Slashdot Mirror

CWmike writes "Microsoft may have simply run out of time with Windows RT, Directions on Microsoft analyst Michael Cherry said on Friday. Windows RT, the name Microsoft slapped on the OS earlier this week after calling it 'Windows on ARM,' or WOA, for months, is the forked version of Windows 8 designed to run on devices powered by ARM SoCs, or system-on-a-chip. Cherry was referring to gaps in Windows RT's feature set, particularly the lack of 'domain joining,' the ability to connect to a corporate Windows network and the lack of support for Group Policies, one of the ways IT administrators use to manage Windows devices. 'This is pure speculation on my part, but it seems like they had to make a trade-off with Windows RT,' Cherry said. 'What we're hearing now about Windows RT is a function of time and how they wanted the thing to behave. It seems to me that the a key goal was to get battery life decent and keep the weight [of devices] down.' His analysis on RT's chance of success: 'I think you can take Windows RT off the table for enterprises,' he said."

MikeatWired writes "In a somewhat startling decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has ruled that several employees at an executive recruitment firm did not exceed their authorized access to their company's database when they logged into the system and stole confidential data from it. The appellate court's decision affirms a previous ruling made by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The government must now decide if it wants to take the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The judge wrote that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, under which they were charged, applies primarily to unauthorized access involving external hackers. The definition of 'exceeds authorized access' under the CFAA applies mainly to people who have no authorized access to the computer at all, the judge wrote. The term would also apply to insiders who might have legitimate access to a system but not to specific information or files on the system Applying the language in the CFAA any other way would turn it into a 'sweeping Internet-policing mandate,' he wrote."

dcblogs writes "Interest in computer science continues to grow among undergrad students, who pushed enrollments up nearly 10% in the 2011-12 academic year, according to the Computing Research Association (CRA) of enrollment and graduation rates at Ph.D.-granting universities. This marks the fourth straight year of increases. Enrollments might have been even higher if not for enrollment caps at some schools that don't have enough faculty, equipment or classrooms to meet demand. Enrollments increased 10% last year as well, but overall enrollments remain below the peak reached during the dot.com bubble. Around 2002, each school had a department with an average enrollment of about 400 students; by 2006-07, that enrollment average had declined to about 200. Average enrollments per department are now nearing 300, according to the survey."

Lucas123 writes "Paper products maker Kimberly-Clark drove the morale of its IT infrastructure group into the ground after massive firings and outsourcing. When they hired a new VP of Infrastructure four years later to turn things around, he implemented a program to spur innovation. The VP took a venture capitalist approach where any employee could submit an idea and if accepted, make a pitch in 30 minutes or less. If the idea had merit, it received first, then second rounds of funding. If not, the employee's idea still got lauded on the company's internal Sharepoint site. As he puts it, 'Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently. It's about what we learn from the failure. Not the failure itself. We celebrate that learning.'"

Lucas123 writes "Major tech vendors are funding patent trolls, companies that derive the bulk of their income, if not all of it, from licensing huge libraries of patents they hold as well as by suing companies that use their patents without permission, according to an investigation by Computerworld. Tech companies — including Apple and Micron — have railed against patent 'nuisance' lawsuits, only to fund or otherwise support some of the patent trolls. Because of patent trolls, more politely called mass patent aggregators, patent litigation has in part increased by more than 230% over the past 20 years. 'Most of the major tech companies are backing a troll in some way, probably financially,' says Thomas Ewing, an attorney who has authored reports on what he calls 'patent privateering.'"

Lucas123 writes "While magnetic tape is about as boring as technology gets, it's still the cheapest storage medium and among the fastest in sequential reads and writes. And, with the release of LTO-6 with 8TB cartridges around the corner and the relatively new open linear tape file system (LTFS) being embraced by movie and television markets, tape is taking on a new life. It may even climb out of the dusty archives that cheap disk has relegated it to. 'Over the last two years, disk drives have gotten bigger, they've gone from 1TB to 3TB, but they haven't gotten faster. They're more like tape. Meanwhile, tape is going the other direction, it's getting faster,' said Mark Lemmons, CTO of Thought Equity Motion, a cloud storage service for the motion picture industry."

dcblogs writes "In the first 40 days of President Barack Obama's administration, the White House email system was down 23% of time, according to White House CIO Brook Colangelo, the person who also delivered the 'first presidential Blackberry.' The White House IT systems inherited by the new administration were in bad shape. Over 82% of the White House's technology had reached its end of life. Desktops, for instance, still had floppy disk drives, including the one Colangelo delivered to Rahm Emanuel, Obama's then chief of staff and now Mayor of Chicago. There were no redundant email servers."

langelgjm writes "After repeated dismissals by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, Congressman Darrell Issa has taken matters into his own hands by posting a copy of ACTA online and asking for public comments. ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, is a secretly negotiated multilateral trade treaty with the potential for profoundly affecting the Internet. 'ACTA represents as great a threat to an open Internet as [do] SOPA and PIPA and was drafted with even less transparency and input from digital citizens,' Issa said."

dcblogs writes "The science and engineering workforce in the U.S. has flatlined, according to the Population Reference Bureau. As a percentage of the total labor force, S&E workers accounted for 4.9% of the workforce in 2010, a slight decline from the three previous years when these workers accounted for 5% of the workforce. That percentage has been essentially flat for the past decade. In 2000, it stood at 5.3%. The reasons for this trend aren't clear, but one factor may be retirements. S&E workers who are 55 and older accounted for 13% of this workforce in 2005; they accounted for 18% in 2010. 'This might imply that there aren't enough young people entering the S&E labor force,' said one research analyst."

dcblogs writes "External forces who work on the customer's data center or supply equipment to it, including manufacturers, vendors, factory representatives, installers, integrators, and other third parties were responsible for 50% to 60% of abnormal incidents reported in a data center, according to Uptime Institute, which has been collecting data since 1994. Over the last three years, Uptime found that 34% of the abnormal incidents in 2009 were attributed to operations staff, followed by 41% in 2010, and 40% last year. Some 5% to 8% of the incidents each year were tied to things like sabotage, outside fires, other tenants in a shared facility. But when an abnormal incident leads to a major outage that causes a data center failure, internal staff gets the majority of blame. 'It's the design, manufacturing, installation processes that leave banana peels behind and the operators who slip and fall on them,' said Hank Seader, managing principal research and education at Uptime."

Lucas123 writes "IBM today claimed to have been able to reduce error rates and retain the integrity of quantum mechanical properties in quantum bits or qubits long enough to perform a gate operation, opening the door to new microfabrication techniques that allow engineers to begin designing a quantum computer. While still a long ways off, the creation of a quantum computer would mean data processing power would be exponentially increased over what is possible with today's silicon-based computing."

dcblogs writes "The European Commission last week said it is doubling its multi-year investment in the push for exascale computing from €630 million to €1.2 billion (or the equivalent of $1.58 billion). They are making this a priority even as austerity measures are imposed to prevent defaults. China, meanwhile, has a five-year plan to deliver exascale computing between 2016-20 (PDF). The Europeans announced the plan the same week the White House released its fiscal year 2013 budget, which envisions a third year of anemic funding to develop exascale technologies. Last year, the U.S. Department of Energy science budget asked for nearly $91 million in funding for the efforts in the current fiscal year; it received $73.4 million. DOE science is trying for about $90 million for exascale for 2013. There's more funding tucked in military and security budgets. The U.S. wants exascale around 2018, but it has yet to deliver a plan or the money for it."

Lucas123 writes "New research shows that far more than wireless network or CPUs, the NAND flash memory in cell phones, and in particular smartphones, affects the device's performance when it comes to loading apps, surfing the web and loading and reading documents. In tests with top-selling 16GB smartphones, NAND flash memory slowed mobile app performance from two to three times with one exception, Kingston's embedded memory card; that card slowed app performance 20X. At the bottom of the bottleneck is the fact that while network and CPUs speeds have kept pace with mobile app development, flash throughput hasn't. The researchers from Georgia Tech and NEC Corp. are working on methods to improve flash performance (PDF), including using a PRAM buffer to stage writes or be used as the final location for the SQLite databases."

Lucas123 writes "A new study by the University of California and Microsoft shows that NAND flash memory experiences significant performance degradation as die sizes shrink in size. Over the next dozen years latency will double as the circuitry size shrinks from 25 nanometers today, to 6.5nm, the research showed. Speaking at the Usenix Conference on File and Storage Technologies in San Jose this week, Laura Grupp, a graduate student at the University of California, said tests of 45 different types of NAND flash chips from six vendors using 72nm to 25nm lithography techniques showed performance degraded across the board and error rates increased as die sizes shrunk. Triple-Level NAND performed the worst, followed by Multi-Level Cell NAND and Single-Level Cell. The researchers said MLC NAND-based SSDs won't be able to go beyond 4TB and TLC-based SSDs won't be able to scale past 16TB because of the performance degradation, so it appears the end of the road for SSDs will be 2024."

Lucas123 writes "Psychiatrists say VoIP technology is more popular with patients than even in-person therapy when it comes to counseling — especially for their younger patients who are less intimidated by it. Along with many patients who like the convenience, telepsychiatry is a necessity for others who live in rural areas or are in, prisons, nursing homes or hospital ICUs. 'We've had just over 60,000 patient encounters. To my knowledge, only six have refused to be seen via teleconferencing,' said Dr. Avrim Fishkind, an emergency psychiatrist. 'We're tailor made for telemedicine because we don't check people's livers. We just talk.'" I wonder whether Eliza can be sued for practicing medicine without a license.

New submitter beta2 writes "Several articles are noting that the German IT security agency BSI is endorsing Google Chrome browser: 'BSI ticked off Chrome's anti-exploit sandbox technology, which isolates the browser from the operating system and the rest of the computer; its silent update mechanism and Chrome's habit of bundling Adobe Flash, as its reasons for the recommendation. ... BSI also recommended Adobe Reader X — the version of the popular PDF reader that, like Chrome, relies on a sandbox to protect users from exploits — and urged citizens to use Windows' Auto Update feature to keep their PCs abreast of all OS security fixes. To update applications, BSI gave a nod to Secunia's Personal Software Inspector, a free utility that scan a computer for outdated software and point users to appropriate downloads.'"

theodp writes "The White House is following up on an offer made by President Barack Obama this week to help find a job for an unemployed semiconductor engineer in Texas. The offer was made during a live online town hall after the ex-TI engineer's wife questioned the government's policy concerning H-1B visa workers. Obama asked for EE Darin Wedel's resume and said he would 'forward it to some of these companies that are telling me they can't find enough engineers in this field.' While grateful, patent-holder Wedel said the president's view on the job prospects for engineers in his field 'is definitely not what's happening in the real world.' Duke adjunct professor Vivek Wadhwa offered his frank take on 40-year-old Wedel's predicament: 'The No. 1 issue in the tech world is as people get older, they generally become more expensive. So if you're an employer who can hire a worker fresh out of college who is making $60,000 versus an older worker who is making $150,000, and the younger worker has skills that are fresher, who would you hire?' Coincidentally, Texas Instruments sought President Obama's help in reducing restrictions on the hiring of younger foreign workers in 2009, the same year it laid off Wedel."

theodp writes "The White House is following up on an offer made by President Barack Obama this week to help find a job for an unemployed semiconductor engineer in Texas. The offer was made during a live online town hall after the ex-TI engineer's wife questioned the government's policy concerning H-1B visa workers. Obama asked for EE Darin Wedel's resume and said he would 'forward it to some of these companies that are telling me they can't find enough engineers in this field.' While grateful, patent-holder Wedel said the president's view on the job prospects for engineers in his field 'is definitely not what's happening in the real world.' Duke adjunct professor Vivek Wadhwa offered his frank take on 40-year-old Wedel's predicament: 'The No. 1 issue in the tech world is as people get older, they generally become more expensive. So if you're an employer who can hire a worker fresh out of college who is making $60,000 versus an older worker who is making $150,000, and the younger worker has skills that are fresher, who would you hire?' Coincidentally, Texas Instruments sought President Obama's help in reducing restrictions on the hiring of younger foreign workers in 2009, the same year it laid off Wedel."

theodp writes "The White House is following up on an offer made by President Barack Obama this week to help find a job for an unemployed semiconductor engineer in Texas. The offer was made during a live online town hall after the ex-TI engineer's wife questioned the government's policy concerning H-1B visa workers. Obama asked for EE Darin Wedel's resume and said he would 'forward it to some of these companies that are telling me they can't find enough engineers in this field.' While grateful, patent-holder Wedel said the president's view on the job prospects for engineers in his field 'is definitely not what's happening in the real world.' Duke adjunct professor Vivek Wadhwa offered his frank take on 40-year-old Wedel's predicament: 'The No. 1 issue in the tech world is as people get older, they generally become more expensive. So if you're an employer who can hire a worker fresh out of college who is making $60,000 versus an older worker who is making $150,000, and the younger worker has skills that are fresher, who would you hire?' Coincidentally, Texas Instruments sought President Obama's help in reducing restrictions on the hiring of younger foreign workers in 2009, the same year it laid off Wedel."

bonch writes "A massive Android malware campaign may be responsible for duping as many as 5 million users into downloading the Android.Counterclan infection from the Google Android Market. The trojan collects the user's personal information, modifies the home page, and displays unwanted advertisements. It is packaged in 13 different applications, some of which have been on the store for at least a month. Several of the malicious apps are still available on the Android Market as of 3 P.M. ET. Symantec has posted the full list of infected applications."

cweditor writes "One afternoon this month, a hacker toured a dozen corporate conference rooms via equipment that most every company has in those rooms: videoconferencing. Rapid7 says they could 'easily read a six-digit password from a sticky note over 20 feet away from the camera' and 'clearly hear conversations down the hallway from the video conferencing system.' With some systems, they could even capture keystrokes being typed in the room. Teleconferencing vendors defended their security, saying the auto-answer feature that left those system vulnerable was an effort to strike the right balance between security and usability."

New submitter tguyton writes "Apple is going after Samsung again in Germany, this time over 10 phones including the Galaxy S II. It should come before the courts in August, a month before their tablet case in September."

Lucas123 writes "IBM researchers say they've been able to shrink the number of iron atoms it takes to store a bit of data from about one million to 12, which could pave the way for storage devices with capacities that are orders of magnitude greater than today's devices. Andreas Heinrich, who led the IBM Research team on the project for five years, said the team used the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope and unconventional antiferromagnetism to change the bits from zeros to ones. By combining 96 of the atoms, the researchers were able to create bytes — spelling out the word THINK. That solved a theoretical problem of how few atoms it could take to store a bit; now comes the engineering challenge: how to make a mass storage device perform the same feat as scanning tunneling microscope."

Hugh Pickens writes "Ira Winkler says whenever he sees another 'cyberchallenge' getting play in the press, he think our priorities are screwed up. 'People seem to think that organizing teams of people to hack into systems is a way to bring together the best computer talent to square off against each other,' writes Winkler. 'I look at it as a waste of that talent.' That's why Winkler supports Facebook's latest Hacker Cup, which has become one of the few tests of creative computer talent. Facebook is using the original definition of 'hacker,' referring not to someone who breaks into computer systems, but rather to an individual who 'enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities.' Facebook's contest consists of successive sets of increasingly difficult algorithmic problems. Scoring will be based on how accurately and quickly the programmers complete the puzzles. 'Meanwhile, the media effectively lionize groups like Anonymous by breathlessly reporting on their latest hacks,' writes Winkler. 'What we really should be doing is not to reward a handful of students to find problems, but to train all students, and inevitably the profession, to integrate security into their efforts from the start.'"

Hugh Pickens writes "Ira Winkler says whenever he sees another 'cyberchallenge' getting play in the press, he think our priorities are screwed up. 'People seem to think that organizing teams of people to hack into systems is a way to bring together the best computer talent to square off against each other,' writes Winkler. 'I look at it as a waste of that talent.' That's why Winkler supports Facebook's latest Hacker Cup, which has become one of the few tests of creative computer talent. Facebook is using the original definition of 'hacker,' referring not to someone who breaks into computer systems, but rather to an individual who 'enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities.' Facebook's contest consists of successive sets of increasingly difficult algorithmic problems. Scoring will be based on how accurately and quickly the programmers complete the puzzles. 'Meanwhile, the media effectively lionize groups like Anonymous by breathlessly reporting on their latest hacks,' writes Winkler. 'What we really should be doing is not to reward a handful of students to find problems, but to train all students, and inevitably the profession, to integrate security into their efforts from the start.'"

alphadogg writes with an excerpt from a Network World article: "The PC is not likely to be challenged by the tablet or the smartphone, and many users of the Internet on these devices will turn to the PC for a better experience, Michael Dell said in Bangalore on Monday. If you were going off to college and could only have one device, you would choose the PC over a smartphone or a tablet, said Dell, whose company also sells smartphones. 'If you could have two devices, then you would probably choose the phone before the tablet,' the Dell CEO added."

Computerworld is one of many publications heralding the expected arrival next week of the long-awaited OLPC tablet, and making much of one very cool feature: the price. The initial XO laptops from OLPC never quite made it to the hoped-for under-$100 level. But at least with an ordinary LCD screen, says project founder Nicholas Negroponte, the new XO-3 actually has. (An optional daylight-readable Pixel Qi screen bumps the price up, but it's not clear quite how much.) Both OLPC and Pixel Qi will be at next week's CES; hopefully I'll get a chance to provide some first-hand details, and ask whether there will be another round of the Buy One Give One program, so users outside the reach of big government buying programs can both further the project and play with the product; so far, the word is that these will only be available for large government buyers. (TechCruch has better pictures of the new device.)

Lucas123 writes "First HP, then EMC, and now NetApp has hiked up the price of its hard disk drives by 5% to 15%. The vendors sent letters to users stating that the flooding in Thailand had caused major component shortages, and while they tried to absorb the supplier price increases, each had to eventually give in. Lenovo also announced it has run out of certain drives for its PC systems including some popular 7,200rpm models."

dcblogs sends this excerpt from ComputerWorld: "The ability of the U.S. to compete globally is eroding, according to an Obama administration report released Friday. It described itself as a 'call to arms.' Titled 'The Competitiveness and Innovative Capacity of the United States (PDF),' it points out a number of 'alarms,' including: the U.S. ran a trade surplus in 'advanced technology products,' which includes biotechnology products, computers, semiconductors and robotics, until 2002. In 2010, however, the U.S. 'ran an $81 billion trade deficit in this critically important sector.' In terms of federal research, in 1980 the federal government provided about 70% of all dollars spent on basic research, but since then the government's share of basic research funding given to all entities has fallen to 57%. It also says real median household income has stalled, and argues for policies that foster innovation."

Hugh Pickens writes "PC World reports that Windows XP lost more than 11 percent of its share from September to December 2011, to post a December average of 46.5 percent, a new low for the aged OS as users have gotten Microsoft's message that the operating system should be retired. Figures indicate that Windows 7 will become the most widely used version in April, several months earlier than previous estimates. Two months ago, as Microsoft quietly celebrated the 10th anniversary of XP's retail launch, the company touted the motto 'Standing still is falling behind' to promote Windows 7 and demote XP. In July, Microsoft told customers it was 'time to move on' from XP, reminding everyone that the OS would exit all support in April 2014. Before that, the Internet Explorer team had dismissed XP as the 'lowest common denominator' when they explained why it wouldn't run IE9. The deadline for ditching Windows XP is in April 2014, when Microsoft stops patching the operating system. 'Enterprises don't want to run an OS when there's no security fixes,' says Michael Silver, an analyst with Gartner Research rejecting the idea that Microsoft would extend the end-of-life date for Windows XP to please the 10% who have no plans to leave the OS. 'The longer they let them run XP, the more enterprises will slow down their migration.'"

dcblogs writes "IT managers see themselves as 'reigning supreme,' in an organization, and are seen by non-IT workers as difficult to get along with, says organizational psychologist Billie Blair. If IT managers changed their ways, they could have a major impact in an organization. 'So much of their life is hidden under a bushel because they don't discuss things, they don't divulge what they know, and the innovation that comes from that process doesn't happen, therefore, in the organization,' says Blair."

dcblogs writes "The Russians are building a 10-petaflop supercomputer as part of a goal to build an exascale system by 2018-20, in the same timeframe as the US. The Russians, as well as Europe and China, want to reduce reliance on U.S. tech vendors and believe that exascale system development will lead to breakthroughs that could seed new tech industries. 'Exascale computing is a challenge, and indeed an opportunity for Europe to become a global HPC leader,' said Leonardo Flores Anover, who is the European Commission's project officer for the European Exascale Software Initiative. 'The goal is to foster the development of a European industrial capability,' he said. Think what Europe accomplished with Airbus. For Russia: 'You can expect to see Russia holding its own in the exascale race with little or no dependence on foreign manufacturers,' said Mike Bernhardt, who writes The Exascale Report. For now, Russia is relying on Intel and Nvidia."

Lucas123 writes "According to published reports Apple is plunking down up to $500 million to purchase solid-state drive start-up Anobit Technologies. Even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted about the deal congratulating Apple on its first acquisition in his country. Apple is planning to use the acquisition to set up to set up a semiconductor development center in Israel. Apple already uses NAND flash from Anobit in its iPhone, iPad and MacBook Air products, according to the reports."

New submitter yeszomgpony writes "For the first time since the Thailand flooding, hard drive prices are finally starting to decrease. The price jump was kicked off in October when drive inventory levels plummeted 90% in less than a week. From the article: 'Over the past few weeks, hard drive prices have leveled off and have begun to drop slowly, according to Dynamite's data. "For first time, less than week after Western Digital's first [fabrication plant] went back on line, drive inventory began increasing at both distributors and ecommerce sites, and index prices began coming down a little too," Kubicki said. IDC has predicted that hard disk drive supply shortages in the wake of Thailand flooding would affect consumers, computer system manufacturers and corporate IT shops into 2013.'"

dcblogs writes "IBM is deploying technology in China that allows meat suppliers to track a single pig all the way from farm animal to pork chop. Pigs are initially identified with a barcoded ear tag. This identification is then put on bins used to track the various pig parts as they pass through the slaughterhouse, processing plant, distribution center and finally to the clear plastic-wrapped package in a grocer's case. If a consumer buys three pork chops in a package, 'you know that these three pieces of pork chop came from pig number 123,' said Paul Chang, who leads global strategy for emerging technologies at IBM. The goal is to control disease outbreaks, but theoretically this technology could allow a grocer to put a picture on the store package of the pig you are eating."

Lucas123 writes "Both Seagate and Western Digital have reduced their hard drive warranties, in some cases from five years to one year. While Western Digital wouldn't explain why, it did say it has nothing to do with the flooding of its manufacturing plants in Thailand, which has dramatically impacted its ability to turn out drives. For its part, Seagate is saying it cut back its warranties to be more closely aligned with other drive manufacturers."

Lucas123 writes "The impact from the monsoonal flooding in Thailand over the past three months is now being felt by users as computer system manufacturers are unable to meet supply needs. Lenovo told its corporate customers this week that is has run out of a number of drives including several types of 7200rpm and 5400rpm HDDs. 'Akin to the hysteria when banks defaulted in the 1930[s], PC orders across the industry are being placed for which HD supply does not exist,' a Lenovo rep wrote to his clients. IDC this week said the HDD shortages that have resulted from the flooding of four major Thailand industrial parks will likely be felt into 2013. Western Digital and Toshiba have been hit the hardest. PC shipments are also expected to fall short by 3.8 million units in the first quarter of 2012 due to component supply shortages. Meanwhile, there has been some indication of retail HDD price stabilization, but for some of the most popular hard drives prices continue to soar."

Lucas123 writes "The impact from the monsoonal flooding in Thailand over the past three months is now being felt by users as computer system manufacturers are unable to meet supply needs. Lenovo told its corporate customers this week that is has run out of a number of drives including several types of 7200rpm and 5400rpm HDDs. 'Akin to the hysteria when banks defaulted in the 1930[s], PC orders across the industry are being placed for which HD supply does not exist,' a Lenovo rep wrote to his clients. IDC this week said the HDD shortages that have resulted from the flooding of four major Thailand industrial parks will likely be felt into 2013. Western Digital and Toshiba have been hit the hardest. PC shipments are also expected to fall short by 3.8 million units in the first quarter of 2012 due to component supply shortages. Meanwhile, there has been some indication of retail HDD price stabilization, but for some of the most popular hard drives prices continue to soar."

dcblogs writes "An analysis of 745 applications for violations of good architectural and coding practices found that Java applications had the most problems and Cobol-built systems, the least. Some 365 million lines of code were analyzed by Cast Software to assess 'technical debt,' or the cost to fix the violations. Java was calculated at $5.42 per line of code, while Cobol did best at $1.26. Cobol code had the least number of violations because programmers 'have been beating on it for 30 years,' said Cast. As far as Java goes, 'there are many people going into Java now that really don't have strong computer science backgrounds,' said its chief scientist, Bill Curtis."

Hugh Pickens writes "Matt Heusser writes that when he went to work for Google all the people he met had a sort of early-twenties look to them. 'Like the characters in Microserfs, these were "firstees," young adults in the middle of the first things like life: First job out of college, first house, first child, first mini-van,' writes Heusser. 'This is what struck me: Where were the old dudes?' and then he realized something very important — you get fifteen years. 'That is to say, your half-life as a worker in corporate America is about age thirty-five. Around that time, interviews get tougher. Your obligations make you less open to relocation, the technologies on your resume seem less-current, and your ability find that next gig begins to decrease.' By thirty-five, half the folks who started in technology have gone on to something else — perhaps management, consulting, on to roles in 'the business' or in operations. 'Yet a few stick it out. Half of the half-life is fifty, and, sure, perhaps 25% of the folks who started as line technologists will still be doing that when they turn fifty,' adds Heusser. 'But by the time you turn thirty-five, you'd better have a plan.'"

Lucas123 writes "President Obama this week issued a directive to all federal agencies to upgrade records management processes from paper-based systems that have been around since President Truman's administration to electronic records systems with Web 2.0 capabilities. Agencies have four months to come up with plans to improve their records keeping. Part of the directive is to have the National Archives and Records Administration store all long-term records and oversee electronic records management efforts in other agencies. Unfortunately, NARA doesn't have a stellar record itself (PDF) in rolling out electronic records projects. Earlier this year, due to cost overruns and project mismanagement, NARA announced it was ending a 10-year effort to create an electronic records archive."

dcblogs writes "Indian and U.S. companies are holding a job fair at the San Jose Convention Center this weekend for jobs in India. The job fair is aimed at Indian workers in the U.S., but anyone with an interest in working overseas can attend. India is pitched as a 'sea of opportunity' in a PowerPoint presentation about the job fair. That's in contrast to another slide that makes the obvious point that the U.S. has 'barely recovered from a downturn,' with 'signs that it's headed for another.'"

Lucas123 writes "The military's a great place to learn how to kill people and break things, but many also consider it one of the best training grounds for high-tech skills. 'If you're working on a ship or a plane or tank, you've got responsibility for large, complex, extremely expensive equipment run by highly sophisticated IT platforms and software,' said Mike Brown, senior director of talent acquisition at Siemens. But, just how well do military tech skills translate to private-sector IT? Computerworld spoke to veterans to find out just what they learned during their tours of duty and how hard it was to transition to the civilian workforce."

richi writes "It looks like Carbonite, Inc. has been giving out customers' personal information. The company has admitted to giving customer email addresses to a third party, in direct contravention of its privacy policy. A company statement reads: 'Carbonite has discovered an advertiser misappropriated our e-mail list during the process of one of our e-mail marketing campaigns. When Carbonite launches an e-mail marketing campaign, it provides a suppression list to e-mail advertisers so that Carbonite customers do not receive promotion emails from Carbonite (since they’re already customers) and importantly, so that people who have opted out of receiving emails from Carbonite do not receive future email from us. This list was mishandled by an advertiser and we have taken immediate remedial efforts. As an online backup company, the security and privacy of our customer data is our top priority. We take all matters related to privacy very seriously. The matter will be addressed privately with the involved third parties and we will ensure that all customer e-mail addresses are permanently removed from their database.'"

First time accepted submitter yourlord writes "Hewlett-Packard Co. has decided to keep its PC division. So says its newly appointed CEO Meg Whitman. Whitman, the former eBay chieftain, categorically rejected a plan offered up by her predecessor, former CEO Leo Apotheker, to either sell or spin-off this division. HP announced the decision after the close of financial markets today."

IDG reports that "The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has voted to overhaul a decades-old system of telephone subsidies in rural areas, with the funding refocused on broadband deployment. The FCC's vote Thursday would transition the Universal Service Fund's (USF's) high-cost program, now subsidizing voice service, to a new Connect America Fund focused on broadband deployment to areas that don't yet have service. The FCC will cap the broadband fund at $4.5 billion a year, the current budget of the USF high-cost program, funded by a tax on telephone bills." That cap, says Reuters, is "the first budget constraint ever imposed on the program."

dcblogs writes "Complaints about the performance of USAjobs.gov, the government's central website for job applicants, are piling up after the U.S. took control this month of the site from Monster.com. The government's official Facebook page has seen nothing but negative comments from users about lag time, search engine failures, and other problems since the U.S. Office of Personnel Management built a new site. The government employs more than 2.6 million people. Linda Rix, the co-CEO of Avue Technologies Corp., a federal contractor who has tested the site, said this about the federal effort: 'They are a personnel management agency, they are not a technology company, and this clearly demonstrates that they don't have the technology skills to be able to do this.'" They're working on it, though — one of their recent Facebook updates says, "Quick update: The three new blade servers have increased our capacity and the system is running smoothly."

Lucas123 writes "OCZ today released a new line of 2.5-in solid state drives that have up to 1TB of capacity. The new Octane SSD line is based on Indilix's new Everest flash controller, which allows it to reduce boot-up times by half over previous SSD models. The new SSD line is also selling for $1.10 to $1.30 per gigabyte of capacity, meaning you can buy the 128GB for about $166."

Lucas123 writes "An extremely profitable relationship between Dell and EMC has come to an end after 10 years. Over the past five years, as Dell has continued to sell more of its own storage products — going further and further upstream in the market — while EMC has continued to sell more products aimed at lower-end customers. As a result, competition between the two vendors has grown. But, the partnership resulted in big revenue for both companies, with Dell reporting as much as 50% of its storage revenue from EMC rebranded products in some years. 'If anything, Dell is making much more money on the bottom line now. So as far as divorces go, this was a pretty easy one,' said industry analyst Steve Duplessie."

Lucas123 writes "NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has placed its data, from photos of Mars to top secret government information, in 10 different public or private clouds. JPL's 5,000 workers have access to that data with any mobile devices they want to use, as long as it has first been secured. Because JPL's and other workforces are becoming more mobile, a help desk as it's known today may soon become unnecessary, according to JPL's IT CTO Tom Soderstrom. 'Have you ever called a help desk for your mobile device? What do you do? Probably, the first you do is Google or Bing it,' he said. 'If you can't get your answer there, you ask your friends who are like you. For us, that's the workgroup.'"