benefits

Microsoft held a meeting with employees today, letting them know that the company plans to make changes to its health care plan, requiring workers to eventually start paying a portion of the insurance costs.

The software maker will continue to pay the full costs for worker health insurance for the next two years, before making workers start to contribute in 2013.

"We can confirm that Microsoft has begun to evolve its employee health care benefit," Microsoft spokesman Lou Gellos said in a statement. "There will be no changes for the next two years, but in 2013, employees … Read more

Cost Benefit Analysis Template provides a simple tool for calculating financial futures. With its familiar layout and excellent direction, this program makes financial forecasting simple enough for even novices.

The program's interface was immediately familiar to us since it was built within an Excel spreadsheet. The money management aspects were simple as well, thanks to its onscreen instructions, which covered navigation and interpretation of fields and equations. This program allowed us to forecast a project's financial expenses as far as nine years away. We simply entered our costs and benefits into the appropriate rows and columns and the … Read more

Storage maker NetApp ranked No. 1 on Fortune magazine's list of the top 100 companies to work for, bumping Google from its perch, according to a report in the publication on Thursday.

NetApp, which employs nearly 8,000 people worldwide, was selected for its "employees enthusiasm," along with its benefits from nearly $11,400 in adoption aid to five paid days to do volunteer work.

And even better still, the company is one of the few in the hiring mode during these recessionary times, seeking to fill 55 positions as of January 13.

This year's ranking … Read more

While the benefits of playing video games should be nothing new to astute gamers, surveys and studies are still being conducted seemingly all the time on this subject.

The latest report on the benefits of gaming comes from Sony Online Entertainment (which, I mean come on, how is this impartial?). The results, published in the latest issue of Family Circle magazine, suggests parents are seeing improvements in hand/eye coordination, problem solving, and typing skills since their children have started playing video games.

In addition, games are apparently creating little Enders, by teaching children to think strategically. The report states … Read more

NEW YORK--"We skipped the paparazzi," Eyebeam director Amanda McDonald Crowley said as she welcomed several hundred people to the digital art center's annual benefit on Tuesday night. "We've got a photo-taking duck."

That requires a little bit of context.

On display at Eyebeam's "Freedom and Creativity"-themed benefit, held at the organization's headquarters in the post-industrial West Chelsea neighborhood, were a number of commissioned artists' and fellows' projects. One of them was Taeyoon Choi's "Camerautomata," literally a robotic duck that skittered about the floor, Roomba-like, taking … Read more

Google slowed its hiring because the company couldn't keep track of what everybody was doing, Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said Wednesday.

"We have slowed our head count growth for a couple of reasons, but the biggest reason is it began to feel like we really didn't have a good sense of what people were doing," Schmidt said in an interview with CNBC. "The systems in the company, literally who's doing what, what are they doing, seemed to lag our ability to hire these great people."

Though the company slowed hiring later in 2007, … Read more