EDIT: This has been closed and I realise that I may not have been specific enough with the original title. I ask two questions here: The general one (Does a PhD help get a job?) which has been asked elsewhere, and the specific one (Is it possible to get work outside of the specific research field?). Assume I've already decided going to ...
When you are reading technical materials (books, blogs, wiki…) do you find detailed theory or direct code samples more helpful? Also do you perfer paper or electronic? ...
My company requires that we achieve our estimates to within 30% of forecast. Typically, clients (any my business is no different) expect that they'll get their product as soon as possible for the lowest cost ("I want all the features delivered yesterday for free"). As part of my team's development iterations, we are required to estimate...
Is there any research available on how/when search-engines decide to display pictures/videos in their search results based on their queries? For example, most people names generate video results from Youtube on Google. However, it is certainly not trivial as the above assumption because - "michael jackson" displays image results and "ge...
My master's thesis is to look at how to apply agile. There is an awful lot of corporate selling of agile - lots of management consultants selling their brand as 'best'. I'm not interested whether XP, Scrum, Crystal Clear, Agile-CMMI, Six Sigma or any other brand/variant is best. I'm interested in what real, active developers (i.e. yo...
I work in a group that does a large mix of research development and full shipping code. Half the time I develop processes that run on our real time system ( somewhere between soft real-time & hard real-time, medium real-time? ) The other half I write or optimize processes for our researchers who don't necessarily care about the code a...
I'm doing an XSS report for my university, and I'm doing some tests with calling external webpages using AJAX. The code I'm using for this example is very simple, and one of my target case-studies is to be able to call an outside web-page via AJAX with cross site disabled. Note: I only plan to use this on FireFox, and I am not concern...
I graduated from a Project 211 university in mainland China this April. I have promised a professor in Hong Kong to begin pursuing a Ph.D. under his supervision in September. However, after living in HK for several months, I find I want an American Ph.D. The main reason is that the US has the best research environment, and a US Ph.D. de...
Disclaimer I am NOT looking for a Ph.D. topic, just curious what areas of research interests other programmers. What areas do SO readers think are the hottest areas in computer science research right now? For example, back near the beginning of this decade, there was a big push for research in VoIP, along with heated debates on H.323 v...
With the recent announcement of Google Wave I started looking into how it worked, I then found that work and research on Real-time Collaborative Editing Systems has been around for some time (the first work was done in 1989). Google "introduced" MapReduce however that had been around for some time in functional programming as well. Are...
When, if at all, do you believe that we will see AI systems that are capable of passing the Turing Test? If a machine acts as intelligently as a human being, then it is as intelligent as a human being This concept forms the basis of the Turing Test, a means to evaluate if an artificial intelligence is indistinguishable from a hum...
And as a related question, what factors determine how much of your programming is split up between development and maintenance? I know this is a highly subjective question, but I'm wondering where software application development tools can add the most benefit, on making the development faster or making the maintenance easier? Thank yo...
I'm interested in generating short codes (up to 6 characters) which are unambiguous for human readability: i.e.: 2Z8B5S would be a very bad code because B looks a lot like 8 and 2 looks a lot like Z, etc. A good code would be something like: AE37HT, say. Obviously, I could try to figure it out myself, but I was looking to see if there...
Hey all, I've been reading through previous posts on declarative programming and I think I understand the underlying concepts. Could anyone describe some declarative programming paradigms and what they are useful for, as well as what their major shortcomings are? I'm trying to examine a new application development system that is comin...
As a software developer, what kind of percentage commission do you expect from a company that licenses your product? In other words, if you create an application for a run-time engine and that firm gets to sell seats to run your product, what kind of percentages do you think are fair commissions? ...
I graduated 4 years ago from a small college with a good computer science program, and I am interested in going back to grad school. My numbers (GPA & GRE) are good, but those don't matter nearly as much as I wish they did! CS grad programs understandably value research and recommendations in an application above all else, and I have n...
Hi, I'm a computer science student and was able to convince a CDN who has a NOC locally to give me a tour of their facility this last Monday. I thought it was great and might consider network engineering in the future. But I think I'd rather be programming the utilities that run and operate these networks. Either way, I would love to pl...
I am working on an academic research regarding some very long functions in the Linux kernel (link, link). For that research, I would like to use some code flow visualization tool, that would be able to plot a graph in which each vertex is a decision point and each edge is a piece of code which runs in a consequent way. Do you know of a...
I'm wondering what portion of Java developers actually invest in writing package.html files, and what they write in them. I am particularly interested in packages that can serve as your public APIs. In addition, I'm wondering whether developers actually bother to read the package level documentation when they use unfamiliar APIs, and wh...
Hi, I'm looking for an open source web application written in ruby on rails, that have had (or still have!) some performance issues in the past. I'd like to carry out some tests on it during my thesis. Thx for any hints! ...