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Microsoft

Ballmer Turns To Geeks For Salvation 370

jfruhlinger writes "One of the critiques of Steve Ballmer as Microsoft CEO is that, as someone who came up through sales, he doesn't really get what running an innovative tech company is about. With the company board starting to question his performance — he didn't get his bonus last year because of the Kin debacle, for instance — it appears that Ballmer is planning to install engineers in high places to turn the company around."

Comment Credit cards blocked in Africa? (Score 1) 146

"Most merchants and payment gateway providers automatically block all credit cards from Africa"
Would someone knowledgable explain the reasoning behind this? I know Africa has more than its share of scammers, but why couldn't a merchant simply set rules requiring the funds to clear, a minimum amount of time between the purchase date and ship date, etc.? Why is an outright ban needed?

Comment Re:Indian Copyright Bill (Score 1, Insightful) 192

I suspect I'm going to get modded down for saying this, but...
You might be able to make the case that Indians work hard, but are they actually productive. I read one anecdote after another about terrible performance from Indian web designers, programmers, call center workers, etc.

I am very reluctant to believe that Indians are somehow inherently "better workers" than Americans.
Communications

Who Should Own Your Smartphone? 129

snydeq writes "The great corporate barrier against employees using personal smartphones in business contexts has been breached, writes InfoWorld's Galen Gruman. According to a recent report from Forrester Research, half of the smartphones in use among US and Canadian businesses are not company-issued equipment. In fact, some organizations are even subsidizing employees' service plans as an easy way to avoid the procurement and management headaches of an increasingly standard piece of work equipment. Gruman discusses the pros and cons of going with a subsidized, employee-owned smartphone plan, which is part of a larger trend that sees IT loosening its grip on 'dual-use' devices, including laptops and PCs."
Graphics

Real-Time, Movie-Quality CGI For Games 184

An anonymous reader writes "An Intel-owned development team can now render CGI-quality graphics in real time. 'Their video clips show artists pulling together 3D elements like a jigsaw puzzle (see for example this video starting at about 3:38), making movie-level CG look as easy as following a recipe.' They hope that the simplicity of 'Project Offset' could ultimately give them the edge in the race to produce real-time graphics engines for games."
Social Networks

Facebook Now Supports Jabber/XMPP 174

supersloshy writes "Facebook Chat has so far only been meant to be used in a web browser, and instant messaging applications have had a hard time implementing its undocumented protocol. Today, Facebook is making this job much easier by enabling support for XMPP to access its chat service. AOL's AIM and the Empathy Instant Messenger are also including pre-set Facebook options, due to already supporting XMPP." Here are instructions for setting up XMPP Facebook chat with popular instant messaging clients, including Pidgin and Adium.

Comment Re:Disclosure At the Table (Score 5, Insightful) 217

I am seeing countries continually regressing in the moral and ethical obligations, a degradation of honesty, transparency, and openness all in the name of making more money. I hear this mantra repeated on /. and elsewhere that the whole world is in moral and ethical decline. Really? Please give me a time period, anytime in world history, where nations were upstanding, moral, open, and fair to everyone. It's fine if you want to argue that globalization has negative consequences that outweigh its positive effects. But don't act like there was some bygone golden age in the past where everything was awesome. Societies act solely in their own self interest, always have, always will.

Comment This stat is rather curious (Score 3, Interesting) 157

The survey taker's school "doesn't use grades" for 0% of heavy users, 3% of medium users, and 10% of light users. This statistic by itself makes me unconvinced about the overall findings...do you mean to tell me that 0% of heavy internet users attend schools that don't give grades? What the hell is the sample size, anyway???

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