Category: strategy

Software Project Estimation: Inaccurate and Unavoidable

This is a follow up to On Our Project, We’re Always 90% Done.

The coder is the one on the hook for long nights, weekends, and stress-related health problems if the estimates suck. It’s in your interest to exert as much control over estimation and scheduling as you can. If you’re not making the estimate, someone is making it for you.

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Another E-Book Flop, This Time From Amazon

It doesn’t take a lot of courage to predict that Amazon’s new Kindle electronic book reader will be a flop. This device looks like something that Sony or Apple circa 1994 would cook up. It’s getting a lot of press attention (such as the cover of the current Newsweek), but this is only because it’s Amazon promoting it, and because the tech press is obsessed with gadgets.

A closer examination, though, reveals that Kindle doesn’t solve the problems that caused prior e-book efforts to fail. It’s not better than a book in any way, and yet it costs more than a laptop PC and is nearly as complicated.

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Journalists, Developers Puzzled by Android SDK’s License

The Android mobile phone software platform from Google has some journalists and developers confused due to its license terms. The terms are open source, but not as free as the GNU General Public License. That decision has people wondering what Google’s up to. I have a theory about why they did this.

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Google Gives J2ME the Finger, but Still Needs a Carrier Partner

It turns out that as The New York Times says, Google is not building a phone. They’ve built (bought, really) a phone platform called Android. It’s Java on Linux, and it’s open source, but notably it is not J2ME based. Reportedly it will run J2ME apps, but the SDK makes the Android API look more like the BlackBerry’s Java API than J2ME. It’s a full featured API that isn’t a least common denominator of all possible mobile devices.
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