Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Pricedrops, Honor, Games
Making your computer worth even less. Acid-F1ux writes: "Advanced Micro Devices has slashed prices of its desktop and mobile Athlon processors just days after a similar move by rival Intel. The cuts range from 17 percent to 52 percent for mobile Athlon XP chips and between 11 percent and 32 percent for desktop Athlon XP chips. On Sunday, Intel dropped prices of its Pentium 4 processors by as much as 53 percent."
Progressive Education strikes a blow. darnellmc writes: "According to this Atlanta Journal-Constitution news article GA Tech had so many students violate the school's "honor code" that they have decided to change it.
"In the wake of the investigation, Tech officials have decided to allow students in introductory computer science courses to share information and collaborate on homework, previously prohibited under the school's academic honor code."
Of course code sharing also teaches the value of Open Source ;o) . Maybe now some young Computer Science student can spend more time on developing a good overall program, instead of spending a bunch of time writing simple things like their own sorting routine."
How many letters will the next big threat have? matthew writes: "LWN is carrying the notes from the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group (BPDG) conference (more info at the EFF). The BPDG is the body that will be suggesting future technological control measures; they make the DMCA and CBDTPA seem like trivial problems. The BPDG conference was last week and it was open to the public so anyone could call in. You can read about what the FSF's Bradley M. Kuhn digitalspeech.org's Jonathan Watterson thought of the conference. The basic summary is that we're screwed if people don't start fighting against this kind of injustice."
This is what's called taking license. infochuck writes "Back in January, this story on Slashdot focused on Borland's licensing PR fiasco, and how they promised to remedy the situation (in short, their license permitted them to search at any time any of your computers looking for stolen software). Well, here we are, five months later, and their license hasn't changed one bit - at least not the two most unreasonable clauses, 12 and 14.4, and not in the license included with the Windows version of the Personal Edition. Download for yourself to see, but be warned, you'll have to register, which involves many questions and no less than 5 checkboxes to uncheck, as well as at least a 25MB DL. I believe pr@borland.com is still the place to write..."
Playful is good. If the last month of pre-hype hype, pre-hype, actual hype and post-hype weren't enough, you'll be pleased to read that E3 coverage continues, at Gamespy (some cool reviews), Gamegal (good photos) and other sites beginning with "Game."
If enough people break the rules, they'll change em!
Never argue with an idiot, he'll just lower you to his level and beat you with experience.
Watch out for AMD. :)
Hey Taco! Looks like you're using the "infinite monkeys and typewriters" scheme to generate Ask Slashdots again...
"Back in the day", they used to have one of the friendliest licenses out there (the "treat this software like a book" license) and a great many people bought their stuff because of the low price and reasonable license. You could even install it on a another computer, and as long as two people weren't using the software at the same time, it was ok.
Progressive Education strikes a blow. darnellmc writes: "According to this Atlanta Journal-Constitution news article GA Tech had so many students violate the school's "honor code" that they have decided to change it.
"In the wake of the investigation, Tech officials have decided to allow students in introductory computer science courses to share information and collaborate on homework, previously prohibited under the school's academic honor code."
Woohoo! Let's get everyone to drive consistantly 10-15 miles (for you yanks) / hour over the limit and maybe they will raise that too! Save me some money in fined it would!
All the software I wr[oi]te at my school includes the GPL copyright notice. The nice thing about the GPL is that you can share with fellow students to your hearts content but if the students use any of your code, they have to clearly mark that it is your code if they use it.
As far as I can tell, this protects me in the event that a student is accused of cheating while still allowing me to show anyone my code. I personally think that software licensing should be a part of every CS program and the GPL should be encouraged to be used for all assignments.
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
just some school rules. A good thing to see. It shows some flexibility and honest appraisal of the situation.
Much too often educational administrators become keepers of the sacred school 'laws' and forget that their sole purpose is to facilitate learning.
A good situation on the whole.
.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
When you are writing software for a company or a non-classroom project, reinventing the wheel is usually a bad idea. However, in the context of learning how to program, I think it is important for students to do their own work and not just copy code from the Internet or from the smart student down the hall.
The new rules are just a license to cheat.
I can understand GT's reluctance to allow "student-student assistance" when I consider the reputation that they have as an engineering school (and not just computer / electical engineering, either). I seem to recall hearing that the Textiles lab at GT came up with about half of the specialty cloths used in NASA's spacesuits. I'm sure that with that sort of history they thought that clamping down tight on the CS students was a good PR move-- not only do we have brilliance, but we pull it out of one student at a time.
Maybe this was good PR. But it was a stupid educational move. And I don't care how good a business they do with NASA or anyone else, or what sort of press they put out; above all else, isn't college supposed to be about learning?
Do you like Japanese imports?
Maybe now some young Computer Science student can spend more time on developing a good overall program, instead of spending a bunch of time writing simple things like their own sorting routine."
Noooo!!!! I don't know how many "groups" you've worked in at college level, but almost every group has one or two people that do the work and understand the material. The others don't have a clue or are freeloading. Even if I do understand the material, jumping into a group and only doing a portion of the work sets me up to not know part of the material very well come test time or when I'm working at a real job.
For large projects, working in groups makes sense in a couple of cases. First, the project is cool, but too large for one person to complete in the alloted time is a prime candidate for a group project. Second, group projects teache the group members to deal with the frustration of working on software with another person. (yeah, cheap shot...)
But please, oh please, don't make it a policy to allow group projects at every level. You'd think we didn't already have a job market saturated with poorly trained CS people.
Personally, I am sorry to see that Ga Tech has decided to back off on its no-collaboration policy for the classes in question. The policy was only in place for "Intro to Programming"-type classes, where learning basic programming techniques, not group-environment programming skills, is the purpose of the course.
Can you imagine the hell of being given a group assignment in a higher level class where half of the members can't remember how to create a for() loop or use pointers, because they "collaborated" that part of their work in the intro classes?
It looks like GaTech will now be offering different Intro-level courses for computer-related majors and non-computer-related majors, but it looks like they won't be enforcing the "no-collaboration" rules even for the comp-sci major classes. With a shift in emphasis to quizzes and tests, rather than actual coding, I can only see this as working to lower the quality level of students' programming skills.
CC-licensed translations of Japanese fiction: http://tonygonz.blogspot.com/
AT&T releases "unix for windows"
holy shit:
http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/uwin/
who else knew about this?
Is Microsoft for the CBDTPA, if they are, then the Republican Party WILL be for it. Which, of course would mean the CBDTPA WILL BECOME LAW, NO MATTER WHAT WE SAY.
Now, imagine if only a government would do something like that. Gee, what a novel concept...
"U.S. citizens: Ours is not to question why, ours is to bend over and expose our behinds..."
There's no wrong way, to eat a Rhesus...
Maybe now some young Computer Science student can spend more time on developing a good overall program, instead of spending a bunch of time writing simple things like their own sorting routine.
You're missing the point of a CS education. Students are supposed to learn how to write "simple" things like sorting routines. (Of course, if you think sorting is simple, you're either inexperienced or you're extremely well versed in computer science.) That's why professors always tell you to not use libraries for assignments you're supposed to do yourself. Otherwise, we're talking about short typing exercises. The more simple algorithms you write, the more experience you gain for making the jump from higher complexity algorithms to code.
Students should not be swapping code on assignments. That's called cheating. These kids need to write as much code as possible, even if it's been done before.
Why bother.
> E3 coverage continues, at Gamespy (some cool reviews), Gamegal (good photos) and other sites beginning with "Game."
;-)
So, am I the only one who misses all the obligatory pictures we used to get from these conventions of 3dfx's latest Lara Croft booth babe?
They may have fallen behind in the video card market before their demise, but they sure had *showmanship*. Teenage girls in skimpy fantasy-wear and video cards the size of...
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
I dont care if its Gamegal or Gamespy!
If she managed to shoot a pic of the "Harry Potter" booth, she damn well could have managed to snag a pic of the DoomIII booth! Fscking chic!
Yeah! I could go to some other website, but still..
Rapid Nirvana
Treason never prospers,
What's the reason?
For if it doth prosper,
None dare call it treason!
I've forgotten who said it and I'm too tired to go search for it.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I have to disagree with this point. We need our C/S students to write basic sorting routines so that they can truly understand the concepts. I don't know about any of you, but watching some professor write the code for a sort algorithm on the board was not equivalent to me understanding it. With any education you need to have a firm grasp of the basics before moving on and if that means really figuring out how to write sort routines then that is what our students need. It would be like watching a couple lectures on basic chemistry and thinking that you could go straight into biochemistry.
Well would you?
My E3 photos. Note, there are more than just E3 photos there, but some 60+ of the show.
People think Microsoft is the answer. Microsoft is just the question, "No" is the answer.
I for one didn't think that the major industry players would even let the public in on any sort of discussion concerning DRM. Counter productive to their cause. Of course if you read the blurb by the FSF people, you will see that the public view was only given token notice. Now if only I wasn't a poor college student, I could actually join groups like the EFF and FSF, instead of just talking about it.
"Maybe now some young Computer Science student can spend more time on developing a good overall program, instead of spending a bunch of time writing simple things like their own sorting routine."
.5 GPA in anything that required real thought.
They entire point of those classes is so you know how to write your own sorting algorithm in case you ever had to, and understand how they work! he submittor obviously never took a cs course in they're life. That, or they education at a crackpot school like Mizzou, and ended up changing to a business major cause they got a
Students are supposed to learn how to write "simple" things like sorting routines.
No, CS courses are not about learing to write sorting algorythms, compilers, operating systems, or any code at all. Computer Science courses should focus on the theory topics such as "this is how you determine the time it would take for the algorythm to complete" (since this is a very limited, deliberate subset of the Turing Halting question, it is possible). Most students won't understand the theory they know how to write code and put the theory to use writing (or analyzing) code-- but that shouldn't affect the course's focus.
So if when you talk of teaching "how to write... sorting routines" you mean teaching "this is the optimal sort algorythm" not "this is how you determine the efficiency", you are the one who've missed the point of CS education.
Do you like Japanese imports?
"including some good news for AMD fans, and a last drizzle of news from E3."
i read the "AMD fans" and was hoping they were having a recall on their CPU fans. mine blows, just not in a good way.
greg
sig - .
Strange, that a similar statement for, say, an English course would be that now English students can more time plagiarizing Shakespeare, and less time learning the difference between "your" and "you're". The thing about a CS course, is that it is meant to give you a good theoretical underpinning to your coding skills. Knowing there is a black box called sort you can use is worthless. Knowing how the black box works is not.
Learning to use others work is a useful skill, sure, but unless you have something in your own brain that you can put into the process, you will never get anything but rehashes of previous work out. Maybe that's ok for an English student looking to write middle-of-the-road sitcoms, or a CS student who is going to churn out the same web application for the rest of their lives.
Summary, there are some things you need to learn for yourself. It's no good knowing that a calculator can add, if you don't know what addition is.
not_cub
q='echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"';s=\';b=\\;echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"
Honestly,
Is there anyone out there using Borland products?
No two ways about it. If you insert a solution into your homework that did not come from your own mind, then a) you haven't learned anything b) it will just bite you in the ass later on an exam where (I assume) you are still not allowed to look at your neighbor's paper.
working in groups is a good idea, if done right. ie everyone shares in the burden. Now it would be up to the profs to have more creative marking...have each member of the team grade the other members in a non-public way.
of course, the easier solution is just to lower the value of assignments (not so much so that they are insignificant though), and make tests much more valuable to your grade. Heck, even throw some some questions from assignments into tests once in a while.
The basic sleazeware produced in a drunken fury by a bunch of UCBerkeley grad students was still the core of BIND. --PV
This is ridiculous. At my school the honor code is shoved down our throat. And I mean shoved. Every class I take the professor takes a whole class meeting to tell everyone that even if you 'see' someones code, for a minute, you are cheating.
Look, I don't like it when one guy does the work and everyone else cheats either. Guess what though, that's how the world works. I'm sorry, but we pay these professors quite a good deal, and a lot of them give me little to no direction, and I am going to talk with my classmates as much as possible. No, I am not going to *copy* their code, but I see absolutely no problem with cooperation.
And then there is groups, this is perfect. Yeah, there is always some guy who does all the work. I say too bad for that guy, because if he let's everyone do the work now, he'll be doing all the work for the rest of his life. Go talk to the teacher and tell him/her what's going on, then leave it up to the teacher to mediate. THIS IS HOW THE REAL WORLD WORKS.
I'm one of those 'too old to be in college' guys, so I've seen both sides. In the real world, you almost always work in groups. You have to learn how to manage them, and how to be a part of them.
Let student's cooperate and enforce more tracking on who is contributing how much, moderated by the teacher.
-- I have fans? Wow.
Advanced Micro Devices has slashed prices of its desktop and mobile Athlon processors just days after a similar move by rival Intel.
I purchased my new AMD XP 2000 just a week ago, and now the price drops. It seems like every time you buy any computer part, the next week prices go down.
We had a similar sitution in regards to my physics course. The homework was turned in over the internet. This lead to several groups forming. Each group, however, ended up with several people doing the work and the rest 'collaborating'. Out of the 40 people the class started with, 12 remained at the end of the semester and only half of those students passed. It seems as though the students who were 'collaborating' didn't fare all that well on the IRL tests. Strangely, the one test conducted over the internet had an excellent pass rate ;-). Collaboration has great value in teaching students why it's not a good idea to screw yourself over by taking the easy road.
The best way to accelerate a windows box is at 9.8 meters per second square.
Of course code sharing also teaches the value of Open Source ;o) . /. pwd, and it is not emailing it to me afte a few more minutes..so eh...ac i am
yeah, never being able to make a profit for your hard work cause some shithead who can barly write 'hello world' steals your code, changes the graphics associated with it, the res files, then sells it as thier own, splitting the profits you make in half. or some company comes along and take the code, takes parts of it to implement into thier own program, then sells it eleminating you all together, yeah oss is great.. i use to be an oss junkie, then i realized with the exceptional few(linux kernal hackers, a few good opengl coders, and misc others) most oss junkies are code thieves. it got so bad(a few ppl at an oss site i posted at a long time ago stole a shitload of my code(over 10,000 lines of code) and modified it, first with open source though no credit, then saying it became so popular they were going to make it closed source and sell it) that i removed a few tens of thousands of lines of code from my favorite oss site. i have met maybee 20 or so oss people i trust and would be willing to share code with, the other few hundred i feel should be irradiated so they human genome can evolve and give communism(and oss of course) a chance:)
well after several attempots to login i see that i lost my
My old school deteriorated even further than that. Last year's "Student of the Year" who hardly ever attended classes, was caught using website cut and paste (without referencing) to supply almost all the material for his final report. Other students did the cut and paste thing all year. Some were caught.
Nobody was disciplined. None. It didn't make me feel all that much pride in my degree to know my school handed them out that indiscriminately.
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
Maybe now some young Computer Science student can spend more time on developing a good overall program, instead of spending a bunch of time writing simple things like their own sorting routine."
Yeah! Last thing we need is fresh grads who actually know how stuff works. Give 'em to me thinking everything is a black box. Why, best thing is if they view the computer, the company, the government, the whole world and everything in it as a mysterious black box. That way Mr. Scorpio and I can fill their heads with our Mantra of Death(TM) while they lounge in their business hamocks. I sure hope this works better than our last endeavor.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Are there any space mmp games? the D&D motief just isn't my style.
The sole purpose of "educational administrators" is not to "facilitate learning" as you put it. Many in the administration, and I think almost all faculty would like for this to be their role, but it is not. The problem with this position is that in order to hold it you must assume that the students' sole interest is in learning. Sadly, this is not the case.
The case in question will inevitably work towards exactly what the administration is trying to prevent. It will devalue the already low value attached to a Bachelor's degree. I wouldn't exactly call this a good situation.
Wait a minute, they had another E3? But they had one last year! I remember because I went a couple months after paying my taxes.....
Damn.
Please don't tell me I have to do those every year too.....
You zap the moderators with a wand of humor! The moderators resist!
E3 is passe, especially when there's (Supposedly) an E9
in other news......
Unix rips off Apples buttons
http://www.unix.com
vs
http://www.apple.com
good to see Unix geeks havent lost their ethics
I noticed others talking about the robots behind Sony, and haven't seen anyone post pictures. So here they are (along with some others):
http://www.eqteam.com/e3/
If you want to see something at higher rez, let me know...
I came across this one day and book marked it because it was worth it. It sort of pertains to the licensing story and to the college story:
l
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.htm
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
"Maybe now some young Computer Science student can spend more time on developing a good overall program, instead of spending a bunch of time writing simple things like their own sorting routine."
I teach graduate courses in AI and math, and I'd have to strongly disagree with that statement. Isn't the point of a Computer Science education to actually learn the basic tenets of the subject? Most CS graduates get away with little or no math... now we'll have a whole bunch who've never even coded up QuickSort.
I'd understand if this policy applied to the Graduate School since the point of a graduate education would be to concentrate on the more interesting/abstract/high_level aspects of the subject. But the thought of having droves of undergrad CS students getting by using the intelligence of a select few is really scary.
"In mathematics, it's not enough to read the words -- you have to hear the music"
Then again, maybe this would only be appropriate for higher level courses. In which case you should give them a CVS repository and have everybody add their part simultaneously.
Anyway, I'm just thinking of ways to incorporate modern practice into the classroom. How many times have any of you started from scratch for a new program?
When the college says "Do not share code", they mean "Do not share code."
But how far do they want to take it? Can't use libc because you're "sharing code" written by the glibc authors? Can't use GCC because you're "sharing code" generated by the compiler?
Will I retire or break 10K?
The GPL requires that:
The original BSD license, in contrast, has an obnoxious clause requiring credit in any advertising, not just in the copyright notice and source code.
If a thing is not diminished by being shared, it is not rightly owned if it is only owned & not shared. S. Augustine
That's why professors always tell you to not use libraries for assignments you're supposed to do yourself.
Are the professors saying you're supposed to master talking directly to the kernel for I/O in every little program, without even using the abstraction of #include <iostream> (or its equivalents)? How far are the professors willing to take their "no libraries" stance?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Was this game at E3?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Like GaTech, the UW-Madison CS department used to have strict "no collaboration" rules and policies for intro level CS courses. They had code analysis tools to find copied code among student's assignment submissions.
They found that cheating was so rampant, it could not be enforced. They got sick of dealing with it.
The new policy (which has been in effect for a couple years at least), is that collaboration is permitted, but assignments make up a smaller portion of your overall grade now.
Typically, there are ~3 big exams counting for ~90 % of your final grade. The last ~10% is made up of several assignments given throughout the semester (YMMV depending on the course).
The rationale is that if you collaborate in a bad way (to the extent that you're not learning the material), you will surely fail when exam time comes. Seemed fair to me, though I personally never collaborated (didn't know anyone, didn't trust others abilities, etc.)
civil disobedience
Feel free to concat me with all your troubles...
I think that learning to use the STL first, rather than, say, learning how to make a linked list or dynamically allocated arrays, etc, is at least as bad as "collaborating" on homework.
It's sad when third year students have trouble with the above-mentioned things.
I really don't see a problem with getting help from another student when you're stuck on something, as long as you're not totally clueless on where to start. If anything, you learn new things that you will remember in the future.
I use kylix all the time, very well designed and easily portable to windows (although you need at least delphi pro for that, which is $1000... i just use it as a really nice IDE to develop X apps)
Maybe now some young Computer Science student can spend more time on developing a good overall program, instead of spending a bunch of time writing simple things like their own sorting routine.
Yeah, that's great. Maybe now all the new CS grads will be so clueless that I'll have more job security.... </sarcasm>
Unfortunatly this isn't a perfect world, and if students stop learning the basics like writing a good sort routine it just means that in a few years I'm going to have some really obnoxious coworkers, and I'm going to end up doing a higher percentage of the work. Good job Georgia tech!
If you learn what you are supposed to from a computer science education, you learn that all the problems can be broken down to layers of simple soultions. Then you learn to understand the simple solutions. If you really understand the simple solutions, you already know how to put the parts to gether into a good whole. If you can't understand the simple stuff, what good are you? It's important to make CS students prove they understand the simple stuff. The rest isn't nearly as important.
I can't say I'm terribly happy to hear this. I've read through the posts in here, and I can see that I'm not the only one....but what are all these idiots doing congratulating GA Tech?? Did these folks not learn anything from writing code in their CS classes? This isn't a matter of reinventing the wheel, it's a matter of learning how to write code. The "no libraries" rules are not to force you to learn some specific algorithm, it's to force you to write your own code. If you're an architect, you can't simply grab the blueprints to an old building and then claim you know what you're doing. If you're an author you can't grab something by Shakespeare and then go get published. You need to do your own work. You need to learn how the language works, how the computer behaves, how to think in terms of algorithms. If you just let students collaborate on everything, or grab code off the net, then where will they learn how to write it themselves?
yrs,
Ephemeriis
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
The problem with this is, exams arent the best way to test someone's knowledge. By definition, they only test a limited subset of knowledge and skills, and they are usually timed, which imposes a different set of demands on the student. Assignments are much closer to a real-world evaluation.
If the school can't enforce no cheating, it is their own fault. All you have to do is start handing out Fs or kicking kids out, and things will change rather quickly.
The reason I left a $25k/semester school for a $1k/semester school is exactly the reverse of your mystical ideas about CS.
Said expensive "But look! We've got a well known name on our diploma!" school decided that knowing such things as sorting devices and various important algos that everyone who touches a compiler should know.. weren't important.
I was writing things that professors insisted were wrong because 'they weren't in the book' or 'we didn't go over that yet'. Simple, simple things that everyone should fscking know - like incrementing a variable in C-like languages via i++;..
I like my new college. People cringe when they hear of it. "Euw, it's one of those community colleges. They just hand out degrees." Heh, if people only knew. I'm working my arse off. I actually get assigned tasks that require me to sit back and *THINK* before coding.
And I no longer have the urge to sit back and play Team Fortress for six hours instead of going to class and deal with thoughts of slitting my wrists from boredom.
Many people have lamented the fact that American students are educated in a school system that refers to students learning to cooperate on a task as "cheating".
Maybe we'll have one exception now.
Yeah, right.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Civil disobedience is when you break a rule, then proclaim, "I have broken this rule, and I have broken it to show you all how unfair the rule is! I dare you to punish me!" then wait for the world to notice. Then you make more noise.
Breaking a rule 'cause you think its dumb and you can get away with it is just breaking a rule.
Speeding down that empty road with the 35 mph speed limit is not civil disobedience. Downloading mp3s of Napster or Gnutella or whatever the hell people are using these days is not civil disobedience.
Walking into your comp sci professor's office with ten other people after collaborating to create a useful application and saying, "We worked together on this. What are you going to do about it? Oh, and this guy works for the Washington Post." is civil disobedience.
Lack of creativity is no excuse for not having a
Don't worry the "new" price has reacehd the distribution market a few weeks ago. Look at this story from theInquirer for more details.
Help fight continental drift.
And because of that, Bush can't even get Judges approved, much less bills passed, since Dashell is set on being obstructionist. But hey, what do I know, I just pay attention...
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
Bullshit! That student will be overwhelmed at the idea of writing a loop. Toss them some man pages and ask them to open a file handle... they'll be pissing their pants.
You're all full of good intentions, Slashdot, but goddamnit if your ignorance isn't overwhelming. Look, there's something about programming--indeed, there's something about working with any formal system--that you just can't get without having the guts to tediously concentrate on it while learning the basic "physics" of the system. During this process, many students will bail and get others to do the hard thinking for them, under the pretense of "groupwork". Sure... I think instruction, interaction, and guidance during the process of "figuring out the physics of a formal system" can be helpful; but my overriding claim is that many undergraduates need a little extra discipline to get the most out of their education. Group work does not become profitable as an en masse policy until the student has moved on to dealing with the higher-level "behavioral" aspects of a system.
Take chess as an example: the first thing you teach a new player is the rules of the game, which mostly consists of allowable piece movements. There's no intresting conversation to be had at this level b/t fellow learners, and there would be no reason, if this were an academic subject, to let fellow learners talk to each other. True, two learners committed to the integrity of their own education could learn faster (perhaps... the time-overhead of communication could exceed the time-benefit), but this advancement would be undermined by all the learners who pawn off this (mildly) arduous task on someone else. Once everybody knows the physics of the system (be it chess or programming), then intresting things can happen. People start playing real games and start writing real programs that solve semi-real-world problems. "Behavior" of these respective systems becomes something to talk about... something where even the master can gain new insight. The chess people will start to debate opening moves and will experiment with different dominance tactics. The programming people will start stressing the semantics of their programming language as they invent clever hacks and so forth.
The poster's speculation that intro CS students will create real programs if allowed to do groupwork is as naieve as supposing that students of geometry will start finding novel theorms if allowed to collaborate on their proofs homework.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
The problem isn't going to be solved by giving low-level CS students a license to cheat. The reason why so many CS students end up copying is that the professors either are incompetent or don't present the material in a stimulating or relevant way. As a frosh I got burned on a homework assignment for a UNIX course along with about 100 others because the professor just plain sucked.
An interesting thing to bring up though is the issue of collaboration. There should be higher level courses to build skills in working team-based projects, but at my school you're pretty much on your own all 4 years. It's funny since they require us to take classes on how to interact with other people instead of having collaborative projects.
All you have to do is start handing out Fs or kicking kids out, and things will change rather quickly.
It's not quite that easy. There was a lot of red tape to go through each time. Also, even though students saw other students being caught, some assumed that they just cut-n-pasted code. They thought they could just change a few variable names and comments to get away with it, not realizing that the code analysis software would still detect the cheating. Over time, this could be alleviated perhaps. I'm just betting that it's much more difficult to enforce than we could imagine.
I agree with the general sentiment of your post, however. The exams certainly weren't a true test of knowledge. There were usually code-writing sections near the end of the exam that were worth a lot of points, though. My biggest complaint is that I believe some professors had difficulty coming up with good questions for the exams, resulting in an exam with questions that would be much more practically answered in the real world by looking it up.
What a great message!
If enough people break the rules, they'll change em!
Well - maybe they do this with some college rules. But laws generally don't get thrown away when nobody obeys them. They just tend to not get enforced.
The problem is that this puts you at a whim of policement, judges and anyone willing to sue on obscure laws. That's not how a judicial system should work.
What kind of terrible lesson are you teaching students if you let them implement their own sorting routine?!? They shouldn't even have to be copying it from their neighbor - that's just stupid of them when the completed work is already staring at them in their face:
#include (stdlib.h) [why don't lt/mt work in html?)
main(){
...
qsort(*etc...);
...
}
students should be learning how to not reinvent the wheel and use standard libraries, not writing their own sorts! They must learn to research if it has been done before so they can be more productive and reuse old code! Where would we be if we had to write a new linked list or a new stack every time we needed one? stack, map, list...i love all those standard libraries - they save me so much work! I also love Tang, but that's another story.
What are the schools involved ?
If you only post one, tell me the one you are at now, the expensive one you used to be at sounds like them all.
Talking about how to solve problems and collaborating on ideas is ok. Sharing your code with someone else in this setting is not good. It is detrimental to the students. If Joe and Timmy talk about ways to implement the [bubble|quick|heap]sort algorithm in Lisp or C that is great. They can draw up pictures and even come up with prototype functions. They should not be allowed to have one of them write the code and then "share" this solution with his friend. If Timmy spends an hour writing quicksort and shows it to Joe, Joe learns dick-squat-fuck-all about quicksort, because he is copying someone else work. If he sits down with the function prototype and a better understanding of how quicksort works by talking it over with Timmy, he learns solid foundations to help him in his career.
You have no idea how many times I have seen the same code turned in with different variable names. That is bullshit and is called on and those students take a big fat zero on that assignment.
okie.
And I no longer have the urge to sit back and play Team Fortress for six hours instead of going to class and deal with thoughts of slitting my wrists from boredom.
It sounds like you are making progress in your maturation. The next bold step is to accept the failure at your previous school as your own, and don't blame the institute for everything. It will be a big step, and it will make you stronger. You are growing up; never stop this process of introspection out of anger or spite.
Hmm.. Nah. Second thought: just slit your wrists, loser. You can't get a job with that crap degree.
ummm, not sure where you people have been, but
states do control their own speed limits.
About 10 years ago the fed. govt. decided to repeal
the federal speed limit of 55 and let states
set it as they wish. In parts of tennessee its 70mph,
while in parts of michigan its 75mpg, and if you go to montana
there is a stretch that has no defined speed limit.
The cops just watch for wreckless driving, i.e. excessive speeding
Writing a selection sort is something all CS undergrads should have to do - it helps build the basics in a CS education. I mean, if you can't do that, then how are you ever going to master ordered insertion of lists, switching pointers, et cetera?
On the first day, it said "Hello World!"...
Um, E3 => booth babes, so how can this possibly be off topic?
b abes/big/TwoInPinkBikinis.jpg
http://www.chickshardware.com/html/expo/ects2000/
(hey, you've got to spend karma somehow)
In introductory courses especially, and in all courses to some degree until complete projects, is the overall program worthy of academia.
A nice frilly interface to an assignment which had to sole purpose of teaching you sorting does nothing to teach you sorting. "I copied the sort out of the book, and then I added all this fluff, look at me, I am a good Computer Scientist, I can draw in VB's IDE."
This is why my one teacher made the statement: "There are scientists, and then there are programmers, and you people are programmers." At the time I took exception until I realized what they were trying to teach, what we were learning, and what we found acceptable to ignore.
The people that my school turned out, at no real fault to the school, were nothing more than lackey's with 4 year degrees. A very small hadnful of people did the tough work, and everyone else "borrowed" the tough routines, and dressed them up a little.
In Timothy's world, there is no need for new ideas, just new marketing on old ideas. Since the overall program is more important than thinking about the parts, since we can just grab the parts from the book/the internet/the geek down the hall, we will never have innovation. Thanks Timothy, Bill has a desk for you in the corner office. Under your tutelage, they can crank out new products with no new engineering, new dressings, and sell them every two years.
Schools have "insane" course requirements for a reason. The real world has much the same requirements. Forcing people to demonstrate that they can learn something NEW (we are in school right, who cares what they were exposed to before) is important in school as well as the real world. People that can't adapt probably have no reason to be at a university, let alone a prestigious one.
Try being a first year engineer in the real world with no computer experience, no programming experience, etc. YOU'RE FIRED. Cheating in your first year of school doesn't make you better qualified. If you don't learn this stuff then (and passing a course that you cheated in to pass doesn't mean you learned it), why would an engineering firm want to hire you.
In the world of computer science, and programming more so, the subtle differences are the important differences. Being able to tell the difference between a selection sort and an insertion sort isn't that important. Having the ability is. That is the ability to tell the difference between a bridge that looks stable, and one that actually is, or the difference between a city sewer system that will balk at the first major rain storm, and one that will grow with a community.
There is no problem with classes that are solely designed to weed out people that can't think. With something as simple as sorting in CS101, I don't care if the TA can't help you. You will swim, or you won't be working in my shop.
From the sound of your post, the problem is obvious. There are so many students that don't belong in college, that the professors can't effectively teach.
This is also why TA's exist. No professor want's to teach the low level classes, because there are so many dumbasses in them.
This all stems from the general idea that everyone needs to go to college. This is a relativly new phenomanon, and a bad one. As the colleges get flooded with people that should have barely graduated high school, the overall education for everyone drops. As the overall education for everyone drops, the Americans attending these universities get dumber and dumber. This results in more apathy in the instructors, which leads to more people actually passing, which leads to more people with college diploma's, which leads to a greater need to have a college degree, which leads to more students in college, which leads to more apathy in instructors... See a problem.
Quit cheating, and drop out of school. You don't belong there. You are ruining the learning experience for those that want to learn. If you are passing your classes, it is becuase the school has dumbed down your degree, or you are cheating in more than your CS101 class.
Murder is simply un-enforcable. We shall now take it off our books.
The people have spoken, and we have listened.
Everyone dogs on the RIAA these days, but let's here some specific complaints.
But on a typical undergraduate-level exam there will be no questions that involve truly original thinking. There *will* be questions that require the student to put together previously learned algorithm A with previously used data structure B to produce a little tool that does C. Being able to quickly identify the algorithms and data structures which solve a particular problem is the bread-and-butter of programming, and is pretty easy to test quickly. If a student is floundering at test time under such a simple load, they didn't do their homework :-)
But those tests are also not at all useful in the real world. Those sorts of tests are designed to certify that hundreds of kids know what Djikstra's algorithm is, but they are not designed to get at the heart of what CS is and how to apply what you know to do something original. I don't think we should just accept that an undergraduate program isn't challenging kids to think creatively. After all, that is what differentiates someone truly bright and original from the rest of the herd.
Excuse me, Senator Daschle would be the correct spelling.
Dissent would be one thing... Dissent would be bringing the candidates up to vote and then voting against them. However, Senator Daschle refuses to allow these appointees and bills to even come to a vote. This has nothing to do with the quality of the bills or the nominees and has everything to do with simply trying to muck things up until the next election so he can try to win a majority.
If he truly wants to be patriotic, go out and Evangelize his ideas as to what the Government should be doing. Convince the people that his party has superior ideas that will work better than the other party's. Instead, he offers no agenda (I've not seen anything resembling a party platform for this election from the Dems) and instead spends his time bashing the other side and repeatedly calling upon the old standbys of 'tax cuts for the rich' and 'starving senior citizens' to play on fears and class envy to drum up votes. I have no respect for fear mongers.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them