[Starwolf]

Ahh. realtime. Where the rubber meets the road. My favorite area to work in. Takes real skill and knocks out most of the cross trained arts & parties majors.

[kdot]

Amen to that.

Besides, our so-called "Computer Programmers" today have alphabet-soup resumes and a wonderful grasp of software development packages. Sure they can chunk out code. But they couldn't begin to discuss kernal mode operations, distributed lock management, device drivers or any multilayer architecture. No, none of that matters because they just have to use the pretty GUIs to establish their locking strategy - or click-here to set up the network.

The reason CS is important is because we still need programmers who can write the next generation device drivers for the new-fangled drives and periperal devices. We still need our operating systems to evolve so the shiny development environments can support high-pay project manager jobs.

Most software developers today are users of robust GUI environments. Great jobs - gotta have them. But real CS programmers know words like MUTEX, QIO, CMKRNL, context switching, paging, swapping, etc.

I know, I'm a dinosaur.