Honestly, if you're going anywhere but the community college, the school labs will most likely have all the computing power you'll need.
I was a computer science major, and after freshman year I left my desktop at home for my parents and just used lab machines. The school bought new machines for at least one lab each year, so it was just a matter of heading to that particular lab if you really needed the computing power.
Using lab machines has the added benefit of getting you out of your dorm room/apartment. I knew very few people that could work effectively for any period of time with their roomates trying to tempt them into a game of beer die/pong/whatever.
Re: The cake scene- This is kind of farfetched, but it's possible that the cake scene was there to introduce the idea of food as a control program. Both times we see Neo visit the oracle, she gives him something to eat(a cookie the first time, and a little red candy(pill?) the second time).
As far as the bandwidth concerns go: I just graduated last year and what they did at my school was block napster on the Academic line, the feed for the Academic buildings, and let it go on the Residential line. This way you could get all the bandwidth you needed from the lab machines for doing work. The dorms were generally a little sluggish, but no one does real work from a dorm room anyways(IMHO)
Matt
Another idea for teaching encapsulation would be to have each group write each of the components, but make them use components from the other groups with their project. I had to do this on a simple compiler project once and it was very interesting. We each wrote the whole compiler, but the version we handed in had to use all different parts ie. Your own scanner, but someone else's parser and someone elses code generator.
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Honestly, if you're going anywhere but the community college, the school labs will most likely have all the computing power you'll need.
I was a computer science major, and after freshman year I left my desktop at home for my parents and just used lab machines. The school bought new machines for at least one lab each year, so it was just a matter of heading to that particular lab if you really needed the computing power.
Using lab machines has the added benefit of getting you out of your dorm room/apartment. I knew very few people that could work effectively for any period of time with their roomates trying to tempt them into a game of beer die/pong/whatever.
Re: The cake scene- This is kind of farfetched, but it's possible that the cake scene was there to introduce the idea of food as a control program. Both times we see Neo visit the oracle, she gives him something to eat(a cookie the first time, and a little red candy(pill?) the second time).
As far as the bandwidth concerns go: I just graduated last year and what they did at my school was block napster on the Academic line, the feed for the Academic buildings, and let it go on the Residential line. This way you could get all the bandwidth you needed from the lab machines for doing work. The dorms were generally a little sluggish, but no one does real work from a dorm room anyways(IMHO) Matt
Another idea for teaching encapsulation would be to have each group write each of the components, but make them use components from the other groups with their project. I had to do this on a simple compiler project once and it was very interesting. We each wrote the whole compiler, but the version we handed in had to use all different parts ie. Your own scanner, but someone else's parser and someone elses code generator.