House Republicans consider high-skills immigration bill
The negotiations to strike a deal on the debt ceiling may be getting all the attention in Congress, but there are also new efforts by lawmakers to address high-skill immigration issues.
First, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee have circulated a discussion draft of a bill that would eliminate the per-country caps on green cards, according to a copy of the document seen by Computerworld. This proposal may well amount to the GOP alternative to a Democratic plan offered in June by Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), whose district includes Silicon Valley.
The federal government sets a cap of 140,000 employment-based green cards a year, but it now limits the number of green cards per country to no more than 7% of the available visas to people from any one country. This limit has meant that for people from countries where green card demand is high, namely India and China, the wait for a green card can exceed six years. Read more...
IT workers with heart
You might think Steve Kranson, who works at Comerica Bank in Auburn Hills, Mich., is your average IT manager. But he's also been known to log hours dressed up like the Easter Bunny, to the delight of local kids.
Amy Crow, who spends most of her working hours as an IT project manager at Texas Health Resources, has been spotted stepping away from her computer to work on gardening and landscaping projects at nursing homes, organize donated linens and other household items for local disaster relief agencies and sing holiday songs at elementary schools in the neighborhood.
And Paychex Inc. employees Dan Canzano, vice president of IT operations and support, and Tammy Hall, director of enterprise service management, have spent some of their worktime polishing their poker-playing skills and raking in some big bucks for charity.
In all three cases, these IT professionals performed these activities with the blessing of their employers, who often allow workers to take paid time off to donate their skills, talents and time to charities and other nonprofit organizations. Read more...
Peter Cochrane’s Blog: What my mobile knows
After suffering yet another healthcare presentation that proposes littering the homes of the old and needy with sensors so their activities and health can be monitored, I decided to compile a list of what my mobile phone knows about me - and you.
I'm sure what follows is a modest list, but it is revealing all the same. Our smartphones routinely know the following:
Our smartphones are inherently capable of gathering information about our habitsPhoto: Ed Yourdon Read more...
Microsoft previews ‘Juneau’ SQL Server tools
Microsoft has released a third preview of SQL Server 2011, codenamed "Denali" and including the "Juneau" toolset.
In the Denali database engine there are new features that supporting high availability, and improve query performance of data warehousing queries. Then there's FileTable, a special table type that is also published as a Windows network share, and which enables file system access to data managed by SQL Server.
For business intelligence, Denali includes tabular modelling, which means in-memory databases that support business intelligence analysis, and a new interactive visualisation and reporting client called Project Crescent.
Interestingly, Project Crescent is built with Silverlight rather than HTML5, despite Microsoft's new-found commitment to all things HTML. Read more...
Marketer taps browser flaw to see if you’re pregnant
Epic Marketplace doesn't use the well-documented browser history leak to track specific websites a user has clicked on, Stanford graduate student Jonathan Mayer said. But it does employ advanced code that tests thousands of visited links per second to compile visitors' interests, including home improvement, pregnancy and fertility, and the repair of bad credit, he said.
Mayer's findings are based on Epic-supplied JavaScript found on websites for online movie service Flixter and cable and internet service provider Charter.net. The code, he said, works behind the scenes and is able to process thousands of URLs per second. If a user exits the browser or visits a new site before the script is done, a browser cookie stores the progress so the search may be resumed at a later time. Read more...
Google buys facial recognition company PittPatt
Google has acquired Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition, known as PittPatt, a company that develops technology for recognizing faces in images and video, according to PittPatt's website.
Its founders began developing the technology at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute in the 1990s and formed PittPatt in 2004 as a spin-off from the university, the website says.
"At Google, computer vision technology is already at the core of many existing products (such as Image Search, YouTube, Picasa, and Goggles), so it's a natural fit to join Google and bring the benefits of our research and technology to a wider audience," PittPatt said. Read more...
Elgan: Why Twitter is obsolete
The microblogging service Twitter debuted five years ago, and by all accounts it's one of the great success stories of the social media era.
Twitter boasts 200 million users and 350 billion tweets per day, and it's a ubiquitous reference on mainstream TV. Visit Twitter today, and it's a hive of frenetic activity. Millions of people rely on the service for news, commentary, blog updates and social interaction. Twitter is about to close an $800 million funding round, which values the company at about $8 billion.
Suddenly, however, the service has been rendered obsolete by Google's new Google+ service, and also by the company's failure to capitalize on its five-year window of opportunity to innovate its way to indispensability.
It's only a matter of time before Twitter becomes a ghost town. Here's why. Read more...
Adobe software breaks down on Mac OS X Lion
More than a dozen Adobe products are not working properly on Mac OS X Lion, Apple's new desktop operating system, continuing Adobe's struggles to make its software compatible with Apple products.
The issues -- listed by Adobe on its website -- aren't as cut and dried as the problem with Flash on iOS, which is that Apple blocks use of Flash on iPhones and iPads.
But Adobe says many of its products are missing functionality under Lion, which was released earlier this week. In addition to the fact that Lion drops support for older PowerPC applications, the Adobe issues may be enough for some users to delay upgrading. Read more...
IBM speeds storage retrieval with flash drives
With an eye toward helping tomorrow's data-deluged organizations, IBM researchers have created a super-fast storage system capable of scanning in 10 billion files in 43 minutes.
This system handily bested their previous system, demonstrated at Supercomputing 2007, which scanned 1 billion files in three hours.
Key to the increased performance was the use of speedy flash memory to store the metadata that the storage system uses to locate requested information. Traditionally, metadata repositories reside on disk, access to which slows operations. Read more...
Oracle ordered to lower damages claim against Google
Oracle has been ordered to lower its multibillion-dollar claim for damages in its patent infringement lawsuit against Google and its Android operating system, court papers show.
Oracle's expert "overreached" in concluding that Google owed up to $6.1 billion in damages for alleged infringement of Oracle's Java patents, U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup said Friday in a sternly written order. The "starting point" for Oracle's damages claim should be $100 million, adjusted up and down for various factors, he said. Read more...