tetrarchy

I actually stopped visitng /. for awhile there when I found digg would cover stories almost immediately, only showing up on slashdot a day or two later. But once digg got too popular their promotion system clearly broke down (not to mention the awful awful 'community', and I've been back to /. (and later HN) since

At the school i'm going to right now (actually the other big school in nyc...), cheating in the CS department is a huge issue. Big enough that the main focus of orientation seemed to be about how if you got caught even on just weekly assignments, you'd get kicked out pretty fast. Was a bit more than I was expecting.

I later found out the reason for this, the high population of foreign students. I'm generally not one to stereotype, but to have thought otherwise was to simply be living under a rock. It was pretty obvious that they tended to work together in fairly large groups or between several groups on their assignments and projects, and that the rest of us who were not were at a significant disadvantage. And while generally, I didn't /really/ care, as my grades tended to be good enough, and I am not the type to shoot for the A+, it really did make doing the assignments on my own very frustrating when I would get stuck. Spending all that extra time to figure it out on my own just wasn't as satisfying when I knew the class average for the assignments would just be artificially high anyways.

But in the end, i'm really going to grad school to learn, and not so much for amazing grades. It just would be nice to not be penalized for doing my own work.

Wow, tough crowd here. When I was in high school, the extent of my computer knowledge was a little visual basic. After watching all of his videos, I'm extremely impressed - it looks like he designed (or at least integrated) a lot of the hardware, operating systems, and applications himself. After a BS and now almost a MS in computer engineering I think I could (...eventually) pull something like this off, but this guy clearly spent a lot of time and effort on learning the ins and outs of computer architecture on his own, in high school no less.

To those complaining that this could be done on a fpga in verilog or something, I think that might be kind of missing the point. There is just something about building the logic up from the ground that is very satisfying. Hooking up the physical wires makes it all that much more real. A huge time investment, but i got the feeling the kid spent a good deal of his free time on it.

So again, mad props. Hope it gets him into a sweet school.