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Comment Re:Amazing (Score 1) 208

IT WOULD BE AWESOME if some CS got into lower education.

It would, although they'd probably taint it in peoples' minds, teaching it as a part of a mathematics course, or something. Looking back, a lot of my high school geometry course was similar to some of my theoretical computer science classes.

It is maddening the damage Slashdot has done to Computer Science

Slashdot is a minor player. The smallest TV news networks have larger audiences. Mainstream media and industry have done more to add a second definition (the one that you disagree with) to "Computer Science", in the minds of the public. Human language in general is stuck in a kind of out-of-control feedback loop, and that's one reason that we end up with islands of population-specific argot. It's useful for those groups to have more concrete definitions of words to use among themselves. I suppose that "Computer Science" acts as a kind of shibboleth; if you take it as a synonym for "Information Technology" instead of "The science of computability, computation, and information theory", then obviously you aren't a computer scientist.

Comment Re:You know what would REALLY motivate kids? (Score 1) 208

Why would a CS grad want to be a software developer?

Because it pays better than academia.

They should have studied software development and programming.

Programming is useful as a tool for studying computer science, so it tends to be something that CS grads learn, to varying degrees. The software development process can be learned on the job. Companies look for CS degrees to mean "software developer"; I don't see many job postings around me for someone who has a SW Dev degree or certification. It's less of a fight to just major in CS and learn to apply the theory to practical engineering problems than it would be to convince a company that they don't actually want a CS grad.

That's like an MD hoping to get a job as a medical tech

More like a biology major trying to get a job as a doctor, IMO.

Their ideal employment will have little to do with coding.

I know two flavors of CS grads: Those who want to get jobs as academics and do teaching or research, and those looking to bend the purpose of a CS degree to get a programming job. In theory, it's a terrible fit. In practice, it's quite workable. After all, if one has the capacity to work out a clean mathematical proof, then one also has the capacity to build a clean piece of software.

Comment Re:Can it run apps from the Google app store? (Score 1) 108

I've waited minutes for ART to do its thing on a singular package

I've never seen that, but I can't say that it's unbelievable. On my device though (admittedly, a much faster phone), it's always taken under five-ten minutes to ART-compile about 150 apps, and the idea that invoking each of those 150 apps one at a time would cause a similar amount of JIT compilation has always sounded reasonable to me. Since it seems to work in my case, I haven't really looked into it.

Also, you sound a lot like the folks responding to those who question memory management on Android: "It's taken care of automatically," they say. "You can't do anything to improve it," they further proclaim.

I've seen too many memory leaks to try to claim that it couldn't be improved upon.

Comment Re:Can it run apps from the Google app store? (Score 1) 108

Can we compute the increased carbon emissions of this, including wear-and-tear due to increased battery aging and decreased lifespan (which more and more means death to the entire device)? Man-hours wasted staring, waiting for devices to compile their own apps?

It's better than JIT on Dalvik, which all non-Lollipop versions of Android would be using. You're complaining about compiling once, when the program is first installed. How about compiling once per time that you run the program? ART provides a net benefit over that scheme.

Comment Re:Windows? (Score 1) 108

Ah, yes. The OS that notifies my wife to reboot her phone daily, to avoid memory leak problems that haven't been fixed since she bought it. The OS that requires her to convince herself that "No, I'm not as interested in that app as I thought", because it's not available on the app store and has no alternatives available. The OS that goes into reboot loops if her phone goes out of range of a cell tower. Yes, I've used Windows Phone. If it worked properly more often and had a better app ecosystem, it would be a perfectly useable phone OS.

Comment Re:Quite the Opposite (Score 1) 271

If every manager needs to know the job of the underlings, how in the world would they ever get the time to get any management done.

My manager has told me "Software development isn't rocket science. I don't see why investigating a bug takes so long." She also hasn't done any development work herself, despite having a computer science degree. She went almost directly into a PM role out of college and doesn't have a frame of reference to understand her employees' work. She hasn't ever been able to understand what her employees are doing, what's reasonable in terms of timeframe for a feature or bug to be completed, doesn't know the product well enough to even know which part of it her team members are working on, etc.

In contrast, my previous manager was promoted up from the ranks of the developers. She was amazing to work for, because she always made her team's jobs easier, and understood what we were working on (in a broad sense, not down to the deep details, of course).

If every manager needs to know the job of the underlings, how in the world would they ever get the time to get any management done.

Knowing their jobs isn't the same thing as taking the time to do their jobs. A manager should manage, but they should know what their decisions mean to their team members. To my current manager, a flurry of e-mails means work is being done, and she expects a constant flow of e-mail to go around her team. I've been chastised in her office several times for not communicating enough while working through bugs on a piece of code that no one else on the team has experience with. I explain to her which bugs I've fixed, which I am still working on, and which features I've implemented. Doesn't matter. No e-mail means no work, because that's how her world works: E-mail and meetings mean decisions are being made and work is being done. No e-mail or meetings == black hole where nothing is happening.

If I needed a manager that knew my job better than me in order not to feel bossed around by a dummy, I'd be looking in vain forever.

Ditto. I know my work better than my manager. That's basically by definition, except for in a very upside-down project. But if I say "I've got the fixes for these 3 bugs in, and I'm working on these 4 others", and I get a reply like "OK, but what are you actually doing?", you'll have a hard time convincing me that I'm not working for an idiot. They don't know my job, don't understand what their employees are doing (even in abstract), and don't belong in a management position over a team until they understand what it is that they're managing.

Comment Uh oh (Score 2) 271

What kind of learning curve could I expect if I took on a new language I have no experience with?

If you're over 40 and you don't know how to answer that question based on past experience, I think you're in trouble. Picking up new languages, frameworks, APIs, and what have you are just par for the course. Those things have been a constant in every development job I've had. If a language is related to something that I already know, then within a few weeks, I may be writing some Perl-ish looking Python and becoming more comfortable using constructs that don't appear in Perl very quickly.

Comment Re:Duration of disconnection (Score 1) 198

Thin of the resources an offline Google Now or Siri would need.

Parts of that wouldn't be feasible (notes coming in about sports scores, news items, what have you), but keeping a local database to correlate locations, time, and all that? Sure, you could do that. Ditto with the voice recognition, especially if it's limited to a certain set of vocabulary that's useful for on-device management of your alarms/calendar/contacts.

but you wouldn't expect to navigate offline, with live traffic data, without a net connection.

I wouldn't? That's what I've got a Garmin with radio traffic updates for. I bought it before I had a smartphone, and it still works as well as it did when I got it.

Or you couldn't cast your IDE from your tablet to your PC without a net connection.

Oh? I can't host an AP from my laptop, run a VNC or RDP server there, and connect from my tablet? Or run VNC on my tablet and access it from the laptop? I'm not sure what you're claiming, because the most direct interpretations of your post have counterexamples.

Comment Alternatives (Score 1) 47

SDL and SFML are both pretty cool and have large development communities. I haven't used Allegro or Clanlib, but Clanlib's features seem especially close to SFML's (based on examining the API). Allegro has been around for over 20 years. SDL for 17, Clanlib for 16, SFML for just about half of that.

It raises a question in my mind: If Clanlib had been out for that long in 2007, providing a C++ game programming library and being well-known enough to be included in at least one book, then why was there a perceived need for SFML? Was it just a marketing/popularizing failure on the part of clanlib's developers, or was there some technical shortcoming in Clanlib at that time? If the latter, has the shortcoming been corrected? In short, why exactly should we be excited about a new release of Clanlib?

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