Kill IE6 says Industry, No says Microsoft!!!

Many Web designers are staging a protest against the old version of Microsoft’s browser, the Internet Explorer 6 (IE6). They allege that the ability of the Web to move forward in a more interactive way is getting hampered due to the browser. Microsoft acknowledged it is recommending IE6 users to upgrade to the newer IE8, but again promised it would support the older version till April 2014.

The designers say that the IE6, which was released in 2001 and since been updated twice by Microsoft is ‘crippling’ the Internet’s potential and slowing down the online experience. They also blame IE6 for giving webmasters a tough job, because they have to write special ‘hacks’ into the Web code to accommodate an outmoded browser. An estimated 15-25 percent of people still use IE6 as their portal to the Internet. Microsoft officials insist they simply can’t end support for IE 6, since it shipped as part of Windows XP.

Recently, a campaign has started, sparked by 40 Internet start-ups who want their users to ditch Microsoft’s eight year old web browser. The campaign is spread to the social networking sites as well. Facebook has been prompting IE6 users to swap out their browsers since February 2009. A petition on Twitter collected nearly 10,000 signatures supporting the effort. Even Google’s YouTube and Digg were taking similar steps to stop their users from using the IE6 browser.

Although Microsoft has released two major versions of Internet Explorer in the past couple of years, for many, the face of Internet Explorer is still the IE6. In large part, the reason is because many of Internet Explorer’s users are the ones who tend not to change the browser that comes with their operating system.

Infosys looking at overseas acquisitions

IT major Infosys Technologies is looking at acquisitions in Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, Japan and Australia, a top company official said. “The size of the company should be around $450-500 million,” Infosys chief executive and managing director S. Gopalakrishnan told reporters on the sidelines of a seminar organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII).

The US accounts for around 62 percent and Europe around 26 percent of the company’s total revenues of $4.6 billion. The company is now looking at increasing the revenue share from Europe to 30 percent.

Regarding recruitments, Gopalakrishnan said the company had hired 18,000 people in 2008, adding that it would look into further recruitment next January-February depending on the economic scenario.

Infosys is pursuing contract deals worth $1 billion, he added.

Satyam Computers is now Mahindra Satyam

Two months after taking over scam-tainted Satyam Computer Services, Tech Mahindra on June 21, 2009 renamed the IT major as Mahindra Satyam.

The logo will be adopted from the Mahindra Group. “This strategic move paves the way for the emergence of a robust brand, which draws from the core values of the Mahindra group and the inherent strength of the Satyam brand,” said a company statement here June 21, 2009 evening.

“Customer centricity, high standards of corporate governance, unimpeachable ethics form the cornerstones of the Mahindra Group,” said Mahindra Group vice chairman and managing director Anand Mahindra.

“This rebranding exercise symbolizes an amalgamation of the Mahindra Group’s values with Satyam’s fabled expertise, even as it retains that part of Satyam’s identity which signifies commitment, purpose and proficiency of the organization and its people,” the statement said.

Satyam’s executive vice chairman Vineet Nayyar described the move as “a significant milestone towards the recovery of the company”.

Tech Mahindra, owned by the $6.3 billion Mahindra Group, bought the scam-hit IT company in an open auction in April 2009.

The re-branding comes six months after Satyam’s founder and then chairman B. Ramalinga Raju confessed to a Rs.78-billion accounting fraud.

The government launched a probe, superseded the board, and put the company up for sale in open auction.

Ramalinga Raju, his brother Rama Raju, former chief financial officer Vadlamani Srinivas and five other accused are currently in jail.

Microsoft To Launch Free Anti-virus Named ‘Morro’ Soon

Microsoft Corp in a quest to provide complete security to its OS users would soon be launching its own antivirus app Code named-‘Morro’. Microsoft also informed that the early version of the product is currently tested by its employees and would soon make a beta product available online before going for a launch at the end of 2009.

The Anti-Virus Software

Anti-virus app ‘Morro’ would provide full–time protection from several types of malicious software including viruses, spyware, rootkits and trojans .Although many are terming it as stripped down version of earlier shelved Live OneCare.

This news assumes significance as this antivirus would be completely free and would provide higher level of security due to close knit approach with Windows OS.Microsoft may be able to provide a great solution due to control over anonymous usage statistics of millions of PC’s.

This has sound alarms for commercial Anti-virus companies like Symantec,kaspersky and McAfee, earning majority of their revenues by protecting Windows PCs all these years. These companies also has significant presence in enterprise security market and attracts huge revenues from it.

Today many users are forced to buy paid anti-virus to fight higher level of threats unleashed by malicious programmes and viruses.The availability of anti-virus app by Microsoft itself would avoid the security dilemma faced by OS users and may also increase its legal OS sales in emerging markets.

Microsoft through this initiative is trying to ramp up confidence amongst its customers, at the same time opening up a new revenue stream in future.The move may be late timed but indeed serve great purpose for users craving about better anti-virus integration in windows OS.

How Does Google Store All of its Data?

Ever wonder how Google manages all their information? Imagine Gmail, it has to keep track of the billions of emails that get sent out each day regardless of whether or not it is spam.

A Database?
My first thought was a database. But if you think about it, if e-mails were stored in a single database table, it would have billions of rows added each day. This just isn’t possible nor is it efficient when performing a search. So Google cannot possibly store their data in a database… at least not in the traditional MySQL sense.

After a bit of digging around, I found an interesting document written by some of Google’s main architect that describes their file system in great detail. It turns out Google uses a distributed file system spread over many machines. It offers huge storage (hundreds of terabytes) over thousands of machines and thousands of disks.

The advantage of this type of system is redundancy and low cost. Their servers are not top of the line but clustering many of them together creates a highly cost-effective file system.

It’s what Yahoo Does
The owner of the largest database in the world, Yahoo!, takes on a similar approach: clusters of cheap computers that form a distributed file system. In fact, if a computer breaks down, it’s usually cheaper and faster to throw away the computer and replace it with a new one than it is to repair it.

So if you have a bunch of old computers sitting around at home, don’t throw them out just yet… you could create your own distributed file system!

Courtesy: www.jonlee.ca

Infosys Layoff – The IT giant Infosys Technologies fires 2100 employees

With companies keen on maximum utilisation of employees and low tolerance to poor performance in the backdrop of global economic turmoil, nearly 2,100 employees in software firm Infosys have faced the axe.

“Some of these employees have been asked to go while some have left on their own,” V Balakrishnan, CFO of the Bangalore-based company, told PTI on April 11, 2009.

Prior to asking the employees to leave, they were put on a performance improvement course and those who showed no improvement were asked to leave while some others quit, he said.

“Tolerance to poor performance is very low given the current economic scenario,” said Infosys CEO Kris Gopalakrishnan.

Usually, the employees who showed poor performance were given some more time to improve themselves, but this time there had been no such consideration, he said.

Both the officials said the sacking was part of annual routine, which usually formed five per cent of the total number of employees but this time it was much lower.

Some of the employees had been “outplaced”, Kris said, which refers to the firm hiring the services of placement agencies to help the employees to get placements in other firms. Infosys has a workforce of 105,000, including trainees.

India test-fires BrahMos cruise missile

SHOW OF STRENGTH: Indian Army officers look on at Brahmos missiles during Army Day parade in New Delhi.

India test-fired BrahMos cruise missile successfully on Jan 20, 2009  at the Pokhran test range of Jaisalmer in Rajasthan.

BrahMos, developed jointly with Russia, is a supersonic cruise missile and can be launched from submarine, ship, aircraft and land based Mobile Autonomous Launchers (MAL).

The missile was to be test-fired for the third time in desert conditions on January 18, 2009  but it was postponed to January 20, 2009  due to heavy fog and rain in the area.

BrahMos has been named after two rivers – the Brahmaputra of India and the Moscow of Russia.

The first test-firing of the BrahMos was conducted on June 12, 2001 at the Interim Test Range Chandipur-On-Sea in Balasore (Orissa).

Ramalinga Raju is hit over Obama in Internet search

He may be popular for all the wrong reasons, but Satyam’s disgraced founder Ramalinga Raju has beaten US President-elect Barack Obama on internet popularity charts in India, and is closing the gap abroad too.

By now infamous IT czar Raju shot to limelight earlier this month after disclosing what has emerged as the country’s biggest ever corporate fraud in India and has been called

‘India’s Enron’ right from the word go. Google’s search volume index shows Raju and Obama were generating almost equal searches from India during the first six days of the year, with Obama leading by a small margin. However, Raju jumped up the charts on January 7, when he admitted to a massive fraud of about Rs 7,800 crore.

The search volumes for Raju are estimated to have been over 10 times more than that of Obama on January 7, after which it has been declining consistently but Raju is still holding an edge over the US President-elect.

In terms of search volumes generated from various regions, Raju’s own state Andhra Pradesh is on top, followed by Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Delhi. In terms of cities too, the maximum search volume has been from Hyderabad, where both Raju and Satyam are based, followed by Chennai, Bangalore, Pune, Mumbai, Mahape and Delhi.

As regards searches for Obama, Tamil Nadu has been on the top, followed by Maharashtra, Karnataka and Delhi among the regions. For cities, the maximum search volumes for Obama has come from Chennai, Mumbai, Navi Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi. Outside India too, Raju has generated significant search volumes from UAE, Singapore, Finland, US, Poland, Australia, UK, Canada and Germany, but has lagged Obama. Raju has been searched for in Abu Dhabi, Singapore, Dallas and San Fransisco, while search queries have come in Polish language too, other than English.

Microsoft launches open-source blogging platform

Microsoft launched Oxite, an open-source blogging platform.

However, the software maker was quick to underline that the product is aimed at developers and not intended to directly compete with popular blogging software such as WordPress or Movable Type.

Microsoft posted the Oxite code on its CodePlex Web site  and made an official announcement. The software, described as an alpha release, is available under the Microsoft Public License, one of Microsoft’s OSI-certified open-source licenses.

Oxite is a standards-compliant, extensible content-management system designed to support either blogs or larger Web sites, Microsoft said. The platform includes support for features such as pingbacks, trackbacks, anonymous or authenticated commenting, gravatars (globally recognized avatars), and RSS feeds at any page level, the company said.

Users can create and edit a set of pages on a site, add customized HTML into pages, and support multiple blogs on a single site.

Oxite is also able to integrate with Microsoft developer software such as ASP.Net MVC, Visual Studio Team Suite, and Background Services Architecture. The project began as a way of demonstrating the capabilities of ASP.Net MVC to developers, Microsoft said.

The Web site for Mix Online was built using Oxite, and Microsoft is providing the Mix Online Web site code for developers to learn from. Mix Online is the online community centered on Microsoft’s Mix Web developer conference.

Oxite is not a direct competitor to existing, established blogging systems, nor is it intended to challenge Microsoft’s own SharePoint, which includes content-management-system capabilities, according to Oxite project coordinator Erik Porter.

The software is intended for developers but could eventually be made suitable for the general public, Porter wrote in an Oxite discussion forum.

“We have no plans to make this anything but a really good developer sample that should be able to run any site you want,” he wrote. “That said, this is a community project now and, if the community decides to take it a different direction, we won’t stop it.”

Infosys to freeze hiring, says signs aren’t good

COMPANY FORECAST: S Gopalakrishnan, CEO and MD of Infosys, speaks at the Reuters India Investment Summit.

Infosys Technologies Ltd will freeze recruitment after meeting this fiscal year’s target of hiring 25,000 staff, a telling sign the global downturn is hitting India’s $52 billion outsourcing sector.

The country’s second largest software services firm however has no plans to cut jobs and is sticking with its third quarter outlook, CEO Kris Gopalakrishnan told reporters.

He said the outsourcing sector’s growth rate would halve next year as some customers delay orders. “Last year the IT industry grew more than 30 per cent, this year it is looking at somewhere in the region of 15 per cent,” Gopalakrishnan said.

India’s export-driven IT sector, used to a scorching pace of growth, has been hit by the financial crisis and recession in the United States, which contributes more than half their revenue. In the last few years, the outsourcing industry has created tens of thousands of jobs, mainly attracting young workers, as global companies look to trim labour costs.

Infosys hired 16,000-17,000 employees in the first half of the fiscal year that began in April and would honour commitments to 6,000 under training, Gopalakrishnan said. Infosys, which counts Goldman Sachs and Philips Electronics among its clients, cut its full-year dollar revenue outlook in October due to the worsening global downturn.

Gopalakrishnan said on Dec 04, 2008 the company would freeze fresh recruitment, apart from meeting specific skill needs. “We will have to look at controlling our cost, controlling our expenses making sure that we run an optimised business. We will have to look at what are things we need to do in order to prepare ourselves for the recovery.” “Growth is coming more and more from emerging markets so hese are the things we need to prepare ourselves. We should not lose momentum in this slowdown,” he said.

But Infosys still expects its strong client base and a weakening rupee to help it meet a forecast for December quarter earnings of $0.57 a share. The Indian rupee has fallen nearly six per cent so far this quarter against the dollar.

“Infosys is seeing further degradation of the demand environment, with headwinds from leadership changes at customers, a shrinking large deal pipeline …. Pricing pressure has emerged,” CLSA Asia-Pacific said in a report this week.