Senate’s big immigration bill seeks to crackdown on offshore outsourcing
The U.S. Senate's comprehensive immigration bill would make major changes to the H-1B visa that are certain to upset some and likely please others. The H-1B changes would likely most upset India's offshore industry.
IT service firms that rely heavily on H-1B and L-1 visas would be hit with new rules intended to "crack down" on the use of H-1B visas "to outsource American jobs," according to an outline of the bill prepared by senate staff.
This bill has the potential of disrupting offshoring outsourcing firms, saddling them with visa fees of as much as $10,000, and the eventual limitation of H-1B and L-1 workers to 50 percent of an employer's workforce. More than half the U.S.-based workforces of many offshore firms are foreign workers holding temporary visas. Read more...
Handwriting beats PowerPoint’s teaching power says MIT boffin
Remember that feeling of struggling to stay awake during university lectures? And not just because of the previous night's imbibing?
The same problem affects students in massive online open courses (MOOCs), the free university courses now offered by reputable institutions around the world.
Anant Agarwal, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and founder of edX, MIT's MOOC arm, thinks the way to stop the somnolence is by ditching PowerPoint and instead making hand-written material a key part of the online learning experience. Read more...
American tech workers lose out in H-1B lottery
Some tech companies won the lottery this week -- not the virtual one creating overnight Bitcoin millionaires, but an actual lottery granting skilled-worker visas known as H-1Bs. However, if Congress answers the tech industry's calls to raise the numbers of visas, it could lead to a hemorrhaging of American tech jobs, opponents warn. Read more...
Objective-C’s dip in popularity tied to decline in iPad and iPhone
Objective-C, best known as the programming language used for building applications to run on Apple's popular iPad and iPhone devices, is beginning to level off in popularity, one monthly assessment of languages reports.
The Tiobe Programming Community Index for April has Objective-C slipping a spot, dropping to fourth place and displaced by C++. The index gauges language popularity based on the number of skilled engineers worldwide, courses, and third-party vendors pertinent to each language, with popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo, as well as other sites used to make the assessment. This month's index had Objective-C coming up in 9.60 percent of searches, which was down from 10.23 percent in April. The language is still up from one year ago, when it showed up in just 8.24 percent of searches. Read more...
U.S. gets 124,000 H-1B petitions, 45% above cap
The federal government on Monday reported that it had received 124,000 H-1B visa petitions, 39,000 more than it can fulfill under two hiring caps.
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service on Sunday held a computer-generated lottery to distribute the visas, which can be used during the federal government's 2014 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1. With the lottery, a U.S.-based company that may be seeking only one or two H-1B visas is on the same footing as a large overseas-based offshore outsourcing firm that may have petitioned for thousands of temporary visas. Read more...
Tick-tock! 40% of PCs start Windows XP malware meltdown countdown
With one year to go until Microsoft kills free support for Windows XP, if you haven’t got a migration plan in place it’s time to start doing something about it... but don't panic, say the migration experts.
One year from today, on 8 April 2014, Microsoft will stop fixing broken code and no longer release security patches for free for an operating system that is still used by a staggering 40 per cent of PCs.
From that date on, you’ll either have to face hackers and malware writers on your own or you’ll be hiding behind the skirts of some premium-level paid Microsoft support instead. Gartner reckons Microsoft will charge you $200,000 if you have a Software Assurance contract and $500,000 without a SA agreement. Read more...
Office for Mac 2008 support umbilical chopped off
Mac fans wedded to Microsoft Office face a stark choice on April 9 – upgrade or continue running the unsupported Office for Mac 2008.
April 9 2013 is the date when Microsoft will stop providing new code and security fixes for Office for Mac 2008, which launched in January 2008.
Redmond is urging Mac users to take out an Office 365 subscription, which includes Office for Mac 2011 and future upgrades to the suite. Read more...
H-1B demand this year will be fast, furious
The U.S. begins accepting new H-1B visa petitions on Monday, April 1, and fast demand is expected. This is going to be followed by much fury.
Industry proponents of the H-1B visa will argue -- at megaphone strength -- that high demand is evidence of both an improving economy and need for skilled workers.
Opponents will counter that H-1B visa employees are displacing U.S. workers, and will point in particular to H-1B visa demand by offshore outsourcing companies. Read more...
Boy Scouts get Game Design badge
The Boy Scouts of America have created a merit badge in Game Design.
Unveiled at tech-and-culture-fest SXSW, the badge's premise appears to be that playing a game can be just as challenging as traditional scouting activities like camping and hiking.
Playing games of all sorts, the Scouts say, “... challenges us to overcome long odds, tell compelling stories, and work with or against one another.” Games also “motivate both young and old to find creative solutions, practice new skills, and keep their brains active.” Read more...
Which tech degrees pay the most from day one?
Young technologists have a variety of undergraduate degrees that they can pursue at the collegiate level. But which degree is going to produce the most job offers and the highest starting salaries? Should college students major in computer science, software engineering, IT, or some other niche in order to snare the top prize four years from now: a six-figure starting salary, perhaps with stock options?
We talked to colleges and professors across various tech disciplines about industry demand for their graduates. We pored over starting salary data from the PayScale College Salary Report 2012-13. We also looked at unemployment rates by college major compiled by Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce.
One trend is clear: The more challenging the tech-oriented major, the more job opportunities available to newly minted graduates ... as well as higher starting salaries. Students who take more math, science and engineering courses in college, tend to earn higher salaries upon graduation. Of course, whether a senior in college has multiple job offers with signing bonuses and other perks depends on their grades and internships. Also, graduating from a highly selective technical college helps tremendously with on-campus recruitment. Read more...
The 2013 Computerworld Premier 100 IT Leaders
"You have to show the business the possibilities," says Steelcase CIO Bob Krestakos, who with another colleague holds the patent for the HD video technology. "One of the big insights IT was able to bring [to product development] is the power of video in sharing data and collaboration." Read more...
With Windows ‘Blue’ rumored, the Windows 8 fire sale begins
The mainstream media has picked up Mary Jo Foley's report about a public preview of Windows "Blue" -- the next version of Windows -- arriving soon. Foley quotes the Chinese-language Win8China site (which has consistently provided good insider information about Windows 8), saying RTM for Windows Blue is planned for June 7, with retail availability in August. She also quotes the site as saying the next Windows Blue milestone will include a public preview -- "MP" for Milestone Preview -- in the coming months. Read more...
How to buy a Microsoft volume license on the cheap
Most people think of Microsoft volume licenses as the province of big companies -- as Microsoft's way of keeping the hoi polloi from buying some of its fancier products. VLs are expensive, cumbersome, and not for the faint of heart, the story goes. But that story's wrong. It turns out there's a trick that people in the know have been using for years to comply, quite precisely, with the rules and pick up any VL software they might want for a song. Read more...
New Groundwork Web dev framework shows promise
Although it shares a name with a systems monitoring tool and a content management system, the Groundwork software development framework could make a name for itself in mobile Web development.
The open source project, introduced earlier this month, is an HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript framework for rapidly prototyping and building websites and applications, said Gary Hepting, founder of Groundwork and an engineer at online television show provider SideReel. Currently in beta release, Groundwork leverages the Sass CSS preprocessor, which extends CSS3 by adding nested rules, variables, selector inheritance, and other features. "Groundwork offers an extremely flexible fractions-based grid system that can utilize halves through twelfths and two strategically targeted break-points, or media queries, that enable the ability to adapt layouts for mobile and handheld devices," Hepting said. Read more...
US students get cracking on Chinese malware code
Wesley McGrew, a research assistant at Mississippi State University, may be among the few people thrilled with the latest grim report into a years-long hacking campaign against dozens of U.S. companies and organizations.
But McGrew's interest is purely academic: He teaches a reverse engineering class at the university, training 14 computer science and engineering students how to analyze malicious software.
Part of the curriculum for his class will involve analyzing malware samples identified in a report from security vendor Mandiant, which alleged a branch of the Chinese military called "Unit 61398" ran a massive hacking campaign that struck 141 organizations over the last seven years. Read more...