Congress holds new hearing on immigration bill
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It appears that the STRIVE (Security Through Regularized Immigration and a Vibrant Economy) Act of 2007 isn’t quite dead after all.
On Thursday, the Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees Border Security, and International Law convened and on its first day took written statements from witnesses on the bill.
The comprehensive immigration bill that caused such a furor earlier this year, mainly over the issue of whether it was offering amnesty to illegal immigrants, also addressed the H-1B visa cap.
The cap, now set at 65,000, with an additional 20,000 reserved for foreign workers who have a graduate degree from a U.S. institution, would be raised to 115,000 for 2008 with a stipulation that it would go up an additional 20 percent each year that the quota was met, with a final cap of 180,000 visas issued.
At the hearing, STRIVE Act cosponsor Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona did not specifically bring up the issue of H-1B, but he did say that the STRIVE Act “addresses the failures and problems with past worker programs.”
Countering Flake’s premise, Julie Kirchner, the government relations director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform said, “These provisions are a serious threat to high-tech workers in the U.S., including legal immigrants who have patiently waited their turn to take part in the American dream.”
In total, there were a dozen witnesses submitting written statements, but the others did not address the issue of the H-1B visa cap.
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Apple to issue $100 credit to iPhone buyers
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- Apple CEO Steve Jobs Thursday afternoon responded to a flood of complaints from existing iPhone owners over Wednesday’s $200 price cut by promising the company would issue a $100 credit to anyone who bought an iPhone before the change.
“I have received hundreds of emails from iPhone customers who are upset about Apple dropping the price of iPhone by $200 two months after it went on sale,” Jobs said in a statement posted to the Apple Web site.
In the open letter addressed to “all iPhone customers,” Jobs defended the price cut, saying “now is the right time to do it. iPhone is a breakthrough product, and we have the chance to ‘go for it’ this holiday season.” He also echoed — albeit in more circumspect language — comments made Wednesday in an interview with reporters from USA Today in which he told disgruntled owners “that’s what happens in technology.”
“There is always someone who bought a product before a particular cutoff date and misses the new price or the new operating system or the new whatever,” Jobs said Thursday. “This is life in the technology lane.”
But he tacitly acknowledged that Apple had stumbled. “We need to do a better job taking care of our early iPhone customers as we aggressively go after new ones with a lower price,” Jobs said in the letter. “Our early customers trusted us, and we must live up to that trust with our actions in moments like these.”
All current iPhone owners with the exception of those eligible for other rebates — people who purchased an iPhone in the last 14 days, for example, can return it for a refund, minus a 10 percent restocking fee — will be issued a $100 credit good either at Apple’s own retail stores or its online shop, said Jobs. Details were not available, but he promised they would be posted to the Apple site next week.
“We want to do the right thing for our valued iPhone customers,” he concluded. “We apologize for disappointing some of you, and we are doing our best to live up to your high expectations of Apple.”
Apple’s change of heart was in reaction to the overwhelmingly negative comments that iPhone owners posted to the company’s own message forums — and forums at other Web sites — starting just minutes after the price change announcement Wednesday.
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Talks under way to put Intel inside OLPC’s $100 laptop
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- Discussions are under way to put an Intel microprocessor inside a version of the�One Laptop Per Child�(OLPC) project’s “$100 laptop” for children in developing countries, according to representatives from both parties.
“Intel, like a lot of other people, is more than welcome to try to design great silicon for this project and this mission, and we’ve been working with them to help them do exactly that,” said Walter Bender, OLPC’s president, in a telephone interview.
Despite its nickname, the OLPC’s lime-green XO laptop actually costs $175. The first version of the machine runs on Advanced Micro Devices’ 433MHz Geode LX-700, an x86-architecture chip that is slow by the standard of mainstream processors but consumes little power and costs less.
OLPC is close to starting production�of the XO. The group has already gone through four generations of test systems to refine the laptop’s design. A production run of 300 machines was completed in August, a final preparatory step before the XO goes into mass production later this month or in early October.
While OLPC has yet to decide whether or not to use Intel processors, Intel confirmed its engineers are developing a motherboard based on one of its chips for an OLPC laptop. That process required the engineers to start from scratch, since the current XO design isn’t based on Intel’s chips.
“It requires a new design, a new product,” said Leighton Phillips, the manager of Intel’s World Ahead Program in Asia.
The design, which Intel plans to submit for OLPC’s consideration, will be based on either existing mobile chips, such as modified versions of the Celeron M called A100 and A110, or Silverthorne, an upcoming processor designed for small, mobile computers.
The dual-core�Silverthorne processor�will be made using a 45-nanometer production process and will be available early next year in different versions.
Silverthorne’s main advantages are lower power consumption and size. The chips are so small that Intel can fit 2,500 of them on a single 300-millimeter silicon wafer, helping to keep unit production costs low enough for them to be used in handheld devices and low-cost computers.
Whether Silverthorne is cheap enough to be used in laptops like the XO remains to be seen. “We’re looking at ways to get there,” Phillips said.
If an Intel chip ends up inside an OLPC laptop, the laptop may be different from the existing XO design. That laptop was designed for use in harsh, rural environments with lots of dust and high humidity, but OLPC wants to develop laptops for use in urban areas where better infrastructure is available.
“I can imagine there will be a family of laptops in terms of processor power and maybe there will be a larger form factor for older kids,” Bender said.
The discussions over an Intel-based laptop are part of wider talks on how Intel and OLPC can cooperate on technology and product development. Those talks started in July after Intel and OLPC signed an agreement that, among other things, gave Intel a seat on the group’s board and prevents the two sides from disparaging each others’ products.
Besides putting an Intel processor inside a future OLPC laptop, the talks could see some of the technology developed by OLPC find its way into Intel’s hands. For example, the chip maker is interested in the low-power screen technology developed by OLPC.
Offering an OLPC laptop with an Intel processor doesn’t mean the group will stop using AMD’s chips, Bender said. “The Geode’s been very easy to work with and hasn’t been a limiting factor whatsoever,” he said.
As part of OLPC’s desire to offer systems based on different processors, the group is looking to work with other vendors, in addition to Intel. One such company is Marvell Technology Group, which could see its Xscale processors, which the company acquired from Intel in 2006, also end up in future OLPC laptops, Bender said.
“We want to have lots of choices, lots of people doing this, because there are lots of kids and lots of need,” he said.
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Microsoft enters virtual machine-management
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- Microsoft released its first software designed specifically to manage virtual machines on a network Thursday�and tweaked licensing for its system-management products to take into account virtualization.
System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007, which has been in the works for about a year and a half, has been released to manufacturing and will be generally available in October as part of Microsoft’s System Server Management Center suite of products, the company said.
The new product is built on the same architecture as other products in the enterprise version of the suite — which include Data Protection Manager, Operations Manager, and Configuration Manager — and is aimed specifically at managing virtual machines in a data center that runs Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2, the current version of Microsoft’s server virtualization technology, said Patrick O’Rourke, group manager, Windows Infrastructure. “Customers now can use the same tools to manage both virtual and physical assets [on the network],” he said.
Microsoft also has changed the licensing model for its for its System Center Server Management Suite Enterprise, making it available for $860 per host server — which means the actual server that hosts any instances of virtual software — plus two years of Microsoft’s Software Assurance plan. Previously, System Center software was licensed per device being managed in the data center, O’Rourke said. The new licensing should make managing virtualized environments with Microsoft’s software more cost-effective for customers, he said.
Microsoft has been developing and fine-tuning its virtualization strategy over the past several years to keep up with virtualization leader VMWare and others, as well as to serve the needs of large customers who increasingly are using virtualization in their data centers. However, the company’s strategy has predictably hit some road bumps.
Microsoft is developing next-generation virtualization technology, code-named Viridian, that takes advantage of virtualization-optimized processors from Intel and AMD and will help keep the company up to speed with competitors. However, though Viridian will be a component of Windows Server 2008, it won’t be available until six months after that new OS is released. And because Microsoft recently pushed back the release of Windows Server 2008 to the first quarter of next year, Viridian’s release is nearly a year away. The company also decided earlier this year to pull out some originally planned features of Viridian due to timing concerns.
In the meantime, customers can use a combination of Microsoft’s stand-alone Virtual Server and its System Center products to install and manage both virtual and physical machines in the data center. Microsoft also is planning a mid-market version of Virtual Machine Manager, called Workgroup edition, for release in January. The software will cost $499 per host server.
Microsoft also plans to extend the capabilities of the next version of Virtual Machine Manager so that it not only supports Windows Server virtualization technologies but also third-party virtualization from VMware and XenSource Inc., O’Rourke said. A beta of that software is expected to be available around the same time as Windows Server 2008, and Microsoft plans to update its roadmap then as well.
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Google to boost universal search effort
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- Google will become more aggressive with its universal search effort, making a bolder push to blend a variety of Web links into a single results list.
Speaking at Citigroup’s Annual Global Technology Conference on Thursday, Sundar Pichai, director of product management at Google, said users of the company’s search engine will see an increase in the frequency of search results that include various types of links, like Web pages, video clips, images, news articles, and maps.
“We’re still at the nascent stages. Going forward, we’ll be more aggressive in terms of when we trigger this,” Pichai said during a question-and-answer session with a Citigroup analyst and audience members.
The universal search effort, launched formally in May but in the works for years at Google, aims to provide a more cohesive search experience for users so that they don’t necessarily have to go to the company’s image search engine to obtain photo results, for example.
In addition to boosting universal search, Google needs to do better in helping users formulate and refine queries as well as improving its personalized search service, which takes into account users’ past queries to tailor search results accordingly. The personalized search offering, which is an opt-in service that requires users to have a free Google account, will incorporate more data to improve the way it tailors search results, Pichai said.
Meanwhile, Nicholas Fox, group business product manager of ads quality at Google, said the company is considering breaking its long tradition of running only text ads in its search result pages.
Moving slowly and cautiously, Google officials are discussing scenarios in which image or video ads may prove more useful than the traditional pay-per-click text ad, Fox said, also speaking during the Citigroup conference.
The ultimate consideration in doing this would be if it improves the user experience, Fox said. “We don’t want to show things that are garish or flashy or cause users to become blind to the ads,” he said.
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Sony to detail Rolly audio entertainment device on Monday
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- After two weeks of teasing, Sony will finally unveil its mysterious Rolly “audio entertainment device” in Tokyo Monday.
Few precise details of the product are known although the company has been releasing tidbits of information for the last two weeks on a dedicated blog. Among the snippets: Rolly has just one control button and doesn’t have a display. Further clues have come from words scrolling across the bottom of a promotional Web site, which include: vivid, move, beauty, imagination, share music, and dance.
Perhaps the biggest insight into the product has come from a leaked video, currently available on YouTube, that apparently shows the device. It appears egg-shaped and has two large rings on which it can roll around the floor. Covers on each end of the device open to reveal speakers when it’s switched on and while music is playing it moves around the floor in time to the track.
The original source of the video isn’t known although it closely matches a clip on Sony’s official Web site, so it appears to have come from the maker.
But even after viewing the video, the exact method of operation isn’t clear and a bigger question remains: exactly what is the idea behind Rolly and what’s it good for?
Answers to these questions should come on Monday when Sony unveils it to local media and later in the day to 50 customers at a launch event.
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Google, Microsoft describe next-gen ‘Office 2.0′
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- As Web 2.0 technologies continue seeping into business systems, a new generation of corporate users is starting to gain access to the collaboration capabilities they are demanding from IT, according to attendees at the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco this week. But before use of the tools spreads too far, they noted, companies must strike a balance between the Web 2.0 wants of users and the needs of corporate IT.
The conference, described as a collective experiment by its long list of sponsors, was organized in two months using the online productivity and collaboration tools that are the focus of the event, organizers said.
Jonathan Rochelle, product manager of Google’s spreadsheet product, predicted that real-time collaboration capabilities, as provided in the Google Docs & Spreadsheets tool set, will become a key part of the next generation of office tools. Employees are increasingly demanding tools that will let them collaborate online when creating documents, he noted.
“The consumer expectation [for Web 2.0 tools] is being brought to the workplace,” he said. “Work groups are taking the product in because they like working with it, and they are more productive.”
Indeed, within Google itself, workers are now derided when they attach documents to e-mail instead of using the online editing tool in Google Docs, he noted. The traditional route is now viewed as a drain on productivity, he added.
Richard McAniff, corporate vice president of Microsoft Office, also predicted that Web 2.0 tools will become interwoven into corporate life over the next few years. For example, combining a social networking tool like Facebook with productivity tools could “really change the way people do work,” he noted.
“We really have to look at … how we can have a complete game changer in terms of what the workforce is really doing,” he said.
Still, companies have to reconcile the demand of its employees for the new tools with the inevitable productivity bumps that come when new technologies like Web 2.0 tools are added in the workplace, he added.
“What people want on the desktop is one thing, [and] what IT might want is something else,” he said. “You have to strike a balance between the two.”
Danny Kolke, founder and CTO of Etelos Systems, a provider of hosted Web applications, noted that many IT organizations are actually under assault by end-users who are demanding Office 2.0 features and tools.
“The reason I use Spreadsheets in Google … is because I know I can create it and share it easily,” Kolke said. “IT comes along and says, ‘We need control over this data.’ A lot of [IT] organizations are defending their turf right now because they are get assaulted. The demand [for Web 2.0 tools] is there.”
The speed in which these Web 2.0 technologies are being developed — and then moving into the enterprise — is increasing the strife between IT and users, he added.
“The market wants [office 2.0 tools] before we’re ready to deliver it in many cases,” he said. “We can’t keep up with the demand. If you listen to the market and innovate for what they are hoping for you don’t have to sell your product.”
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Cisco consumer move afoot?
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- Cisco Systems executives hinted at major changes in the company’s consumer strategy on Wednesday even as they�voiced optimism about networking�and the world economy.
The vendor bought�Linksys�to enter the home networking market in 2003 and recently has gone deeper into the consumer market by acquiring video infrastructure and set-top box maker Scientific-Atlanta. It’s one of several new directions for Cisco, a large, 23-year-old company looking for continuing revenue growth.
Cisco’s consumer business brings in about $3.5 billion per year and is growing between 10 percent and 20 percent per year. That’s compared with nearly $35 billion in total revenue for the company’s last fiscal year. But Chairman and CEO John Chambers believes consumer-oriented technologies such as social networking have a big future in enterprises and wants to bring new capabilities to homes, such as a less expensive version of�Cisco’s TelePresence conferencing system. Meanwhile, Microsoft and other IT vendors have designs on networked home entertainment, too.
The company will never be a majority player in consumer electronics by following its current path, Chambers said during a roundtable discussion with reporters on Wednesday. Cisco is used to being the dominant player in an industry, as its switching and routing businesses are juggernauts.
“One of the major decisions we face in the next twelve months … is, are we going to continue along the current path … and is there a path that gives up sustainable differentiation, especially given where the markets are going?” Chambers said. Collaboration, TelePresence, and unified voice, text, and video communications are among the technologies he expects to see in that arena.
One change that’s likely to happen eventually is the�demise of the Linksys brand, which Chambers has hinted at before but Cisco has hastened to downplay. It will take time, he noted.
“Linksys often has a higher brand recognition to the retail consumer, but over time you’ll see us move under the whole Cisco brand,” Chambers said. This is the reason Cisco streamlined its logo last year, he said. The company also wants to establish an “audio brand,” a sound people associate with the company, he added.
The San Jose, California, company has much to gain from better home broadband, and Cisco believes local government is a major hurdle in the U.S.
“I think the developing countries are out-executing the U.S. broadband buildout,” including slashing their prices faster, Chambers said.
Before they can improve the key “last mile” of networks to homes and businesses in the U.S., service providers have to negotiate with local governments and work through complex regulations, said Charles Giancarlo, senior vice president and chief development officer. Clearing the path requires municipalities recognizing broadband as a priority similar to water and electricity, he said.
The executives downplayed municipal wireless initiatives in the wake of EarthLink Inc.’s pullback from that industry. “Eventually, major service providers will get into the provisioning of broadband wireless and will follow a traditional service-provider model,” Giancarlo said.
However, Chambers cautioned that others will step in if the carriers drag their feet on broadband. “When it isn’t provided from the traditional way … we as individual users or companies will look for other ways,” Chambers said.
Giancarlo took a jab at Cisco’s key competitor in unified communications when asked about Microsoft’s Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007, launching in October. It may combine collaboration with voice features, but it probably won’t be an effective full telephony system, he said.
“I expect it to be, frankly, somewhat of a 1.0 product in the real-time communications area,” Giancarlo said. However, Cisco does have a number of projects with Microsoft to incorporate OCS features such as presence federation into Cisco’s CallManager platform, he added.
As it wrapped up a daylong conference with financial analysts at its headquarters, Chambers said the future for Cisco looks bright. Most of Cisco’s customers believe the world economy is in good shape and central banks will be able to handle possible credit problems caused by home foreclosures in the U.S., he said. Cisco expects service providers to keep up big spending on infrastructure, though the enterprise networking industry may be bumpy, he added.
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IBM syndicating technical content via ‘gizmos’
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- IBM is launching a free syndicated content service Friday enabling access to technical resources and emerging technologies via systems ranging from computers to devices like the popular iPhone.
The effort involves extending content to Web platforms, including Google, Yahoo, NetView, and iPhone, via a syndication tool called a “developer gizmo.” Content is accessed from the IBM developerWorks Web site.
Developer gizmos include widgets, gadgets, and modules customized to display IBM content within a browser, operating system, a desktop, or a mashup page. They extend services offered by content providers like Yahoo to customize publicly available code or processes. Users can export content from IBM through podcasts, forums, blogs, and other mediums.
“It’s a new way for us to syndicate our content to the users very easily by basically having our gizmos, so they can just with the click of a button add developerWorks content,” said Kathy Mandelstein, IBM director of worldwide developer programs. Gizmos take APIs from popular portal sites and build on the APIs so developerWorks content flows into those formats, she said.
Adoption of concepts like social networking and Web 2.0 is a goal of the initiative. A small business owner, for example, could create a customized gizmo on a MyYahoo Web page to receive updates and information on Web 2.0 technologies. Or a game developer could developer a gizmo to syndicate technical information from the game development space on developerWorks.
The gizmos provide an interface enabling users to select content from developerWorks, which features thousands of technical resources.
Developers can get more information on building gizmos on developerWorks at this Web page.
IBM, as part of the announcement, is providing new avenues for custom syndicated content:
* developerWorks community spaces, which serve as a platform for developers to build communities on a broad range of topics and business trends, such as Web 2.0 and SaaS.
* developerWorks “build your own feeds” application, enabling users to select any combination of developerWorks open-source topics, technologies, or IBM product brands and export the corresponding article as RSS, ATOM, HTML, or as a Yahoo Widget, Google Gadget, or NetVibes Module.
*developerWorks Google Desktop Gadget for viewing content and searching the developerWorks Web site from a user’s desktop.
Apple iPhone users can view developerWorks top stories through an interface customized for the iPhone, to be accessible on the developerWorks site.
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Rich Web technologies debated
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- While the landscape for rich Web development technologies is getting crowded, industry dignitaries at The Rich Web Experience conference in San Jose, Calif. Thursday nonetheless saw a place for the various entrants in this space.
The field of technologies has grown to include AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript), Adobe Flex, Microsoft Silverlight, and Sun’s JavaFX, said Neal Ford, application architect for Thoughtworks, who moderated a panel addressing rich Web development. Audience members also gave a nod to the Ruby, Python, and Groovy languages.
Panelist Scott Davis, an author and consultant, said he originally thought that AJAX would rule the world. “It runs in any browser,” Davis said. But his horizons have expanded.
“Quite honestly, I’ve gotten really interested in Flex recently,” Davis said. The recent open-sourcing of Flex has made it more attractive, he stressed.
AJAX drew affirmations with reservations from panelist Jon Ferraiolo, an IBM Web architect who manages the OpenAjax Alliance. “My perspective is that AJAX works today. It’s fantastic, it does nearly everything you want to do except for multimedia types of things,” Ferraiolo said.
“I think there’s room for Flash, Flex; there’s room for Silverlight. These things are going to be the cutting-edge applications that require the latest features,” said Ferraiolo.
With the proliferation of mobile devices however, HTML browsing will not be available on all these systems, and the iPhone does not have Flash and probably will not have Silverlight either, said Ferraiolo. AJAX, however, is always there and is open and can be counted on, he said.
“There is a continuum of experience that needs to be looked at,” said Josh Holmes, an evangelist at Microsoft who is speaking on Silverlight at the conference. There is the standards-based Web with HTML and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and there is AJAX, he said. Moving on, there are platforms optimized for a particular OS or hardware that can render 3D graphics, said Holmes.
“My personal opinion is that Silverlight and Flex are definitely on that heavy, rich but not quite platform-optimized edge,” Holmes said. There are benefits to both, he said.
Another panelist sided with Flex for enterprise usage. “In the enterprise space, I tend to recommend things like Flex because the development is much faster to get up and going,” said Bill Scott, AJAX evangelist at Yahoo.
“Creating a desktop style [application] in AJAX is still really hard,” Scott said. AJAX does fit into a lot of areas, but none of the rich Web technologies will rule the world, he said.
Panelists also addressed the question of application-testing.
“Yes, testing is absolutely crucial, and as an industry, it’s something we have not taken seriously for the last couple of years,” Davis said.
“I think this is a space that the market realizes isn’t served really well right now,” said Ryan Breen, vice president of technology at Web performance tester Gomez.
The Crosscheck open-source testing platform was cited by panelist Stuart Holloway, co-founder of software developer Relevance.
The issue of tools for JavaScript was raised. IntellliJ, said Davis, “has got killer JavaScript support, and it’s got wonderful CSS support,” he said. But lately, he has been developing with the simpler TextMate tool.
“I’ve found that the overhead of a big heavy tool is less valuable to me than having something that’s easy for me to bring up, bring down, refresh,” Davis said. This lighter format seems to fit the Web development model, he said.
Panelists and an audience member also mourned the lack of staying power of SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics).
“SVG just breaks my heart,” Davis said. “SVG had the opportunity to be kind of a unified solution. I wish it would come back strong, but I’m not holding out hope.”
Silverlight, Holmes said, uses XAML instead of SVG. “My opinion is SVG has kind of stalled and there were some things that were needed beyond it,” so Silverlight uses other technologies instead, Holmes said.
Ferraiolo said he was one of the initiators of SVG while at Adobe. “SVG was there in 2001, 2002, but Adobe decided to pull the plug on it despite the fact that it was on 200 million desktops,” he said.
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