The Weekly Round-Up: 04.09.09

It was only last week that the Round-Up was complaining about how much like hard work it is to slack off in the office these days.

But now it seems that workers at one council will shortly face the prospect of life without status updates, comments on baby pictures and tossed sheep. During the day, at least.

Bosses at Portsmouth City Council are banning Facebook after discovering their staff spent, on average, 400 hours on the site every month.

And don't think they can turn to Twitter, Bebo or eBay to get their fix of web 2.0 - those sites are getting slapped with a ban too.

It's a draconian move by the council bosses especially when, according to the BBC, the council didn't know whether staff had been accessing Facebook in lunchtimes or even before and after work, which had been previously allowed.

In fact, let's don the wellies of sensibility and wade through the quagmire of confusion. Four hundred wasted hours? Break it down (in a maths rather than the MC Hammer sense). With 4,500 staff at the council this amounts to, for each member of the council, over the space of the month… six minutes.

Just to emphasise, that's per person. Per month. Six minutes.

Less than 20 seconds per person, each day. Hardly the end of the world, is it?

If the Round-Up was to spend just 20 seconds each minute slacking that would represent a significant performance boost.

Spending 20 seconds per day on Facebook is about enough time to update your status from "At work" to "Checking Facebook" and then to "Back to Work". Or enough time to send off one hurried tweet.

Neither of which seem to be really using the full extent of the 21st century marvel that is the internet.

So where does the march of efficiency stop? Will we be asked to stop saying "hello" or "goodbye"? No more talking about last night's match or EastEnders?

As a young, perplexed Woody Allen is told at the end of Manhattan: "You have to have a little faith in people..."

Anyway, it's all academic now. The ban will come into effect in a couple of weeks' time.

YouTube has already been banned, which is ironic given how the UK government is increasingly using it and other social media technology as a way to engage with citizens.

And now, leaving all this web 2.0 stuff to one side for the moment, a gentle trip down memory lane.

Most of us carry more computing power in our trouser pockets these days than it takes to put man on the moon, so it's worth remembering that in the olden days computers used to be quite large, mechanical beasts. By which the Round-Up is not referring to Transformers, but something with just as dramatic a name - the Witch.

Witch - the Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computing from Harwell - was based on telephone exchange relays and 900 Dekatron gas-filled tubes, which could each hold a single digit in memory. Paper tape was used to both input data for and store the output of the machine.

The device is not the oldest electronic calculating device but is regarded as the first modern computer still capable of working.

Work began this week on restoring the Witch, which will be the world's oldest working stored-program electronic computer. The computer that was first used in 1951 for atomic research. Take a look at the pictures from the National Museum of Computing and you'll agree - it's a mighty piece of kit.

Are you a fresh-faced IT graduate, taking those first tentative steps into the big, outside world in search of that first job in technology?

Well, CIOs have a message for you: wise up baby, otherwise you don't have a snowball's chance in hell.

Or something along those lines.

IT graduates are leaving UK universities without the business and technical competencies that employers need to survive or even appear vaguely attractive to prospective employers, according to silicon.com's CIO Jury.

That 2:2 in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering doesn't seem so special now, does it?

A common gripe of the CIOs is that the universities aren't producing graduates with the right mix of skills for business, which is even more depressing considering they're competing for a diminishing number of IT jobs.

Seventy-five per cent of CIOs thought university leavers simply didn't make the grade despite, technically speaking, getting a grade.

So there you are. You worked hard for three years in university, coding and debugging, learning the fundamentals of algorithms, data structures and interface design while the Arts students mucked about in the sunshine with frisbees, drank bottles of cheap red wine and cultivated ridiculous facial hair.

You ended up with a greenish tan from the hours spent in front of a computer screen and developed the pleasant aroma that comes from spending too much time in rooms with too many servers and not enough air conditioning. And all for what?

But - before you go: take a moment to enjoy the rest of the best tech news from the week.

A huge Gmail outage is a blow to its ability to offer a robust service to enterprise? Thankfully, the company acknowleged the problem with good humour.

Firefox gains more ground on Internet Explorer, and who's that coming up on the outside? Why it's Chrome.

Will the sat-nav go the way of the dodo? If it does it may be the fault of the iPhone. Then again, as one silicon.com reader pointed out: "If your wife takes the car, do you really want her taking your phone?"

Until next week: the Round-Up is off to look at its English degree and dig out its frisbee to enjoy the final and diminishing rays of the summer sun.