Windows Vista : What is BitLocker Drive Encryption?

BitLocker Drive Encryption is an integral new security feature in the Windows Vista operating system that provides considerable protection for the operating system on your computer and data stored on the operating system volume. BitLocker ensures that data stored on a computer running Windows Vista remains encrypted even if the computer is tampered with when the operating system is not running. This helps protect against "offline attacks," attacks made by disabling or circumventing the installed operating system, or made by physically removing the hard drive to attack the data separately.

BitLocker uses a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) to provide enhanced protection for your data and to assure early boot component integrity. This helps protect your data from theft or unauthorized viewing by encrypting the entire Windows volume.

BitLocker is designed to offer a seamless user experience. It is designed for systems that have a compatible TPM microchip and BIOS. A compatible TPM is defined as a version 1.2 TPM. A compatible BIOS must support the TPM and the Static Root of Trust Measurement as defined by the Trusted Computing Group. For more information about TPM specifications, visit the TPM Specifications section of the Trusted Computing Group's Web site (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=72757).

The TPM interacts with BitLocker to help provide seamless protection at system startup. This is transparent to the user, and the user logon experience is unchanged. However, if the TPM is missing or changed, or if the startup information has changed, BitLocker will enter recovery mode, and you will need a recovery password to regain access to the data.

Microsoft Bids $44.6 Billion for Yahoo

Microsoft has made an offer to buy Yahoo for about $44.6 billion, or $31 a share, in a mix of cash and stock.

It is not clear how Yahoo’s board will react to Microsoft’s offer.

Job Losses Raise Recession Fears

US employers eliminated 17,000 jobs in January, the government reported Friday, the first decline in the work force in more than four years, and the strongest signal yet that the United States may be in the early stages of a recession.

The broad weakness in the job market, which affected many sectors, shows how the collapse of the housing bubble is rippling through the rest of the economy and suggests the likelihood of more pain for millions of American families in the months ahead from job losses, lower real wages and fewer working hours.

Employment has been weakening for months. While employers continued to add jobs last year, they did so at an ever slower pace, averaging just 42,000 jobs a month in the fourth quarter and 95,000 jobs a month for all of last year. That was down sharply from 175,000 a month in 2006, when the recovery from the 2001 recession was still in full swing.

Middle Class Indians to realize their dreams of owning a car

Ratan Tata has changed the dynamics of auto industry and silenced scores of his detractors. He is the Chairman of Tata Group and Chairman of India’s investment Commission. But Ratan Tata has also faced brickbats from the satraps in the Tata Empire after he took over as Chairman of Tata Sons in 1991 and form India Inc who has dismissed him as a man of no consequence with little business sense. He is not a mere
dreamer, but a winner too who can help tens of millions growing middle class Indians to realize their dreams of owning a car.

Tata’s name is reaching new geographies through an aggressive merger and acquisition around the globe. The group has a presence in 40 countries and exports to 140. In 2007 Ratan Tata successfully engineered the group’s acquisition of Europe’s largest steel maker,Corus, in a US $ 12-billion deal that has been hailed as a turning point for the Indian business.

In one of his recent book, India’s Global Wealth Club, Geoff Hiscock, a leading expert on Asian business observes: “ The Corus takeover, the biggest yet by an Indian company, was one more step in a 15 year process that has seen Ratan Tata reorganize and rejuvenate a group widely seen as too unwieldy, lethargic and
Under-performing.” Tatas continue their acquisition spree around the globe and is likely to pursue more in the coming months.

When Tata revealed his dream of making a people ‘s car, analysts predicted his ruin. His rival car maker Maruti Suzuki Corporation that holds fifty percent of the passenger car market,ex-chief Osama Suzuki dismissed the feasibility of such a low-priced car and that it cannot be produced without compromising on safety and environmental standards. Now that Tata has done it, his detractors are eating their words fearing about their bottom lines that may go southward in years to come. Ratan Tata has shown the world that he not only inherited the mantle of the vast Tata empire but also the legacy of JRD of being the most respected and admired businessman in India.

What Celebs Can Teach Us About Success

By Kate Lorenz, CareerBuilder.com Editor

Do you remember your first or worst job? Did it have anything to do with what you're doing today or where you want to be tomorrow?

Consider this - Jennifer Aniston used to wait tables, Madonna served donuts at Dunkin' Donuts and Jerry Seinfeld hawked lightbulbs as a telemarketer.

All careers start with a good foundation. The same is true for those of the rich and famous. They worked their way into their thriving careers by starting at the bottom and paying their dues. The skills and experience they gained at their first jobs helped to catapult them into future success. So what can they teach us?
Read full story at http://msn.careerbuilder.com/custom/msn/careeradvice/viewarticle.aspx?articleid=449&SiteId=cbmsn4449&sc_extcmp=JS_449_advice&catid=

New Blu-ray 2.0 spec makes PS3 the most future-proof player

By Ben Kuchera | Published: January 18, 2008 - 10:13AM CT

With the sudden and unexpected announcement from Warner that the studio would be abandoning HD DVD titles in favor of Blu-ray, it seemed to many observers that the high-def format war was all over, bar the shouting.

With the upcoming 2.0 player profile requiring Blu-ray players to be networked, Sony finally gets to play its trump card: the PlayStation 3, which has clearly emerged as one of the best Blu-ray players on the market—and is likely to remain so for some time. Why? Because the first player now becomes the most versatile, sporting a future-proof Blu-ray setup.

Before we can understand why the PlayStation 3 is able to so easily deal with new profiles, we must first look at the difference between the 1.0, 1.1, and 2.0 profiles to see why a simple firmware update isn't enough to make a player compliant.

• 1.0 is the launch profile, and secondary audio and video decoders are optional, as is local storage and network connectivity. The majority of standalone players fit into this category.
• 1.1 is the newer profile, and to take advantage of these discs, players need a secondary audio and video decoder to handle picture-in-picture, as well as at least 256MB of local storage for content.
  
• 2.0 is the profile of the future, requiring the two secondary decoders, 1GB of local storage for updates and content, and an Internet connection.
  

HD DVD players have included networking as standard since the beginning, but Blu-ray has not, and the evolving standard may become a large problem for early adopters. The 2.0 profile actually changes the minimum requirements for full compatibility. In other words, there is only one player currently on the market that will be 2.0 compatible: the PlayStation 3, which, with its upgradeable hard drive, Ethernet port, and powerful graphics capabilities, will be able to adapt to any and all future updates. This is quite the slap in the face to consumers who paid several hundred dollars for players that won't able to be updated to take advantage of the 1.1 profile, much less the upcoming 2.0

Read the whole story at http://www.arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080118-new-nlu-ray-2-0-spec-makes-ps3-the-most-future-proof-player.html

No, The Tech Skills Shortage Doesn't Exist

Employers game the system and misrepresent the key market indicators.
By Ron Hira InformationWeek January 12, 2008 12:02 AM (From the January 14, 2008 issue)

Employers claim there is a severe shortage of IT workers in the United States. Listen in on any klatch of CIOs, and the conversation inevitably turns to their difficulties finding talent. Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s Bill Gates, Intel (NSDQ: INTC)'s Craig Barrett, and other captains of tech industry argue that the situation has reached crisis proportions.

But moving beyond anecdotal impressions and vested interests, the employment and economic data paint another picture--one in which the IT labor market is clearing and none of the indicators demonstrates a systemic shortage. While exceptional talent or skills in emerging technologies will always, by definition, be in short supply, the most relevant market indicators--wages and employee risk--clearly show there's no broad-based scarcity of U.S. IT workers. In their zeal to enlist government help to expand the supply of tech workers through foreign guest worker programs, employers are misrepresenting IT labor market conditions.

key indicator of tightness in any labor market is wages--more specifically, whether wages are rising much faster than the norm. IT worker wages grew by a modest 2.9% in constant dollar terms from 2003 to 2005, according to Department of Labor data compiled by the Commission on Professionals in Science & Technology (CPST). This increase is indeed greater than the average 0.6% growth for all professional occupations, but the gains for IT workers were hardly robust and don't indicate any significant scarcity. More recently, we've seen some growth in the wages for newly minted bachelor's degree computer scientists, according to the National Association for Colleges & Employers. Salaries for those entry-level jobs rose from $50,744 in 2006 to $53,051 in 2007, an increase of 4.5%. But those gains were almost completely gobbled up by inflation, which ran about 4.3% in 2007.
Another factor in considering the relative health of the IT job market is the level of risk employees face. As any investor will tell you, riskier investments should have the higher potential payoffs. It's no different with careers. While there are no formal measures of the risk and uncertainty of IT careers, it's obvious that they have soared over the past few years. The train wreck of 2002-2004 in the IT labor market derailed the careers of many professionals; some tech pros haven't come back.

Meantime, employer norms have shifted radically. Long gone are the days when IBM (NYSE: IBM) never laid off a worker. Nowadays, companies don't think twice about shipping IT work overseas or bringing in lower-cost foreign workers to replace U.S. employees, and even asking American workers to train their replacements. Intel's Barrett writes an op-ed piece about the shortage of U.S. workers even when his own company is in the process of major layoffs, shedding 14% of its workforce over the past two years.

In addition, the risk of technological obsolescence and age discrimination are higher in IT relative to other professions. How many physicians or pharmacists become obsolete at age 40? Put in this context, it's hard to believe that the very modest wage gains of the past few years balance the increases in IT employee risk.

The consequences of this new equilibrium play out most prominently in career choices for those attending college. Enrollment of undergraduate computer science majors in major U.S. colleges and universities has plummeted an astounding 40% over the past four years, according to a survey by the Computing Research Association. Many blame a lack of interest in the tech field among young people, or our failing K-12 education system. But the most likely explanation is that students, using an array of information at their disposal, including advice from relatives in the field, have decided that IT isn't as attractive an option as it once was.

Read the whole story at http://www.informationweek.com/outsourcing/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=205601556&pgno=1&queryText=h-1b

Low visa quotas and delays may be sending highly skilled and entrepreneurial immigrants back home—to work for U.S. competitors

by Vivek Wadhwa

For the first time in its history, the U.S. faces the prospect of a reverse brain drain. New research by my team at the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University shows that more than 1 million highly skilled professionals such as engineers, scientists, doctors, researchers, and their families are in line for a yearly allotment of only around 120,000 permanent-resident visas for employment-based principals and their families in the three main employment visa categories (EB-1, EB-2, and EB-3). These individuals entered the country legally to study or to work. They contributed to U.S. economic growth and global competitiveness. Now we've set the stage for them to return to countries such as India and China, where the economies are booming and their skills are in great demand. U.S. businesses large and small stand to lose critical talent, and workers who have gained valuable experience and knowledge of American industry may become potential competitors.

The problem is simple. There aren't enough permanent-resident visas available each year for skilled workers and their families. And there is a limit of fewer than 10,000 visas that can be issued to immigrants from any single country. So countries with the largest populations such as India and China are allocated the same number of visas as Iceland and Mongolia.

Visa Delays Deprive U.S. of Talent

The result is that wait times for employment visas currently stretch from four to six years for immigrants from countries such as India and China, and all indications are that these delays will get longer. Based on a 2003 study of new legal immigrants to the U.S. called the New Immigrant Survey, we estimate that in 2003, about 1 in 3 professionals who had been through the immigration process either planned to leave the U.S. or were uncertain about remaining. Media reports and other anecdotal evidence indicate that many skilled workers have indeed begun to return home.

Much of the current public debate on immigration centers on concerns over low-skilled immigrants entering the U.S. illegally. We do need to develop fair policies to deal with this problem. But skilled immigrants who enter the U.S. legally are a different issue. Professor Richard Devon of Pennsylvania State University estimates that in the U.S. about $200,000 is invested in a child by the time they gain a bachelor's degree in engineering. That means that the U.S. gains billions of dollars in benefit from educated professionals who leave other countries to come here. And we lose billions when they return home. Additionally, we end up training highly skilled workers in our markets, technology, and way of doing business.

Consider this: Earlier research by my team found that more than half of the engineering and technology companies started in Silicon Valley and a quarter of those started nationwide from 1995 to 2006 had immigrant founders. These companies employed 450,000 workers and generated $52 billion in revenue in 2006. Their founders tended to be very highly educated in science, technology, math, and engineering-related disciplines, with 96% of them holding bachelor's degrees and 75% holding master's degrees or PhDs (see BusinessWeek.com, 6/11/07, "Immigrants: Key U.S. Business Founders").

Patents: Evidence of Entrepreneurial Activity

We also uncovered some puzzling data on patent filings. When we analyzed the international patent database maintained by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), we found that 1 in every 4 patent applications from the U.S. in 2006 listed a foreign national residing in the U.S. as an inventor. This number had increased threefold over an eight-year period and didn't take into account inventors who had become U.S. citizens before applying for a patent.

We realized that these foreign-national inventors were not likely to be from the same immigrant group that was founding high-tech companies. They were likely to be PhD students and employees of U.S. corporations who are in the U.S. on temporary visas. Temporary-visa holders can't easily start their own companies—their visas require them to work full time for the company that sponsored them.

For our new research, we reanalyzed the WIPO patent database to look at which immigrant groups and corporations were applying for the most patents. To understand the foreign-national data, we examined extensive information published by the Homeland Security Dept., the Labor Dept., and the State Dept. We also reviewed the New Immigrant Survey to gain insight into the immigration process and to examine the potential that, even after becoming permanent residents, skilled immigrants might return home.

Here is what we found:

• Foreign nationals contributed to more than half of the international patents filed by companies such as Qualcomm (QCOM) (72%), Merck (MRK) (65%), General Electric (GE) (64%), Siemens (SI) (63%), and Cisco (CSCO) (60%). Their contributions were relatively small at Microsoft (MSFT) (3%) and General Motors (GM) (6%). Surprisingly, 41% of the patents filed by the U.S. government had foreign nationals listed as inventors.

• Foreign nationals contributed to 25.6% of all U.S. international patent applications in 2006, but the numbers were much higher in several states such as New Jersey (37%), California (36%), and Massachusetts (32%).

• In 2006, 16.8% of international patent applications from the U.S. had inventors with Chinese names and 36% of these (or 5.5% of the total) were foreign nationals. Similarly, 13.7% had Indian names and 40% (or 6.2% of the total) were foreign nationals.

• Both Indian and Chinese inventors tended to file most patents in the fields of medicine, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, and electronics.

Our analysis of the immigration data produced the most startling results.

"Immigration Limbo"

We estimate that, as of Sept. 30, 2006, there were 500,040 individuals in the main employment-based visa categories and an additional 555,044 family members in line for permanent-resident status in the U.S. An additional 126,421 with job offers were waiting abroad. In total, there were 1,181,505 educated and skilled professionals waiting to gain legal permanent-resident status.

In the 2005-06 academic year, there were 259,717 international students in the U.S. There were an additional 38,096 in practical training—many of these are PhD researchers.

One thing is certain: If we wait five years to fix immigration policy, the unskilled workers will still be here, but the skilled workers who are in "immigration limbo" will be long gone. Our loss will be the gain of countries we are increasingly competing with in the new global landscape.

Vivek Wadhwa, the founder of two software companies, is an Executive-in-Residence/Adjunct Professor at Duke University. He is also the co-founder of TiE Carolinas, a networking and mentoring group.

Google buys garage where empire began

SAN FRANCISCO - Internet search leader Google Inc. has added a landmark to its rapidly expanding empire — the Silicon Valley home where co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin rented a garage eight years ago as they set out to change the world.
The Mountain View-based company bought the 1,900-square-foot home in nearby Menlo Park from one of its own employees, Susan Wojcicki, who had agreed to lease her garage for $1,700 per month because she wanted some help paying the mortgage.
Wojcicki, now Google's vice president of product management, didn't work for the company at the time and only knew the Stanford University graduate students because one of her friends had dated Brin.
During Google's five-month history there, the garage became like a second home for Page and Brin.
The entrepreneurs, then just 25, seemed to be always working on their search engine or soaking in the hot tub that still sits on the property. They also had a penchant for raiding Wojcicki's refrigerator — a habit that may have inspired Google to provide a smorgasbord of free food to the 8,000 employees on its payroll.
When Page and Brin first moved in the garage, Google had just been incorporated with a bankroll of $1 million raised from a handful of investors. Today, Google has about $10 billion in cash and a market value of $125 billion.
Google declined to reveal how much it paid for its original home, but similar houses in the same neighborhood have been selling in the $1.1 million to $1.3 million range. That's a small fraction of the $319 million that Google paid earlier this year for its current 1-million-square-foot headquarters located six miles to the south.
Although the Google garage isn't considered a historic site quite yet, it already has turned into a tourist attraction.
The busloads of people that show up to take pictures of the house and garage have become such an annoyance that Google asked The Associated Press not to publish the property's address, although it can easily be found on the Internet using the company's search engine.
Google may use the home as a guest house, but nothing definitive has been worked out. "We plan to preserve the property as a part of our living legacy," said Google spokesman Jon Murchinson.

'Crocodile Hunter' Steve Irwin killed while filming

Brisbane: Steve Irwin, the Australian television personality and environmentalist known as the ''Crocodile Hunter,'' was killed on Monday by a stingray during a diving expedition, Australian media said. He was 44.Irwin was filming an underwater documentary on the Great Barrier Reef in northeastern Queensland state when the accident occurred, Sydney's The Daily Telegraph newspaper reported on its website.
The Australian Broadcasting Corp said Irwin was diving near Low Isles near the resort town of Port Douglas.A helicopter carrying paramedics flew to the island, but he died from a stingray barb to the heart, ABC reported on its Web site.Telephone calls to Australia Zoo, Irwin's zoo in southern Queensland, were not immediately answered.
Irwin is famous for his enthusiasm for wildlife and his catchcry ''Crikey!'' in his television program Crocodile Hunter, which was first broadcast in Australia in 1992 and has aired around the world on the Discovery channel.
He rode his image into a feature film, and developed the Australia Zoo as a tourist attraction.
Irwin had received some negative publicity in recent years. In January 2004, he stunned onlookers at his Australia Zoo reptile park by carrying his 1-year-old son into a crocodile pen during a wildlife show. He tucked the infant under one arm while tossing the 13-foot reptile a piece of meat with the other.Authorities declined to charge Irwin for violating safety regulations.
Later that year, he was accused of getting too close to penguins, a seal and humpback whales in Antarctica while making a documentary. Irwin denied any wrongdoing, and an Australian Environment Department investigation recommended no action be taken against him.