We break the project into use cases. Estimate each use case. Identify the risk of each use case (High = New stuff that may not work or is hard to predict, Low = Straight forward coding to implement).
Divide the work into time blocks (3 to 5 weeks, I liked 1 month increments). Each month, measure actual progress against plan.
Another thing I do for my resources is to maintain an ongoing metric of whether they over or underestimate and apply it to their estimates. So eager girl who says she can do it it 50 hours but took 75, gets a +50% to her ongoing average. Meanwhile, cautious lad who estimates 80 and took 60, gets a -25% put in with his average.
I usually have a meeting with the stakeholders AND the developers to firmly establish scope and when scope changes, we renegotiate the deadline.
By putting the high risk items early (just do a proof of concept that Xserve 3.85 really does work under Unix 3.71 over a VPN connection before you commit 180 million dollars of dead end work to the project).
While I do not normally overwork my resources, if one of them bids 30 days from now to deliver, then if they have to work extra to make that date, then so be it.
Corporations incorporated in states where the stockholders votes are advisory and lack binding authority. Large blocks of stock owned by hedge funds which are run by other wealthy people.
infinite copyright is good low taxes on the wealthy are good because you might someday be wealthy too! high taxes on the wealthy are bad despite the many periods we (and other countries) had high taxes and did fine.
Care about Abortion and vote against your own self interests by voting for a corporate selected politician!
It came down to me and one person from the other team.
I and a single shot gun and he had a machinegun. But to be cute, they let him use a second machinegun from a dead person on his side.
I was behind a 3' tree. He was running towards me rambo style with both guns going from his hip.
I *calmly* leaned out one one knee, took aim, and shot him with one shot in the chest from about 25'-30' away and then leaned back behind the tree so some stray ball wouldn't hit me.
He probably fired 10 shots while I took my one but they were all at the tree and over my head and off to my right into the bushes.
I have no gun experience and don't play tons of paintball. And I'm about as big as a barn.
No problems with Draw on Win7 desktop, WIn Vista Laptop, and WIn XP laptop. Have some fairly complex drawings.
Had problems with running out of memory in Writer that would produce crashes without any reason why. Solution was to close other applications when I was working with 3mb documents with a couple hundred pictures.
Might check your free memory. Possible new features may have taken you closer to the edge. Could be a bug they need to look into.
Tables have *NEVER* really been well liked by Microsoft Word. Undos and formatting commands do not work properly for them. They are still basically "grafted" on to word after nearly a decade.
This continues with the Ribbon. Many commands are still on the old dialogs only, and some of the damn things took me months to find. It was basically 5 months of required usage to come back to full productivity in Word 2007 and THEN it wouldn't print documents which started as Word 2003 documents because of overlapping tables with graphic elements. Not that you could tell in Word 2007. But when I loaded them into Ooo, it clearly showed what was really happening (with all those nice grey guide lines) and I was able to resolve the formatting issues which Word was choking on.
I still stumble on rarely used features which are not on the ribbons. I have to load help and search around for them. With menu's, it may have been nested but I could get to it. Menus are sucky but cram a lot of commands into a small area. The continuum is like: CLI text commands -> Menu commands -> Ribbons
I find OOo to be as good as MS Office for most features, better than MS Office for a few features, worse than MS Office for a few features, and completely lacking some newer features which I have no interest in.
I find OOo and MS Office lacking some features that Google Docs has.
I assume they'll merge towards each other. I entered bug reports for missing features which I cared about for OOo back as early as 2004 and all of them have been fixed as of 3.00. So nothing I need is missing. If you care about a feature, put it into Bugzilla and vote it up, and in two or three years it will probably be in OOo.
That's a wonderful concept, but then you have in this thread people saying the CEO of Toyota lied significantly about this issue and was caught flat footed because the interviewer had proof of the lie.
But keep the Hansei going as well as you can. The natural tendency is in the other direction. It's a good goal tho.
I think of them more as "amoral" mega-corporations than evil mega-corporations.
They'll happily dump toxins, lock bleeding rape victims in containers under guard, suppress evidence but they don't do these things for fun, just for profit. It's not personal and it's not about pleasure or enjoyment- only about profit.
When it is more profitable to be "good", they'll be as good as possible.
But the ultimate profitability is zero labor cost, zero taxes, and zero costs of business.
So they do everything they can to get labor costs as low as possible, taxes to zero, and to externalize the cost of doing business onto the rest of society. Even to the point that it becomes evil.
The human being converting the material is the reason.
And the human being writing the article.
It was 8 hours to convert the first 100 pages. Then about 4 hours to convert the next 100 pages and next 100 pages. Then about 2 hours to convert the final 100 pages and 100 pages.
Openoffice converted the documents in seconds. But the formatting and sectioning created by the program are unusable and uneditable.
I converted them to completely native format with very clean sectioning. I had to learn what the little grey lines meant and about the navigator and so on.
The first hundred pages had about 80 sections. After conversion it has 12 sections. Half of those are single column chapter headings.
I had to redo the cross-referencing (since it is a different model)
It's as your first responder says. I have an 18 year old dnd game which started with Cyclopedia. Currently have 12 active players.
The characters are 13th to 19th level. The 17th to 19th level group came up from 1st level. The 10th to 14th level group started at 8th level.
About 30% remains Cyclopedia, the rest are a boatload of custom rules.
At my peak I was running 24 players but now it's just a couple sessions a month. I've had about 5 people nibbling so I may start a 3rd session.
It has influences from 4thE (and to be fair, some 4thE concepts I thought up independently years ago), everquest, runequest, and various psionic books around the web.
At this point, it's very clean. The players really suffered in 2003 and still rib me about the changes then. The dominion system went from a complex mess to a very nice streamlined system that feels real enough but takes minimal time to maintain.
It's all hopelessly meshed with wotc copyrights and hence would probably take a year to clean up enough to ever publish.
But every new player gets a complete set of rules, maps, and campaign books. The campaign material runs to about 80 pages.
Someday I might try to monetize parts of the campaign.
He was right and the corporations that make vaccines were more powerful.
Given the astroturfing they can lay down and the amount of financial influence they have, it's pretty impossible to tell the truth any more. (of course that presumes it used to be possible to tell the truth but I'm starting to wonder).
I maintain a 500 page RPG rules book with Ooo which has complex layout, cross referencing, tons of graphics (going to OOo shrank the size of the documents by 75% because of how I could treat the graphics).
I went to OOo because 2007 would NOT print the 2003 version of the documents.
The first document took me about 8 hours to convert.
It finally dropped to about 2 hours to convert 100 pages.
First thing was to set up default styles, ( finally had a template document which I just opened empty and pasted the content into).
Then I would rip out all the sections and put them back in manually (it's mostly dual column but with occasional single column for headers and the conversion engine created sectioning which was way to complex).
The toughest thing for me to solve each time was 1-3% of the graphics which were at the top right corner of the page. They would float incorrectly and randomly until I nailed them down.
I can't see going back to Word now. Even at $10 for a legitimate corporate user, home copy.
I once apologized to an executive because I let a project fail because I chose to preserve the relationship with the other teams over project success. I'd presented the risks and been outvoted. I could have been the "hero" and saved the project.
As it was, it failed, 6 weeks later it went in successfully anyway and I maintained a good relationship with the other team.
I think most big companies value relationships and risk management over "home runs" and stomped egos.
I get the feeling that two or three levels up that changes and they all carry sharp knives with them most of the time. I'm getting a definite sense of "teams" and the need to pick a side which you either win with or lose with. I've seen two smiling people talking pleasantly to each other in a meeting only gathered later that they were in a big struggle in the meeting.
It's almost like the old samurai movies where one person shifts their toes slightly to the left and it means something.
But down at our level, it's much more important to be nice.
We had a problem and, unexpectedly, I figured out what it was instead of the appropriate department. They not only ignored the solution but tried every other possible solution before implementing the solution. And they are still (2 years later) pissy about it. The tools I used to solve the problem were disabled.
I'm sure there is an entire department of Toyota people who would be very embarrassed that a person outside their department AND outside their company AND outside their business figured out the problem when they couldn't.
But the same thing was true in both cases. Simple logic and noticing details. Woz debugged the problem. I debugged the problem. Most people just don't like to think logically and finely.
I hope Toyota gets their head out of their posterior exit and listens to him. People have died over this issue (including a cop trained in emergency driving along with his wife and 2 kids).
Slashdot Mirror
I like this methodology.
We break the project into use cases.
Estimate each use case.
Identify the risk of each use case (High = New stuff that may not work or is hard to predict, Low = Straight forward coding to implement).
Divide the work into time blocks (3 to 5 weeks, I liked 1 month increments).
Each month, measure actual progress against plan.
Another thing I do for my resources is to maintain an ongoing metric of whether they over or underestimate and apply it to their estimates. So eager girl who says she can do it it 50 hours but took 75, gets a +50% to her ongoing average. Meanwhile, cautious lad who estimates 80 and took 60, gets a -25% put in with his average.
I usually have a meeting with the stakeholders AND the developers to firmly establish scope and when scope changes, we renegotiate the deadline.
By putting the high risk items early (just do a proof of concept that Xserve 3.85 really does work under Unix 3.71 over a VPN connection before you commit 180 million dollars of dead end work to the project).
While I do not normally overwork my resources, if one of them bids 30 days from now to deliver, then if they have to work extra to make that date, then so be it.
Corporations incorporated in states where the stockholders votes are advisory and lack binding authority.
Large blocks of stock owned by hedge funds which are run by other wealthy people.
It's the the total package. Pay attention to the music next time you watch it. Pretty classic emotional button pushing chords.
I thought it was a great commercial.
Basic message of the megacorp
infinite copyright is good
low taxes on the wealthy are good because you might someday be wealthy too!
high taxes on the wealthy are bad despite the many periods we (and other countries) had high taxes and did fine.
Care about Abortion and vote against your own self interests by voting for a corporate selected politician!
e! That's irrational!
This was my one experience with it in paintball.
It came down to me and one person from the other team.
I and a single shot gun and he had a machinegun. But to be cute, they let him use a second machinegun from a dead person on his side.
I was behind a 3' tree. He was running towards me rambo style with both guns going from his hip.
I *calmly* leaned out one one knee, took aim, and shot him with one shot in the chest from about 25'-30' away and then leaned back behind the tree so some stray ball wouldn't hit me.
He probably fired 10 shots while I took my one but they were all at the tree and over my head and off to my right into the bushes.
I have no gun experience and don't play tons of paintball. And I'm about as big as a barn.
Dang it. I had managed to not thinking about death all morning.
Why did I get on the internet and read your post???
This is very depressing.
No problems with Draw on Win7 desktop, WIn Vista Laptop, and WIn XP laptop. Have some fairly complex drawings.
Had problems with running out of memory in Writer that would produce crashes without any reason why. Solution was to close other applications when I was working with 3mb documents with a couple hundred pictures.
Might check your free memory. Possible new features may have taken you closer to the edge. Could be a bug they need to look into.
They are out on the open... unless they are not.
Tables have *NEVER* really been well liked by Microsoft Word. Undos and formatting commands do not work properly for them. They are still basically "grafted" on to word after nearly a decade.
This continues with the Ribbon. Many commands are still on the old dialogs only, and some of the damn things took me months to find. It was basically 5 months of required usage to come back to full productivity in Word 2007 and THEN it wouldn't print documents which started as Word 2003 documents because of overlapping tables with graphic elements. Not that you could tell in Word 2007. But when I loaded them into Ooo, it clearly showed what was really happening (with all those nice grey guide lines) and I was able to resolve the formatting issues which Word was choking on.
I still stumble on rarely used features which are not on the ribbons. I have to load help and search around for them. With menu's, it may have been nested but I could get to it. Menus are sucky but cram a lot of commands into a small area. The continuum is like: CLI text commands -> Menu commands -> Ribbons
It's complicated.
I find OOo to be as good as MS Office for most features, better than MS Office for a few features, worse than MS Office for a few features, and completely lacking some newer features which I have no interest in.
I find OOo and MS Office lacking some features that Google Docs has.
I assume they'll merge towards each other. I entered bug reports for missing features which I cared about for OOo back as early as 2004 and all of them have been fixed as of 3.00. So nothing I need is missing. If you care about a feature, put it into Bugzilla and vote it up, and in two or three years it will probably be in OOo.
OOo and GD will still be free as in beer.
I believe europe uses the period for a common.
So 100.000 web sites is 100,000 web sites (not 100).
That's a wonderful concept, but then you have in this thread people saying the CEO of Toyota lied significantly about this issue and was caught flat footed because the interviewer had proof of the lie.
But keep the Hansei going as well as you can. The natural tendency is in the other direction. It's a good goal tho.
I think of them more as "amoral" mega-corporations than evil mega-corporations.
They'll happily dump toxins, lock bleeding rape victims in containers under guard, suppress evidence but they don't do these things for fun, just for profit. It's not personal and it's not about pleasure or enjoyment- only about profit.
When it is more profitable to be "good", they'll be as good as possible.
But the ultimate profitability is zero labor cost, zero taxes, and zero costs of business.
So they do everything they can to get labor costs as low as possible, taxes to zero, and to externalize the cost of doing business onto the rest of society.
Even to the point that it becomes evil.
I've thought about that several times since 2003 and going to OOo had more personal value.
I'm unlikely to create any other items that use Latex.
The human being converting the material is the reason.
And the human being writing the article.
It was 8 hours to convert the first 100 pages.
Then about 4 hours to convert the next 100 pages and next 100 pages.
Then about 2 hours to convert the final 100 pages and 100 pages.
Openoffice converted the documents in seconds. But the formatting and sectioning created by the program are unusable and uneditable.
I converted them to completely native format with very clean sectioning. I had to learn what the little grey lines meant and about the navigator and so on.
The first hundred pages had about 80 sections. After conversion it has 12 sections. Half of those are single column chapter headings.
I had to redo the cross-referencing (since it is a different model)
It's as your first responder says. I have an 18 year old dnd game which started with Cyclopedia. Currently have 12 active players.
The characters are 13th to 19th level. The 17th to 19th level group came up from 1st level. The 10th to 14th level group started at 8th level.
About 30% remains Cyclopedia, the rest are a boatload of custom rules.
At my peak I was running 24 players but now it's just a couple sessions a month. I've had about 5 people nibbling so I may start a 3rd session.
It has influences from 4thE (and to be fair, some 4thE concepts I thought up independently years ago), everquest, runequest, and various psionic books around the web.
At this point, it's very clean. The players really suffered in 2003 and still rib me about the changes then. The dominion system went from a complex mess to a very nice streamlined system that feels real enough but takes minimal time to maintain.
It's all hopelessly meshed with wotc copyrights and hence would probably take a year to clean up enough to ever publish.
But every new player gets a complete set of rules, maps, and campaign books. The campaign material runs to about 80 pages.
Someday I might try to monetize parts of the campaign.
Well... we have two possibilities.
He was wrong.
He was right and the corporations that make vaccines were more powerful.
Given the astroturfing they can lay down and the amount of financial influence they have, it's pretty impossible to tell the truth any more. (of course that presumes it used to be possible to tell the truth but I'm starting to wonder).
I maintain a 500 page RPG rules book with Ooo which has complex layout, cross referencing, tons of graphics (going to OOo shrank the size of the documents by 75% because of how I could treat the graphics).
I went to OOo because 2007 would NOT print the 2003 version of the documents.
The first document took me about 8 hours to convert.
It finally dropped to about 2 hours to convert 100 pages.
First thing was to set up default styles, ( finally had a template document which I just opened empty and pasted the content into).
Then I would rip out all the sections and put them back in manually (it's mostly dual column but with occasional single column for headers and the conversion engine created sectioning which was way to complex).
The toughest thing for me to solve each time was 1-3% of the graphics which were at the top right corner of the page. They would float incorrectly and randomly until I nailed them down.
I can't see going back to Word now. Even at $10 for a legitimate corporate user, home copy.
I once apologized to an executive because I let a project fail because I chose to preserve the relationship with the other teams over project success. I'd presented the risks and been outvoted. I could have been the "hero" and saved the project.
As it was, it failed, 6 weeks later it went in successfully anyway and I maintained a good relationship with the other team.
I think most big companies value relationships and risk management over "home runs" and stomped egos.
I get the feeling that two or three levels up that changes and they all carry sharp knives with them most of the time. I'm getting a definite sense of "teams" and the need to pick a side which you either win with or lose with. I've seen two smiling people talking pleasantly to each other in a meeting only gathered later that they were in a big struggle in the meeting.
It's almost like the old samurai movies where one person shifts their toes slightly to the left and it means something.
But down at our level, it's much more important to be nice.
Aye... the old "it's funny because it's true."
Since Dilbert and management books talk about the issue regularly, you can assume it is true for 99% of publicly traded companies.
I think i'll believe THE computer guy.
This happened internally at my company.
We had a problem and, unexpectedly, I figured out what it was instead of the appropriate department. They not only ignored the solution but tried every other possible solution before implementing the solution. And they are still (2 years later) pissy about it. The tools I used to solve the problem were disabled.
I'm sure there is an entire department of Toyota people who would be very embarrassed that a person outside their department AND outside their company AND outside their business figured out the problem when they couldn't.
But the same thing was true in both cases. Simple logic and noticing details. Woz debugged the problem. I debugged the problem. Most people just don't like to think logically and finely.
I hope Toyota gets their head out of their posterior exit and listens to him. People have died over this issue (including a cop trained in emergency driving along with his wife and 2 kids).
Doh! I was shooting for sarcastic/funny.
Okay w3schools didn't seem like the best source after I posted... so found this.
http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0&qptimeframe=M&qpsp=120&qpnp=13
It is quoted as a source in an article on Chrome's growth.
It has a cool date selection option...
So...Without further ado...
January 2009
Opera: 2.23%
January 2010
Opera: 2.38%
and you can use the date selection combined with the graph to look at the other browsers too.
The comparison between this and w3schools shows w3 gets a lot less IE browsers and more of the other types.