E-week: Global Talent Panel

Some comment from the distinguished speakers on finding talents on a global level hosted by eweek:
http://eweek.stanford.edu/2009/0223.html

1. Interview skills are short in supply both on interview and interviewee side
2. Most Chinese engineer thinks that if they don't become a manager at age 30, they're a failure
3. Sometimes one cannot promote managers from within, need to hire from external environment
4. Process Management skills are extremely important, and do due diligence.
5. Build one culture amongst different offices when you're still a relatively small company.
6. Communication skills are extremely critical in cementing a team, bridging cultural differences
7. Trust
8. Passion for hating to lose
9. In China, lack project managers or process managers (Fish analogy: one small fish gets eaten by big fish, a group of small fish will scare away the big fish from a distance)
10. Don't overlook your friends' shortcomings
11. Good sleeping habits are important (Have to work on that...)
12. How to schedule things correctly
13. A round of Mahjong can show a person's personality.

Tom Siebel

Tom Siebel, founder of Siebel Systems and one of the most resepected entrepreneurs, came to speak at Stanford last Weds for the Entrepreneurs Thought Leader Seminars.

His topic was on "From I.T. to E.T." with E.T. being Environmental Technology.

One thing that particularly caught my ears was that he said that if he were a fresh graduate from college, he would get on a boat and head straight to China. He thinks that China's engineers are at least on par with the top US engineers.

I agree with his view and ThinkBulbs will always be spotting out for interesting opportunities in China.

Look out for Mac OS X kernel panics after using QuickPWN 2.2.1

QuickPWN usually does not brick your iPhone, but the newest version breaks your Mac a bit (provided that you use the Mac version, of course).

The story is this, Apple shipped an updated IOUSBFamily.kext (.kext means kernel extension in a Mac, something roughly analogous to a driver in Windows) with the OS X 10.5.6 update. For some reason, the new kernel extension blocks QuickPWN from detecting your iPhone in DFU mode. DFU mode is a pre-requisite state for QuickPWN to reflash your iPhone's firmware. Without a method of detection, QuickPWN simply cannot jailbreak your iPhone.

To fix this, QuickPWN's developer recommends Mac OS X 10.5.6 users to download an older IOUSBFamily.kext from Apple, install it to their Macs, reboot, and proceed to jailbreak their iPhones.

So your Mac still boots, and your iPhone is jailbroken, all is good, right?

Well, have you tried using a USB stick with your Mac lately? If you haven't, try it now. Last time I tried that on my Mac, I got a kernel panic.

The fix to this problem, is to replace the "cracked" IOUSBFamily.kext with the original one. You can either download the original .kext for 10.5.6 from Apple Developer Connection (the same place you downloaded the older, "cracked" .kext); or, if you're smart, you could have backed up the original .kext while trying out the newest QuickPWN.