Slashback: Pricedrops, Honor, Games

Slashback (below) is chock full of updates to recent (and not recent) Slashdot stories, including some good news for AMD fans, and a last drizzle of news from E3.

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."

Comments

Open Source in College

[lkaos]

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.

Re:Open Source in College

[Rudeboy777]

I second your comment, and I strongly disagree with timothy implying that intro CS students should not have to think through and code their own bubble sort. In CS as in any other discipline, the foundations are CRITICAL for further success in later semesters. You cannot breeze through CS101 with only a half-assed understanding of arrays and switch statements. You will need this stuff later, no way around it.

Groups can be very bad

[gregfortune]

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.

I Beg Your Pardon?

[Lethyos]

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.