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I went to Michigan Tech, and I can understand this by Ewann · 2003-04-03 12:27 · Score: 1 · on RIAA Moves Against College-Network Fileswapping

Michigan Tech is a small 6,000 person engineering school stuck up in the middle of NOWHERE. Check out this map to get some idea of what I mean. It's an absolutely beautiful area- it's on the shore of Lake Superior, and the hiking/biking/camping/skiing is fantastic. Tech turns out a lot of good engineers in part because there's not much to do throughout most of the school year except play in the snow and drink. Oh, and the poor (for the men) male:female ratio means not much of a distraction for the guys in that regard, either.

Aside from the great college radio station (all 100 watts of it), at least in 1996 there was basically nowhere to hear new music. Bands wouldn't ever stop in the area and the three local radio stations were top 40, country, and NPR.

So, while I can't really defend this guy, I have to imagine his network was *extremely* popular. It was probably the only place to get music locally unless Musicland was still open at the Copper Country Mall ("Over Forty Stores!")

Anybody from Tech care to comment on whether or not things are any different today than they were when I was there?

Re:Image Errors by jdoff · 2003-03-25 03:19 · Score: 3, Funny · on Adobe Says PCs Are Preferred

Oh, sure, like we expect Adobe to care about correct bar graphs. Like this, for example (actual screen shot).

Re:Not a new platform by abhisarda · 2003-03-24 06:13 · Score: 1 · on Sun to Build Alternative Desktop ?

My university[mtu.edu] was the first to adopt those sun ray programs MTU in 2000 for students in residence halls. Turned out to be big flop and MTU discontinued that program in 2002. Sun Rays are a real pain in the ass. I worked on them for 2 years but just hated them. Of course I had no alternative because the math dept had only suns. Thank god my Elec Engg dept did not use them.

Re:You'd be doing your students a disservice by Yort · 2003-03-12 09:31 · Score: 1 · on A College Without Microsoft?

CS should not be about programming! Programming is a tool

Exactly. My first internship out of college at MTU was for a company programming in both COBOL and DB2 databases, neither of which I had any experience in. However, due to the CS concepts I'd learned at college, I was programming code faster and better than those employees who had actually taken COBOL and DB2 classes for their IS degrees. (Lest you think this an isolated case, this was also true for my other CS co-worker).

For the CS students, I think the real question, tho, is what kind of degree are the people in the CS department getting? If they're looking to learn how to program in Visual Basic, they'd be better off going to a 6 month vocational school and saving themselves the time and money.

For the "other" students, I agree that not being exposed to M$ products entirely might be detrimental, especially for those in Business degrees. I mean, let's face it - when people are looking through resumes for keywords, they're looking for experience in "Microsoft PowerPoint", not "OpenOffice" or even "Presentation software." So I think you might have to allow for exceptions.

For the average student, tho, who only uses the computers to type up reports and essays, and surf the web, do email, and instant message - they're not going to be at a disadvantage, I don't think, especially if most of the college is non-M$. When they get to the "real" world, I doubt they're going to notice much of a difference between Outlook and Evolution, or IE and Mozilla.

Re:Why no Sun Rays? by abhisarda · 2003-02-28 04:58 · Score: 1 · on Windows vs. Unix Revisited

Haha.. Sun Rays are a real pain in the ass. I worked on them for 2 years but just hated them. Of course I had no alternative because the math dept had only suns. Thank god my EE dept did not use them.

Sun Rays were introduced in MTU in a big way in 2000Sun Rays in depts and to students in residence halls. The demand was so low that MTU has discontinued the Sun Ray program for students in 2002.

Re:Troubles of Middle Earth - bandwidth almost gon by Anonymous Coward · 2002-12-18 07:10 · Score: 1, Informative · on LOTR: The Two Towers

Here's the Windows version. It took me forever to get. I'd mirror the tarball as well, but you know how it goes with finals and all. Maybe later.

Enjoy.

here is a short list by jon787 · 2002-12-08 20:29 · Score: 3, Informative · on 101 Uses for an AOL CD?

http://www.csl.mtu.edu/~jadevree/aol.html

Re:what does phoenix look like? by jdkincad · 2002-12-08 02:50 · Score: 2, Informative · on Phoenix 0.5 Has Arrived

OK. Here is a shot of 0.4 with bookmarks toolbar as it looks out of the box.

SIA ! by Lt+Razak · 2002-12-03 10:39 · Score: 5, Informative · on Seeking Interesting Sites When Travelling the World?

I would check out SIA

A group of us used to do the same thing you mentioned, and we've been to their conferences and tours. One of our friends subscribed to all their newsletters and journals, and passed them around. The ads in there alone will point you to other organizations just like it. It's amazing.

I smiled while reading your description of awe-inspiring marvels of the world. I must say that being able to run a 5K race on the Great Wall of China was most amazing experience I've ever had.

Society for Industrial Archeology by sphealey · 2002-12-03 10:33 · Score: 5, Informative · on Seeking Interesting Sites When Travelling the World?

You might want to take a look at the Society for Industrial Archeology. They sponser conferences and tours that do exactly this, as well as publishing several neat newsletters and journals.

sPh

Mirror site by Anonymous Coward · 2002-11-13 10:36 · Score: -1, Troll · on MAME To Become GPL?

Mirror 1

Non Profit stations such as WMTU by Anonymous Coward · 2002-09-21 09:56 · Score: 0 · on How Would You Start a Radio Station?

I would suggest contacting other college radiostations, attempting to get funding from the school and reading a shitload about FCC regulations and equipment. At my local college we run a Nonprofit FM station that I am a part of (first year). It doesn't have much of a range (10 miles on a good day in an area full of hills) but it serves our purpose. WMTU is the name of it. It's too bad that those personal low power radio station licenses fell through. Instead you'll have to go to the level of nonprofit. I think another requirement is that someone is always in the DJ booth, so you'd have to find other likeminding people and get a schedule setup.

-John

Re:Best graphics books, in my opinion... by TastySiliconWafers · 2002-07-26 15:18 · Score: 1 · on Best Computer Books For The Smart

An excellent online resource for graphics (particularly B splines, NURBS, etc.):

Intro to Computing with Geometry Class Notes

Mirai by voodoo1man · 2002-07-18 19:04 · Score: 1 · on Software for the Realtime 3D Modeler?

If you can get it (there's been trouble in this department, but someone close to the company seems to have recently sorted it), Izware's Mirai is a very good solution for at least your second problem.

This software (in it's previous incarnations as Nichimen's N-World and Symbolics' S-Graphics packages (it's virtually a direct descendant! ain't Lisp great?)), is where most of the current packages are leeching their modelling features from - first Subdivision surfaces modeller on the market, and because of the fact that it uses the Winged-Edge data structure to store geometry, the first with "edge loops."

While these edge loops aren't triangle strips per-se (I actually think it's a horrible idea to force triangle fans and strips at the tools level - leave that for converters and exporters!), they, as an edge control structure, will help form the proper polygon arrangements so you can exploit triangle strips later down the pipeline.

As for shaders, at this time I also thing it's a downright horrible idea - there aren't any implemented standards yet! At least wait for OpenGL 1.4 drivers to come out.

Mirai's next release should be ready for this, since it currently features a versatile materials "domain" editor that lets you painlessly transfer those material and texture properites that you define for the renderer onto OpenGL for previewing (well, everything that the domain permits), and later onto your target console (although the domains are for older systems - Mirai hasn't been updated in a while.), and vice-versa.

Besides that, you get 2d and 3d paint, advanced UV editing tools, rigging controls that will blow your mind (sure, Maya's poweful, until you start watching the time it takes to rig a skeleton fully with IK and FK solvers, and then throw on a couple of more controls to keep the skeleton in place - there's absolutely nothing like Mirai's "pin" joint system out there, and it's the only package where you can use skeletons to actually aid your modelling), the industry's first (despite SoftImage's claims, and IMO still the most useful) non-linear animation system, and a batch of Mo-Cap processing tools from TestaRossa, and a specially designed game-data export framework (Game Exchange). Oh, and did I mention it's all written in Common Lisp? Who needs a plugin interface, when you can run code directly from the Lisp image!

Is it really worth raving so much about? Hell yes.

Re:Amazing, and just a little scary... by Horizon_99 · 2002-04-30 10:35 · Score: 1 · on Hubble's Upgrade: Pretty Pictures

Reminds me of a picture from Carl Sagan's book Pale Blue Dot. A picture very similar to this one was in there with the text mentioning that the portion of the sky represented was about 1% of the viewable angle of the moon from earth. Now that makes you feel tiny!

"The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition." - Carl Sagan

Sounds Familiar by goofy183 · 2002-04-16 12:15 · Score: 1 · on Georgia Tech Cracks Down on Learning

Many schools around the countries have similar policies. As a 3rd year CS student at Michigan Technological University our CS department has a similar policy. We are not allowed to discuss our programs with anyone other than professors and the lab instructors. Some professors allow students to discuss their code but it's still very strict. There are usually one or two cases a year of students getting caught discussing work and are put on probation. There has been a lot of dissension among students on the points of making it very difficult to learn and not being very realistic to what people will be doing at a job. Many off the professors have now ok'd collaboration as long as no code is exchanged and you wait a while after discussion before you being coding.

-Eric Dalquist

It's the explanation that's the bogus part. by Eric+S.+Smith · 2002-03-23 09:54 · Score: 1 · on Build Your Own UFO

It is said that 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof' I would say that a crude electrogravitic kite lifting an 18 gram payload is pretty extraordinary.

It's the "electrogravitic" part that's the extraordinary claim. You want us to believe that the rewired guts of a 14" colour monitor are distorting space instead of just ionizing some air.

If the experiment can be easily repeated and duplicated the argument is over.

And no doubt you'd have us believe that since anyone can light things on fire, the phlogiston theory of combustion is proven.

Here's a pro-phlogiston article, by the way. Don't mind the printing date — look instead at how much it looks like all of the defenses of doomed crackpot theories that you can dredge up on the Web today.

Notwithstanding the confidence thus strongly expressed by these able and experienced chemists, I must take the liberty to say, that the experiments to which they allude appear to me to be very liable to exception, and that the doctrine of phlogiston easily accounts for all that they observed.

...and so on.

.Net vs Java by goofy183 · 2002-03-03 14:55 · Score: 1 · on Will CS Students Switch From Microsoft?

I know that here at Michigan Tech our CS department is entirly *nix. Starting 3 years ago Java was the language taught to incoming freshman. Before that it was C++ on a compeltely SunOS Unix platform. I don't ever see Micrsoft taking over in good CS programs as a good learning platform. I know a bit of VB and have used .NET and it just doesn't seem to have the ease of use and methods for demonstrating the fundamentals of Computer Science that Java and C++ do. Learning to deal with pointers or memory or such it a development platform that abstracts you so far away from the system just doesn't work.

Another big problem with .NET is it's not free. gcc and the JDK are free. MS is never going to give .NET away. At least not while that have medium to large corporations and schools paying huge licence fees to use it in their IT departments.

-Eric Dalquist

Re:What next ? by Shickdawg · 2001-07-11 23:46 · Score: 2 · on Cross Country Solar Race

Well, firstly we need more efficient solar panels. Most commercial-grade photovoltaic panels are (at best) 20% efficient. Meaning? Meaning you need a lot of panels to create a significant enough flow to power the car.

Secondly, we need smaller, more efficient batteries. The single greatest technological reason hybrid and electric cars are not all over our streets is because too much space and weight is lost to batteries. Make smaller, more efficient batteries, and these cars become more feasible.

And, we need to completely run out of dino oil for the world to put the internal combustion engine into the Smithsonian for good.

Kit

Oh, yeah. Go Michigan Tech!

Pics by Cheese_isgood · 2001-03-29 00:25 · Score: 4 · on Amazing Northern Lights Show

Here are some sights that have a few good pictures of the Aurora Borealis in them: Aurora Borealis - Northern Lights, pictures, Auroral Photography, & The Aurora Page

Re:ahh yes, marketing by EvlPenguin · 2001-03-01 09:15 · Score: 2 · on Microsoft: The Biggest Web Bugger

Well, you could put them all in a line and test out how many people a real railgun could shoot through.

It's not without purpose either! Based on the result, iD Software would be able to make the next Quake's railgun more realistic.

--

The best lecture I heard in college by salmi · 2001-03-01 07:29 · Score: 1 · on Marine Corps Testing Maser for Anti-Personnel Use

started with "So you want to build a death ray" Prof. Campbell at Michigan Tech a talk about building a flesh burning device out of a microwave oven, a prabolic antenna, and maxwell's equations. It was a fun filled hour of mayhem!

Stromboli by JCCyC · 2000-12-19 10:01 · Score: 3 · on XFree86 4.0.2 Released

(...) this new release adds the Render extension which will hopefully give us anti-aliased fonts, alphablended menus, and a stromboli delivered nice and hot to your door.

Why would I want a volcano delivered to my door?

Another great pic by discore · 2000-11-02 14:35 · Score: 3 · on Hubble Captures Colliding Galaxies

Wow, that site is really cool. I remember going to it a long time ago, they certainly have kept it going.

Anyway, here's another great pic of 2 more galaxies collding.

http://www.phy.mtu.edu/apod/ap991109.h tml

And hell, I might as well borrow their html of the description:

Billions of years from now, only one of these two galaxies will remain. Until then, spiral galaxies NGC 2207 and IC 2163 will slowly pull each other apart, creating tides of matter, sheets of shocked gas, lanes of dark dust, bursts of star formation, and streams of cast-away stars. Astronomers predict that NGC 2207, the larger galaxy on the left, will eventually incorporate IC 2163, the smaller galaxy on the right. In the most recent encounter that peaked 40 million years ago, the smaller galaxy is swinging around counter-clockwise, and is now slightly behind the larger galaxy. The space between stars is so vast that when galaxies collide, the stars in them usually do not collide.

Re:Bezier patches by tolldog · 2000-08-10 21:40 · Score: 4 · on Voxel/Polygon Accelerator

Instead of knocking out the cobwebs, I will give you the links that I learned from.
bezier patches

Bezier curves

Nurbs

What it boils down to is an easy way to store a curved data set. The display part is trickier... and that is where the acceleration would be nice.
If you had a curved object, you could break it into poly's and have all the triangle points stored in memory or you can have the control points (and the weights if used) stored in memory.

Obviously the math for the poly's are faster but the display isn't as smooth (Such as Quake 2). With bezier patches, the display takes more math but is smoother because you are representing curves and not lines.
When it is all said and done, the math isn't too bad, it is just additional math that needs to be done at 30+ fps.

Re:Bezier patches by tolldog · 2000-08-10 21:40 · Score: 4 · on Voxel/Polygon Accelerator

Instead of knocking out the cobwebs, I will give you the links that I learned from.
bezier patches

Bezier curves

Nurbs

What it boils down to is an easy way to store a curved data set. The display part is trickier... and that is where the acceleration would be nice.
If you had a curved object, you could break it into poly's and have all the triangle points stored in memory or you can have the control points (and the weights if used) stored in memory.

Obviously the math for the poly's are faster but the display isn't as smooth (Such as Quake 2). With bezier patches, the display takes more math but is smoother because you are representing curves and not lines.
When it is all said and done, the math isn't too bad, it is just additional math that needs to be done at 30+ fps.

Finally... a story where this is *not* offtopic... by Anonymous Coward · 2000-05-19 20:38 · Score: 5 · on Oxford Yanks Student Page Over Spoof DeCSS

and I'm asleep at the keyboard. Doh!

Oh well... here it is.
Add your own, and spread this far and wide:

This announcement brought to you by the DeCSS Polar Bear.

Finally... a story where this is *not* offtopic... by Anonymous Coward · 2000-05-19 20:38 · Score: 5 · on Oxford Yanks Student Page Over Spoof DeCSS

and I'm asleep at the keyboard. Doh!

Oh well... here it is.
Add your own, and spread this far and wide:

This announcement brought to you by the DeCSS Polar Bear.

If you can't see it... by drdink · 2000-04-06 12:56 · Score: 4 · on G3 Solar Storm

If you are interrested in this or you can't see it, this site has everything you could ever want to see or know about the Northern Lights.

Time for Slashdot to take a stand... by Anonymous Coward · 2000-04-05 03:12 · Score: 4 · on MPAA Files Another Injunction Against 2600

The following is a list of all the mirrors from the 2600 site.

Time for Slashdot to take a stand... by Anonymous Coward · 2000-04-05 03:12 · Score: 4 · on MPAA Files Another Injunction Against 2600

The following is a list of all the mirrors from the 2600 site.

Re:Mirrors? by Telsa · 1999-09-03 21:09 · Score: 2 · on Solar Eclipse, As Seen From Mir

I haven't checked how many of these carry the entire back catalogue (which is _well_ worth it), but the first two certainly do:

http://www.star.ucl.ac.uk/~apod/ apod/astropix.html, UK,(London)
http://www.phy.mtu.edu/apod/astropix.html , US (Midwest)
http://mirrors.inside.net/apod/, Switzerland
http://www.sai.msu.su/apod/: Russia
http://phyhp.phy. ncku.edu.tw/~astrolab/mirrors/apod/astropix.html Taiwan (Chinese)
http://phyhp.ph y.ncku.edu.tw/~astrolab/mirrors/apod_e/astropix.ht ml: Taiwan (English)
http://apod.aguianet.com.br/: Brazil
http://www.astro.cz/apod/

I got this list from the info page on the main site. I've just tried 'em out, and the Swiss one appears to be down but the rest are there.

These all point to the picture of the day (which is of Earth, though it doesn't look like it!), of course: you'll have to head to the archives to find the eclipse picture. They've been carrying loads of eclipse pictures recently, and they're beautiful.

very true. by Zebulun · 1999-04-27 08:21 · Score: 1 · on Students Opting Away from high-tech Degrees?

I graduated High School in 1996 and the only thing we ever used computers for was typing class. Of course, many of us wanted to do more, but the school put more priority on home ec than the use of computers. They figured that all they have to do is buy lots of new computers and the problem is solved.

but what good is a tool without someone to show you how to use it?

Then at MTU they couldn't hire any good teachers in the CS department and a huge reason is who would accept a low paying University job where with the same credentials they could get a high paying job a major corp?
Also, to note, is the drop-out rate in the CS fields at major Universities. My old roomate at MTU was an awesome programmer and got excellent grades, but thought the profs and CS program stunk so bad he moved to EE.

-Z

Check out my page... by Mike+Bedy · 1999-04-26 04:06 · Score: 1 · on Voices From The Hellmouth

I am now a grad student, but I can identify with the letters here. Check out the following page for the thoughs I wrote up a couple days ago: Here.

EPIC, VLIW, Links for more Info by Mr+Z · 1999-04-04 18:39 · Score: 1 · on Troubles with Merced

First, before everyone jumps in and says "Intel will never get there because the compiler will never get there," please don't forget that some shipping devices are already there.

Quite simply, EPIC allows a compiler to tell the hardware ahead of time where it knows parallelism exists, so that the silicon (which is finite) doesn't have to hunt for it. Compared to the rate at which silicon must make scheduling decisions (at 800MHz, that's 1.25 nanoseconds), compiler time seems infinite.

Granted, compiler time is not infinite, but for performance-critical applications, it is quite large. The Texas Instruments TMS320C6000-family of DSPs, for instance, rely on compilers and assembly optimizers in order to eek out that last bit of performance, and as any DSP engineer will likely tell you, its usually worth it. Cycles saved in one loop are cycles that can be spent elsewhere on value-added features, leading to a more valuable product.

This points to the real fundamental problem as I see it, which is that the current VLIW darling in the industry is in the embedded world. Why should that make a difference, you ask? Because the embedded developer is the one most likely to take advantage of the raw capability that an exposed parallelism architecture can provide.

Merced's biggest problem lying ahead is the fact that workstation-class code does not naturally exhibit large amounts of parallelism. While I was attending MICRO-31, I heard someone remark about how most code looks like a series of 5-10 instruction bursts followed by a jump. ICK!!

Embedded programmers generally seem willing to learn whatever it takes to get their product running in the fewest MIPS (so that they can either use cheaper parts or provide more features), and so are often willing to jump through a few hoops to help out the compiler in order to get the parallelism they desire.

Workstation programmers, on the other hand, are interested in the much bigger picture (since their applications are much larger and tend to have larger life expectancies), and so code tends to be human-friendly and not compiler friendly. (Certain heavily-traveled code paths in the Linux kernel being a noteworthy exception.)

The point is that the Merced compiler will ship with alot of amazing compiler transformations, but very few of them will be effective at translating the hopping, skipping, and jumping nature of your typical general-purpose database-ish looking code into highly parallel performance-oozing EPIC instructions, at least straight out of the gate.

Merced will inherently provide big performance wins to the compute-farm customers (your big engineering shops that currently use networks full of Sun or HP workstations to crunch VHDL, Spice, or whatever simulations around the clock), as these applications end up reducing to huge matrix manipulations and numeric crunching galore -- oozing with parallelism. But Merced will be hard pressed to feed up web pages or database queries much faster than any other architecture, unless it's able to massively crank its clock rate due to losing the shackles of the instruction scheduling hardware.

Anyway, those compiler nuts in the crowd might find the following links useful and informative.

The Rocket Project -- ILP research at Michigan Tech University
VLIW Architectures -- a description of VLIW that's part of a larger presentation about VLIW compiler techniques.
The Trimaran Research Compiler -- HP's research compiler that was supposedly used in development of the architecture that begat Merced.
EE Times -- article which describes the release of Trimaran and includes a diagram showing the relationship of architectures from Superscalar to VLIW/EPIC to TTA.

--Joe

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