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Topic One: Introduction to Management

Management involves long hours, multiple responsibilities, dealing with conflict and constant stress. There are no general principles which can be applied to all situations in management. There are several contrasting approaches that can be used and will work successfully [sounds like Perl]. The rewards include the excersise of power, good pay and the opportunity to contribute to the organisation.

Now the fun starts

Google have announced Google Chrome OS. This is interesting on several fronts.

Firstly, and most obviously, this is an open statement of war on Microsoft. It is written in the text of the announcement "We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better." This device will have no MS APIs on it. None. Nada. The end of the MS lock in.

Unit 101: Financial Management

Notes from the textbook Michael E. Bazley, Contemporary Accounting (6th edition), Cengage Learning Australia, 2004 and the study guide.

Study Guide

Financial Literacy

A core problem exists in the assumption that what is profitable for an individual entity is profitable for an economy as a whole. This is raised on a divisional/entity level in the Contemporary Accounting textbook: ".. the maximisation of a division's profit may not always ensure the maximisation of the profit of the entity" (p13).

Two articles by the LVRG come to mind on this matter, one is a long-term index of real-estate prices to GDP and the other is a recent empirical study on the correlation of speculative investment to financial collapse.

Managing People in the GFC

By raising the question "Global Financial Crisis or Opportunity?" in the first order requires a proper analysis of what sort of global financial crisis this is in order to discern whether there are any opportunities that can arise from it.

Which Bank?

Which bank gets confused about some fairly trivial technical and security issues on their own helpdesk system?

Installing OpenFOAM 1.5 on a 64-bit AMD Opteron Cluster running CentOS 5 Linux

OpenFOAM (Open Field Operationa and Manipulation) is a computational fluid dynamics toolbox which simulates "anything from complex fluid flows involving chemical reactions, turbulence and heat transfer, to solid dynamics, electromagnetics and the pricing of financial options." All this and free and open source as well.

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