How to Measure Anything

How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business, Second Edition by Douglas W. Hubbard Wiley | 2010 | ISBN: 0470539399 | 320 pages | PDF | 14 MB
Anything can be measured. This bold assertion is the key to solving many problems in business and life in general. The myth that certain things can't be measured is a significant drain on our nation's economy, public welfare, the environment, and even national security. In fact, the chances are good that some part of your life or your professional responsibilities is greatly harmed by a lack of measurement—by you, your firm, or even your government.
Building up from simple concepts to illustrate the hands-on yet intuitively easy application of advanced statistical techniques, How to Measure Anything, Second Edition reveals the power of measurement in our understanding of business and the world at large. This insightful and engaging book shows you how to measure those things in your business that, until now, you may have considered "immeasurable," including technology ROI, organizational flexibility, customer satis-faction, and technology risk. Offering examples that will get you to attempt measurements—even when it seems impossible—this book provides you with the substantive steps for measuring anything, especially uncertainty and risk.

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UEFI to Replace PC BIOS by 2011

Bios' replacement, known as UEFI, will predominate in new PCs by 2011.









The upgrade will spell the end for the 25-year-old PC start-up software known as Bios that initialises a machine so its operating system can get going.

The code was not intended to live nearly this long, and adapting it to modern PCs is one reason they take as long as they do to warm up.

Bios' replacement, known as UEFI, will predominate in new PCs by 2011.
The acronym stands for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface and is designed to be more flexible than its venerable predecessor.
"Conventional Bios is up there with some of the physical pieces of the chip set that have been kicking around the PC since 1979," said Mark Doran, head of the UEFI Forum, which is overseeing development of the technology.

Mr Doran said the creators of the original Bios only expected it to have a lifetime of about 250,000 machines - a figure that has long been surpassed.
"They are as amazed as anyone else that now it is still alive and well in a lot of systems," he said. "It was never really designed to be extensible over time."

AMI is a firm that develops Bios software. Brian Richardson, of AMI's technical marketing team, said the age of the Bios was starting to hamper development as 64-bit computing became more common and machines mutated beyond basic desktops and laptops.

"Drive size limits that were inherent to the original PC design - two terabytes - are going to become an issue pretty soon for those that use their PC a lot for pictures and video," he said.

Similarly, he said, as tablet computers and other smaller devices become more popular, having to get them working with a PC control system was going to cause problems.
The problem emerges, he said, because Bios expects the machine it is getting going to have the same basic internal set-up as the first PCs.


As a result, adding extra peripherals - such as keyboards that connect via USB rather than the AT or PS/2 ports of yesteryear - has been technically far from straightforward.
Similarly, the Bios forces USB drives to be identified to a PC as either a hard drive or a floppy drive.




The Bios tells the computer what input and output devices are installed

This, said Mr Richardson, could cause problems when those thumb drives are used to get a system working while installing or re-installing an operating system.


UEFI frees any computer from being based around the blueprint and specifications of the original PCs. For instance, it does not specify that a keyboard will only connect via a specific port.


"All it says is that somewhere in the machine there's a device that can produce keyboard-type information," said Mr Doran.
Under UEFI, it will be much easier for that input to come a soft keyboard, gestures on a touchscreen or any future input device.


"The extensible part of the name is important because we are going to have to live with this for a long time," said Mr Doran.


He added that UEFI started life as an Intel-only specification known as EFI. It morphed into a general standard when the need to replace Bios industry-wide became more widely recognised.


Alternatives to UEFI, such as Open Firmware and Coreboot, do exist and are typically used on computers that do not run chips based on Intel's x86 architecture.



UEFI is proving a boon to those managing lots of computers in data centres


The first to see the benefits of swapping old-fashioned Bios for UEFI have been system administrators who have to oversee hundreds or thousands of PCs in data centres or in offices around the world.


Before now, said Mr Doran, getting those machines working has been "pretty painful" because of the limited capabilities of Bios.
By contrast, he said, UEFI has much better support for basic net protocols - which should mean that remote management is easier from the "bare metal" upwards.


For consumers, said Mr Doran, the biggest obvious benefit of a machine running UEFI will be the speed with which it starts up.
"At the moment it can be 25-30 seconds of boot time before you see the first bit of OS sign-on," he said. "With UEFI we're getting it under a handful of seconds."


"In terms of boot speed, we're not at instant-on yet but it is already a lot better than conventional Bios can manage," he said "and we're getting closer to that every day."


Some PC and laptop makers are already using UEFI as are many firms that make embedded computers. More, said Mr Richardson, will result as motherboard makers complete the shift to using it.
He said that 2011 would be the year that sales of UEFI machines start to dominate.


"I would say we are at the edge of the tipping point right now," he said.

'New Earth is Discovered'

New find ... planet called Gliese 581G has enough gravity to allow an atmosphere




AN Earth-like planet which could support human life has been discovered, scientists sensationally said last night.

The new world - 120 trillion miles away in another solar system - orbits its own sun and is three times the size of Earth.

Crucially boffins believe the "new planet" called Gliese 581G has enough gravity to allow an atmosphere - and could have water on its surface.

Its relative closeness to the Earth makes it an important target for future space missions searching for extraterrestrial life.

Last night Professor Steven Vogt, of the University of California in Santa Cruz, said: "Our findings offer a very compelling case for a potentially habitable planet.

"The fact that we were able to detect this planet so quickly and so nearby tells us that planets like this must be really common."


Gravity

Prof Vogt added that the surface gravity would be about the same or slightly higher than Earth's, so a person could easily walk upright on the planet.

However the planet does not spin around, meaning one side is always facing its sun and basking in perpetual daylight.

And the other is in constant darkness because it faces away from the star.

The most habitable part of the new planet would be the line between darkness and light where the average surface temperature of the planet ranges between -24 and 10 degrees Fahrenheit (-31 to -12 degrees Celsius), boffins said.

Prof Vogt added: "Any emerging life forms on the new planet would have a wide range of stable climates to choose from and to evolve around, depending on their longitude."

The professor said two other planets had been previously detected in the same system, but one, known as planet C, was deemed too hot to be habitable and the other, planet D, too cold.

Prof Vogt said: "We had planets on both sides of the habitable zone - one too hot and one too cold - and now we have one in the middle that's just right."

The new "super-Earth" is named after its star Gliese 581 - a small "red dwarf" about a third of the size of our Sun - and is 20 light years away from us in the constellation Libra.

The scientists determined that the planet has a mass three to four times that of Earth and an orbital period of just under 37 days.