Results tagged “techies”

Last night Google announced that it would soon be open-sourcing a new operating system, Google Chrome OS, to be run on netbooks for an ultimate 2010 release to consumers. Google says, "It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be," but as TechCrunch puts it: "Let’s be clear on what this really is. This is Google dropping the mother of bombs on its chief rival, Microsoft. It even says as much in the first paragraph of its [blog] post, 'However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web.'"

Area bankruptcy filings have gone up 50% in the first quarter of 2009, compared to last year, the San Jose Mercury News reports. Records at the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in San Jose (which covers Santa Clara, Monterey, San Benito and Santa Cruz counties) showed 2,399 filings in Q1 2009; for Q1 2008, there were just over 1,500 while in Q1 2006, there were just 500. One bankruptcy lawyer explained, "We're seeing cutbacks in electronics and at Sun, Yahoo — large numbers of people are having their income cut, and for many it's making their house unaffordable," while another points out many of those filings are from "people in their mid-50s, formerly with Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, Intel and Applied Materials... They've been with these employers, in some cases, for decades. They are engineers, highly skilled people, and now they're being laid off. I didn't see that in the last downturn."