Nonprofits train youth in tough neighborhoods for IT jobs.
Courtesy: CIO.in
Archive for February, 2010
IT Matchmakers
February 26th, 2010PayPal to open app store for developers
February 25th, 2010PayPal will open an applications store this year where developers can offer their wares, the latest step in the company’s multi-pronged strategy to deepen its relationship with external programmers.
Developers have a big opportunity to offer applications for merchants and consumers that PayPal doesn’t have the interest or resources to build itself, a PayPal official said Tuesday.
Courtesy: Infoworld News
Zend adds code-tracing to PHP Web app server
February 25th, 2010PHP development tools maker Zend Technologies announced on Wednesday general availability of its Zend Server 5.0 PHP Web application server, featuring Code Tracing technology intended to improve problem resolution times.
Courtesy: Infoworld News
Interview mistakes you wish you could take back
February 25th, 2010
When I look back at pictures of myself from years ago — specifically the 1980s — I cringe. The jeans, the ill-fitting shirts, the hair gel. At the time I thought I looked cool and no one told me otherwise. Alas, the pictures do not lie. I have the same feelings about my earliest job interviews, where I thought I was smooth and polished. I was actually a fumbling mess. I remember telling an interviewer that, no, I didn’t know anything about the company.
Looking at a recent CareerBuilder survey, I suppose many other job seekers share the same face-in-the-palm level of embarrassment about some of their missteps. For the survey, employers were asked to name some of the most notable interview mistakes they’ve witnessed, and they gave some whoppers. As outrageous as some of these missteps are, I’m sure we’ve all had interviews we wish we could take back. The professional equivalent of acid-washed jeans, if you will.
Here are some of the most entertaining responses:
- Candidate wore a business suit with flip flops.
- Candidate asked if the interviewer wanted to meet for a drink after.
- Candidate had applied for an accounting job, yet said he was “bad at managing money.”
- Candidate recited poetry.
- Candidate applying for a customer service job said “I don’t really like working with people.”
- Candidate used Dungeons and Dragons as an example of teamwork.
- Candidate filed fingernails.
Even if you haven’t exhibited interview behavior on this level, you might have still left an unfavorable impression behind. According to employers, these are the most common mistakes candidates make during interviews:
- Dressing inappropriately
- Appearing disinterested
- Speaking negatively about a current or previous employer
- Appearing arrogant
- Answering a cell phone or texting during the interview
- Not providing specific answers
- Not asking good questions
In the full release, vice president of human resources Rosemary Haefner offers several tips on how to avoid being the candidate who is singled out for strange behavior. Perhaps the most important piece of advice she gives is to practice. The more prepared you are, the less likely you are to ramble or say something you’ll eventually regret. Read the rest of the release for more tips and examples of interview faux pas.
So how about it, readers–who else can admit to some embarrassing interview behavior? Surely I’m not the only one.
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Courtesy: The Work Buzz
Post-26/11, unmanned vehicles ignite interest
February 25th, 2010
New Delhi: Not very long ago, in the Afghan theatre of war, the US Army’s method of clearing caves of bombs was so low-tech that it was practically no-tech: A young soldier with a stick, a gun and a flashlight. “Oh, and he’d have a rope tied around his waist,” Joseph Dyer, a division president of iRobot Inc., says wryly. “So that, you know, if anything went wrong, they could haul him back out.”
In 2004, though, the soldier began to be taken out of the equation. That year, 162 robots were deployed to find and dispose of explosive devices, iRobot’s PackBot among them. It was the start of an unmanned battle thrust that reached its technological apogee in the targeted strikes of armed Predator drones. Last August, a drone strike killed Baitullah Mehsud, a Taliban leader in Pakistan; the drone’s images were so clear, according to one report, that they captured Mehsud’s intravenous drip, from a height of two miles (3.2km), as he rested on his terrace.
The publicity accorded to the US drones—as well as the realization, in hindsight, of how valuable robots could have been during the terrorist attacks of 26/11—ignited interest in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) at the 2010 Defexpo last week. At the previous Defexpo in 2008, one participant recalls, there were only two or three exhibitors talking about any unmanned vehicles at all. This year, however, scaled-down replicas of UAVs stood on pedestals in nearly every hall, and UGVs conducted demos for surprisingly well-informed visitors.
The philosophy of war, experts agree, is shifting rapidly. Robots, used until recently just to neutralize bombs, are now incorporated into infantry. Last year, in his book Wired for War, a defence scholar Peter Singer outlined a future in which “our wars are…handed over to machines”. Even with present-day technology, casualty rates can be brought down significantly. “We hear a statistic like: 52% of the US Army’s deaths are in the first contact with the enemy,” Dyer says. “And we think: What a great job for robots!”
In front of Dyer’s stall, two of his robots do their thing. The PackBot, which looks like an overhead projector on steroids, has an arm that extends out many feet, ending in a grip that can handle and dismantle bombs. The Negotiator, a flat creature with a glass dome full of circuitry, is a reconnaissance robot that can crawl on its treads into suspicious rooms and send back images. “It would have been ideal for 26/11, in the hotels,” says Guptha Sreekantha, iRobot’s managing director in India.
The National Security Guard is currently testing a PackBot model out, Dyer says. He is one of several exhibitors at the Defexpo to claim that the Indian defence forces have expressed keen interest in unmanned vehicles, a trend that M.M. Pallam Raju, the Union minister of state for defence, confirms. “Our services and intelligence agencies have suddenly realized the value of (UAVs and UGVs),” Raju said on the sidelines of Defexpo.
Analysts such as Bharat Verma, a retired captain and the editor of the Indian Defence Review, cite the same internal and external uses of UAVs that Raju does. “That kind of intelligence is crucial,” Verma says. “We can look inside enemy territory and even see a guy drinking a glass of milk in his house.”
None of the unmanned vehicles being pitched to India is armed, mostly because such sales are restricted by the governments of these foreign manufacturers. Instead, the UAVs at Defexpo were purely surveillance machines.
Sepp Dabringer, Schiebel’s area manager for India, sits next to what he calls his “camcopter”—a white helicopter, not quite as long as a Tata Nano, capable of flying for eight hours within a 50km-radius and returning to land on any flat surface. “We’ve sold 130 of these to 15 countries in the last four years,” Dabringer says. “The German and French navies have bought it, and Boeing sources it from us, paints its name on it, and sells it to the US forces.” Recently, the Indian Navy tested Schiebel’s camcopter, and Dabringer is sounding out the Border Security Force, for whom he insists it is ideal.
More tireless than rotor-winged aircraft such as the camcopter are fixed-wing UAVs, of which the Predator drone is an example. The Defence Research and Development Organisation is, at present, developing its own fixed-wing UAV, the Rustom. The first flight of the Rustom prototype, last November, did not go well; it crashed, after a “misjudgement of altitude”, in an airfield near Hosur, Tamil Nadu.
Elsewhere in the world, UAV development has progressed “in leaps and bounds”, says Woolf Gross, a corporate director at Northrop Grumman Corp. Prices have dropped —into the hundreds of thousands of dollars for UAVs like the camcopter—and the capacity of technology has improved. With Northrop Grumman’s Fire Scout, a rotor-wing UAV, “we could increase the payload from 250 pounds (112.5kg) to 600 pounds just by adding a fourth rotor blade”, he says.
Gross calls the growth of the UAV market over the last five years “exponential”, and like other firms, he admits that Northrop Grumman’s marketing efforts in India accelerated after 26/11. The option to take personnel out of danger is, he says, attractive, but it is only a secondary driving force. The primary appeal of UAVs is their sheer efficacy.
The ease of waging such war has invited some criticism. In his book, Singer worries that such devices can give the impression that war is “costless”.
Dyer of iRobot, however, doesn’t think an army’s human presence can ever be entirely replaced on the battlefield. “In economic terms, this is just a classic technology-for-labour trade,” he says. There are still plenty of tasks robots cannot perform in the near future, “but they can definitely put distances between our soldiers and harm’s way”.
Courtesy: LiveMint
U.S. Says IT Firm Underpaid H-1B Workers
February 25th, 2010The U.S. labor department is charging that that Peri Software in New Jersey owes some $1.45 million in back wages to 163 H-1B workers it allegedly underpaid.
Courtesy: CIO.in
Intel, VC Partners, Set to Invest $3.5 Billion in U.S. Tech Firms
February 25th, 2010Intel CEO Paul Otellini today announced joint efforts to invest $3.5 billion in tech firms, and to hire some 10,500 recent college graduates this year.
Courtesy: CIO.in
Xerox sues Google, YouTube, and Yahoo over search patents
February 24th, 2010Xerox has filed a lawsuit against Yahoo, Google, and YouTube alleging infringement of Xerox patents on search and integration technology.
The document management and services company alleges that Google’s AdWords and AdSense services violate a Xerox patent on automatically generating searches. The suit, filed Friday in U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, also alleges that Yahoo Search Marketing, Yahoo Publisher Network, and Y!Q Contextual Search infringe the patent.
Courtesy: Infoworld News
HP grooms green data center services for small-business market
February 24th, 2010HP today unveiled a host of new services aimed at helping small data-center operators boost performance and cut operating costs. Aimed at data centers up to 5,000 square feet in size, these facilities-oriented services include capacity analysis, infrastructure condition and capacity analysis, and energy-efficiency analysis.
Courtesy: Infoworld News
Govt to hold 3G spectrum auction on 9 April
February 24th, 2010
New Delhi: The government will hold the much-awaited auction for third generation mobile spectrum on April 9 and will start inviting applications from the prospective bidders from tomorrow.
Announcing the schedule of 3G auction, a government notification said the notice inviting applications would start tomorrow and the last date for submitting the applications is 19 March. The government is expecting Rs35,000 crore from the auction.
While the pre-qualification of bidders would take place on 30 March, mock auctions would be held on the 5th and the 6th of April.
The auction date for 3G spectrum is 9 April 2010, it said.
In the past, 3G auctions have been deferred twice even after the date of announcements of the auction. All big telecom majors Bharti, Vodafone, Rcom and Tatas have readied their plans for the auction.
When contacted, most of the operators expressed relief at the announcement of the dates, but said they would wait for the NIA to for more clarity.
The auction has been delayed over differences between government departments over pricing wireless radio spectrum and on the availability of spectrum to be auctioned.
However, the issues were later resolved, telecom minister A Raja had said.
Though the quantum of the spectrum available for auction is still not clear, sources indicated that three slots may be put on the block in most circles while a few areas may have enough air waves to accommodate four players.
The move comes after the law ministry gave its approval to the NIA last week, paving the way for the government to go ahead with the auction. DoT has, however, dropped a clause in the NIA, which stated that the Government will refund the bid amount in case the auctioned spectrum was not allocated by 1 September 2010.
In an emerging economy like India, there would be a lot of unexplored possibilities in value added services after the introduction of 3G, thus resulting in increased revenues to telecom companies.
With 3G, users will be able to access high-end data services, including ultra-fast internet and video-conferencing, by next year when the operators roll out their commercial 3G services.
Courtesy: LiveMint
