For all those people out there that say you should go get a system xyz and run abc on it, you are totally underestimating the primary advantage that homebrew console scenes have:
Everybody is developing on the exact same system.
This has tremendous implications in the development and testing of the software. You only have to develop for one platform, test for one platform, and support one platform. The software that anybody else out there writes for it will work for my box too. This is a tremendous advantage over getting some software that has some bugs/quirks with your slightly different "open" system.
For instance, on my PC (standard Dell Box), I encounter a pretty nasty bug in Mame where it will kill my video card until I did a hard reset.
I slapped the xbox version of Mame on my modded xbox and was running with no problems.
You do have other limitations with using a proprietary console, but you must realize that the same "feature" that makes console games cheaper and more reliable than PC games can pay off for opensource developers as well.
While he states ~$370 per Xbox, you don't need a keyboard, mouse, and mod chip for every xbox.
With the right modchip and a small bit of sodering you can flash the bios (TSOP) already on the motherboard then remove the modchip to repeat on other Xboxs. After the first xbox + supplies, setting up additional xbox is just going to cost the the xbox and a bit of time (1 hour or less). So each additional xbox should be 199.99 + tax.
Granted, it's still not very effective clustering solution.
Here's my take as software developer who got a BS in CS in '99.
Groups in school are hit and miss, and the students are learning how to handle it. You don't have a good idea how to divvy up the work, working with various schedules suck, and everybody is pretty much inexperienced software engineering wise. So you're going to get various amounts of effort - some because you weren't able to plan well and some because you have slacker teammates.
In the real world, tasks are usually individually defined. Even though you're in a group, you are given individual tasks which are the bulk of your work. These individual works are then integrated by a subset of the group working together. There are still important group activities - during the design phase and to keep everybody on the same page. But the majority of development work is done individually.
Groups in school try to get you a taste of what software engineering is about, but in my experience schools do a good job with the theories and the basics, but don't have the time, resource, or experience to really prepare you to working in a large group.
So yeah, I think your school is doing the right thing on testing you indivually on a large part of your work. Small group project (2-4 people, 5 weeks, 3 or 4 credit hour course) don't do much to teach you real world skills or experiences (though group interaction often aids in the learning experience of the topic at hand - just not in regards to software engineering).
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For all those people out there that say you should go get a system xyz and run abc on it, you are totally underestimating the primary advantage that homebrew console scenes have:
Everybody is developing on the exact same system.
This has tremendous implications in the development and testing of the software. You only have to develop for one platform, test for one platform, and support one platform. The software that anybody else out there writes for it will work for my box too. This is a tremendous advantage over getting some software that has some bugs/quirks with your slightly different "open" system.
For instance, on my PC (standard Dell Box), I encounter a pretty nasty bug in Mame where it will kill my video card until I did a hard reset.
I slapped the xbox version of Mame on my modded xbox and was running with no problems.
You do have other limitations with using a proprietary console, but you must realize that the same "feature" that makes console games cheaper and more reliable than PC games can pay off for opensource developers as well.
While he states ~$370 per Xbox, you don't need a keyboard, mouse, and mod chip for every xbox.
With the right modchip and a small bit of sodering you can flash the bios (TSOP) already on the motherboard then remove the modchip to repeat on other Xboxs. After the first xbox + supplies, setting up additional xbox is just going to cost the the xbox and a bit of time (1 hour or less). So each additional xbox should be 199.99 + tax.
Granted, it's still not very effective clustering solution.
Here's my take as software developer who got a BS in CS in '99.
Groups in school are hit and miss, and the students are learning how to handle it. You don't have a good idea how to divvy up the work, working with various schedules suck, and everybody is pretty much inexperienced software engineering wise. So you're going to get various amounts of effort - some because you weren't able to plan well and some because you have slacker teammates.
In the real world, tasks are usually individually defined. Even though you're in a group, you are given individual tasks which are the bulk of your work. These individual works are then integrated by a subset of the group working together. There are still important group activities - during the design phase and to keep everybody on the same page. But the majority of development work is done individually.
Groups in school try to get you a taste of what software engineering is about, but in my experience schools do a good job with the theories and the basics, but don't have the time, resource, or experience to really prepare you to working in a large group.
So yeah, I think your school is doing the right thing on testing you indivually on a large part of your work. Small group project (2-4 people, 5 weeks, 3 or 4 credit hour course) don't do much to teach you real world skills or experiences (though group interaction often aids in the learning experience of the topic at hand - just not in regards to software engineering).