Forgot your password?

typodupeerror

Comment: RSS (Score 1) 2254

by Excaliburszone (#35004896) Attached to: Slashdot Launches Re-Design

THANK GOD I moved to RSS for keeping up with /., the new UI blows, I can't find an easy way to expand all the stories on the index. Who the thought it would be intelligent to collapse certain stories so you have to click on the titles and reload the page to read themt? I mean, if it was really long, then cut it off and put in a "read more after the 'jump'" link. The reason I stayed with the old design was to read all the stories and decide if I wanted to read comments. That and I could just scroll down the index without having to do a crap load of clicking.

Well, Google Reader to the rescue. No souped up CPU usage and crap JavaScript coding to slow my browser down.

Now, if someone can explain how to expand all the stories on the index page so that I can get that fixed, that'd be great. But until then, RSS only for me.

Comment: Re:Beat me to it. (Score 3, Insightful) 467

by Excaliburszone (#34901800) Attached to: Advice On Teaching Linux To CS Freshmen?

Right on. Most CS students are unaware that they have signed on for math, set theory, relational algebra, etc. They mostly think that they're going to learn how to program games and become rich.

There's also the other subset of CS students who are forced to take beginning CS classes due to their major. Bioinformatics for instance. They really don't have the head to figure this stuff out.

I would say that 95% of the CS students I have taught in lab or tutoring were in above their heads and 60% either switched majors or failed. Some of them failed the CS intro to programming 3-4 times before they figured it out.

You may not realize it, but the 90/9/1 principle applies to CS as well. 90% won't get it, 9% will get through it, and 1% will go on to Masters or PhD.

So, the best way to teach CS students about Linux is to wrap it up in a series of lectures that include different OSes such as Windows, Linux, Mac OS, DOS, etc. That's probably the only way to get them interested (most will gravitate towards the pretty ones).

Comment: Attention to detail is key... (Score 1) 684

by Excaliburszone (#31121670) Attached to: How Easy Is It To Cheat In CS?

I was a TA for my university's CS department for a few years. There was this one semester where two students decided they were going to cheat off each other in Intro to Programming.

They might have pulled it off since they were in two different classes and had two different TAs doing the grading.

Except one of the berks decided he wasn't going to change anything in the copied project, not even in the file headers where the other student's name sat staring at me...

yeesh

Comment: Re:DiVx brought this up years ago. (Score 2, Interesting) 275

by Excaliburszone (#28237633) Attached to: The Perils of DRM — When Content Providers Die

The difference between this and with Circuit City's Divx fiasco is physical media. Those people who were sucked in by CC's idiocy at least have the hardware that can be hacked or made to work in some way. If I can recall correctly, your player was able to play normal DVD as well as gold and platinum Divx discs.

With digital media and DRM you have to rely on finding a software solution. But there is no physical media.

disbar, n: As distinguished from some other bar.

Working...