Free Republic

Washington - The US received nearly 50,000 packages of H-1B visa applications on the very first day, a media report has said, which is reflective of the sudden surge in demand of the country's most sought after work-visas for the IT professionals. The USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services), officially, has not come out on the number of H-1B applications received by it since April 1 when it started accepting petitions for it for the fiscal 2014 beginning October 1, 2013. According to an estimate provided by FCi Federal, Virginia-based government services and technology provider, which is supplying personnel...

I'm having trouble recording mp3s. My Asus laptop has 2 headphone jacks and I used to use a short cable between one of them to my microphone jack and use Magix to record internet radio while I'm at work. I recently had a virus removed that required reinstalling Windows 7. Since then one headphone jack stopped working and when I connect the one that does work to the mic jack I just get a buzz in the recording. If I connect a mic to the jack and record from that it seems to work but the recording is not as...

Mitt Romney says it "kills" him that he's not president. But he doesn't blame Superstorm Sandy, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie or anything else on his loss to President Barack Obama--except his campaign's failure to connect with minority voters.

So I had surgery 6 months to repair a torn and wrecked Shoulder Rotator Cuff. The pain sucked before the surgery and sucked more afterward. It held me back from doing just about everything. I was tired from constantly having to shift to get comfortable and escape the pain and then there was the pain. Oh it sucked...bad. But, It's been Six Months and I've had enough of this baloney. I want to live and live it up. Went to the range today with my Sweet Baby Kimber Tac II. She had been missing me and I her but, we...

An interesting article caught my eye at jobstractor.com — the programming language trends review. The company analyzed more than 60,000 job vacancies during 2012 to produce a chart of the most sought-after technologies: Language Jobs PHP 12,664 Java 12,558 Objective C 8,925 SQL 5,165 Android (Java) 4,981 Ruby 3,859 JavaScript 3,742 C# 3,549 C++ 1,908 ActionScript 1,821 Python 1,649 C 1,087 ASP.NET 818 Despite developer complaints, demand for PHP and Java (server/Android) remains strong. You would also expect those jobs to require some SQL knowledge although that has a strong showing in its own right. ActionScript is a dying art...

Current hard-drive designs are reaching their limit in data storage, but a new manufacturing technique could allow drive capacities to keep expanding. A technique that enables the nanopatterned layers that store data in hard disk drives to assemble themselves has been improved to better suit mass production, and could enable disks that store five times as much data as the largest available today. Using self-assembly instead of machines that print or etch out features has long been considered a potential solution to a looming barrier to expanding the capacity of hard-disk designs. Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin...

As Republicans try to explain their Election Day losses in terms of policy, tactics, and strategy, one factor is emerging as the essential difference between the Obama and Romney campaigns on November 6: the absolute failure of Romney’s get-out-the-vote effort, which underperformed even John McCain’s lackluster 2008 turnout. One culprit appears to be “Orca,” the Romney’s massive technology effort, which failed completely. ... Likewise, Twitchy recorded widespread real-time complaints and criticisms on Twitter by Project Orca volunteers. At one point during Election Day, the system had malfunctioned so badly that desperate volunteers wondered if the program had been hacked. ......

I'm not as pissed as I sound. Enjoy.

Big Data. Are You Ready? Big data can offer big business benefits, but are you ready to acquire, organize, access, and analyze it? Social media, digital sensors, and handheld devices all generate massive volumes of data—and a potential treasure trove of valuable information about customer behavior and business operations. However, this data has not always been readily accessible or integrated in enterprise data warehouses and business intelligence applications. Until now. Oracle offers a complete portfolio of products that enable you to acquire, organize, and analyze big data alongside traditional enterprise data for immediate business value. Join us at the Big...

Translation of the breaking news from one of Northern Europe's leading papers: "The new Apple surf pad is not going to work within the range and demands provided by the extremely swift Scandinavian 4G presently being launched in the Nordic Countries."

Development of Information Technology (IT) is facilitating the regeneration of terrorists and thus compounding the fight against terrorism, a sociologist here said. New terrorist cells have become difficult to detect or identify because they were formed with the aid of information technology, said Najib Azca, a professor of sociology with Gadjah Mada University here on Wednesday. "Just by uploading a provocative video on the slaughter of Muslims into a web, radicals can persuade other people to join their jihad." Najib said at a national seminar themed "Violence, Radicalism and Peace Building Efforts in Indonesia." It was now becoming easier and...

Walter Isaacsson has, recently, completed a great work on Steve Jobs. My relatives will probably force me to read it (even though Isaacson was the former head of CNN, they're Conservatives and I'm a 42 year old with a will of my own) but prefer his magnificent study of Einstein as far books go. Anyhow, what do people actually understand about how and in what ways the IT sector of the economy has transformed all of our lives? Being Swedish, I wish to draw attention to what a marvelous revolution a certain poor peasant boy from the region of Värmland...

FR is usually full of smart guys unlike liberals. Had to ask this question, anyone who owns a website probably heard on Filezilla or just heading to your host cpanel to change or update info on your site. Our IT guy is on vacation and we wanted to add some stuff (specifically images) to sub sections say, departments section A or go SECTION B. Like ESPN with basketball as 1 section to NFL to section 2. We opened up Filezilla and all we could find is folder DOCS, CGI BIN, DISTRIBUTOR and IMAGES. The actual sections are missing so we...

Is information technology destroying more jobs than it creates? That’s long been the conventional wisdom, of course. Proponents of IT, on the other hand, point to the new types of opportunities created as a result of the march of technology — from programming to analytics to technicians. However, two longtime proponents of IT as an opportunity creator — Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, both with MIT — have taken a darker view of IT’s impact on the economy. In the latest edition of MIT Technology Review, David Talbot reviewed Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s new book: Race Against The Machine: How the...

An “Occupy Cleveland” protester tells police she was raped in her tent over the weekend.

Xerox, whose CEO, Ursula Burns, is advising President Obama on exports, last week told its product engineering employees that it is in outsourcing talks with India-based IT services firm HCL Technologies... Burns was appointed last year as vice chairwoman of the President's Export Council, a panel of CEOs advising the Obama administration on how to increase exports, which would lead to an increase in domestic jobs... Burns is outspoken on the need to improve the pool of math and science graduates in U.S. schools. In a recent video interview on CNN, she warned that if graduation rates in these areas...

When Jennifer Barassa started her business, she did not even have a computer. She thought she saw a gap in the market, set up in her sitting room and spent her first 30 shillings (35 US cents) paying someone to type a letter for her. Fifteen years later, her marketing promotion agency, Top Image, turns over more than $3m a year and employs more than 300 people in three countries, hired to promote everything from mobile phones to bank accounts to the continent’s growing consumer class. Nor does she intend to stop there: next she wants to take on multinational...

The buzz at Pivot25, a conference for mobile-phone software developers and investors held this June, is all about the future of money. Ben Lyon, the 24-year-old business-development VP of Kopo Kopo, wants $250,000 to produce his app for shops to process payments made by text message. Paul Okwalinga, 28, describes his money app — called M-Shop, it allows you to buy travel tickets and takeout via mobile phone — as "not reinventing the wheel but pimping it." Kamal Budhabhatti, 35, claims Elma, the latest product from his company Craft Silicon, lets a phone do and be almost anything financial —...

Skype, the IP telephony company founded and part-owned by Swedish entrepreneur Niklas Zennström, has been bought bought by US software giant Microsoft, the firms confirmed on Tuesday afternoon. The statement confirmed speculation over the deal to buy the firm, whose product allows users to conduct video and telephone calls over the internet. Microsoft confirmed that the deal is worth some $8.5 billion, dwarfing the $6 billion the US firm paid for online advertising firm aQuantive in 2007 and its largest acquisition since its founding in 1975. The news of the pending deal has shocked analysts who consider the price to...

Why is Scandinavia rich? "- Because of oil", some would reply. It's true Norway has oil. Libiya too has. Libiya, in fact, has even more of it than Norway does. More gas too. But Libiya isn't rich like Norway is. A tour in the average Norwegian family's leisure boat and a vacation spent in their "hytte" - summer house - could probably make them Libiyans reflect upon this issue. In fact, Norway has more dollar millionaires than any other country has. Perhaps it's a matter of playing your cards well.. I personally love Germany (and Norge/Norway as well). Germans are...