Recruitment Season and Student Concerns

This is the recruitment season for fresh engineering graduates coming out of colleges by next year Mar/April/May. Due to recession not many companies are visiting the campuses and students are in panic. You can see that from their questions regarding what is good for them. They'll mention every possible recruiter and ask if it is worth taking up a job with them.

At one level, this is a hard question. During this recession time it is not easy to give anything a go by. One tends to grab at any opportunity that can come along. It is hard on us too. As we know some of the jobs are dead ends. Because of our planned economy legacy, there are a lot of jobs with Government run agencies. Usually you get a life time job but then get into something where nothing much happens. It'll be criminal not to point out the hazards to guys who have half a mind and have learnt to exercise that.

ZOHO, An Amazing On-line Resource!

Bright hub editors have started using Zoho and that piqued my interest back on. I had fiddled with the original zohowriter when that on-line offering of MS Office like tools had a very strong curiosity value. I logged in again. It showed I was logging in after 1074 days or some such numbers. That's 3 years!

I was in for a very pleasant surprise! It has a whole array of tools, interface is newly designed. I just used the Zoho show and share and was duly impressed. I have vowed to myself to use it regularly. There's just about every facility you could ask for as a office productivity tool. As I keep changing place between my workplace and home, such on-line stuff is going to be very useful indeed!

University Syllabus WBUT

I have been teaching Advance OS and Distributed computing for sometime. They have similar content. They talk about distributed computing. Advanced features such as a higher level OS that can co-ordinate the OS of individual yet disparate systems are the topics of discussion. What I cannot help wondering is how many such systems are being built? The computers on networks are able to communicate as peer to any other peer and get the work done without trying to synchronize events in geographically dispersed locations. How many of the computer science engineers we are producing are going to use the techniques being taught!

On the other hand we have virtualization that really manages multiple and different operating systems withing one physical box. Cloud computing is a super hot topic that handles thousands of boxes in a data center. Should not we talk about these topics! Granted the synchronization and communication techniques are going to be useful. But giving the students a touch of reality is important too!