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"They don't exactly teach sysadmin in school, you know."

Actually, they do, at least at RIT

Though it is certainly true that astronomers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries spent a great deal of time and energy travelling to the far corners of the Earth to observe transits of Venus, these rare events were NOT their only chances to measure the absolute size of the solar system. Simultaneous or near-simultaneous measurements of Mars or certain asteroids also allow one to derive absolute distances via parallax; although the targets are more distant than Venus, they provide significantly better observing conditions and references for astrometry. Cassini, for example, used measurements of Mars in 1672 to calculate the Astronomical Unit (the distance between Earth and Sun) to better than 10 percent.

Still, transits of Venus were certainly a major focus for the astronomical community. I wrote up material on the geometry and history of transits for a seminar: read it for yourself . There are links to other good sites at the end of my lecture.

i am beginning to think coding is easier with less brains; then again it might be because i have spent the last year working with c#

As a note to the original parent, though, coding is about the most insignificant thing i learned in my cs degree. Coding without a solid background in math, science, physics, and ample skills in the humanities, is no different than being a draftsman or accountant. Not to say that being the 'application' builder is bad, but it ain't a science

Excuse me? Who puts graphics cards with blinkenlights an colorful fans on them into their computers? Mac users?

http://www.rit.edu/~930www/paley/

1.6 million dollars. Have yet to talk to a student who does not think the thing is hideous.

If this were happening it's reasonable to assume those forums and media would be abuzz about it. Perhaps this is just more M$ FUD. BK425

Have you actually talked to some art students lately? Aside from people that are actually doing computer graphics work, their computer skills (in general) are pitiful. Having a Mac does not help this - in fact, it gives them even less incentive to actually learn how their computer works beyond "double-click the cute little icon to open IE/AIM/Photoshop/etc.".

Feel free to prove me wrong, but I go to a fairly geeky school, and with a couple exceptions, I haven't really seen otherwise among the art/photo majors here.

I think that a lot of schools recognize this, such as RIT's college of science. They offer a "Computational Mathematics" degree, a 5-year (ouch!) program that combines their Applied Math (also College of Science) and their College of Applied Science and Technology's Computer Science program.

The enrollment has traditionally been rather small in size; when I started (transferring in with a 2-year degree), there were only 7 people in the program; the Applied math had some 40, the Applied Statistics had some 30 people. When I graduated, there were only 3 of us--some had transferred to Applied Math, or to straight Comp-Sci.

The challenge was that most math people did NOT like computer science; and that most comp sci people took only the required maths, and nothing else. Being able to bridge both worlds did my career a lot of good!

The critical thinking imparted in a Numerical Methods course or an Abstract Algebra course is invaluable to a computer scientist. While you may never have to use the maths presented in a Real Variables course, twisting your brain around the topics really trains you to learn new things.

What did my math degree get me? It taught me how to learn. In any straight comp sci degree, if you learn the technology du jour, it will be good for (insert number) of months. You need to learn how to learn new technology.

RIT's Computational Math program can be found here.

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wwjd? jwrtfm!

The uni I work for (RIT) is working to migrate their entire campus to a Microsoft Active Directory environment. Part of the reason for this is to give users a universal username/password for any and all university services.

Now, they enforce basic password etiquette (minimum length, non-alpha character requirement, etc...), which helps the situation somewhat (aside from the office biddies who write them on post-it notes on their CRTs), but the situation is far from secure.

Students use their webmail (Exchange... I won't even get into that one...) and register for classes (telnet), and generally aren't careful with their passwords. I couldn't tell you how many times I've sat down at a public terminal to find someone else's account all set up for me to exploit. And since the password is universal, I can do anything I want.

Myself, I use a different password for everything I connect to, and thus don't have to worry about being wholly compromised in an instant. Then again, I'm a geek, so I'm not exactly the norm.

Does anyone else see this push toward universal logins/passwords as a problem?

File sharing in general doesn't really work at all anymore, except within the university. Really high speeds (~5MB/s), but very low diversity.

Obviously you're not looking very hard.

games that have no personality

I mean, really, you sound like a whiny film student...

Hmmmmm, hungry!

I heard they're planning to use The Sentinel as an antenna FR

I did something similar. But what I did could more accurately be described as 'shelves', not racks. I spent about $20. It ain't pretty to look at but at least I have room for more computers. Picture

This picture of the N2 was out a while ago...

Transits of Venus -- in which the planet crosses the face of the Sun as seen from Earth -- are rare events. They occur in pairs, eight years apart, with gaps of roughly 120 years between pairs. The last pair was 1874 and 1882, so this movie shows the most recent transit.

However, the next transit is in just a few months, on June 8, 2004. It will be visible from Europe, but only the tail end can be seen from North America. If you miss this one, the next is in June of 2012.

Transits were very important to astronomers in the past because they offered an opportunity to measure the distance between the Earth and the Sun; that, in turn, yielded the distance between Earth and every planet in the solar system. I've written a document explaining how transits of Venus could be used to determine the size of the solar system. It includes a little history, too. Look at

http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/phys235/venus_t/venus _t.html

Technically, a link can only be useful if it's a link.

Main Site
Kate Gleason College of Engineering
Microelectronic Engineering Department
Optical Lithography Research

Technically, a link can only be useful if it's a link.

Main Site
Kate Gleason College of Engineering
Microelectronic Engineering Department
Optical Lithography Research

Technically, a link can only be useful if it's a link.

Main Site
Kate Gleason College of Engineering
Microelectronic Engineering Department
Optical Lithography Research

Technically, a link can only be useful if it's a link.

Main Site
Kate Gleason College of Engineering
Microelectronic Engineering Department
Optical Lithography Research

Another, better mirror.

Two other guys were linked in the article as having their own Tron costumes

I am currently attending RIT for a Masters in Comp Sci. Last May I recieved a Bacholers in Software Engineering from RIT. For the past several years, RIT has been trying to deal with it's rettention problem ... right now, the "grand idea" is to reduce the acdemic program. This would involve reducing the maximum number of co-ops and reduce total number of required credit hours.

This is a horrible idea ... and this article is proof of that. Why would I want to hire someone who has less expereince coming out of college ... when I could hire someone overseas for less who knows at least as much. Its a damn shame. Most classes I took were vauable - at least the ones within my major. Its pretty damn obvious that they wont cut math/science/lib arts ... so the only thing that will suffer is the core courses. what a shame.

Pitty on ol al simone and the administration ... its just a bad Idea. If they want to solve the retition issue, they outta look at revoking the dry-campus policy.

I am currently attending RIT for a Masters in Comp Sci. Last May I recieved a Bacholers in Software Engineering from RIT. For the past several years, RIT has been trying to deal with it's rettention problem ... right now, the "grand idea" is to reduce the acdemic program. This would involve reducing the maximum number of co-ops and reduce total number of required credit hours.

This is a horrible idea ... and this article is proof of that. Why would I want to hire someone who has less expereince coming out of college ... when I could hire someone overseas for less who knows at least as much. Its a damn shame. Most classes I took were vauable - at least the ones within my major. Its pretty damn obvious that they wont cut math/science/lib arts ... so the only thing that will suffer is the core courses. what a shame.

Pitty on ol al simone and the administration ... its just a bad Idea. If they want to solve the retition issue, they outta look at revoking the dry-campus policy.

Upcoming talk and demonstration on the development of Brain-Computer Interfaces: http://www.notacon.org/speakers.html#lowne (shameless plug)

Invasive, motor-cortical BCI development at Utah: http://www.bioen.utah.edu/cni/Projects/Motor.htm

Mike Gibbs' work with BCIs at Oxford University's Robotics Group: http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~mgibbs/research.html

The Neural Prostheses program at the National Institutes of Health includes calls for proposals in BCI development: http://www.ninds.nih.gov/npp/

The University of British Columbia's BCI research group: http://www.ece.ubc.ca/~garyb/BCI.htm

Results of the 2003 Brain Computer interface competition (focuses on signal processing techniques): http://ida.first.fraunhofer.de/projects/bci/compet ition/results/index.html

BCI development at the Cognitive Science and Technology group at the Helsinki University of Technology: http://www.lce.hut.fi/research/bci/

Dr. Jessica Bayliss's BCI work and extensive bibliography (very important, seminal work on BCI development): http://www.cs.rit.edu/~jdb/research/ and http://www.cs.rit.edu/~jdb/research/baylissThesis. pdf

Dr. Charles Anderson's work at Colorado State University with EEG pattern classification in BCI systems: http://www.cs.colostate.edu/eeg/index.html

Manchester University's Toby Howard has written some good articles on BCIs, mostly for Popular Science: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/aig/staff/toby/research/bc i/

Dr. Michael Black at Brown University teaches a course in BCI development: http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/cs295-7/home.html

Cyberkinetics, Inc. makes medical-use BCIs: http://www.cyberkineticsinc.com/

Upcoming talk and demonstration on the development of Brain-Computer Interfaces: http://www.notacon.org/speakers.html#lowne (shameless plug)

Invasive, motor-cortical BCI development at Utah: http://www.bioen.utah.edu/cni/Projects/Motor.htm

Mike Gibbs' work with BCIs at Oxford University's Robotics Group: http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~mgibbs/research.html

The Neural Prostheses program at the National Institutes of Health includes calls for proposals in BCI development: http://www.ninds.nih.gov/npp/

The University of British Columbia's BCI research group: http://www.ece.ubc.ca/~garyb/BCI.htm

Results of the 2003 Brain Computer interface competition (focuses on signal processing techniques): http://ida.first.fraunhofer.de/projects/bci/compet ition/results/index.html

BCI development at the Cognitive Science and Technology group at the Helsinki University of Technology: http://www.lce.hut.fi/research/bci/

Dr. Jessica Bayliss's BCI work and extensive bibliography (very important, seminal work on BCI development): http://www.cs.rit.edu/~jdb/research/ and http://www.cs.rit.edu/~jdb/research/baylissThesis. pdf

Dr. Charles Anderson's work at Colorado State University with EEG pattern classification in BCI systems: http://www.cs.colostate.edu/eeg/index.html

Manchester University's Toby Howard has written some good articles on BCIs, mostly for Popular Science: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/aig/staff/toby/research/bc i/

Dr. Michael Black at Brown University teaches a course in BCI development: http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/cs295-7/home.html

Cyberkinetics, Inc. makes medical-use BCIs: http://www.cyberkineticsinc.com/

Anybody else think Xorg sounds a lot like Zorg?

"You got Sc0'd"
lets see some photoshopping

First of all, I unfortunately see some posts that are like "well if you can't program, don't use computers!" And that bothers me a little bit. Now while I will say that it is hard to use computers to any significant degree above the average joe without doing at least SOME programming, that doesn't mean that you have to dedicate your life to it to be in a computer field.

Case in point. I went to a community college and got an associates degree in Computer Science. I could do programming, but my heart just wasn't in it. Let's face it, some people like to code, some don't, and I'm one of the ones who isn't that fond of it. So when I went on to a 4-year institution I switched my degree from CS to Information Technology. Instead of focusing purely on coding like with a CS degree, the IT degree involved many more aspects of the computer. I did my concentrations in systems administration, and in networking, and now I have my bachelors degree for IT. (there were also concentrations in writing code, and web design, and database work, and things like that)

But the point I'm trying to make is that as a systems admin, I have to write code perodically. Our account-generation program on campus is 100% hand-coded, and I'm quite proud to have done it myself. But do I code on a daily basis? Nope. Just when necessairy to make a task easier. And honestly, that suits me just fine. So I'd recommend looking at alternative computer degrees at whatever college you are attending to see if they have something that might suit your needs better than CS does. I wouldn't expect to get away with no coding, but you can definately get away with less.

At RIT the alternative degree to CS was the Information Technology degree, like I mentioned. At the community college I went to, I believe the alternative to the CS degree, was the CIS (Computer Information Systems) degree. So just keep an eye out and see what else is availble. Just don't shut yourself off from coding 100%, there are times where even a little bit of code will help make your life a lot easier.

All I have to say is that we have a networked vending machine. You telnet into it and tell it to drop a drink in x amount of seconds. Then you simply walk down there and get your nice cold caffeinated beverage. Eventually a robot will bring it to us (not joking about that btw) What will they think of next. Big Drink's Website

This is a little project we have been working on for a while...hacking a vending machine to make it networked...aka vend a drink from anywhere in the world. Big Drink

torrent of hi-quality quicktime movie

It's all going to depend on how much they change the syntax, which Yahoo!!!!!111! doesn't seem to be providing us with right now. (I'm sure if I were on a perl list I'd hear more about it.)

Personally what I'd recommend (as a full-time perl programmer) is to learn 5 anyway. It'll take two or three years before the next edition of the Llama (O'Reilly, _Learning_Perl_, look it up your own darn self on Amazon if you must) is out, and in the meantime you can get out of the baby-talk phase this way. Learn regular expressions thoroughly, absolutely thoroughly, backwards and forwards, even if you won't need to use most of the complex stuff -- you'll wind up using it sooner or later, and if you know if cold, then you've got better odds of remembering something obscure when you need it. [Caveat: apparently regexes are a big part of the language changes. So learn the Perl 5 regex engine as thoroughly as you can, and then compare and contrast with this rundown on the new stuff.]

Obviously core language features aren't likely to go anywhere, and you won't be wasting your time learning them. And you'd be amazed at what even a couple of months will do for your language maturity.

Start now. No sense putting it off.

"Some friends of mine made one of these for a project in college. Check it out here."

clicky clicky

I would disagree that laptop is the optimal choice. The school I went to had ample computers in the library with the full host of standard apps (ms office, photoshop, illustrator), the science labs had matlab & mathematica, the engineering labs had engineering software, and so on.

The ideal solution, imo, these days, is a small form factor pc and a good lcd monitor. This gives you what college students will Really use there pcs for (mp3, movies, web, instant messenger, games and word processing), it doesn't take up much space (i would almost wager less space than a laptop, if you don't count the small form factor pc, which can be stashed just about anywhere), and will give you jsut about maximal bang/buck.

Yeah, I'm sitting in class at RIT right now. There's a new forensics course starting next month (taught by Troell, who rocks), which will be rolled into the new security/IA degree from GCCIS. There is supposed to be a masters program, starting in the fall. press release here

India, on the other hand, appears to have contributed precisely jack shit to all of this, and it's very understandable that they're going to want to want a piece of the pie now that they can just go buy a book and pirate a copy of windows XP and take advantage of the American computer revolution.

The computer was invented by a Brit and a Hungarian.

Until those fscking American thiefs stole it, that is.

( /sarcasm )

Thomas Miconi

I came to the Rochester Institute of Technology and I've loved every minute of it. They have top notch CS, IT, and SE programs. There are also Computer Engineering and Electrical engineering programs that are highly rated in the US News and World Report. One thing that attracted me the most was a "special interest house", namely Computer Science House. We do things above and beyond what the rest of the school does. When they (students or the institute) need something done, they come to us. It is the biggest incubator for talent around. We have over 400 alumni working everywhere including high ranking jobs at the CIA, NSA, DoD, FedEx, as well as many self-employees. Overall, it is an amazing environment that I would definitely consider checking out. Contact me for more information.

I came to the Rochester Institute of Technology and I've loved every minute of it. They have top notch CS, IT, and SE programs. There are also Computer Engineering and Electrical engineering programs that are highly rated in the US News and World Report. One thing that attracted me the most was a "special interest house", namely Computer Science House. We do things above and beyond what the rest of the school does. When they (students or the institute) need something done, they come to us. It is the biggest incubator for talent around. We have over 400 alumni working everywhere including high ranking jobs at the CIA, NSA, DoD, FedEx, as well as many self-employees. Overall, it is an amazing environment that I would definitely consider checking out. Contact me for more information.

The title "Computer Engineering" can mean so many things, though.

I know it was all about the internal computers from microwaves, stereos, etc. where I went to school. CE people had a very good combination of IT, CS, and various microprocessor-related engineering skills.

What does it mean to you?

They bandwidth cap was tested Summer 2003, and put into full-effect fall-2003. 256Kbit/sec Internet1 Outgoing Cap.

Network Graphs -- WTF, they just changed from MRTG to RRD-- like this week?

http://www.csh.rit.edu/~benjamin/articles/linux_pd a.php

-Benjamin Meyer

• Know someone on the inside of a company who will hire you
• Develop a unique skillset in a computer-related field, such as bioinformatics
• Work your ass off looking for jobs, for example I've seen a lot of full-time positions scroll by on jobs.perl.org.

[Speal about what it is/does]

Do you want to add a full fledged configure dialog to your Qt application by only writing one, twenty line function? If so than the KAutoConfig library is what you want. KAutoConfig is several classes that enables a developer to easily create a configure dialog for their applications. It automatically syncs GUI widgets values with values in the configuration file. It does this by looking for keys and widgets that have the same name. It obtains the default values from the initial values of the widgets. KAutoConfigDialog also manages all of the buttons in a normal configure dialog.

-Benjamin Meyer

I know this patent is obvious, but here's another example of prior art. At my college most departments give students email accounts on their own servers For example, my email account is %username%@it.rit.edu and my department's web page is http://it.rit.edu Other departments do it also, such as the CS department. Best I can tell this system was put in place in early 1999, predating this patent by 4 years.

I know this patent is obvious, but here's another example of prior art. At my college most departments give students email accounts on their own servers For example, my email account is %username%@it.rit.edu and my department's web page is http://it.rit.edu Other departments do it also, such as the CS department. Best I can tell this system was put in place in early 1999, predating this patent by 4 years.

A really good troll makes every word in his sentence a link so that his point seems valid.

You don't even have to visit the sites, just google something like "linux vs windows", grab relevent links and include then in your post. No one will read them anyways, and believe you because you provided plenty of background Info and reputable sources (computing.net included!). They will have to believe your Pro-Windows rant.

Linux isn't a Toy OS. it's used by google. Who provided you this Informative post :)

Here's a mirror of the entire site.

also see the index page for this set at Photographs by Andrew Davidhazy

http://www.rit.edu/~andpph/exhibit-3.html

My favourite is the playing card shot half

http://www.rit.edu/~andpph/exhibit-3.html

My favourite is the playing card shot half