The plural of anecdote is not data. The problem with American health care is not the care itself, it's the payment. Health insurance in the US is a problem but healthcare is not. Yes, there are cases of bad doctors (there are always a few cases of bad doctors) but the US has the most stringent and difficult medical certification in the world. In fact, the cases of malpractice in the United States are widely panned among the medical community as not being based on sound medicine but by posturing and inflation by lawyers in order to engender a larger settlement for a lawsuit.
I come from a family of physicians and they are all very well respected in the medical community. My grandfather received his MD from Columbia and still gives grand rounds at medical schools across the country. My mother is a well respected private practice pathologist in Baltimore after her MD from the University of Rochester. My father studied at Princeton and Stanford and now teaches as an associate professor at Johns Hopkins. An American MD requires years more training than that of almost every other country and, for the most part, it shows. Don't mistake sensationalism for truth -- we actually have very very good care, but also pay far more than we should for it.
I completely agree - you are right, software engineering can be difficult. Actually, I would consider professional software development to often be quite hard. Definitely harder than HR or one of the more "customer service" oriented positions.
However, I think an important distinction needs to be made here. I would rather treat computer science as an academic discipline and software development as a professional one. It's not a perfect analogy, but I tend to think of computer science as the "electrical engineer" to the "electrician." Being an electrician is not easy and there are a number of codes and regulations that you have to follow, etc, etc, but you go to a professional school to be an electrician, not a university. Computer science, much like EE, should more appropriately be considered an academic discipline. A computer scientist can program, yes, but to quote Edsger Dijkstra, "Computer science is as much about computers as astronomy is about telescopes." Computer science teaches you to use programming as a tool to achieve your goal, which should be less about fulfilling a list of requirements and more about designing or architecting a system.
In essence, pure "software developers" would use a database to store information exactly like it says on his/her spec sheet. The computer scientist would be designing the database.
When is the right time for project members to fork when their chief maintainer does not respond anymore or pursues an adverse commercial agenda?
I think you may have your answer. If a couple people agree with you, why don't you draft an email to the project maintainer with your concerns and the signatures of the other people? If he doesn't answer or you're not satisfied with his answer, I think forking the project should definitely be on the table.
Yes, that means we sit idly by while the Germans put up concentration camps. Yes, that means watching the slaughter occur in various places in Africa. Yes, that means...you get the picture.
Let genocide happen so we can... what? Eat more ice cream?
The more I read about history, the more I believe that a major issue we have in the US is taking sides in wars that do not involve us.
Keep reading. The wars that have been problems for the United States have been those based on our foreign political interests. No one thinks that it was bad that we intervened in WWII, no one would think it bad if we interfered in the Sudan or had done so in Cambodia.
I'm sorry but your need for a traditional cushy American life doesn't abrogate your responsibility as a human being to prevent crimes against humanity. This is not an American responsibility, it is a human responsibility. It just so happens that we have the most power and "with great power comes great responsibility."
Why is the parent modded troll? Not only does it produce a huge amount of greenhouse gases, but the very mining process is one of the most environmentally destructive on the planet. It's essentially blowing a mountain apart, which destroys the entire ecosystem in the area.
Because Vuze is the name that they have given their useless adware overlay to the Azureus/Aeltis transfer core. Azureus was and is the name given to the kernel in the source code.
also, utorrent is the way to go. it has most of the features of azureus/vuze and is about 40 times smaller than azureus/vuze. its sad when people support open source without considering quality.
If you are worried about privacy, certainly not. You can never trust closed source code. Some would go so far as to say that you can never trust compiled binaries, although I only follow that rule for things such as libssl and other crypto libraries. uTorrent may be superior quality code, but license is never about code quality. I specifically mentioned that uTorrent is not Free Software, which is troubling for both the closed source aspect and ethical considerations.
its very important that we focus on efficiency and quality of open code.
Correct. I always prefer good open code to bad open code.
you should always encourage adoption of code which is better, regardless of whether it is open source, or it runs only on windows or not.
Wrong. You should always encourage code that is ethically the best choice for the job. If you are doing something unimportant, perhaps you can make do with a closed source piece of software, but you can never trust it. A copyleft license is also a big bonus, but not necessarily required for every project. Although if there are two similar choices, the Free Software choice is the better one.
Although I previously disregarded the features of the software itself, when designing your own software you should always attempt to incorporate maximum portability according to your limitations. Those who can and don't are not just bad programmers, but harmful to the software community.
the first step for vuze developers would be to accept that utorrent is not "some closed source Windows piece of crap", quoting you.
The first step would be for vuze/azureus developers to indeed recognize that uTorrent is a closed source Windows piece of crap from a license standpoint - one that they should not attempt to emulate. The second step is to realize that, while uTorrent code is not a good code model, the idea of a small footprint client is a good idea, at which point they should ditch Vuze entirely and throw out most of the cruft that has been incorporated into Azureus in the past 2 years.
remember that close-minded comments like yours inhibit wide-spread adoption of linux, despite it being much better in some ways than windows.
1) In some ways it is better, yes. In most ways they are simply different. I have no animosity towards Windows and only believe that a POSIX development environment is more amenable to my coding style. I don't even believe that the closed source license is terribly bad for much of the operating system - pragmatically I am only very worried about parts that I rely on for security or privacy. 2) I don't care about wide-spread adoption of Linux. If people like it, fine - good for them. I am never looking forward to the "year of the linux desktop." I will simply continue to use what I use and everyone else can make their own choice. I will continue to use the license to make what I use better, though (which is often not Linux, but a form of BSD or Mac).
people like you are convinced that any code, if open source is better than any other closed source code. which is plainly wrong.
I don't know if this is plainly anything. This is certainly what Richard Stallman believes. I do not agree with him for a variety of pragmatic reasons, but I can definitely see where he is coming from. For him, it is a matter of personal ethics.
However, anyone who thinks that using a closed source encryption program of firewall is better than using a really bad open source program is simply ignorant. Security through obscurity is not security.
Vuze actually isn't a bad choice for research. Java is relatively easy to check for code correctness and it is portable across all systems. It's also very easy to port to a variety of different platforms. I'm sure a libtorrent plugin would be trivial to implement in C from the Java source.
No. This is a research project, not a software product. I wouldn't even expect more out of this plugin, much less any kind of port work. Fabian probably only cares about the software as much that it is proof-of-concept.
I know that people don't read articles on Slashdot but that's seriously about half way down the list:
Why use the Vuze/Azureus BitTorrent client? For one, it's probably the most popular client in terms of use, so targeting Vuze gives us the greatest potential impact. Additionally, Vuze is Java-based, meaning anyone can run their software (and ours). Finally, Vuze offers a convenient plugin feature, requiring no changes to your existing Vuze client. And once you're running SwarmScreen, it will automatically search for new versions and update itself for you!
In addition, Java plugins are trivially ported to other systems. Azureus (I refuse to call it Vuze) also has some useful debugging tools.
Not to mention that ÂTorrent is not Free Software, so it is definitely not the "way to go." I mean, seriously, the thing is Windows only, what's happening to Slashdot that some closed source Windows piece of crap is "the way to go?"
Disclaimer: I am a computer science major at Northwestern. I did not participate in this research, though.
When I was in high school in my chem AP class, my teacher had set it up so that at the end of the year we all had to read a timely chemistry research paper that had been published in a major journal and prepare a presentation on it for the class. This may not be what you want to hear but from what I remember of my chem. AP curriculum, I was grossly underprepared to do any serious research. However, I definitely remember than dealing with both a research subject and the academic publishing style gave a lot of background for my future.
That said, I'm computer science not chemistry, so I guess I don't know how that would have turned out in the long run. Even though I'm not chem, I know that the experience in reading real research papers definitely prepared me for graduate and research coursework in college more than anything else in my time in high school.
That said, my minor is physics, so I do know a little bit about that as well. If you've done electromagnetism/electronics, I would encourage maybe giving your students an electronics project. It was nice to have a little practical lab after all that theory. An infinite field of one ohm resisters is one thing - rewiring your coffee maker with a job server is another (btw if any of your students actually manage to do this, send me an email). That said, many of your students (I was one) may really like theory and Maxwell's equations and vector calculus, so don't make the course too EE based.
What you describe is what happens when there's no standard of quality for output or the "engineers" themselves.
Oh, I disagree. I believe that software engineering is a discipline that produces a systematic approach to the development of software in the real world, which includes real world constraints. We are talking about different levels of quality. The optimal code in an academic environment is a very different breed than optimal code in a production environment. Honestly, if you don't accept that production environments are subject to a different set of constraints than academia, then I don't know how to convince you. Academia doesn't have clients, it doesn't have marketing, it doesn't have dynamic specifications - it's simply not the same process.
The decision making and design are certainly backed by analysis (you've heard of Gantt charts and UML diagrams, I assume), but these analyses have to take into account fluid specifications and time constraints and user testing, etc, etc, etc. Most of all, academic projects (for classes, your post indicates a Master's degree to me, but I could be wrong) are not long term commitments. There is no long term development and support and other things that software engineers have to deal with (just like any of the other engineering fields). Computer science is computer science and software engineering is software engineering.
SVN for revision control, JUnit for testing, and Design Patterns out the wazzoo.
In my experience, definitely the exception (except for maybe version control - i think everyone gets that version control is a great thing by now).
The fact that these tools are not widely used in CS I dispute, but even if this is the case, I submit that academics are in the business of research not delivering a product.
Exactly. This is actually the entire point of my post. Computer science is not delivering a product - software engineering is. Choosing an algorithm based on "reality" is not software engineering. Once again, youre doing what academics love to do (I'm one of them by the way, so Im including myself), which is optimize based on things like example data and various studies, etc.
Software engineering isn't about delivering a great product to a final user that everyone will buy (well ostensibly, but not in reality). In reality, software engineering is about figuring out halfway through your backend that microsoft made a bloody stupid error in.NET that's going to break your whole program, so to hell with it - we're going to hardcode this hack in to get this thing working. It's not elegant and its not optimal, but at least it works. Software engineering is about using a substandard algorithm because it's easier to understand and will make fewer problems in maintenance later. Software engineering isn't about making the best software for everyone, it's about making something that works most of the time and that a large group of people will buy. Honestly, I wouldn't have it any other way.
P.S. JUnit? What kind of compiler design were you doing in Java? Were you porting some interpreted language to the JVM (ala JRuby)?
As I tell all my PhD friends, research is nice but it sure ain't for everyone.
I couldn't agree more. My only issue is when people say that graduate degrees are useless or don't have an impact in the "real world." This is simply untrue - they simply stress different abilities than may be offered in undergraduate degrees or "on-the-job" training. Especially in CS, many people think that a Masters degree will make them a better software engineer and are disappointed and disrespectful when they find out that graduate degrees market a completely different skill set.
Both software engineering and computer science are useful fields that have a tangible impact on the "real world," they simply have different roles to play. A graduate degree in computer science is just that - an advanced study in computer science, not a programming course. Research may not be a part of that if you don't want it (in a Masters program at least), but I don't think that people should graduate saying they never had the chance.
While we don't require all MSCS students to complete a research thesis, some students pursue a departmental honor called a "distinction in research". It's a great option if you're at all interested in research or considering a possible Ph.D program or a career as a researcher. The goal is to produce work that is publishable in a journal or a conference.
I guess it is not required for a masters degree, however every top level school that I can find gives the opportunity for research. Sometimes as a student you have to take the initiative and make the most out of your education.
At the very least, it is directly applicable in various areas of computer science, if not software engineering
The Master of Science degree in Computer Science indicates two things to prospective employers. First, it guarantees that you have a broad grounding in computer science as a discipline. Second, it certifies that you have studied a particular area in detail and thus have additional depth in a particular specialty. Both components are important to the Masterâ(TM)s program, and it is not possible to secure a Stanford MSCS degree that does not meet both requirements.
Only those who learn to code without reading code. I taught myself C from K&R when I was 10 years old and read reputable C code for comparison. Honestly, not that much has changed in C since then.
Most of the things I learned in grad school were invented before I was born. Most of the rest were simply re-hashes of old methods to new problems or to better hardware.
If timely research and academic publishing weren't part of your graduate degree, something is seriously wrong.
You speak as though you've never been in a graduate program. Graduate programs in Computer Science are advanced degrees that confer a thorough and in-depth knowledge of computer science. I think the problem is that you confuse non-academic jobs with computer science, when really most of them are software engineering.
Computer science is an entirely different discipline from software engineering and even a BS isn't really focused on teaching you software engineering (bug tracking, version control, etc.). If you want to do software engineering, certainly don't consider a graduate degree. On the other hand, if you want to study computer science, by all means consider it. For example, one of the main areas of research that I am interested in is the development of implicitly parallizable languages that scale across many cores and processors. This is most definitely computer science, but definitely not software engineering.
There is a need for both, but the two disciplines are highly separate. Have computer scientists do software engineering and you end up with unreadably elegant code with no bug tracking or version control that only works as a "proof of concept," and have software engineers do language design and you end up with PHP.
We're working on it. Just to let you know, while I'm sure an official release will be useable, don't expect the raw source ffmpeg model to go out any time soon. I expect that bug fixes and features will be in the repository very quickly and if you have a need for these things, you should probably compile the code from source. You may also want to keep an eye on the mailing lists http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/mailman/listinfo/ffmpeg-cvslog/ http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/mailman/listinfo/ffmpeg-devel/
Slashdot Mirror
The plural of anecdote is not data. The problem with American health care is not the care itself, it's the payment. Health insurance in the US is a problem but healthcare is not. Yes, there are cases of bad doctors (there are always a few cases of bad doctors) but the US has the most stringent and difficult medical certification in the world. In fact, the cases of malpractice in the United States are widely panned among the medical community as not being based on sound medicine but by posturing and inflation by lawyers in order to engender a larger settlement for a lawsuit.
I come from a family of physicians and they are all very well respected in the medical community. My grandfather received his MD from Columbia and still gives grand rounds at medical schools across the country. My mother is a well respected private practice pathologist in Baltimore after her MD from the University of Rochester. My father studied at Princeton and Stanford and now teaches as an associate professor at Johns Hopkins. An American MD requires years more training than that of almost every other country and, for the most part, it shows. Don't mistake sensationalism for truth -- we actually have very very good care, but also pay far more than we should for it.
I completely agree - you are right, software engineering can be difficult. Actually, I would consider professional software development to often be quite hard. Definitely harder than HR or one of the more "customer service" oriented positions.
However, I think an important distinction needs to be made here. I would rather treat computer science as an academic discipline and software development as a professional one. It's not a perfect analogy, but I tend to think of computer science as the "electrical engineer" to the "electrician." Being an electrician is not easy and there are a number of codes and regulations that you have to follow, etc, etc, but you go to a professional school to be an electrician, not a university. Computer science, much like EE, should more appropriately be considered an academic discipline. A computer scientist can program, yes, but to quote Edsger Dijkstra, "Computer science is as much about computers as astronomy is about telescopes." Computer science teaches you to use programming as a tool to achieve your goal, which should be less about fulfilling a list of requirements and more about designing or architecting a system.
In essence, pure "software developers" would use a database to store information exactly like it says on his/her spec sheet. The computer scientist would be designing the database.
I didn't forget, I just don't like counterstrike ;)
See Warcraft 3 and DoTa. The DoTa mod is vastly more popular than the original game.
When is the right time for project members to fork when their chief maintainer does not respond anymore or pursues an adverse commercial agenda?
I think you may have your answer. If a couple people agree with you, why don't you draft an email to the project maintainer with your concerns and the signatures of the other people? If he doesn't answer or you're not satisfied with his answer, I think forking the project should definitely be on the table.
- Family porn (or super-softcore) (e.g. Enterprise)
There had to be a better way to say that...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_attainder
Yes, that means we sit idly by while the Germans put up concentration camps. Yes, that means watching the slaughter occur in various places in Africa. Yes, that means...you get the picture.
Let genocide happen so we can... what? Eat more ice cream?
The more I read about history, the more I believe that a major issue we have in the US is taking sides in wars that do not involve us.
Keep reading. The wars that have been problems for the United States have been those based on our foreign political interests. No one thinks that it was bad that we intervened in WWII, no one would think it bad if we interfered in the Sudan or had done so in Cambodia.
I'm sorry but your need for a traditional cushy American life doesn't abrogate your responsibility as a human being to prevent crimes against humanity. This is not an American responsibility, it is a human responsibility. It just so happens that we have the most power and "with great power comes great responsibility."
Why is the parent modded troll? Not only does it produce a huge amount of greenhouse gases, but the very mining process is one of the most environmentally destructive on the planet. It's essentially blowing a mountain apart, which destroys the entire ecosystem in the area.
why?
Because Vuze is the name that they have given their useless adware overlay to the Azureus/Aeltis transfer core. Azureus was and is the name given to the kernel in the source code.
also, utorrent is the way to go. it has most of the features of azureus/vuze and is about 40 times smaller than azureus/vuze. its sad when people support open source without considering quality.
If you are worried about privacy, certainly not. You can never trust closed source code. Some would go so far as to say that you can never trust compiled binaries, although I only follow that rule for things such as libssl and other crypto libraries. uTorrent may be superior quality code, but license is never about code quality. I specifically mentioned that uTorrent is not Free Software, which is troubling for both the closed source aspect and ethical considerations.
its very important that we focus on efficiency and quality of open code.
Correct. I always prefer good open code to bad open code.
you should always encourage adoption of code which is better, regardless of whether it is open source, or it runs only on windows or not.
Wrong. You should always encourage code that is ethically the best choice for the job. If you are doing something unimportant, perhaps you can make do with a closed source piece of software, but you can never trust it. A copyleft license is also a big bonus, but not necessarily required for every project. Although if there are two similar choices, the Free Software choice is the better one.
Although I previously disregarded the features of the software itself, when designing your own software you should always attempt to incorporate maximum portability according to your limitations. Those who can and don't are not just bad programmers, but harmful to the software community.
the first step for vuze developers would be to accept that utorrent is not "some closed source Windows piece of crap", quoting you.
The first step would be for vuze/azureus developers to indeed recognize that uTorrent is a closed source Windows piece of crap from a license standpoint - one that they should not attempt to emulate. The second step is to realize that, while uTorrent code is not a good code model, the idea of a small footprint client is a good idea, at which point they should ditch Vuze entirely and throw out most of the cruft that has been incorporated into Azureus in the past 2 years.
remember that close-minded comments like yours inhibit wide-spread adoption of linux, despite it being much better in some ways than windows.
1) In some ways it is better, yes. In most ways they are simply different. I have no animosity towards Windows and only believe that a POSIX development environment is more amenable to my coding style. I don't even believe that the closed source license is terribly bad for much of the operating system - pragmatically I am only very worried about parts that I rely on for security or privacy.
2) I don't care about wide-spread adoption of Linux. If people like it, fine - good for them. I am never looking forward to the "year of the linux desktop." I will simply continue to use what I use and everyone else can make their own choice. I will continue to use the license to make what I use better, though (which is often not Linux, but a form of BSD or Mac).
people like you are convinced that any code, if open source is better than any other closed source code. which is plainly wrong.
I don't know if this is plainly anything. This is certainly what Richard Stallman believes. I do not agree with him for a variety of pragmatic reasons, but I can definitely see where he is coming from. For him, it is a matter of personal ethics.
However, anyone who thinks that using a closed source encryption program of firewall is better than using a really bad open source program is simply ignorant. Security through obscurity is not security.
Vuze actually isn't a bad choice for research. Java is relatively easy to check for code correctness and it is portable across all systems. It's also very easy to port to a variety of different platforms. I'm sure a libtorrent plugin would be trivial to implement in C from the Java source.
No. This is a research project, not a software product. I wouldn't even expect more out of this plugin, much less any kind of port work. Fabian probably only cares about the software as much that it is proof-of-concept.
I know that people don't read articles on Slashdot but that's seriously about half way down the list:
Why use the Vuze/Azureus BitTorrent client? For one, it's probably the most popular client in terms of use, so targeting Vuze gives us the greatest potential impact. Additionally, Vuze is Java-based, meaning anyone can run their software (and ours). Finally, Vuze offers a convenient plugin feature, requiring no changes to your existing Vuze client. And once you're running SwarmScreen, it will automatically search for new versions and update itself for you!
In addition, Java plugins are trivially ported to other systems. Azureus (I refuse to call it Vuze) also has some useful debugging tools.
Not to mention that ÂTorrent is not Free Software, so it is definitely not the "way to go." I mean, seriously, the thing is Windows only, what's happening to Slashdot that some closed source Windows piece of crap is "the way to go?"
Disclaimer: I am a computer science major at Northwestern. I did not participate in this research, though.
Mods sure are dumb today. This is the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
They're not looking for vendor tools to come out of it, they're looking for research to come out of it to help build such a tool.
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/GHC/Data_Parallel_Haskell
http://manticore.cs.uchicago.edu/
http://www.beskerming.com/commentary/2007/08/12/249/German_Security_Professionals_in_the_Mist
When I was in high school in my chem AP class, my teacher had set it up so that at the end of the year we all had to read a timely chemistry research paper that had been published in a major journal and prepare a presentation on it for the class. This may not be what you want to hear but from what I remember of my chem. AP curriculum, I was grossly underprepared to do any serious research. However, I definitely remember than dealing with both a research subject and the academic publishing style gave a lot of background for my future.
That said, I'm computer science not chemistry, so I guess I don't know how that would have turned out in the long run. Even though I'm not chem, I know that the experience in reading real research papers definitely prepared me for graduate and research coursework in college more than anything else in my time in high school.
That said, my minor is physics, so I do know a little bit about that as well. If you've done electromagnetism/electronics, I would encourage maybe giving your students an electronics project. It was nice to have a little practical lab after all that theory. An infinite field of one ohm resisters is one thing - rewiring your coffee maker with a job server is another (btw if any of your students actually manage to do this, send me an email). That said, many of your students (I was one) may really like theory and Maxwell's equations and vector calculus, so don't make the course too EE based.
What you describe is what happens when there's no standard of quality for output or the "engineers" themselves.
Oh, I disagree. I believe that software engineering is a discipline that produces a systematic approach to the development of software in the real world, which includes real world constraints. We are talking about different levels of quality. The optimal code in an academic environment is a very different breed than optimal code in a production environment. Honestly, if you don't accept that production environments are subject to a different set of constraints than academia, then I don't know how to convince you. Academia doesn't have clients, it doesn't have marketing, it doesn't have dynamic specifications - it's simply not the same process.
The decision making and design are certainly backed by analysis (you've heard of Gantt charts and UML diagrams, I assume), but these analyses have to take into account fluid specifications and time constraints and user testing, etc, etc, etc. Most of all, academic projects (for classes, your post indicates a Master's degree to me, but I could be wrong) are not long term commitments. There is no long term development and support and other things that software engineers have to deal with (just like any of the other engineering fields). Computer science is computer science and software engineering is software engineering.
SVN for revision control, JUnit for testing, and Design Patterns out the wazzoo.
In my experience, definitely the exception (except for maybe version control - i think everyone gets that version control is a great thing by now).
The fact that these tools are not widely used in CS I dispute, but even if this is the case, I submit that academics are in the business of research not delivering a product.
Exactly. This is actually the entire point of my post. Computer science is not delivering a product - software engineering is. Choosing an algorithm based on "reality" is not software engineering. Once again, youre doing what academics love to do (I'm one of them by the way, so Im including myself), which is optimize based on things like example data and various studies, etc.
Software engineering isn't about delivering a great product to a final user that everyone will buy (well ostensibly, but not in reality). In reality, software engineering is about figuring out halfway through your backend that microsoft made a bloody stupid error in .NET that's going to break your whole program, so to hell with it - we're going to hardcode this hack in to get this thing working. It's not elegant and its not optimal, but at least it works. Software engineering is about using a substandard algorithm because it's easier to understand and will make fewer problems in maintenance later. Software engineering isn't about making the best software for everyone, it's about making something that works most of the time and that a large group of people will buy. Honestly, I wouldn't have it any other way.
P.S. JUnit? What kind of compiler design were you doing in Java? Were you porting some interpreted language to the JVM (ala JRuby)?
As I tell all my PhD friends, research is nice but it sure ain't for everyone.
I couldn't agree more. My only issue is when people say that graduate degrees are useless or don't have an impact in the "real world." This is simply untrue - they simply stress different abilities than may be offered in undergraduate degrees or "on-the-job" training. Especially in CS, many people think that a Masters degree will make them a better software engineer and are disappointed and disrespectful when they find out that graduate degrees market a completely different skill set.
Both software engineering and computer science are useful fields that have a tangible impact on the "real world," they simply have different roles to play. A graduate degree in computer science is just that - an advanced study in computer science, not a programming course. Research may not be a part of that if you don't want it (in a Masters program at least), but I don't think that people should graduate saying they never had the chance.
While we don't require all MSCS students to complete a research thesis, some students pursue a departmental honor called a "distinction in research". It's a great option if you're at all interested in research or considering a possible Ph.D program or a career as a researcher. The goal is to produce work that is publishable in a journal or a conference.
http://cs.stanford.edu/degrees/mscs/classes/planning/
I guess it is not required for a masters degree, however every top level school that I can find gives the opportunity for research. Sometimes as a student you have to take the initiative and make the most out of your education.
At the very least, it is directly applicable in various areas of computer science, if not software engineering
The Master of Science degree in Computer Science indicates two things to prospective
employers. First, it guarantees that you have a broad grounding in computer science as a
discipline. Second, it certifies that you have studied a particular area in detail and thus have
additional depth in a particular specialty. Both components are important to the Masterâ(TM)s
program, and it is not possible to secure a Stanford MSCS degree that does not meet both
requirements.
Only those who learn to code without reading code. I taught myself C from K&R when I was 10 years old and read reputable C code for comparison. Honestly, not that much has changed in C since then.
Most of the things I learned in grad school were invented before I was born. Most of the rest were simply re-hashes of old methods to new problems or to better hardware.
If timely research and academic publishing weren't part of your graduate degree, something is seriously wrong.
You speak as though you've never been in a graduate program. Graduate programs in Computer Science are advanced degrees that confer a thorough and in-depth knowledge of computer science. I think the problem is that you confuse non-academic jobs with computer science, when really most of them are software engineering.
Computer science is an entirely different discipline from software engineering and even a BS isn't really focused on teaching you software engineering (bug tracking, version control, etc.). If you want to do software engineering, certainly don't consider a graduate degree. On the other hand, if you want to study computer science, by all means consider it. For example, one of the main areas of research that I am interested in is the development of implicitly parallizable languages that scale across many cores and processors. This is most definitely computer science, but definitely not software engineering.
There is a need for both, but the two disciplines are highly separate. Have computer scientists do software engineering and you end up with unreadably elegant code with no bug tracking or version control that only works as a "proof of concept," and have software engineers do language design and you end up with PHP.
We're working on it. Just to let you know, while I'm sure an official release will be useable, don't expect the raw source ffmpeg model to go out any time soon. I expect that bug fixes and features will be in the repository very quickly and if you have a need for these things, you should probably compile the code from source. You may also want to keep an eye on the mailing lists
http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/mailman/listinfo/ffmpeg-cvslog/
http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/mailman/listinfo/ffmpeg-devel/