Accenture Laying Off About 336 Senior Executives

The IT Market is picking up and some companies have shown profits in their last quarter which was sounding good till now, the word "Reccession" is slowly moving of the minds and now the layoff bells rings again. This time it is by accenture which targets Senior executives not the freshers or medium level engineers. Well Accenture has got around 4,800 senior executives , it says 336 employees may be affected.

The company expects the space reductions to be completed by the end of the current fiscal year, and the workforce actions to be substantially completed during the first quarter of fiscal year 2010.

Accenture says these actions will result in a pre-tax restructuring charge of approximately $247 million in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2009, ending 31 August 2009. Accenture expects net revenues for the 4th quarter of fiscal year 2009 to be in the range of $5.0 billion to $5.2 billion.
According to William D. Green, chairman and CEO, Accenture, “The realignment of our senior-executive workforce will help ensure that Accenture has the right people, skills and capabilities, at the right levels and in the right places. The affected executives are highly skilled and valued professionals, and we will be working with them, as appropriate, to help them find new opportunities outside of Accenture that take advantage of their experience and expertise.”

William D. Green further added, “In addition to continuing to manage Accenture with great discipline in a challenging environment, we’re taking proactive steps to ensure that we have the right cost structure to support our business going forward and that our organisation is properly aligned to most effectively capture future growth opportunities. At the same time, we’re making strategic investments in high-value growth areas that will enable us to extend our leadership in the market.”

While looking at the layoffs by the companies , Govt has to come up with strict laws for stopping these layoffs , as i say loss to company is brought by the people sitting at the higher level of the companies who are responsible to take decisions for the growth of the companies and they are being paid not only to get the profits but also to analyse future possible disasters. If the company comes into loss what does a fresher or a simple employee has got to do with that, the loss of profit for the company is generated by the decision making of the management. Now company should analyse who are exactly responsible for the loss and penalise them.This is very rude towards the employees who doesn't even know why they are being layedoff, the only reason they were given is company is in loss.

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Kilimanjaro Microsoft SQL server 2010

Kilimanjaro is no longer just an inactive volcano in Tanzania, as Microsoft has borrowed the name to designate the next iteration of its data platform. Microsoft is coming up with big release of much awaited sql server 2010 . Good news for all sql server developers and admin , get ready for the new tool coming into your hands loaded with new features .As per the information first Preview build is by late 2009 around dec or jan 2010 and release is in late 2010 or early 2011.Its code name is Kilimanjaro

“Kilimanjaro is focused on 'People Ready BI'. A key component of Kilimanjaro is 'Project Gemini', this is all about self-service BI using Excel. The vision behind Gemini is to free IT resources by giving business intelligence analysis and reporting capabilities to the end-users without IT losing control,” revealed a "Technology Solution Professional" for the Data Platform.

SQL Server 2010 will focus on what the company calls “managed self service” with new reporting tools. Microsoft promises with this release to make it easier for users to pull data from various sources, but make all that work traceable by IT. What’s new here is new in-memory features that will let users pull all that data into Excel, lay out out tables and charts with clickable elements”.

SQL Server 2008 shipped with Policy-Based Management, a way for DBAs to control large numbers of instances by setting up configuration policies. For example, we can create policies that every table must have a primary key, or that all stored procedures must begin with usp. SQL Server 2010 takes this to the next logical level by enabling these policies by default.

Stay tuned for more information....

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Job portal from Govt. of India.

Jobsites such as Naukri.com and Monster.com could now face competition from an unexpected source — the Government of India.Employement is the most important that our Govt. need to focus. There are huge job portals in the indian market which gives pretty good information about the employment oppurtunities but imagine Govt. of india giving the same information accross the nation which would really help the job seekers and even govt can earn some amount using this portal.

The Government is creating a web-portal that will have comprehensive details about the skilled manpower requirements of industry and the available skilled manpower in the country. This was announced by the Minister of State for Labour and Employment, Mr Harish Rawat, at the Global Skills Summit organised by FICCI.

Well they took long time to realize about modernising this system but anyways it is a good move imaging openings for railways or bankings or any other government sector, now people need not stand on the road side shops for getting the information about the openings.Mr Rawat said the Government has realised that it was time employment exchanges across the country were modernised.

“If we do get our skills development act together, in 10 years India may conceivably become a global reservoir of skilled person power. Else, our demographic dividend could turn into a demographic nightmare.”



The Minister said: “The constraints of dissemination of information to both employers and job seekers would be overcome by the introduction of this e-Governance project.”


Now the government target is to complete the modernization process at all 469 employment exchanges by this year end. . Once the modernisation was completed, employment exchanges across the country would do more than just keep lists of job seekers and jobs. Mr Rawat said the process would be in line with current trends in the industry and employment exchanges would cater to the needs of industry, providing it with full information on the available labour force in the country.

Speaking on the sidelines of the summit, the Minister said the upgradation and modernisation of 400 Industrial Training Institutes with World Bank assistance was almost complete.

Mr Narendra Jadhav, Member, Planning Commission, in his address, pointed out the huge potential of the skills development process. “If we do get our skills development act together, in 10 years India may conceivably become a global reservoir of skilled person power. Else, our demographic dividend could turn into a demographic nightmare.”

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WebSphere vs .NET: IBM and Microsoft Go Head to Head

"After carrying out a number of benchmarks, Microsoft concluded that .NET offers better performance and cost-performance ratio than WebSphere." (Shock! Surprise!)

"IBM rebutted Microsoft’s findings and carried out other tests proving that WebSphere is superior to .NET." (Shock! Surprise!)

"Microsoft responded by rejecting some of IBM’s claims as false and repeating the tests on different hardware with different results."

More details GO Here

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Hiring activity picks up by 1.3%

Indian market is slowly picking up its pace though it not much affected by recession, the market recruitements or growth activities had been slowed down earlier. We have seen inflation rate going to negative values. Companies stopped hiring the employees rather they fired some many employees out of the companies. Layoffs was the only word heard in the corporate world earlier.

Now the good news is companies started recruiting the employees. Specially Indian market is seeing the increase the percentage of recruitements by the companies. India inc's hiring activity picker up by 1.3 % in the month of july with the improvement in recruitement in IT, real estates and retail sectors.

As per the survey of Naukri the largest job portal of india says that monthly 'JobSpeak index' continued to move upwards and edged up by 1.3 percent to727 in July compared to 718 in June.

On a three monthly moving average, the index inched up from 686 in June to 703 in July with industries including real estate, semiconductors, banking, auto and IT, witnessing an improvement, the survey said.

"The uptrend over consecutive months is encouraging. Improvement in hiring activity in lagging industries, such as IT, real estate, retail and auto, echoes optimism. However, continued increases in hiring activity over the next few months will indicate a turnaround in economic activity and in hiring," Info Edge, owner of naukri.com, National Head Marketing and Communications Sumeet Singh said.

In June, the hiring activity had increased 8.1 percent over the previous month.

Recruitment activity in the IT industry remained in the green with hiring up by four per cent in IT-software, seven per cent up in IT-hardware and networking and three per cent up in ITeS and BPO.

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Solar energy for mobile devices is still 'limited'

Solar energy which we were talking about from years , how to utilise this energy. Personally i feel this is the only energy which never ends and can be utilised in a proper way. why not we invest money in developing technology for utilising solar enery rather then electricity or any other fuel. Socal cars, Solar heaters, etc which came into the world was never a sucess story for the people.

Mobiles are most used gadgets by the people these dasy. Analysts says that Mobiles are the future computers.
Now companies are struggling hard to create mobile devices that run with soloar energy, sounds cool but how successfull they can be by designing these devices.

photovoltaic (PV) technology is the one which is being used to design solar mobiles devices.Solar or photovoltaic (PV) technology in mobile computing devices is still impeded by performance and price issues, and is not likely to entirely replace batteries anytime soon, according to analysts.

James Hines, Gartner's research director for semiconductor, told performance is the "primary inhibitor to the practical application of integrated solar cells" in today's mobile devices.Solar-powered battery chargers for mobile phones and other devices are already available in the market, but are not only expensive but performance is also "poor", he had said in a recent research document.

Even in India we have seen mobiles running with solar power. In June, Samsung launched the Solar Guru in India, which the Korean mobile maker says has the capacity to provide five to 10 minutes of talk time by charging one hour in sunlight. Japanese vendor Sharp also unveiled its Solar Phone SH002 in June, the Nikkei Business Publications reported. Samsung could not be reached for comments, while Sharp was unable to respond by press time.

For these applications to be feasible, however, there must be "a significant breakthrough in PV technology" to not only improve energy conversion efficiency but also lower costs, Hines pointed out.

Photovoltaic cells, he explained, currently have a low-energy conversion, while mobile devices increasingly consume more power in active mode. To meet "a significant portion" of the power requirements of full-feature modern mobile devices, the solar panels will have to be larger than the devices, which makes portability more problematic.


But if solar bateries are really successful, imagine the consumption of electric power can be reduces to lot extent. Hope the technology takes a diversion involves more in solar energy consumption techniques.

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IBM Faces Backlash Against Pensions Proposals

IBM recently announced plans to close its final salary pension scheme in the UK, in order to maintain competitiveness and introduce greater predictability to long-term pension provision costs. Where as Unite, the UK's Largest trade union has reportedly warned IBM of a "backlash" from thousands of employees against its proposal as there are more than 5000 employees get affected with this move by IBM.

Earlier IBM said it would consult the staff from 5 Aug 09 till 60 days from then and take decision on the feedback receieved by the staff. But what made employee going against the proposal if IBM has really consulted the staff.
As of now employees are really angry with the decision of IBM Pensial proposal.

The union calculated that typically people in their mid-50s could lose up to £200,000 as a result of these changes from the retirement pension they had expected to draw before the company's announcement in July.

Peter Skyte, national officer, IT and communications, Unite, warned, "IBM is facing a backlash against its pensions proposals. These highly skilled and experienced staff were key to the company's survival and they view the company's proposals as a kick in the teeth."

He also said, "IBM is a highly profitable company with substantial revenues and cash reserves. But is using the recession as a cloak to close its pension schemes to existing members and further line the pockets of its shareholders and senior executives at the expense of its loyal workforce."

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DOS attack on Twitter and Facebook

Twitter and Facebook were attacked by DDOS (DISTRIBUTED DENIAL OF SERVICE) which led to the site-wide outage for several hours on Thursday suffered periodic slowness and time-outs throughout the day. Also heard few of Google services were also being attacked. Speaking about this attack Max Kelly, chief security officer at Facebookalleged one blogger, who uses the account name "Cyxymu," (the name of a town in the Republic of Georgia)

Kelly also mentioned that “Cyxymu's LiveJournal page wasn't accessible, but a cached version showed that it was updated on Thursday with a message about the denial of service (DOS) attacks on his accounts on the US-based sites. “Now it's obvious it's a special attack against me and Georgians," the message in Russian said.” And he also mentioned that this was the first coordinated attack on the sites, and all the companies involved were working closely on the investigation

However Facebook and Google were able to minimize any impact to their sites, including Blogger, YouTube and Google Sites. Facebook even managed to keep the Cyxymu account accessible to Web surfers from that region


What is this DOS or DDOS are really?
A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users.

How this will be done?
One common method of attack involves saturating the target (victim) machine with external communications requests, such that it cannot respond to legitimate traffic, or responds so slowly. In general terms, DoS attacks are implemented by either forcing the targeted computer(s) to reset, or consuming its resources so that it can no longer provide its intended service or obstructing the communication media between the intended users.

Attacks can be directed at any network device, including attacks on routing devices and web, electronic mail, or Domain Name System servers.

For example, sending an extraordinary amount of electronic mail to someone could fill the computer disk where mail resides. This means that people who use the computer with the full disk cannot receive any new email until the situation changes.

A DoS attack can be perpetrated in a number of ways. The five basic types of attack are:
1. Consumption of computational resources, such as bandwidth, disk space, or processor time
2. Disruption of configuration information, such as routing information.
3. Disruption of state information, such as unsolicited resetting of TCP sessions.
4. Disruption of physical network components.
5. Obstructing the communication media between the intended users and the victim so that they can no longer communicate adequately.

Details regarding DDOS courtesy: Wikipedia and other sources

To know more about this DDOS attacks, types of DDOS attacks and how these will be done in detailed please visit below links
Wiki and cert

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