Comment Re:I'm Sold (Score 5, Funny) 144
It's got what plants crave!
Comment Re:Slashdot account (Score 1) 633
I plan on passing my slashdot account on to my children. That way, people will see a six figure number and think they're just an old curmudgen and ignore them. Kids need opposition to learn and grow.
Comment Re:Teachers wrong here (Score 4, Interesting) 333
Good profs at the very least work on a 4 semester rotation of courses where you're going to have to dig up a student from a few years ago at least before you have an easy "tweak and resubmit" assignment. Any instructor that dishes out the exact same projects semester after semester isn't showing any commitment, and certainly isn't staying with the times. Computer science is in such a continuous state of flux that any prof that isn't consistently reworking their coursework isn't doing their job.
Depends on the school. I'm and adjunct professor at a local satellite campus, and I teach the same class every year. The topic is data structures, and not a lot changes year over year when you're talking about something so fundamental. I have changed my curriculum each year, but only because I have yet to find a book that I feel really treats the topic well. Each book has some high points and some glaring low points, but I dream of the day when my lectures actually become somewhat static. I spend way too much time tweaking my lecture notes.
Also, you don't seem to have considered that in some courses, each programming assignment builds on the one before. By posting his assignments, even after the due dates, he may be influencing his fellow students in the follow on assignments.
Comment He got exactly what he deserved (Score 4, Funny) 410
I mean, he was watching the Bears vs. the Lions. No network should be forced to even touch that traffic.
Comment Re:BS (Score 1) 325
The lone Linux netbook?
A Dell Inspiron with 512 MB of RAM and 4 GB of Flash for $350.
"Not sold in stores."
Obviously, someone didn't look at Dell.com before they posted...
Dell Inspirion mini 9 with Ubuntu linux, and all the above specs: $249
The Windows XP version does come with a hard drive double the size for just $50 more, but notice that is after $25 of "instant savings." Make of that what you will.
Comment Re:no kidding (Score 1) 330
If these "college kids" are extra special then we as a nation are completely and utterly doomed.
Fortunately, the nation in question is Canada...
Comment Re:Drilling into a volcano - and were shocked? (Score 1) 251
Actually, I would expect to encounter pockets of super heated gasses riding on top of the magma. I think the point here is that they can punch more holes in and study the magma, which it wouldn't really be safe to do in the crater.
Submission + - Apple Execs Reportedly Faked Options Documents
theodp writes: "Federal prosecutors are reportedly looking closely at stock option administration documents that were apparently falsified by Apple execs to maximize the profitability of option grants. While Apple has said CEO Steve Jobs did not profit from the stock-option backdating, Jobs has reportedly hired his own attorney to deal with the SEC and Justice Department."
Submission + - Back to the drawing board: PS3 vs Xbox 360
Timmus writes: "A year ago, FiringSquad wrote about the eleven design mistakes of Xbox 360. In their latest article, they see how accurate their predictions were (answer: very). The article continues with an discussion of how Sony has learned from Microsoft's mistakes. Finally, they close with a very interesting analysis which predicts why the PS3 will succeed, even though every other analyst claims the opposite.
I.E., Blu-Ray is completely worthless to developers. You only need the capacity if you've got a ton of pre-rendered HD cutscenes. Nobody uses pre-rendered cutscenes anymore, except Square-Enix... Polyphony Digital, Konami, and Square-Enix program with the wrong paradigm, but that's the paradigm that Sony catered to."Both the PS3 and Xbox 360 are developer oriented — it's a question of who they're targeting. The Xbox 360 adopts a balanced approach favored by legendary programmers such as John Carmack. It's fundamentally and academically, the right way to do things when designing a console capable of playing a wide variety of games.
Sony has taken an approach that's hated by the majority of developers, but is well-liked by Polyphony Digital, Konami, and Square-Enix. [These companies] buy into the religion of massively multithreaded games that harness multiple parallel CPUs... [and] approach games with the same vision that Sony offers with the PS3.
