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• Should I be wary of signing a non-disclosure agreement with someone I just met?

  - by Thomas Levine

  tl;dr: Some guy I just met says he wants me to join his company. Before he shows me what they do, he wants me to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Is this weird? I'm traveling right now. Someone who saw me coding seemed to think I was smart or something and started talking with me. He explained that he owns a software company, told me a bit about what it does and told me that he was looking for a programmer who would work for a stake in the company. He explained that the company's product is being developed rather secretly, so he couldn't tell me much. But he did tell enough about the product to convince me that he's not completely making this up, which is a decent baseline. He suggested that he show me more of what he's been working on and, after seeing that, I decide whether I want to join. Because of the secrecy behind the product, he wants me to sign a non-disclosure agreement before we talk. I'm obviously somewhat skeptical because of the random nature by which we met. In the short term, I'm wondering if I should be wary of signing such an agreement. He said it would be easier to show me the product in person rather than over the internet, and I'm leaving town tomorrow, so I'd have to figure this out by tomorrow. If I decide to talk with him, I could decide later whether I trust that it's worth spending any time on this company. The concept of being able to avoid telling a secret seems strange to me for the same reason that things like certain aspects of copyright seem strange. Should I be wary of signing a non-disclosure agreement? Is this common practice? I don't know the details of the agreement of which he was thinking, (If I end up meeting with him, I'll of course read over the agreement before I decide whether to sign it.) so I could consider alternatives according to the aspects of the agreement. Or I could just consider the case of an especially harsh agreement. This question seems vaguely related. Do we need a non-disclosure agreement (NDA)? Thanks

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• Introducing Glimpse – Firebug for your server

  - by Neil Davidson

  Here at Red Gate, we spend every waking hour trying to wow .NET and SQL developers with great products.  Every so often, though, we find something out in the wild which knocks our socks off by taking “ingeniously simple” to a whole new level.  That’s what a little community led by developers Nik Molnar and Anthony van der Hoorn has done with the open source tool Glimpse. Glimpse describes itself as ‘Firebug for the server.’  You drop the NuGet package into your ASP.NET project, and then — like magic* — your web pages will bare every detail of their execution.  Even by our high standards, it was trivial to get running: if you can use NuGet, you’re already there. You get all that lovely detail without changing any code. Our feelings go beyond respect for the developers who designed and wrote Glimpse; we’re thrilled that Nik and Anthony have come to work for Red Gate full-time. They’re going to stay in control of the project and keep doing open source development work on Glimpse.  In the medium term, we’re hoping to make paid-for products which plug into the free open source framework, especially in areas like performance profiling where we already have some deep technology.  First, though, Glimpse needs to get from beta to a v1. Given the breakneck pace of new development, this should only be a month or so away. Supporting an open source project is a first for Red Gate, so we’re going to be working with Nik and Anthony, with the Glimpse community and even with other vendors to figure out what ‘great’ looks like from the a user perspective.  Only one thing is certain: this technology deserves a wider audience than the 40,000 people who have already downloaded it, so please have a look and tell us what you think. You can hear more about what the Glimpse developers think on the Glimpse blog, and there are plenty more technical facts over at our product manager’s blog. If you have any questions or queries, please tweet with the #glimpse hashtag or contact the Glimpse team directly on [email protected]. [*That’s ”magic” in the Arthur C. Clarke “sufficiently advanced technology” sense, of course] Neil Davidson co-founder and Joint CEO Red Gate Software http://twitter.com/neildavidson    

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• Music before bells and whistles

  - by Tony Davis

  Why is it that Windows has so much difficulty in finding content on its file system? This is not an insurmountable technical problem; on my laptop, I have a database within which I can instantly find text or names within millions of records, within 300 milliseconds. I have a copy of Google Desktop that can find phrases within emails or documents, almost as quickly. It is an important, though mundane, part of an operating system to be able to find files. The first thing I notice within Windows is that the facility to find files or text within files is called 'search' rather than 'find'. Hmm. This doesn’t bode well. What’s this? It does a brute-force search for file names? Here we are in an age when we can breed mice that glow in the dark, and manufacture computers that fit in our shirt pockets, and we find an operating system that is still entirely innocent of managing and indexing content in hierarchical data. I can actually read the files of my PC into a database, mimic the directory/folder hierarchies and then find files in a flash; but when I do the same with Windows Vista, we are suddenly back in a 1960s time warp. Finding files based on their name is bad enough, but finding files based on the content that they contain is more or less asking for an opportunity to wait 20 minutes in order to see a "file not found" message. Sadly, with Windows 7, Microsoft seems to have fallen into the familiar trap of adding bells and whistles before finishing the song. It's certainly true that Microsoft has added new features and a certain polish to Windows Search 4.0, the latest incarnation. It works more like a web search and offers a new search syntax, called Advanced Query Syntax, which allows you to search on file author, file size, date ranges (e.g. date:=7/4/09still does not work reliably. I've experienced first-hand its stubborn refusal, despite a full index, to acknowledge the existence of a file I know exists, based on a search for a specific term within that file that I know is in there somewhere; a file that Google Desktop search, or old wingrep, finds in seconds. When users hark back to the halcyon days of Windows XP search, you know something is seriously amiss. Shouldn't applications get the functionality right before applying animated menus and Teletubby graphics, or is advancing age making me grumpy? I’d be pleased to hear your views, as always. Cheers, Tony.

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• Rights Expiry Options in IRM 11g

  - by martin.abrahams

  Among the many enhancements in IRM 11g, we have introduced a couple of new rights expiry options that may be applied to any role. These options were supported in previous versions, but fell into the "advanced configuration" category. In 11g, the options can be applied simply by selecting a check-box in the properties of a role, as shown by the rather extreme example below, where the role allows access for just two minutes after they are sealed. The new options are: To define a role that expires automatically some period after it is assigned To define a role that evaluates expiry relative to the time that each document is sealed These options supplement the familiar options to allow open-ended access (limited by offline access and the ever-present option to revoke rights at any time) and the option to define time windows with specific start dates and end dates. The value of these options is easiest to illustrate with some publishing examples: You might define a role with a one year expiry to be assigned to users who purchase a one year subscription. For each individual user, the year would be calculated from the time that the role was assigned to them. You might define a role that allows documents to be accessed only for 24 hours from the time that they are published - perhaps as a preview mechanism designed to tempt users to sign up for a full subscription. Upon payment of a full fee, users can simply be reassigned a role that gives them greater access to exactly the same documents. In a corporate environment, you might use such roles for fixed term contractors or for workflows that involve information with a short lifespan, or perhaps as part of a compliance process that requires rights to be formally re-approved at intervals. Being role-based, the time constraints apply to any number of documents - including documents that have not yet been created. For example, a user with a one year subscription would have access to all documents published in the relevant classification during the year without any further configuration. Crucially, unlike other solutions, it is not the documents that expire, but the rights of particular users. Whereas some solutions make documents completely inaccessible for all users after expiry, Oracle IRM can allow some users to continue using documents while other users lose access. Equally crucially, a user whose rights have expired can always be granted fresh rights at any time - for example, because they renew their subscription or because a manager confirms that they still need the rights as part of a corporate compliance process. By applying expiry to rights rather than to documents, Oracle IRM avoids the risk of locking an organization out of its own information.

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• JCP EC Nominations and Meet the Candidates Call

  - by heathervc

  The Nominations period for the 2012 JCP EC Elections closes tomorrow, 11 October at midnight pacific time.  Eligible JCP Members (all current JSPA 2 signers) may nominate themselves.  You will need your Elections credentials to complete the nomination, which were sent to the primary contacts of all eligible JCP Members via email last week. This year all ratified (there are 4 proposed ratified candidates) and elected (there are 7 candidates so far) will appear on one ballot; the top 2 candidates will win elected seats. This year, the selected EC Members will serve a single year term.  Following the 2012 Elections, there will be one merged EC (approved through JSR 355), and a new JCP version, JCP 2.9 will be in effect.  In 2013, all EC members will stand for election to complete the merge process described in the JCP 2.9 process document. All of the candidates' nominations materials are now available. The ratified candidates are:  Cinterion, Credit Suisse, Fujitsu and HP.The elected candidates are:  Cisco Systems, CloudBees, Giuseppe Dell'Abate, London Java Community, MoroccoJUG, Software AG, and Zero Turnaround. Next week, 18 October, we will hold an open teleconference for the Java Community to meet the candidates and ask questions regarding their nomination.  We hope you will be able to participate in the call.  Should the time be inconvenient, a recording will be made available for download, and candidate questions may be posted on this blog entry or sent to [email protected]. Topic: Meet the EC Candidates Date: Thursday, October 18, 2012 Time: 9:30 am, Pacific Daylight Time (San Francisco, GMT-07:00) Meeting Number: 807 818 225 Meeting Password: MeetEC ------------------------------------------------------- To join the online meeting (Now from mobile devices) ------------------------------------------------------- 1. Go to https://jcp.webex.com/jcp/j.php?ED=186721592&UID=0&PW=NMmUzNjY5ZTMw&RT=MiM0 2. If requested, enter your name and email address. 3. If a password is required, enter the meeting password: MeetEC 4. Click "Join". To view in other time zones or languages, please click the link: https://jcp.webex.com/jcp/j.php?ED=186721592&UID=0&PW=NMmUzNjY5ZTMw&ORT=MiM0 ------------------------------------------------------- To join the audio conference only -------------------------------------------------------     +1 (866) 682-4770     Outside the US: global access numbers  https://www.intercallonline.com/portlets/scheduling/viewNumbers/listNumbersByCode.do?confCode=6279803 or +1 (408) 774-4073     Conference code: 9454597     Security code: JCPEC (52732)------------------------------------------------------- For assistance ------------------------------------------------------- 1. Go to https://jcp.webex.com/jcp/mc 2. On the left navigation bar, click "Support".

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• Hadoop growing pains

  - by Piotr Rodak

  This post is not going to be about SQL Server. I have been reading recently more and more about “Big Data” – very catchy term that describes untamed increase of the data that mankind is producing each day and the struggle to capture the meaning of these data. Ten years ago, and perhaps even three years ago this need was not so recognized. Increasing number of smartphones and discernable trend of mainstream Internet traffic moving to the smartphone generated one means that there is bigger and bigger stream of information that has to be stored, transformed, analysed and perhaps monetized. The nature of this traffic makes if very difficult to wrap it into boundaries of relational database engines. The amount of data makes it near to impossible to process them in relational databases within reasonable time. This is where ‘cloud’ technologies come to play. I just read a good article about the growing pains of Hadoop, which became one of the leading players on distributed processing arena within last year or two. Toby Baer concludes in it that lack of enterprise ready toolsets hinders Hadoop’s apprehension in the enterprise world. While this is true, something else drew my attention. According to the article there are already about half of a dozen of commercially supported distributions of Hadoop. For me, who has not been involved into intricacies of open-source world, this is quite interesting observation. On one hand, it is good that there is competition as it is beneficial in the end to the customer. On the other hand, the customer is faced with difficulty of choosing the right distribution. In future, when Hadoop distributions fork even more, this choice will be even harder. The distributions will have overlapping sets of features, yet will be quite incompatible with each other. I suppose it will take a few years until leaders emerge and the market will begin to resemble what we see in Linux world. There are myriads of distributions, but only few are acknowledged by the industry as enterprise standard. Others are honed by bearded individuals with too much time to spend. In any way, the third fact I can’t help but notice about the proliferation of distributions of Hadoop is that IT professionals will have jobs.   BuzzNet Tags: Hadoop,Big Data,Enterprise IT

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• Should we exclude code for the code coverage analysis?

  - by romaintaz

  I'm working on several applications, mainly legacy ones. Currently, their code coverage is quite low: generally between 10 and 50%. Since several weeks, we have recurrent discussions with the Bangalore teams (main part of the development is made offshore in India) regarding the exclusions of packages or classes for Cobertura (our code coverage tool, even if we are currently migrating to JaCoCo). Their point of view is the following: as they will not write any unit tests on some layers of the application (1), these layers should be simply excluded from the code coverage measure. In others words, they want to limit the code coverage measure to the code that is tested or should be tested. Also, when they work on unit test for a complex class, the benefits - purely in term of code coverage - will be unnoticed due in a large application. Reducing the scope of the code coverage will make this kind of effort more visible... The interest of this approach is that we will have a code coverage measure that indicates the current status of the part of the application we consider as testable. However, my point of view is that we are somehow faking the figures. This solution is an easy way to reach higher level of code coverage without any effort. Another point that bothers me is the following: if we show a coverage increase from one week to another, how can we tell if this good news is due to the good work of the developers, or simply due to new exclusions? In addition, we will not be able to know exactly what is considered in the code coverage measure. For example, if I have a 10,000 lines of code application with 40% of code coverage, I can deduct that 40% of my code base is tested (2). But what happen if we set exclusions? If the code coverage is now 60%, what can I deduct exactly? That 60% of my "important" code base is tested? How can I As far as I am concerned, I prefer to keep the "real" code coverage value, even if we can't be cheerful about it. In addition, thanks to Sonar, we can easily navigate in our code base and know, for any module / package / class, its own code coverage. But of course, the global code coverage will still be low. What is your opinion on that subject? How do you do on your projects? Thanks. (1) These layers are generally related to the UI / Java beans, etc. (2) I know that's not true. In fact, it only means that 40% of my code base

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• How do I (tactfully) tell my project manager or lead developer that the project's codebase needs serious work?

  - by Adam Maras

  I just joined a (relatively) small development team that's been working on a project for several months, if not a year. As with most developer joining a project, I spent my first couple of days reviewing the project's codebase. The project (a medium- to large-sized ASP.NET WebForms internal line of business application) is, for lack of a more descriptive term, a disaster. There are three immediately noticeable problems with the coding standards: The standard is very loose. It describes more of what not to do (don't use Hungarian notation, etc..) than what to do. The standard isn't always followed. There are inconsistencies with the code formatting everywhere. The standard doesn't follow Microsoft's style guidelines. In my opinion, there's no value in deviating from the guidelines that were set forth by the developer of the framework and the largest contributor to the language specification. As for point 3, perhaps it bothers me more because I've taken the time to get my MCPD with a focus on web applications (specifically, ASP.NET). I'm also the only Microsoft Certified Professional on the team. Because of what I learned in all of my schooling, self-teaching, and on-the-job learning (including my preparation for the certification exams) I've also spotted several instances in the project's code where things are simply not done in the best way. I've only been on this team for a week, but I see so many issues with their codebase that I imagine I'll be spending more time fighting with what's already written to do things in "their way" than I would if I were working on a project that, for example, followed more widely accepted coding standards, architecture patterns, and best practices. This brings me to my question: Should I (and if so, how do I) propose to my project manager and team lead that the project needs to be majorly renovated? I don't want to walk into their office, waving my MCTS and MCPD certificates around, saying that their project's codebase is crap. But I also don't want to have to stay silent and have to write kludgey code atop their kludgey code, because I actually want to write quality software and I want the end product to be stable and easily maintainable.

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• Scrum and Team Consolidation

  - by John K. Hines

  I’m still working my way through one of the more painful team consolidations of my career.  One thing that’s made it hard was my assumption that the use of Agile methods and Scrum would make everything easy.  Take three teams, make all work visible, track it, and presto: An efficient, functioning software development team. What I’ve come to realize is that the primary benefit of Scrum is that Scrum brings teams closer to their customers.  Frequent meetings, short iterations, and phased deployments are all meant to keep the customer in the loop.  It’s true that as teams become proficient with Scrum they tend to become more efficient.  But I don’t think it’s true that Scrum automatically helps people work together. Instead, Scrum can point out when teams aren’t good at working together.   And it really illustrates when teams, especially teams in sustaining mode, are reacting to their customers instead of innovating with them.  At the moment we’ve inherited a huge backlog of tools, processes, and personalities.  It’s up to us to sort them all out.  Unfortunately, after 7 &frac12; months we’re still sorting. What I’d recommend for any blended team is to look at your current product lifecycles and work on a single lifecycle for all work.  If you can’t objectively come up with one process, that’s a good indication that the new team might not be a good fit for being a single unit (which happens all the time in bigger companies).  Go ahead & self-organize into sub-teams.  Then repeat the process. If you can come up with a single process, tackle each piece and standardize all of them.  Do this as soon as possible, as it can be uncomfortable.  Standardize your requirements gathering and tracking, your exploration and technical analysis, your project planning, development standards, validation and sustaining processes.  Standardize all of it.  Make this your top priority, get it out of the way, and get back to work. Lastly, managers of blended teams should realize what I’m suggesting is a disruptive process.  But you’ve just reorganized the team is already disrupted.   Don’t pull the bandage off slowly and force the team through a prolonged transition phase, lowering their productivity over the long term.  You can role model leadership to your team and drive a true consolidation.  Destroy roadblocks, reassure those on your team who are afraid of change, and push forward to create something efficient and beautiful.  Then use Scrum to reengage your customers in a way that they’ll love. Technorati tags: Scrum Scrum Process

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• What type of interview questions should you ask for "legacy" programmers?

  - by Marcus Swope

  We have recently been receiving lots of applicants for our open developer positions from people who I like to refer to as "legacy" programmers. I don't like the term "old" because it seems a little prejudiced (especially to HR!) and it doesn't accurately reflect what I mean. We are a company that does primarily .NET development using TDD in an Agile environment, we use Git as a source control system, we make heavy use of OSS tools and projects and we contribute to them as well, we have a strong bias towards adhering to strong Object-Oriented principles, SOLID, etc, etc, etc... Now, the normal list of questions that we ask doesn't really seem to apply to applicants that are fresh out of school, nor does it seem to apply to these "legacy" programmers. Here is how I (loosely) define a "legacy" programmer. Spent a significant amount of their career working almost exclusively with Assembly/Machine Languages. Primary accomplishments include work done with TANDEM systems. Has extensive experience with technologies like FoxPro and ColdFusion It's not that we somehow think that what we do is "better" than what they do, on the contrary, we respect these types of applicants and we are scared that we may be missing a good candidate. It is just very difficult to get a good read on someone who is essentially speaking a different language than you. To someone like this, it seems a little strange to ask a question like: What is the difference between an abstract class and an interface? Because, I would think that they would almost never know the answer or even what I'm talking about. However, I don't want to eliminate someone who could be a very good candidate in their own right and could be able to eventually learn the stuff that we do. But, I also don't want to just ask a bunch of behavioral questions, because I want to know about their technical background as well. Am I being too naive? Should "legacy" programmers like this already know about things like TDD, source control strategies, and best practices for object-oriented programming? If not, what questions should we ask to get a good representation about whether or not they are still able to learn them and be able to keep up in our fast-paced environment? EDIT: I'm not concerned with whether or not applicants that meet these criteria are in general capable or incapable, as I have already stated that I believe that they can be 100% capable. I am more interested in figuring out how to evaluate their talents, as I am having a hard time figuring out how to determine if they are an A+ "legacy" programmer or if they are a D- "legacy" programmer. I've worked with both.

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• Reasons to Use a VM For Development

  - by George Stocker

  Background: I work at a start-up company, where one team uses Virtual Machines to connect to a remote server to do their development, and another team (the team I'm on) uses local IIS/SQL Server 2005/Visual Studio installations to conduct work. Team VM is located about 1000 miles from Team Non-VM, and the servers the VMs run off of are located near Team VM (Latency, for those that are wondering, is about 50ms). A person high in the company is pushing for Team Non-VM to use virtual machines for programming, development, and testing. The latter point we agree on -- we want Virtual Machines to test configurations and various aspects of the web application in a 'clean' state. The Problem: What we don't agree on is having developers using RDP to connect to a desktop remotely that contains Visual Studio, SQL Server, and IIS to do the same development we could do locally on our laptops. I've tried the VM set-up, and besides the color issue, there is a latency issue that is rather noticeable, not to mention that since we're a start-up, a good number of employees work from home on occasion with our work laptops, and this move would cut off the laptops. They'd be turned in. Reasons to Use Remote VMs for Development (Not Testing!): Here are the stated reasons that this person wants us to use VMs: They work for TeamVM. They keep the source code "safe". If we want to work from home, we could just use our home PCs. Licenses (I don't know what the argument is, only that it's been used). Reasons not to use Remote VMs for Development: Here are the stated reasons why we don't want to use VMs: We like working from home. We get a lot done on our own time. We're not going to use our Home PCs to do work related stuff. The Latency is noticeable. Support for the VMs (if they go down, or if we need a new VM) takes a while. We don't have administrative privileges on the VM, and are unable to change settings as needed. What I'm looking for from the community is this: What reasons would you give for not using VMs for development? Keep in mind these are remote VMs -- this isn't a VM running on a local desktop. It's using the laptop (or a desktop) as a thin client for a remote VM. Also, on the other side of the coin: Is there something we're missing that makes VMs more palatable for development? Edit: I think 'safe' is used in term of corporate espionage, or more correctly if the Laptop gets stolen, the person who stole would have access to our source code. The former (as we've pointed out, is always going to be a possibility -- companies stop that with litigation, there isn't a technical solution (so far as I can see)). The latter point is ( though I don't know its usefulness in a corporate scenario) mitigated by Truecrypt'ing the entire volume.

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• java+netbeans+mysql+ubuntu 64 bits LTS VS C#+MS SQL for fast develop trading system

  - by crunchor

  I am going to build a trading system and use with the broker "Interactive Broker" API. The API supports C++ Socket, Java Socket, DDE, Active X APIs in Windows. The API supports Java Socket API, Posix C++ Socket API in Unix kind like Ubuntu. My trading system has some real time long calculations to do and a lot of maths for backtest. I am using a retail trading program Amibroker which is written in C++ and I run it in windows xp 32 bits, it will take me days to do one serious backtest with my G620 Sandy Bridge CPU and 3GB of ram. So for my trading system, I need to have 1. speed, 2. stability, 3. fast development I have done some research, C++ is fastest but I am not good at it and it takes much longer time to develop. Other than C++, Java in linux has the best speed. I also did some research for database and look like mysql has the best speed. Mysql and PostgreSQL both are very popular open source sql db, which one should I choose? I see MySQL has Workbench now which looks like similar to MS SQL management studio so look like a good start. Netbeans should be the most popular Java IDE now and seem like its GUI design can be as easy as Virtual Studio now. I am not sure if made by Netbeans would affect the speed and if its GUI design is really that good and easy to use. Ubuntu 64 bits LTS has good long term support, good community support, and stable. I will buy a new computer if I can create a good trading system for live trading and backtest. Very likely I will buy a I7 or I5 depends on if I7 can really have better speed for my case. Actually I mainly deal with C# in my jobs and I just knew java but not good at java. What would you guys recommend? Any better solution? This will be a big project and very likely life long project for me so I seriously do research including asking you guys before I start and focus on what I should, thanks!

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• Inverted schedctl usage in the JVM

  - by Dave

  The schedctl facility in Solaris allows a thread to request that the kernel defer involuntary preemption for a brief period. The mechanism is strictly advisory - the kernel can opt to ignore the request. Schedctl is typically used to bracket lock critical sections. That, in turn, can avoid convoying -- threads piling up on a critical section behind a preempted lock-holder -- and other lock-related performance pathologies. If you're interested see the man pages for schedctl_start() and schedctl_stop() and the schedctl.h include file. The implementation is very efficient. schedctl_start(), which asks that preemption be deferred, simply stores into a thread-specific structure -- the schedctl block -- that the kernel maps into user-space. Similarly, schedctl_stop() clears the flag set by schedctl_stop() and then checks a "preemption pending" flag in the block. Normally, this will be false, but if set schedctl_stop() will yield to politely grant the CPU to other threads. Note that you can't abuse this facility for long-term preemption avoidance as the deferral is brief. If your thread exceeds the grace period the kernel will preempt it and transiently degrade its effective scheduling priority. Further reading : US05937187 and various papers by Andy Tucker. We'll now switch topics to the implementation of the "synchronized" locking construct in the HotSpot JVM. If a lock is contended then on multiprocessor systems we'll spin briefly to try to avoid context switching. Context switching is wasted work and inflicts various cache and TLB penalties on the threads involved. If context switching were "free" then we'd never spin to avoid switching, but that's not the case. We use an adaptive spin-then-park strategy. One potentially undesirable outcome is that we can be preempted while spinning. When our spinning thread is finally rescheduled the lock may or may not be available. If not, we'll spin and then potentially park (block) again, thus suffering a 2nd context switch. Recall that the reason we spin is to avoid context switching. To avoid this scenario I've found it useful to enable schedctl to request deferral while spinning. But while spinning I've arranged for the code to periodically check or poll the "preemption pending" flag. If that's found set we simply abandon our spinning attempt and park immediately. This avoids the double context-switch scenario above. One annoyance is that the schedctl blocks for the threads in a given process are tightly packed on special pages mapped from kernel space into user-land. As such, writes to the schedctl blocks can cause false sharing on other adjacent blocks. Hopefully the kernel folks will make changes to avoid this by padding and aligning the blocks to ensure that one cache line underlies at most one schedctl block at any one time.

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• Hadoop growing pains

  - by Piotr Rodak

  This post is not going to be about SQL Server. I have been reading recently more and more about “Big Data” – very catchy term that describes untamed increase of the data that mankind is producing each day and the struggle to capture the meaning of these data. Ten years ago, and perhaps even three years ago this need was not so recognized. Increasing number of smartphones and discernable trend of mainstream Internet traffic moving to the smartphone generated one means that there is bigger and bigger stream of information that has to be stored, transformed, analysed and perhaps monetized. The nature of this traffic makes if very difficult to wrap it into boundaries of relational database engines. The amount of data makes it near to impossible to process them in relational databases within reasonable time. This is where ‘cloud’ technologies come to play. I just read a good article about the growing pains of Hadoop, which became one of the leading players on distributed processing arena within last year or two. Toby Baer concludes in it that lack of enterprise ready toolsets hinders Hadoop’s apprehension in the enterprise world. While this is true, something else drew my attention. According to the article there are already about half of a dozen of commercially supported distributions of Hadoop. For me, who has not been involved into intricacies of open-source world, this is quite interesting observation. On one hand, it is good that there is competition as it is beneficial in the end to the customer. On the other hand, the customer is faced with difficulty of choosing the right distribution. In future, when Hadoop distributions fork even more, this choice will be even harder. The distributions will have overlapping sets of features, yet will be quite incompatible with each other. I suppose it will take a few years until leaders emerge and the market will begin to resemble what we see in Linux world. There are myriads of distributions, but only few are acknowledged by the industry as enterprise standard. Others are honed by bearded individuals with too much time to spend. In any way, the third fact I can’t help but notice about the proliferation of distributions of Hadoop is that IT professionals will have jobs.   BuzzNet Tags: Hadoop,Big Data,Enterprise IT

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• Game timings and formats

  - by topright

  There are more or less standardized TV-show/movie formats and recommended timings: 1. By the early 1960s, television companies commonly presented half-hour long "comedy" series, or one hour long "dramas." Half-hour series were mostly restricted to situation comedy or family comedy, and were usually aired with either a live or artificial laugh track. One hour dramas included genre series such as police and detective series, westerns, science fiction, and, later, serialized prime time soap operas. Programs today still overwhelmingly conform to these half-hour and one hour guidelines. Source 2. In the United States, most medical dramas are one hour long. Source 3. Traditionally serials were broadcast as fifteen minute installments each weekday in daytime slots. In 1956 As the World Turns debuted as the first half-hour soap opera. All soap operas broadcast half-hour episodes by the end of the 1960s. With increased popularity in the 1970s most soap operas expanded to an hour (Another World even expanded to ninety minutes for a short time). More than half of the serials had expanded to one hour episodes by 1980. As of 2010, six of the seven US serials air one hour episodes each weekday. Source Interesting. Are there any standards of timing in game development? Well, 5-20 minutes casual games, of course. There is even a "5-minutes-game" site. And 1-hour-gamer site. Are there 1-week, 1-year, 1-eternity game formats? Chess and Go - deep games that you can study all your life; but they are played in hour or several days (pro games). Addictive long-term online role-playing games (without win-condition) are played in monthes and, possibly, years. Replayability is an important factor to consider. It's good when game design document contains a line: "A game is designed for solving in X hours". How can it be measured before there is any prototype or demo? When you know your game format, you know your audience (and vice versa). It is practical question. Are there psychological researches about dynamic of gaming interest and involvement? And is there a correlation between game format and game genre?

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• Attach to Process in Visual Studio

  - by Daniel Moth

  One option for achieving step 1 in the Live Debugging process is attaching to an already running instance of the process that hosts your code, and this is a good place for me to talk about debug engines. You can attach to a process by selecting the "Debug" menu and then the "Attach To Process…" menu in Visual Studio 11 (Ctrl+Alt+P with my keyboard bindings), and you should see something like this screenshot: I am not going to explain this UI, besides being fairly intuitive, there is good documentation on MSDN for the Attach dialog. I do want to focus on the row of controls that starts with the "Attach to:" label and ends with the "Select..." button. Between them is the readonly textbox that indicates the debug engine that will be used for the selected process if you click the "Attach" button. If you haven't encountered that term before, read on MSDN about debug engines. Notice that the "Type" column shows the Code Type(s) that can be detected for the process. Typically each debug engine knows how to debug a specific code type (the two terms tend to be used interchangeably). If you click on a different process in the list with a different code type, the debug engine used will be different. However note that this is the automatic behavior. If you believe you know best, or more typically you want to choose the debug engine for a process using more than one code type, you can do so by clicking the "Select..." button, which should yield a "Select Code Type" dialog like this one: In this dialog you can switch to the debug engine you want to use by checking the box in front of your desired one, then hit "OK", then hit "Attach" to use it. Notice that the dialog suggests that you can select more than one. Not all combinations work (you'll get an error if you select two incompatible debug engines), but some do. Also notice in the list of debug engines one of the new players in Visual Studio 11, the GPU debug engine - I will be covering that on the C++ AMP team blog (and no, it cannot be combined with any others in this release). Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• OTN Latinoamérica Tour 2012

  - by Dana Singleterry

  Better late than never. Sorry for the delay on getting this content up for all of you and thanks again for your attendance. A number of excellent questions came out of the sessions I delivered and herein I'm providing you with the content, in pdf format, for those sessions. I'm also providing pointers to Forms to ADF integration/migration as well as some details around OAF as used in E-Business Suite and ADF. Here's the sessions delivered by location. Click on any of the links to download the session content in pdf format. Montevideo Uruguay: Is Oracle ADF Simpler than Oracle Forms? Understanding the Fusion Development Platform Building Web Data Dashboards Without Coding Buenos Aires, Argentina: Is Oracle ADF Simpler than Oracle Forms? Developing Cross Device Mobile Applications Sao Paulo, Brazil Understanding the Fusion Development Platform Is Oracle ADF Simpler than Oracle Forms? A brief note on Form Integration & Migration: Does your organization have an Oracle Forms application that you'd like to migrate to ADF? Or, perhaps you're an Oracle Forms Developer and want to modernize your application development skills? If so, you've come to the right place! This section will strive to answer common questions that arise as you move from Forms to ADF. Our Oracle Forms Statement of Direction points out that Oracle is committed to the long-term support of Oracle Forms and Reports. However, many customers feel they are outgrowing their Forms applications. Users are demanding more sophisticated and interactive users interfaces. Executives are requiring SOA-enabled applications that integrate with peripheral services. Development leads are encouraging a more modern approach to application development, including adherence to design patterns like MVC. So even as Oracle still supports Forms, the list of reasons to move off of it is becoming more compelling and is only gaining further momentum by the fact that Oracle's own Fusion Applications are using ADF. Developers and organizations looking to align with both the technology stack and look-and-feel of Fusion Applications are choosing ADF, and thus reaping the benefits of years of best practices in enterprise application development that are baked into the ADF framework. So, if you decide to migrate off of Forms for any of these reasons, ADF is the way to go. Grant Ronald has published a video of our position on the subject, along with an ODTUG article explaining our direction. These materials explain that there are other migration tools/frameworks/paths, but the best choice is usually to follow Gartner's recommendation that if you are going to migrate off of Oracle Forms, ADF is the least risky and least costly migration path. Please visit the Oracle Forms page here. For details around OAF as used in E-Business Suite (EBS) and when to use ADF with EBS you can review the following blogs from Shay Shmeltzer. To ADF or to OAF? or Can I use ADF with Oracle E-Business Suite?

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• Enhance Your Browsing with Hyperwords in Firefox

  - by Asian Angel

  While browsing it is easy to find information that you would like to know more about, convert, or translate. The Hyperwords extension provides access to these types of resources and more in Firefox. Using Hyperwords Once the extension has finished installing you will be presented with a demo video that will let you learn more about how Hyperwords works. For our first example we chose to look for more information concerning “WASP-12b” using Wikipedia. Notice the small bluish circle on the lower right of the highlighted term…it is the default access for the Hyperwords menu (access by hovering mouse over it). If you hover over the the Wikipedia (or other) link you can access the information in a scrollable popup window. Or if you prefer click on the link to view the information in a new tab. Choose the style that best suits your needs. Hyperwords is extremely useful for quick unit conversions. Suppose you want to share a news story that you have found while browsing. Highlight the title, access Hyperwords, and choose your preferred sharing source. You may need to authorize access for Hyperwords to post to your account. Once you have authorized access you can start sharing those links very easily. This is just a small sampling of Hyperwords many useful features. Preferences Hyperwords has a nice set of preferences available to help you customize it. Alter the menu popup style, add or remove menu entries, and modify other functions for Hyperwords. Conclusion Hyperwords makes a nice addition to Firefox for anyone needing quick access to search, reference, translation, and other services while browsing. Links Download the Hyperwords extension (Mozilla Add-ons) Download the Hyperwords extension (Extension Homepage) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Switch to Private Browsing Mode Easily with Toggle Private BrowsingPreview Tabs in Firefox with Tab Preview 0.3You Really Want to Completely Disable Tabs in Firefox?Quick Hits: 11 Firefox Tab How-TosWhen to Use Protect Tab vs Lock Tab in Firefox TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 Outlook Tools, one stop tweaking for any Outlook version Zoofs, find the most popular tweeted YouTube videos Video preview of new Windows Live Essentials 21 Cursor Packs for XP, Vista & 7 Map the Stars with Stellarium Use ILovePDF To Split and Merge PDF Files

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• Play Thousands of Online Radio Stations with Shoutcast in VLC

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Are you looking for more variety from your radio stations? Today we’ll take a look at how to easily stream thousands of radio stations to your desktop with VLC media player. Getting Started Select Media from the menu, go to Services Discovery, and click Shoutcast radio listings.   Next, select View from the menu and click Playlist.   Or, click on the Show Playlist button In the Playlist window, click on Shoutcast radio listings in the left pane. You should then see a very long list of Titles displayed on the right. Scroll though the list to find a music genre or topic that interests you. Double-click to expand the list of station options. Select one of the channel listings from the list and double click to begin playing.   Looking for a specific station? Type a search term into the search filter box to see if it is available.   That’s it. Sit back and enjoy listening to your favorite Internet radio programming. If you are a music or talk radio fan, you aren’t likely to run out of listening options in VLC. Want to find some more uses for VLC? Check out our articles on how to copy a DVD, convert video files to MP3, and how to set a video as your desktop wallpaper. Download VLC Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Listen to Over 100,000 Radio Stations in Windows Media CenterListen to Local FM Radio in Windows 7 Media CenterListen and Record Over 12,000 Online Radio Stations with RadioSureGeek Reviews: Play And Record Internet Radio With Screamer RadioWeekend Fun: Watch Television on Your PC with AnyTV TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 Zoofs, find the most popular tweeted YouTube videos Video preview of new Windows Live Essentials 21 Cursor Packs for XP, Vista & 7 Map the Stars with Stellarium Use ILovePDF To Split and Merge PDF Files TimeToMeet is a Simple Online Meeting Planning Tool

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• Fast Data: Go Big. Go Fast.

  - by J Swaroop

  Cross-posting Dain Hansen's excellent recap of the Big Data/Fast Data announcement during OOW: For those of you who may have missed it, today’s second full day of Oracle OpenWorld 2012 started with a rumpus. Joe Tucci, from EMC outlined the human face of big data with real examples of how big data is transforming our world. And no not the usual tried-and-true weblog examples, but real stories about taxi cab drivers in Singapore using big data to better optimize their routes as well as folks just trying to get a better hair cut. Next we heard from Thomas Kurian who talked at length about the important platform characteristics of Oracle’s Cloud and more specifically Oracle’s expanded Cloud Services portfolio. Especially interesting to our integration customers are the messaging support for Oracle’s Cloud applications. What this means is that now Oracle’s Cloud applications have a lightweight integration fabric that on-premise applications can communicate to it via REST-APIs using Oracle SOA Suite. It’s an important element to our strategy at Oracle that supports this idea that whether your requirements are for private or public, Oracle has a solution in the Cloud for all of your applications and we give you more deployment choice than any vendor. If this wasn’t enough to get the juices flowing, later that morning we heard from Hasan Rizvi who outlined in his Fusion Middleware session the four most important enterprise imperatives: Social, Mobile, Cloud, and a brand new one: Fast Data. Today, Rizvi made an important step in the definition of this term to explain that he believes it’s a convergence of four essential technology elements: Event Processing for event filtering, business rules – with Oracle Event Processing Data Transformation and Loading - with Oracle Data Integrator Real-time replication and integration – with Oracle GoldenGate Analytics and data discovery – with Oracle Business Intelligence Each of these four elements can be considered (and architect-ed) together on a single integrated platform that can help customers integrate any type of data (structured, semi-structured) leveraging new styles of big data technologies (MapReduce, HDFS, Hive, NoSQL) to process more volume and variety of data at a faster velocity with greater results.  Fast data processing (and especially real-time) has always been our credo at Oracle with each one of these products in Fusion Middleware. For example, Oracle GoldenGate continues to be made even faster with the recent 11g R2 Release of Oracle GoldenGate which gives us some even greater optimization to Oracle Database with Integrated Capture, as well as some new heterogeneity capabilities. With Oracle Data Integrator with Big Data Connectors, we’re seeing much improved performance by running MapReduce transformations natively on Hadoop systems. And with Oracle Event Processing we’re seeing some remarkable performance with customers like NTT Docomo. Check out their upcoming session at Oracle OpenWorld on Wednesday to hear more how this customer is using Event processing and Big Data together. If you missed any of these sessions and keynotes, not to worry. There's on-demand versions available on the Oracle OpenWorld website. You can also checkout our upcoming webcast where we will outline some of these new breakthroughs in Data Integration technologies for Big Data, Cloud, and Real-time in more details.

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• Programming and Ubiquitous Language (DDD) in a non-English domain

  - by Sandor Drieënhuizen

  I know there are some questions already here that are closely related to this subject but none of them take Ubiquitous Language as the starting point so I think that justifies this question. For those who don't know: Ubiquitous Language is the concept of defining a (both spoken and written) language that is equally used across developers and domain experts to avoid inconsistencies and miscommunication due to translation problems and misunderstanding. You will see the same terminology show up in code, conversations between any team member, functional specs and whatnot. So, what I was wondering about is how to deal with Ubiquitous Language in non-English domains. Personally, I strongly favor writing programming code in English completely, including comments but ofcourse excluding constants and resources. However, in a non-English domain, I'm forced to make a decision either to: Write code reflecting the Ubiquitous Language in the natural language of the domain. Translate the Ubiquitous Language to English and stop communicating in the natural language of the domain. Define a table that defines how the Ubiquitous Language translates to English. Here are some of my thoughts based on these options: 1) I have a strong aversion against mixed-language code, that is coding using type/member/variable names etc. that are non-English. Most programming languages 'breathe' English to a large extent and most of the technical literature, design pattern names etc. are in English as well. Therefore, in most cases there's just no way of writing code entirely in a non-English language so you end up with mixed languages anyway. 2) This will force the domain experts to start thinking and talking in the English equivalent of the UL, something that will probably not come naturally to them and therefore hinders communication significantly. 3) In this case, the developers communicate with the domain experts in their native language while the developers communicate with each other in English and most importantly, they write code using the English translation of the UL. I'm sure I don't want to go for the first option and I think option 3 is much better than option 2. What do you think? Am I missing other options? UPDATE Today, about year later, having dealt with this issue on a daily basis, I have to say that option 3 has worked out pretty well for me. It wasn't as tedious as I initially feared and translating in real time while talking to the client wasn't a problem either. I also found the following advantages to be true, based on my experience. Translating the UL makes you pay more attention to defining the UL and even the domain itself, especially when you don't know how to translate a term and you have to start looking through dictionaries etc. This has even caused me to reconsider domain modeling decisions a few times. It helps you make your knowledge of the English language more profound. Obviously, your code is much more pleasant to look at instead of being a mind boggling obscenity.

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• Don Knuth and MMIXAL vs. Chuck Moore and Forth -- Algorithms and Ideal Machines -- was there cross-pollination / influence in their ideas / work?

  - by AKE

  Question: To what extent is it known (or believed) that Chuck Moore and Don Knuth had influence on each other's thoughts on ideal machines, or their work on algorithms? I'm interested in citations, interviews, articles, links, or any other sort of evidence. It could also be evidence of the form of A and B here suggest that Moore might have borrowed or influenced C and D from Knuth here, or vice versa. (Opinions are of course welcome, but references / links would be better!) Context: Until fairly recently, I have been primarily familiar with Knuth's work on algorithms and computing models, mostly through TAOCP but also through his interviews and other writings. However, the more I have been using Forth, the more I am struck by both the power of a stack-based machine model, and the way in which the spareness of the model makes fundamental algorithmic improvements more readily apparent. A lot of what Knuth has done in fundamental analysis of algorithms has, it seems to me, a very similar flavour, and I can easily imagine that in a parallel universe, Knuth might perhaps have chosen Forth as his computing model. That's the software / algorithms / programming side of things. When it comes to "ideal computing machines", Knuth in the 70s came up with the MIX computer model, and then, collaborating with designers of state-of-the-art RISC chips through the 90s, updated this with the modern MMIX model and its attendant assembly language MMIXAL. Meanwhile, Moore, having been using and refining Forth as a language, but using it on top of whatever processor happened to be in the computer he was programming, began to imagine a world in which the efficiency and value of stack-based programming were reflected in hardware. So he went on in the 80s to develop his own stack-based hardware chips, defining the term MISC (Minimal Instruction Set Computers) along the way, and ending up eventually with the first Forth chip, the MuP21. Both are brilliant men with keen insight into the art of programming and algorithms, and both work at the intersection between algorithms, programs, and bare metal hardware (i.e. hardware without the clutter of operating systems). Which leads me to the headlined question... Question:To what extent is it known (or believed) that Chuck Moore and Don Knuth had influence on each other's thoughts on ideal machines, or their work on algorithms?

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• Lubuntu Desktop messed up for logged in user, but not for guest

  - by RPi Awesomeness

  I recently upgraded my laptop from Lubuntu 12.04 to 14.04.1 and the upgrade process seemed to go fine. However, when I went to login as my normal user, I encountered an issue. The background loaded up, but none of LXDE or LXPanel showed up, leaving me with an empty desktop and nothing else except two errors. I thought that this was weird, so I just figured something had been messed up and would be fixed by a reboot. But it wasn't. I then tried logging in as guest, and it's just fine. I checked the ~/.xsession-errors file (for my main user, not guest, did it via TTY1) and this is what I got: Script for ibus started at run_im. Script for auto started at run_im. Script for default started at run_im. init: Unable to register as subreaper: Invalid argument init: lxsession main process (1649) killed by TERM signal init: Disconnected from notified D-Bus bus init: job dbus failed to stop init: job upstart-dbus-session-bridge failed to stop init: job upstart-dbus-system-bridge failed to stop init: job upstart-file-bridge failed to stop I also read the sometimes removing the ~/.Xauthority file can help, if the ownership is messed up. ls -l /home/MYUSER/.Xauthority tells me -rw------- 1 MYUSER MYUSER 60 Aug 16 09:57 /home/MYUSER/.Xauthority. Should that be root or something else, or should I try deleting that and ~/.profile. Here's what ~/.profile looks like: # ~/.profile: executed by the command interpreter for login shells. # This file is not read by bash(1), if ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bash_login # exists. # see /usr/share/doc/bash/examples/startup-files for examples. # the files are located in the bash-doc package. # the default umask is set in /etc/profile; for setting the umask # for ssh logins, install and configure the libpam-umask package. #umask 022 # if running bash if [ -n "$BASH_VERSION" ]; then # include .bashrc if it exists if [ -f "$HOME/.bashrc" ]; then . "$HOME/.bashrc" fi fi # set PATH so it includes user's private bin if it exists if [ -d "$HOME/bin" ] ; then PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH" fi Should I post the output of dmesg? I'll try and get a screenshot, but does anyone have any idea what could be causing the desktop (LXDE/LXPanel) not to display? EDIT I attempted removing the ~/.XAuthority file, but that didn't seem to do anything.

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• The Social Business Thought Leaders - Ray Wang

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  It seems both consumers and businesses are at the peak of the social hype. Overwhelmed by social media channels, platforms, and processes both in their private and professional life, many early adopters are starting to feel the social fatigue. Mirroring what happened with email and web sites during the late 1990's - early 2000's, more and more managers are looking to move from ubiquitous social media tactics to the most appropriate business use case and processes. This step becomes even more important considering the year over year contraction in IT budgets and the consequent need to maximize return on every dollar spent in new technologies. Ray Wang, CEO and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, suggests engagement through collaborative technologies both as a conceptual model and a transformational tool for enterprises to reap business value. Without participation - the reasoning goes - there is no value and good technology alone is not enough to guarantee employee and customer adoption. Enterprise gamification is a new lever to succeed with Social Business by directing a critical mass of participation towards desired outcomes. What kind of outcomes? A recent study from Constellation Research (see 2012 Q1 Gamification Early Adopters Best Practices) highlights how Marketing, Customer Service and HR are leading the pack with gamification in processes such as: Sustaining long term customer loyalty (76.4%) Improving response in campaign to lead (74.5%) Right channeling incidents for resolution in social media (67.3%) Growing the number service and support incidents resolved by the community (63.6%) Improving employee referral rates and effective recruiting (43.6%) Driving on-boarding success with new hires (20%) More than simply adding badges, points and leaderboards to existing processes, enterprise gamification should be holistically embedded into employee and customer experience to stimulate specific behaviors. According to Ray Wang this can be done at three core levels: Measurable actions. The behaviors we want to facilitate consist of granular actions (i.e likes, comments, posts, recommendations, etc) and more complex actions (i.e projects, initiatives, programmes) attributed to individuals, groups and/or external actors  Reputation. The reputation an individual has earned through his actions is a key factor in building motivation among others and it is determined by its identity, social standing status and competitiveness Incentives or the intrinsic and extrinsic rewards that motivate behaviors and drive actions Listen to Ray Wang's video-interview to learn more about the dynamics that are shaping the future of collaboration and how gamification can help organizations attain new levels of engagement.

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• Get to Know a Candidate (12 of 25): Andre Barnett&ndash;Reform Party

  - by Brian Lanham

  DISCLAIMER: This is not a post about “Romney” or “Obama”. This is not a post for whom I am voting. Information sourced for Wikipedia. Barnett is an American politician and entrepreneur. He is the founder of the information technology (IT) company WiseDome Inc.  Barnett was born in Zanesville, Ohio in 1976. He attended Austin Peay State University and Western Governors University.  A former member of the United States Armed Forces, Barnett served in Sarajevo before being wounded in a helicopter accident.  Following his military service, Barnett became a fitness model in New York. In 2001, he founded WiseDome Incorporated, an IT company that provides information technology and data recovery services. Reform Party of the United States of America (RPUSA), generally known as the Reform Party USA or the Reform Party, is a political party in the United States, founded in 1995 by Ross Perot. Perot said Americans were disillusioned with the state of politics—as being corrupt and unable to deal with vital issues—and desired a viable alternative to the Republican and Democratic Parties. The party has nominated different candidates over the years, such as founder Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, and Ralph Nader. The party's most significant victory came when Jesse Ventura was elected governor of Minnesota in 1998. Since then, the party has been torn by infighting and disagreements, which it seeks to overcome. The Reform Party platform includes the following: * Maintaining a balanced budget, ensured by passing a Balanced Budget Amendment and changing budgeting practices, and paying down the federal debt * Campaign finance reform, including strict limits on campaign contributions and the outlawing of the Political action committee * Enforcement of existing immigration laws and opposition to illegal immigration * Opposition to free trade agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement and Central America Free Trade Agreement, and a call for withdrawal from the World Trade Organization * Term limits on U.S. Representatives and Senators * Direct election of the United States President by popular vote * Federal elections held on weekends A noticeable absence from the Reform Party platform has been social issues, including abortion and gay rights. Reform Party representatives had long stated beliefs that their party could bring together people from both sides of these issues, which they consider divisive, to address what they considered to be more vital concerns as expressed in their platform. The idea was to form a large coalition of moderates; that intention was overridden in 2001 by the Buchanan takeover which rewrote the RPUSA Constitution to specifically include platform planks opposed to any form of abortion. The Buchananists, in turn, were overridden by the 2002 Convention which specifically reverted the Constitution to its 1996 version and the party's original stated goals. Barnett has Ballot Access in: FL Learn more about Andre Barnett and Reform Party on Wikipedia.

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