estimation

My firm just got its first large-scale development project inquiry and I would like to use an Agile process. The client has a vision for the application but openly admits to having very few requirements and recognizes that we will have to charge by the hour. Because of this, I've all but sold him on an Agile approach. The problem is that he wants a figure to budget around. I've read a number of articles that pretty much advocate against giving up an estimate because the client will budget for that number and even as requirements change, the number in their head and in the books doesn't. I've

I am attempting to extract a fundamental frequency from a sound source. maybe someone is singing A3 into the microphone, so I want to be detecting ~ 110Hz my approach is: FFT 1024 floats use the phase of each bin to accurately determine its precise frequency determine peaks (typically 50 or so) order them with the loudest first (Peak[0].power=1063.343750, .freq=2032.715088 (Peak[1].power=1047.764893, .freq=3070.605225 (Peak[2].power=1014.986877, .freq=5925.878418 (Peak[3].power=1011.707825, .freq=6963.769043 (Peak[4].power=1009.152954, .freq=4022.363037 (Peak[5].power=995.199585, .freq=4974

I want to estimate the noise in an image. Let's assume the model of an Image + White Noise. Now I want to estimate the Noise Variance. My method is to calculate the Local Variance (3*3 up to 21*21 Blocks) of the image and then find areas where the Local Variance is fairly constant (By calculating the Local Variance of the Local Variance Matrix). I assume those areas are "Flat" hence the Variance is almost "Pure" noise. Yet I don't get constant results. Is there a better way? Thanks. P.S. I can't assume anything about the Image but the independent noise (Which isn't true for real image yet let

I have the following available: last reported lat,lon w/timestamp target lat,lon estimated time to target heading How can I interpolate an estimated position over time? I know that's enough to calculate the required average velocity for the remainder of the trip. Given a straight-line distance, it's pretty trivial. I know it has to do with vectors but I'm a bit rusty and thought it better to consult some experts. The reason I need this update rate is limited, so to show smooth animation I need to guess at the current position between updates. The target platform is a Google Maps application so

We've all poked fun at the 'X minutes remaining' dialog which seems to be too simplistic, but how can we improve it? Effectively, the input is the set of download speeds up to the current time, and we need to use this to estimate the completion time, perhaps with an indication of certainty, like '20-25 mins remaining' using some Y% confidence interval. Code that did this could be put in a little library and used in projects all over, so is it really that difficult? How would you do it? What weighting would you give to previous download speeds? Or is there some open source code already out

I'm trying to get an rough (order-of-magnitude) estimate of how long time the following query could take: mysql> EXPLAIN SELECT t1.col1, t1_col4 FROM t1 LEFT JOIN t2 ON t1.col1=t2.col1 WHERE col2=0 AND col3 IS NULL; +----+-------------+--------------------+------+---------------+------------+---------+-----------------------------+---------+--------------------------+ | id | select_type | table | type | possible_keys | key | key_len | ref | rows | Extra | +----+-------------+--------------------+------+---------------+------------+---------+-----------------------------+---------+-------------