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Comment Re:As someone who was on H1-B, it's a scam (Score 3, Informative) 325

I am a US citizen (and native) who was employed by Tata for a F500 company (call them BigCo.) I had been with BigCo on a temporary project with another staffing group and BigCo's managers forced Tata to find and hire me for a basic support contract while BigCo's long time employees were slowly laid off. Two of us were citizens of the US on this contract, brought in by management, everyone else was either H1B or offshore. I can assure you that Tata let my contract expire and replaced me with an H1B worker already on their payroll who made significantly less all the while Tata charged BigCo the same rate. The mandatory HR training calls were hilarious. I've been outsourced, been an outsourcer, and an outsourced outsourcer. The H1B system totally abused in a way that non-foreign staffing companies only wished they could do.

Comment Re:Wines, cheeses, trees (Score 1) 1397

When I came to my current position, every PC was named for the original user. Over time this became disorganized and a spreadsheet was used to track the computers. Not only that, the CEO and other executives had their computers easily identified on the network. We changed the scheme to location-OS-AssetNumber. The help desk people hate it and say it is difficult, but they still have to use the same spreadsheet. Plus we have the bonus of simple asset tracking for the help desk. The benefits are obvious. To be sure, obscurity is not a complete solution, but it does make it harder for the mail clerk to to find profit/loss statements on the CEO's desktop or personnel records in HR. It's just another layer in a comprehensive solution. I've used Greek mythology for servers before as well as location/function schemes. The scheme I inherited used movie characters. I've discontinued it for a different system. It's completely unprofessional to have a COO call the help desk to complain about Yoda problems.
Power

Mimicking Electric Eel Cells 71

An anonymous reader writes "A team of US researchers has asked the following question in the new field of systems biology: 'Do we understand how a cell produces electricity well enough to design one, and to optimize that design?' They believe it should be possible to build artificial cells replicating the electrical behavior of electric eel cells. In fact, such artificial cells could deliver better performance — as much as 40% more energy than real eel cells, a computer model suggests. They could be used to power medical implants and other small devices."

Comment Re:What remote access technology? (Score 1) 251

How could be this done? How could he connect to his laptop without knowing the IP address?

One word, DynDNS.

Beyond using the obvious, there are services that allow viewing for support, for instance. Here's how it works: Computer boots, service is started that opens a connection to the remote assistance server. Remote user browses to the remote assistance site and logs in. Remote user can view/use the comptuer remotely through a normal browser. logmein.com has a free version of their paid service that allows you to do just that. I'm sure that gotomypc and others have the same thing.

Linux Business

10 Years of Pushing For Linux — and Giving Up 857

boyko.at.netqos writes "Jim Sampson at Network Performance Daily writes about his attempts over a decade to get Linux working in a business/enterprise environment, but each time, he says, something critical just didn't work, and eventually, he just gave up. The article caps with his attempts to use Ubuntu Edgy Eft — only to find a bug that still prevented him from doing work." Quoting: "For the next ten years, I would go off and on back to this thought: I wanted to support the Open Source community, and to use Linux, but every time, the reality was that Linux just was not ready... Over the last six years, I've tried periodically to get Linux working in the enterprise, thinking, logically, that things must have improved. But every time, something — sometimes something very basic — prevented me from doing what I needed to do in Linux."
Microsoft

Microsoft Applies To Patent DRM'ed OS Modules 134

wellingj writes "Microsoft has applied for a patent that sounds on the face of it like it ought to improve OS stability and reliability: the patent proposes to modularize device drivers much like Linux does. But, going further, Microsoft would apply DRM to these modules — as Groklaw puts it, 'using modularity plus DRM to restrict and contain and enforce.' The net result is that you might have to pay extra for OS hardware support. Things like USB keys, DVD-ROMS, Raid drives, and video cards might not be supported out of the box. LXer indulges in some dystopian speculation."
Spam

Spam Doubles, Finding New Ways to Deliver Itself 486

An anonymous reader noted that the times is running a piece on the rise in spam that you might have noticed in your inbox over the last 6 months. Gates promised the end of spam by 2006, but they figure it's doubled in the last few months. And best of all, a huge percentage of spam is now images that circumvent traditional text analysis.

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