tim ferro
ramblings of a code monkey, fanboy, and uber-geek

” Fedora 9 beta is available for download today, with a final release scheduled for April 29. The latest version of the free (as in beer) cousin of Red Hat Linux comes with a number of major updates, including support for the latest versions of the KDE and GNOME desktop environments.” - Source

Google, oft the trend setters, have a position within the company of Chief Culture Officer. This person is in charge maintaining and innovating the culture at Google to keep their employees happy. The fact that this position exists shows their complete commitment to their employees, their happiness, and most importantly, employee retention. At Google, the position is held by the person who is also head of Human Resources.

In my opinion, this works because CCO is now her full time job. This position cannot be a part time job. More companies need to adopt the position and seriously work on making it a priority. Most companies care about their employees and “try” to keep them happy, but this is rarely achievable. Money is rarely the only reason employees leave their companies. This is where the CCO comes into play. When it comes to employee retention, having a CCO can make a huge difference.

This position has unique challenges for companies of all sizes. Large companies have the money and man power but have to work on keeping thousands happy. Smaller companies might not have the man power or money but have less people to work with. Some companies don’t make much of an effort to keep employees happy and some try a good amount but that is still not enough. In today’s work environment, there is always someone else, like Google, going the extra mile or 10 miles just to attract and retain top employees.

The CCO is the new, progressive position to start hiring and utilizing for companies of all sizes. This is increasingly important given the current environment of the IT industry, where employees, especially Gen Y ones, are job hopping for more than money.

– Tim Ferro

“As Bender’s Big Score gets set to air in four installments on Comedy Central later this month, Fox Home Entertainment ahs announced that the next adventure in the series of Futurama DVD movies will be available at retail this summer. The Fate of human and robot-kind is at stake when Futurama: The Beast With A Billion Backs debuts at retail on June 24.

In what Fox is calling the most tentacle-packed Futurama epic, space itself rips open, revealing a gateway to another universe. What lies beyond is a mix of horror and love as the Planet Express crew encounters a repulsive, planet-sized monster with romantic intentions.” - Source

“No more betas, release candidates, or other test builds for Windows Vista SP1. Microsoft is pushing the final version of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 out the door. You can download standalone installers for X86 and X64 systems from Microsoft starting today.” - Source

“Since its launch in January 2006, the only thing that has been publicly known about former AMD CTO Fred Weber’s new venture is its name: MetaRAM. Clearly, the stealth-mode company was working on something to do with RAM, but what? As of today, MetaRAM is finally ready to talk about its technology, and it appears to be a pretty solid evolutionary step for the tried-and-true SDRAM DIMM module. In short, MetaRAM’s technology enables DIMM capacity increases of two or four times, so that a single DDR2 MetaSDRAM DIMM can hold 4GB or 8GB of memory while still being a drop-in replacement for a normal DIMM.” - Source

“Microsoft has released the first public beta of Internet Explorer 8 for download by willing testers, which debuted this week at the Mix conference in Las Vegas. Intended for developers and designers only, IE8’s most intriguing new feature so far is “Web Slices,” which lets you monitor a single section of a web page, like an eBay auction (similar to Leopard’s Web Clips.) Web developers will be excited about better standards compliance.” - Source

“Amazon’s MP3 store got officially Linux-friendly last week, adding support for Debian 4 Etch, Fedora 8, Open SUSE 10.3, and Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy. So who’s still locked out of the store?” - Source