I went there two years ago in September. I took 2 phones there, a little Motorola that works in all the USA and Europe (but as it turns out, not China) an unlocked Iphone 2g. (I left my then-new Iphone 3g at home - not unlocked, higher theft value). I kept it on my person at all times, and Customs didn't ask about it when I entered the country; it was in my pocket.
It worked fine; I bought a 300 MB data-enabled SIM which lasted me 10 days (remember, Edge speeds). As a phone it worked fine, and when I got text messages in Chinese they were either spam, or sent to my Chinese friends from their family. I didn't try to get texts in English but I heard they work too.
With the data plan, I could pull up Google maps, check email, etc. Google maps helps a bit for finding your way, if you know about where you are and where you want to go, but without a GPS it's only partly useful.
I had to find a bilingual person who knew what I was talking about to make sure to get the right SIM card (with data) - mine was China Telecom. And I had to set my DNS and Edge settings correctly, I had done my homework and knew the correct settings (but the cheerful girl at the corner mobile phone stand knew the settings too, and it was the one thing in English on the SIM packaging).
My last day there, I tried to exhaust the data plan by emailing pictures from my high-speed train ride, but failed. I used 272 MB total in 10 days - mostly email and checking mainstream US sites for news, some map lookup, etc.
Things may have changed since then, especially around GPS and the Great Firewall of China (thus access to some US sites). If you're paranoid, set up a new Gmail account and use only it on the Iphone - assume it's compromised from day one, and don't do anything on that account you wouldn't want a lumbering but occasionally paranoid foreign communist government to know about. Commercial or personal stuff is fine, just stay away from politics.
Get a cheap Fedora or Centos box, download SugarCRM v 5.x, and go to town. Salesforce has per-user fees, while SugarCRM does not; it also has a robust community for support and customizing.
It was either "Kentucky Fried Movie" or "Amazon Women on the Moon" that had a funny skit called Feel-a-vision. An usher performed the 'feeling' part for the patron - the first movie was a detective mystery; the second was announced as Deep Throat (at which point the movie patron ran away at great speed). Someone who remembers it better should chime in with the details - the motto of the decade seems to be "Everything old is new again, this time with computers!"
Also have all equip signed in/out, that's all - nothing leaves without a cross-check to make sure it was checked in by the same guy. If you make it look like you are expecting theft, people will steal. If you put everyone on notice that you have an honor system and this signin is just to prevent mixups for identical-looking equipment, you'll have happier party-goers.
The disclaimer should be nothing too onerous, but with plenty of disclaimers - "YOU agree that YOU are responsible for everything that happens to YOUR equipment while it's here, including theft, spillage, power surges, lightning strikes, or other acts of man or God."
Yep, a separate throw-away email account will work. Kind of like a one-time-pad for email accounts.
The OP said he mostly wanted to check email. For a 10-day trip, set up 10 email accounts, one per day, and set up forwarding rules on the real account to all of them. This way the first time you access a email account on a public terminal is the last time you access that account - make your last step after checking email to delete the account.
Your mail sent from this account would tell the recipient not to reply to this account, just your regular account - some free mail accounts can probably set up a separate reply-to but most probably not. Also, cc: the original account so the next throw-away account would have your reply.
Retrieving the keylogged info would hopefully take longer than it would take to check mail, do your stuff, delete the account, log out. If not... you're still screwed, sorry.
Double author books - they can be anything. I've happened to pay attention to how it works for various people.
Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven - they plot the books together, and each work on each paragraph (one writes, the other revises, and it goes back and forth many times.
Eric Flint and David Drake (Belasarius series, starting with 'An Oblique Approach' - Drake gave Flint a/detailed/ outline for each book - many thousands of words - and reviewed the results. Flint calls the first 5 books of this series his 'apprenticeship'. (Similar for Drake and Stirling, 'The General' series).
But most often, "FAMOUS AUTHOR" (huge type) + Joe Unknown (tiny type) means that Joe Unknown wrote the whole thing, with or without input from the famous author. Sometimes Famous Author is old and slipping, sometimes they don't care, sometimes they help quite a bit. It's a bit of a gamble.
My least favorite is where the Famous Author is YEARS DEAD:
I've done this, and gotten it to work. The key is to get people seeing what their jobs do first, then getting into the details.
Get some 11x17 or larger paper. Help them draw up simple (informal) process flowcharts of what the heck they do - with each separate process. Note inputs, outputs, work actions, decision steps - that's enough. Then put them on a wall and you examine the processes across the company. It can also help with inter-group communication, where different people call the same thing by two names.
You will probably have to micromanage the process - these people aren't used to thinking that way. "Amy told me that she fills out a form and sends it to you, Bob. What do you do with it?"
Emphasize that you are creating a living document - one anyone can and should change if we find a better way, or some new requirement comes along. Flowcharts are easy to change.
Draw it all up in Visio or something and print it out big, then review it individually (with your input people), then with their group, and finally in inter-group meetings. Walk through each process with everyone (high level). This is the 'get buy-in' phase.
You are trying to drive out inefficiency. If two groups are doing the same thing, or something gets routed around three times when twice would work - that is what you are trying to fix. There is plenty of work to do - you are just trying to get people to do less unnecessary work.
Finally, you can use the flowcharts as the table of contents to the Big Manual No One Reads (where the picky details are stored) - if someone needs to find the part in question, they can (in theory). The details will change and people will need to keep their part updated, this will be an ongoing but smaller problem.
Much of what the previous posters have said about management is useful and true - especially the HR side of things. But that is 'just' nuts-and-bolts (not saying 'easy'). Leading is help establish where the company/division is going - Managing is making sure you get where you are heading (no matter who sets the goals). And leading from below is hard - think of a tiny auxiliary rudder on a big ship - but can be done, slowly. But it has the greatest reward.
What IT or business policies would help your company? Who should implement them? How do you get this across to everyone in all departments? (This is where the Win Friends and Influence People book comes in).
Stand up for your people, but also stand up to your people - ask for commitments from them in writing, and use it to evaluate their work. Transparency in expectations is usually welcome.
The quickest way of getting the team on your side is to try to eliminate un-needed work and other pain points that get in the way of what they do best. If you have developers working in Excel, PowerPoint, MS Project all day they aren't doing what they were hired to do. ========== The Manager's Cheat Sheet: 101 Common-Sense Rules for Leaders
Management is all about connecting with the people on your team. So how do you effectively manage a team? With common knowledge, of course. These are a few back-to-basics rules that will help you develop management skills that really matter. Body Language
Like it or not, your body speaks volumes, even when you are silent. Here's how to express an attitude that's appropriate for a leader.
1. Stand tall. Keeping your shoulders back and holding yourself up to your full height will give you an air of confidence. 2. Take your hands out of your pockets. Putting your hands in your pockets is often seen as a sign that you have something to hide. 3. Stand with your arms crossed behind your back. This will help you adjust your posture, and it leaves your hands in a position that is open and not intimidating. 4. Make eye contact. Always look directly into the eyes of the people you are speaking with. This shows you're interested and also gives you a sense of confidence. 5. Sit up straight. Even if you're at an 8 a.m.meeting and feeling tired, it's important to sit up straight in your chair. Slouching makes you look disinterested and can give off an unwanted air of laziness. 6. Face the person you're talking to. This shows you are interested and engaged in the conversation. 7. Shake hands firmly. For many, a handshake is a reflection of the person you're shaking hands with. You don't want to come across as unsure or overbearing, so make sure yours is professional and confident. 8. Always smile. Smiles are contagious and will make others feel positive when you're around. 9. Look your best. You don't have to be model perfect every day, but you should dress appropriately and neatly. Clothes can have a big impact on the way you're perceived. 10. Walk confidently. Keep your head up and take even strides. Meeting Deadlines
No one will be happy if your team has to rush around at the last minute to complete a project. Follow these tips to make deadlines less stressful for everyone.
11. Only promise what you can realistically deliver. Don't create deadlines that you know you can't meet. By only promising what you know you can do, you'll be able to finish on time. 12. Set clear goals. Once you know what you need to accomplish, it helps to know how and when you want to do it. Put your goals down on paper and make sure everyone on your team gets a copy. 13. Organize a team. Many of your employees will have unique strengths and training that can make them great assets to certain projects. Pick a team that has the right skills to carry out the job. 14. Delegate t
Ah, where to begin... I did this for a while. You will encounter (a) people too dumb to learn not to click "Sure, infect my machine" on every prompt; (b) people who think that $10.00 / hr is about the right wage for your service, (c) Packard Bell and WebTV boxes that people want to 'upgrade' so they can see the latest porn sites (and other technical impossibilities), (d) most insides of machines filled with dust monsters and cat hair; worst if it comes from a smoker's house, and (e) people who bounce checks, revert credit card charges, etc. People don't like paying someone younger than them, and not in a business suit, more than they make per hour.
With the price of an e-machines or low-end Dell, it doesn't take much in the way of billable hours to make it cheaper to just throw out the old machine and buy a new one. That's now what I council people to do. And as for training, if you spend a couple of hours walking them thru a 'Dummies' book, and telling them what a wicked world we live in (scammers, phishers, etc.) then you will have covered 90% of things.
Most people have one task they really want to do on the PC - one app that they want to know well (geneology, pr0n, games, PrintMaker, whatever). Get this one app working well and you are good to go - but often it is an old, old version that won't run on anything newer than a 486 / Win 3.1; and the new version is unavailable or changed so much they no longer know how to use it. And this is your fault of course. Blame the messenger is alive and well.
On the bright side, I made some good contacts doing this and still help out a couple of small businesses on the side, but not for pay, instead for trade. There is a body shop that owes me some free work on my car. They are grateful to see me when I can make it there, whereas if I was getting paid by the hour to clean Bondo out of their machines, upgrade software, and exchange fishing stories, they would (right or wrong) start to resent paying for how long it took.
In short, this is a job from hell because people with older broken PCs are mostly cheap and dumb. Sorry, but anyone who has tried this will say the same thing; some are nice guys and just ignorant but they are the exception. There is a reason the shops charge so much, it's easier to put up with someone who breaks open a 3.5" floppy and puts the inside disk on the CD tray at $95/hr - and the cheapest of the lusers will be driven away.
Sorry to burst your bubble but after 3 months you will be wondering what you've gotten yourself into and after a year you will HATE hearing the phone ring. Been there, done that, still have the T-shirt.
I remembered the existence of the article but not the details - I just browsed the article some months back. The course is a bit specific and definitely French, but this is a sort of idea (transferable to the work world) that a current math major may want to look into.
Search back issues of the Wall Street Journal. A few months back (March-to-May timeframe I think) there was a front-page article (might have been on the front page of section B or C) that mentioned a specific teacher, a specific statistical class, and the 6-figure incomes that graduates of this class got in Wall Street finance firms. Basic subject of the class was how to calculate the value of each part of a transaction and figure out the risk/reward for it as an investment. Derivitives and how to calculate them are big now, it is what Hedge Funds are doing.
If you are from a poor Chinese family, this is the only chance you will have to get into get into a university, with the govt. paying most or all of the costs. It is a way out of poverty for a whole family; the pressures are enormous, and there are many suicides of students who failed to get high enough scores on the entrance exam (held just once per year, typically on a Thursday). So, anything goes. If you can't afford to pay a tutor, or are not quite smart enough in the first place, and don't have a Party member for a family friend to pull some strings, you are doomed to work in an IPod factory or even a rice paddy for the rest of your life. So, you do whatever it takes.
In the west, we have lots of opportunities and second chances, and China is doing better these days, but has much govt. control still. It's a developing country, with a huge gap between the 'haves' and 'have nots'.
I personally hope the Chinese govt. can keep things from boiling over at some point. People (over 1 Gig of people there) want more than the Govt. can supply, and it's a balancing act. Most of the top govt. officials are engineers, which (if you know engineers) is both good and bad.
Assuming it's informatics you want... Find out where the people who you want to be like hang out - Informatics blogs, IT Toolbox groups for informatics apps, etc. Just absorb for a while. Then get the to know the tools they use - there is uaually a way to get an evaluation copy or at least a white paper. Ask polite questions when you don't understand, and get to know the more kindly regulars. You CAN work in informatics without a subject matter degree, but it's harder - you need to be able to buddy-up with a scientist and do the computer things he does not want to, without becoming 'just the computer guy' (who is expected to do all the low-level computer stuff).
There are some college-level statistics courses available for free, too - I think MIT has one.
This method will work for any semi-advanced but not too esoteric field these days. Those internets, amazing things.
(Copied from Jerry Pournelle's letters page, just spell-checked)
The global warming controversy hingers on four key questions:
1. Is there a sustained, long term increase in global average temperatures? 2. If this increase exists, is it due to natural environmental factors (including the observed warming of the sun over the past few decades), to human influences (e.g. industrial carbon dioxide, agricultural methane, etc.), or to a combination of these factors? 3. Is this environmental change likely to be, on the whole, beneficial or detrimental to human society? 4. If the change is likely to be detrimental, what actions should be taken to mitigate or eliminate the deleterious effects.
Briefly, in turn:
1. Is there a sustained, long term increase in global average temperatures?
a. Experimentally observed temperature effects are, at present, well within the historical data base of measured temperature extremes, which include cyclic patterns on scales of a year, two to three years (the El Nino/La Nina cycle), twenty-two years (the "normal" solar cycle), 80-odd years (natural the hurricane cycle which peaked in the 1930s and which is peaking again now) and several hundred years (the cycle that left Lief Erikson's Greenland as an agricultural paradise, then created the "mini ice age" in Europe in the late Middle Ages. These cycles are their interactions are poorly understood, and the possible forcing (or retarding) effects of man made influences even less so.
b. Most of the evidence for long-term "global warming" is a consequence of computer models which, of necessity, oversimple some (or many) aspects of the global environment. All of these models systematically predict warming of from 2 - 9 degrees C (3.5 - 16 degrees F) over the next century. This is noteworthy, but is is evidence -- even after the fact given the not yet understood cycles noted above? In any event, a lot of people think that if the most sophisticated weather models we can produce are in error by several degrees after five to seven days, why should we worry about climate models over the period of a century, and there is much to be said for that position.
2. If this increase exists, is it due to natural environmental factors (including the observed warming of the sun over the past few decades), to human influences (e.g. industrial carbon dioxide, agricultural methane, etc.), or to a combination of these factors?
The pro-warming factions maintain that their models hold that only 30% of observed warming is due to the solar warming, and that the balance is due to human influences. However, the "observed" warming -- against a baseline of mid-1940's temperatures -- is something like 0.2 degrees C (0.4 degrees F), which as noted above is well within the limits of historical temperatures of the past. Even that observed warming is questioned by many researchers, because our most direct temperature measurements are associated with urban areas, which are known to be heat traps due to the replacement of naturally cooling foliage by high-heat-retaining pavement (plus the waste heat of human activities). To some extent (this is being debated rigorously) this effect is skewing the underlying effects of the observed warming.
The solar variations are discussed at sites in the list of references below, and the average variation over the sun's normal 22 year cycle is approximately 0.2% -- which for a normal surface temperature of 300 degrees Kelvin (27 degrees C) amounts to a cyclic change of 0.6 degrees -- against which we are trying to detect a systematic 0.2 degree effect against a two-cycle background. Ask me again in a century.
3. Is this environmental change likely to be, on the whole, beneficial or detrimental to human society?
It is an open question whether meteorological "forcing" by increased temperatures would normally result just in warmer days and warmer nights by the same amount, by increased violent weather, or by a combination of these effects. There are also scare scenarios about Arc
Yeah, that too:-) A petard IS a small explosive device meant to blow up walls, gates, and (as needed) people too. When used in the term 'hoisted by his own petard', it means used as a mine.
So, that's why I said 'close' - not meaning it was wrong. Probably poor wording, sorry.
Straight Dope column
Even non-bidirectional printer points can receive data, even though it's just 4 bits at a time. Printer interface status lines have worked that way since the original IBM PC-XT. So turning off the bidirectional part might not work. Most of these printeres are USB anyway.
12 volt dedicated lines to the booths, firing the same solenoids that the buttons on the front of the box would. Not really a FIFO queue.
Older Rowe and Seeburg boxes had a mechanical queue. Jukebox idle, you choose A1 and D1. A1 starts playing. If nothing else happens, it will play D1. But if I choose C1 (while A1 is playing), C1 will play before D1, because the mechanical scanner comes to it first.
When I put in my money and choose C1, a 9-notched mechanical thingie, about the length of a toothpick, will be pushed in to the first notch, for position C1. When song A1 finishes, it scans the 'next thing to play' mechanical queue, and plays the first thing it comes to. In my example, it plays C1 (and the notched thingie goes back to the 0 position) and then goes on to song D1.
The 9-notch thing means that a song can be chosen 9 times but no more - and that the scanner will scan the rest of the jukebox queue first. If I had chosen C1 twice (and nothing else selected), song order would be A1, C1, D1, C1. If I had put in lots of coins and chosen C1 twenty times, it would only play 9 times.
Details differ on different brands, of course. Slightly newer ones (in the late 1970s) started storing the playlist in a true FIFO queue electronically.
Curvature of the earth? What heresy is that? The Flat Earth Society will come down on you like a ton of bricks!
Actually, you don't have to get up very high to have a line-of-sight to a house in a city. Probably most safe flying heights would be okay for your average cruise-around flight that lands at the same airport.
Oops, my bad. 4200 fps (40 grain bullet from 220 Swift), not 6000 fps. Mach 4, or thereabouts.
The physics are the same regardless of the source of energy - if you can boil n amount of water (i.e. to turn a power plant turbine), you need x amount of energy. The tighter you confine it, the more violently it escapes, given the chance.
But I'd rather have a fusion explosion of a given size close enough to rattle the windows than a fission explosion two counties away. Less radioactivity.
Put some lightning in a tree and watch it explode:-) (Yeah, that's extra energy input, so it does not count.)
But once it leaves containment, there is nothing to maintain the temperature and pressure, therefore the reaction stops and all you get is a warm cloud of hyderogen gas (not very much hyderogen either.)
Close, but it certainly could explode. The total energy is not that great (on this labratory scale), but if the confinement is suddeny released, could be very damaging if it encountered anything physical. If it was just confined by a magnetic field, it would be quite safe, but magnetic fields are made by wires, coils, etc.
As an analogy, think of smokeless rifle powder. If a few grams are poured on the ground and lit, it burns with a bit of a flash, but nothing serious. The same energy confined in a cartridge case, and released by firing it, produce pressures over 50,000 psi and bullet velocities up to about Mach 6. It's all a matter of how the released force is directed.
I've given "Neep Tides" (halfway between the highest tides of the month and lowest tides of the month are the neep tides) - and "Evil dogs that live in the woods" when people ask non-answerable questions, like "...but WHY did the appplication crash?" These days, people are getting better at realizing that most PCs are inheriently unstable and badly programmed.
The article is more about the display hardware - which could be neat. Its success depends on the operating system, and how books are sold and stored.
All the DRM-enabled e-book devices (Rocket) and formats (Palm reader) introduced so far have failed. No one wants to buy an e-book that is tied to a specific bit of hardware, or one who's access disappears if you lose your Passport account (MS Reader). Some devices won't even *permit* unencrypted data.
I hope that the designers realise that. Actually, the designers probably do, but the marketing guys or the managers will insist on it.
"...this novel e-Book reader offers users an enjoyable experience and the freedom to access material at their convenience."
My convienence does not include intrusive DRM, thank you.
Slashdot Mirror
I went there two years ago in September. I took 2 phones there, a little Motorola that works in all the USA and Europe (but as it turns out, not China) an unlocked Iphone 2g. (I left my then-new Iphone 3g at home - not unlocked, higher theft value). I kept it on my person at all times, and Customs didn't ask about it when I entered the country; it was in my pocket.
It worked fine; I bought a 300 MB data-enabled SIM which lasted me 10 days (remember, Edge speeds). As a phone it worked fine, and when I got text messages in Chinese they were either spam, or sent to my Chinese friends from their family. I didn't try to get texts in English but I heard they work too.
With the data plan, I could pull up Google maps, check email, etc. Google maps helps a bit for finding your way, if you know about where you are and where you want to go, but without a GPS it's only partly useful.
I had to find a bilingual person who knew what I was talking about to make sure to get the right SIM card (with data) - mine was China Telecom. And I had to set my DNS and Edge settings correctly, I had done my homework and knew the correct settings (but the cheerful girl at the corner mobile phone stand knew the settings too, and it was the one thing in English on the SIM packaging).
My last day there, I tried to exhaust the data plan by emailing pictures from my high-speed train ride, but failed. I used 272 MB total in 10 days - mostly email and checking mainstream US sites for news, some map lookup, etc.
Things may have changed since then, especially around GPS and the Great Firewall of China (thus access to some US sites). If you're paranoid, set up a new Gmail account and use only it on the Iphone - assume it's compromised from day one, and don't do anything on that account you wouldn't want a lumbering but occasionally paranoid foreign communist government to know about. Commercial or personal stuff is fine, just stay away from politics.
Get a cheap Fedora or Centos box, download SugarCRM v 5.x, and go to town. Salesforce has per-user fees, while SugarCRM does not; it also has a robust community for support and customizing.
It runs using all free software - LAMP stack.
It was either "Kentucky Fried Movie" or "Amazon Women on the Moon" that had a funny skit called Feel-a-vision. An usher performed the 'feeling' part for the patron - the first movie was a detective mystery; the second was announced as Deep Throat (at which point the movie patron ran away at great speed). Someone who remembers it better should chime in with the details - the motto of the decade seems to be "Everything old is new again, this time with computers!"
"From the article on Growler" ? Rob, you turned on spell check? That coudln't be!
Also have all equip signed in/out, that's all - nothing leaves without a cross-check to make sure it was checked in by the same guy. If you make it look like you are expecting theft, people will steal. If you put everyone on notice that you have an honor system and this signin is just to prevent mixups for identical-looking equipment, you'll have happier party-goers.
The disclaimer should be nothing too onerous, but with plenty of disclaimers - "YOU agree that YOU are responsible for everything that happens to YOUR equipment while it's here, including theft, spillage, power surges, lightning strikes, or other acts of man or God."
Yep, a separate throw-away email account will work. Kind of like a one-time-pad for email accounts.
The OP said he mostly wanted to check email. For a 10-day trip, set up 10 email accounts, one per day, and set up forwarding rules on the real account to all of them. This way the first time you access a email account on a public terminal is the last time you access that account - make your last step after checking email to delete the account.
Your mail sent from this account would tell the recipient not to reply to this account, just your regular account - some free mail accounts can probably set up a separate reply-to but most probably not. Also, cc: the original account so the next throw-away account would have your reply.
Retrieving the keylogged info would hopefully take longer than it would take to check mail, do your stuff, delete the account, log out. If not... you're still screwed, sorry.
Double author books - they can be anything. I've happened to pay attention to how it works for various people.
/detailed/ outline for each book - many thousands of words - and reviewed the results. Flint calls the first 5 books of this series his 'apprenticeship'. (Similar for Drake and Stirling, 'The General' series).
Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven - they plot the books together, and each work on each paragraph (one writes, the other revises, and it goes back and forth many times.
Eric Flint and David Drake (Belasarius series, starting with 'An Oblique Approach' - Drake gave Flint a
But most often, "FAMOUS AUTHOR" (huge type) + Joe Unknown (tiny type) means that Joe Unknown wrote the whole thing, with or without input from the famous author. Sometimes Famous Author is old and slipping, sometimes they don't care, sometimes they help quite a bit. It's a bit of a gamble.
My least favorite is where the Famous Author is YEARS DEAD:
http://www.amazon.com/McNallys-Dare-Lawrence-Sanders/dp/0399150552
LAWRENCE SANDERS (Big Type)
McNally's Dare (Freakin' Huge Type)
a Archy McNally novel by (tiny type)
Vincent Lardo (tiny type)
I've done this, and gotten it to work. The key is to get people seeing what their jobs do first, then getting into the details.
Get some 11x17 or larger paper. Help them draw up simple (informal) process flowcharts of what the heck they do - with each separate process. Note inputs, outputs, work actions, decision steps - that's enough. Then put them on a wall and you examine the processes across the company. It can also help with inter-group communication, where different people call the same thing by two names.
You will probably have to micromanage the process - these people aren't used to thinking that way. "Amy told me that she fills out a form and sends it to you, Bob. What do you do with it?"
Emphasize that you are creating a living document - one anyone can and should change if we find a better way, or some new requirement comes along. Flowcharts are easy to change.
Draw it all up in Visio or something and print it out big, then review it individually (with your input people), then with their group, and finally in inter-group meetings. Walk through each process with everyone (high level). This is the 'get buy-in' phase.
You are trying to drive out inefficiency. If two groups are doing the same thing, or something gets routed around three times when twice would work - that is what you are trying to fix. There is plenty of work to do - you are just trying to get people to do less unnecessary work.
Finally, you can use the flowcharts as the table of contents to the Big Manual No One Reads (where the picky details are stored) - if someone needs to find the part in question, they can (in theory). The details will change and people will need to keep their part updated, this will be an ongoing but smaller problem.
Much of what the previous posters have said about management is useful and true - especially the HR side of things. But that is 'just' nuts-and-bolts (not saying 'easy'). Leading is help establish where the company/division is going - Managing is making sure you get where you are heading (no matter who sets the goals). And leading from below is hard - think of a tiny auxiliary rudder on a big ship - but can be done, slowly. But it has the greatest reward.
What IT or business policies would help your company? Who should implement them? How do you get this across to everyone in all departments? (This is where the Win Friends and Influence People book comes in).
Stand up for your people, but also stand up to your people - ask for commitments from them in writing, and use it to evaluate their work. Transparency in expectations is usually welcome.
The quickest way of getting the team on your side is to try to eliminate un-needed work and other pain points that get in the way of what they do best. If you have developers working in Excel, PowerPoint, MS Project all day they aren't doing what they were hired to do.
==========
The Manager's Cheat Sheet: 101 Common-Sense Rules for Leaders
Inside CRM Editors (
http://www.insidecrm.com/features/Manager-Common-S ense-Rules-082207/
Management is all about connecting with the people on your team. So how do you effectively manage a team? With common knowledge, of course. These are a few back-to-basics rules that will help you develop management skills that really matter.
Body Language
Like it or not, your body speaks volumes, even when you are silent. Here's how to express an attitude that's appropriate for a leader.
1. Stand tall. Keeping your shoulders back and holding yourself up to your full height will give you an air of confidence.
2. Take your hands out of your pockets. Putting your hands in your pockets is often seen as a sign that you have something to hide.
3. Stand with your arms crossed behind your back. This will help you adjust your posture, and it leaves your hands in a position that is open and not intimidating.
4. Make eye contact. Always look directly into the eyes of the people you are speaking with. This shows you're interested and also gives you a sense of confidence.
5. Sit up straight. Even if you're at an 8 a.m.meeting and feeling tired, it's important to sit up straight in your chair. Slouching makes you look disinterested and can give off an unwanted air of laziness.
6. Face the person you're talking to. This shows you are interested and engaged in the conversation.
7. Shake hands firmly. For many, a handshake is a reflection of the person you're shaking hands with. You don't want to come across as unsure or overbearing, so make sure yours is professional and confident.
8. Always smile. Smiles are contagious and will make others feel positive when you're around.
9. Look your best. You don't have to be model perfect every day, but you should dress appropriately and neatly. Clothes can have a big impact on the way you're perceived.
10. Walk confidently. Keep your head up and take even strides.
Meeting Deadlines
No one will be happy if your team has to rush around at the last minute to complete a project. Follow these tips to make deadlines less stressful for everyone.
11. Only promise what you can realistically deliver. Don't create deadlines that you know you can't meet. By only promising what you know you can do, you'll be able to finish on time.
12. Set clear goals. Once you know what you need to accomplish, it helps to know how and when you want to do it. Put your goals down on paper and make sure everyone on your team gets a copy.
13. Organize a team. Many of your employees will have unique strengths and training that can make them great assets to certain projects. Pick a team that has the right skills to carry out the job.
14. Delegate t
Ah, where to begin...
I did this for a while. You will encounter (a) people too dumb to learn not to click "Sure, infect my machine" on every prompt; (b) people who think that $10.00 / hr is about the right wage for your service, (c) Packard Bell and WebTV boxes that people want to 'upgrade' so they can see the latest porn sites (and other technical impossibilities), (d) most insides of machines filled with dust monsters and cat hair; worst if it comes from a smoker's house, and (e) people who bounce checks, revert credit card charges, etc. People don't like paying someone younger than them, and not in a business suit, more than they make per hour.
With the price of an e-machines or low-end Dell, it doesn't take much in the way of billable hours to make it cheaper to just throw out the old machine and buy a new one. That's now what I council people to do. And as for training, if you spend a couple of hours walking them thru a 'Dummies' book, and telling them what a wicked world we live in (scammers, phishers, etc.) then you will have covered 90% of things.
Most people have one task they really want to do on the PC - one app that they want to know well (geneology, pr0n, games, PrintMaker, whatever). Get this one app working well and you are good to go - but often it is an old, old version that won't run on anything newer than a 486 / Win 3.1; and the new version is unavailable or changed so much they no longer know how to use it. And this is your fault of course. Blame the messenger is alive and well.
On the bright side, I made some good contacts doing this and still help out a couple of small businesses on the side, but not for pay, instead for trade. There is a body shop that owes me some free work on my car. They are grateful to see me when I can make it there, whereas if I was getting paid by the hour to clean Bondo out of their machines, upgrade software, and exchange fishing stories, they would (right or wrong) start to resent paying for how long it took.
In short, this is a job from hell because people with older broken PCs are mostly cheap and dumb. Sorry, but anyone who has tried this will say the same thing; some are nice guys and just ignorant but they are the exception. There is a reason the shops charge so much, it's easier to put up with someone who breaks open a 3.5" floppy and puts the inside disk on the CD tray at $95/hr - and the cheapest of the lusers will be driven away.
Sorry to burst your bubble but after 3 months you will be wondering what you've gotten yourself into and after a year you will HATE hearing the phone ring. Been there, done that, still have the T-shirt.
Great job finding this.
I remembered the existence of the article but not the details - I just browsed the article some months back. The course is a bit specific and definitely French, but this is a sort of idea (transferable to the work world) that a current math major may want to look into.
Search back issues of the Wall Street Journal. A few months back (March-to-May timeframe I think) there was a front-page article (might have been on the front page of section B or C) that mentioned a specific teacher, a specific statistical class, and the 6-figure incomes that graduates of this class got in Wall Street finance firms. Basic subject of the class was how to calculate the value of each part of a transaction and figure out the risk/reward for it as an investment. Derivitives and how to calculate them are big now, it is what Hedge Funds are doing.
If you are from a poor Chinese family, this is the only chance you will have to get into get into a university, with the govt. paying most or all of the costs. It is a way out of poverty for a whole family; the pressures are enormous, and there are many suicides of students who failed to get high enough scores on the entrance exam (held just once per year, typically on a Thursday). So, anything goes. If you can't afford to pay a tutor, or are not quite smart enough in the first place, and don't have a Party member for a family friend to pull some strings, you are doomed to work in an IPod factory or even a rice paddy for the rest of your life. So, you do whatever it takes.
In the west, we have lots of opportunities and second chances, and China is doing better these days, but has much govt. control still. It's a developing country, with a huge gap between the 'haves' and 'have nots'.
I personally hope the Chinese govt. can keep things from boiling over at some point. People (over 1 Gig of people there) want more than the Govt. can supply, and it's a balancing act. Most of the top govt. officials are engineers, which (if you know engineers) is both good and bad.
Assuming it's informatics you want... Find out where the people who you want to be like hang out - Informatics blogs, IT Toolbox groups for informatics apps, etc. Just absorb for a while. Then get the to know the tools they use - there is uaually a way to get an evaluation copy or at least a white paper. Ask polite questions when you don't understand, and get to know the more kindly regulars. You CAN work in informatics without a subject matter degree, but it's harder - you need to be able to buddy-up with a scientist and do the computer things he does not want to, without becoming 'just the computer guy' (who is expected to do all the low-level computer stuff).
There are some college-level statistics courses available for free, too - I think MIT has one.
This method will work for any semi-advanced but not too esoteric field these days. Those internets, amazing things.
(Copied from Jerry Pournelle's letters page, just spell-checked)
The global warming controversy hingers on four key questions:
1. Is there a sustained, long term increase in global average temperatures? 2. If this increase exists, is it due to natural environmental factors (including the observed warming of the sun over the past few decades), to human influences (e.g. industrial carbon dioxide, agricultural methane, etc.), or to a combination of these factors? 3. Is this environmental change likely to be, on the whole, beneficial or detrimental to human society? 4. If the change is likely to be detrimental, what actions should be taken to mitigate or eliminate the deleterious effects.
Briefly, in turn:
1. Is there a sustained, long term increase in global average temperatures?
a. Experimentally observed temperature effects are, at present, well within the historical data base of measured temperature extremes, which include cyclic patterns on scales of a year, two to three years (the El Nino/La Nina cycle), twenty-two years (the "normal" solar cycle), 80-odd years (natural the hurricane cycle which peaked in the 1930s and which is peaking again now) and several hundred years (the cycle that left Lief Erikson's Greenland as an agricultural paradise, then created the "mini ice age" in Europe in the late Middle Ages. These cycles are their interactions are poorly understood, and the possible forcing (or retarding) effects of man made influences even less so.
b. Most of the evidence for long-term "global warming" is a consequence of computer models which, of necessity, oversimple some (or many) aspects of the global environment. All of these models systematically predict warming of from 2 - 9 degrees C (3.5 - 16 degrees F) over the next century. This is noteworthy, but is is evidence -- even after the fact given the not yet understood cycles noted above? In any event, a lot of people think that if the most sophisticated weather models we can produce are in error by several degrees after five to seven days, why should we worry about climate models over the period of a century, and there is much to be said for that position.
2. If this increase exists, is it due to natural environmental factors (including the observed warming of the sun over the past few decades), to human influences (e.g. industrial carbon dioxide, agricultural methane, etc.), or to a combination of these factors?
The pro-warming factions maintain that their models hold that only 30% of observed warming is due to the solar warming, and that the balance is due to human influences. However, the "observed" warming -- against a baseline of mid-1940's temperatures -- is something like 0.2 degrees C (0.4 degrees F), which as noted above is well within the limits of historical temperatures of the past. Even that observed warming is questioned by many researchers, because our most direct temperature measurements are associated with urban areas, which are known to be heat traps due to the replacement of naturally cooling foliage by high-heat-retaining pavement (plus the waste heat of human activities). To some extent (this is being debated rigorously) this effect is skewing the underlying effects of the observed warming.
The solar variations are discussed at sites in the list of references below, and the average variation over the sun's normal 22 year cycle is approximately 0.2% -- which for a normal surface temperature of 300 degrees Kelvin (27 degrees C) amounts to a cyclic change of 0.6 degrees -- against which we are trying to detect a systematic 0.2 degree effect against a two-cycle background. Ask me again in a century.
3. Is this environmental change likely to be, on the whole, beneficial or detrimental to human society?
It is an open question whether meteorological "forcing" by increased temperatures would normally result just in warmer days and warmer nights by the same amount, by increased violent weather, or by a combination of these effects. There are also scare scenarios about Arc
Yeah, that too :-) A petard IS a small explosive device meant to blow up walls, gates, and (as needed) people too. When used in the term 'hoisted by his own petard', it means used as a mine.
So, that's why I said 'close' - not meaning it was wrong. Probably poor wording, sorry.
Straight Dope column
Close... but a 'petard' was a primitave (Elizabethean) anti-personnel land mine.
Even non-bidirectional printer points can receive data, even though it's just 4 bits at a time. Printer interface status lines have worked that way since the original IBM PC-XT. So turning off the bidirectional part might not work. Most of these printeres are USB anyway.
12 volt dedicated lines to the booths, firing the same solenoids that the buttons on the front of the box would. Not really a FIFO queue.
Older Rowe and Seeburg boxes had a mechanical queue. Jukebox idle, you choose A1 and D1. A1 starts playing. If nothing else happens, it will play D1. But if I choose C1 (while A1 is playing), C1 will play before D1, because the mechanical scanner comes to it first.
When I put in my money and choose C1, a 9-notched mechanical thingie, about the length of a toothpick, will be pushed in to the first notch, for position C1. When song A1 finishes, it scans the 'next thing to play' mechanical queue, and plays the first thing it comes to. In my example, it plays C1 (and the notched thingie goes back to the 0 position) and then goes on to song D1.
The 9-notch thing means that a song can be chosen 9 times but no more - and that the scanner will scan the rest of the jukebox queue first. If I had chosen C1 twice (and nothing else selected), song order would be A1, C1, D1, C1. If I had put in lots of coins and chosen C1 twenty times, it would only play 9 times.
Details differ on different brands, of course. Slightly newer ones (in the late 1970s) started storing the playlist in a true FIFO queue electronically.
Curvature of the earth? What heresy is that? The Flat Earth Society will come down on you like a ton of bricks!
Actually, you don't have to get up very high to have a line-of-sight to a house in a city. Probably most safe flying heights would be okay for your average cruise-around flight that lands at the same airport.
This just goes to show, there occasionaly IS a problem that can be solved by pissing and moaning.
Oops, my bad. 4200 fps (40 grain bullet from 220 Swift), not 6000 fps. Mach 4, or thereabouts.
:-) (Yeah, that's extra energy input, so it does not count.)
The physics are the same regardless of the source of energy - if you can boil n amount of water (i.e. to turn a power plant turbine), you need x amount of energy. The tighter you confine it, the more violently it escapes, given the chance.
But I'd rather have a fusion explosion of a given size close enough to rattle the windows than a fission explosion two counties away. Less radioactivity.
Put some lightning in a tree and watch it explode
But once it leaves containment, there is nothing to maintain the temperature and pressure, therefore the reaction stops and all you get is a warm cloud of hyderogen gas (not very much hyderogen either.)
Close, but it certainly could explode. The total energy is not that great (on this labratory scale), but if the confinement is suddeny released, could be very damaging if it encountered anything physical. If it was just confined by a magnetic field, it would be quite safe, but magnetic fields are made by wires, coils, etc.
As an analogy, think of smokeless rifle powder. If a few grams are poured on the ground and lit, it burns with a bit of a flash, but nothing serious. The same energy confined in a cartridge case, and released by firing it, produce
pressures over 50,000 psi and bullet velocities up to about Mach 6. It's all a matter of how the released force is directed.
I've given "Neep Tides" (halfway between the highest tides of the month and lowest tides of the month are the neep tides) - and "Evil dogs that live in the woods" when people ask non-answerable questions, like "...but WHY did the appplication crash?" These days, people are getting better at realizing that most PCs are inheriently unstable and badly programmed.
The article is more about the display hardware - which could be neat. Its success depends on the operating system, and how books are sold and stored.
All the DRM-enabled e-book devices (Rocket) and formats (Palm reader) introduced so far have failed. No one wants to buy an e-book that is tied to a specific bit of hardware, or one who's access disappears if you lose your Passport account (MS Reader). Some devices won't even *permit* unencrypted data.
I hope that the designers realise that. Actually, the designers probably do, but the marketing guys or the managers will insist on it.
"...this novel e-Book reader offers users an enjoyable experience and the freedom to access material at their convenience."
My convienence does not include intrusive DRM, thank you.
Not that I will get my hopes up...