What Oracle has done and other notes
Here are some observations about Oracle's decision on Itanium, and some other topics at HP’s user conference this week in Las Vegas.
-- HP customers who run Oracle on Itanium are not happy. They see Oracle’s decision to end new...
'Security as a service' may be federal future
In the U.S. Capitol Wednesday, a forum for congressional staffers on cloud computing brought together representatives of rival firms, including Google, Microsoft, IBM, Dell, Salesforce, SAP, and Savvis.The vendors...
Clueless in the White House
Vice President Joe Biden doesnt know a thing about the H-1B visa.There is one basic fact about this temporary work visa that everyone in political office, or running for political office, ought to understand and it is this: Theres...
Tech can fight against climate change
Im glad the Senate killed the Keystone pipeline. The only thing exploitation of tar sands will do is to increase the severity of climate change.James Hansen, the NASA climate scientist, in his book Storms of My Grandchildren, warned...
Obama didn't get advance copy of new iPad
Aboard Air Force One today en route to Charlotte, President Barack Obama's press secretary was asked about the latest iPad during the press briefing. After answering questions about Syria, Iran as well as some other topics of...
Five points about Apple's job claims
Apple is claiming that it is a job creation powerhouse, responsible for some 514,000 direct and indirect jobs in the U.S. But there is a lot that isn't disclosed in Apple's report, and there are many questions about it.
Let's look...
A social engineering story
I'm surprised that the Internet security aspects of the Heartland Institute document leak haven't gotten more attention. There's a good lesson here. The person who received the documents, Peter Gleick, an environmental scientist and...
ICANN.dysfunctional
The group that manages the domain name system, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), has become a useless empire-building organization and is in need of a complete reboot. No one really believes that the...
Gingrich: Let AmEx run the visa program
The Republican candidate who is leading the polls in Iowa, Newt Gingrich, is also for eliminating the H-1B cap, and says the visa cap policy is wrong and economically misguided.That view puts Gingrich in the mainstream of the...
FCC unravels AT&T's job saving claims
In its effort to sell its T-Mobile merger, AT&T repeatedly advertised a promise to bring 5,000 wireless call center jobs back to the U.S. if the merger was approved. Mergers often lead to jobs losses, but AT&T put out a...
The making of a political issue: USAjobs.gov
Users were having trouble accessing USAjobs.gov early Tuesday, in what was the latest problem the site has seen since the U.S. Office of Personnel Management took it back this month from Monster.com. The news about the access issue...
Data centers use 2% of U.S. energy, below forecast
The amount of energy used by servers and data centers is increasing, but not as fast as the government once thought it would. The recession, as well as wider adoption of virtualization, has played a role in cutting energy demand....
What happens to IT hiring if Congress self-destructs?
If Congress fails to agree on a debt ceiling limit and the U.S. defaults, it seems clear enough that a series of disastrous things will occur, including rising interest rates and higher unemployment.IT budgets and hiring are certain...
Server shipments flatten as tech improves
Heres some interesting data from IDC about server shipments over the last five years. It includes high and low end systems. U.S. Server Shipments2006 - 2.87 million2007 - 2.96 million2008 - 2.87 million2009 - 2.45 million2010 -...
Sarah Palin, Alaska's IT, and the rowboat complaint
When she was governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin received a memo about a fellow who had to get in a boat and row out in a bay to make a call. The complaint came from a man living in Port Tongass, Alaska, and it was relayed to Palin by a...
India's growing visa problem
For most of the last decade, India's large tech outsourcing firms have had little trouble getting H-1B visas. This is changing. A research report by CLSA, a brokerage and investment group focused on the Asia-Pacific market, believes...
Can Internet gambling really work in D.C.?
The District of Columbia recently legalized Internet gambling, and may offer Texas holdem games in hot spots this summer. The plan is to eventually make gambling widely available to anyone in the District whether its from home,...
Inside visa fraud in India
Over the last two years, there has been increasing criticism of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service's (USCIS) paperwork requirements for processing H-1B visas. But a newly released WikiLeaks State Dept. cable helps explain...
Why Google's climate change action matters
Google is addressing global warming by cutting its greenhouse gas emissions. It recently announced an agreement to buy 100 MW of power from an Oklahoma wind farm, one of a number of things that Google has done to reduce its...
Tim Berners-Lee tweets for transparency
Among those who have officially joined the federal budget debate is Tim Berners-Lee, the person who invented the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee, in a tweet, urged his followers to support the Sunlight Foundation's effort to protect...
