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Guessing you're a teacher? There are definitely some perks to that life, though the downside is that you'll never get vacation at other times of year (e.g. going on a ski trip in January).

There is an academic break that usually runs four weeks from the second week of December to about January 7. That four weeks is enough time to squeeze in a little skiing.

https://registrar.calpoly.edu/...

So, to summarize: Three months' vacation during the summer. A week during Spring. A month in the Winter. I'm trying to figure out a time of the year where I might miss a vacation. Maybe I can't make it to New England during the Autumn.

MySidia,

Good point about the softer side of the network from the Portland 911 system event. On a larger scale, all it took was one a misplaced if/break statement to prove a "trivial" Unix patch can bring down even the most robust network. ( As a C programmer I have to take issue with the article blaming the compiler and not the programmer and their test tools/environment, but then than's just my world view).

The oldest computer I programmed was a Bendix G-15, a computer that used a drum for memory and vacuum tubes for logic. I stumbled on it at Cal Poly, a college in California. They said they had traded a jet engine for it.

The documentation for the computer ended with a letter from Bendix saying that Control Data had taken over responsibility for the computer line, and it was henceforth to be known as the CDC Bendix G-15. When I returned to the main part of the campus I told some students that the engineering lab up the hill had a Control Data computer..They were very impressed—they were making do with an IBM 360, whereas Control Data Coropration was well known for their fast comptuers.

I think that's a likely cause. I doubt they're updating the app (executable) on a regular basis and pushing the update, when it's only the data that changes regularly. All it takes is one glitch in a weekly data update, and one bad switch statement to cause a program to crash.

Proper error handling is one of the most important things in keeping things running (especially in unattended systems), but one of the harder things to get right, because it's hard to test (as in QA) for every possible unexpected input. You have to get a bit paranoid with your coding, because garbage input really is out to get you.

For non-Quadro cards, there is little pyramid shaped box that connects to a USB port. The communications protocol has been reverse-engineered for Linux compatibiity by many projects (libnvstusb and http://users.csc.calpoly.edu/~zwood/teaching/csc572/final11/rsomers/)

"California Polytechnic State University,
San Luis Obispo
College of Liberal Arts
Philosophy Department
Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group"

http://ethics.calpoly.edu/Greenwall_report.pdf

D-Wave is selling snake oil. Their so-called quantum computer is pure hogwash. The main reason that quantum computing is nonsense is that it is based on the pseudo-scientific concept of quantum state superposition. The problem is, superposition is not observable by definition. It is just a silly interpretation of QM. Superposition is nonsense on the face of it since any child can tell you that nothing can be its own opposite. Physicists do not understand why quantum interactions are probabilistic and yet they feel knowledgeable enough to conjure up all sorts of cockamamie Star-Trek physics that make no sense. The actual reason that quantum interactions are probabilistic is that there is no such thing as a time dimension. Therefore, nature cannot calculate the exact timing of interactions and is forced to use probability. Conservation laws are momentarily violated but are obeyed in the long run. Why is there no time dimension? Because a time dimension makes motion impossible. Surprise! This is the reason that time travel is crackpottery and that Sir Karl Popper compared Einstein to Parmenides and called spacetime, "Einstein's block universe in which nothing happens". From Science: Conjectures and Refutations. Don't take my word for it.

You laugh now, but some are seriously looking at where robotics might go.
Perhaps those talented Cal Poly students will soon be giving life to more than New Years' day parade floats?

http://www.calpolynews.calpoly.edu/news_releases/2011/February/robots.html

Kinda gives a new angle to the notion of robotic overlords....

Some fear robots becoming self-aware, but them being used against us by other humans might come first.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cf0jlzVCyOI

It's your own damn fault if you were dumb enough to go to COW POLY. (Unless you are a Cuesta or Handcock student, in which case I offer my sincere apologies)

I'm not sure how Computer Science courses are at other educational institutions, but my school's Comp Sci program didn't focus much on programming at all. Everything was largely theoretical and we never did much programming at all. If you wanted to fine tune your coding skills, you'd have to do it on your own, or even better on co-op or internship.

I always find it amazing that, no matter how much I rant about all of the things my department could do better, we are seemingly far above most other unis. We started programming the first (or perhaps second) day in class, and have very few core classes that don't require coding (I spent at least 10 hours a week programming in my algorithms class).

Denver had some problems implementing the idea.
http://users.csc.calpoly.edu/~dstearns/SchlohProject/csc463.html

Though I do agree that "Computer Science" is a stupid name. They already have Mechanical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, etc - why not just call it "Software Engineering"?

Some of us do.

But years before the contest.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport#Automated_baggage_system

http://users.csc.calpoly.edu/~dstearns/SchlohProject/problems.html

The second article sounds familiar. All the warning signs of a risky project failure were there, but no one seemed to know it or pay attention.

Satellites are becoming smaller and cheaper because of advances in miniature high-performance computers, solar panels, batteries, and increased launch capabilities due to standardization. CubeSats are one example. People can put small, but high-resolution cameras into space, and if you can launch 100 pico-satellites with cameras then your going to get near real-time imagery of many places on the earth. Its only a matter of time until even the poorest third-world country gets its own fleet of spy satellites.

Seems like it is also called "Tyrannosaurus-Rat beer" or "T-Rat beer" for short. Somehow that was also lost to marketing I suppose:

http://calpolynews.calpoly.edu/magazine/Spring-08/ancient-ale.html

(from the link of their front page at the right bottom).

While there is that other Cal Poly in Pomona, the "Learn By Doing" school is indeed the correct one. He's the Director of Cal Poly's Environmental Biotechnology Institute and Unocal Professor of Environmental Studies (more accolades here).

Oddly, his inspiration for brewing beer seems to be convincing his slightly inebriated father to provide money for a movie and a hamburger.

There are two California Polytechnic State Universities, one in San Luis Obispo and one in Pomona. Dr. Raul Cano is at CalPoly SLO. I guess their new slogan can be "Learn by brewing"...

There is some activity in this area already: http://cubesat.calpoly.edu/ http://www.cubesatkit.com/ And for other form factors including picosats and Mars Rover type experiments, including a shakedown launch: http://www.arliss.org/

Bachelor's Degree program in Software Engineering

The threat of science to freedom is a classic theme of Feyerabend's, for example. I don't have anything to say better than what he does, so go read up. (For those of you too lazy to read actualy books, try this or this.)

Note that this does not mean "science is an evil that we must eradicate"; it means "science is not the panacea that its most ardent supporters would like us to believe."

You're thinking of the work of Adrian Thomspson.

Oh, you think you're so funny.

http://cla.calpoly.edu:16080/~cjenning/

That's my design professor's set of slides. He reads them word for word. When he's in a particularly good mood, he paraphrases what he just said after every slide.

Also: He teaches design.

Let me emphasize because it's vaguely important: DESIGN.

He also uses clip-art in his syllabus. And no, I'm not joking.

Project management is not a computer science skill; it's a software engineering skill (software engineering != computer science, although I feel, by experience, that software engineering skills are very important for computer scientists to learn). However, there are schools now that offer software engineering degrees which do explain some of the methodology and practices behind software engineering. Project management does fit in with a software engineering degree, exactly in the same way as project management techniques fit in with the traditional engineering disciplines.

I believe that for most industry positions in the software industry, a software engineering degree would be a better fit than a computer science degree, since the software engineering degree better prepares students for some of the conditions and practices that they'll see in industry. At my school, the software engineering degree also contains courses on teamwork and other engineering practices (sometimes alongside traditional engineers). A computer science degree, by definition, is geared toward people who want to become computer scientists. Computer scientists are focused more on research than software engineers, who are focused on building software. A computer scientist is to a software engineer as a physicist is to an electrical or mechanical engineer. Scientists are focused on expanding knowledge and doing research, whereas engineers are focused on applying scientific knowledge to practical uses.

If you think Star Wars fits any definition of "believable", you're crazy. Star Wars operates on pure suspension of disbelief, period.

This is absurd. Suspension of disbelief does not mean "nothing makes sense". Even in fantasy or sci-fi settings we expect order and reason by and large. Cause and effect. Suspension of disbelief is always limited, and "realism" is important even in fantasy and sci-fi.

I believe "dramatic foil" is the term.

It's not. Not even close. Look it up. Here's just one example: Definition: a dramatic foil is a minor character who resembles or is in parallel circumstances to a central figure in the play. Foils are similar enough to the main character(s) to provide a useful basis of comparison, but different enough that the comparison is meaningful: they enhance our understanding of the main character's personality traits or actions. from here: http://cla.calpoly.edu/~dschwart/engl339/ayli.html

So we come to this: Han Solo was originally the kind of person who was not above shooting someone underneath a table to avoid getting killed himself. He could have tried an open, "fair" fight, he could have tried running away. He could have sat there and waited for Greedo to kill him. Instead, he shoots first and pays the bartender for the mess. That's a defining moment much like the Indiana Jones scene where, instead of dueling sword-to-sword, he draws his revolver and shoots the bad guy.

To argue that having Greedo shoot first changes nothing is assinine. It doesn't change Han Solo's character overtly, but it dramatically removes the scene as being indicative of his characater. Anyone can get shot at, but a rogue shoots first (under the table).

To further argue that having Greedo shoot first and miss somehow establishes the star wars rule that blasters are inaccurate is even less believable. In subsequent scenes Han and others manage to have great accuracy, just as the storm troopers do when they take out the Jawa vehicle. So that's nonsensical too.

I don't care where you're coming from, but you clearly don't have a good grasp on film theory (not that I'm an expert) and it shows in your exceptionally poor arguments and misunderstanding of relevant terms.

-stormin

The CS people really don't care about software dev cycles and databases, (emphasis mine)

Databases are a very important part of computer science. Databases are fundamental tools for many computer science (and other) research projects, and databases themselves are still being researched.

I still believe that a computer science and software engineering split is a great idea. In fact, at my school, the computer science department has two separate programs: computer science and software engineering. (A computer engineering degree is also offered, but it is its own department). Computer science is for people who want a more general exploration of computer science topics, software engineering is for people who want to know about the software engineering process, and computer engineering is a combination of computer science and electrical engineering.

Actually it's not really a linear collider at all but a nutrino cannon! We just finished using a the prototype on japan and there hasn't been a terrorist attack on the subway in tokyo since 1995. A cannon that can shoot nutrinos through solid earth and stop terrorism, congress will pay-up for sure!

It's possible to avoid this problem with a new alphabet, but is that what we want?

I don't like it, especially because current English spelling encodes etymological structure that conveys meaning and relationship between families of words.

I really have to ask. You North Americans, why the hell do you build your homes out of toothpicks?

Look at the photo from the article:
http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/41805000/jpg /_41805420_001842788_house_getty300.jpg

Every hurricane or every news report about tornado alley showing the damaged homes looks like this. This looks like a pile of toothpicks! You really spend thousands of dollars to build and live in these wooden things?

I'm from the Bahamas. Although I'm the least patriotic person I know, I have to admit that our buildings hold up pretty damned good under hurricanes. A hell of a lot better that the photos we see coming out of florida. We build everything with CINDER BLOCKS reinforced with steel rods. They work, trust me.

I tried googling for some photos to illustrate but none of them show enough steel rods to be accurate.

And what is with you people and sheetrock walls? I've heard crooks in ft. lauderdale getting in through people's walls. Try breaking through cinder blocks. Actually I remember something from a guiness book of world records where a karate teacher and his young students totally demolished an entire home by just karate chopping everything. If a dozen 14yr olds can destroy a house built out of the same material as so many american homes, what the hell did you think a hurrican (or tornado) would do!?!

steel rebar...
http://www.caed.calpoly.edu/polycanyon/ncbs_galler y/full/Post-Tension-Rebar-Closeup.jpg ...reinforcing cinder blocks...
http://www.proptek.com/dbfiles/products/17/carrier 15.jpg

and held together with cement.

versus 2x4's, nails, and sheetrock!

I for one could not get a good nights sleep knowing my home is held up by this crap.
http://www.yournextbroker.com/uploaded_images/Home %20construction%20for%20web-716493.jpg

Another semi-random thought on CS education. If you want to be a good programmer doing interesting programming--get an engineering degree. You will have a more rigorous background, and you will probably get better problem solving skills training. Alternatively, look for a school like Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo (I am not a grad). that focusses on what makes an employable programmer, and subsequently get great support from industry.

I'm a freshman CS student from Cal Poly. Finally my school is mentioned on Slashdot!

Anyways, I agree. Cal Poly has a pretty good computer science department and has pretty small classes (only 25-35 students in a class, and 99% of classes are taught by PhDs). The curriculum has a nice mixture of practical and theory courses. Almost every computer science class has a laboratory component as well. Cal Poly also offers a computer engineering degree (basically an electronics engineering degree) and a software engineering degree. I am also a mathematics minor as well; my goal is actually to become a computer science researcher or professor.

Anyways, to get back on topic, I think the decline in computer science majors is due to the fact that the gold diggers (people who entered CS because it paid $$$ and not because they liked the subject) have ran away and shifted to business and law (the hot majors today). You need to be very passionate about computer science in order to do it. At my school, some people are "weeded out" after their first or second computer science classes due to the demands of the program. Some people aren't truly passionate about computer science and end up switching to another major.

So, I believe the number of CS majors are declining mostly because the gold diggers are gone, leaving only two types of students: those who think CS == creating Counterstrike (and end up weeded out), and those who are passionate about computer science.

"exercize" - I'm glad I'm not the only one who has a problem spelling that damn word... (it's "exercise", btw) :-)

Anyway, I ran across this article about procrastination yesterday which I think sort of relates to what you're saying. You don't seem to suffer from the problem, but I'm posting the link here since someone looking for help and reading what you wrote may also find it insightful.

Japanese students are obsessed about grades, because to be successful in life, they have to be perfect students, and get great grades, and do very well on exams. I'd imagine that if we put American kids into that kind of situation, the rates would be even *worse*.

American kids are put in these kinds of situations (albeit not to the extent as in Japan). I suppose you've never been to the College Confidential message boards, haven't you? Go to some of the sections about getting into college and high school preparation, and come back with your findings. None of them are suicidal, but the board is filled with perfectionists, complaining about 2390s on the SAT (highest score is 2400 now), 3.99 GPAs versus 4.0s, and stressing themselves out wondering if they have the stats to get into MIT and Stanford. (The graduate school boards are similar). I went to that site when I was in 11th grade, accidentally stubling across it to find college admissions advice. Let's just say, that site made my perfectionism a bit worse (even though it never got as bad as some people on the board), until I finally went away from it after two months of browsing.

I'm a CS freshman at a reasonably good university, but I am still an ardent perfectionist, even though I haven't been doing a good job at being perfect ;) (looks at my sub-3.4 GPA). There are certain goals that I have (such as being a researcher) that require that I do extremely well in school. However, my fear is not doing well. The other issues with perfectionists is what is considered "well." To many perfectionists, a 3.0 or even a 3.5 college GPA is considered terrible, even though some people on campus will kill for that GPA (no pun intended). However, it seems that everybody needs to perform almost perfectly or perfectly to have a chance to get the best things in life, or they'll be shafted.

So, I feel that American kids are already feeling the pressure. The message is that you have to do exceptionally well in elemetary school, middle school, high school, and college in order to get anything in life. That, or learn how to be exceptional with a sport or be an exceptional performer.

Hey. I know it's a joke, but the US has lots of tough colleges. The quality of secondary education may be bad, overall, but the US have some of the best colleges in the world. My university is one of the best public schools in the country, and its computer science department is well known. You should also remember universities such as Berkeley, MIT, Stanford, Caltech, Carnegie Mellon, and Georgia Tech (among others), who will also give you an academic butt-whipping (at least in the engineering and science disciplines).

• "Cal" (alone) = University of California, Berkeley (usually). Other UC schools are usually written "UC Irvine" or "UCI".
• "Cal State" = CSU = California State University (many campuses abound).
• "Cal Poly" = California Polytechnic State University, a public institute outside the UC and CSU systems.

Plenty of other schools do the same (or better), e.g.:

http://www.csc.calpoly.edu/~zwood/teaching/csc476/ final/
http://www.evl.uic.edu/spiff/class/cs426/projects/

http://littonlab.atl.calpoly.edu/ http://www.cubesatkit.com/

http://littonlab.atl.calpoly.edu/
The article was notibly short on details, so here is a link to one of the satellites in the launch. This was an impressive feat for the schools involved and much was learned from the process.

There are actually many satellite projects for stuff this small. The space industry in Florida holds an annual competition for college students to design picosats called Funsat that uses the Cubesat format. And on their website, they have a rather large list of other developers that use the CubeSat design. Indeed, small satellites are nothing new.

This is occurring in North America, which somehow makes it news(?)

Of course, there have been plenty of micro- and nano-sat's in the US too... the CubeSat community has been doing stuff like this for years, and NASA/AFRL have sponsored the University Nanosat competition for the last several years. Not to mention NASA projects like the ST-5 nanosat constellation pathfinder, or Air Force projects like PICOsat.

Not that what the CanX team are doing isn't cool. But they're just one member of a much larger community of smallsat developers that get hardly any PR. One of the best resources for seeing what the small/micro/nano-sat community is up to is the annual SmallSat conference.

There are actually many satellite projects for stuff this small. The space industry in Florida holds an annual competition for college students to design picosats called Funsat that uses the Cubesat format.

Here's a better link to Michael Schloh's( calpoly.edu ) complete "Analysis of the Denver International Airport baggage system":

http://www.csc.calpoly.edu/~dstearns/SchlohProject /csc463.html

LoB

The BAE design includes a number of high-tech components. It calls for 300 486-class computers distributed in eight control rooms, a Raima Corp. database running on a Netframe Systems fault-tolerant NF250 server, a high-speed fiber-optic ethernet network, 14 million feet of wiring, 56 laser arrays, 400 frequency readers, 22 miles of track, 6 miles of conveyor belts, 3,100 standard telecars, 450 oversized telecars, 10,000 motors, and 92 PLCs to control motors and track switches.

Let's make some educated guesses here. How many PCs? 300? Good grief! Later in the article it says the PCs were running OS/2. So what? This is just bad architecture, regardless of OS. So many parts, so many points of potential failure. And the NetFrame Systems "fault tolerant" server is simply...a glorified PC. (It's X86, ~300 MHz P2, and likely running Windows NT, according to other sources.) This article has more on the sad fate of NetFrame.

There's nothing even close to a mainframe computer in this baggage handling system. The New York Times sucks again!

While I don't expect just this to convince you, there are many theories on the specifics of how life formed that don't mention an intelligent designer. That said, I'll try to focus more on intuition, to build a criteria for what intelligence can design, and to explain why I think life sprung from evolution.

The only thing we really know about intelligence is that humans have it. So look at the things we create. They are obviously quite different from things which are alive - few would mistake a human creation for life even if that was the explicit goal of the creator. The distance between human creations and life is the same as the distance between inanimate objects and life. Yet we are the most intelligent species we know.

Why the difference? The most obvious reason is that we design things for a purpose - yet if life has a purpose, humanity hasn't agreed on it. But a less subjective, more fundamental difference is that intelligent creatures need to understand what they create. This limit leaves its mark on everything we create.

Intelligence can only create what it can understand. Thus our designs are either simple (so they can be understood) or modular (so that while the system is incomprehensible, each part can be understood, and the interactions between parts can be understood). Making an analogy to software design, we like our code clean, object-oriented, and modular. If each line of code could affect every other, we wouldn't be able to understand the software, so we try to limit the interactions.

Consider our DNA - if it were software, it would be far worse than the most abominable lump of spaghetti code ever written by humans. Not only can one person not understand it, all the people in the world could not understand it - it's not modular at all; it cannot be divided into a part for me to understand and a part for you to understand. Thus, if life were designed by an intelligent creature, that creature's intelligence would need to be practically infinite.

Now, though I can't deny the possibility of a unseen and almost-infinitely intelligent creator, I will suggest a more believable alternative (and a theory with more predictive power). The process of evolution is not intelligent, and does not have the inherent limitations of intelligence. The process of evolution does not understand what it creates, and it doesn't need to.

As a concrete example, consider the experiment described in this story. Basically, an analog signal recognizer was made using only 100 cells of an FPGA, via a process of artifical evolution. What stands out to me is that the result is wholly unlike anything a human designer would make on an FPGA. There are parts of the circuit which aren't connected to the remainder, but which are still essential, communicating with the rest of the circuit via either radio or power consumption. The resulting circuit is not portable across logically identical FPGAs unless it was evolved on multiple FPGAs. It has very low tolerances for different temperatures unless it was evolved at different temperatures. It is not like anything designed by humans - it is not modular, it's not easy to understand. However, it has qualities in common with life - spaghetti-code-like complexity, dependence on physics that humans don't understand well enough to use, adaption to the environment in which it evolved.

If you found a circuit made by this evolutionary process lying in the desert, you might believe it to be an alien technology - when you try to understand how it works, you get the impression that it was made by someone with more than a human ability to

http://www.lib.calpoly.edu/infocomp/modules/05_eva luate/WIC2a.html

But Perl scripts and Visual Basic applications aren't computer science. A decent bachelor's in computer science program teaches you how to analyze and write algorithms, discrete math, the theory and application of various different technologies (compilers, operating systems, graphics), language theory, and other theory courses. This is a sample curriculum from a highly ranked public school. You might also want to look at this (another highly ranked public university) and this (from MIT). You'll also get a nice helping of calculus, statistics, differential equations, linear algebra, physics, chemistry, humanities courses, and some more.

If you want to spend your time learning Perl and VB, get an IT degree (like an MIS degree or a BS from Devry). If you want to spend your time learning the theory and application behind the interpreters that parse and interpret your Perl and VB code, you might want to get your BS in CS from a decent university.

A bachelor's degree (yet alone a master's or doctorate) isn't supposed to be job training; job training is left to trade schools (whose job is to teach people how to perform various jobs). An university degree is supposed to be used for education about a certain subject. If your job requires Perl and VB, learn them. Just don't expect the computer science department to teach you those languages; that's not computer science. This doesn't mean that the BS degree is a waste of time. You might be hired to help write the next Perl or Visual Basic.

You can't just grab a P4 chip and throw it on a satellite.

What about cubesats? They seemed to be a way around the red tape when they were reported on slashdot a while ago. Using unmanned launchers and cheap disposable sats allows you to get up there fast, do your mission and throw away the junk at the end.

I was involved with the research on this. I just worked on the Oracle db stuff many, many years ago at Cal Poly under Ed Sullivan.

Dr. Sullivan (CP Civil Eng.) has done a lot of research on SR91 (inc cost/benefit analysis), available at:

http://ceenve.calpoly.edu/sullivan/sr91/

Having said all that, what Lockheed really needs to look out for is Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd in the UK. They started as a university program about 20 years ago, but they're now a full-fledged company that is well-known for innovative designs and cost-cutting measures. They have launched about 25 satellites so far, have the contract for the Galileo constellation prototypes, and are pushing into the US market (they've already done several projects for the USAF). Definitely a company to keep an eye on.

And are you going to add a new letter to the English alphabet for the schwa