I've just graduated from Computer Science from a good British university. It was a good university in the rankings and is well known and I worked very hard and achieved a good degree. As a result, I've had a lot of job offers with very good salaries for a fresh graduate position (£30k to £45k) and had to turn down quite a few and pick the one which was most interesting and enjoyable to me. Finding a job hasn't been hard at all. The same applies for the rest of my year and my friends, all had good jobs to go to straight after university.

I did a really interesting course, with a great balance between theory and practice. We have some of the best lecturers in the country and had opportunities to work with a lot of cutting edge research and technologies. You don't have teachers, but researchers and lecturers working on really exciting things and up to date knowledge sharing it with their students. It was very useful and valuable, and quite different from what a CS Major is in the US. We actually study just CS (A-levels and GCSEs cover what Americans generally also cover alongside their Major, which are done at school). What I learnt and did on my course has been invaluable in my job, so it was definitely worthwhile (not to mention really interesting!)

Companies want *good* graduates, not just graduates. As I've ended up doing some recruitment myself in my current position, that comes from experience as well! If you are a good graduate who has worked hard, has a passion and an interest, did a good course and is ready and willing to learn and give their best, you can't find enough of them and they will get good jobs, and indeed they do!

I don't know how much people know about the UK university system, but there a good universities and bad universities. Good universities are top in the rankings, have a good reputation, and are about learning and gaining new knowledge. Bad universities are basically a result of the government pushing everyone into higher education. To go to a good university, you need to work hard at school, get good A-levels and work hard through your course and get an accredited meaningful degree from a university people will know exist. All the rest go to the bad universities (which are more like colleges - polytechnics which werent even previously called universities), require nothing to get in, party and have a good time and get a fairly meaningless degree at the end of it and very little knowledge. There's a big difference here.

Furthermore, CS in the article is grouped as containing all the other related-but-not-really degrees. From experience again, people with IT degrees (completely different to CS - CS is technical, IT is "business thinking") find it hard to find jobs. They can't really become managers as they don't understand what they are trying to manage. They can't go into technical positions as they haven't done it. On the other hand, as a good CS graduate, you have a lot of opportunities in a lot of different areas.

In conclusion, a good graduate from a good university will have no problem at all getting a job. Students from bad universities (ones which recruit, rather than select students) and who do strange courses (e.g. Things like Computer Games offered at some not-so-great universities) or things like IT degrees generally find it a lot harder. Theres some big distinctions here, which the article doesn't fairly represent.

A utility I found a while ago which I absolutely live by these days is WindowTabs, which gives the ability to use tabs in Windows - grouping things however you want, autogrouping by application and other fairly useful features.

It's found at http://www.windowtabs.com/

It's great when dealing with lots of putty windows, Outlook messages, switching between browser windows, vim windows and so forth.

Just thought I'd post this for anyone else looking for something like this, because I never realised something like this existed, so hopefully it'll help someone :)

I have been thinking the same thing. I dont think I have ever been prompted to upgrade Flash on my current install, and it's quite far out of date. It's a shame Firefox can't use Mozilla's update functionality for updating plugins as well as addons, as then it would be seamless. In fact, I've just tried to find an easy way to upgrade Flash, and it seems the only way is to go back to the website and download it again?

The summary of the story doesn't emphasise the point that the spying test was just a small trial, and that Phorm is actually coming directly to the UK.

3 of the major UK ISPs: Virgin Media, BT and Talk Talk are getting all ready to implement and bring in Phorm. More information and details are available at the useful website BadPhorm: http://www.badphorm.co.uk/

Thousands and thousands of UK users are going to be subject to this inescapable violation of their privacy with little to do about it. There is an opt-out cookie, but this does not prevent the fact that the users browsing still goes through the Phorm servers. Would you be happy with all your internet browsing going through a third party server, let alone one owned by an advertising company that wants to profile you and "see the whole internet" (Reference: http://www.badphorm.co.uk/news.php?item.30.3 ) through your browsing history.

There is lots of interesting discussion going on about this, particularly at Cable Forum by Virgin Media users, who are going to be thrown into this spying (Link: http://www.cableforum.co.uk/board/12/33628733-virgin-media-phorm-webwise-adverts-updated.html )

A fast growing petition to the UK government on the governments website is nearing 10000 signatures, and just shows how many people do not want this to happen (Link: http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/ispphorm/ )

This may not concern many people in the US, or people on the smaller ISPs in the UK - but the worrying thing is, other ISPs are already saying that they are going to watch the results and see if the ISPs can get away with it - if they can, they will likely pick it up to. And your ISP might do too!