Because the economy increasingly runs on good IT people, but there aren't enough to go around.

People around the age of 40 - 45 in this country come from a real boom for the IT industry - the introduction of the "home computer" - 8-bit microcomputers within the budget of the working citizen.

The perfect storm of kids TV that only lasted for an hour or so each day, and computers that came with a BASIC interpreter, and you needed to learn at least one BASIC command on to get them to do anything, created a generation of "bedroom programmers". People would learn to program for fun. We then had a perfect progression through 8-bit micros, to 16-bit, and then 32-bit PCs, learning all the way.

The skills you need these days to get your computer to do something interesting, whether it sits in a box under your desk, on your lap, or it's just a circuit board behind a flat piece of glass, are very much different, and typically involve poking a couple of pretty icons.

Kids get very disappointed when they can't make things go all whizz-bang within 5 minutes of their first coding lesson. It's always been a special fraction of the population with the inclination to be programmers. But these days, the bar has been set even higher - you have to have a real obsession with programming to overcome the draw of all the other shiny toys out there, especially when they discover that to make even one simple app requires many hours of dedicated study and practice and work.

That's the problem. Computers were fun in our day because we were doing things that no-one else had done. Catching up to others is work.

It boggles the mind, doesn't it.

One of my favourite interview questions is "What's your favourite data structure, and why?", and when they answer, I ask "How would you implement it?"

For something like 80% of the candidates I've interviewed, the answer is usually "erm...."

The vast majority of the remainder say "ArrayList" but don't usually say why.

Out of those, I've only interviewed one who could give any kind of basic indication that they knew how to implement one.

The state of the industry is shocking.

What, we don't think that Lync and everything else that offers a chat server in your own rack can't be configured to do this?

Hell, at my last office, they were feeding all our VoIP calls through this SIGINT app ; the only reason I found out was because I was copied in on ICT change reports for operational reasons and one of the changes was they moved the storage for the VoIP calls to another server.

Presume that you're being watched. You likely are, by someone.

The NHS might be far from the best healthcare system imaginable, but it's official - it's one of the best universal healthcare systems, in terms of both efficiency and outcomes.

Mirror, mirror.

I'm really not sure it puts out a good image of your product if a 5 year old can pass your professional certifications.

It either means your certs are weak sauce, or your product is lamentably simple.

People are going to have to start accepting cryptographic signatures (maybe from keys signed by the government, like they have in Estonia).

Most of my utility bills are now via email.

Screw that.

Keep the card in a foil lined sleeve. You can get a pack of five for a few dollars, or get a fancy shielded wallet. I quite like the look of the ones made of woven stainless steel thread. I tested the el-cheapo ones that are just card and foil and they prevent card reads from all the readers I tested.

Then your physical removal of the card from it's sleeve is required to complete any transaction, contactless or otherwise. No-one will have a reason to amputate your finger.

If you scan things into Apple Pay it's not a copy of your card (unless someone seriously fucked up when they designed the crypto schemes for your payment card). You have to trust Apple, who are no doubt greatly enjoying the information about your payment history.

H1B tax.

You should pay a tax on top of the H1B employees wages that makes the full package 20% more costly than employing a US worker.

He's not in England. He's in Ecuador. The embassy is their sovereign soil, by international treaty. If the English police set foot in there to deport him to Sweden (as they would do if he left), that's an invastion of their territory.

I have one Triganic Pu. Will they make change?

CVS is just a layer on top of RCS. RCS stores all history for a given file, in a file in the RCS store named for that file.

Therefore to purge all history for that file, you delete it's repository file. Tada! Gone.

CVS is just a layer on top of something designed for single file programs, and it shows. It doesn't handle renames well. It doesn't handle getting arbitrary revisions of entire projects well. The more files you have in your project, the more overhead you'll consume attempting to track global project revisions.

SVN does at least fix some of that.

Indeed.

VSS had this feature. It was called "Purge".

If you used it, it destroyed the entire history of the given source file. It was then no longer possible to replicate any build that included that file, ever again. That's a bad thing, in a revision control system.

I found a lot of these problems were resolved by doing a system cache wipe ; it went from hardly charging at all to charging in sensible time. Currently the tablet has been sat lurking in an IRC channel on my nightstand, off charger, for at least a week, and still has more than 40% charge.

The only cable problem I had was when I dropped the thing on the floor when charging ; I had to rebend the shroud on the USB socket back into place. It's still a bit loose, depending on the cable you use.

Yes, you shouldn't have to tinker with things. I can't say I'm impressed with the overall quality of Asus's tablet offerings - my girlfriend has one of their transformer tablets, and the keyboard dock has failed - the connection seems to work fine, because the touchpad part still works... just the keyboard doesn't.

Yeah, I can really relate to this.

The decent chaps (particulary ones who naievely point out "not all men..." before discovering this is like a red rag to a bull) are the ones who attempt to engage positively with these issues.. and because they are the ones trying to engage, they are often in receipt of some of the unpleasant feedback that should really be going to those other guys.

The problem is that once bitten, twice shy - it inclines most of us to back away and not prod that particular hornet's nest again. Which is a shame, because the idiots who create these problems in the first place are far more likely to listen to "bro's before ho's" - getting more of the decent men on side and active against their idiot step-brothers would be a victory for feminism.

I was really encouraged to see this point of view put forward by Emma Watson in her speech.

Both sides have something to learn - the well-meaning men need to learn that they don't need to engage with the women - they already *know* about discrimination. They need to engage with the misogynists.

And the feminists could help matters by swallowing some of their totally understandable rage and politely explaining this to us, instead of biting our heads off.