Free Republic

There are no unions in India's information technology sector now and the billionaire chairman of the country's top software exporter wants to keep it that way. "The unionization of the sector would certainly be a retrograde step. It will unnecessary damage the growth of the industry as global clients will get concerned about whether they should be sending business to India," said Wipro's (nyse: WIT - news - people ) Azim Premji, according to the Hindustan Times newspaper. The IT sector is a key component in India's $17 billion in annual earnings from outsourcing. Companies such as Cisco (nasdaq: CSCO...

Folding@Home update: 3 Work Units completed, 2 computers, 138 points, overall team rank #15,162

NEW YORK MAN PLEADS GUILTY TO FEDERAL SOFTWARE PIRACY CHARGE NEW HAVEN, CT-Kevin J. O'Connor, United States Attorney for the District of Connecticut, and Matthew J. Etre, acting special agent-in-charge of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), announced that Hunter Pine, 27, of 33 Gold Street, New York, New York waived indictment and pleaded guilty today before Senior United States District Judge Ellen Bree Burns in New Haven to one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement. According to documents filed with the court and statements made in court, Pine was a participant in the "warez scene" - an...

Any Freepers "folding@home"???? For those not familiar with F@H -> some diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer and even "mad cow" disease are believed to be linked to protein (mis)folding. A scientist team from Stanford University studies this phenomenon to try and find a cure to these diseases. To do this, they have designed a software (folding@home) which enables people to donate unused power from their computer to speed up medical research!

The company on Tuesday is set to announce the next version of its business software, Microsoft Dynamics GP 9.0. Due out Dec. 19, the release marks the first wave of a broader strategy to embrace Web services — software that runs all sorts of business tasks over the Internet. Though Microsoft's Windows and Office software is nearly ubiquitous, the company hasn't had as large a role in more complex corporate software — the realm of SAP (SAP) and Oracle. (ORCL) But as businesses shift more of their computing online, Microsoft sees a chance to grab a bigger piece of the...

I have come across some video on a website of my son's platoon in action. Does anyone know of a way to download a videoclip that is imbedded so to speak in a website?

CHICAGO, Nov. 7 (UPI) -- Just a few years ago, Brian Olson recalls, he would head back to the office and spend weekends at the studio of the company where he works to assemble a polished home video that "friends and relatives actually wanted to see." Today, Olson, who works for a software company near Denver, has networked his home computer and his digital camera, and he can edit and mix movies from the privacy of his study.

OUTSOURCING of design to India by car manufacturers has boosted sales of related design engineering software. "The influx of design outsourcing into India is helping," agreed Mr Narendra Reddy, Managing Director, India Operations, UGS, an engineering services company that offers Computer Aided Design and Manufacturing (CAD-CAM) solutions and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions. With General Motors and Ford entering the country, as well as Tata Motors and Mahindras setting up design labs, the necessity for engineering service solutions is increasing. Global products, as opposed to local ones, are being favoured with the setting up of microcosms of labs abroad. The...

By Andrew Orlowski Published Thursday 9th September 2004 13:36 GMT P2P jail bill moves forward By Andrew Orlowski Published Thursday 9th September 2004 13:36 GMT HR.4077, the Piracy Deterrence and Education Act, has been approved by the United States' House Judiciary Committee. The bill specifies up to five years' jail for anyone making over a thousand copyrighted works available for download. That's if the infringer is profiting from the action: ordinary P2P users would face up to three years simply for making their collections available. Thwarted by the courts, copyright holders and their lobby groups, notably the Recording Industry Ass. of...

CHICAGO, Oct. 24 (UPI) -- R&D in networking hardware and software is accelerating, as several new development projects have been announced this month in Bangalore and Pune, India, and at least one foreign firm has located operations in the United States, experts tell UPI's Networking. Last week Cisco Systems, which first established operations in India in 1995, broke ground on a brand-new, 1 million-square-foot R&D facility in Bangalore, budgeting $50 million for the project and planning to hire 3,000 scientists, engineers and researchers. The technical teams will work on projects spanning the San Jose, Calif.-based company's entire networking technology portfolio....

Programmers released version 2 of OpenOffice.org on Thursday, a major overhaul to an open-source software suite that has recently become a more serious rival to Microsoft Office. OpenOffice.org includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation creator and--with version 2.0--a database. Project organizers had hoped to release the upgrade last week, on the fifth anniversary of the creation of the open-source project, but a last-minute bug derailed the plan. Advocates have ambitious hopes for the software. "OpenOffice.org is on a path toward being the most popular office suite the world has ever seen," Sun Microsystems President Jonathan Schwartz said in a statement....

Microsoft has signed on to promote a new programming language intended to replace BASIC as the first step students take towards learning how to code. The Kid's Programming Language, or KPL, was developed under the direction of Jonah Stagner, and his colleagues, ex-Microsoft program manager Jon Schwartz and former NCR engineer Walt Morrison. The three run the software consultancy Morrison-Schwartz Inc. "One of the things we realized is that we all learned programming on some flavor of BASIC when we started. You're not going to learn how to program in BASIC anymore," said Morrison, in an interview. "We wanted something...

And now, the war forecastSep 15th 2005 From The Economist print editionSoftware: Can software really predict the outcome of an armed conflict, just as it can predict the course of the weather? IN DECEMBER 1990, 35 days before the outbreak of the Gulf war, an unassuming retired colonel appeared before the Armed Services Committee of America's House of Representatives and made a startling prediction. The Pentagon's casualty projections—that 20,000 to 30,000 coalition soldiers would be killed in the first two weeks of combat against the Iraqi army—were, he declared, completely wrong. Casualties would, he said, still be less than 6,000...

FOUR months to six months. Only a year or two ago, that was how long start-up companies generally had to cajole, fret and act nonchalant while waiting for venture capitalists to part with money - if they proved willing to write a check at all. Even during robust times, the period between a first pitch meeting with a venture capitalist and financing typically spans three months. So imagine the surprise of those behind a start-up called XenSource when they started shopping for cash this summer on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, Calif. - the venture capital equivalent of Wall...

SEPTEMBER 12, 2005 (COMPUTERWORLD) - Users are unsure of just how the Oracle Corp's $5.85 billion buyout of ailing Siebel Systems Inc. will play out for them, but some IT shops were openly optimistic about the deal announced this morning (see ”Update: Oracle to buy Siebel Systems for $5.85B”). Siebel’s CRM products are seen as feature-rich and highly mature, something Oracle believes it can exploit as it crafts its next generation set of best-of-breed applications, which it has dubbed Fusion.

Online marketplaces like RAC (www.rentacoder.com) offer enough reason to generate effusive prose. It's the kind of place where 110,000 software programmers from across the world log on to earn a living. Of these, roughly 50,000 are Indians --all the way from Srinagar to Bhatinda, and Surat to Nagercoil. Put the 70-80 marketplaces like RAC together and a picture emerges of approximately one lakh Indian software programmers who generate about a billion dollars every year. At sites like RAC, mostly small and a few mid-sized American companies hoping to outsource their IT requirements post details of jobs that need to be...

Top U.S. generals openly admit that America's strategic ABM defenses are based on a technology in which other nations are already developing more experts than the United States which is inherently vulnerable to devastating disruption. Under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. Armed Forces have moved father than ever before in developing anti-ballistic missile and space-based strategic assets, and trying to integrate combined operations around the globe using state of the art Information Technology. In the short term, America's lead in these areas is, indeed, growing faster than ever. And the stunning success of the three-week campaign to destroy the...

Microsoft's chairman sits down for a talk about the company's new approach to business software, the shortage of computer-science grads, and more.Microsoft's ambition in the market for software that runs companies' finance, sales, and operations is large, but so far results in Microsoft's 5-year-old Business Solutions division have been lukewarm. The company has had to manage expensive research-and-development teams it inherited through two acquisitions, respond to customer requirements without the benefit of a direct sales force, and iron out overlap in its network of resellers. On Sept. 7, Microsoft rolled out a new plan for its business-apps group that revolves...

The federal government and commercial-software developers are offering doctors and medical clinics low-cost -- and sometimes free -- electronic medical-records software, hoping to spur the expansion of networked physicians' offices around the United States, experts told UPI's Networking. By Gene Koprowski

NEW ORLEANS — A New Orleans-based patient advocacy firm is getting a $1 million cash infusion from two state venture funds and a group of private investors, officials announced today. Patient Care closed the deal this week and is the first company to receive money from the newly created Louisiana Technology Fund, a $2.3 million fund designed for early stage tech companies. The fund invested $300,000. Another state technology fund, Louisiana Fund 1 LP, contributed $200,000, while the remaining $500,000 came from angel investors, said Jane Cooper, Patient Care chief executive officer. The company, which employs 20, plans to use...