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Submission + - Veep Joe Biden Briefs U.S. Governors on H-1B Visas, IT, and Coding

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Back in 2012, Computerworld blasted Vice President Joe Biden for his ignorance of the H-1B temporary work visa program. But Joe's got his H-1B story and he's sticking to it, characterizing the visa program earlier this month in a speech to the National Governors Association as "apprenticeships" of sorts that companies provide to foreign workers to expand the Information Technology industry only after proving there are no qualified Americans to fill the jobs. Biden said he also learned from his talks with tech's top CEOs that 200,000 of the jobs that companies provide each year to highly-skilled H-1B visa holders could in fact be done by Americans with no more than a two-year community college degree.

Submission + - Firefox 33 gets Cisco's OpenH264 (ghacks.net)

Submitted by NotInHere
NotInHere writes: As promised, version 33 of the Firefox browser will fetch the OpenH264 module from Cisco, which enables Firefox to decode and encode H.264 video, for both the <video> tag and WebRTC, which has a codec war on this matter. The module won't be a traditional NPAPI plugin, but a so-called Gecko Media Plugin (GMP), Mozilla's answer to the disliked Pepper API. Firefox had no cross-platform support for H.264 before.

Submission + - Comcast Customer Service Rep Just Won't Take No For An Answer

Submitted by RevWaldo
RevWaldo writes: The Verge and other sources post how AOL's Ryan Block ultimately succeeded in cancelling his Comcast account over the phone, but not before the customer service representative pressed him for eight solid minutes (audio) to explain his reasoning for leaving "the number one provider of TV and internet service in the country" in a manner that would cause a character in Glengarry Glen Ross to blanch. Comcast has as of now issued an apology.

Submission + - Dell's Chromebook sales go crazy, so company halts sales (pcworld.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: Dell’s only Chromebook is at least temporarily unavailable for online purchase through the company’s website, only seven months after the model started shipping.

Facing rising commercial demand for the devices, Dell has not been able to keep up with orders.

The Chromebook 11, which shipped in December, is listed as unavailable on Dell’s Chromebook website, and the company is asking potential buyers to call in orders.

“Due to strong demand, the Dell Chromebook 11 is currently not available for order on Dell.com. It continues to be available for our education customers and can be ordered through their sales representative,” said Ellen Murphy, a Dell spokeswoman, in an email.

The laptop will eventually come online again, though the company did not provide a specific date.

With Dell keeping Chromebook purchases open mainly to commercial customers, individual buyers may have to turn to competitive products from Samsung, Toshiba, Lenovo and Hewlett-Packard, which are available online starting at under $200.

Submission + - Designer Brews Beer, Prints Resume on Side of Custom 4-Pack, Scores Job (dice.com)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: Canadian graphic designer Brennan Gleason wanted to attract more work, so he came up with a novel concept: custom-printing his resume on boxes of the beer he brews as a sideline. “I brewed up a nice blonde ale, so I figured it would awesome to use it to promote myself and my work,” Gleason wrote in a post on Dribbble. “Box contains the resume and the bottles each contain a piece of my work.” In addition to some bits about his work history, the carton labeling features a prominent link to his personal website. The best part? His creative effort reportedly gained him a few job offers. And if the employer loves beer, a resume on the side of a beer carton could go a long way toward scoring that job interview, provided the employer in question isn’t a teetotaler.

Comment Re:Thanks for the tip! (Score 1) 448

by Gazzonyx (#47306639) Attached to: $500k "Energy-Harvesting" Kickstarter Scam Unfolding Right Now

I'm in complete agreement here. We desperately need some way to tell legitimate Kickstarter campaigns from frauds. For that matter, the entire internet is full of scams and con-men waiting to take your money. That's why my team has developed iScam, the revolutionary new fraud-protection device.

Inside every iScam is a tiny induction coil that is powered by negative energy. When negative energy released by a scam such as this one activates the device, it generates a current which in turn activates a blinking LED, with the frequency of the blinking being proportional to the negative energy field. Simply aim the device at your computer screen, or hold it up to the phone when you get that too-good-to-be-true offer, or even point it at your lover... if there's any deception in the area, iScam will be activated and you'll be alerted!

Pledge just $15 and we'll send you one device. For $25 we'll send you two. For $100, we'll send you an improved prototype with even more sensitive scam-detection algorithms. And for the especially gullible-those of you who have lost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to scammers before- you need the top-level security provided by iScam Pro, which has a more powerful induction circuit, both increasing the range of the device and allowing it to detect even the tiniest fib! Pledge just $999 and we'll send you an iScam Pro. With our patented technology, you'll be safer than ever. And best of all, it's all environmentally friendly and fair-trade, with 10% of all proceeds going to benefit orphaned pandas.

Seems legit.

Comment Hard to tell (Score 3, Funny) 163

by Gazzonyx (#47304063) Attached to: I suffer from jet lag ...
It's hard for me to tell. Whenever I ride on a machine at 30,000 ft above the ground at 300 MPH, I take a Xanax (or three, funny story, but I have been "carried" off of flights by friends and family) to help me forget the previously mentioned facts. If I ever remembered that there's software on those machines, I'd probably take my pills with alcohol. Either way, when I get to my destination I always sleep for about 10 hours.

Off topic, I heard a great programmer joke; a bunch of programmers are hanging out and talking about code and such. One of them says, "show of hands, would you ever get on a plane if you knew your company wrote the software that controls the airplane?" A single hand goes up out of the group. "You believe that your company writes software that well?!" questions the programmer that brought up the topic. The man with his hand up replies, "No. I'm just not that worried about troubles from our software mid-flight; if my company wrote the software, the plane would never even take off in the first place."

Submission + - Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Released

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Today, Red Hat unveils Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, with new features designed to meet both modern datacenter and next-generation IT requirements for cloud, Linux Containers, and big data. The new version includes Linux containers (LXC) lets Linux users easily create and manage system or application containers, improved MS Active Directory / Identity Management (IdM) integration, XFS as the default file system, scaling to 500 TB (additional file system choices such as btrfs, ext{3,4} and others are available), a new and improved installation experience, managing Linux servers with OpenLMI, enhancements to both NFS and GFS2, optimized network management, bandwidth, the use of KVM Virtualization technology and more. See the list of complete features set here (PDF). CentOS 7 shouldn't be lagging too far behind due to recent cooperation between Red Hat and CentOS project.

Submission + - Anatomy Of The 1,000 MPH Bloodhound SSC

Submitted by cartechboy
cartechboy writes: The laws of physics are pretty clear: speed is relative. To a snail, human walking pace is incomprehensible, yet compared to the speed at which light travels, everything in the universe is standing still. To us mere humans, 1,000 mph is pretty fast. It's even faster along the surface of the planet, which is what the Bloodhound SSC land speed record team aims to achieve next summer. Using both a jet engine and a rocket, the 1,000 mph target seems within reach. A new video has been released detailing the anatomy of the record attempt including the start and stop points which are twelve miles apart. The entire run is lined with rocks which isn't very comforting, but the Bloodhound SSC does have the world's strongest brakes, parachute, and air-brakes. Still, aiming your 1,000 mph car at a bed of rocks is still risky business. We'll find out how it all pans out next summer when the record attempt run takes place.

Comment You forgot to factor in the supply chain (Score 1) 1040

by Gazzonyx (#47156111) Attached to: Seattle Approves $15 Per Hour Minimum Wage
You forgot to figure in that when the minimum wage goes up all of your suppliers have more overhead and pass that on to you. So your cost of supplies increases as well. When you buy a Big Mac, you're paying for the entire supply chain that got the thing to you. Sometimes that chain is reasonably long and you have to cover the cost of every step of it.

Submission + - Why does light stretch as the Universe expands?

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: On the one hand, galaxies are definitely redshifted, and they're redshifted more severely the farther they are; that's been indisputable since Hubble's data from the 1920s. But spacetime's expansion — the idea that photons get redshfited because expanding space stretches their wavelength — is just one possibility. Sure, it's the possibility predicted by General Relativity, but a fast-moving, receding galaxy could cause a redshift, too. How do we know what the cause is? Here's how.

Submission + - DISH Becomes World's Largest Company to Accept Bitcoin (coindesk.com)

Submitted by Raystonn
Raystonn writes: US satellite service provider DISH Network has announced that it will start accepting Bitcoin payments later this year from its more than 14 million pay-TV subscribers. This will make it the largest company to accept Bitcoin to date.

Comment Good way to brick your XP box (Score 1) 322

by Gazzonyx (#47098731) Attached to: Registry Hack Enables Continued Updates For Windows XP
Seems like MS would make a lot of dough if you were to enable these non-XP updates and then one of them bricked your box. Maybe it's a bit of a tinfoil hat idea, but I'm sure they're not going out of their way to make sure that enabling this registry key isn't going to make you a potential customer again.

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