We had some screenshots sent in Word too... interestingly they were actual photos taken of the screen because the system wasn't hooked up to a network at the time, and they needed to email from another computer (still no reason to put it in Word... just email me the JPG) and apparently they didn't have a USB thumbdrive. Also interesting is that the problem they were having was with a virus (for real) on a computer that was supposedly not networked, and no thumbdrive... curious.
Ok, here's a decent method I've used for estimating:
"Brainstorm" all tasks. Mindmaps work well here. Experience helps. Talk to other people who've done it before.
For all tasks, come up with a best case and worst case amount of time (e.g. if everything went perfectly, it might take me 5 hours to code up this page, but I could get hung up chasing down some stupid bug, and it could take me a day and a half...)
Then, for each task, pick a "probable" amount of time between best and worst.
Using a spreadsheet, calculate a base time for each task = (best + 4*probable + worst)/6
Assign each task a rough "risk" value. I use: low (done it before), medium (haven't done it before, but it's a common task in the industry, so it'll take some research, but I'm sure I can do it), high (cutting/bleeding edge)
Calculate an "uncertainty factor" for each task. I like to use (worst-best)/6
Take the base time for each task and add one "uncertainty factor" if it's medium risk, and two "uncertainty factors" if it's high risk. This is your adjusted time
Add up the adjusted time for each task, add 10% contingency (for stuff you didn't think of in the first step), and that's your estimate.
Obviously the hardest part is trying to come up with the list of tasks in the first place.
The best judge of good code is always other programmers. I also think that once you move into management for a few years, you start to lose the ability to tell good code, because there really is an element of the "best application of current technology" somewhere in there.
The worst place to work would be a place where nobody ever looked at or judged your code. That's like an author with no audience.
Sealand continues to exist because they're not hurting anyone and there's no advantage to kicking them off their little platform.
The same could be said of many not-so-powerful nations around the world, now couldn't it? The fact that Sealand may be one of the weakest and least able to defend itself just makes it an interesting boundary case, but it doesn't mean that Sealand isn't a sovereign nation.
Whenever I've used agile with the right people, it was a breeze getting the job done.
Well, whenever I've done anything with the "right people", it's always been a breeze. The problem is that those projects are few and far between. The methodology that will eventually work the best is one that takes the wrong people and makes them productive. (Like assembly lines making cars - if you had a bunch of skilled mechanics, they could make a good car, but if all you have is a bunch of high school drop outs, and you want to build good cars, you need an extremely rigid process to make them useful.)
Along the lines of what you're saying, where I see "traditional" engineers being most useful is in an established business where you need to take an existing process and make it more efficient. But coming up with a new business idea and executing it successfully, I don't think you can teach that in university. Best way to learn that is to find good mentors, and then try and fail a few times.
I don't know where you've been working, but I think middle management is full of engineers who were attracted into management by the "career promotion" but ended up sucking because management is all about the "softer" people skills, not analytical ability. Not that analytical ability doesn't hurt, but you need to be interactive, outgoing, etc..
Basically you could drop out of university half way through without taking any particular program, and still be successful in business if you just find the right combination of resources, need, and luck and put it all together at the right time.
But couldn't you have some kind of option you could turn on in your connection string that only allows one call per connection? Enable that and you've added some security to your site, but not removed any features.
We're currently trying to upgrade a.NET 1.1 web application to.NET 3.5. I assure you that Microsoft didn't appear to have backward compatibility on their minds when they went from.NET 1.1 to.NET 2.0.
So far I've found Hak5 interesting (also from Revision3). It's definitely unpolished (I find it charming), but it does introduce you to some interesting topics I wouldn't normally have noted. Of course, nothing's going to go into 100% detail, but at least it's a starting point.
You can automate both the voting process and the vote tallying process, provided you publish a government standard ballot format. The vote machine generates the standard paper ballot that has both human readable (text) and machine readable (e.g. 2D barcode) data on it. The human who votes verifies their vote using the human readable portion. The vote tallying machine scans the paper ballots and tallies the votes.
That allows you to tally votes electronically for efficiency and speed, but if there's a problem, you can go back and count by hand. If you find that the hand count doesn't match the electronic count, you start checking the encoded information vs. the human readable information. If they match, then the vote tallying system is to blame, and you sue that company. If they don't match, then the vote generating machine is to blame, and you sue that company.
Hydrogen is not a power source, it's a power storage medium. The idea is you take electricity(solar, wind, wave, etc.) that you don't need at the moment (night time?) and use it to break water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. You then store the hydrogen and burn it with oxygen when you actually need it.
There aren't huge masses of easily accessible raw hydrogen molecules sitting around all over the Earth like there is with coal.
If you play an MMO based on a movie/TV show where there's a very small number of super powerful characters, then everyone wants to play the game as those characters and be super-powerful compared to everyone else. But you can't do that well in an MMO because not everyone can be uber. Obviously everone wants to play as a vampire slayer (or a vampire, I guess) just like in Star Wars Galaxies everyone wanted to play as a Jedi.
I think something like a Harry Potter MMO would make more sense. You start off with little to no powers but earn them at every level, and you can make every character go through the same levelling (i.e. Hogwarts school). It would make more sense that the main character (you) is just like everyone else in the game.
Most American action movies don't really lend themselves well to MMOs because there tends to be a single hero character with clear advantages over everyone else. Hard to model that in an MMO.
Southwestern Ontario, Canada has always seemed pretty mild to me living here. Not that we never get the odd tornado or covered in ice sometimes, but certianly nothing like the major disasters the seem to happen elsewhere. *Knocks on wood*
I'm pretty sure that no matter what file format the files are stored in, somewhere on the successor to the internet 25 years from now there will be a converter that will read them. The problem is obviously the media (physical format). Hard copies of the photos on high quality paper will work, but you won't get exact digital copies if that's what you need.
There are other options. One very common 2D barcode format is PDF417. A quick google search indicates you can print 1144 characters (I interpret that as bytes) per square inch. If you figure there's up to 84 square inches of printable area on a standard letter sized piece of paper, and you use JPEG compression, then you could put about one 4x6" picture's worth of data on each piece of paper (my math says about 95k per page). Print it out on really good acid free paper. PDF417 uses error detection and correction technology, so even if there's a bit of damage, it should come out intact.
Label the top of each page as PDF417 format. Leave it as an exercise to the next generation to scan them in and decode them.
Plus you could put printed hard copies of the photos in there too as a backup.
What's more interesting to me is that you can look through the portal and see what's on the other side, including the object that just went through. In fact, you can put two portals on the floor beside each other, drop an object into one and you basically see two copies of the object oscillating alternately. If you stand near the portals you can see the object in two places. I just think that's neat.
I had a similar experience. I liked Snowcrash and loved Cryptonomicon, but it took me about 2 years to read through the Baroque Cycle trilogy without many breaks reading other books. Since I finished a year ago, I've read at least 10 more books (not Stephenson though).
I just found that the Baroque Cycle books (especially the middle one) were just overly descriptive, particularly about the setting, and I just didn't care. I've seen enough period pieces to have a decent idea of what London looked like in those days, so I don't need to read about the way the sunlight plays off the brickwork.
I remember my wife saying the same thing about Snowcrash - that it was too descriptive, and I couldn't understand what she was talking about. Now I have an idea how she felt.
The most enjoyable parts of the trilogy were the action parts with Jack, and the science/economics parts.
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We had some screenshots sent in Word too... interestingly they were actual photos taken of the screen because the system wasn't hooked up to a network at the time, and they needed to email from another computer (still no reason to put it in Word... just email me the JPG) and apparently they didn't have a USB thumbdrive. Also interesting is that the problem they were having was with a virus (for real) on a computer that was supposedly not networked, and no thumbdrive... curious.
Citation: Wikipedian Protester
Ok, here's a decent method I've used for estimating:
Obviously the hardest part is trying to come up with the list of tasks in the first place.
The best judge of good code is always other programmers. I also think that once you move into management for a few years, you start to lose the ability to tell good code, because there really is an element of the "best application of current technology" somewhere in there.
The worst place to work would be a place where nobody ever looked at or judged your code. That's like an author with no audience.
Sealand continues to exist because they're not hurting anyone and there's no advantage to kicking them off their little platform.
The same could be said of many not-so-powerful nations around the world, now couldn't it? The fact that Sealand may be one of the weakest and least able to defend itself just makes it an interesting boundary case, but it doesn't mean that Sealand isn't a sovereign nation.
The longer-term goal is to create a system with the level of complexity of a cat's brain.
We can already model a cat's behavior in software.
Well, whenever I've done anything with the "right people", it's always been a breeze. The problem is that those projects are few and far between. The methodology that will eventually work the best is one that takes the wrong people and makes them productive. (Like assembly lines making cars - if you had a bunch of skilled mechanics, they could make a good car, but if all you have is a bunch of high school drop outs, and you want to build good cars, you need an extremely rigid process to make them useful.)
Along the lines of what you're saying, where I see "traditional" engineers being most useful is in an established business where you need to take an existing process and make it more efficient. But coming up with a new business idea and executing it successfully, I don't think you can teach that in university. Best way to learn that is to find good mentors, and then try and fail a few times.
I don't know where you've been working, but I think middle management is full of engineers who were attracted into management by the "career promotion" but ended up sucking because management is all about the "softer" people skills, not analytical ability. Not that analytical ability doesn't hurt, but you need to be interactive, outgoing, etc..
Basically you could drop out of university half way through without taking any particular program, and still be successful in business if you just find the right combination of resources, need, and luck and put it all together at the right time.
But couldn't you have some kind of option you could turn on in your connection string that only allows one call per connection? Enable that and you've added some security to your site, but not removed any features.
Ok sir, I'll get off your lawn.
We're currently trying to upgrade a .NET 1.1 web application to .NET 3.5. I assure you that Microsoft didn't appear to have backward compatibility on their minds when they went from .NET 1.1 to .NET 2.0.
Wouldn't something like a "pay it forward" scheme work better? Like by signing up for this treatment, you agree to be a donor twice in the future...
So far I've found Hak5 interesting (also from Revision3). It's definitely unpolished (I find it charming), but it does introduce you to some interesting topics I wouldn't normally have noted. Of course, nothing's going to go into 100% detail, but at least it's a starting point.
You can automate both the voting process and the vote tallying process, provided you publish a government standard ballot format. The vote machine generates the standard paper ballot that has both human readable (text) and machine readable (e.g. 2D barcode) data on it. The human who votes verifies their vote using the human readable portion. The vote tallying machine scans the paper ballots and tallies the votes.
That allows you to tally votes electronically for efficiency and speed, but if there's a problem, you can go back and count by hand. If you find that the hand count doesn't match the electronic count, you start checking the encoded information vs. the human readable information. If they match, then the vote tallying system is to blame, and you sue that company. If they don't match, then the vote generating machine is to blame, and you sue that company.
Hydrogen is not a power source, it's a power storage medium. The idea is you take electricity(solar, wind, wave, etc.) that you don't need at the moment (night time?) and use it to break water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. You then store the hydrogen and burn it with oxygen when you actually need it.
There aren't huge masses of easily accessible raw hydrogen molecules sitting around all over the Earth like there is with coal.
...and I didn't realize the standard measurement for transformers had been changed to tons. Must be a European measurement?
I think kVA or MVA would be a better statistic.
Except that RAID only gives you redundancy at a single geographic location.
Why wouldn't you just encrypt your files before you send them up to the storage cloud?
If you play an MMO based on a movie/TV show where there's a very small number of super powerful characters, then everyone wants to play the game as those characters and be super-powerful compared to everyone else. But you can't do that well in an MMO because not everyone can be uber. Obviously everone wants to play as a vampire slayer (or a vampire, I guess) just like in Star Wars Galaxies everyone wanted to play as a Jedi.
I think something like a Harry Potter MMO would make more sense. You start off with little to no powers but earn them at every level, and you can make every character go through the same levelling (i.e. Hogwarts school). It would make more sense that the main character (you) is just like everyone else in the game.
Most American action movies don't really lend themselves well to MMOs because there tends to be a single hero character with clear advantages over everyone else. Hard to model that in an MMO.
Southwestern Ontario, Canada has always seemed pretty mild to me living here. Not that we never get the odd tornado or covered in ice sometimes, but certianly nothing like the major disasters the seem to happen elsewhere. *Knocks on wood*
I'm pretty sure that no matter what file format the files are stored in, somewhere on the successor to the internet 25 years from now there will be a converter that will read them. The problem is obviously the media (physical format). Hard copies of the photos on high quality paper will work, but you won't get exact digital copies if that's what you need.
There are other options. One very common 2D barcode format is PDF417. A quick google search indicates you can print 1144 characters (I interpret that as bytes) per square inch. If you figure there's up to 84 square inches of printable area on a standard letter sized piece of paper, and you use JPEG compression, then you could put about one 4x6" picture's worth of data on each piece of paper (my math says about 95k per page). Print it out on really good acid free paper. PDF417 uses error detection and correction technology, so even if there's a bit of damage, it should come out intact.
Label the top of each page as PDF417 format. Leave it as an exercise to the next generation to scan them in and decode them.
Plus you could put printed hard copies of the photos in there too as a backup.
What's more interesting to me is that you can look through the portal and see what's on the other side, including the object that just went through. In fact, you can put two portals on the floor beside each other, drop an object into one and you basically see two copies of the object oscillating alternately. If you stand near the portals you can see the object in two places. I just think that's neat.
I had a similar experience. I liked Snowcrash and loved Cryptonomicon, but it took me about 2 years to read through the Baroque Cycle trilogy without many breaks reading other books. Since I finished a year ago, I've read at least 10 more books (not Stephenson though).
I just found that the Baroque Cycle books (especially the middle one) were just overly descriptive, particularly about the setting, and I just didn't care. I've seen enough period pieces to have a decent idea of what London looked like in those days, so I don't need to read about the way the sunlight plays off the brickwork.
I remember my wife saying the same thing about Snowcrash - that it was too descriptive, and I couldn't understand what she was talking about. Now I have an idea how she felt.
The most enjoyable parts of the trilogy were the action parts with Jack, and the science/economics parts.
We have about 100 to 120 people spread out over one corporate office and 7 branch offices. IT staff: 2.