Business Networking

The book I read to research this post was Working The Net by Simon Bozeat which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. When I saw the title to this book I assumed it was about using social media to promote your business but actually it's about using networking meetings. I must admit I think these kind of meetings probably attract lots of salespeople and very few selling prospects. Anyway Simon has made a career of this and runs his own business so obviously there is potential in this if it is done right. He does give some advice like that you should focus on people who you think realistically might buy something. A lot of time can be wasted talking to people who may be interested in your product but are unlikely to buy anything. Another suggestion is you should keep notes about what people tell you. Bill Clinton had a computer database that information on every one he met right from when he was a teenager. Of course you should review it regularly but you never know when a snippet of information proves useful. This book is only around 100 pages but is an interesting read & I enjoyed it.

Windows Server 2012

The book I read to research this post was Introducing Windows Server 2012 R T M Edition by Mitch Tulloch which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. This book is just an introduction to Windows Server 2012 & really just covers the main features and how to install it. It is the biggest upgrade in the history of Windows Server and the biggest change in computing is cloud computing which is catered for. This program works seamlessly with cloud computing platforms with support in particular for the Microsoft offerings like Azure & Office 365. Now it is possible as long as you are logged into your computer to avoid having to log in to your cloud environment separately. There is also a huge increase in the hardware that Windows Server 2012 works with, Server 2008 just worked with upto 64 processors for example but Server 2012 works with upto 2048 virtual processors. It also has support for working with several hard drives as one virtual hard drive or volume as they call it. This it has in common with Windows 8. It also will share a network hard drive between 2 hosts. Mitch was one of the developers of Server 2012 and a lot of this book gives addresses of sites like blogs for more information about various subjects. There is also sidebars in the book where people who have worked on particular aspects of Server 2012 write about certain things. It still uses Internet Information Server 8 which is the same as in Server 2008. There is also a server core version on the same disc as the graphical version of Server 2012 which allows you to use a command line and doesn't upload the graphical parts of Server 2012. Some components like Internet Explorer aren't installed with this version.

Superconductivity

The book I read to research this post was Superconductivity A Very Short Introduction by Stephen J Blundell which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. This book is a good introduction to this subject and covers it in a lot of detail although some of it was a little difficult to understand. Superconductivity was discovered in Germany in 1911 and originally was called supraconductivity and the name was later changed. It was first discovered in mercury at extremely low temperatures. It is often found in substances that don't normally conduct electricity and is when a current can be passed into a substance and because no heat or friction is generated it will continue to go round a circuit indefinitely. Sometimes pressure has to be added to a substance in addition to an extremely low temperature for it to work but quite a lot of substances particularly the transition metals have this ability. Some applications for this technology are Maglev Trains & MRI Scanners. When first discovered scientists were at a loss in understanding it and working out what it could be applied to. Eventually they hope that substances can be developed that can do this at room temperature & scientists have developed substances that will do it at 138 K which is on the Kelvin scale where 273 K is the freezing point of water. The Kelvin scale is the same as the Centigrade scale but starts at absolute zero which is the coldest possible temperature. I certainly enjoyed reading this book and it is an interesting subject.

Start A Paid Membership Website

The book I read to research this post was Start A Paid Membership Site by Ansel Gough which is an excellent book which I downloaded for free from kindle. I think this book or ebook is probably on an almost unique topic & would probably buy this book if I saw it for sale. It's on a very interesting subject & is a business that I think could work. The premise is you have a website that has content on an interesting subject, one example is Japanese candlestick charting, then you offer users either a trial membership at reduced rate for one month or a yearly membership. Of course this is renewed every year and you can make a sizeable income. Of course you make costs like getting people to build the site and it's probably to get experts in that topic to add additional content. It's probably a good idea to let users show off their work on the site or maybe do blogs on the site. For people paying for their membership a couple of recommended sites for safety of payment were http://paypal.com & http://worldpay.com . A site for getting ideas for a topic for your site is http://smartdigitalassets.com . Obviously you need a high ranking in the search engines but a couple of similiar sites are http://goclick.com & http://findwhat.com . A site where you can test your idea for a topic for your site and see its popularity is http://clickbank.com . You can adverstise for free on www.prweb.com , http://pressbox.co.uk & http://freesticky.com . You can also do an article on your site or your topic on an ezine site and that should give it lots of publicity. They also suggest rather than paying search engines for pay per click you might be better off using a SEO specialist. This book of course has lots more information about this topic.

Dinosaurs

The book I read to research this post was Dinosaurs A Very Short Introduction by David Norman which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. Dinosaurs were first recognized for what they were in 1847. Prior to that people just thought they were rock abnormalities. It did revolutionize how people thought about the history of the world & we know Darwin was aware of this discovery when he was coming up with his theory of evolution which took it a step further. The ages of the when the dinosaurs lived were normally named after where dinosaurs from that period were first discovered. Hence we have names like the devonian period & the pennsylvanian period. Fossils tend to be be found at sites that yield coal deposits partly because they are obviously mining the coal and obviously as the rock is broken up and removed coal miners find them & also because it's soft rock. When they had the Great Exhibition in London the people who built the huge exhibition hall out of glass didn't want it to go to waste and it was resited at Sydenham and became Crystal Palace. They then had a dilemma about what to display in there and some bright spark came up with the idea of models of authentic dinosaurs. This helped educate people about that wasn't generally known at the time and brought it to prominence. 

Forensic Accounting

The book I read to research this post was Forensic Accounting & Fraud Investigation For NonExperts by Howard Silverstone which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. I think this book is intended as a broad introduction to these subject & if you are hoping to learn how to do Forensic Accounting it's probably the wrong book. There is a lot of examples of actual cases which are quite interesting. If someone is committing business fraud it will normally take the form of one of 2 things either ghost employees or faked expenses. Ghost employees are employees are employees who have left a company and it's made look like they are still being payed and the money is pocketed. Fraud is frequently for huge amounts of money over a long period of time which can run into millions of dollars or whatever currency is used. Often cases aren't prosecuted and the true extent of fraud is unknown. We know that the cases that come to light are the tip of the iceberg. Often companies keep quiet about it to avoid adverse publicity. In many companies the boss has a free hand when it comes to expenses and finance and it's all too easy to be tempted by fraud. 

Junos OS

The book I read to research this post was Junos OS For Dummies by Michael Bushong et al which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. This book tells you all about Junos OS and even has a part dealing with 2 contrasting devices. It's mainly used on big computer networks and is an operating system which is specifically used to run a network. Some of these items like switches can be rack based and weigh 350 pounds so you need to know what you are doing. It has a smaller attack surface than the Windows operating system & the vast majority of viruses can't attack it. There are other networking operating systems like Cisco IOS but Junos OS is gaining in popularity. This operating system is more text based than Windows you use a lot of textual shortcuts to set things up. To go to the next page you fill the text box with asterisks. It's compatible with protocols like TCP/IP & IPV4. A device will normally have an RJ-45 connector on a cable labelled console that connects to a computer to set it up. There is a free download called Junos OS Pulse which is a version you can use on a workstation. Administrators are called Super Users when you are stting a device up. This is something I'd like to learn more about and I have quite a few books on Junos OS so I'll probably review more books on this subject. 

Digital Marketing

The book I read to research this post was Tickled: Digital Marketing For Technology Companies by Peter Thomson which is a very good book which I bought from kindle for free. Peter is quite a well known business writer and he has written a book on a fairly unusual subject. This book is about social media marketing for business to business or B2B companies. These are companies like web hosts and mining where most of their businesses come from other businesses. The book is a decent length and contains quite a lot of interesting information. The person responsible for promoting the company brand needs to be passionate about the products and have a certain honesty and deal with potential customers in a way that isn't patronizing. Of course that goes for any online marketing. The company needs its own website in addition to things like facebook pages because you never know when a company like facebook might have to go offline temporarily. Any site like facebook or linkedin pages needs to be professionally done with things like themes which will help people realise it's the official site. You should have lots of guest blogs done by knowledgeable people & you should videos and photos displayed that have a degree of professionalism about them. Humour in videos is ideal for business to consumer businesses or B2C companies but are trying to attract businesses.

Social & Cultural Anthropology

The book I read to research this post was Social & Cultural Anthropology A Very Short Introduction by John Monaghan which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. This book looks at various cultures and contrasts them and looks at what they have in common. In particular they try to look at a culture for what it is and not pass judgement on whether it's better or worse than another. In a lot of cultures we have seen a kind of westernisation as they have often converted to either islam or christianity and members have tried to get jobs and get modern luxuries. In many places we have seen the laying on of electricity and water supplies etc. One group in particular they study is a group in Indonesia who are quite close knit and have refused to be inducted into this westernisation mostly. They don't have utilities like electricity and stick with their religion and laws. They live in teak houses on stilts in a remote part of Bali & view our culture with great suspicion. Some members have converted to christianity and islam and got jobs but are seen as outcasts. They have their own laws and traditions and their own kind of medicine. The witch doctors sort a lot of their problems out. There was one case where one man threatened a lady because she was betrothed to someone else and she falsely accused him of hitting her and although everyone knew he hadn't he was fined and forced to beg her forgiveness to keep with tradition. He had broken their etiquette in a very serious way. In many cultures there has also been problems with western diseases and even enslavement as they have been integrated with the west as well.

Penny Shares

The book I read to research this post was Penny Shares For Dummies by Peter Leeds which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. This book gives a general overview of penny shares including their history and details how to find a lucrative winner. Penny shares are defined as a share with a value of less than $5.00 and they are thought to have originated in Canada. Mining companies would sell ultra low priced shares to raise money for new mining operations. The Vancouver Stock Exchange was almost exclusively penny shares until it merged with the Toronto Stock Exchange. Penny shares can potentially make you very rich very quickly but they also carry a lot of risk. You should only invest in American companies. A popular acid test to study a companies viability is find out if they can pay off all their debts and expenses and still have enough to continue in business. This book also looks at technical analysis & fundamental analysis which can help you pin point a good stock. If you buy loads of penny shares in a company you can potentially make the price of those shares go up without spending all that much which is a little unscrupulous and some people do this and then sell their shares which makes the price crash but makes them a nice profit. Others sell their stock and when the price crashes are able to buy more stock with less money. 

Computers

The book I read to research this post was The Computer A Very Short Introduction by Darrel Ince which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. This book gives a kind of general overview of computing and its history and various technologies. A very early which was in a universitie's computer science department cost $29,000 and had a 128kb of memory and had to have instructions entered on punch cards as well as a keyboard. This computer was also the size of a room. The owner of Intel came up with a law in 1965 that still holds true today. It states that the fastest available speed of processor doubles every 2 years. Interestingly the owner of IBM thought the world would only need 5 computers at any one time. It's estimated that a typical family in the USA has 30 computers if you include all the computer controlled devices they possess like dvd players, electronics in a car & even a computer keyboard has a tiny computer built into it separate to the computer it is connected to. A recent creation is the beowulf cluster, these are supercomputers with lots of ordinary processors that are much cheaper than a single super powerful processor that will fit in a suitcase and typically cost around $2,500. These computers usually run linux and are normally used on computer networks. There has been a supercomputer called Deep Blue that famously beat Gary Kasparov, the world chess champion at chess. In the future we are likely to see more computer controlled devices and the computers will get smaller and items like televisions and fridges which are just to be connected to the internet ie for automatically ordering food and entertainment will become more integrated.

Evolution

The book I read to research this post was Evolution A Very Short Introduction by Brian Charlesworth which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. This books tells you all about evolution and how DNA is made up so that you get significent differences in the genetics of an animal or other living thing in roughly 1 in 100,000 and in the wild most of these would die but in some cases they would have enhancements and would become more successful and the species would evolve. An example is on the Galapagos Islands if there is a drought plants that produce small seeds stop producing them to save water but plants that produce a small amount of big seeds still produce them. As a result temporarily birds evolve deep big beaks but once the drought finishes they gradually go back to normal. In rats many have been exterminated by warfarin which is a rat poison. They have developed a tolerance in some to this but they also had stunted growth if they were immune but now appear to have changed genetically in many cases to get around. Warfarin works by preventing the blood from clotting and affects vitamin k platelets in their blood. Evolution of course was discovered by Darwin & an interesting point is there is probably life on other planets in other solar systems. The sun is a fairly typical star of which there are billions of a similiar type in our galaxy and there are billions of galaxies in our universe.