HP Throwing Another 16,000 Employees Under the Bus

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May 222014
 

HP Killing another 11,000-16,000 JobsHP CEO Meg Whitman – Another Massive Layoff Coming
(Pix Courtesy: Reuters)

Somebody’s gotta pay for the Brobdingnagian salaries, stock options and the private jets of HP CEO Meg Whitman (yeah, she of the failed California gubernatorial bid after spending $140 million) and other top executives of the company.

HP today said it’d fire another 11,000-16,000 employees.

The job cuts will cover all divisions and geographies.

HP expects to save a billion dollars on the additional layoffs over and above the $3 billion to $4 billion the company anticipated previously for slashing 34,000 jobs.

Increasing Layoffs

Over the last two years, HP has steadily upped the number of employees it’s going to jettison.

In May 2012, HP disclosed plan to guillotine 27,000 employees.

By September, the number of HP jobs at risk had increased to 29,000.

Come December 2013, the number rose to 34,000.

If you take the 16,000 impending layoffs, Meg will have butchered a total of 50,000 jobs.

Here’s what HP said today: Continue reading »

Good DuckDuckGo gets Better

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May 212014
 

Google’s tiny rival DuckDuckGo has redesigned its search engine and search page.

The site has a slick, neat look now.

In the wake of reports of massive NSA surveillance, DuckDuckGo shot to fame last year with a better no-tracking privacy policy compared to its larger rivals.

I have used DuckDuckGo in the past and can attest to the site’s decent quality of search results.

New Features

The search engine, which is gaining new privacy-concerned users every day, has added new features like image and local search, recipe search, weather forecast, auto-suggest and a so called “Smarter Answers” feature that leverages work by the open source community in providing answers to users’ queries.

DuckDuckGo once again is highlighting that it offers “real privacy” in what’s unmistakably a reference to media reports of large technology companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft working with the spy agency National Security Agency to undermine users’ privacy.

The search engine is hoping “its focus on smarter search and real privacy will appeal to a significant percentage of people.”

I’d recommend you give DuckDuckGo a shot.

Snapdeal Snags $100m

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May 212014
 

SnapDeal Raises $100m
Indian online marketplace Snapdeal has attracted another $100 million in funding taking total backing of the 250-man startup to $350 million.

Singapore’s Temasek Holdings, asset management firm BlackRock and a bunch of other investment firms ponied up the cashes, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The money will go toward adding more engineering staff and boosting listings from small businesses, the WSJ said.

Unlike mature e-commerce markets like the U.S., Indians are wary of online shopping and still largely shop at brick and mortar outlets.

Cisco CEO Mad at NSA, Writes to Obama

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May 192014
 

Cisco CEO John Chambers Upset with NSACisco CEO John Chambers is hopping mad at recent revelations that U.S. spy agency National Security Agency intercepted Cisco routers meant for customers and installed spyware in them before repackaging them and sending them on their way.

In his new book No Place to Hide, author Glenn Greenwald disclosed documents that purportedly showed NSA agents implanting spyware in Cisco routers after intercepting them while they were on their way to a customer.

NSA’s Tailored Access Operations Unit, in cooperation with the FBI and CIA, plants bugs and spyware in products of targeted customers.

Upset over the disclosure in Greenwald’s book, Chambers took his displeasure to the highest office in the land, the White House.

In the letter to President Obama dt May 15, 2014, Chambers wrote:

We ship our products globally from locations inside as well as outside the United States, and if these allegations are true, these actions will undermine confidence in our industry and in the ability of technology companies to deliver products globally. Continue reading »

Adobe Creative Cloud Suffers Massive Outage

 Cloud Computing, General  Comments Off on Adobe Creative Cloud Suffers Massive Outage
May 152014
 

Adobe Creative Cloud DownAdobe’s Creative Cloud service has suffered a massive outage that’s preventing users from logging into their accounts for over 18 hours

Creative Cloud is the jewel in Adobe’s cloud services crown and includes Photoshop, Acrobat, Dreamweaver, Lightroom, InDesign, Illustrator and other software.

The outage seems to be widespread and is affecting users in Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific today (May 15, 2014).

Adobe says it’s identified the cause but did not disclose it.

Here’s what we found on the Creative Cloud Status web site:

Adobe Creative Cloud Down

On its AdobeCare Twitter handle, the company wrote:

We apologize that Adobe login is offline. We identified the cause & will restore as soon as possible.

Adobe is asking users currently signed into the Creative Cloud applications and services not to sign out until after service has been restored.

Update: Adobe is offering a workaround to affected users telling them they can use their Creative Cloud software in trial mode.

Creative Cloud is hosted on Amazon Web Services.

Update 2 (9:02PM ET, May 15, 2014): Adobe says Creative Cloud is operating normally and apologizes for outage.Adobe Apologizes for Creative Cloud Outage

Hangouts Goes HD

 General, Products  Comments Off on Hangouts Goes HD
Aug 282013
 

Google’s Hangouts video chat service has started letting users chat with friends and family in HD (high-definition).

HD is being rolled out to the live streaming Hangouts on Air service initially.

Google intends to extend HD to all desktop Hangouts video calls in the coming weeks.

Google is ditching the H.264 video codec in Hangouts standard definition for its own open VP8 codec to enable Hangouts in HD.

Before you can enjoy HD Hangouts, ensure that you have a HD webcam, good bandwidth speed and a fast computer with lots of processing power.

You can download the Hangouts app at Google Play and iTunes App Store for Android and iOS mobile devices respectively or install a plugin for the Chrome browser on the PC.

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