People are asked to estimate things all the time. Quantity Surveyors, if they are good ones, can save a construction project a great deal of money by being close in their materials estimates for a given project. Cost is harder because there is no way of knowing if the bottom is going to fall out of the steel and concrete markets. The more you know about an area of expertise the closer your estimates will become.
In this case I have not used Visual Studio so I don’t know how say the database layer has been improved. Any estimates I make will be based on my experience and how fast I might code up an application. Unless you know the skill levels of the people working on the upcoming project then it is also difficult to build in contingency. A beginner programmer will take a lot longer to build an application that someone well versed in the tools and technologies. The kind of project is also important. Building a Web solution can be different from the Windows Forms version.
So here are my rules for estimating. If you don’t know the subject area or the environment don’t. Always ask people in the area or field who have more experience than you do. If possible bet two people to work independently on the estimate and see how close you are. The private sector is usually quite different than the public sector. In general add more time for the latter. Always have an item called contingency or unknown. If you now what you are doing then this is about 10-15 percent on top of your estimates. The less certain you are the greater the contingency. It is best to add this to your base estimates and also have a smaller additional line item to cover it.
Industry News
According to some leaked images, which may or may not be valid, Windows 8 is looking more like Office 2007 than what we have come to expect from a Windows operating system. According to the shots the 2007 UI Ribbon features in the new design. The pundits are positing that this will replace the familiar toolbars and menus we have come to love or hate.
The reason for the ribbon on 2007 is to have more features visible, or “easier to find.” Once you know where everything is this is a reasonable assumption but there is a learning curve. I could imagine a Ribbon in Windows 8 where one tab was say the Control Panel elements, another the Start Menu and so on. For the moment it is only found in the Windows Explorer with tabs labeled Library Tools, Picture tools and Disk tools. Syncing and sharing also appear to be possibilities especially if they are integrated with the Microsoft Cloud. One reason this may not work very well is that most of us are sick of having to learn a whole new UI every time a new version of Windows comes out. I understand that Microsoft does this for the training dollars and to show that the next version is indeed different but different isn’t always the best.
Windows 8 will also come with far greater tablet support. Multi-touch, instant on and facial recognition are some of the features being mentioned in a halls of Redmond. You may remember that MS bought the gesture recognition specialist Canesta a while back. There are other rumours that W8 will come with two interfaces, one regular tile based and another based on the Jupiter engine using an application programming model and download new apps directly from the MS store. Ribbons are also a bit more friendly on a tablet device where touching a tab will shift the focus and screen real estate is precious.
I think building a ribbon into an OS is a bit risky. Microsoft already learned that producing a new operating system does not guarantee adoption, look at Vista as an good example. Not only was it different but it didn’t work very well so people stayed with XP Pro. Now that Windows 7 seems to be doing well, and once you get used to it it isn’t bad, Windows 8 may not be that attractive. It is a gamble and these are very early days in the design cycle. It will be interesting to see how the leaks progress over the next few months.
Hands up if you remember the Osborne computer. If like me you do then in computer terms you are old. Weighing in at a svelte 11 kgs, well it was light for those days, it is one of the earliest ‘portable’ computers and it is celebrating its 30th birthday. Five years before that a Xerox prototype machine called the Note Taker was one of the really early computers but not for public purchase but some speculate that the Osborne was based on this and later Xerox prototypes. I remember using an assembly based machine by Olivetti in 1974.
Any computer person who has a little bit of age behind them remembers the Commodore 64. For some time new there has been an initiative to build a PC inside a C64 box. It was supposed to come out in June last year but didn’t The latest is that it is coming closer to a release date. So a bit like Duke Nukem, an old product that wants to come out in a new form. Instead of a RAM card port and cassette connection there will be an optical drive and a regular memory port. They better hurry up or those that remember will be gone and no one will know what the fuss is all about.
When was the last time you backed up your data, media files, documents etc.? I love cautionary tales of what happens when you don’t. Cyberlink, a cloud provider, is being sued by a Hawaiian TV show over the loss of a season’s episodes of their children's TV show, Zodiac Island. A disgruntled employee logged back into the system after he was fired and wiped out two years of work including animation files, soundtracks, storyboards and videos. This represented many man hours of the work of hundreds of people from many companies for a total of 304Gb of data.
No problem, you would say, they have backups right? Apparently not and so they cannot recover all of the data. Two big problems here. The first is that an employee could log in a month after they were fired, to the company server no less. Two they had no offsite backup. Both of these are big no-nos. The irony here is that CyberLink off back services for others and encourages their users to make backups. This is one of those classic do what I say not what I do situations.
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