Beyond Messaging

Unimpressed Astronaut

Unimpressed Astronaut

via www.quickmeme.com

Free Inbox and To Do Management Guide (Kindle Ebook)

Free Kindle book on email and To Do list management: "Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information" by Mark Hurst. 

This has over 130 reviews giving an average of 4 1/2 stars.

 

Growth Vs. Income

This week I am mulling over something - a lot of investors expect growth and seek out companies they think will be growing.  If the company posts earnings or forcasts that show less growth than the market expected, the stock goes down.

Another type of investor is looking for income.  They want a stock that generally posts a dividend and are less concerned with the price of the stock going up and down.  If it goes up, great, but they really want that quarterly divendend.

I was thinking about this as an analogy to the world population.  The population of some countries is growing, and some countries are slowing down.  In a consumer driven economy that population growth represents more sales opportunities.  Would a stable or slowing population be more like dividend paying economy rather than a growth economy?

Unchecked growth, whether in a company or population, probably isn't good in the long run.  On the other hand, we want to see the quality of life and bottom line numbers getting better.  I think its a game of balance between growth and income. 

Free Book - What's New in Java 7

Here is a small freebie from O'Reilly that gives an overview of new features in Java 7.  Here is the blurb from the publisher:

Java 7 has a number of features that will please developers. Madhusudhan Konda provides an overview of these, including strings in switch statements, multi-catch exception handling, try-with-resource statements, the new File System API, extensions of the JVM, support for dynamically-typed languages, and the fork and join framework for task parallelism.

 

Free HTML 5 ebook from O'Reilly

Publisher O'Reilly is giving away this tech book on HTML5 by Brett McLaughlin.  It's normally a 99 cent title so I expect it is a short book.

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From 1890: The First Text Messages

via sundaymagazine.org

This is a great article about the side communication between telegraph operators back in 1890. They used their own version of text message speak to get short messages in between the official business.

Pretty neat, everything new is really old.

Business Cat Gets a New Mouse

via www.quickmeme.com

Technologically Impaired Duck

I have made my own Meme Picture.  This is dedicated to the sales guy I supported at a previous company who was very upset and wanted me to explain why system idle process was using up 99% of his processor according to the Windows Task Manager.

Business Cat Says:

via i.imgur.com

Worker Shortage?

"We don't understand the formation of interest in STEM disciplines," admits Fitzgerald. "It's been hard to move the needle. Is it that one teacher that makes a difference?

"What we know is that few 12th graders are interested in these disciplines, about 50% switch to other majors in college, only 19% graduate with a STEM degree, and only 10% of those go into STEM jobs."

via management.fortune.cnn.com

First of all, if there is a coming worker shortage, its pretty ironic to talk about it right now when plenty of tech workers cannot find a job, are being paid less, or are working under their potential.

BY the way - STEM stands for science, technology, engineering and math. I work in technology and I HATED those STEM subjects in school. I was a Sociology major in College. And yes - one teacher can make the difference. One terrible math or science teacher can ruin the subject for students. Girls in school can particularly have a hard time with the way abstract mathematical concepts are presented.