Slashdot Mirror

so we need you to be a sanitation engineer

If there's a glut of surgeons to the point where hospitals aren't likely to be hiring more, a freshman advisor diverting someone from pre-med to mechanical engineering might not be so unthinkable.

There's a difference between a sanitation technician and a sanitation engineer. A tech drives the garbage truck. A sanitation engineer designs a container and lifting mechanism that work together to collect more waste with a given amount of labor and fuel. There are probably plenty of graduates of the mechanical engineering program at my alma mater who went on to build better garbage trucks.

Totally. I was from the American middle class but had the opportunity, due to my high performance, to attend (and graduate with the degree from) an elitist private school. For the first four months I was the hottest thing on campus and showing my peers, who were from CEO/VP/millionaire/upper military/big time familes, the ropes (14th out of a class of ~350 after first quarter, same rank halfway into second... and then...). My peers decided that I would be much less of a star performer if they would pawn the local goose-egging (0.0 GPA, doesn't go to class, whines and complains and prevents you from getting anything done) wannabe frat girl off on me--push her towards me to get us to hook up together. The fallout from that situation closed almost all doors on campus and even made a couple of real good enemies for me in the administration; look, I made mistakes, they were being hard-noses, and the bottom line is that I was all of eighteen and they were 40-60 year old multi-Ph.D. engineers and scientists in the admin and faculty. Do not try to tell me that they didn't see that I had been set up to crash. Setting the "unfavorite" up to crash is 90% of office games in corporate America.

It took me an extra two quarters to recover from that. I had a hard time sophomore year, junior year wasn't any more fun, and senior year I was just praying to be able to finish. I graduated with a 3.2 overall, 3.1 in my major (chemistry), and corporate America treated me like a reject from a community college. Now I have been homeless for five years. Even when I was in corporate America I do not believe that I was making anywhere close to the median salary for graduates of my class and no where near the average for my grade performance level.

Wow... if you ask me, it sounds like you have some serious issues taking responsibility for your actions.

Totally. I was from the American middle class but had the opportunity, due to my high performance, to attend (and graduate with the degree from) an elitist private school. For the first four months I was the hottest thing on campus and showing my peers, who were from CEO/VP/millionaire/upper military/big time familes, the ropes (14th out of a class of ~350 after first quarter, same rank halfway into second... and then...). My peers decided that I would be much less of a star performer if they would pawn the local goose-egging (0.0 GPA, doesn't go to class, whines and complains and prevents you from getting anything done) wannabe frat girl off on me--push her towards me to get us to hook up together. The fallout from that situation closed almost all doors on campus and even made a couple of real good enemies for me in the administration; look, I made mistakes, they were being hard-noses, and the bottom line is that I was all of eighteen and they were 40-60 year old multi-Ph.D. engineers and scientists in the admin and faculty. Do not try to tell me that they didn't see that I had been set up to crash. Setting the "unfavorite" up to crash is 90% of office games in corporate America.

It took me an extra two quarters to recover from that. I had a hard time sophomore year, junior year wasn't any more fun, and senior year I was just praying to be able to finish. I graduated with a 3.2 overall, 3.1 in my major (chemistry), and corporate America treated me like a reject from a community college. Now I have been homeless for five years. Even when I was in corporate America I do not believe that I was making anywhere close to the median salary for graduates of my class and no where near the average for my grade performance level.

Well, yes, but then I've never heard anyone refer to "Economics" as "Econ",

Er.. what? I went to an engineering school and it was incredibly common to hear someone say "I'm late for Econ." or "I've got an Econ paper to work on this weekend." Politics was polysci and Thermodynamics was therm or thermal. About the only thing that got abbreviated and kept its 's' was conservation and accounting principles -> conaps, which is probably an exception because the class sucked so much. /fistshake http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~richards/courses/es201/index.htm/

Unlike Indiana: http://www.rose-hulman.edu/alumniaffairs/Ski-immediate.htm

(warning, shameless plug)

I've been working on a similar program for a while called libgis. The main difference is that libgis is built as a library instead of an application and uses OpenGL for rendering, which allows it to render terrain. It also uses GTK+ instead of Qt, but that's just due to my personal preferences. Unfortunately, it's not (yet!) as complete as Marble/WorldWind/Google Earth.

Well, I know, I discussed this before, and I now have some more links on the flaws of "shareholder value":
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/599009962631/m/750009712041
http://www.aom.pace.edu/amle/AMLEVolume4Issue1pp75-91.pdf
http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~christ/vfecon_asee2008.pdf

A former professor of mine, Dr. Ed Doering, set up this page here for our intro logic/FPGA course: PLD Oasis. The school it's hosted off of, my alma mater, is the school that produced one of the co-founders of Xilinx.

In any case, Dr. Doering has lots of video tutorials about how to use Xilinx software, Spartan boards, Nexys boards, and all other manner of Progammable Logic Devices (PLDs), as well as some clever software resources. He includes things about visual schematic design, which may be beneficial for being able to drop logic circuits onto FPGAs without Verilog as an intermediary, but it's also useful in that you can look at the intermediate Verilog files to get a handle on how Xilinx renders schematics to code.

Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology has an interesting program called Operation Catapult that might be of interest. I attended many years ago, and the program was great. All the facilities -- libraries, labs, machine shops, etc -- were available to you and you worked with full professors and department heads for your project. It's an invitational program, but it sounds like you're qualified.

The school itself is not widely known to the general public, but it is very well respected academically. Check out the wikipedia page.

PS: Sorry to post as a reply to an early post, but the thread is getting heavily trolled and I didn't want this post to get pushed back to page 3 of a troll-a-thon.

Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology has an interesting program called Operation Catapult that might be of interest. I attended many years ago, and the program was great. All the facilities -- libraries, labs, machine shops, etc -- were available to you and you worked with full professors and department heads for your project. It's an invitational program, but it sounds like you're qualified.

The school itself is not widely known to the general public, but it is very well respected academically. Check out the wikipedia page.

PS: Sorry to post as a reply to an early post, but the thread is getting heavily trolled and I didn't want this post to get pushed back to page 3 of a troll-a-thon.

Oh, good ole TH. Please tell me you didn't go to ISU from CA. Given the ./ demographic I'd say no.

It was Rose Hulman, obviously. =)

What a waste. Go to a university, get a BS in Computer Science and make your own games.

And get whom to make the models, textures, maps, and audio? And then get whom to pitch the playable prototype to publishers?

You are going to a game school and making a game for that school. What do you expect?

At a game school, I would expect a game-oriented job fair, game development internships, and other ways of making contacts in the video game industry. The school where I earned a BS in computer science didn't have that.

Where I go to school, just this year we switched from teaching the introductory classes in Java to a combination of Python, then C, then Java. I think that this is much better than using any particular one of those languages the whole time. It gives the student experience with more different concepts and from that I think they can begin to see how everything works together. Also, starting with something simpler than Java/Eclipse seems to make it a lot easier the first few weeks of the course.

One thing I have noticed though, is a complete lack of security related training. Something about calling eval() on every input just to parse integers makes me cringe. I guess the idea is that worrying to much standard practices keeps people from thinking creatively or something. Unfortunately, it also seems like a good way to get into a lot of bad habits.

Here's a page with an illustration that makes the operation of the fountain obvious. The other page explains the operation only in text, and pictures of old devices that were constructed to be deliberately misleading.

Senior Project?! At my university, Rose-Hulman, Computer Scientists, Software Engineers, and Computer Engineers take a class, Computer Architecture, in which they design a CPU, and the only prereq is ECE130: Circuits and Systems, which can be taken as a first quarter Freshman! I think this project would be a sophomore level project at most!

I thought the article was going to talk about this or this.

If you connect to a Windows machine, the icon for that machine in Leopard is a beige monitor with a BSOD!

What makes this all the more ironic is that in the new CoverFlow Finder, PCs on the network are displayed with a Blue Screen of Death... teeeheee!

...what Windows machines look like in Coverflow.

If $25,000,000,000 matches their definition of "good".

I'm stupid...sorry for anyone that actually tried to have a look at my machine. I think the link thing got screwed up, so here we go again: http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~shieldga/story.php?ID= 11212006, and I checked it this time :-).

I thought my [somewhat] recent project was fascinating. I managed to get Windows Server 2003 running on a 350Mhz AMD, 220Mb (?), less than 100Gb system. You can read about it on my website and see the nasty pictures of the beast here: http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~shieldga/story.php?ID= 11212006/

In terms of solving the relevent math covered in the study of Quantum Mechanics and Molecular Spectroscopy (senior Inorganic Chem II at my alma mater), pumping energy into an electron is computationally similar to accelerating an object of 1000 kg mass to 60 mph over the span of time required to travel 250 feet and then nearly instantaneously pumping enough energy to double the velocity in the span of time represented by the distance travelled in one more inch.

• Text based like RSS and Atom feeds
• Interactivity like X11/RDP/VNC and Ajax
• Ability to run standalone programs like X11 (e.g without a browser)
• Private vs. Shared sessions like VNC

Do a bit better research next time before you bandy about accusations.

what's with requiring buildings to have ramps? What're they gonna do, claw their way up them? They can't walk! Ridiculous!

People with no legs have no trouble walking.

Unless this is supposed to be some sort of obscure movie quote...

Rose-Hulman is a decent size name, in private engineering college circles. I know, I went there. :)

Anyway, I'm assuming that 0 means that they submitted a design, but didn't compete. I went to their website to try to dig up if that was the case, and found that they may have been focused on Project X, where they are working on a biodiesal powered SUV. Rose is a small school (my class had 450, roughly, in its freshman year), so I suspect they have problems supporting more than one car based project. I know they used to have a very successful solar car team, but they haven't done anything in a while.

Ah-ha. I found Another Article, which suggests they had engine problems (and probably didn't finish). Ah well, maybe next year.

Rose-Hulman is a decent size name, in private engineering college circles. I know, I went there. :)

Anyway, I'm assuming that 0 means that they submitted a design, but didn't compete. I went to their website to try to dig up if that was the case, and found that they may have been focused on Project X, where they are working on a biodiesal powered SUV. Rose is a small school (my class had 450, roughly, in its freshman year), so I suspect they have problems supporting more than one car based project. I know they used to have a very successful solar car team, but they haven't done anything in a while.

Ah-ha. I found Another Article, which suggests they had engine problems (and probably didn't finish). Ah well, maybe next year.

I went to Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology (webpage), which is right down the street from ISU. In fact, I still have a few friends at ISU. Rose has provided laptops for its incoming freshmen since 1995. Granted, Rose is a private school, but having experienced first hand the laptop-oriented education system, I must say I approve of this move by ISU. Of course, I'm biased in thinking that they're just taking a page out of our book. :)

I actually heard talk of this a coupla years ago. I never actually thought it would go through. All I can say is, well...I've seen/used ISU's network on several occasions, mostly when visiting friends. If this laptop thing is gonna be a success, they really need to take their connectivity issues more seriously, especially in a few years once EVERY student has a laptop, because their bandwidth is pretty bad as it is.

To that tech school on the other side of town, Rose-Hulman. They've required school-standard laptops since before I was a freshman there, I think around 1998 or so.

I would suggest that you get in contact with Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. (http://www.rose-hulman.edu/TSC/laptops/)

They have had mandatory laptops for the last 8 years. The students did not have to buy the laptops separately, but they were included in the cost of freshmen tuition.

I see a lot of "ITS GOING TO BE STOLDED". When everyone has a something... no one cares that much about stealing it. 2000 undergraduate students and there isn't a problem with theft. They even have an open door polity. Unless someone is sleeping, most dorm doors are open, even if I'm not there. I don't know about what university and the surrounding metropolitan area. But in rural Indiana, theft between students isn't an issue.

All the laptops are preloaded with the licensed software. Everyone's laptop is identical. Whom ever they have a contract with allows them to repair their own computers. This is a huge deal. For the first 5 years they had Acer, because Acer was one of the only companies that allowed them to repair onsite. I guess this year's class has Dell. They must have worked something out so that they could work on it. This means no shipping time and the laptop is back in your hands in 24 hours.

You can take your computer down to the technical center and give them your laptop. In the mean time they give you a loaner and swap the hard drives. Other than maybe flair, the computer looks, smells, acts like your original computer. 0 down time.

Every teacher knows what piece of software you have. They know exactly what you have. One of the problems with Purdue University is that teachers will give you assignment X. To do this project some students have to live by the hours labs. Others can work at home.

Math classes can be geared a bit higher order because some of the elementary stuff can be done in Maple. Not to say we don't learn it. The first test may be no laptop. You learn how to do Laplace. But for the second test, when you want to move on you don't spend half the test working on the first test's material.

"Computer" classes don't have to be held in labs. Teachers expect students to bring their laptops to class if they tell them to do so. There isn't room for "I don't have a computer" etc. If the teacher wants to go through some code in class, it's up on the projector and on our laptops.

It also eliminates syncing problems. One of the biggest pains with the computer lab setup at Purdue is that I have 2 drives, Engineering and University. In addition I have a laptop and a desktop. I have to remember which computer I was last working on and try and get to it (which isn't always possible). When I bring my laptop to class, it's the same computer that I worked on it in my dorm room. It's the same computer that I worked on in the library and in between classes. This also helps, imho, with productivity and configuration. If I want AutoCAD to have a white background, and have UGS off and have all the menus and everything arranged such... it stays that way. Every time sit down at a new computer at Purdue I spend 10 minutes getting everything setup the way I want it. In addition, it's still MY laptop. I can dual boot. Triple boot. As long as I don't break the base programs which are required for my classes. I know most CS students usually go to linux and gcc for their work.

If your school network is divided into classroom and dorm by subnet, put some filters up. Disallow all P2P, AIM, etc from the classroom subnets.

As far as where to go with your college, I would suggest looking at this format. Don't give students a requirement, tell them this you're your laptop. Do a group purchase through the university. Have a laptop orientation day (not everyone has been on computers for 10 years)

And as far as the different between Apple/Windows, no clue.

My alma-mater, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, has included laptop purchase (and insurance!) in the tuition of every incoming freshman since 1995. I was in the 3rd class that required laptops, and by then they had a well-oiled system for dealing with most of the issues you mentioned: A service window for laptops, to quickly deal with reimaging, replacing hard drives, screens, keyboards, etc. Each year students got update CD's produced by the school containing all site-licensed software, OS installs, drivers, etc. that you would need to reimage a laptop on your own once you messed it up beyond repair. The union and cafeteria have lockers specifically for securing laptops.

Their laptop page here has a lot of good information about how they run the program.

When I was there, security was limited to local anti-virus installs; no restrictions were put on what software you installed, what internet ports you used, etc. At the end of the day, the laptop is the student's property and its proper operation really only affects the student's ability to do his or her school work. As opposed to lab machines, where one student can hose it and the school has to clean it up so that others may use it, the student-owned laptop model shifts responsibility for responsible use to the student. If the student has to go a week without his laptop because he let the gator installer run, that's his problem and only he will suffer.

My alma-mater, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, has included laptop purchase (and insurance!) in the tuition of every incoming freshman since 1995. I was in the 3rd class that required laptops, and by then they had a well-oiled system for dealing with most of the issues you mentioned: A service window for laptops, to quickly deal with reimaging, replacing hard drives, screens, keyboards, etc. Each year students got update CD's produced by the school containing all site-licensed software, OS installs, drivers, etc. that you would need to reimage a laptop on your own once you messed it up beyond repair. The union and cafeteria have lockers specifically for securing laptops.

Their laptop page here has a lot of good information about how they run the program.

When I was there, security was limited to local anti-virus installs; no restrictions were put on what software you installed, what internet ports you used, etc. At the end of the day, the laptop is the student's property and its proper operation really only affects the student's ability to do his or her school work. As opposed to lab machines, where one student can hose it and the school has to clean it up so that others may use it, the student-owned laptop model shifts responsibility for responsible use to the student. If the student has to go a week without his laptop because he let the gator installer run, that's his problem and only he will suffer.

As a sophomore in the electrical engineering curriculum at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, I cannot tell you how amazing it has been for me to have my own laptop. Sure it's expensive, but tack it on the the total expense, and it doesn't mean anything. Like you said, art school. Well I don't have any tips there, but I'll say for sure that when I need to have high end performance AND portability, my laptop is amazing. The school picks out a "freshman laptop" each year that the next incoming class will be required to purchase. We have licensing through several top names, including MS Office, AutoCad, Matlab, Maple, Mathcad, AutoCad, Cadence/PSPice, and so forth. I don't know about the artistic approach, but I know for sure I have no regrets whatsoever with my school requiring my computer.
-Gareth
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
Terre Haute, IN

Well, if they were Dinosaur Neil's pants...

I'm not entirely certain, but I think that that episode of The Tick was the only TV plot EVER resolved by a giant dose of aspirin.

The most glaring mistake in this entire chain of events was that the structural engineer did not review the final design. As can be seen from the evidence, the real failure that caused the collapse of the Hyatt Regency walkways was actually a failure of communication in the design phase of the project. As a result of the disaster, the two engineers from G. C. E. International lost their professional engineering licenses in the state of Missouri. These engineers were Jack D. Gillum, the engineer of record, and Daniel M. Duncan, the project engineer.

Private funding for research on fetal stem cells is not restricted

You can stick your head like an ostrich in the sand.
Your loss

Private funding for research on fetal stem cells is not restricted

You can stick your head like an ostrich in the sand.
Your loss

Private funding for research on fetal stem cells is not restricted

You can stick your head like an ostrich in the sand.
Your loss

Hey, it's Carpeted Man from The Tick!
http://www.cs.rose-hulman.edu/~stinerkt/tickdocs/s hcarp.html

When I was your age, I didn't have a choice; feet weren't invented yet. We had to walk on our ankles or not walk at all.

When I was your age, legs weren't invented yet. We had to walk on our hands and bottom. And all we had to eat was pie. Beef pie, apple pie, chicken pot pie (except pot was legal back then), and if you were rich, pizza pie.

Why isn't there a Weebles video game?

Why wouldn't you simply buy your child a desktop? I know that all the things you stated in favor of your child's laptop are things that can be learned from a traditional desktop as well. I learned to type on my father's Commodore 64, I learned the internet on our 486DX2 66, and by the time we had our first Pentium III I was either at or past his own level.

Now that I'm graduating college, I've built several of my own computers and own a laptop that my college (http://www.rose-hulman.edu/) requires incoming freshman to have. I feel like my experience with computers as a child prepared me for owning a laptop. I never felt left out because I had never had the portability or usability of a laptop.

Actually, I only ran into that page a couple weeks ago - he is a "poster child", so to speak, of such discrimination. Nonetheless, I've talked about the subject with a gaijin anthropologist with a focus on studies about Japan (Scott Clark), and he made it clear that you do run into that sort of anti-foreigner discrimination in places. He'd know - he toured essentially the entire country visiting onsen and public baths to write a book about them.

Maybe they should change the name of the organization to the Civic Minded-18. Of course their battle cry is going to have to be, "Let's Make A Difference!"

I think The Tick said it best: "Science in those days worked in broad strokes! They got right to the point! Nowadays it's always molecule, molecule, molecule... "

If you can't get a job in your field then you are most likely crap at your job and should cross-train to a different career.

I'm already thousands of dollars deep in student loan debt from getting a B.S. in computer science from a respected school, and even if I can convince the government or a bank to lend me even more money, I'll still have no paid work experience in anything I train for.

What websites [designed only for Microsoft Internet Explorer] are these?

Windows Update, but that was a given. Try playing an ActiveX based game such as Cartoon Network's Codename: Kids Next Door outside of IE. (That you do not have elementary-school-age children is not a defense.) Try using Trend Micro's ActiveX-based HouseCall virus scanner outside of IE. (Trend Micro claims to offer it as a Netscape plug-in as well, but the Netscape plug-in installer refused to continue because it couldn't find my Mozilla 1.7.x installation. It's probably for old-ass Netscape 4.x.)

And, I guess, in the US, where there are more than 5 banks

Sure, a decent-size city such as Fort Wayne, Indiana, has branches of Bank One, Wells Fargo, National City, and Fifth Third within two blocks of one another, but when I lived in Terre Haute, Indiana, for four years, it was either Terre Haute First National Bank or a $4 ATM fee ($2 to the bank and $2 to the ATM owner) for every withdrawal.

I think the big question is, how can we get small game studios back? Is it really not possible for a small team to make commercial games?

I believe that the problem smaller studios face can be overcome with some lateral thinking. The problem is two-fold: production costs and marketing costs are too high to allow indies to compete on equal footing with the big boys. The solution, then, is to not compete on equal footing.

Don't: Try to copy a game that took 60 people 3 years to create.
Do: Draw from an existing genre, but come up with a unique twist -- something meaty that doesn't exist elsewhere.

Don't: Compete with larger productions on the same style of graphics.
Do: Come up with a unique look; it's easier to wow people with a fresh style. (Though Monolith is not a small studio, Tron 2.0 was the opposite of the hyper-realism trend, and set itself apart on appearance, among other things.)

Don't: Try to out-advertise Activision, Microsoft, or Infogr- er- Atari. A small studio's meager advertising budget should be used towards development.
Do: Make as much use of word-of-mouth marketing as is humanly possible. It's easier to connect with your individual players because... well... there are fewer of them.

Don't: Re-invent the wheel. id Software must create its own 3D engine from scratch; you don't (necessarily) have to.
Do: Make as much use of middleware as possible. You don't need to be an artist to create skycubes. You don't need to know DirectX or OpenGL intimately to create an engine. You don't need to write your audio engine from scratch.

And I deeply believe better games would be coming out of a smaller and more laid back studio...

I like the cut of your jib. I hope you're right.

________________________
Inago Rage - A first-person shooter where you fight in arenas of your own creation.

And is specifies them as "campus owned" computers...

At some schools - like my alma mater Rose-Hulman - all of the students are required to buy laptops, so the "school owned" computer to student ratio is incredibly low.

Of course, freshmen there have been required to buy laptops since 1995.

I guess I can see how you would come to this.

I started using solely linux around 4 years ago. One of the first things I did was install apache and play around with that. I got it working with a little effort. After that I always built it from scratch. I eventually decided to try using apache out of the portage tree and it was set up as soon as I ran emerge and setup the configs in /etc/conf.d I've been using the gentoo build ever since then.

Anyways I had to develop some webapp and my boss wanted me to do it in php on IIS. We had a hell of a time getting all of the authentication and settings, we couldn't quite get it all working. We had trouble with ssl and a few other things. so my co-worker and I dropped apache on it and got it working with SSL in about 10 minutes.

I guess the short version of the story is: Hire MS sys admins for MS systems and here Linux sys admins for Linux systems. Rather than saying one is easier than the other, it might be better to say that one comes more naturally to a given user. And since I'm at a school with a bunch of nerds and almost all of the people I know prefer to run linux, there's a good chance that we can probably get something like apache setup more easily than IIS.

No thx. I went to Rose-Hulman for undergrad, so I already know what a no-girls-on-campus experience is like. CU is the antithesis of RHIT :)