Manda QoP

It is a black art trying to get the costs right on a development estimate. Too much money and the client will go elsewhere, even if your quote is realistic and reasonable. Too little and you become one of the suppliers the client goes to when the realistic estimate sounds too high. If you're one of the second estimate types, the sort who say it will cost less than it actually will, then you run the risk of not completing the work on time and within budget, you will have stressed out staff and may end up costing your company money instead of making money. So what to do about this? Personally I aim for realistic where possible and include a contingency amount as well just in case of blowouts. I also do a very detailed breakdown in the estimate so the client knows why this project of theirs will take 2000 man hours. So a client has approached you and asks "how much to build this? Just give me a rough estimate of dollar amount and time". You have very little detail, perhaps f

I gave in and bought the i7 processor - shiny, pretty thing that it is. I may have been a magpie in a former life.

After much trial and error at the weekend (at least 10 minutes of investigating), it appears that the HDD hasn't gone kaput on the monster PC at home, the CPU has died a horrible death. What a terrible shame, now I'll have to buy a new motherboard, CPU, memory... blah de blah... The thing is though, do I just want to get spannerbox to make me a spiffy new 64-bit machine that I can dual-boot (cubase and 64-bit do not play well together), or shall I just upgrade the current box. It'll probably cost the same whichever way I do this but I guess if I upgrade the Thermaltake box at least then I'll get some moolah back - the box itself is worth a few hundred bucks. If anyone has a spare (free) i7 processor lying around with a compatible motherboard, feel free to send it my way. :) Rest in pieces CPU.

This morning I had a horrible fright. Background To The Scare I recently backed up my entire life onto a new 1TB external HDD, and I mean everything . All the poems, lyrics, music, artwork that I've created since my school days, all the photos of friends and family going back to the year dot, all my certificates and numerous other things. You get the drift, it was shit loads of data and a lot of it had great personal meaning. I imagine that a lot of us nowadays keep our life on the computer, so this could happen to anyone. My PC has recently done a bit of travelling, it's been from Auckland to Whangarei and back sitting in my 4x4 that Mum & Dad kindly babysat whilst I was gallavanting round the UK. I arrived back a few weeks ago but have been using the laptop. Last weekend I decided to set the PC back up. Nothing untoward happened. The PC booted up. I plugged in the external HDD, again, all good, everything showing up. Now I fully deserve what happened to me next.

It was interesting to read how web use in Sweden dropped overnight by 40% since the introduction of a strict new copyright law... see here: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/web-2-0/news/article.cfm?c_id=363&objectid=10565443 , I'm wondering if perhaps a point has been missed in the NZ Herald article. I'm guessing they've copied the information from one site that seemed credible without putting in any actual thought or real journalism; the first result returned by Google gave me pretty much the same information that was contained in the NZ Herald article. This prompted me to do a bit of reading up of my own, especially as 4 0% seems rather higher than would be expected by just losing the file swappers. Surely 40% of Internet users in Sweden aren't using the Internet purely for file swapping and illegal downloads? Who knows? One day really isn't a long enough sample period and things may bounce back next week when people get over the shock of the new law. Swedish Pirate

We have Pat Martin from Microsoft presenting at the April meeting. The meeting will be at Level 7, Fronde House, 131 Queen Street starting at 6pm. Go to www.aucklandsql.com for more information and to register.

Sharepoint Designer is now available as a free download. Check out this link for more information. http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/04/02/sharepoint-designer-available-as-a-free-download.aspx