The number of petitions for H-1B temporary workers filed for next year increased overall by about 20 percent this time around, U.S. immigration officials said this week.

On Tuesday, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said it had closed this year’s application window, having received more than enough petitions to meet a congressionally mandated cap of 65,000 visas and fill another 20,000 slots for foreigners holding advanced degrees from U.S. universities. But it didn’t immediately reveal the number of petitions it had received.

USCIS said on Thursday that according to a “preliminary” count, it had received more than 163,000 petitions, of which about 31,200 pertained to the visas for advanced degree holders, between April 1 and April 7. Per a recent rule, USCIS plans to conduct a random computer selection process to narrow down the petitions received during those first five days of the application window.

Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s top technology executive is stepping down as the world’s No. 2 microprocessor maker tries to recover from a sales slump triggered by prolonged product delays and tougher competition.

The Sunnyvale-based company said Friday that Chief Technology Officer Phil Hester’s resignation is not connected to AMD’s financial woes or its recently announced 10 percent reduction of its global work force.

Hester joined the company in 2005 after working for more than two decades at IBM Corp. and was responsible for crafting AMD’s technological roadmap over the past three years.

Spokesman Rob Keosheyan declined to give further details about Hester’s departure, except to say the position won’t be filled because each of AMD’s key business units now has its own chief technology officer - a structure Hester helped establish.

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is coming under fire for discontinuing its policy of taking a “digital snapshot” of all federal agency and congressional public Web sites at the end of congressional and presidential terms.

NARA, which until this year had collected a “harvests” of federal Web sites at the end of presidential and congressional terms, said in a recent memo that it would discontinue the practice at the end of George W. Bush’s presidency.

A spokeswoman for NARA Friday asserted that the content is already saved by each agency as permanent records.

People searching the Internet for information about suicide methods are more likely to find sites encouraging suicide than those offering help or support, according to a study released Friday.

Researchers from the Universities of Bristol, Oxford and Manchester found that nearly half of websites showing up in queries of the four top search engines gave “how to” advice on taking one’s own life.

Only 13 percent, by contrast, focused on suicide prevention or offered support, while another 12 percent actively discouraged suicide.

Previous studies have shown that media reporting of suicide and its portrayal on television influence suicidal behaviour, particularly the choice of method used, but little is known about the impact of the Internet.

The study, published in the British Medical Journal, replicated a typical search that might be undertaken by a person looking for instructions and information about methods of suicide.

The same set of search terms were fed into Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.

The researchers then analysed the first ten sites from each search, giving a total of 480 hits.

Just under half of the sites provided some information about methods of suicide, while almost a fifth were for dedicated suicide sites, half of them actively encouraging, promoting, or facilitating the taking of one’s life.

A federal appeals court said Friday it won’t reconsider a ruling favoring TiVo Inc. in its patent dispute with Dish Network Corp.

The decision puts TiVo closer to receiving the $94 million a lower court awarded the Alviso, Calif.-based digital video recorder maker for Dish Network’s patent infringement. It also sets an important legal precedent that gives TiVo leverage as it negotiates partnerships with other satellite and cable TV providers who want to use DVR technology.

In January, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit agreed with a lower court that DVRs distributed by Dish, formerly known as EchoStar Communications Corp., violated the software elements of TiVo’s patent. The ruling overturned the lower court’s finding that Dish also infringed on the patent’s hardware elements.

Dish last month asked the Washington-based appeals court to rehear the case, saying the court’s ruling relied on inaccurate testimony from a TiVo witness. But the court Friday declined to reconsider its decision.

Dish Network said it would file an appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court.