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!

A Strange Dilemma

There has been a lot of discussions at my current workplace aboutt how to make students attend classes more. The requirement of the university is 75% during a semester. On the one hand this does not happen in case of many a students. Yet, it is really hard to stop a student from appearing in the final semester exams because of this. There has even been court cases and the courts seem to say that you cannot really stop the students from appearing from the examinations. The cirteria is that they should pass the final test. If they can do it without attending classes the what's the problem!

I personally also think that we should really not bother about attendance. These are professional courses. If students can clear their examps without attending classes so be it! This should, entirely, be voluntary! If most students pass without attending classes, where we are supposedly teaching the subject to them, then the problem lis elsewhere. The examination standards then become suspect.

How Not to Do a Seminar

Here was this company at our institute to talk about ERP, the enterprise resource planning, technology to the students and memebers of the faculty. The standard way of doing it is the sales presentation to show off how you could do a lot of things with the software and try to relate them to the way your prospective customers could solve problems in their life. But, there would not be much in it for students who would like to understand what it is all about, the structure of the software in terms of software architecture terms and so on.

They were so used to the standard approach that despite actually being told how to structure the talk, they still came up with the standard sales pitch. No wonder, students started slipping away. While we started with 60 odd guys in theseminar we ended up with just about half a dozen by the time we finished! Who can blame them! If I was not the host, I would have too.

Microsoft, Yahoo and Google

The MS- Yahoo! deal finally came off! That makes Microsoft Bing the no 2 search engine. Apparently it has something like 15% of the market. between Yahoo! and Bing this share is expectyed to go up to 30% or better and start challenging Google who's sitting on more than 65% share.

With this one move Microsoft moves to number 2 position. Yahoo! gives up search business and saves on the R&D expenses. Yahoo woyuld server up ads on the Bing search results and have a sharing arrangement with MS. Look like it is quite win-win for both of them.

Is Google worried! Te gap is so large, if they maintain theinnovation periodically, they should be oki. But, for consumers it is good to have a number 2 challenging number one. The number one is likely to get complacent over time.

Android is Moving into Sub-laptop Space

When Android came out on a cell phone, it was quite a sensation. Within a couple of years now, it seems to be moving into these small formfactor laptops. Gartner reported from Computex 2009 in Taiwan that Android is set to move into this space certainly. Computex showed quite a few exaples of these products that used Android.

This space actually includes couple of types of products. The netbooks, 10 inch display with Atom on the inside kind of products that are primarily aimed at being a net aid. These products are actually PCs with scaled down performance, being the same Wintel combination. In fact lot of people are seeing these as truly affordable laptops.

The other product category in the same display format are called smartbooks as these use the processors used in smartphones and giving you similar net access on the small notebook format.Thees are predominantly ARM processor based.

Examples on both kind of platforms were seen on the show floor, coupled with the fact that Microsft is not going to port windows 7 onto ARM, there's enough incentive for Goole to fill that vacuum. Additionally ports to MIPs also were shown. Acer is even doing a x86 port of Android. So, what's going to stop Android! Let's watch and see, this is going to be interesting.