Tuesday 23 February 2010

Management Accounting - Full Costing

Full Costing


In our list of ways to define cost, we're onto number 3:

  • Differential future cash flows (DFC)

  • Cost behaviour in relation to output

  • Assignment to cost object

  • Financial statement perspective

  • Business function

Thursday 11 February 2010

Distributed Computing - Architectures


This post is going to be mainly about the architectures employed by a distributed system and I don't mean this kind of architecture:



There are two main types of architectures that we shall be looking at those which are...




  • Tightly Coupled- several machines which are highly integrated, which may seem and work like a single computer.

Management Accounting - Operating Gearing, Marginal Analysis

Operating Gearing and Marginal Analysis


If you have an activity, and it has high fixed costs compared to it's variable costs, then that activity has high operating gearing.

When operating gearing (OG) is high, a small change in sales will have a much bigger effect on profit, so you can say that profits are more sensitive to activity volume when OG is high.

Tuesday 9 February 2010

Management Accounting - Fixed and Variable Costs

Fixed and Variable Costs


You'll remember from the previous post that there's more than one way to define cost. The methods were:


  • Differential future cash flows (DFC)

  • Cost behaviour in relation to output

  • Assignment to cost object

  • Financial statement perspective

  • Business function



The previous post focused on DFC, and this post is about cost behaviour in relation to output. What's that in english? We're on about fixed and variable costs.

Algorithms - Traversals

Traversals


What is a traversal? It's when you visit every node of a tree or graph using the edges.

Tree traversal


Let's talk about 3 methods of traversing trees (Note: Always start at the root)

  • Depth-First-Search: Visit all the descendants of a node before visiting the sibling nodes. You have to visit some nodes more than once in a DFS, this is called backtracking

  • Breadth-First-Search: Visit all children of a node before visiting sibling nodes

  • Priority Search: Nodes are given priorities, and the children of the node that haven't been visited yet with the highest priority are visited first


So let's try these on a tree. Here's one I made earlier:

Monday 8 February 2010

Algorithms - More graphs

More Graphs (yay)


Note: This is a direct follow on (or a sequel if you want) to this post, so you might want to read that first!

Representing graphs


So you've seen what graphs are and how they can be classified. But how do you represent them in code? For example, do we put them in an array, a vector or a linked list? There isn't one definite answer, so let's go through some of the methods of representing them.

CSS Funnies

A Post For All Our Boredom :)


Proxies and Caches:

Friday 5 February 2010

Management Accounting - Relevant Costs

Relevant Costs


Right, onto the proper lecture material!

What is cost?


Basically there isn't a single way to define cost, which is quite inconvenient for us. What you're going to use the cost to figure out should tell you how to calculate it however.

Management Accounting - Introduction

Management Accounting - An Introduction


Like most of the intro lectures, this is going to be quite brief, the real 'meat' is in the next lectures!

What is accounting?


Seems like an easy question...but it's something you need to learn! My answer at first was "erm it's you know money and stuff and balance sheets". This is not a model answer!

Thursday 4 February 2010

Using NetBeans 6.8 to Create a Tab View

Hey guys,

Here's a video that may come in useful when developing GUIs for Java application using NetBean's interface builder.

Symbolic AI - Subject Overview

Symbolic AI is very different from other Artificial Intelligence courses, as it attempts to solve the problem of how to get computers to validate a statement given a load of facts. We humans do it all the time:

That car is indicating.
Cars which indicate turn.


From this we're able to deduce that the car is going to turn. Getting computers to interpret these statements of fact and validate statements would be incredibly useful.

Tuesday 2 February 2010

Distributed Computing - Parallel Computation

Why would you even want to use 100’s or even 1000’s of computers? What would you do with such a large number of networked computers?

Well the simplest answer is that there are many applications that we utilize which require good response time, such as Search engines, and File sharing. By increasing the number of computers working in parallel we can actually increase the execution time, giving users faster responses to resource queries.

  • Parallel computing – utilizing multiple CPU’s within a single computer

  • Distributed Computing – utilizing several computers connected through a network


Distributed Computing - Challenges

Okay sooo distributed systems are spread out over vast distances. Due to this attribute there are many issues and challenges surrounding such distributed systems some of which are discussed below! Enjoy!

Challenge No.1 - Heterogeneity


Heterogeneity - “Describes a system consisting of multiple distinct components”

System Architecture - Subject Overview

It's a new semester, and we've got 3 modules to pick from 6, and getting your choices right can be tricky. This should be a brief introduction to System Architecture and why you should take it, or why you shouldn't, and hopefully make picking your modules slightly easier.

Monday 1 February 2010

Distributed Computing - Introduction



Introduction to distributed computing


As this is just an intro I'll keep it brief...

Sooooo, what is a distributed system? I'm going to 'borrow' the description that Matt used in his COMP10052 posts (this post to be precise):

Algorithms - Intro to Graphs

Intro to Graphs


What are graphs?


So while you might think that graphs are things like these:



..you're right! That is a graph. But when computer scientists talk about graphs, they actually mean these: