What do we want our kids to be when they grow up?

A recent survey from recruitment consultancy, Hudson, says: “One in five (21%) UK IT professionals are so dissatisfied with their role they do not want their children to follow them into IT.” While the dissatisfaction statistic from the survey is obviously a concern for the industry, I’m not sure that the link with what they / we want for our children is relevant…  I’m pretty happy doing what I am doing and I manage to pay the bills but I can’t say that I want any of my kids to become PR consultants.  Did my dad want me to become an IFA?  I shouldn’t think so.

“Even more discontented than IT staff were male lawyers. Almost one third (32.3%) said they would not want their children to follow them into the law.”

We all want our kids to be happy / happier than us, healthy and comfortable.  We want them to live stress-free lives and have few worries.  Maybe a better and more interesting survey would be to find the industries where people DID want their children to follow in their footsteps…  I can’t think of too many.

Charge your phone with the power of ‘dance’

This is clever stuff but I wonder if there is a version that will charge my phone while I sit on my rump watching the telly..?!  If they could use the opposite of kinetic energy to charge things while I sit completely still…  then I’d be impressed.

“The system uses a arrangement of weights and magnets to exploit the Faraday Principle that an electric current can be generated from a conductor moving in a magnetic field. Consequently, as wearers dance, the charger generates energy which is stored in a reservoir battery that can then be used later to recharge a mobile phone.”

Bold as brass

I like my Blackberry Curve but I do wish it did more (and it isn’t as sexy as the iPhone even though it is more practical).  But RIM’s newest family member does look interesting…

The screen looks a bit small but with 3G and WiFi built in, this looks impressive and I could be tempted if I’m not wowed by anything else when it comes to upgrade time.

Jason Stamper seems quite impressed too.

This will stop damn cyclists going through red lights

I have nothing against cyclists (some of my best friends, etc.), but I do hate those ‘bad bikers’ that think the Highway Code is not for them and that it is OK to go through red lights – especially when I am crossing the road with my kids (or a hot cup of Americano…). Maybe this will stop them?

Instead of showing a red light when it’s time for pedestrians to cross the street, a curtain-like, two-dimensional image of giant people crossing the street is projected. The real pedestrians walk behind their virtual counterparts. Nice.

The ultimate “laptop”

Not sure about this.  Something tells me that frantically typing onto my groin in a public place (train, plane, coffee shop) would be a tad embarrassing…

The ‘G spot’ is especially tricky as it is slap bang in the middle of the keyboard…

I told you so…

As I said, encrypting data is all that is needed in the age of “every time a laptop is lost, it is front page news”.  This would have been a really big story if the CD in question hadn’t been encrypted.  As the data was secure, the panic is over (though how on earth it got “hidden between the keyboard and the circuit board of the laptop” is anyone’s guess).

40 winks

I am a big fan of the power nap – and, when I used to travel a lot, I managed to teach myself to sleep anywhere for short periods of time to recharge my batteries.  So, I like this concept planned for airports but somehow this all seems a bit too public a place for me to get a bit of valuable shut-eye.  I guess I am happy enough to close my eyes and dribble onto my shirt on the tube for 20 minutes at a time so maybe this will actually afford me with more dignity rather than less..?

And I do like the fact that you can book one of these for as little as 3o minutes at a time and can even book a wake up in service just in case you slip into a deep sleep and risk missing a flight.

Who for Yahoo!?

Now that News Corp is in [not so] ‘secret talks with Yahoo!’, it is interesting to see the comparisons between the three main players in the ‘love triangle’. I am guessing that most Yahoo! shareholders (and staff) who are keen to protect the Yahoo! brand would prefer a world in which Mr Murdoch was an ‘investor’ in a still independent Yahoo! rather than have Messers Gates and Ballmer in charge.

Microsoft to buy Yahoo!..?

I remember when Compaq’s (ill-fated) $9.6bn acquisition of Digital Equipment Corporation was the biggest of its kind in the IT industry… and now news has just broken that Microsoft has offered nearly $45bn for Yahoo!

I wonder if the Google folks are genuinely worried or laughing into their cornflakes? Yahoo! hasn’t managed much of a fight against Google in recent times but this would bring together two enormous giants.

Interesting times are ahead of us…

As is often the case, dot.life’s take on this is very insightful:

“…as companies like Yahoo and Google, as well as thousands of garage start-ups have shown, from Facebook to Joost, the battle was never really about the browser – it was about services.  From instant messaging and online advertising to social networks, blogs, communities, and IPTV Microsoft is not out in front in any of these areas.  Microsoft is attracted to Yahoo because a purchase would take a key rival out of the game in one swoop.”

I’m SO bored of these stories

Yet ANOTHER data loss story has just appeared on the BBC News website. This time it was an M&S laptop, which was actually stolen in April last year. This week there has also been the story about MoD lost laptop and in the last couple of months alone there have been countless other examples – here, here and here… to name but a few – and that doesn’t even include the HMRC data loss, which was way back in November.

THIS SHOULDN’T BE NEWS… We live in an era where technology is advanced and if any of the public or private businesses involved in any of these stories had encrypted their data then the losses would be as interesting and newsworthy as “Man goes to the toilet” or “It’s raining in Yorkshire”…

I even did a search. Google took just 0.24 seconds to find over 6 million results for data encryption. Please, please, please can the people responsible for this (or any other) data look into encrypting it instead of desperately hoping that theft or loss is miraculously eradicated from our world…