Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Announcements

Submission + - Stable Open Source NTFS After 12 Years of Work

Submitted by
irgu
irgu writes: "Open source NTFS development started in 1995 by Martin von Loewis under Linux, which was taken over by Anton Altaparmakov in 2000. Two years ago Apple hired Altaparmakov to work on Mac OS X and made a deal with the team to relicense the code and return the new one, soonest in the spring of 2008. But the team also continued the work and Szabolcs Szakacsits announced the read/write NTFS-3G driver for beta testing last year. Only half year passed and NTFS-3G reached the stable status and has been already ported to FreeBSD, Mac OS X, BeOS, Haiku, 64-bit and big-endian architectures, and new CPU's!"
United States

Submission + - How to Keep America Competitive

Submitted by pkbarbiedoll
pkbarbiedoll writes: In a Washington Times column from this weekend, Bill Gates writes,

This issue has reached a crisis point. Computer science employment is growing by nearly 100,000 jobs annually. But at the same time studies show that there is a dramatic decline in the number of students graduating with computer science degrees. The United States provides 65,000 temporary H-1B visas each year to make up this shortfall — not nearly enough to fill open technical positions. Permanent residency regulations compound this problem. Temporary employees wait five years or longer for a green card. During that time they can't change jobs, which limits their opportunities to contribute to their employer's success and overall economic growth.


Interesting read, but this argument is not new and is based on a distortion of truth. If US companies simply offered fair pay, good benefits, and a general sense of job security to US citizens there would be no reason to insource labor from other countries. Mr. Gates implies that US workers are not willing to work IT anymore. He fails to mention why. Most college students do not wish to throw away 4 years of their lives (and thousands of dollars) on a career in an industry rife with outsourcing. Mr. Gates acknowledges that most US companies are not interested in offering competitive wages, so the only solution in his eyes is to import coders willing to work for a lot less (or, outsource). This has nothing to do with innovation and everything to do with creating downward pressure on IT costs.
User Journal

Journal SPAM: Resource Of Wages

Journal by mercedo

I thought it is a price for our labour. But the manager of our premises said it derives from profit we earned.

Strange.

Suppose if our salary were derived from the profit, we can't earn it if no profit was made. On the other hand we can get much more if we can get more profit than expected.

If our salary is a compensation for our labour, we can get our salary regardless of whether our company came up with no profit or much more profit.
The Almighty Buck

An Ad Upstart Forces Google to Open Up a Little 58

Posted by Hemos from the from-the-smallest-mustard-seeds dept.
The Firehose brought us a link from the NYTimes about Quigo. As the Times feed says: "Yahoo and Google are facing a challenge from a tiny adversary named Quigo Technologies over contextual text ads online." And while obviously not in the same financial league, it is good to see more competition in this space.
Space

Submission + - Will Apollo mistakes be made with Mars?

Submitted by
MattSparkes
MattSparkes writes: "In some ways the Apollo 11 mission was a great success; the astronauts got back to Earth safely after walking on the moon. However, it was a massive disaster in terms of quarantine procedures — the astronauts had to leave the landing capsule to enter the quarantine module, after it was found that the crane on board the ship wasn't strong enough to raise it. Would NASA be able to protect the Earth from Martian pathogens if it successfully returns soil samples from the Red Planet?"

Slashdot Top Deals

The sum of the Universe is zero.

Close