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Microsoft Unveils "Elevate America"
nandemoari writes "In response to the current economic crisis, Microsoft Corp. has come out with a stimulus plan of their own. Their goal is to help a large group of individuals use their computers to land employment in ways other than to generate a compelling resume. The new online initiative, Elevate America, is set to equip close to 2 million people (over the next three years) with the skills needed to succeed in the field of technology."
At first, I was going to post about not berating Microsoft blindly. Then I RTFA... They have basic courses for free online, but anything past that is an advertisement for MS certs.
i see no Cisco training, Apache, MySql, etc
but i do see training on Server2008 (woopee do)
this is just a fluff/feelgood PR initative, when really they want 2 millon mcse's/advocates/salespeople who only know about a single vendors product and are therefore ill equipped for the modern diverse IT industry.
there is more to IT than MS and a Mcse
So they wan to help laid off workers, just not their own laid off workers?
Microsoft Bungles Severance, Asks Laid Off Workers for Money Back
How Microsoft-esque
Full story http://www.infopackets.com/news/business/microsoft/2009/20090223_microsoft_unveils_its_own_economic_stimulus_plan.htm
If you're going to be a xenophobe, you might as well come out and say it, rather than blaming all of our economic woes on foreigners.
The number of H1B workers is a drop in the bucket in the context of the national economy.
The number of H1-B visas that can be issued in a given year is limited to 65,000 by law.
According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, the total size of the American workforce was approximately 153.7 million last month (with unemployment at a troubling 11.6 million).
An H1B worker is typically limited to a 6-year stay, unless the worker is applying for permanent residency. Assuming that all 65,000 workers stay each year, we have 390,000 H1B workers in the country at the present (I'd guess the actual number is somewhat less than that).
At the very worst, H1-Bs might represent 0.25% of the national workforce.
Microsoft employs 3,517 H1-B workers (the 3rd most of any American firm), out of 89,809 total employees, or just about 4%. This number might be a little high, although 4 percent doesn't strike me as being particularly alarming.
Microsoft's recent round of layoffs (the first in the company's history) let go about 5,000 workers. Although I suppose these could have largely been avoided by eliminating all of the H1-B workers, that still leaves 1,500 workers, and assumes that every single H1-B worker was worthless to the company (which is somewhat doubtful).
To summarize: Stop complaining about the H1-B workers. Although it's not a good idea to begin hiring foreign workers during a recession, the current crop of H1-B workers is simply too small to be having any substantial effect on the economy.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Kelvin is a unit in and of itself; there is no such thing as a "degree kelvin".
Slumdog Millionaire is, at least according to all the sources I've seen, in English and Hindi, which are the two languages "of the Union" in the Republic of India. If it had been set in, e.g., Iran or Afghanistan, it might have been in Farsi.
the 2 languages with the highest use are English and Chinese. but Chinese is primarily used in one country, but English is the primary language of several countries on six continents. the demise of English is possible, but predicting it is, at the very least, premature.
no big sig
To extend your argument, "Chinese" is not really a language. The people of China speak several different non-mutually intelligible variants. Linguistically these are more separate languages than dialects, although they are often lumped under "Chinese" for cultural and political reasons. For comparison, the linked article states that there are 836 Million speakers of Mandarin Chinese, the most common "dialect," while the number of English speakers is estimated between . To be fair, I do not know if the numbers for Mandarin only include native speakers or also includes those who speak Mandarin as an additional language.
Another point pushing for English to be a dominant world language is the Internet... it was first developed in English speaking countries, and I would hazard a guess that most computer software is written using English. Written in English both as in the most common programming languages use English commands, and the code, comments and documentation are written in English. Being the "native" language of computing could do almost for pushing English as a dominant world language as simply having a large speaking base.
I personally think it would be more likely for a patois of Chinese (mostly Mandarin,) English and other languages to develop than for Mandarin to take over as the sole language of trade and international relations.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
You make something really, *really* hot. It's fairly interesting, see here.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvin Until the 13th General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) in 1967-1968, the unit kelvin was called a "degree", the same as with the other temperature scales at the time. It was distinguished from the other scales with either the adjective suffix "Kelvin" ("degree Kelvin") or with "absolute" ("degree absolute") [...] The 13th CGPM changed the name to simply "kelvin" (symbol K).[2] The omission of "degree" indicates that it is not relative to an arbitrary reference point such as the Celsius and Fahrenheit scales, but rather an absolute unit of measure which can be manipulated algebraically (e.g. multiply by two to indicate twice the amount of "mean energy" available among elementary degrees of freedom of the system).