2. You need to develop a method of coming up with your educated guesses that is repeatable. The process must allow you to estimate every step of your development process and how much each step is estimated to cost both in time, materials and labor.
I was always taught to estimate HOW you are going to do something, not WHAT you are going to build. If you start with a block diagram with 8 blocks and your work breakdown structure has 8 major headings you are probably going to get rubbish estimates. Building those 8 blocks and connecting them up probably involves 20 macro-level steps. Many of the developers I've seen get this wrong don't think through HOW they will build the final state they are trying to get to so their estimates miss a lot of stuff.
Can you honestly put your hand on your heart and say the true decommissioning costs of these nuclear plants are built into the prices today? I don't think anyone can. We have properly decommissioned and cleaned up so few nuclear plants that all of the cost estimates I see have a massive risk of cost overruns associated with them. The unfortunate feature of such a long-lived asset and then waste stream is that it's very hard to price in the true cost and the community end up wearing the risk if these are miscalculated. I don't claim malice or conspiracy, just that pricing long term costs is really, really hard.
If this means a Windows 7 install that has been around for 2-3 years won;t have 50GB+ consumed by windows installer cache files I'll be pretty happy with the change. Not sure it is going to mean that though...
I know Jeff Dagle and he knows what he is talking about. I meet him when visiting PNNL earlier in the year and he understands how the bulk transmission system in the US works better than most people on the planet.
The best thing the US TSOs have done to prevent this happening again is install lots of PMUs under the NASPI program (see https://www.naspi.org/) which Jeff is a member of. This is what gives the TSOs (and all the regional coordination authorities etc....) the real-time operational awareness of the stability of the bulk transmission system that just didn't exist a decade ago.
Try looking up the Olympic Dam mine in Australia owned by BHP Billiton. Every few years they send the geologists out a few more hundred meters and add another 50 years to the life of the mine when they need to boost reserve numbers for financial reasons. No one knowns how big the deposit is but it is HUGE - I've heard figures sugesting it might supply 30% of world uranium demand for the next century or more.
I have had a lot to do with the baggage handling system at Sydney Airport (SACL T1 & T2) having worked at both these terminals as a control systems engineer in the last few years.
I can confidently say this will have bugger all effect. The scanning rates on the primary infeed scanners are already over 96%, we have secondary scanner that achieve 80+% (they are dealing with the bags that could not be read first time through) and manual enconding stations at the third level. So the chances of miss-reading a bag are very close to zero.....
The hard part about a baggage handling system is tracking the bags along the conveyors until they get tot he right sortation device. This is the hard problem and involves writing very complex PLC code to and RFID tags will not help this problem one iota unless they are prepared to put an RFID reader next to every sortation device, which if RFID readers are 100th the price of scanner gantries then this might work....
What you will probably find is that Symantec did not install a handler that traps every right click at all.
In all likely hood it installed a shell extension and the normal MSI system was invoked as part of verifying the installation is correct. Normally this check does almost nothing - but once you install is broken it will try and repair it every time. All of this is normal MSI functionality
Anyone who has worked on installers for a complex / old Win32 app will know what I mean.
It's pretty obvious you have never worked in a support business that is actually a profit center - not just a cost code.
In the commercial software world the trick is that you get everyone to pay about 18% (that is the norm) of upfront licensing fees every year as an ongoing maintenance / support contact. This provides you with good cash flow.
If your software is anywhere near decent you will probably find only a small percentage (say 10%) of these customers actually have problems that cost you anywhere near the 18% you are charging them. Some small percent will have problems that cost you 10x their support agreement costs. It all comes down to trying to make your software better and playing the averages.
One of my old project managers had a risk management philosophy that basically said that the form of communications you should you use is dependent on the risk associated miscommunication.
So if we have a problem worth a couple of hundred dollars we sent an e-mail. If it was worth a couple of thousand dollars we made a phone call. If it was worth tens of thousands of dollars we got in the car and saw the people face to face. (This was the construction industry so a few thousand dollars is still a small problem)
The whole point of this was risk mitigation. Most people simply do not factor in the risk that miscommunication can add to a project.
What was meant as an ironic comment unfortunately turns out to be true. In SharePoint v3 (due out in 2006) they are adding support for Wikis and Blogs.
Once again another case of back to the future. Unfortunately I'm sure they will be like all the other SharePoint features - worst of breed in everything that they do. (If you don't believe me just go and have a look at the 'discussion boards' features of SharePoint)
I have used e-Tax for a few years now and alos know a few people who are developing web services for the ATO and have the following comments:
1. e-Tax is not the only application available for electronic lodgment. This just happens to be the one the ATO give away for free.
2. The ATO have been developing a huge web services interface for quite a few years now. The idea is to provide a standards compliant interface that anyone can write an application against to help people lodge their tax return.
3. Web serives interfaces was first implemented for the GST quaterly statments but are supposed to be rolled down to personal taxes before too long.
Not to worry. Based on how things are going at the moment we (Australia) will just tack ourselves onto America and New Zealand will declare itself part of Europe.
This seems to be how politics is running down here at the moment.
Broadband refers to the fact that it uses a broad segment of the bandwidth spectrum, as opposed to narrowband which uses a narrow segment.
The term really has nothing to do with what use use that amount of the spectrum for. On the whole you can generally get more data across more spectrum. The main exception is when you use a lot of spectrum to solve some other problem like interference, as in spread spectrum systems and the like.
The best thing about the Australian electrocal system is compulsary voting. This elimnates many of the problems that can occur when you only have about 30% of the eligable population voting.
Once again this shows that the internet helps to make the world look like one single marketplace. The old tactics of marketplace division (sell the product at the highest possible price in every possible market) are beginning to break down.
This is the sort of lesson the MPAA is learning with region coding of DVDs etc....
With this announcment there will proabably be a few big corporate orders for spares for the next two decades.
Alcoa for instnace runs all their rolling mill controls systems on a Alpha based platform doing realtime control using very specalised fortran libaraies they have spent decades developing. They need spares for the life of the rolling mill system that have installed to date.
I am an Electrical Engineer (and have a very keen interest in Economics) and I'm going to have to take issue with this.
The people running the nation grid and deregulation have had a good look at California. They are not going to do some of the quite frankly stupid things they did (like capping consumer prices but freely floating wholesale prices with no allowance for what happens if the wholesale price actually goes UP).
The deregulation process has gone through very well in Victoria and the only reason the national electricity market is not work that well is that NSW is dragging it's feet. This has horribly distorting effects on the market.
And the mention of Packer and Murdoch. Can you remind me what other utilities these guys have invested in? They have no interest in utilities, the yields are far too low for them.
As far as I'm aware SMBus is just I2C with only a subset of the commands supported. Electrically it's identical. SMBus was basically simplified I2C for use with chip temperature sensors and the like on motherboards.
Re:I drove a VW Diesel
on
239 MPG Car
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
> 1. They are noisy, and dirty.
I don't know what the auto manufacturers are doing in the US but in Australia a lot of work has gone into making diesel engines quiet.
A lot of utes and 4WD vehicles run on (realtivley) small, supercharged diesel engines. They are now just as quiet and clean as petrol equivalents.
This has really happened in the last 8-10 years in Australia.
Slashdot Mirror
2. You need to develop a method of coming up with your educated guesses that is repeatable. The process must allow you to estimate every step of your development process and how much each step is estimated to cost both in time, materials and labor.
I was always taught to estimate HOW you are going to do something, not WHAT you are going to build. If you start with a block diagram with 8 blocks and your work breakdown structure has 8 major headings you are probably going to get rubbish estimates. Building those 8 blocks and connecting them up probably involves 20 macro-level steps. Many of the developers I've seen get this wrong don't think through HOW they will build the final state they are trying to get to so their estimates miss a lot of stuff.
Can you honestly put your hand on your heart and say the true decommissioning costs of these nuclear plants are built into the prices today? I don't think anyone can. We have properly decommissioned and cleaned up so few nuclear plants that all of the cost estimates I see have a massive risk of cost overruns associated with them. The unfortunate feature of such a long-lived asset and then waste stream is that it's very hard to price in the true cost and the community end up wearing the risk if these are miscalculated. I don't claim malice or conspiracy, just that pricing long term costs is really, really hard.
If this means a Windows 7 install that has been around for 2-3 years won;t have 50GB+ consumed by windows installer cache files I'll be pretty happy with the change. Not sure it is going to mean that though...
I know Jeff Dagle and he knows what he is talking about. I meet him when visiting PNNL earlier in the year and he understands how the bulk transmission system in the US works better than most people on the planet.
The best thing the US TSOs have done to prevent this happening again is install lots of PMUs under the NASPI program (see https://www.naspi.org/) which Jeff is a member of. This is what gives the TSOs (and all the regional coordination authorities etc....) the real-time operational awareness of the stability of the bulk transmission system that just didn't exist a decade ago.
Try looking up the Olympic Dam mine in Australia owned by BHP Billiton. Every few years they send the geologists out a few more hundred meters and add another 50 years to the life of the mine when they need to boost reserve numbers for financial reasons. No one knowns how big the deposit is but it is HUGE - I've heard figures sugesting it might supply 30% of world uranium demand for the next century or more.
With about 10 lines of perl you can rip down all of The Daily Show clips from the akamai servers
I have had a lot to do with the baggage handling system at Sydney Airport (SACL T1 & T2) having worked at both these terminals as a control systems engineer in the last few years.
I can confidently say this will have bugger all effect. The scanning rates on the primary infeed scanners are already over 96%, we have secondary scanner that achieve 80+% (they are dealing with the bags that could not be read first time through) and manual enconding stations at the third level. So the chances of miss-reading a bag are very close to zero.....
The hard part about a baggage handling system is tracking the bags along the conveyors until they get tot he right sortation device. This is the hard problem and involves writing very complex PLC code to and RFID tags will not help this problem one iota unless they are prepared to put an RFID reader next to every sortation device, which if RFID readers are 100th the price of scanner gantries then this might work....
What you will probably find is that Symantec did not install a handler that traps every right click at all.
In all likely hood it installed a shell extension and the normal MSI system was invoked as part of verifying the installation is correct. Normally this check does almost nothing - but once you install is broken it will try and repair it every time. All of this is normal MSI functionality
Anyone who has worked on installers for a complex / old Win32 app will know what I mean.
It's pretty obvious you have never worked in a support business that is actually a profit center - not just a cost code.
In the commercial software world the trick is that you get everyone to pay about 18% (that is the norm) of upfront licensing fees every year as an ongoing maintenance / support contact. This provides you with good cash flow.
If your software is anywhere near decent you will probably find only a small percentage (say 10%) of these customers actually have problems that cost you anywhere near the 18% you are charging them. Some small percent will have problems that cost you 10x their support agreement costs. It all comes down to trying to make your software better and playing the averages.
One of my old project managers had a risk management philosophy that basically said that the form of communications you should you use is dependent on the risk associated miscommunication.
So if we have a problem worth a couple of hundred dollars we sent an e-mail. If it was worth a couple of thousand dollars we made a phone call. If it was worth tens of thousands of dollars we got in the car and saw the people face to face. (This was the construction industry so a few thousand dollars is still a small problem)
The whole point of this was risk mitigation. Most people simply do not factor in the risk that miscommunication can add to a project.
What was meant as an ironic comment unfortunately turns out to be true. In SharePoint v3 (due out in 2006) they are adding support for Wikis and Blogs.
Once again another case of back to the future. Unfortunately I'm sure they will be like all the other SharePoint features - worst of breed in everything that they do. (If you don't believe me just go and have a look at the 'discussion boards' features of SharePoint)
I have used e-Tax for a few years now and alos know a few people who are developing web services for the ATO and have the following comments:
1. e-Tax is not the only application available for electronic lodgment. This just happens to be the one the ATO give away for free.
2. The ATO have been developing a huge web services interface for quite a few years now. The idea is to provide a standards compliant interface that anyone can write an application against to help people lodge their tax return.
3. Web serives interfaces was first implemented for the GST quaterly statments but are supposed to be rolled down to personal taxes before too long.
Paper can be found here. Quite a good read.
Not to worry. Based on how things are going at the moment we (Australia) will just tack ourselves onto America and New Zealand will declare itself part of Europe.
This seems to be how politics is running down here at the moment.
Broadband refers to the fact that it uses a broad segment of the bandwidth spectrum, as opposed to narrowband which uses a narrow segment.
The term really has nothing to do with what use use that amount of the spectrum for. On the whole you can generally get more data across more spectrum. The main exception is when you use a lot of spectrum to solve some other problem like interference, as in spread spectrum systems and the like.
The best thing about the Australian electrocal system is compulsary voting. This elimnates many of the problems that can occur when you only have about 30% of the eligable population voting.
Once again this shows that the internet helps to make the world look like one single marketplace. The old tactics of marketplace division (sell the product at the highest possible price in every possible market) are beginning to break down.
This is the sort of lesson the MPAA is learning with region coding of DVDs etc....
For those interested, here is the race web site of the Sunswift II team from UNSW.
Alcoa for instnace runs all their rolling mill controls systems on a Alpha based platform doing realtime control using very specalised fortran libaraies they have spent decades developing. They need spares for the life of the rolling mill system that have installed to date.
I am an Electrical Engineer (and have a very keen interest in Economics) and I'm going to have to take issue with this.
The people running the nation grid and deregulation have had a good look at California. They are not going to do some of the quite frankly stupid things they did (like capping consumer prices but freely floating wholesale prices with no allowance for what happens if the wholesale price actually goes UP).
The deregulation process has gone through very well in Victoria and the only reason the national electricity market is not work that well is that NSW is dragging it's feet. This has horribly distorting effects on the market.
And the mention of Packer and Murdoch. Can you remind me what other utilities these guys have invested in? They have no interest in utilities, the yields are far too low for them.
If they need windwos for a few apps I find it interesting they didn't use a solution based on a few big windows servers and rdesktop.
The other solution would be to try and use WINE, but I suspect that would be a great deal of pain.
They obviously have their reasons thought and would have investigated the options.
As far as I'm aware SMBus is just I2C with only a subset of the commands supported. Electrically it's identical. SMBus was basically simplified I2C for use with chip temperature sensors and the like on motherboards.
> 1. They are noisy, and dirty.
I don't know what the auto manufacturers are doing in the US but in Australia a lot of work has gone into making diesel engines quiet.
A lot of utes and 4WD vehicles run on (realtivley) small, supercharged diesel engines. They are now just as quiet and clean as petrol equivalents.
This has really happened in the last 8-10 years in Australia.
Am I the only one who still has the image of the librarian from the movie Tomcats in their mind?
Wouldn't it be possible to use 3 antennas and analyse the delay between the reception of signals at each of them?