Oh my, I guess we are seeing the effects of semesters starting somewhat globally again

or starting to see them :)

that's the feeling I got going through the close votes earlier today

@Gilles Yes. But science, not engineering, is my point.

@Juho It has been on for two or three weeks already, hasn't it?

Well it surely depends, Finland just started this week

and so did at least some universities in the US if not all

FHs (Fachhochschulen) in Germany might have started, but universities won't for another six weeks or so.

I thought I saw some homework questions that all sounded Indian-ish.

oh, six weeks "alone" sounds like a long time :)

the new freshmen here only spend the first week without the company of the older students

Hi @Raphael, what do you mean by FHs ?

@Juho Huh? Our freshmen are probably still on vacation.

Oh, sorry

I thought you meant freshmen with FHs (and I even misread that as FMs...)

@imaibou We have the concept of "Fachhochschule" which I think is similar to technical universities in the US. They have different goals and methods then universities; they provide more of a job training, that is stay close to current industry standards, often incorporate crafts aspects, and also hire people from industry for teaching.

@Juho Oh no. :D I don't know why they diverge from the "traditional" rhythm, but some universities do to.

it's been 2 moths since I started documenting about studying in germany and this is the first time I hear about it

@Raphael can you tell me about international students admission there, do they provide graduate studies or something similar?

@Juho Same in the UK if I recall my experience from about five years ago.

Also, Hey

@imaibou Sure they do, as would virtually any sensible(?) university. Why not check the international offices webpages of the university you are interested in?

I sure will, thaks @Raphael

@imaibou FHs usually offer both bachelor and master programs, but (mostly) no PhDs. Job training, not education towards research, as I said. (Some people want this to change since the meaning of a PhD gets reinterpreted, and some changes are being made, but if you want a research degree, go to a university.)

@imaibou I don't know about international students policies; every university/school has their own. You'll have to search the websites of schools you are interested in for information. I'm pretty sure you can study anywhere, though. Where are you from?

@Mourdos Hi!

@Raphael I don't really want a PhD

@Raphael I am from algeria (africa) and am finishing my cs bachelor studies, may be I will try to get a master degree there

@imaibou I know that we have lots of African students; mostly bachelor-level, though, and few finish. :/

@Raphael what are the good FHs in computer science that you recommand ?

I don't know about the spectrum and level of the education you get over yonder, but you might have to do some bachelor modules (most often maths and/or TCS). At least, this is how my department handles international master students with gaps in their curricula; they decide on a case-by-case basis.

@imaibou I honestly have no idea. I'm in TCS at a university, so I can't really comment on their quality even if I knew any curricula in detail.

I'm asking a friend who has been visiting more schools (he's involved in the accreditation process), maybe he can point out some.

@imaibou Assuming there's an international office at your university, talk to the people there. They typically know things, and at least know where to find the relevant information

His answer: "depends on the criteria" :D

@Raphael ok, thank you very much for the insights

@imaibou You're welcome!

@imaibou Anyway, criteria include geographic restrictions (I assume none), interest in PhD (you said none) and your focus area. So, what part of CS would you like to focus on?

@Raphael mainly computer security or operation systems

@Raphael Is this CS? It mentions “x86” and “ARM” and “POWER” a lot.

@Raphael can you tell me about something: What I understand is that after obtaining a bachelor degree, one can carry on the studies to obtain a master degree. is that right?

@imaibou My friend recommends Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences because of their international student body/council, programs for equating differences in prior knowledge and well-structured courses of studies.

@imaibou Yes.

@Raphael thanks a lot, I will take a look

@Raphael @WanderingLogic and others: as Operating Systems is shutting down, I'm going to suggest a bunch of migrations to Computer Science, to be performed on Friday. meta.operatingsystems.stackexchange.com/questions/52/…

In Germany, it's usually a good idea to contact the Fachschaft of your target department. They know their courses of studies inside out and have a mandate to help students. The councils are democratic entities with some say in how the school does some things. (FS Informatik in Darmstadt: fbihome.de )

Unfortunately, English websites seem to be rare there. :/

@Gilles I'll trust you guys to make the right calls; I'm not quite qualified for this field, anyway.

@Gilles Only skimming abstract and headlines: the model part is certainly CS. Application to said processors and languages, probably more SE.

@imaibou Uhhh, apparently their master program is in German, duh. Do you speak any?

Apparently most FHs have German master programs -- that may be why you did not came across any references during your research. Too bad. :/

(Maybe that's why we get as many international students that don't really (want to) belong at a research-oriented university as we do -- the industry-oriented alternatives are no good for them.)

@Raphael then what you call SE is (or overlaps) applied CS

@Raphael I used to speek german very well, we lived in munchen when i was young, I then moved to algeria and didn't practice that much so i lost it a little. but i believe i can recall it back

@Gilles Certainly overlaps, especially in verification where theory, applied CS and engineering work very closely together to solve real problems.

@imaibou Oh, in that case FH in Germany might still be an option. You'd probably miss some technical vocabulary, but most is English in CS, anyway. (afaik)

Many places offer concentrated German courses to be taken before starting to study; you might even have to take one of these in order to get some certificate attesting your ability. Many students arrive six or twelve months before they start studying in order to do that.

With prior knowledge, that should be relatively easy for you. (Du kannst natürlich auch schon aus Algerien mit Deutschen chatten, um wieder warm zu werden. ;) )

--> e.g. tandempartners.org mylanguageexchange.com

I have found tandems to be very effective, in particular for every-day language.

@Gilles Yes. That too. *facepalm*

Moderator on SE, missing the perfect opportunity to advertise the network. Good job.

@Gilles @Raphael thanks

@Gilles Another data point: this question may very well admit (applied) CS answers, so I'd leave it. The first sentence of @WanderingLogic's answer definitely is conceptual (as far as I can tell), but then an alarming amount of CPU specs follows; the last paragraphs are more on the conceptual side.

The way I see it, it's a conceptual answer to a question rooted in observing reality, but it still needs real data in order to make the point. This is pretty much as far as I'm "willing" to stretch scope-wise.

@FrankW @WanderingLogic @d.w. @davidricherby @lplant As always, I appreciate and value your participation in the community moderation process. However, closing a question as unclear without telling the OP why is not a good idea. Please leave a comment that tells the OP what to improve. Thanks! (I did not read the question, so I may be missing something obvious.)

@Raphael Can you remind us which one? I remember voting to close a couple of days ago on a question with no comment, but don't remember which one.

@WanderingLogic Ah, of course: this one.

@Raphael IIRC there were comments, when I voted. Maybe these have been adressed by one of the revisions, while the votes remained?

@Raphael Ah. The same thing is happening to me this time as happened when I voted to close. I start reading and my eyes glaze over. It is filled with jargon to the point where (a) I can't find the question and (b) I actually wonder if it is randomly generated text.

I have no idea how to give constructive advice.

It really was/is "unclear what they are asking." As it's currently written, it's hard to tell exactly what they are asking.

As it says in the hold message.

@WanderingLogic I agree. One of the rare cases, where this message is effectively the best we (at least I) can do in terms of describing the problem with the question.

After reading this, I have an idea how some people feel, when reading larsian. ;)

@WanderingLogic at least say something like “I am an expert in <topic> and I have no idea what you mean by “<phrase from the question>””

A close with no comment is fine for something that is obviously bad like a homework copy-paste, but this guy put some effort into writing his question and the question is motivated by a real problem

for example, does “k-maximally link disjoints paths” make sense? Do you understand what inputs and outputs the algorithm should have? How the algorithm should decide what to output?

@Gilles If you are sure he actually put in effort and it is not actually something like this: pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen, then I'll take another look at it.

Hmmm. And also this: math.stackexchange.com/questions/908514/…

And this: cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/25600/…

(I went looking to see if this was a legitimate user or one of those Spamdexers (people who post questions all over so that their user page will get high rank by Google, and then they can point their user page at someones advertisement.)

I think it's a legitimate user, just one who doesn't know how to write a decent question. Almost certainly struggling with english.

The "random" quality may come from using Google translate to produce the english text.

Okay. Did my best.

@WanderingLogic I can't tell for sure, I don't understand the question (but I wouldn't expect to since it's too far from a field I know), but it looks too readable and well-constructed to be randomly assembled.

For all I know the poster may have copied someone else's question

@WanderingLogic if your feedback is “you seem to have a valid question but your English is incomprehensible”, that's useful feedback too

thanks for leaving feedback

@FrankW @WanderingLogic I see, fair enough. Thanks for adding the comments anyway!

FWIW, the question reads legit to me. I don't understand the question either; I suspect that clearly stating the problem that is currently only named in the title would help a lot.

@FrankW Yes, there were comments because the original question ended mid-sentence. Nothing beyond that was discussed, so I removed them after the sentence had been completed.

Anyone interested in discussing what we can do to grow cs.se and/or avoid the distraction of overlapping area 51 proposals?

We also could use this as an opportunity to leverage the Area51 Compilers and Programming Languages proposals into something actually positive.

WL... to me the proliferation of area51 proposals that are "near" preexisting/ established se sites is due to a few factors.

a) there is good general coverage by existing groups.

b) those groups tend to be narrow/ (overly?) strict about their charters.

these phenomena are se-wide, it is not unique to individual sites.

c) many sites are not so concerned about dedicated "outreach/ publicity" efforts.

here, wrt (c) gilles has shown significant outreach effort eg ML group closed & also OS group closed, by importing high-valued questions.

another factor,

d) there are many failed area51 proposals, some reaching large # of subscribers. se mgt does not seem too concerned about it or see it as something that needs to be addressed/ "solved"/ "fixed"

the phrase "if you cant beat em, join em" comes to mind....

@WanderingLogic Yes, but not today.

(Note that pings only work if the user has been in that room recently.)

@vzn You mean I should go on Area 51 and propose a new "Computer Science" Q&A site? (Subtitle: "For experts and enthusiasts in Computer Science who Stack Exchange brings to the Area 51 site instead of the existing CS Q&A site").

WL rejection stings. (know the feeling.) the group got far. it is not all in vain/ for naught.

if you look at the history of cs.se, there was significant antagonism wrt cstheory.se which started 1st.... cs.se eventually succeeded....

the failure of area51 proposals after large # of users and significant momentum shows how thinly spread cyber attn in general is...

notice that even cs.se hasnt graduated yet!

we would all like a small playground that includes our favorite topic & excludes stuff that we dont want... after some pt it becomes impractical...

←still bummed out after failure of ML proposal! the nth one!

your contributions are significantly valued on cs.se wrt points etc...

@vzn Actually I'm not feeling bitter or rejected.

My sense of humor tends to be acerbic.

:| ok so then (therapist hat on briefly here) what are you feeling?

@vzn That Area 51 is a serious UX bug that makes the entire stack exchange network worse. I'm hoping that we can turn the most recent lemon that Area 51 produced into some lemonade.

lol.

area51 can be seen as a bit like a global meta for blowing off steam by disaffected/ disenchanted/ annoyed/ disengaged users etc.

ie, possibly not a bug but a feature...

gilles is indeed making lemonade by moving worthwhile questions. "all is not lost"

Any opinions about whether process-scheduling should be a synonym for scheduling?

18 out of 21 questions tagged process-scheduling are also tagged operating-systems. Only 3 out of 30 questions tagged scheduling are also tagged operating-systems.

(I don't know what, if anything, that proves. It's just very different between the two tags.)

@WanderingLogic against

Resource planning is pretty different from deciding which process to run next

Great! Thanks.

Ugh

Y nobody close?

community eval: Satisfactory × 14, Needs Improvement × 8, Excellent × 2

I should go and close all these useless questions