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Didn't get close to the 9m / 1min requirements, but they did manage to get off the ground, over a decade ago! http://www.calpoly.edu/~wpatters/helo.html

There a bunch of other amateur satellite projects - for a start check out:
http://cubesat.calpoly.edu/
http://ssdl.stanford.edu/
http://www.arliss.org/

images.google.com served up this:

http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~zoe/zoe_grad1.jpg

http://www.csc.calpoly.edu/~zwood/zoe-poppy-sm.jpg

The secret life of your computer illustrates what went in to make a computer.

Don't forget, this can be said for a lot of other things as well, like consumer electronics.

Trash and waste abounds at both ends of the equation.

Speaking of the Newton: Did Microsoft's monopolistic policies actually hurt our national security? Are there Al-Qaeda / Redmond links? Did Microsoft weaken our anti-terrorist defenses enough to allow 9/11?

Ummm... prob'ly not. But if the idea of a bunch of grunts with Newtons intrigues you, you might find these interesting:

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/hunter- warrior.htm

This one's PDF, takes a while to load:www.cadrc.calpoly.edu/pdf/feat4_brochure.pdf

The Dalai Llama
I got your Sea Dragon right here...

I use a custom home page. It contains forms for searches, web email, and whatever else I feel like putting there. The fact that it is world-accessible means I can use it from any terminal. The only problem is getting around to updating it.

Most login forms are convertible into a single text box for your password. Since I'm the only one who uses it, I can hardcode my username into a "type=hidden" input element. The submit button is also usually extraneous.

My wishlist now includes that Wikipedia random page idea and javascript email address obfuscation for forms where I login using my email address.

Slashdot had a discussion about Programming Gone Wrong in the past.

It mentioned, among others, the Ariane 5 Failure, the infamous Therac-25 accidents, loss of Mars Orbiter, Hi-tech toilet swallowing woman, AT&T Switch failure, a bunch of things literally crashing, etc. And here is yet another article on miserable Patriot failure.

For professional assessment of risks, there is a Usenet group for RISKS Digest (Google groups) that describes all kinds of situations where technology has gone wrong.

Speaking of unique situations, one of my instructors uses a tablet with great success during lectures. Rather than simply reading a boring PowerPoint slide or attempting to draw out a complex diagram on the board, he mixes it up and handwrites additional notes on top of a prepared slideshow. Also very, very helpful when you're trying to follow the lecture: his slides are black text on a solid white background.

(BTW, if you go to his website, you'll see he is quite the geek. He spends lab time reading overclocking websites. Maybe he'll read this...)

Here at calpoly we have a third party ratings system at http://www.polyratings.com which does almost the same thing. I was looking on it the other day and there are comments about how they want a teacher to die, just random profanity unrelated to the class, among others. The site has not been taken down, nor has it even removed these comments which are still up for everyone to see. Anyone with a half brain ignores these comments and just goes to the next one anyways since they are probably from a disgruntled student who couldn't make the grade.

Have you ever looked at a fractal? The math is simple, but that patterns are infinitely complex and varied. Conway's game of life, perhaps? Simple rules, complex patterns right between chaos and order. Simple rules can create complex things.

We both look at nature and see boundless complexity. You say, "whoever designed this must be way smarter than us." I say, "whatever designed this must not be constrained to understanding it."

We design things with a top-down approach. You can see how this affects our designs. For example, we were able to jump to the concept of wheels; our designs aren't restricted by what has gone before. But our designs are limited by our understanding; we don't like spaghetti logic which is common in natural designs.

Check this out. He took an FPGA, started with random patterns, tested them, took the best ones, mutated them, and repeated this a few thousand times. As expected, the circuits got good at doing what he selected for. But the circuits took advantages of defects in the FPGA, the temperature, crosstalk etc. Just like life, they worked very well in the environment they evolved in, but they were very dependant upon it. And the most important thing - when the circuits were done, they couldn't figure out how they worked.

My point is that a simple, mindless process, not encumbered by understanding, can produce amazingly complex things. Is that so hard to believe?

I used Gopher to get classes in college. Without it, it would have been nearly impossible to get into the high-demand classes!

This was at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, between 1992 and 1998.

A friend of mine showed me the basic technique, and I wrote some scripts to do it.

Every hour, the school updated the list of classes that were open, and published them via Gopher. Classes were full, but because people added and dropped classes constantly during the frantic first week or so of each quarter, high-demand classes would occasionally open up.

I made a script that called the Gopher client with the equivalent of "lynx --dump" every hour, and grepped that for classes I needed. If it found a match, it emailed me. If I checked my email often enough, I had a chance. Back then, the dream was to have an emailable pager, so you wouldn't be tied to checking email! I never did get around to rigging up a more complicated setup to use an analog modem to dial an old-style numeric pager, but some people did.

Without Gopher, I might still be there, trying to get the one or two critical classes needed to graduate...!

How about the gayest 404 on the net: Here Holy mary

My XP box already knows how mad I am at it.

Nicotine is something your body needs, and actually produces itself.

I call bullshit. Nicotine is an alkaloid and a poison, and while there are drugs (hallucinogens even) that occur in the body, nicotine is not one of them. There is nicotinic acid (niacin or vitamin B-3) but that's a precursor to nicotine in tobacco plants. In humans it's a precursor for molecules like NADH. Nicotine acts at nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, but not at muscarinic acetylcholine receptors. Acetylcholine and nicotine have little else in common.

It looks like eBay is becoming a cheap way to get your company, or yourself, into the media spotlight these days. Just put something strange up for auction (satellite, your virginity, your dignity, your wife, etc.) and you're guaranteed to get coverage on all major tech websites, magazines and news shows (CNN, Time, BBC, etc. are sure to run this). The fact that they porbably won't get $9,500,000 out of it doesn't really matter. Millions more people will now know that they can build satellites for a fraction of the price NASA or ESA does.

If you don't have $9,500,000, or don't want something quite as big, look at getting your own CubeSat. Dozens of these are beign built at universities around the world. You can buy most of the parts you need and just put them together. They are launched together on one rocket, sharing the launch cost and making it even cheaper than the $9,500,00 needed for a microsatellite (CubeSats are pico satellites, 10cm x 10cm x 10cm, and weigh only 1 kg).

CERN, whose laboratories straddle the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, said it had sent 1.1 Terabytes of data at 5.44 gigabits a second (Gbps) to a lab at the California Institute of Technology, or Caltech, on October 1.

at least the most pressing crisis of the day, that of their nasty, godless relations to the south.

Yes, Isabella reluctantly bid Columbus set sail the day after the last of the Jews had [officially anyway] been expelled from Cordoba.

Just imagine; if Spain had decided that sending out ships to raid the spice islands was of higher priority than exterminating the Moors from Spain, how much different Europe and the world might be today, with a vital tradition of both Jewish and Moslem culture in the mediterranean.

Perhaps some argument can be made, that sending all our effort into exploration and discovery is a better strategy than beating up on our neighbors and solving other domestic disputes, but history seems to favor the latter.

Even though a couple of students protested that they never use the campus facilities, those students still had to pay the fee.

Much like my student body fees, which support on-campus activities that I rarely attend because I spend as little time on campus as possible. It's bullshit. No, I do not want my tuition used to subsidize a video rental store. The freshman can go to Blockbuster like everyone else.

All of the sweeping generalizations you make about state universities are exactly untrue at mine*. Nearly all of my professors at least know me by name and if they don't, it's because I haven't approached them. Even a little too often for my liking, they know who I am despite my best efforts. Among my worst professors are the incredibly bright and incredibly nice type who simply can't get thoughts out of their head fast enough. All of my professors though, are very much willing to go beyond the minimum requirements to help you understand the material.

As much noise as US News makes with these ratings, what's really important is choosing the right school for your major. When I got my admissions responses back, I had cheaper options, and I had more prestigious options, but Cal Poly won out because it's the right education at the right price. (Though recent hikes are pissing me off..)

* California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo: ranked #1 "public largely undergraduate university in the West" for the 11th year in a row, which is a lot of hogwash. The more qualifiers you add, the less impressive that #1 becomes. But it really is a very good school, and I can't imagine where I'd rather go.

Ethically, I'm so confused...

My roommate is actually a member of Cal Poly's Solar Car Team (website waay out-dated, beware). I'm incredibly surprised to find out they're in the race. I haven't seen my roommate since school ended, but at that time they were rushing like mad to put the car together and my roommate didn't think they'd make it. They decided to scrap their old car and build an entirely new one for this race, but they didn't get started until this year.

The funny part is that I've met the guys who work on it, I've seen their work shed, and it really killed the awe of seeing a solar-powered car. The whole thing seems pretty simple when you think about it. It's a car frame with some solar cells attached to a motor. Well, it's not that simple but it's close. I can't comment on the other cars, but about the most complex system they have in the car is the motor control and diagnostics (basically, a digital speedometer).

Of course, I don't mean to take away from anyone's accomplishments. I know for a fact that my roommate and the rest of the team (well, the active ones) put a lot of time and effort into the car, on top of and occaisionally in spite of their coursework. I can't wait to see how the race turns out. Go Poly!

...Cal Poly has been doing this for years, even decades now. Our motto is even "Learning by Doing."

...that emphasizes a "learn by doing" educational experience...

I took the Computer Science GRE straight out of undergrad (from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo), and it was fairly hard. However, I did get into a good PhD program (UCSD).

When preparing, the only material I had were the "worst-reviewed book" (and it truly was bad), my friend who I studied with, and my textbooks from classes.

Even though the red book was bad, I still got two things out of it: (1) an appreciation for what the real test would be like (to some degree), and (2) we were forced to evaluate each question for correctness (since there are incorrect answers), which made us study the material more critically, and understand it better. So there is some benefit to using the red book.

If I had to do it over again, I would still use the red book (but with the knowledge that it is poorly written). I would *definitely* find another person (of my same caliber) to study with again. The only thing I would do differently is I would review my classes & old textbooks more, guided by topics found in the red book.

I disagree with the posters who say that you need a master's first to do well on this exam. I didn't ace it, but I did well enough to get into a good program.

Finally, for the GREs (all of them), nothing beats taking practice tests for getting prepared. I took one practice test a week for about 6 weeks, and that helped a lot (for the general GREs).

Burt Rutan is a graduate of the AERO department at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo! Go Poly!

I don't recall if those filaments were also found in humans, but I think so. Small Fe3O4 magnetized filaments. Similiar to those described in a famous article by Blakemore (i read a review in a journal from 1996). Could be the practical effect of strong magnetic fields acting on those strains.

Something on the magnetotactic bacteria is found at this page

Seriously, at my university, thermocouples are covered in a sophomore year mechanical engineering class and lab.

Seriously, at my university, thermocouples are covered in a sophomore year mechanical engineering class and lab.

Actually, the switching code was in C and the crash was due to a programmer's apparent misunderstanding of the 'break' statement. See full details at: http://www.csc.calpoly.edu/~jdalbey/SWE/Papers/att _collapse.html

In the Physics classes I've taken at college, computer generated graphics are not uncommon. I liked them and the profs merged them well into the lectures. A 3D projection system would be nice addition, but nowhere near as cool as the light-emitting pickle.

In the Physics classes I've taken at college, computer generated graphics are not uncommon. I liked them and the profs merged them well into the lectures. A 3D projection system would be nice addition, but nowhere near as cool as the light-emitting pickle.

In the Physics classes I've taken at college, computer generated graphics are not uncommon. I liked them and the profs merged them well into the lectures. A 3D projection system would be nice addition, but nowhere near as cool as the light-emitting pickle.

My University's Solar Car Club built, well, a solar car, and it's street legal, insured, and they plan to drive it half way across the country some time next year. Of course, there will be a gas-powered car in front of it and one behind it the whole way, using more gas than they would if everyone just stayed at home.

I'm intrigued by the idea, but please clarify some activities anticipated on these computers.

I'm sorry I caused all those security problems.

I won't do it again.

Not to be outdone by the Nepalese, a school in Bhutan has begun to grow PC cases out of melons.

Wrote a speach about this topic after I took AI in a class. Take a look: http://www.calpoly.edu/~kdobrien/personal/truth/pl ayingg0d.htm.

Other likely job categories for a computer engineer:

• Embedded Systems
• Device Drivers
• Robotics
• Automated Test systems

Can be found here. Written by a professor at California PolyTech.

I wouldn't throw out my current servers, but I would certainly favor boxes that were otherwise equal but used less power. Why?

1) Why be wasteful? Just because you can afford to do something doesn't mean you should. I pay about 5% more to use 100% renewable power. (Before the latest crisis, I paid 20% less.)

2) It's cheaper. Even under moderate assumptions, you could save a couple thousand dollars a year for a medium-sized commercial web site. That money would be much better spent on more hardware. Or more beer.

3) It's cooler. Not in the sense of hipness, but in terms of temperature. If the Register's numbers for a dual-Itanium server power consumption are to be believed, a couple of those babies would put out more heat as a hair dryer or a space heater.

Judging by Athalon's heat output, the heat output of typical CPUs scales 1:1 with speed. A lot of server rooms I enter are already running a little warm; imagine what it will be like after a round of upgrades to faster and hotter boxes.

Maybe you can afford to pay for the electricity, but can you afford to pay for a massive upgrade to your air conditioning?

As a first timer, I learned a lot working at such a simple low level with a simulator I could modify and beat heck out of.

As a first timer, I learned a lot working at such a simple low level with a simulator I could modify and beat heck out of.

Cal Poly SLO's CSC department uses the 2.0 Linux kernel for our OS classes.

Why use 2.0 and not something bleeding edge? Documentation and commentaries are more available for the 2.0 series. We used David A Rusling's The Linux Kernel online book, Linux Kernel Internals edited by Michael Beck and Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems.

Cal Poly SLO's CSC department uses the 2.0 Linux kernel for our OS classes.

Why use 2.0 and not something bleeding edge? Documentation and commentaries are more available for the 2.0 series. We used David A Rusling's The Linux Kernel online book, Linux Kernel Internals edited by Michael Beck and Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems.

Cal Poly SLO's CSC department uses the 2.0 Linux kernel for our OS classes.

Why use 2.0 and not something bleeding edge? Documentation and commentaries are more available for the 2.0 series. We used David A Rusling's The Linux Kernel online book, Linux Kernel Internals edited by Michael Beck and Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems.

1. Obtain the OS 3.5 ROM. I signed the NDA to become a Palm developer, then downloaded it from palmos.com. Try it. It's worth it.

2. Backup your Palm with a HotSync, preferrably after running BackupAll or BackUpBitster to set all your backup bits to "on" and tagging every database to "dirty".

3. Use the OS Upgrade Utility tool to update to the new OS.

4. HotSync to restore your old databases.

It's simple, it takes less than an hour, and it's totally free and legal, as long as you legally own the ROM.

What I really want to know is if I can hack this to run Windows CE.
Now that would really make it useful....

Plus, the pretty BSOD could be used as a night light.

Secret Windows Settings

I summarize some of the details below, but you can read all about it at the site his friends set up. FreePaul has details, transcripts, audio recordings, musings, and propaganda for you to enjoy.

Basically, Paul had a job in town doing admin work on some computers. He was working on those machines from his dorm room, and had to reboot them a few times (I don't know why. I do know he runs Linux on his personal box.), so each time they rebooted, the dynamically allocated IP was new. Meaning he had to find it again. He knew what range the IP would be in, so he scanned that range to find his machines. He did this, depending on who you believe, between four and a dozen times, over a day or three (again, conflicting stories). He then set up a script enabling the computer to email him with its IP when it reboots, so he didn't need to scan anymore. But someone had already complained.

Apparently, the school networking guys got a complaint from off-campus ("Hey, I'm being scanned by x.y.z.r on your campus. Do something!") and called up Paul, saying 'Don't do that anymore.' This was after Paul had set up the script, so he had no more reason to scan. School networking seemed OK with this, so it seemed everything was hunky-dory (um, that's slang for "just fine").

Then the school's Judicial Affairs department heard about it. And they started going after Paul with a vengance. Paul wasn't told about certain rights he had in the process, rights declared in California State Law. Judicial Affairs violated State law in the course of the investigation and prosecution (Notice of Hearing was a big one). It seems like Judicial Affairs was trying to make an example of him. Even if all the accusations against him are true, JA still was out of line in the details of the prosecution of the case. I happen to beleive that the charges aren't right, but even if they are, there has been a mis-carraige of what I think of as Justice.

Now, how does this affect you, and your department's struggle with your Acceptable Use Policy? Be careful. Look at the mechanisms used to prosecute students who violate policies. If you think certain problems are minor compared to others (pinging isn't as bad as running BackOrifice on your professor's computer), try to put those judgements of relative harm into the policy as recomendations for punishments. The people who are now in charge of prosecuting students may be great people, kind, generous, wanting to help. But those people may leave, and the replacements may get on a power-trip, or may think that making a few 'examples' will "keep the little buggers in line". Do your best to make that very hard.

Good luck.

Louis Wu

"Where do you want to go ...

4. stabilization. Even quite a short (100m) tether will be stabilized by Earth's tidal forces and can be used to keep a satellite pointed in a certain way

Most satellites must be kept in a certain attitude to perform correctly, and lots of effort is put into maintaining this attitude. The real expenses start to build as you try to create an ever-more precise system. But if you hang a mass from a line, gravity gradients will pull the line straight down, orienting the satellite.

Gravity gradient: gravity depends on distance [F=G*m1*m2/(r^2) with 'm1' & 'm2' being the Earth and the orbiting stuff in this case, and 'r' being the distance between the centers of mass of the two objects], so the closer you are to the Earth, the more gravity you feel. Not a whole lot more, but there aren't a whole lot of other forces acting on your satellite. So a few kilograms on the end of a line (100m -> 1000m) should straighten your satellite out. This is great for communications satellites: they must face the center of the Earth for best performance, and that is exactly what a tether does for you.

The author of the NASA tether article alludes to that in this section, saying, in part,

Once the rocket's stage and the tether's end mass are far enough apart, the difference in the gravitational force at the two locations will in effect pull the objects apart. Eventually, the tether will be vertical with respect to Earth.

"Where do you want to go ...

[ Please moderate this up because I am using it right now on Linux, and have been for almost 6 months! ]

I have been using my Panasonic/Creative DVD-RAM drive for almost 6 months now under Linux (and have had the drive for ~18 months). RedHat kernels since 2.2.12 have detected it and installed a SCSI generic disk driver (as /dev/sda since I have IDE drives). The reason why DVD-RAM was supported so quickly in Linux is because much of the firmware is similar to the old Panasonic PD drives (remember, rewritable CD before CD-RW? ;-).

Ext2 works fine on it if you decide to format it. Otherwise, a simple download and compile of Ben Fennema's UDF driver (no complicated kernel patch necessary, just ./config, make, make install installs the VFS module necessary) and you're cooking with an OS independent filesystem on media that lasts 30+ years! 2.6GB per side (with newer 4.7GB drives/media as the above pointed out). Again, it's simple. Just put the "/dev/sda" line in your /etc/fstab as normal with "udf" as the filesystem (assuming you've done the above). I assume you can do similar with CD-RW drives and the UDF driver as well (SCSI CD-RW drives at least).

For those of you not familiar with rewritable DVD, there are various formats. DVD-RAM was supposed to be the "standard." Of course that didn't stop Sony, Philips and others from breaking away from Panasonic, Creative, Matsushita, Pioneer and others to create their own, proprietary standards. The reason I choose DVD-RAM is because unlike most other DVD drives (most of the DVD-ROM drives of the time, fall 1998) is because they had trouble reading CD-RW media, and even some 2nd generation drives had trouble reading CD-R media (DVD-RAM reads all media: CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW and CD-various formats). But understand that no rewritable DVD-RAM I know of allows you to burn DVD-R, nor even CD-R/RW (although it was rumored that Philips had a proprietary 3/6GB DVD-rewritable that could also CD burn/re-write as well? But I never saw it myself). Another reason why I went with DVD-RAM is because some 2nd and most 3rd generation DVD-ROM drives could read it physically (at least the non-cartridge, single-sided version) and non-Panasonic/Creative/Matsushuita/Pioneer drives only needed a firmware upgrade to do so. And DVD-RAM is rewritable at 1,350KBps (1x DVD, 9x CD) whereas many CD-RW (and even some other DVD-rewritable formats) are a measly 300-600KBps (2/4x CD).

Anyhoo, while other vendors talk about rewritable DVD sizes and capabilities, Panasonic delivered a long time ago. And now they are boosting the size to 4.7GB/side with the possibility of CD-RW compatibilty. You can get Panasonic 5.2GB DVD-RAM drives for $200-250 nowdays (and I only paid $500 for mine in fall of 1998), with the 2.6/5.2 single/double-sided media for $20/30, respectively. It's not hard disk speeds, but it is massive storage at cheap prices. With Pioneer and others finally giving Panasonic/DVD-RAM a boost in portable video equipment within the last 12 months, I'd say DVD-RAM will become the standard that it was originally spec'ed to be. With a 30+ year shelf life, it's a great archiving format for 10+ years where magnetic tape is not. And unlike other optical formats, DVD-RAM is an open standard which means that future drives should be able to read it -- a very important factor when considering long-term archiving because who cares if it lasts if you won't have a drive that can read it!

DVD-RAM is great for video editing systems, for which, I bought my DVD-RAM drive to complement my brand new Matrox Marvel G200-TV at the time. Again, much, much cheaper than magnetic disks per MB/GB.

-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith