I Learnt Today…

2010-04-01

In 1930s, a group of economists developed an approach to understand relationship among a firm’s environment, behaviour and performance. This theoretical framework, since then, is known as the Structure-Conduct-Performance (S-C-P) Model.

Structure, in this model refers to the structure of the industry in which the firm is operating. According to their findings, following factors could be used by a firm to measure the industry structure it’s operating in.

• Number of Competing Firms
• Homogeneity of Products
• Cost of Entry and Exit

Conduct refers to the set of strategies that the firm implement to gain competitive advantage over its rivals.

Performance in the s-c-p model has two meanings:

1. Performance of the individual firm
2. Performance of the economy as a whole

The Link Among Structure, Conduct and Performance

Attributes of the industry structure define the range of options and constraints a firm has to face. In highly competitive industries, firms have a very limited motion space as they are only let with a very few options too many constraints when compared to options. In such setting, both firm’s conduct and long term performance are determined by the industry structure making (in general) firms only able to gain competitive (not competitive advantage).

On the other hand, in less competitive industries, firms have the liberty of large ranges of conduct options and fewer constraints, enabling capable firms to gain competitive advantages. However, even at this type of setting, the industry structure can impact on firms critically such as deciding how long a firm can maintain its competitive advantage.

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Cassian Menol Razeek

2009-05-19

English is not my first language so I use online dictionaries frequently as a part of my daily routine to clarify and learn unfamiliar words as I read through articles in the Internet.

I have been using www.ditionary.com for a long time and I had the plan to make this work easy by creating a small application to retrieve the definition with support of a web service. This morning suddenly a new idea hit me to use JavaScript to get the word in the first place and load the appropriate URL.

How Does This Work?

When a user enters a word in the www.dictionary.com interface it redirects the user to the following dynamic URL.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Target-Word

Target-Word is The word we are seeking the definition for

What this JavaScript does is it retrieves the desired word from the user via a prompt, generate the appropriate URL according to the above format and open the new URL in a new window or tab so the time taken (under normal circumstance) to, load the web site, type-in the word, wait till the site redirects you, is saved. Now time is only taken for a single server request/response.

How To Set This Up?

It’s simple, just add a new favorite (for IE) or bookmark (for FireFox) in your browser and paste following code as the URL (for IE) or Location (for FireFox):

javascript:(function(){var%20word=prompt(%22Enter Word:%22);if(word!=null){window.open(%22http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/%22+word);}})();

Now, when you open the favorite/bookmark, it will ask you for the word you want to look for and open the definition in a new window/tab.

It’s easier to use if you add the bookmark/favorite as a button into your bookmark/links toolbar

This small script helps me a lot now so I hope this would help you too!

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Cassian Menol Razeek

2009-05-11

I have being working on a software application made on .Net and recently my client asked me to use D LINQ instead of SQL.

D LINQ has great benefits loaded! As I started working with DLINQ I started to know that preventing SQL injection is not a headache anymore and misspelled SQL queries will not trouble agian at run time because DLINQ generates all necessary SQL inside the framework!

I chose to use annotations inside the class instead of using separate xml file. Following is a part of the first class I ported to D LINQ.

</p>

<table(Name:="tbl_Process")> _
Public Class Process
<column(Name:="ProcessID", DbType:="Int", isprimarykey:=True)> _
Public ProcessID As Integer
<column(Name:="BusinessProcessID", DbType:="varchar(50)")> _
Public BusinessProcessID As String
<column(Name:="ProcessText", DbType:="varchar(50)", isprimarykey:=True)> _
Public ProcessText As String
...
...

ProcessID column is the primary key of my database table tbl_Process.

Important Point: I use database to auto-generate values for the primary key column (integer value incremented by one).

So when I run the application, It gave me this unexpected error:

Cannot insert explicit value for identity column in table ‘tbl_Process’ when IDENTITY_INSERT is set to OFF.

Basically, the IDENTITY_INSERT when using the database to auto generate value for a field but when I ran a SQL insert statement at the database end it worked fine!

After some tough time I found out the solution for this problem!

When we use an auto-generate field in a data table we have to specifically mention it in the matching field in the appropriate class.

The code to state this is:

Syntax:

IsDbGenerated:=True

This has to be added to the annotation added for the specific column like:

</p>

<column(Name:="ProcessID", DbType:="Int", isprimarykey:=True, IsDbGenerated:=True)> _
Public ProcessID As Integer

Now D LINQ can understand that the field value is auto-generated by the database!

Was this post helpful to you? How can I improve? – Your comment is highly appreciated!

Cassian Menol Razeek