All posts by herdivineshadow

half-girl, half-robot
reBlogged

Computer industry ‘faces crisis’


The computer industry faces a skills crisis, the president of the British Computer Society has told BBC News.

Unless steps are taken now, there will not be enough qualified graduates to meet the demands of UK industry, warned Professor Nigel Shadbolt.

Prof Shadbolt said there was increasing demand but decreasing supply of graduates in computer science.

As a computer science graduate, this story makes me giggle a bit. Mainly because I’m now working in an area nothing to do with computer science. In fact, studying computer science may well discourage graduates from going into that area when they enter the workplace. I know I certainly learnt to hate programming and a number of my fellow students learnt to hate computers entirely.

Coupled with a seemingly high drop-out rate for Computer Science degrees (I’m sure only about a third of the students I entered university with stuck around to graduate), I’m not surprised that there is this concern about a lack of graduates.

One solution would perhaps make Computer Science more attractive to female students – I was one of only two girls graduating with my particular degree, and there can’t have been more than 40 girls total graduating from my department. Alternatively, another idea would be to give oppotunities in IT related careers to people without Computer Science degrees, but relevant experience and expertise from other sources.

Originally by Rachel from More Tomorrow on November 20, 2006, 5:41am

reBlogged

Police to fingerprint on streets


Motorists who get stopped by the police could have their fingerprints taken at the roadside, under a new plan to help officers check people’s identities.

I know there’s a lot of concern about how this is all Big Brotherish and turning the UK into Orwell’s “1984″ state but my concern about this mobile fingerprinting is slightly different.

My problem with this is that the devices used to take the fingerprints is bound to be something that will get dirty and not correctly capture fingerprints – possibly giving incorrect information to the police officers involved. This is especially a problem if the fingerprint capturing surface is made of glass or plastic – it’s bad enough when you get fingerprints on windows and mirror, but having a glass surface full of mucky fingerprints when you’re trying to use fingerprints to identify someone is wacky and crazy. I’d be interested to know how they get around this potential problem.

Originally by Rachel from More Tomorrow on November 22, 2006, 5:49am

reBlogged

Google Checkout


“When we’ve had to contact Google about issues (such as the suspected fraud), we’ve received intelligent customer service and the problems were quickly resolved. Contacting PayPal customer support, on the other hand, has been a complete nightmare. Automated response hell, followed by canned responses that didn’t address our issue, followed by silence.”
– TechCrunch

That alone is enough to tempt me into using Google Checkout. Any alternative to paypal is worth a look actually, though I’m going to have to investigate if and how I could use this with ebay. Even without being able to use it with Ebay, it could certainly be useful for selling on forums and on my journal. Something to think about.

Originally by Rachel from More Tomorrow on November 12, 2006, 1:37pm

reBlogged

there you are, angry with me

So today I went to church and we sang dissonant songs related to death and hope and the foe and stuff.

That was pretty much all I’ve done, apart from vacuuming downstairs. Later I’ll do upstairs.

Yesterday there was shopping and buying of stuff. One wickedcool black dress, a grey cardigan (i’m working on the basis that my mum can’t complain that I only ever seem to wear black if I wear only grey), much chocolate from Hotel Chocolat, stuff from Lush, a Winnie the Pooh advent calendar and Christmas tea. 😀 I figure I might as well spend the jobseekers money that… finally arrived after I got a job, on frivolous things and use it on Christmas stuff for my mum and dad.

On that note, actually, the whole Jobseekers Plus thing was wholly unhelpful. Going along at lunchtime every two weeks to sit around doing essentially nothing for a little over an hour is crazyunproductive. It’s like they thought I had nothing better to do (though yes I spent huge amounts of time online, I do that anyway what with my waking up early thing). So that was annoying. Time when I could have been sorting out lunch for my dad or making sure we had food for dinner in the evening or vacuuming or fixing stuff or cleaning or finding out obscure things that my mum wants to know about. Annoying. Yes. And it’s not like they actually helped me find a job anyway. I got told to apply for… 3 low-paid jobs that I was ludicrously overqualified for that wouldn’t have hired me because… I was ludicrously overqualified and they wouldn’t have wanted someone who would be looking for other jobs and likely to leave at any moment. And the looking in the newspaper thing never worked out for me because it was all stuff in London that was a bit too far away. Or in Surrey. So OMG READ THE NEWSPAPER EVERY DAY did nothing but make me annoyed at whoever was writing the articles for missing out information that I already knew about from reading about the same thing online.

Button clicking on the internet however = win + jobs. Also, takes all of two minutes.
</end rant>

Some time this week I think I should go to the cinema. Probably Wednesday. And then… on Friday I go away to an abbey near Wales.

Originally from her divine shadow on November 12, 2006, 6:31am