Google offers jobs to Nokia employees

Google seems all set to welcome with open arms employees of Nokia who are in the firing line, thus adding a new dimension to the new battle that started with the mobile major joining hands with Google's arch rival Microsoft.

Though there is no official confirmation from the search engine giant yet, one of its leading recruiter has tweeted Nokia software engineers are welcome to apply.

"Any Nokia software engineers need a job? We're hiring: www.google.com/jobs," read the tweet posted by Google EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) recruiter Aidan Biggins.

The world's top mobile phone maker Nokia plans to significantly cut jobs as it transitions to a new strategy involving a partnership with software giant Microsoft, its chief executive had said on Friday.

"There will be substantial reductions in employment in various locations around the world and that too will affect Finland," Stephen Elop told reporters in London after the company announced major shake-up in the face of intense competition.

"We don't have any specific comments about who and what level of people will be hit," he had added in a webcast. In October 2010, the company had announced 1,800 job cuts.

Nokia had last week said it is adopting Microsoft's mobile phone platform as its primary operating system. Seemingly commenting on which Google vice-president of engineering Vic Gundotra, had commented via Twitter, "Two turkeys don't make an eagle."

Interestingly, he parroted what Nokia EVP Anssi Vanjoki had said in 2005 on BenQ buying Siemens's handset business to take on the might (then) of Nokia.
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Google Fights against Spam

During this time, google search engine accused of being a nest for spam that lies in their ads. The cyber criminals managed to get their spam because spam is paired using a free pass. This of course is directly contradicted by the California-based company. Not only denied a place spam, Google promised to fight against all spam hiding through ads posted on their services. Google in its attitude will be dealing mainly with the fields of content that was shallow, and of low quality.
Reported by PC Magazine, tactical step taken by Google is to launch two major algorithmic changes, to combat the fields of content that includes spam.
Google will take action against sites that violated the guidelines of our quality standards, explained Matt Cutts from Google. Some researchers found a number of spammers has proven to utilize the search engine giant Google as a tool to send spam to avoid tracking installed email filter.
Based on the latest reports MessageLa, found the number of blocked websites increased approximately 91 percent, from 2076 sites in June, and approximately 3968 in July, with the largest percentage of the website is exposed to SQL injection attacks.
Most of the spam that is found will be automatically downloaded by bringing a sort of anti-spyware program Antivirus XP 2008. Programs that look genuine but fake ask the user to buy a license.
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GM recalls 2,800 imported cars in China: Report

Shanghai General Motors is to recall 2,806 imported Cadillacs in China to repair faulty suspension , state media said Monday, citing a government statement.

The recall, due to begin on March 21, includes models of the Cadillac CTS produced between June 16, 2008 and April 20, 2009, the government's General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine said on its website, according to the Xinhua news agency.

The statement said the company would repair or replace rear suspension track bars of the recalled vehicles because some nuts on the bars are likely to loosen and cause worn screw threads.

This could lead to a loosened track bar under extreme conditions, which is unsafe when travelling fast, it said.

China's booming market has become increasingly important to US auto giant General Motors as demand weakens in the States. China, where GM's international operations are now based, overtook the US as the world's biggest auto market in 2009.

GM has several joint ventures in China including Shanghai General Motors, a partnership with China's largest auto maker SAIC Motor.

GM said on Wednesday last week its sales in China jumped 22.3 percent year-on-year in January to set a new monthly record.
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Facebook News Feed filtering can make friends vanish

If some of your friends seem to have become unusually quiet on Facebook, it may not be their fault.The social network quietly changed the settings that govern what updates appear in the News Feed.
Before, clicking the "Most Recent" link atop that list of updates would give you exactly that: the most recent updates from your friends, instead of the automatically edited selection available under "Top News." Now, however, the Most Recent list can itself be filtered: Facebook can hide some updates by friends if you haven't interacted with them on the site recently.
(In a similar move, Facebook now sorts posts on pages from fans by their perceived relevance, not the order in which they were posted.)
To check, click the Most Recent link (twice if you're now viewing the Top News list) and select "Edit Options..." from the menu that appears below it. You'll see a dialog pop open, as seen above; its "Show posts from:" menu will offer a choice of "Friends and pages you interact with most" or "All of your friends and pages." The latter will restore things to their prior working, showing everything from your friends (and the companies, organizations and public figures whose pages you've endorsed with a click of their Like buttons).
In fairness to Facebook, it's tackling one of the harder problems in computing: finding out what's important to a user and hiding what's not. This challenge comes up in one category of application after another and has spawned solutions as diverse as Gmail's "Priority Inbox" and the smart playlists that music programs offer to ensure you can keep rocking along to 2003's greatest hits.
But this sort of change requires better documentation than Facebook has provided so far. More choices in News Feed filtering would also help. Here are a few options that I'd like to see the site add:
* Hide politically themed updates from friends I tolerate despite their reactionary/pinko leanings.
* Hide politically themed updates from friends of similar political views who just can't shut up about them.
* Hide really syrupy Valentine's Day greetings and other public displays of digital affection.
* Hide all updates from Facebook games.
* Show only the first four copies of a joke, link, photo or video once it starts to go viral across the site.
* Hide status updates that a friend has cross-posted from Twitter, but show all other posts by that friend.
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Brazil great Ronaldo confirms retirement

SAO PAULO: Three-time FIFA World Player of the Year Ronaldo, whose goalscoring genius led Brazil to the 2002 World Cup title, confirmed his retirement on Monday at the age of 34.

The tearful Corinthians striker announced his decision at a press conference in Sao Paulo.

"I'm stopping my career as a professional footballer," he said, his voice breaking. "It's been a beautiful, emotional, marvellous career.

"These last two years, I've had a long series of injuries, from one side to the other, one leg to the other, one muscle to the other. The pain pushed me to think about the end of my career."

Ronaldo also revealed that he suffered from a thyroid problem that had made it difficult to control his weight.

"Four years ago, in Milan, I discovered that I suffered from an under-active thyroid that slowed down my metabolism and that to control it, I had to take hormones that weren't authorised in football as they were considered a form of doping," he said.

"Lots of people must regret having made jokes about my weight. But I feel no anger towards anyone."

Having earlier indicated that he hoped to play on until the end of the year, injuries and Corinthians' early elimination from the Copa Libertadores prompted him to bring forward his retirement.

During a glittering 14-year spell in Europe, Ronaldo scored goals at a prolific rate for PSV Eindhoven, Barcelona, Inter Milan, Real Madrid and AC Milan, before returning to Brazil in 2009.

He won the World Cup with Brazil in 2002 and became the leading scorer in World Cup finals tournaments when he scored his 15th goal at the 2006 tournament in Germany.

He was twice named European Footballer of the Year, in 1997 and 2002, and finished his international career with 62 goals in 97 appearances.

Widely regarded as one of the greatest players of all time, 'El Fenomeno' (The Phenomenon) won the World Cup with Brazil for the first time in 1994, though on that occasion the 17-year-old was part of the squad and did not play.

In 1998, he was among the losing finalists, beaten 3-0 at Stade de France by a rampant French side that included the inspirational Zinedine Zidane.

Brazil's star striker suffered a convulsive fit on the eve of the match and was removed from the starting line-up.

In a dramatic changing-room re-shuffle, he was reinstated just before kick-off but was a shadow of the intimidating forward who had scored four goals in the run-up to the final.

But the 2002 tournament was where he made history.

Shrugging off injury in the tournament, which was hosted by Japan and South Korea, he played a key role in helping Brazil to the trophy, scoring both goals in his country's 2-0 win over Germany in the final in Yokohoma.

At the 2006 World Cup in Germany he took his World Cup tally to 15 goals, surpassing the previous record held by Gerd Mueller by one goal.

Ronaldo, who began his career with Cruzeiro, had to fight back from three career-threatening knee injuries over the course of his career.

He was sidelined while playing for Inter by a knee injury in 1999 only to damage the same knee in his comeback for the club in February 2000, effectively keeping him out of action until March 2002.

In February 2008 he ruptured a tendon in his right knee playing for AC Milan against Livorno, an injury that ended his career in Europe.

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Adobe Launches E-form Service

Adobe Launches E-form Service
Adobe has launched a service for conducting online surveys that the company says should ease the process of setting them up and analyzing their results.
"Form and survey management is traditionally a very time-consuming process, often times involving IT," said Mark Grilli, Adobe director of product marketing. "You'd use one mechanism for retrieving information, and another for doing analysis. We thought having an end-to-end solution would give knowledge workers the tools they need to get their jobs done."
The hosted service, called Adobe Forms Central, allows organizations to develop a customized survey form that would be accessible from the Internet. Adobe has endeavored to make the service easy enough to use so that the task of conducting surveys can be done without the intervention of IT staff, Grilli said.
With Forms Central, the user creates a form online at the Adobe site, either using a set of templates or by designing a form from scratch. The forms will be based on HTML, making them accessible from any Web browser on any platform. Forms can be customized for each participant, with personalized name and message. Adobe provides a Web address for the finished form, which then can be mailed to possible participants.
The service will also compile the results into an online spreadsheet, which can be analyzed or embedded in another Web page. A dashboard shows a summary of the results. The administrator tools are accessed by a Web browser, using Adobe Flash.
With this offering, Adobe is entering a mature and highly competitive market, as FormsCentral will compete against similar Web survey services offered by SurveyMonkey, Zoomerang, FormStack and others. Nonetheless, the company is confident this service will stand apart from competitors.
"We have a unique approach to analysis. Many other solutions abdicate analysis to an internal tool," Grilli said.
Instead of downloading the resulting survey data to a spreadsheet, a user can search, sort and filter the response data directly in Adobe's service. Multiple participants are allowed to analyze the data at the same time, bringing a collaborative feeling to the service. The service also allows multiple participants to collaborate in the design of the form as well.
FormsCentral is not Adobe's first foray into the world of electronic and digital forms. The company's PDF format, of course, can be used as a digital form that allows the user to fill information into data fields. And the company's LiveCycle suite of workflow tools features a set of electronic-form design and analysis capabilities.
As an Internet-based hosted offering, however, FormsCentral is suited for surveying a more geographically dispersed set of participants than can be easily accessed with the enterprise-focused LiveCycle.
The service will initially be offered only in English, though the company plans to offer additional languages in the near future.
Pricing for the service, available Monday, comes in three tiers. A free trial includes the ability to post one form and receive up to 50 responses. The "Basic" subscription service, priced at US$14.99 a month, includes the ability to post five forms and allows up to 500 responses per form. The "Plus" service, for $199, allows unlimited forms, with 5,000 responses per form.
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