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Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at "Philosophy".
...es verdad!!!
desde Ford Prefect ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Prefect_(character)) a Philosophy son 4 saltos!!!
Firefox Beta users have just been updated to a new release! While this is not the final Firefox Beta, you have been updated to a new release to test the new development channel switcher.
Mozilla Firefox is moving to a rapid release development cycle to deliver new features, performance enhancements, security updates and stability improvements to users faster. To help with this, Mozilla recently launched the Firefox Aurora channel to give users more opportunities to participate in building Firefox. The Aurora channel is where users can test early stage features for future versions of Firefox without all the polish and stability of a beta release.
We’d like to extend this release to our beta users and help test the new Firefox development channel switcher feature.
To test the channel switcher, users can try to switch to the aurora channel and back to the beta channel. Please note that this release is NOT the final beta of the next version of Firefox. This build is a copy of aurora re-packaged as beta for testing.
How to test:
1. Open the About dialog
2. Click “Change”
3. Choose “Aurora”
4. Apply
Once you are done testing the channel switcher, simply use the same steps above to switch back to beta and continue to test that channel. Without switching back, you will stay on the aurora channel, which has early-stage features and is not as stable as beta. We’ll keep you updated as to when the final beta is ready for testing.
Visit this support article for help with the channel switcher.
Please file any bugs with the channel switcher or update process in Bugzilla, or, by clicking on the Help menu to submit feedback.
Thank you for being a Firefox Beta tester!
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PDF with additional information:
http://ecommons.txstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1022&context=cscitrep
...number of changed requirements... 1
...have a look at the "future Research" in the pdf
La gestión de proyectos predictiva afirma que la forma más eficiente de hacer un trabajo es hacerlo bien a la primera. ¿Es más eficiente la gestión de proyectos predictiva que la gesitón de proyectos ágil?.
La ingeniería de software tradicional necesita requisitos detallados y estables.
Para la gestión de requisitos tradicional, (una de las cinco áreas de
conocimiento de la ingeniería de requisitos según SWEBOK) cada
modificación de requisitos es una "incidencia". Un torpedo contra el
éxito del proyecto que requiere un estudio de impacto y medidas de reparación.
Sin embargo , los requisitos genéricos y los cambios durante el desarrollo son las premisas del desarrollo ágil, que
afirma cosas como "Son bienvenidos los requisitos cambiantes, incluso si
llegan tarde al desarrollo. Los procesos ágiles se doblegan al cambio
como ventaja competitiva para el cliente".
La clave de esta aparente contradicción está en los ciclos de vida
empleados por unos y por otros: El desarrollo secuencial o en cascada
necesita requisitos detallados y estables, algo que no sucede si se usan modelos iterativos.
Pero... todo tiene su precio. La agilidad
se adapta al cambio y da más valor a la visión del producto, en cada
modificación que va descubriendo mientras lo construye... pero claro, los cambios de requisitos repercuten en la eficiencia del equipo y en la calidad entregada.
Porque es evidente que "La forma más eficiente de hacer un trabajo es hacerlo bien a la primera".
¿Sí?.
¿Alguien lo ha comprobado, o simplemente se da por supuesto porque parece obvio?.
Esto es lo que se plantearon los profesores de la Universidad de San
Marcos en Texas Elizabeth Oyeyipo y Carl Mueller, y para comprobarlo han realizado un estudio con 33
alumnos de Ingeniería de Software, formando 8 equipos de 4 ó 5
programadores y cuyos resultados publica la Universidad en el reciente informe "Requirements Management in an Agile Scrum "
Los 8 equipos construyeron el mismo sistema con el mismo product backlog y
trabajando con el mismo propietario de producto: un programa de gestión
de agendas.
Siete equipos trabajaron con Scrum, admitiendo al propietario de producto realizar cambios en el backlog de requisitos durante la ejecución del proyecto.
Un equipo se empleó como referencia para contrastar los datos, de forma
que usó un ciclo de desarrollo iterativo (4 iteraciones en lugar de los 4 sprints) pero sin modificar los requisitos, para
analizar las diferencias de eficiencia y calidad.
Las métricas empleadas en el estudio han sido 29, agrupadas en 4
categorías: Esfuerzo del equipo, Funcionalidad producida, Impacto de los
cambios de requisitos y calidad entregada.
El estudio concluye que los grupos trabajando con Scrum permitiendo cambios en el backlog entregaron más calidad, más funcionalidades e invirtieron menos horas que los que trabajaron con iteraciones sin permitir cambios.
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Thanks to:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1382844/How-E-T-Worlds-final-radio-telescope-closed-funding-cuts.html
It's a question which has always fascinated humans: Are we alone in the universe?
But the search for other intelligent life in space has been dealt a devastating blow which means we may never find out the answer.
The planet’s only radio telescopes dedicated to searching for other life has been shut, the victim of U.S. government spending cuts.
Closure: The Allen Telescope Array, the world's last radio telescopes, are to be mothballed due to U.S. government spending cuts
The Allen Telescope Array in California has been mothballed after funding ran out, said senior astronomer Seth Shostak.
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No me lo puedo creer...
Un sujetador que se abre con una palmada!
XD
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Microsoft Battles Apple in the Wrong Market
Microsoft has launched a new Windows 7 campaign to take on Mac OS X. A new tab on the Windows 7 sites compares Windows 7 to Mac OS X in a number of areas--listing out the reasons that Windows 7 is the superior choice. Most of the points made by Microsoft are valid, but the campaign itself is a waste of resources that could be better used battling Apple where it counts.
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/202962/microsoft_battles_apple_in_the_wrong_market.html?tk=hp_blg
Cuando puedo partirme el c..o?
Google has confirmed its acquisiton of social networking application developers Slide, for a reported $228M. The move follows other investments Google has made in the social networking sector, with a particular focus on game developers, including Zynga and its 28M Texas Hold ‘Em players. This may have serious ramifications for the online gambling community, as Bodog Europe CEO Patrik Selin believes that if/when the United States does actually give online poker its legal blessing, Zynga might well be the best positioned company to capitalize on such a move.
The plot thickens, as Google may have just secured for itself the big fat double-wide traffic lane on the new two-tier interwebz, leaving the other online poker companies to limp down a digital gravel road… Geez, you half expect to wake up tomorrow and discover Google has trademarked the word ‘poker’. Read more.
The purpose of this brief article is to laugh. Laugh about how we as business analysts approach our work. Whether you are a proponent of agile, waterfall, or some hybrid solution development life cycle (SDLC), I hope this article makes you laugh. Remember laughter is the best medicine.
Agile: If____, you may be on an agile project
Waterfall: If_________, you may be on a waterfall project
Final Comment
The style of the previous statements of course is borrowed from Jeff Foxworthy, the popular comedian and TV quiz show host. I'm a big fan of his work and I just couldn't resist writing this article. As you read the agile and waterfall statements, I am sure you came up your own. I invite you to submit them as comments for everyone's enjoyment. Let's all laugh a little at ourselves. Or maybe cry!
Don't forget to leave your comments below
Mark.A Monteleone holds a B.S. in physics and an M.S. in computing science from Texas A&M University. He is certified as a Project Management Professional (PMP®) by the Project Management Institute (PMI®), a Certified Business Analysis Professional (CBAP®) by the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA®), a Certified ScrumMaster (CSMTM) and Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPOTM) by the Scrum Alliance. He holds an Advanced Master's Certificate in Project Management and a Business Analyst Certification (CBA®) from George Washington University School of Business. Mark is also a member of the Association for the Advancement of Cost Engineering (AACE) and the International Association of Facilitators (IAF). Mark is the President of Monteleone Consulting, LLC and can be contacted via e-mail - mark.a.monteleone@sbcglobal.net.
Today’s release comes with a “beta” label for a few reasons. First, it currently covers only the core Google web search product. To help avoid misunderstanding, when you search using SSL, you won’t see links to offerings like Image Search and Maps that, for the most part, don’t support SSL at this time. Also, since SSL connections require additional time to set up the encryption between your browser and the remote web server, your experience with search over SSL might be slightly slower than your regular Google search experience. What won’t change is that you will still get the same great search results.
Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity.
—Herman Melville, Billy Budd
Orange, red? I don’t know what to believe anymore!
—Anonymous, Color Survey
I WILL EAT YOUR HEART WITH A FUCKING SPOON IF YOU AKS ANY MORE QUESTIONS ABOUT COLORS
—Anonymous, Color Survey
Thank you so much for all the help on the color survey. Over five million colors were named across 222,500 user sessions. If you never got around to taking it, it’s too late to contribute any data, but if you want you can see how it worked and take it for fun here.
First, a few basic discoveries:
Overall, the results were really cool and a lot of fun to analyze. There are some basic limitations of this survey, which are discussed toward the bottom of this post. But the sheer amount of data here is cool.
Sex
By a strange coincidence, the same night I first made the color survey public, the webcomic Doghouse Diaries put up this comic (which I altered slightly to fit in this blog, click for original):
It was funny, but I realized I could test whether it was accurate (as far as chromosomal sex goes, anyway, which we asked about because it’s tied to colorblindness) [Note: For more on this distinction, see my follow-up post]. After the survey closed, I generated a version of the Doghouse Diaries comic with actual data, using the most frequent color name for the handful of colors in the survey closest to the ones in the comic:
Basically, women were slightly more liberal with the modifiers, but otherwise they generally agreed (and some of the differences may be sampling noise). The results were similar across the survey—men and women tended on average to call colors the same names.
So I was feeling pretty good about equality. Then I decided to calculate the ‘most masculine’ and ‘most feminine’ colors. I was looking for the color names most disproportionately popular among each group; that is, the names that the most women came up with compared to the fewest men (or vice versa).
Here are the color names most disproportionately popular among women:
Okay, pretty flowery, certainly. Kind of an incense-bomb-set-off-in-a-Bed-Bath-&-Beyond vibe. Well, let’s take a look at the other list.
Here are the color names most disproportionately popular among men:
I … that’s not my typo in #5—the only actual color in the list really is a misspelling of “beige”. And keep in mind, this is based on the number of unique people who answered the color, not the number of times they typed it. This isn’t just the effect of a couple spammers. In fact, this is after the spamfilter.
I weep for my gender. But, on to:
RGB Values
Here are RGB values for the first 48 out of about a thousand colors whose RGB values (across the average monitor, shown on a white background) I was able to pin down with a fairly high degree of precision:
The full table of 954 colors is here, also available as a text file here (I have no opinion about whether it should be used to build a new X11 rgb.txt except that seems like the transition would be a huge headache.)
The RGB value for a name is based on the location in the RGB color space where there was the highest frequency of responses choosing that name. This was tricky to calculate. I tried simple geometric means (conceptually flawed), a brute force survey of all potential center points (too slow), and fitting kernel density functions (math is hard). In the end, I used the average of a bunch of runs of a stochastic hillclimbing algorithm. For mostly boring notes on my data handling for this list, see the comments at the bottom of the xkcd.com/color/rgb/ page.
Spelling and Spam
Spelling was an issue for a lot of users:
Now, you may notice that the correct spelling is missing. This is because I can’t spell it either, and when running the analysis, used Google’s suggestion feature as a spellchecker:
A friend pointed out that to spell it right, you can think of it as “fuck-sia” (“fuch-sia”).
Misspellings aside, a lot of people spammed the database, but there were some decent filters in place. I dropped out people who gave too many answers which weren’t colors used by many other people. I also looked at the variation in hue; if people gave the same answer repeatedly for colors of wildly varying hue, I threw out all their results. This mainly caught people who typed the same thing over and over. Some were obviously using scripts; based on the filter’s certainty, the #1 spammer in the database was someone who named 2,400 colors—all with the same racial slur.
Map
Here’s a map of color boundaries for a particular part of the RGB cube. The data here comes from a portion of the survey (1.5 million results) which sampled only this region and showed the colors against both black and white backgrounds.
The data for this chart is here (3.6 MB text file with each RGB triplet named). Despite some requests, I’m not planning to make a poster of any of this, since it seems wrong to take advantage of all this volunteer effort for a profit; I just wanted to see what the results looked like. You’re welcome to print one up yourself (huge copy here), but keep in mind that print color spaces are different from monitor ones.
Basic Issues
Of course, there are basic issues with this color survey. People are primed by the colors they saw previously, which adds overall noise and some biases to the data (although it all seemed to even out in the end). Moreover, monitors vary; RGB is not an absolute color space. Fortunately, what I’m really interested in is what colors will look like on a typical monitors, so most of this data is across the sample of all non-colorblind users on all types of monitors (>90% LCD, roughly 6% CRT).
Color is a really fascinating topic, especially since we’re taught so many different and often contradictory ideas about rainbows, different primary colors, and frequencies of light. If you want to understand it better, you might try the neat introduction in Chapter 35 ofThe Feynman Lectures on Physics (Vol. 1), read Charles Poynton’s Color FAQ, or just peruse links from the Wikipedia article on color. For the purposes of this survey, we’re working inside the RGB space of the average monitor, so this data is useful for picking and naming screen colors. And really, if you’re reading this blog, odds are you probably—like me—spend more time looking at a monitor than at the outdoors anyway.
Miscellaneous
Lastly, here are some assorted things people came up with while labeling colors:
Thank you so much to relsqui for writing the survey frontend, and to everyone else who sacrificed their eyeballs for this project. If you have ideas and want to analyze these results further, I’ve posted the raw data as an SQLite dump here (84 MB .tar.gz file). It’s been anonymized, with IPs, URLs, and emails removed. I also have GeoIP information; if you’d like to do geocorrelation of some kind, I’ll be providing a version of the data with basic region-level lat/long information (limited to protect privacy) sometime in the next few days. Note: The ColorDB data is the main survey. The SatOnly data is the supplementary survey covering only the RGB faces in the map, and was presented on a half-black half-white background.)
And, of course, if you do anything fun with this data, I’d love to see the results—let me know at xkcd@xkcd.com.
