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Businesses

Submission + - Dell begins their largest layoff ever. 3

cyphercell writes: Dell has begun their largest series of layoffs ever. This morning at about 10:00am more than two hundred employees at Dell's Roseburg Oregon Call center found out that they no longer had jobs. Sparking what appears to be the beginning of year long run of layoffs for the company. http://www.newsreview.info/article/20070802/NEWS/7 0802014

Refuting local suspicions of malice Dell spokesman David Frink states:

... the closure has nothing to do with a lawsuit filed by employees of the Roseburg center in February, claiming Dell violated federal and state wage and hour laws.
http://www.newsreview.info/article/20070213/NEWS/7 0213020

and later says

...plans to reduce employment worldwide by 10 percent at the end of May.


Their plans to reduce employment can be found here:
http://www.statesman.com/business/content/business /stories/technology/06/01/1dell.html

Here are some highlights:

Dell set to shed 8,800 workers...

Dell has 82,200 permanent workers, including 18,000 in Central Texas, and 5,300 temporary workers worldwide. The layoffs are expected to affect both groups...

In its last large-scale layoffs, Dell cut more than 5,000 jobs in Austin after the high-tech bust in 2001.

...many of the layoffs could come in Central Texas, where Dell is headquartered. In a March 29 report to clients, Goldman Sachs analysts said Dell might reduce the work force at its test and assembly facilities in the U.S. and Malaysia.
Windows

Submission + - Has Windows Data Execution Protection(DEP) helped?

An anonymous reader writes: It has been about two and half years since Microsoft shipped XP Service Pack 2, which enabled software DEP and also supported the NX-bit for hardware-enforced DEP.

The software-enforced DEP was well known in 2004 for being part of the reason that SP2 was slower than SP1, especially on cache-limited CPUs. I myself have begun turning DEP off in the BOOT.INI file on older systems.

The question: Has DEP ever stopped anything, or is it just more useless overhead? I note that I haven't seen Microsoft mention DEP in any recent advisories and Windows continues to be exploited(like last weeks ANI Cursor bug) by system-level holes that DEP was supposed to catch.
Power

Submission + - Why do smart people disagree on peak oil so much?

Prof. Goose writes: ""There continues to be considerable disagreement on both the timing and the magnitude of Peak Oil, though last week's US GAO report(pdf) should be helpful in shrinking that gap. Part I of this 3 part series summarized some of the recent discussion of why some are very concerned about Peak Oil and others are relatively unconcerned. We also discussed why there needs to be a clear definition of Peak Oil so that policymakers discuss 'apples and apples'. This post will continue to examine areas of disagreement between the two camps, and will particularly focus on what I perceive to be the largest disconnect in energy, financial and government circles — that of the difference between gross and net production of finite sources."

Here's a link: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2367"
Databases

Submission + - Are stored procedures bad?

An anonymous reader writes: I use stored procedures all the time; if not for anything else, but just for the isolation it provides between the business logic and data management. And that's was school taught me! But I was just going through Frans Bouma's article and it shattered all my beliefs. If not all, atleast a few of Frans's points are undeniable. It's an old article and I believe it dates back to 2003 so I'm sure someone would have figured what is best.
It's funny.  Laugh.

Submission + - OMG Ponies

jibjibjib writes: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Donec dignissim metus non orci. Proin malesuada. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Suspendisse sollicitudin elit non leo. Aliquam nisl massa, blandit sit amet, venenatis adipiscing, consectetuer in, turpis. Donec lacus odio, pellentesque at, interdum eu, pharetra non, metus. Donec rutrum arcu quis ligula. Fusce fermentum. Proin dapibus vulputate sem. Praesent egestas lacinia turpis. Cras tellus ante, dictum sit amet, semper id, adipiscing id, ante. Proin urna. Cras a justo. Phasellus posuere adipiscing tellus. Donec nonummy sollicitudin dui. Nullam at mauris. Nam consectetuer eros ac lacus.
Businesses

Submission + - Are Smokers Dead Weight at the Office?

theodp writes: "The latest salvo in the war against smoking has been fired, with two studies suggesting that daily smokers have lower working performance and take more sick days than their non-smoking colleagues. However, Navy researchers said it could be that cigarette smoking is simply a 'marker' for non-conformity and high risk-taking, which contribute to poorer performance in the military."
Microsoft

Submission + - Windows Vista restricts GNU GCC apps to 32 MB

An anonymous reader writes: Thomas R. Nicely reports that images compiled with GCC or DJGPP on Vista without employing the Win32 API cannot allocate more than 32MB of memory. The same problem does not appear on Windows 98 or Windows XP.

No mention was made or guess offered as to what would motivate Microsoft to make this restriction.

Will this affect applications that you distribute?
Debian

Submission + - Debian win32-loader adds win9x and Vista support

Robert Millan writes: The win32 loader for installing Debian that was mentioned here earlier now targets for a broader spectrum of "victims". Over the last few days, support for Windows 95/98/ME was added. Now, this tool can easily replace Windows Vista as well. Seems like every member of the big "win32 family" can now be replaced with Debian in a matter of minutes. Only ReactOS missing. Anyone send the patch? :-)

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