White House ‘clarifies’ H-1B, green card rules to attract investment
The White House is attempting to make it more attractive for foreign entrepreneurs to create a business in the U.S. by "clarifying" H-1B visa and green card rules.
This idea of making it easier for foreign investors to create U.S.-based start-ups has been pitched by lawmakers who proposed "start-up visa" or "founder's visa" bills in recent years.
The White House isn't proposing new visa regulations, but is instead making what it characterized as "clarifying" adjustments to green card and H-1B rules that may make it easier for foreign investors to get a visa. Read more...
Digia opens Qt office in the U.S.
Finnish company Digia has opened an office in the U.S. in an effort to boost the commercial usage of a cross-platform application and user interface framework Qt, it said on Tuesday.
In March, Digia announced it was acquiring Nokia's Qt Commercial licensing and services business. Nokia kept control of the software itself.
Qt is designed to let developers write and deploy applications across desktop, mobile, and embedded OSes without rewriting the source code. It is available either as open source or under a commercial license. Companies that want to use the latter for its embedded and desktop systems can now turn to Digia. Read more...
Google patches 30 Chrome bugs, adds Instant Pages
Google patched 30 vulnerabilities in Chrome today, paying out the third-highest bounty total ever for the bugs that outsiders filed with its security team.
The company packaged the patches with an update to Chrome 13, adding Instant Pages to the "stable" channel of the browser. The feature, which Google earlier tucked into Chrome 13 previews, proactively pre-loads some search results to speed up browsing.
Google last upgraded Chrome's stable build in early June. Like Mozilla, which this year shifted to a rapid-release schedule, Google produces an update about every six-to-eight weeks.
Fourteen of the 30 vulnerabilities patched today were rated "high," the second-most-serious ranking in Google's four-step scoring system, while nine were pegged "medium" and the remaining seven were labeled "low." Read more...
Telstra offers online portal for mobile device management
Australian operator Telstra has launched the Mobile Device Management Portal, which allows IT administrators to remotely manage Apple iPhone and Android-based smartphones, the company said on Tuesday.
The growing adoption of smartphones and the increasing numbers of employees who access corporate data through personal devices has become a challenge for IT departments, according to Telstra.
Once logged into the Mobile Device Management Portal, an organization's fleet of mobile devices are visible. The number of administrative features available through the management portal depend on a mobile device's operating system, with some having more features than others. Read more...
Android, iPhone biggest winners in global smartphone battle
The latest global market-share estimates for smartphones are out. And as we've come to expect from these regular exercises in mobile OS number-crunching, the news is bright for Apple and Google, but a bit bleak for Nokia, Research In Motion (RIM), and Microsoft.
Research firm Canalys released its final smart phone market estimates for the second quarter of 2011, which show that Google's Android mobile operating system now has nearly half of the worldwide smartphone market--48 percent, to be exact. Of the 56 countries Canalys tracks, Android leads in 35 of them.
Nearly 52 million Android-based smartphones shipped in Q2, a staggering 379-percent increase over a year ago. Android has been the top platform by shipments since the fourth quarter of 2010, according to Canalys. Read more...
OCZ releases next-gen PCIe SSD
OCZ today released the fifth generation of its PCI-Express SSD (solid state drive), which it said can perform at a 2.8GB/sec read rate.
The new Z-Series SSD R4 doubles the performance of the previous generation SSD, according to OCZ CEO Ryan Petersen.
Past generations of OCZ's Z-Drives sported up to 2TB of capacity and 1.4Gbit/sec throughput. The latest model comes in capacities ranging from 300GB to 1.2TB on a half-height card and from 800GB to 3.2TB on a full-height card.
Unlike previous generations of OCZ drives, which were sold directly to end users, the new hardware is targeted directly at server manufacturers. Read more...
Chrome 13: Google uncloaks search click prediction engine
Google has released a new stable version of its Chrome browser, adding an "Instant Pages" service that attempts to accelerate your Google searches by rendering pages before you actually click on them.
Chrome 13 – available here for Mac, Windows, and Linux – also a offers a print preview tool just for Windows and Linux users, plus a new version of the omnibox, that very Googly combination of search box and traditional address bar.
In June, Mountain View added Instant Pages to the Chrome beta channel, boasting that it would remove between two and five seconds from the average Google search. When you use Google's search engine, Instant Pages renders the first search result if it's "confident" that's what you're about to click on. Read more...
Apple vanishes MySQL from Mac OS X Lion Server
Apple has removed MySQL from the latest version of Mac OS X server, replacing it with PostgreSQL.
The previous version of the OS – Snow Leopard Server – offered access to MySQL from both the GUI and the command line, but the open source database has disappeared entirely from Mac OS X Lion Server, released last week. Postgres is there, but it's available only from the command line.
EnterpriseDB – the outfit that has commercialized the open source PostgreSQL – says it was unaware of the change until Lion hit the Apple Store, and the company indicates that it has had no involvement with Apple when it comes to the inclusion of Postgres with Mac OS X Lion. "We weren't working with them directly on this," vice president of business development Sean Doherty tells The Reg. Read more...
Ghosting issues haunt Lenovo ThinkPad X220
Some Lenovo customers are concerned about ghosting on LCD screens in the ThinkPad X220 laptop, in which images temporarily remain fixed on screens, but the company tried to allay fears by saying that images dissipate in a short time and do not damage panels.
The ghosting phenomena -- commonly called image persistence -- are common to LCDs and do not cause images to burn into displays, said Ray Gorman, a Lenovo spokesman, in an email. But some customers have raised concerns, saying the image persistence was prominent, and the issue was not as seemingly normal as projected by Lenovo. Read more...
Google, data centers using less power than expected
Data centers have been using less electricity than you think ... or at least, compared with what they have in the past.
According to a study by Jonathan Koomey, a consulting professor at Stanford and a climate and energy researcher, data center energy use in the last five years rose only about 56 percent vs. doubling in the period between 2000 and 2005. And in the U.S., it rose only 36 percent instead of doubling.
Electricity used in global data centers in 2010 accounted for between 1.1 percent and 1.5 percent of total electricity use, the Koomey study found. For the U.S. that number was between 1.7 and 2.2 percent. Read more...