExplosionCenter < explosionRadius) { /* Collision :: Smaller distance larger the damage */ int damageToApply; if (self.directHit) { damageToApply = self.explosionMaxDamage + self.directHitBonusDamage; [tank takeDamageAndAdjustHealthBar:damageToApply]; CCLOG(@"Explsoion-> DIRECT HIT with total damage %d", damageToApply); } else { // TODO adjust this... turning out negative for some reason... damageToApply = (1 - (distanceFromExplosionCenter/explosionRadius) * explosionMaxDamage); [tank takeDamageAndAdjustHealthBar:damageToApply]; CCLOG(@"Explosion-> Non direct hit collision with tank"); CCLOG(@"Damage to apply is %d", damageToApply); } // end if } else { CCLOG(@"Explosion-> Explosion distance is larger than explosion radius"); } // end if } // end if Questions: 1) Can this circle to rect collision algorithm be done better? Do I have too many checks? 2) How to calculate the percentage based damage? My current method generates negative numbers occasionally and I don't understand why (Maybe I need more sleep!). But, in my if statement, I ask if distance < explosion radius. When control goes through, distance/radius must be < 1 right? So 1 - that intermediate calculation should not be negative. Appreciate any help/advice!

  Read the article

• New Working Environment Starting November

  - by Jenson

  Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 This is actually a post dated update. After I’ve been working in the private sectors for so many years (the 2 years when I was working as IT trainer in a secondary school is not counted, as I was working under a contract with a private IT training agency), I’ve decided to try my luck into public sector. And fortunately, I passed the interview and I was offered a position of Web Administrator in a government statutory board, that’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (of Singapore). During my previous employment with a Japanese MNC (multinational company), it was a totally new environment for me, as I had never worked for a Japanese company before, but the first time I work for Japanese company also gave me the very first nightmare I have with them, and vowed not to work for them anymore, and any other Japanese companies. No doubt I have freedom of choosing the tools and methods I wish to use for the projects, but the project management is simply too messy and out of order. And a lot of time, I don’t find that everyone is working as a team, more like achieving their own goals. Accountability for project is not shared, all lumped onto the shoulders of the developer in charge (they called it Software Engineer). I was working on a windows based .NET project, which I already voiced out that it’s not manageable by just 1 software engineer, but it seems like nobody cares, even the one who propose the solution to customer doesn’t care much. What he cares is whether you deliver the project on time so that he can please his customer and the senior management of his good work. Too many stories to tell, and I just simple doesn’t want to talk too much on this as it has already became the past to me. With my new title with the government agency, I hope to contribute my best to them, while learning as much as I can. I will share whatever I can on technologies, methodologies, and etc whichever I’m allowed and permitted to (of course, for those non-work-related stuff, I would be glad to share with you without much hesitation). Thank you! /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

  Read the article

• Isis Finally Rolls Out

  - by David Dorf

  Google has rolled their wallet out for several chains; I see the NFC readers in Walgreen's when I'm sent their for milk.  But Isis has been relatively quiet until now.  As of last week they have finally launched in their two test cities: Austin, and Salt Lake City.  Below are the supported carriers and phones as of now, but more phones will be added later. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} AT&T supports: HTC One™ X, LG Escape™, Samsung Galaxy Exhilarate™, Samsung Galaxy S® III, Samsung Galaxy Rugby Pro™ T-Mobile supports: Samsung Galaxy S® II, Samsung Galaxy S® III, Samsung Galaxy S® Relay 4G Verizon supports: Droid Incredible 4G LTE. Of course iPhone owners have no wallet since Apple didn't included an NFC chip. To start using Isis, you have to take your NFC-capable phone to your carrier's store to get the SIM replaced with a more sophisticated one that has a secure element configured for Isis.  The "secure element" is the cryptographic logic that secures mobile payments.  Carriers like the secure element in the SIM while non-carriers (like Google) prefer the secure element in the phone's electronics. (I'm not entirely sure if you could support both Isis and Google Wallet on the same phone.  Anybody know?) Then you can download the Isis app from Google Play and load your cards.  Most credit cards are supported, and there's a process to verify the credit cards are valid.  Then you can select from the list of participating retailers to "follow."  Selecting a retailer allows that retailer to give you offers via the app. The app is well done and easy to use.  You can select a default payment type and also switch between them easily.  When the phone is tapped on the reader, there are two exchanges of information.  The payment information is transferred, and then the Isis "SmartTap" information which includes optional loyalty number and digital coupons.  Of course the value of mobile wallets comes from the ease of handling all three data types (i.e. payment, loyalty, offers). There are several advertisements for Isis running now, and my favorite is below.

  Read the article

• Educational, well-written FOSS projects to read, study or discuss

  - by Godot

  Before you say it: yes, this "question" has been asked other times. However, I could not fine many of such questions and not that easily, and those I found had similar results. What I'm trying to say that there are no comprehensive lists of well written Open Source projects, so I decided to set some requirements for the entries (one or possibly more): Idiomatic use of the language in which they are written The project should be lightweight. Not as in "a few kbs", as in "clean" and possibly following the UNIX philosophy, making an efficient use of resources and performing its duty and nothing more. No code bloat, most importantly. Projects like Firefox and GNOME wouldn't qualify, for example. Minimal reliance on external, non-standard libraries, with exceptions for some common FOSS libraries (curses, Xlib, OpenGL and possibly "usual suspects" like gtk+, webkit and Boost). Reliance on well-written libraries is welcome. No reliance on proprietary software - for obvious reasons (programs that rely on XNA, DirectX, Cocoa and similar, for example). Well-documented code is welcome. Include link to web interfaces to their repositories if possible. Here are some sample projects that often pop up in these threads: Operating Systems Plan 9 from Bell Labs: More or less, the official "sequel" to UNIX. Written in C by the same people who invented C! NetBSD: The most portable BSD implementation, written in C and also a good example of portable and organized code. Network and Databases Sqlite: Extremely lightweight and extremely efficient, one of the best pieces of C software I've seen. Count the lines yourself! Lighttpd: A small but pretty reliable web server written in C. Programming languages and VMs Lua: extremely lightweight multi-paradigm programming language. Written in C. Tiny C Compiler: Really tiny C compiler. Not really comparable to GCC or Clang but does its job. PyPy: A Python implementation written in Python. Pharo: OK, I admit it, I'm not really a Smalltalk expert but Pharo is a fork of Squeak and looked rather interesting. Stackless Python - An implementation of Python that doesn't rely on the C call stack - written in C (with some parts in Python) Games and 3D: Angband: One of the most accessible roguelike codebases around here, written in C. Ogre3D: Cross-platform 3D engine. Gets bloated if you don't skip the platform-specific implementation code, otherwise is a pretty solid example of good C++ OO. Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection: Title says it all. Other - dwm: Lightweight window manager. Written in C. Emulation and Reverse Engineering - Bochs: x86 emulator, written in C++ and tiny enough. - MAME: If you want to see C at one of its lowest levels, MAME is for you. May not be as clean as the other projects but it can teach you A LOT. Before you ask: I didn't mention Linux because it has become quite bloated in the last few years, Linus has also confirmed it. Nonetheless, it'd be a great educational read the same, even if for other reasons. Same for GCC. Feel free to edit or wikify my post. I hope you won't lock my question, I'm only trying to organize a little community effort for the good of all those people who want to enhance their coding skills.

  Read the article

• Lessons Building KeyRef (a .NET developer learning Rails)

  - by Liam McLennan

  Just because I like to build things, and I like to learn, I have been working on a keyboard shortcut reference site. I am using this as an opportunity to improve my ruby and rails skills. The first few days were frustrating. Perhaps the learning curve of all the fun new toys was a bit excessive. Finally tonight things have really started to come together. I still don’t understand the rails built-in testing support but I will get there. Interesting Things I Learned Tonight RubyMine IDE Tonight I switched to RubyMine instead of my usual Notepad++. I suspect RubyMine is a powerful tool if you know how to use it – but I don’t. At the moment it gives me errors about some gems not being activated. This is another one of those things that I will get to. I have also noticed that the editor functions significantly differently to the editors I am used to. For example, in visual studio and notepad++ if you place the cursor at the start of a line and press left arrow the cursor is sent to the end of the previous line. In RubyMine nothing happens. Haml Haml is my favourite view engine. For my .NET work I have been using its non-union Mexican CLR equivalent – nHaml. Multiple CSS Classes To define a div with more than one css class haml lets you chain them together with a ‘.’, such as: .span-6.search_result contents of the div go here Indent Consistency I also learnt tonight that both haml and nhaml complain if you are not consistent about indenting. As a consequence of the move from notepad++ to RubyMine my haml views ended up with some tab indenting and some space indenting. For the view to render all of the indents within a view must be consistent. Sorting Arrays I guessed that ruby would be able to sort an array alphabetically by a property of the elements so my first attempt was: Application.all.sort {|app| app.name} which does not work. You have to supply a comparer (much like .NET). The correct sort is: Application.all.sort {|a,b| a.name.downcase <=> b.name.downcase} MongoMapper Find by Id Since document databases are just fancy key-value stores it is essential to be able to easily search for a document by its id. This functionality is so intrinsic that it seems that the MongoMapper author did not bother to document it. To search by id simply pass the id to the find method: Application.find(‘4c19e8facfbfb01794000002’) Rails And CoffeeScript I am a big fan of CoffeeScript so integrating it into this application is high on my priorities. My first thought was to copy Dr Nic’s strategy. Unfortunately, I did not get past step 1. Install Node.js. I am doing my development on Windows and node is unix only. I looked around for a solution but eventually had to concede defeat… for now. Quicksearch The front page of the application I am building displays a list of applications. When the user types in the search box I want to reduce the list of applications to match their search. A quick googlebing turned up quicksearch, a jquery plugin. You simply tell quicksearch where to get its input (the search textbox) and the list of items to filter (the divs containing the names of applications) and it just works. Here is the code: $('#app_search').quicksearch('.search_result'); Summary I have had a productive evening. The app now displays a list of applications, allows them to be sorted and links through to an application page when an application is selected. Next on the list is to display the set of keyboard shortcuts for an application.

  Read the article

• Problems with 3D Array for Voxel Data

  - by Sean M.

  I'm trying to implement a voxel engine in C++ using OpenGL, and I've been working on the rendering of the world. In order to render, I have a 3D array of uint16's that hold that id of the block at the point. I also have a 3D array of uint8's that I am using to store the visibility data for that point, where each bit represents if a face is visible. I have it so the blocks render and all of the proper faces are hidden if needed, but all of the blocks are offset by a power of 2 from where they are stored in the array. So the block at [0][0][0] is rendered at (0, 0, 0), and the block at 11 is rendered at (1, 1, 1), but the block at [2][2][2] is rendered at (4, 4, 4) and the block at [3][3][3] is rendered at (8, 8, 8), and so on and so forth. This is the result of drawing the above situation: I'm still a little new to the more advanced concepts of C++, like triple pointers, which I'm using for the 3D array, so I think the error is somewhere in there. This is the code for creating the arrays: uint16*** _blockData; //Contains a 3D array of uint16s that are the ids of the blocks in the region uint8*** _visibilityData; //Contains a 3D array of bytes that hold the visibility data for the faces //Allocate memory for the world data _blockData = new uint16**[REGION_DIM]; for (int i = 0; i < REGION_DIM; i++) { _blockData[i] = new uint16*[REGION_DIM]; for (int j = 0; j < REGION_DIM; j++) _blockData[i][j] = new uint16[REGION_DIM]; } //Allocate memory for the visibility _visibilityData = new uint8**[REGION_DIM]; for (int i = 0; i < REGION_DIM; i++) { _visibilityData[i] = new uint8*[REGION_DIM]; for (int j = 0; j < REGION_DIM; j++) _visibilityData[i][j] = new uint8[REGION_DIM]; } Here is the code used to create the block mesh for the region: //Check if the positive x face is visible, this happens for every face //Block::VERT_X_POS is just an array of non-transformed cube verts for one face //These checks are in a triple loop, which goes over every place in the array if (_visibilityData[x][y][z] & 0x01 > 0) { _vertexData->AddData(&(translateVertices(Block::VERT_X_POS, x, y, z)[0]), sizeof(Block::VERT_X_POS)); } //This is a seperate method, not in the loop glm::vec3* translateVertices(const glm::vec3 data[], uint16 x, uint16 y, uint16 z) { glm::vec3* copy = new glm::vec3[6]; memcpy(&copy, &data, sizeof(data)); for(int i = 0; i < 6; i++) copy[i] += glm::vec3(x, -y, z); //Make +y go down instead return copy; } I cannot see where the blocks may be getting offset by more than they should be, and certainly not why the offsets are a power of 2. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

  Read the article

• Clever memory usage through the years

  - by Ben Emmett

  A friend and I were recently talking about the really clever tricks people have used to get the most out of memory. I thought I’d share my favorites, and would love to hear yours too! Interleaving on drum memory Back in the ye olde days before I’d been born (we’re talking the 50s / 60s here), working memory commonly took the form of rotating magnetic drums. These would spin at a constant speed, and a fixed head would read from memory when the correct part of the drum passed it by, a bit like a primitive platter disk. Because each revolution took a few milliseconds, programmers took to manually arranging information non-sequentially on the drum, timing when an instruction or memory address would need to be accessed, then spacing information accordingly around the edge of the drum, thus reducing the access delay. Similar techniques were still used on hard disks and floppy disks into the 90s, but have become irrelevant with modern disk technologies. The Hashlife algorithm Conway’s Game of Life has attracted numerous implementations over the years, but Bill Gosper’s Hashlife algorithm is particularly impressive. Taking advantage of the repetitive nature of many cellular automata, it uses a quadtree structure to store the hashes of pieces of the overall grid. Over time there are fewer and fewer new structures which need to be evaluated, so it starts to run faster with larger grids, drastically outperforming other algorithms both in terms of speed and the size of grid which can be simulated. The actual amount of memory used is huge, but it’s used in a clever way, so makes the list . Elite’s procedural generation Ok, so this isn’t exactly a memory optimization – more a storage optimization – but it gets an honorable mention anyway. When writing Elite, David Braben and Ian Bell wanted to build a rich world which gamers could explore, but their 22K memory was something of a limitation (for comparison that’s about the size of my avatar picture at the top of this page). They procedurally generated all the characteristics of the 2048 planets in their virtual universe, including the names, which were stitched together using a lookup table of parts of names. In fact the original plans were for 2^52 planets, but it was decided that that was probably too many. Oh, and they did that all in assembly language. Other games of the time used similar techniques too – The Sentinel’s landscape generation algorithm being another example. Modern Garbage Collectors Garbage collection in managed languages like Java and .NET ensures that most of the time, developers stop needing to care about how they use and clean up memory as the garbage collector handles it automatically. Achieving this without killing performance is a near-miraculous feet of software engineering. Much like when learning chemistry, you find that every time you think you understand how the garbage collector works, it turns out to be a mere simplification; that there are yet more complexities and heuristics to help it run efficiently. Of course introducing memory problems is still possible (and there are tools like our memory profiler to help if that happens to you) but they’re much, much rarer. A cautionary note In the examples above, there were good and well understood reasons for the optimizations, but cunningly optimized code has usually had to trade away readability and maintainability to achieve its gains. Trying to optimize memory usage without being pretty confident that there’s actually a problem is doing it wrong. So what have I missed? Tell me about the ingenious (or stupid) tricks you’ve seen people use. Ben

  Read the article

• Comparing Isis, Google, and Paypal

  - by David Dorf

  Back in 2010 I was sure NFC would make great strides, but here we are two years later and NFC doesn't seem to be sticking. The obvious reason being the chicken-and-egg problem.  Retailers don't want to install the terminals until the phones support NFC, and vice-versa. So consumers continue to sit on the sidelines waiting for either side to blink and make the necessary investment.  In the meantime, EMV is looking for a way to sneak into the US with the help of the card brands. There are currently three major solutions that are battling in the marketplace.  All three know that replacing mag-stripe alone is not sufficient to move consumers.  Long-term it's the offers and loyalty programs combined with tendering that make NFC attractive. NFC solutions cross lots of barriers, so a strong partner system is required.  The solutions need to include the carriers, card brands, banks, handset manufacturers, POS terminals, and most of all lots of merchants.  Lots of coordination is necessary to make the solution seamless to the consumer. Google Wallet Google's problem has always been that only the Nexus phone has an NFC chip that supports their wallet.  There are a couple of additional phones out there now, but adoption is still slow.  They acquired Zavers a while back to incorporate digital coupons, but the the bulk of their users continue to be non-NFC.  They have taken an open approach by not specifying particular payment brands.  Google is piloting in San Francisco and New York, supporting both MasterCard PayPass and stored value. I suppose the other card brands may eventually follow.  There's no cost for consumers or merchants -- Google will make money via targeted ads. Isis Not long after Google announced its wallet, AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile announced a joint venture called Isis.  They are in the unique position of owning the SIM in the phones they issue.  At first it seemed Isis was a vehicle for the carriers to compete with the existing card brands, but Isis later switched to a generic wallet that supports the major card brands.  Isis reportedly charges issuers a $5 fee per customer per year.  Isis will pilot this summer in Salt Lake City and Austin. PayPal PayPal, the clear winner in the online payment space beyond traditional credit cards, is trying to move into physical stores.  After negotiations with Google to provide a wallet broke off, PayPal decided to avoid NFC altogether, at least for now, and focus on payments without any physical card or phone.  By avoiding NFC, consumers don't need an NFC-enabled phone and merchants don't need a new reader.  Consumers must enter their phone number and PIN in the merchant's existing device, or they can enter their PIN in the PayPal inStore app running on their phone, then show the merchant a unique barcode which authorizes payment. Paypal is free for consumers and charges a fee for merchants.  Its not clear, at least to me, how PayPal handles fraudulent transactions and whether the consumer is protected. The wildcard is, of course, Apple.  Their mobile technologies set the standard, so incorporating NFC chips would certainly accelerate adoption of many payment solutions.  Their announcement today of the iOS Passbook is a step in the right direction, but stops short of handling payments. For those retailers that have invested in modern terminals, it seems the best strategy is to support all the emerging solutions and let the consumers choose the winner.

  Read the article

• Indexed view deadlocking

  - by Dave Ballantyne

  Deadlocks can be a really tricky thing to track down the root cause of.  There are lots of articles on the subject of tracking down deadlocks, but seldom do I find that in a production system that the cause is as straightforward.  That being said,  deadlocks are always caused by process A needs a resource that process B has locked and process B has a resource that process A needs.  There may be a longer chain of processes involved, but that is the basic premise. Here is one such (much simplified) scenario that was at first non-obvious to its cause: The system has two tables,  Products and Stock.  The Products table holds the description and prices of a product whilst Stock records the current stock level. USE tempdb GO CREATE TABLE Product ( ProductID INTEGER IDENTITY PRIMARY KEY, ProductName VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL, Price MONEY NOT NULL ) GO CREATE TABLE Stock ( ProductId INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, StockLevel INTEGER NOT NULL ) GO INSERT INTO Product SELECT TOP(1000) CAST(NEWID() AS VARCHAR(255)), ABS(CAST(CAST(NEWID() AS VARBINARY(255)) AS INTEGER))%100 FROM sys.columns a CROSS JOIN sys.columns b GO INSERT INTO Stock SELECT ProductID,ABS(CAST(CAST(NEWID() AS VARBINARY(255)) AS INTEGER))%100 FROM Product There is a single stored procedure of GetStock: Create Procedure GetStock as SELECT Product.ProductID,Product.ProductName FROM dbo.Product join dbo.Stock on Stock.ProductId = Product.ProductID where Stock.StockLevel <> 0 Analysis of the system showed that this procedure was causing a performance overhead and as reads of this data was many times more than writes,  an indexed view was created to lower the overhead. CREATE VIEW vwActiveStock With schemabinding AS SELECT Product.ProductID,Product.ProductName FROM dbo.Product join dbo.Stock on Stock.ProductId = Product.ProductID where Stock.StockLevel <> 0 go CREATE UNIQUE CLUSTERED INDEX PKvwActiveStock on vwActiveStock(ProductID) This worked perfectly, performance was improved, the team name was cheered to the rafters and beers all round.  Then, after a while, something else happened… The system updating the data changed,  The update pattern of both the Stock update and the Product update used to be: BEGIN TRAN UPDATE... COMMIT BEGIN TRAN UPDATE... COMMIT BEGIN TRAN UPDATE... COMMIT It changed to: BEGIN TRAN UPDATE... UPDATE... UPDATE... COMMIT Nothing that would raise an eyebrow in even the closest of code reviews.  But after this change we saw deadlocks occuring. You can reproduce this by opening two sessions. In session 1 begin transaction Update Product set ProductName ='Test' where ProductID = 998 Then in session 2 begin transaction Update Stock set Stocklevel = 5 where ProductID = 999 Update Stock set Stocklevel = 5 where ProductID = 998 Hop back to session 1 and.. Update Product set ProductName ='Test' where ProductID = 999 Looking at the deadlock graphs we could see the contention was between two processes, one updating stock and the other updating product, but we knew that all the processes do to the tables is update them.  Period.  There are separate processes that handle the update of stock and product and never the twain shall meet, no reason why one should be requiring data from the other.  Then it struck us,  AH the indexed view. Naturally, when you make an update to any table involved in a indexed view, the view has to be updated.  When this happens, the data in all the tables have to be read, so that explains our deadlocks.  The data from stock is read when you update product and vice-versa. The fix, once you understand the problem fully, is pretty simple, the apps did not guarantee the order in which data was updated.  Luckily it was a relatively simple fix to order the updates and deadlocks went away.  Note, that there is still a *slight* risk of a deadlock occurring, if both a stock update and product update occur at *exactly* the same time.

  Read the article

• DallasXAML.com – A New User Group for Silverlight, WPF, XBAP, etc.

  - by vblasberg

                                   http://DallasXAML.com   I’ve devoted much of last month to starting the DallasXAML User Group.  I finally got back into user group management after 2 years away from leading the Dallas C# SIG.  Now I’m having fun getting a Silverlight/WPF user group going strong for the Dallas / Ft. Worth community.  Our first meeting was March 3rd at the Improving Enterprises offices in North Dallas.  We had about 25 to 35 attendees in the first meeting and it went well.  We covered the most important topic that everyone should understand well – data binding.   So I chose the XAML user group so we can get together for a common group improvement in the Dallas / Ft. Worth area and learn cross-technology information that we can use now.  It is not a lecture hall.  The great thing is that we’ll provide hands-on experience with most every meeting.  The goal is to get the experience that we can use the next work day.  I unfortunately broke that rule by speaking all through the first meeting, but next month is part two with more hands-on data binding.   The differentiation is this group concentrates on XAML, not Silverlight or Windows Client alone.  What we learn in one area, we gain for all areas.  That includes the Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 coming later this year.  Next year it may be Windows Phone 8, 9, or whatever.    I started developing WPF seriously almost a year ago.  I experienced the painful learning curve.  Anyone who reports that there isn’t a big learning curve either thinks in XAML before it was developed, is on the Silverlight or WPF development team, or has already conquered the learning and forgot the pain.  So I wanted to share the pain or make it easier for others – same thing.  I have found that the more I learn and use good disciplined techniques, the more interesting and rewarding development is again.   A few months ago, I was sitting in the iPhone development session at the Dallas C# SIG.  After the meeting, the audience was polled for future topics.  After a few suggestions, Silverlight got the big hands up.  That makes sense because it’s still the hot topic for many Microsoft developers.  So I surfed around and found that there aren’t enough user groups to help in this area.  I polled a few local group leaders and did the work to start the group.  This week I got a telerik controls licence and improved the site with some great controls, namely the RadHtmlPlaceholder control.  It provides a Silverlight control to show HTML in an IFrame-like area.  On DallasXAML.com, the newsletters and resource pages display in HTML because Silverlight just isn’t there yet.  I’m looking forward to a Silverlight XPS viewer with flow documents.  There are some good commercial version available, but this is a non-profit group.    The DallasXAML.com site points to many other resources such as podcasts and webcasts.  I would rather give them the credit than try to out-do them.  So check out the DallasXAML user group site and attend our meetings if you can.  We meet the first Tuesday of the month.   -Vince DallasXAML User Group Leader  

  Read the article

• Custom Templates: Using user exits

  - by Anthony Shorten

  One of the features of Oracle Utilities Application Framework V4.1 is the ability to use templates and user exits to extend the base configuration files. The configuration files used by the product are based upon a set of templates shipped with the product. When the configureEnv utility asks for configuration settings they are stored in a configuration file ENVIRON.INI which outlines the environment settings. These settings are then used by the initialSetup utility to populate the various configuration files used by the product using templates located in the templates directory of the installation. Now, whilst the majority of the installations at any site are non-production and the templates provided are generally adequate for that need, there are circumstances where extension of templates are needed to take advantage of more advanced facilities (such as advanced security and environment settings). The issue then becomes that if you alter the configuration files manually (directly or indirectly) then you may lose all your custom settings the next time you run initialSetup. To counter this we allow customers to either override templates with their own template or we now provide user exits in the templates to add fragments of configuration unique to that part of the configuration file. The latter means that the base template is still used but additions are included to provide the extensions. The provision of custom templates is supported but as soon as you use a custom template you are then responsible for reflecting any changes we put in the base template over time. Not a big task but annoying if you have to do it for multiple copies of the product. I prefer to use user exits as they seem to represent the least effort solution. The way to find the user exits available is to either read the Server Administration Guide that comes with your product or look at individual templates and look for the lines: #ouaf_user_exit <user exit name> Where <user exit name> is the name of the user exit. User exits are not always present but are in places that we feel are the most likely to be changed. If a user exit does not exist the you can always use a custom template instead. Now lets show an example. By default, the product generates a config.xml file to be used with Oracle WebLogic. This configuration file has the basic setting contained in it to manage the product. If you want to take advantage of the Oracle WebLogic advanced settings, you can use the console to make those changes and it will be reflected in the config.xml automatically. To retain those changes across invocations of initialSetup, you need to alter the template that generates the config.xml or use user exits. The technique is this. Make the change in the console and when you save the change, WebLogic will reflect it in the config.xml for you. Compare the old version and new version of the config.xml and determine what to add and then find the user exit to put it in by examining the base template. For example, by default, the console is not automatically deployed (it is deployed on demand) in the base config.xml. To make the console deploy, you can add the following line to the templates/CM_config.xml.win.exit_3.include file (for windows) or templates/CM_config.xml.exit_3.include file (for linux/unix): <internal-apps-deploy-on-demand-enabled>false</internal-apps-deploy-on-demand-enabled> Now run initialSetup to reflect the change and if you check the splapp/config/config.xml file you will see the change applied for you. Now how did I know which include file? I check the template for config.xml and found there was an user exit at the right place. I prefixed my include filename with "CM_" to denote it as a custom user exit. This will tell the upgrade tools to leave that file alone whenever you decide to upgrade (or even apply fixes). User exits can be powerful and allow customizations to be added for advanced configuration. You will see products using Oracle Utilities Application Framework use this exits themselves (usually prefixed with the product code). You are also taking advantage of them.

  Read the article

• Enterprise Manager in EPM 11.1.2.x...a game of hide and seek!

  - by THE

  Normal 0 21 false false false DE X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} guest article: Maurice Bauhahn: Users of Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management 11.1.2.0 and 11.1.2.1 may puzzle why the URL http://<servername>:7001/em may not conjure up Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control. This powerful tool has been installed by default...but WebLogic may not have been 'Extended' to allow you to call it up (we are hopeful this ‘Extend’  step will not be needed with 11.1.2.2). The explanation is on pages 425 and following of the following document: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/bi-foundation/epm-tips-issues-1-72-427329.pdf A close look at the screen dumps in that section reveals a somewhat scary prospect, however: the non-AdminServer servlets had all failed (see the red down-arrow icons to the right of their names) after the configuration! Of course you would want to avoid that scenario! A rephrasing of the instructions might help: Ensure the WebLogic AdminServer is not running (in a default scenario that would mean port 7001 is not active). Ensure you have logged into the computer as the installing owner of EPM. Since Enterprise Manager uses a LOT of resources, be sure that there is adequate free RAM to accommodate the added load. On the machine where WebLogic AdminServer is set up (typically the Foundation Services machine), run \Oracle\Middleware\wlserver_10.3\common\bin\config (config.sh on Unix). Select the 'Extend an existing WebLogic domain' option, and click the 'Next' button. Select the domain being used by EPM System. - Typically, the default domain is created under /Oracle/Middleware/user_projects/domains and is named EPMSystem. - Click 'Next'. Under 'Extend my domain automatically to support the following added products' - place a check mark before 'Oracle Enterprise Manager - 11.1.1.0 [oracle_common]' to select it. - Continue accepting the defaults by clicking 'Next' on each page until - on the last page you click 'Extend'. - The system will grind for a few minutes while it configures (deploys?) EM. - Start the AdminServer. Sometimes there is contention in the startup order of the various servlets (resulting in some not coming up). To avoid that problem on Microsoft Windows machines you may start and stop services via the following analogous command line commands to those run on Linux/Unix (these more carefully space out timings of these events): Ensure EPM is up:\Oracle\Middleware\user_projects\epmsystem1\bin\start.bat Ensure WebLogic is up:\Oracle\Middleware\user_projects\domains\EPMSystem\bin\startWebLogic.cmd Shut down WebLogic:\Oracle\Middleware\user_projects\domains\EPMSystem\bin\stopWebLogic.cmd Shut down EPM:\Oracle\Middleware\user_projects\epmsystem1\bin\stop.bat  Now you should be able to more successfully troubleshoot with the EM tool:

  Read the article

• Fixing some Visual Studio RC install issues

  - by terje

  The Visual Studio RC has shown some install issues in some cases, particularly for those who upgrades from VS 11 Beta.  I have listed the fixes known now below, and will update if there are more issues.  Note that a repair will not fix the issue, and a Windows restore and subsequent reinstall may not fix it either.  The system seems to remember too much. That was the case for me, at least.  The fixes below however, cures these issues. 1. The Team Explorer Build node doesn’t work You get an error saying System.TypeLoadException like this: To solve this do as follows: 1. Open a command prompt as administrator 2. Go to your program files directory for VS 2012 and down to  the extension folder like:   C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\CommonExtensions\Microsoft\TeamFoundation\Team Explorer 3. Run “gacutil –if Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Controls.dll     2. The SQL Editor gives loading error When you start up VS 2012 RC you get a loading error message.  The same happens if you try to go from the menu to  SQL/Transact-SQL Editor/New Query.    To solve this do as follows: 1. Open Control Panel/Programs and Features 2. Locate the “Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Data-Tier App Framework     (Note , you might find up to 4 such instances) The ones with version numbers ending in 55 is from the SQL 2012 RC, the ones ending in 60 is from the SQL 2012 RTM.  There are two of each, one for x32 and one for x64.  Which is which no one knows. 3. Right click each of them, and select Repair. (It would be nice if someone with this issue tries only the latest RTM ones, and see if that clears the error, and comment back to this post. I am out of non-functioning VS’s )   3.  Errors referring to some extension You get errors referring to some extension that can’t be loaded, or can’t be found.  Check the activity log (see below), and verify there.  If you see yellow collision warnings there, the fix here should solve those too. To solve these:    1. Open a Visual Studio 2012 command prompt 2.  Run:   devenv /resetsettings     How to check for errors using the log Do as follows to get to the activity log for Visual studio 2012 RC 1. Open a Visual Studio 2012 command prompt 2. Run:   devenv /log This starts up Visual Studio.  3. Go to %appdata%/Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0 4. Double click the file named ActivityLog.xml.  It will start up in your browser, and be formatted using the xslt in the same directory. 5.  Look for items marked in red.  Example for Issue 1 :

  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

• Disneyland Inside Out on iPhone and Android

  - by Ryan Cain

  It's hard to believe October was the last time I was over here on my blog.  Ironically after getter the developer phone from Microsoft I have been knee deep in iPhone programming and for the past few weeks Android programming again.  This time I've spent all my non-working hours programming a fun project for my "other" website, Disneyland Inside Out.  Disneyland Inside Out, a vacation planning site for Disneyland in California, has been around in various forms since June 1996.  It has always been a place for me to explore new technologies and learn about some of the new trends on the web.  I recently migrated the site over to DotNetNuke and have been building out custom modules for DNN.  I've also been hacking things together w/ the URLRewrite module in IIS 7.5 to provide strong SEO optimized URLs.  I can't say all that has really stuck within the DNN model of doing things, but it has worked pretty well. As part of my learning process, I spent most of the Fall bringing Disneyland Inside Out to the iPhone.  I will post more details on my development experiences later.  But this project gave me a really great opportunity to get a good feel for Objective-C development.  After 3 months I actually feel somewhat competent in the language and iPhone SDK, instead of just floundering around getting things to work.  The project also gave me a chance to play with some new frameworks on the iPhone and really dig into the Facebook SDK.  I also dug into some of the Gowalla REST api's as well.  We've been live with the app in iTunes for just about 10 days now, and have been sitting in the top 200 of free travel apps for the past few days.  You can get more info and the direct iTunes download link on our site: Disneyland Inside Out for iPhone Since launching the iPhone version I have gotten back into Android development, porting the Disneyland Inside Out app over to Android.  As I said in my first review of iPhone vs. Android, coming from a managed code background, Android is much easier to get going with.  I just about 3 weeks total I will have about 85 - 90% of the functionality up and running in the Android app, that took probably 1.5 - 2x's that time for iPhone.  That isn't a totally fair comparison as I am much more comfortable w/ Xcode and Objective-C today and can get some of the basic stuff done much faster than I could in the fall.  Though I'd say some of the hardest code to debug is still the null pointer issues on objects that were dealloc'd too early in Objective-C.  This isn't too bad with the NSZoombies enabled for synchronous code, but when you have a lot of async, which my app does, it can be hairy at times to track exactly what was causing the issue.   I will post more details later, as I am trying to wrap up a beta of the Android app today.  But in the meantime, if you have an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad head on over to the site and take a look at my app.

  Read the article

• Collision detection via adjacent tiles - sprite too big

  - by BlackMamba

  I have managed to create a collision detection system for my tile-based jump'n'run game (written in C++/SFML), where I check on each update what values the surrounding tiles of the player contain and then I let the player move accordingly (i. e. move left when there is an obstacle on the right side). This works fine when the player sprite is not too big: Given a tile size of 5x5 pixels, my solution worked quite fine with a spritesize of 3x4 and 5x5 pixels. My problem is that I actually need the player to be quite gigantic (34x70 pixels given the same tilesize). When I try this, there seems to be an invisible, notably smaller boundingbox where the player collides with obstacles, the player also seems to shake strongly. Here some images to explain what I mean: Works: http://tinypic.com/r/207lvfr/8 Doesn't work: http://tinypic.com/r/2yuk02q/8 Another example of non-functioning: http://tinypic.com/r/kexbwl/8 (the player isn't falling, he stays there in the corner) My code for getting the surrounding tiles looks like this (I removed some parts to make it better readable): std::vector<std::map<std::string, int> > Game::getSurroundingTiles(sf::Vector2f position) { // converting the pixel coordinates to tilemap coordinates sf::Vector2u pPos(static_cast<int>(position.x/tileSize.x), static_cast<int>(position.y/tileSize.y)); std::vector<std::map<std::string, int> > surroundingTiles; for(int i = 0; i < 9; ++i) { // calculating the relative position of the surrounding tile(s) int c = i % 3; int r = static_cast<int>(i/3); // we subtract 1 to place the player in the middle of the 3x3 grid sf::Vector2u tilePos(pPos.x + (c - 1), pPos.y + (r - 1)); // this tells us what kind of block this tile is int tGid = levelMap[tilePos.y][tilePos.x]; // converts the coords from tile to world coords sf::Vector2u tileRect(tilePos.x*5, tilePos.y*5); // storing all the information std::map<std::string, int> tileDict; tileDict.insert(std::make_pair("gid", tGid)); tileDict.insert(std::make_pair("x", tileRect.x)); tileDict.insert(std::make_pair("y", tileRect.y)); // adding the stored information to our vector surroundingTiles.push_back(tileDict); } // I organise the map so that it is arranged like the following: /* * 4 | 1 | 5 * -- -- -- * 2 | / | 3 * -- -- -- * 6 | 0 | 7 * */ return surroundingTiles; } I then check in a loop through the surrounding tiles, if there is a 1 as gid (indicates obstacle) and then check for intersections with that adjacent tile. The problem I just can't overcome is that I think that I need to store the values of all the adjacent tiles and then check for them. How? And may there be a better solution? Any help is appreciated. P.S.: My implementation derives from this blog entry, I mostly just translated it from Objective-C/Cocos2d.

  Read the article

• Microsoft Build 2012 Day 1 Keynote Summary

  - by Tim Murphy

  So I have finally dried the tears after watching the Keynote for Build 2012.  This wasn’t because it was an emotional presentation, but because for the second year I missed the goodies.  Each on site attendee got a Surface RT, a Lumia 920 and a voucher for 100GB of SkyDrive storage. The event was opened with the announcement that in the three days since the launch of Windows 8 over 4 million upgrades have been sold.  I don’t care who you are that is an impressive stat.  Ballmer then spent a fair amount of time remaking the case for the Windows and Windows Phone platforms similar to what we have heard over the last to launch events. There were some cool, but non-essential demos.  The one that was the most fun was the Perceptive Pixel 82” slate device.  At first glance I wondered why I would ever want such a device, but then Ballmer explained it’s possible use for schools and boardrooms.  The actually made sense. Then things got strange.  Steve started explaining features that developers could leverage.  Usually this type of information is left to the product leads.  He focused on the integration with the Charms features such as Search and Share. Steve “Guggs” Guggenheim showed off an app that would appeal to my kids from Disney called “Agent P” which is base on Phineas and Ferb.  Then he got to the meat of the presentation.  We found out that you could add a tile that can be used to sell ad space.  In the same vein we also found out that you could use Microsoft’s, Paypal’s or any commerce engine of your own creation or choosing. For those who are interested in sports and especially developing sports apps you would have found the small presentation from Michael Bayle of ESPN.  He introduced the ESPN app which has tons of features.  For the developers in the crowd he also mentioned that ESPN has an API available at developer.espn.com. During the launch events we were told apps were coming.  In this presentation we were actually shown a scrolling list of logos and told about a couple of them.  Ballmer mentioned specifically Twitter, SAP and DropBox.  These are impressive names that were just a couple of the list impressive names. Steve Ballmer addressed the question of why you should develop for the Windows 8 platform.  He feels that Microsoft has the best commercial terms for developers, a better way to build apps than other platforms and a variety of form factors.  His key point though was the available volume of customers given the current Windows install base and assuming even a flat growth of the platform.  This he backed with a promise that Microsoft is going to do better at marketing and you won’t be able to avoid the ads that they are bringing out. The last section of the key note was present by Kevin Gallo from the Windows Phone team.  This was the real reason I tuned into the webcast.  He impressed upon those watching that the strength of developing for the Microsoft platform is the common programming model that now exist.  While there are difference between form factor implementations you can leverage code across them. He claimed that 90% of developer requests for Windows Phone 8 had been implemented.  These include: More controls with better performance Better live tiles including lock screen integration Speech support in custom apps Easier submission to the market place App camera integration VOIP and chat support Bluetooth and NFC support Native C++ development Direct 3D development   The quote from Kevin that stood out for me was that “Take your Dramamine and buckle your seatbelt type of games are coming to Windows Phone 8”.  He back this up by displaying a list of game development frameworks and then having Unity come out and do a demo. Ok, almost done … The last two things of note for me were the announcement that the SDK is immediately available at dev.windowsphone.com and that they were reducing the cost of an individual developer account to $8 for the next 8 days. Let the development commence. del.icio.us Tags: Build 2012,Windows 8,Windows Phone 8,Windows Phone

  Read the article

• Hell and Diplomacy: Notes on Software Integration

  - by ericajanine

  Well, I'm getting cabin fever and short-timer's ADD all at the same time. I haven't been anywhere outside of my greater city area in FOREVER and I'm only days away from my vacation. I have brainlock because the last few days have been non-stop diffusing amazingly hostile conversations. I think I'll write about that. So then, I "do" software. At the end of the day, software is pretty straightforward. Software is that thing we love and try to make do things not currently in play, in existence. If a process around getting software to do something is broken (like most actually are), then we should acknowledge it and move on. We are professional. We are helpful beyond the normal call of duty. We live and breathe making the lives better for those apps being active in the world. But above all--the shocker: We are SERVICE. In a service frame of mind, all perspectives shift to what is best overall for system stabilization vs. what must be in production to meet business objectives. It doesn't matter how much you like or dislike the creator of said software. It doesn't matter what time you went to bed last night or if your mate appreciates your Death March attitude. Getting a product in and when is an age-old dilemma in a software environment where more than, say, 3 people are involved. We know this. Taking a servant's perspective eliminates the drama surrounding what a group of half-baked developers forgot to tell each other in the 11th hour about their trampling changes before check-in. We, my counterparts in society, get paid to deal with that drama. I get paid to diffuse that drama and make everything integrate as smoothly as possible. At the end of the day, attacking someone over a minor detail not only makes things worse, it's against the whole point of our real existence. Being in support or software integration means you are to keep your eyes on the end game. That end game? It's making a solution work for all stakeholders, not just you or your immediate superior. Development and technology groups exist because business groups need them to exist and solve their issues. The end game? Doing what is best for those business groups ultimately. Period. Note: That does not mean you let your business users solely dictate when and if something gets changed in an environment you ultimately own. That's just crazy. Software and its environments are legitimately owned by those who manage it directly, no matter how important a business group believes it is to the existence of mankind. So, you both negotiate the terms of changing that environment and only do so upon that negotiation. Diplomacy is in order. So, to finish my thoughts: If you have no ability to keep your mouth shut in a situation where a business or development group truly need your help to make something work even beyond a deadline, find another profession. Beating up someone verbally because they screw up means a service attitude is not at the forefront of your motivation for doing what is ultimately their work and their product. Software, especially integration, requires a strong will and a soft touch to keep it on track. Not a hammer covered in broken glass.

  Read the article

• Getting the number of fragments which passed the depth test

  - by Etan

  In "modern" environments, the "NV Occlusion Query" extension provides a method to get the number of fragments which passed the depth test. However, on the iPad / iPhone using OpenGL ES, the extension is not available. What is the most performant approach to implement a similar behaviour in the fragment shader? Some of my ideas: Render the object completely in white, then count all the colors together using a two-pass shader where first a vertical line is rendered and for each fragment the shader computes the sum over the whole row. Then, a single vertex is rendered whose fragment sums all the partial sums of the first pass. Doesn't seem to be very efficient. Render the object completely in white over a black background. Downsample recursively, abusing the hardware linear interpolation between textures until being at a reasonably small resolution. This leads to fragments which have a greyscale level depending on the number of white pixels where in their corresponding region. Is this even accurate enough? Use mipmaps and simply read the pixel on the 1x1 level. Again the question of accuracy and if it is even possible using non-power-of-two textures. The problem wit these approaches is, that the pipeline gets stalled which results in major performance issues. Therefore, I'm looking for a more performant way to accomplish my goal. Using the EXT_OCCLUSION_QUERY_BOOLEAN extension Apple introduced EXT_OCCLUSION_QUERY_BOOLEAN in iOS 5.0 for iPad 2. "4.1.6 Occlusion Queries Occlusion queries use query objects to track the number of fragments or samples that pass the depth test. An occlusion query can be started and finished by calling BeginQueryEXT and EndQueryEXT, respectively, with a target of ANY_SAMPLES_PASSED_EXT or ANY_SAMPLES_PASSED_CONSERVATIVE_EXT. When an occlusion query is started with the target ANY_SAMPLES_PASSED_EXT, the samples-boolean state maintained by the GL is set to FALSE. While that occlusion query is active, the samples-boolean state is set to TRUE if any fragment or sample passes the depth test. When the occlusion query finishes, the samples-boolean state of FALSE or TRUE is written to the corresponding query object as the query result value, and the query result for that object is marked as available. If the target of the query is ANY_SAMPLES_PASSED_CONSERVATIVE_EXT, an implementation may choose to use a less precise version of the test which can additionally set the samples-boolean state to TRUE in some other implementation dependent cases." The first sentence hints on a behavior which is exactly what I'm looking for: getting the number of pixels which passed the depth test in an asynchronous manner without much performance loss. However, the rest of the document describes only how to get boolean results. Is it possible to exploit this extension to get the pixel count? Does the hardware support it so that there may be hidden API to get access to the pixel count? Other extensions which could be exploitable would be debugging features like the number of times the fragment shader was invoked (PSInvocations in DirectX - not sure if something simila is available in OpenGL ES). However, this would also result in a pipeline stall.

  Read the article

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, September 20, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, September 20, 2012Popular ReleasesSiteMap Editor for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: SiteMap Editor (1.1.2020.421): New features: Disable a specific part of SiteMap to keep the data without displaying them in the CRM application. It simply comments XML part of the sitemap (thanks to rboyers for this feature request) Right click an item and click on "Disable" to disable it Items disabled are greyed and a suffix "- disabled" is added Right click an item and click on "Enable" to enable it Refresh list of web resources in the web resources pickerWPF Animated GIF: WPF Animated GIF 1.2.1: Bug fixes 1275: fixed rendering issues when DisposalMethod = 2 or 3AJAX Control Toolkit: September 2012 Release: AJAX Control Toolkit Release Notes - September 2012 Release Version 60919September 2012 release of the AJAX Control Toolkit. AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4.5 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 3.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 3.5 and sample site (Recommended). Notes: - The current version of the AJAX Control Toolkit is not compatible with ...Lib.Web.Mvc & Yet another developer blog: Lib.Web.Mvc 6.1.0: Lib.Web.Mvc is a library which contains some helper classes for ASP.NET MVC such as strongly typed jqGrid helper, XSL transformation HtmlHelper/ActionResult, FileResult with range request support, custom attributes and more. Release contains: Lib.Web.Mvc.dll with xml documentation file Standalone documentation in chm file and change log Library source code Sample application for strongly typed jqGrid helper is available here. Sample application for XSL transformation HtmlHelper/ActionRe...Sense/Net CMS - Enterprise Content Management: SenseNet 6.1.2 Community Edition: Sense/Net 6.1.2 Community EditionMain new featuresOur current release brings a lot of bugfixes, including the resolution of js/css editing cache issues, xlsx file handling from Office, expense claim demo workspace fixes and much more. Besides fixes 6.1.2 introduces workflow start options and other minor features like a reusable Reject client button for approval scenarios and resource editor enhancements. We have also fixed an issue with our install package to bring you a flawless installation...WinRT XAML Toolkit: WinRT XAML Toolkit - 1.2.3: WinRT XAML Toolkit based on the Windows 8 RTM SDK. Download the latest source from the SOURCE CODE page. For compiled version use NuGet. You can add it to your project in Visual Studio by going to View/Other Windows/Package Manager Console and entering: PM> Install-Package winrtxamltoolkit Features AsyncUI extensions Controls and control extensions Converters Debugging helpers Imaging IO helpers VisualTree helpers Samples Recent changes NOTE: Namespace changes DebugConsol...Python Tools for Visual Studio: 1.5 RC: PTVS 1.5RC Available! We’re pleased to announce the release of Python Tools for Visual Studio 1.5 RC. Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) is an open-source plug-in for Visual Studio which supports programming with the Python language. PTVS supports a broad range of features including CPython/IronPython, Edit/Intellisense/Debug/Profile, Cloud, HPC, IPython, etc. support. The primary new feature for the 1.5 release is Django including Azure support! The http://www.djangoproject.com is a pop...Launchbar: Lanchbar 4.0.0: First public release.AssaultCube Reloaded: 2.5.4 -: Linux has Ubuntu 11.10 32-bit precompiled binaries and Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit precompiled binaries, but you can compile your own as it also contains the source. If you are using Mac or other operating systems, please wait while we try to package for those OSes. Try to compile it. If it fails, download a virtual machine. The server pack is ready for both Windows and Linux, but you might need to compile your own for Linux (source included) Changelog: New logo Improved airstrike! Reset nukes...Extended WPF Toolkit: Extended WPF Toolkit - 1.7.0: Want an easier way to install the Extended WPF Toolkit?The Extended WPF Toolkit is available on Nuget. What's new in the 1.7.0 Release?New controls Zoombox Pie New features / bug fixes PropertyGrid.ShowTitle property added to allow showing/hiding the PropertyGrid title. Modifications to the PropertyGrid.EditorDefinitions collection will now automatically be applied to the PropertyGrid. Modifications to the PropertyGrid.PropertyDefinitions collection will now be reflected automaticaly...JayData - The cross-platform HTML5 data-management library for JavaScript: JayData 1.2: JayData is a unified data access library for JavaScript to CRUD + Query data from different sources like OData, MongoDB, WebSQL, SqLite, Facebook or YQL. The library can be integrated with Knockout.js or Sencha Touch 2 and can be used on Node.js as well. See it in action in this 6 minutes video Sencha Touch 2 example app using JayData: Netflix browser. What's new in JayData 1.2 For detailed release notes check the release notes. JayData core: all async operations now support promises JayDa...????????API for .Net SDK: SDK for .Net ??? Release 4: 2012?9?17??? ?????，???????????????。 ?????Release 3??????，???????，???，??? ??????????????????SDK，????????。 ??，??????? That's all.VidCoder: 1.4.0 Beta: First Beta release! Catches up to HandBrake nightlies with SVN 4937. Added PGS (Blu-ray) subtitle support. Additional framerates available: 30, 50, 59.94, 60 Additional sample rates available: 8, 11.025, 12 and 16 kHz Additional higher bitrates available for audio. Same as Source Constant Framerate available. Added Apple TV 3 preset. Added new Bob deinterlacing option. Introduced process isolation for encodes. Now if HandBrake crashes, VidCoder will keep running and continue pro...DNN Metro7 style Skin package: Metro7 style Skin for DotNetNuke 06.02.01: Stabilization release fixed this issues: Links not worked on FF, Chrome and Safari Modified packaging with own manifest file for install and source package. Moved the user Image on the Login to the left side. Moved h2 font-size to 24px. Note : This release Comes w/o source package about we still work an a solution. Who Needs the Visual Studio source files please go to source and download it from there. Known 16 CSS issues that related to the skin.css. All others are DNN default o...Visual Studio Icon Patcher: Version 1.5.1: This fixes a bug in the 1.5 release where it would crash when no language packs were installed for VS2010.VFPX: Desktop Alerts 1.0.2: This update for the Desktop Alerts contains changes to behavior for setting custom sounds for alerts. I have removed ALERTWAV.TXT from the project, and also removed DA_DEFAULTSOUND from the VFPALERT.H file. The AlertManager class and Alert class both have a "default" cSound of ADDBS(JUSTPATH(_VFP.ServerName))+"alert.wav" --- so, as long as you distribute a sound file with the file name "alert.wav" along with the EXE, that file will be used. You can set your own sound file globally by setti...MCEBuddy 2.x: MCEBuddy 2.2.15: Changelog for 2.2.15 (32bit and 64bit) 1. Added support for %originalfilepath% to get the source file full path. Used for custom commands only. 2. Added support for better parsing of Media Portal XML files to extract ShowName and Episode Name and download additional details from TVDB (like Season No, Episode No etc). 3. Added support for TVDB seriesID in metadata 4. Added support for eMail non blocking UI testEmmaClient - Liveresults for Orienteering: EmmaClient 2012-09-13: Minor release with a small fix for producing OS2012 results (and status of runners in the forest)Multiple Image choice custom field type: MultipleImageUpload V1.0: This is the Custom field type which allows the users to choose image as a choice field. This custom field type is SharePoint 2010, install the WSP thru powershell or Stsadm tool and enjoy the functionality...MDS Administration: Version 1.1.3: Fixed Rename issueNew Projects3dxia: bug3dxiaBitbucket Issue Tracker: A simple issue-tracking Windows client for your projects hosted on bitbucket.org.C++ thread-safe logging: Visual Studio C++ log library project: add to your project for thread-safe logging capabilities.Caddies GeoNote: The work started from making a vision for a neighbourhood communication platform, and ended up in creating the version 1.0 of a mobile application – GeoNotes – CodePlexGitHookForAzure: TestCommerce Server Pipeline Log Analyzer: This tool read and analyze pipeline logs under one selected folder. It applies to Microsoft Commerce Server 2002, 2007, 2009 and 2009 R2 Pipeline logs.Contrib.Mod.ResetPassword: Send reset link as a shapeContrib.Taxonomies.ViewExtension: Orchard module that adds a filter box to the taxonomies selector.EasierRdp: This is a remote desktop session management tool which provides an easy way to maintain multiple users and servers' connectionEconomic news grabber: WCF service for get news from rss, news sites and etc. WPF client for presentation this data for end users.Eticaret Sitesi: eee ticFacebook Graph API SDK Helper Class Library: Facebook C# Graph API SDK Helper Class Under developmentfxch01v14: helloKarned 2: Karned est un carnet de pêche informatique. Ce logiciel permet de noter vos prises de pêche à des fins d'analyse, ou simplement pour le souvenir...lixotrash: SandBox and POCs collections, not interesting hereLoggerLib: The project is a "Tracing Library" developed in a Borland C++ enviroment. Il progetto consiste in una libreria di tracciamento, sviluppata in ambiente Borland.LyncTalker: A simple tray application which will speak incoming Lync instant messages.MicroFrameWork: MicroFrameWorkNuzzle: 2.6.5 Dofus EmulatorPDF Merge: PDF Merge is a simple user-friendly application that allows you to merge multiple PDF documents including scanned / imported documents and images into 1 PDF.Pipeline: A library of several lightweight pipeline implementations ("pipes and filters" pattern).Prime Calculator: PrimeCalculator factorizes a number or a math expression into its prime factors or if prime display its prime type [Unit, Prime, Additive, Pure].Racing: not ready yetRuntime DataSet/DataTable viewer: This component basically allows you to inspect the contents of any Data Set or a Data Table at runtime without breaking into the debugger again and again.Service billing: Student group work for the College of West Anglia UCWA. Snake!: A Snake game written in C#SoccerBot: this is just a test projectSQL Server Trace File Import Utility: Command-line utility to import trace files into a data warehouse type structure. Currently it only handles Login events.testscenairo7onv14: helloToQueryString: Serialize any object in C# to a query string with the .ToQueryString() extension method. Supports primitives, strings, arrays and collections.tyajz: tyajz projectWindows Azure Table Storage: you can find all the details in my blog: hhaggan.wordpress.com and if you do have any question or inquiries feel free to contact me at hhaggan@hotmail.comwtcms: wtcms

  Read the article

• Organization &amp; Architecture UNISA Studies &ndash; Chap 6

  - by MarkPearl

  Learning Outcomes Discuss the physical characteristics of magnetic disks Describe how data is organized and accessed on a magnetic disk Discuss the parameters that play a role in the performance of magnetic disks Describe different optical memory devices Magnetic Disk The way data is stored on and retried from magnetic disks Data is recorded on and later retrieved form the disk via a conducting coil named the head (in many systems there are two heads) The writ mechanism exploits the fact that electricity flowing through a coil produces a magnetic field. Electric pulses are sent to the write head, and the resulting magnetic patterns are recorded on the surface below with different patterns for positive and negative currents The physical characteristics of a magnetic disk   Summarize from book   The factors that play a role in the performance of a disk Seek time – the time it takes to position the head at the track Rotational delay / latency – the time it takes for the beginning of the sector to reach the head Access time – the sum of the seek time and rotational delay Transfer time – the time it takes to transfer data RAID The rate of improvement in secondary storage performance has been considerably less than the rate for processors and main memory. Thus secondary storage has become a bit of a bottleneck. RAID works on the concept that if one disk can be pushed so far, additional gains in performance are to be had by using multiple parallel components. Points to note about RAID… RAID is a set of physical disk drives viewed by the operating system as a single logical drive Data is distributed across the physical drives of an array in a scheme known as striping Redundant disk capacity is used to store parity information, which guarantees data recoverability in case of a disk failure (not supported by RAID 0 or RAID 1) Interesting to note that the increase in the number of drives, increases the probability of failure. To compensate for this decreased reliability RAID makes use of stored parity information that enables the recovery of data lost due to a disk failure.   The RAID scheme consists of 7 levels…   Category Level Description Disks Required Data Availability Large I/O Data Transfer Capacity Small I/O Request Rate Striping 0 Non Redundant N Lower than single disk Very high Very high for both read and write Mirroring 1 Mirrored 2N Higher than RAID 2 – 5 but lower than RAID 6 Higher than single disk Up to twice that of a signle disk for read Parallel Access 2 Redundant via Hamming Code N + m Much higher than single disk Highest of all listed alternatives Approximately twice that of a single disk Parallel Access 3 Bit interleaved parity N + 1 Much higher than single disk Highest of all listed alternatives Approximately twice that of a single disk Independent Access 4 Block interleaved parity N + 1 Much higher than single disk Similar to RAID 0 for read, significantly lower than single disk for write Similar to RAID 0 for read, significantly lower than single disk for write Independent Access 5 Block interleaved parity N + 1 Much higher than single disk Similar to RAID 0 for read, lower than single disk for write Similar to RAID 0 for read, generally  lower than single disk for write Independent Access 6 Block interleaved parity N + 2 Highest of all listed alternatives Similar to RAID 0 for read; lower than RAID 5 for write Similar to RAID 0 for read, significantly lower than RAID 5  for write   Read page 215 – 221 for detailed explanation on RAID levels Optical Memory There are a variety of optical-disk systems available. Read through the table on page 222 – 223 Some of the devices include… CD CD-ROM CD-R CD-RW DVD DVD-R DVD-RW Blue-Ray DVD Magnetic Tape Most modern systems use serial recording – data is lade out as a sequence of bits along each track. The typical recording used in serial is referred to as serpentine recording. In this technique when data is being recorded, the first set of bits is recorded along the whole length of the tape. When the end of the tape is reached the heads are repostioned to record a new track, and the tape is again recorded on its whole length, this time in the opposite direction. That process continued back and forth until the tape is full. To increase speed, the read-write head is capable of reading and writing a number of adjacent tracks simultaneously. Data is still recorded serially along individual tracks, but blocks in sequence are stored on adjacent tracks as suggested. A tape drive is a sequential access device. Magnetic tape was the first kind of secondary memory. It is still widely used as the lowest-cost, slowest speed member of the memory hierarchy.

  Read the article

• Conflict Minerals - Design to Compliance

  - by C. Chadwick

  Dr. Christina  Schröder - Principal PLM Consultant, Enterprise PLM Solutions EMEA What does the Conflict Minerals regulation mean? Conflict Minerals has recently become a new buzz word in the manufacturing industry, particularly in electronics and medical devices. Known as the "Dodd-Frank Section 1502", this regulation requires SEC listed companies to declare the origin of certain minerals by 2014. The intention is to reduce the use of tantalum, tungsten, tin, and gold which originate from mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and adjoining countries that are controlled by violent armed militia abusing human rights. Manufacturers now request information from their suppliers to see if their raw materials are sourced from this region and which smelters are used to extract the metals from the minerals. A standardized questionnaire has been developed for this purpose (download and further information). Soon, even companies which are not directly affected by the Conflict Minerals legislation will have to collect and maintain this information since their customers will request the data from their suppliers. Furthermore, it is expected that the public opinion and consumer interests will force manufacturers to avoid the use of metals with questionable origin. Impact for existing products Several departments are involved in the process of collecting data and providing conflict minerals compliance information. For already marketed products, purchasing typically requests Conflict Minerals declarations from the suppliers. In order to address requests from customers, technical operations or product management are usually responsible for keeping track of all parts, raw materials and their suppliers so that the required information can be provided. For complex BOMs, it is very tedious to maintain complete, accurate, up-to-date, and traceable data. Any product change or new supplier can, in addition to all other implications, have an effect on the Conflict Minerals compliance status. Influence on product development  It makes sense to consider compliance early in the planning and design of new products. Companies should evaluate which metals are needed or contained in supplier parts and if these could originate from problematic sources. The answer influences the cost and risk analysis during the development. If it is known early on that a part could be non-compliant with respect to Conflict Minerals, alternatives can be evaluated and thus costly changes at a later stage can be avoided. Integrated compliance management  Ideally, compliance data for Conflict Minerals, but also for other regulations like REACH and RoHS, should be managed in an integrated supply chain system. The compliance status is directly visible across the entire BOM at any part level and for the finished product. If data is missing, a request to the supplier can be triggered right away without having to switch to another system. The entire process, from identification of the relevant parts, requesting information, handling responses, data entry, to compliance calculation is fully covered end-to-end while being transparent for all stakeholders. Agile PLM Product Governance and Compliance (PG&C) The PG&C module extends Agile PLM with exactly this integrated functionality. As with the entire Agile product suite, PG&C can be configured according to customer requirements: data fields, attributes, workflows, routing, notifications, and permissions, etc… can be quickly and easily tailored to a customer’s needs. Optionally, external databases can be interfaced to query commercially available sources of Conflict Minerals declarations which obviates the need for a separate supplier request in many cases. Suppliers can access the system directly for data entry through a special portal. The responses to the standard EICC-GeSI questionnaire can be imported by the supplier or internally. Manual data entry is also supported. A set of compliance-specific dashboards and reports complement the functionality Conclusion  The increasing number of product compliance regulations, for which Conflict Minerals is just one example, requires companies to implement an efficient data and process management in this area. Consumer awareness in this matter increases as well so that an integrated system from development to production also provides a competitive advantage. Follow this link to learn more about Agile's PG&C solution

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 459 460 461 462 463 464 465 466 467 468 469 470  | Next Page >