The JDM course list is for email discussion among members of the Spring
2000 JDM elective at the Cranfield School of Management.

The main website for the course is

 http://www.cranfield.ac.uk/public/mn/mn795/coures/jdm/

and there will be an archive of this list there.

Some tips:

  (1) When responding to something someone has posted there is usually no
      need to quote their entire message.  Instead quote selectively and
      give your response after the quoted material.  This make discussion
      far more conversational and easier to follow.

  (2) I will try to have some mechanism for people to upload various
      sorts of files.  If I do, then there is no need to send attachments
      to the mailing list.  Instead message to the mailing list should be
      plain text only, with URLs pointing to documents or other large files

  (3) If you upload or word processor documents, it is very strongly
      recommended that you save and upload the document as RTF instead
      of as MSWord files.  MSWord was never designed for document exchange
      while RTF was.  Here are some differences

          (a) RTF files are usually much smaller than MSWord files (there
              can be exceptions depending on the type of embedded graphics)
        
          (b) RTF files don't care about which particular version of MSWord
              you are using, but will be readable by almost every version

          (c) RTF is a published standard and more programs can read it than
              can read MSWord documents. (And I can read it at home on a
              machine that doesn't have MSWord).

          (d) No viruses.

          (e) Receiving RTF documents looks the same to Word users as getting
              a Word document

          (f) If you happen to send your document to someone who understands
              these issues, you will appear more clued in than the typical
              MSWord users.

      There are two drawbacks to using RTF.

          (a) You have to make the extra step of saving from Word as RTF.
              (It's very simple, just save as RTF)

          (b) On very rare occassions with complicated documents a small
              portion of the formatting information can be lost.

      But overall, the only time you should send things as MSWord is to a
      co-author of a document you are both developing in MSWord.