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Because my school sucked. You slipped a schedule underneath a random door each term, and later it appeared in the office with a scrawl on the bottom. This allowed you to pay more money to stay there another year. The punch line comes when, in April of your senior year, some other random professor with the "Department Head" title tells you that you can't graduate because your courses haven't fulfilled a requirement. Yes, this happened.
The faculty doesn't give a crap about the students, the students have no desire to be there, and the 'Tute keeps raking in the money.

The original poster said "school funded" which is accurate in the case of the RPI chapter, officially at least.

Once upon a time, 1978 -1982, I called RPI home.

During those years all student clubs were student financed. Each student paid an activity fee and the student government, led by the Grand Marshall and the President of the Student Union, handled a multi-million dollar budget.

Today the studend union, "... directly oversees the budgets of all clubs and organizations, an approximate $8.5 million." (from RPI.

So it appears that it is still the students and not the school that makes the funding decision.

SteveM

RPI's other search engine, run by a school-funded computer club, was taken by the school's request.

RPI's other search engine, run by a school-funded computer club, was taken by the school's request.

Doesn't anyone remember this? Nanotubes seem to catch fire when you take pictures of them with a flash camera. How is putting light inside the tube going to take care of this *small* problem?

Now that they've sued one search engine at RPI, another one, funded by the student union, has been taken down at RPI's request.

Now that they've sued one search engine at RPI, another one, funded by the student union, has been taken down at RPI's request.

The following is hearsay, of course. I have no transcripts, but I do know some people who could probably back me up.

The year was 1984. I was a freshman at RPI, busily ruining my life by not going to class and spending all my time in night mode on MTS, the local timesharing system. One of the most popular ways for me to waste time was by using CZSC:CB, a primitive chat room type of thing. One night I was experiencing a craving for cheese, and started babbling about it on the channels. Nobody seemed to pay attention, so I became more and more vociferous, asking people if they had any cheese, did they know anyone who had cheese in their dorm, did anyone know of an all-night supermarket where I could some cheese. Finally I started just typing CHEESE CHEESE CHEESE over and over, filling the line with CHEESE.

Some people found this funny, some people found it annoying. It was dubbed a cheeseyell. It became my trademark, over the next few months, to perform a cheeseyell or six from time to time, especially when bored.

Many of us were indeed Python freaks. Someone *may* have mentioned the relationship to the Spam sketch at the time.

After the Fall 1985 semester, I flunked out (surprised?). Around 1987, my life still a shambles, I started connecting long distance to RPI's systems. By now CB had been banned from MTS, but its heir was called CONNECT. I believe it ran on the same hardware, but you connected to it differently, and it was much less wasteful of resources. I revived the cheeseyell. I am positive that at this point the term "Spamming" was applied to it, as well as to similar repetitious, zero-content remarks. What is now referred to as "scrolling" was not an essential factor, just repetition.

Well, while secrecy of voting is an important issue, it seems to be an orthogonal one to whether voting is online or paper-based. One can have both open and secret votes in both systems.

For instance, it is technically possible, by using public key encryption techniques, to have an online election which is verifiable, secret, and resistant to fraud. There's lots of academic research on this subject; here's a random URL on this stuff. At present, I don't think these types of secure online voting schemes are actually implemented in real-world situations, but the technology is still rather new.

Terry

I think it was discovered at RPI.

AFAIK Oxygen is necessary for this combustion to take place, so your chips would be safe.

But in the end nobody really knows.

p.s. this has serious implications on the space-elevator, if y'all havn't thought about it already. =)

Thanks JohnFluxx. Let's try that again:
click here
click here
And BTW, this ~is~ the laser powered rocket n1ywb mentioned below. Myrabo pops up on the Discovery channel every couple of years. Unfortunately, his progress has been fairly slow. I read his book back when I was in Junior High. His big problem is using lasers. Both lasers and microwaves have their problems. I think it is a good idea, though, and I wish Dr. Myrabo luck. I recommend the book to NEone who is seriously interested in the problem of how to put things in orbit cheaply and safely.

I just wanted to let all /.ers know that one of the defendents in this case, Jesse Jordan of Rensselaer has set up a furom for discussion of the lawsuit and whatever else. Find it at http://www.chewplastic.com/bb

If anybody's interested in checking out the RPI student paper's stance on this mess, check it out here.
Lots of letters to the editor and a few articles.

I just wanted to let all /.ers know that one of the defendents in this case, Jesse Jordan of Rensselaer has set up a furom for discussion of the lawsuit and whatever else. Find it at http://www.chewplastic.com/bb

Other universities, namely umass and rpi are known for their smb indexing utilities to share files throughout their networks. My question is why pick on Dan Peng of Princeton University for creating wake when several other universities have been doing the same thing long before the inception of wake. canofsleep being a perfect example. Also the flatlan client created by an RPI Engineering student.

However, one network searching site run by an RPI club is still alive and well.

Interestingly enough, network sharing has been way down this year. During my freshman year I could 'phynd' anything I wanted, but now in my junior year there only seems to be a handleful of popular divx movies and most mainstream mp3 albums. Certainly not the selection that Kazaa offers.

I would just like to speak out, as a student at RPI, that Celery and Phynd, the samba search engines in quesiton have been an invaluable tool. Yes, they are frequently used for mp3's, divx, warez, and even pornograhpy, but at the same time they are invaluable when it comes to locating a paper that your class group is sharing when you've forgotten where its shared. There are lots of times these engines have saved my butt.

You imply that inheriting from a base class is always better, but that's not necessarially true.

The guy(s) who wrote the STL Containter Classes did it that way (using templates) because they think it's better than having all the objects inherit from one base. It's a style of programming called Generic Programming.

The basis of Java is dynamic run-time polymorphism. Using templates and generic programming techinques most run-time polymorphic algorithims can be reimplemented using compile-time polymorphism, which is much faster. That's what the C++ STL container classes are. That's where the power of templates are.

p.s. I've looked at the book in the article and I would describe it as an entire book of special cases. It explains things like recursive template definitions. Things that are so confusing that I try and stay away from most of them. They make code un-readable to anyone but a template expert. Then again, I don't write templated libraries either.

you want a paid internship?! ha! I'm a CS major at RPI and I'm graduating in May.. i know about 100 CS or engineering majors also graduating this year and not one of them has a job yet. this has people divided into 2 groups; people applying to grad schools (they pay a living stipend and take care of your tuition costs) and people who are just about ready to apply at mcdonalds after 4 years of college.

and you want a paid internship?! paid short-term positions were in short supply 2 years ago. Right now it's safe to say that microsoft's offer is the only one you're going to find left in the entire country. of course, you can always join the military or an get a job with an oil company. those are the only 2 sections of our economy that bush hasn't gone out of his way to trash.

Since MAC addresses are so easy to spoof, authentication will become necessary.

The following paper gives an idea what some of them are, and where we are in the commercialization process. Most of them are at stages where we either have evidence of interesting properties, or else measured proof of interesting properties, but we don't have any manufacturing processes that would let us put them into place. But there are a small number of applications already out there, and many, many more which it is certain will be viable as soon as production processes improve.

With passive terahertz imaging, you have to face the problem that basically everything, including your detector, is emitting terahertz radiation. With a well-designed pulsed terahertz source, as in the links, you are much less sensitive to thermal noise. Unfortunately, it requires quite a bit more equipment, most importantly a femtosecond pulsed laser system which is too expensive (at least USD 150,000), bulky, and fragile for use outside a laser laboratory.

With passive terahertz imaging, you have to face the problem that basically everything, including your detector, is emitting terahertz radiation. With a well-designed pulsed terahertz source, as in the links, you are much less sensitive to thermal noise. Unfortunately, it requires quite a bit more equipment, most importantly a femtosecond pulsed laser system which is too expensive (at least USD 150,000), bulky, and fragile for use outside a laser laboratory.

``Suppressing Roughness of Virtual Times in Parallel Discrete-Event Simulations'' G. Korniss, M.A. Novotny, H. Guclu, Z. Toroczkai, and P.A. Rikvold, Science 299, 677 (2003).

Now, let's ask why that is such a good contribution. In discrete event simulation, the system consists of a set of entities, each entity has a discrete state, but can undergo state changes at an arbitrary time (so states update asynchronously, unlike in time step driven models). In PDES, the entities are mapped to logical processors (LPs), and communicate via message passing using time stamped messages. It can be shown that the fidelity of the simulation is preserved if each LP processes its messages in ascending time stamp order, this is called the local causality constraint. There are two primary kinds of protocols:

1. Conservative which always check that processing a message does not violate the local causality constraint, and
2. Optimistic which employ speculative execution, and use reverse computation or checkpointing and rollback to do a fixup if they process events out of order.
   1. Both sets of protocols need for each LP to get an estimate of the simulation time (a hard problem). This appears to be Korniss et al's contribution.

Guess that other schools just need a kick in the pants some times to get their act together, cause cheating kids by giving them good grades and taking their $$$ every year doesn't seem fair to me.

I know that at WPI it is impossible to get below a C in your freshman year, as any grade given below that is considered to be no credit and does not go on the transcript. I think this is a very bad idea, freshman year isn't that hard! Kids should be forced to work hard to attain good grades!

That's ok, because I have degrees from an engineering college, and science and engineering students basically think liberal arts schools are community colleges, not real higher education. :)

You'll note Slashdot uses MySQL and is very happy.

You misspelled "real fucking slow".

erm.. which slashdot are you using?

this article with all it's comments (242K of HTML alone) loads in less than 1 second on mozilla. i'm logged in and i have a bunch of custom content in slashboxes on the right hand side. in addition, all my foes + friends are properly marked throughout the page. I'm fairly sure that the 1/2 second delay is mozilla trying to render the HTML with all the messy nested tables and crap, not slashdot being slow in sending it.

as a point of refrence, wget downloads the same page (with me logged in) at over 550K/sec. less than 1/2 a second.

you can complain about the crappy editorial comments, the duplicate stories, the slashtrolls or the fact that taco can't spell, but saying that slashdot is slow is just stupid.

as for oracle, my school uses an oracle app called "banner" for student registration, grades and financial information. it's running on several monster dedicated AIX machines. Around registration time the system slows to a crawl, and often dies, with less than 1000 students pounding on it!

You'll note Slashdot uses MySQL and is very happy.

You misspelled "real fucking slow".

erm.. which slashdot are you using?

this article with all it's comments (242K of HTML alone) loads in less than 1 second on mozilla. i'm logged in and i have a bunch of custom content in slashboxes on the right hand side. in addition, all my foes + friends are properly marked throughout the page. I'm fairly sure that the 1/2 second delay is mozilla trying to render the HTML with all the messy nested tables and crap, not slashdot being slow in sending it.

as a point of refrence, wget downloads the same page (with me logged in) at over 550K/sec. less than 1/2 a second.

you can complain about the crappy editorial comments, the duplicate stories, the slashtrolls or the fact that taco can't spell, but saying that slashdot is slow is just stupid.

as for oracle, my school uses an oracle app called "banner" for student registration, grades and financial information. it's running on several monster dedicated AIX machines. Around registration time the system slows to a crawl, and often dies, with less than 1000 students pounding on it!

I also can't wait to see the outcome of this fight.

Frankly, I agree with the "Alliance for Digital Progress," as they're calling themselves. They just don't want to slow down progress by putting digital copy prevention in every product (according to their site.

Yes. pirating happens, but the movie industry is still very strong (and if you don't think "Kangaroo Jack" netting $21.8 million dollars in a weekend is strong, then you need to have your head examined :). Digital piracy - from what I've personally seen living at a RPI - is not such a big problem. There are movies floating around the campus-wide network, but most of the movies I've seen since I came here in the fall of 2000 have been off of a DVD, on TV, on the campus movie channel, or off a videocassette.

Go for it, 'Alliance for Digital Progress'!

When I (a women) was in college and trying to declare a major, I told my advisor that I wanted to get my degree in CS. He immediately replied that I should go into biology instead, because the math in CS would be too difficult. I am not even remotely bad at math, so his statement was somewhat shocking to me. I can only assume that it was caused by the general "girls are bad at math" mentality. I'm not debating whether women are worse than men at math or science, but when a professor at a top ranked engineering school automatically assumes that the girl student in front of him doesn't have enough math skills to get a CS degree, then there is definitely a problem.

I also have to add that my mother discouraged me from getting a CS degree too. She said, "Computer Science is so lonely... you don't want to do that. Wouldn't you rather do something that involved people?"

In the end I decided to get my BS in biology with a minor in computer science. Perhaps it was my fault for listening to them, but I ended up wasting time learning about e-coli when I should have been focusing on what interested me... (I'm now running my own software company.)

The main computer lab at RPI (I can't be the only "Wrensaleer" geek reading this) to Vorhees Computing Center (VCC) was allegedly(*) designed to be heated by the original mainframe. The VCC was, prior to being renovated, a huge church, so we're talking about a huge volume and rock walls here. I spent more hours here than in my dorm room.

Post-mainframe RPI students (which I think remarkably was somewhere around 93-95) can attest, that place gets COLD. Especially on cold Troy nights when all of the workstations and monitors go to sleep and there isn't that much body heat in there either. It's been a long time since I've been back to the VCC but if they replaced all of those CRTs with LCD panels that place will be like a meat locker.

(*) - I say "allegedly" since like most universities there is a huge amount of urban legend built up about the history of the place. I can vouch it was seriously cold!!!!

Ahh, reminds me of my days around the E-Club at dear old RPI... (ok, this was just the past few years)
the club website

It all started when the school threw out a VAX 8530... Thankfully, we have 3-phase power available to run the thing, and it's now happily running VMS 5.5-2 in all it's massive glory. Over the years we've also accumulated a VAX 11/780 (dead unfortunately), a PDP-11/45 (which one club member had to rebuild the power supply for), a pair of Sun 3/280s (complete with 12" platter hard drives), along with various other "smaller" machines that might be to new to be considered classic. (some MicroVAX-class machines, a bunch of old model IBM RS/6000s, some HP9000 stuff, etc, etc.)

He forgot to mention that the guy to girl ratio is like 1000:1

I went to RPI (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, just North of Albany, NY). Around there, the ladies had a saying: "The odds are good, but the goods are odd."

Of course, there was always the Tatnall law of Women and Parking Spaces: "The good ones are all taken. The rest are either too far out or you don't want anyway."

supplementary material to the lecture (some reference PDF of quick notes, very handy if you forget some bit of C code, et al.),

the lecture notes themselves (usually power point, sometimes PDF or HTML),

work being done (it's nice to be able to write your code while the stuff is still fresh in your mind),

Slashdot (imagine that)

BattleTech armor guidelines (I guess it was more interesting than NP completeness)

These are among other things. I do think it's nice to have instance reference, and to be able to do homework during class if a lecture isn't particularly interesting or engaging.

That having been said, I don't bring a laptop. I don't find that any of those things need to be done during class, and that I can live without them until lectures and labs are done for the day. Not just that, but laptops can get a bit heavy after carrying the between a few classes. At least, in addition to other notebooks and texts.

I might add that I don't take notes on my laptop either. I tried a few times, and while maybe some of you have had a different experience, I find taking notes on a laptop is very limiting. I draw lots of little diagrams and figures in my notes which is difficult to do quickly in most text editors.

On the other hand, there is something to be said for laptops and wireless devices. Since we all are required to have laptops, labs are much cheaper. Rather than lots of desktop machines in a dedicated room, a few tables and chairs with CAT5 can be a fully functioning lab. This has its own problems (IM, Email, etc) but the room can be a small lecture room, or non-computer based class when the computer lab is done. This also worked in my high school, where laptops were required as well. Even for non-computer classes (e.g. English Lit) this had advantages, like being able to read free texts online without needing any paper copies, etc. It's a nice convenience.

With wireless all of this becomes even easier, and any room is a connected room. No longer is the CAT5 needed, or the desktop machine. It's a great advance in convenience.

Even after all that, I still try to take my computer labs in the actual labs with big desktop machines or terminals; I like the big screens and full keyboards and looking slightly up to the monitor rather than down. I still don't bring my laptop to class because I can take notes just fine on paper, if not better, and most things I'd need a computer for can wait until I'm done with class.

Assuming that the posting wasn't intended as flamebait, in the U. S. the term "polytechnic" is NOT "synonymous with poor-quality education." It is mostly just an indication that the school DOES have a long history.

For example, WPI (Worcester Polytechnic Institute) and RPI (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) are both fine schools.

2000 sheets of 8-1/2 x 11, 20# laserwriter paper weighs 20 lbs.
First of all, this changes your estimate of weight from 100 tons to 250 tons.

Typical yield of paper: 125 lbs per tree
250 tons (500000 lbs) divided by 125 lbs per tree gives us 4000 trees.

440 trees per acre
This, after division, gives us 9 acres of trees destroyed for backing up 1 TB of data. Seem worth it? :)

Sounds more like it would be unique to OV, if they implemented it.

This appears to be a fairly natural thing for compression based on wavelet transforms, which were used by both SPIHT and VDO.

Or you simply (unwittingly?) stole it from the Simpsons.

craptacular

I believe that this is a case of prior art.

See you in court.

I know that's a joke, but just in case someone decides to take it seriously....

This is one of those persistent myths. Darwin apparently did dislike the way certain atheists tried to appropriate his work as a theological agrument, but there's no proof he ever disavowed evolution or converted back to Christianity at the end of his life. (Review: The Darwin Legend by James Moore)

That said, evolution and theology have little to do with each other. If you believe in God (or some version thereof), there's no reason to disbelieve that she/he/it used evolution as a mechanism of creation. Personally, I think a supreme being is an unnecessary complication, but that's not related to evolution either.

" 1. All network traffic to/from any UCI computer, web site or server is untouched. There are no controls and no need to shape this, as it is "educational" traffic. Further, as it does not go to or from the Internet, we don't have to pay for it. As long as it stays within the UCI network, we can take advantage of the high-speed connections and equipment we have on campus."

Some guys did it at RPI when I was there. They started it out of their dorm room, posted signs around campus listing the station, and did a decent job involving the listeners. It went for a while, but listeners dropped off, as did participation ... but for the month or so that it ran, it was amusing.

when i was living in japan a few years ago, suntory (pepsi's japan distributor) tries to up pepsi's market share with a "trip to space" contest. i was all excited until i found out the "winner" would still have to shell out some dough, and it was a suborbital flight, during most of which one would be presumably stuck to the chair. info about the contest seems pretty hard to find on the web.

While you are right about one thing: I'm not sure either how appropriate this piece is for Slashdot. However, hackers are in the humanities classrooms more and more. You might look at the programs offered at Rennsselaer Polytechnic's Language, Literature and Communications department which is involved in different technology based programs. Meanwhile, I have a degree in computer science theory and am working on a PhD in English. And I know of others who are "hackers" and English types.

I'm working on a couple of projects they tell me will be open source (I haven't seen the license yet, but I expect it to be fine) for the EPA. There are some good reasons for making it open source:

• The same physics apply everywhere. I write one Gaussian plume atmospheric transport routine, and it works for anyone who wants to use it.
• People can review the work. Other models do the same thing, but the source code is not available. Meteorologists aren't going to reverse-engineer the code and figure out what's going on. They would rather be able to review it outright.
• It helps other organizations which have the same problems.

There are a number of special purpose applications that governments have a particular need for, and there's no reason everyone should develop the software separately.

They said the same thing about R. Byron Pipes, the last "shit-stirrer" at RPI. At RPI, the Roland Schmidt era led to complacency and stagnation within the faculty, a decrease in incoming research monies (at one point RPI had the highest-funded Chemistry research program of any U.S. university), and the town-gown relations went into the crapper.

Yes, change hurts whether it's at RPI or somewhere else, but when it's change for the better, get over yourself and work with the program. (I have to admit that trying to get rid of the acronyms (JEC, CII, VCC, DCC, C+CC, VIC, AS&RC, etc.) was a pretty dumb idea, and it was unnecessary to rename "old school 14" as "Academy Hall" ;) )

Although Albany isn't a city in the New York or San Francisco sense, it does have its own life. There are tons of diners, Tanglewood is nearby, Saratoga is one of the world's great racing centers (and has a life of its own during the racing months if you're not into racing), and all the "real" cities are within a reasonable distance. I would consider living there again, if the economic conditions were better.

Economically, it's a little distressed, but all it takes is a good shot in the arm to bring it to life. Its only downfall is that it's in-land.

Whether or not RPI helps is a different matter. Most RPI grads that stay within the northeast move to either New York or Boston, where the jobs are plentiful, the salaries are high, and the student loans are paid off quicker. However, I think it's more likely the other way around; RPI would benefit from the influx of companies. Their MBA program will thrive, and perhaps finally they could be more of a world-class institution and get the respect that the school deserves.

Not just for Silicon. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is building an $8 million biotechnology center, which they hope will form a biotech hub along with the University of Albany. The building will contain over 60 faculty members and 300 researchers, and is bound to attract a lot of attention from the private biotech industry.

There are also many hi-tech companies in the capital region. There is the Big One, but also there are several good small ones, including Plug Power, a company that is working on fuel cell power. Also, check out the Rensselaer Incubator Center (shoot, can't find a good link for that one). RPI helps startups by providing office space and other amenities - there have been some great companies to come out of this.

So, all of these together will hopefully kickstart the tech industry in the Capital Region!

-Montag

Surelyann, RPI's current president, has been very supportive and pivotal in trying to secure "high-tech" employers and industry to come to the Troy/Albany area (yes, I left out Schenectady on purpose - not because GE doesn't bring good things to life, but because they're not really as attached to the initiative as the pols in Albany.)

As part of this initiative, locals have come up with the moniker of Tech Valley to describe the upper Hudson region. The area does have a lot to offer, housing is cheap, sprawl is relatively low (stay away from Colonie, though) and as RPI used to describe in their admissions info, "It's not in the middle of nowhere, it's in the middle of somewhere!" (2.5 hours to NYC, 2 hours to Syracuse, 3 hours to Boston, 3 hours to Lake Placid, etc.)

As someone who grew up, went to high school,and lived in Troy, escaped to NYC, and then transferred back to (and graduated from) RPI, I can say that Troy (and the surrounding area) definitely has a lot to offer (it's been described as other alumni friends of mine not from Troy as a great place to raise a family) - so there is good reason for tech jobs to move there.

The biggest problem thus far, however, has been local opposition and people afraid of expansion. About 2 or 3 years ago, the Rensselaer Technology Park tried to bring lots of jobs to the area and spark the Tech Valley thing, but locals in the Town of North Greenbush, where the tech park is located, killed the plan. The proposed chip fab plant was to be a boon to the area, but local squabbling (always a problem in parochial Albany and Rensselaer Counties) got to it before it could take root. Unless there have been significant changes in very recent history, my guess is that the local hometown opposition ("we don't need no stinkin' chip fab plant!") will continue to be vocal.

For what it's worth, though - President Jackson, RPI and SUNY Albany could really lead the region into great things - IF the locals allow it. Not to mention the kick-ass, two-time NCAA (1954, 1985) champion hockey team! ;)

Surelyann, RPI's current president, has been very supportive and pivotal in trying to secure "high-tech" employers and industry to come to the Troy/Albany area (yes, I left out Schenectady on purpose - not because GE doesn't bring good things to life, but because they're not really as attached to the initiative as the pols in Albany.)

As part of this initiative, locals have come up with the moniker of Tech Valley to describe the upper Hudson region. The area does have a lot to offer, housing is cheap, sprawl is relatively low (stay away from Colonie, though) and as RPI used to describe in their admissions info, "It's not in the middle of nowhere, it's in the middle of somewhere!" (2.5 hours to NYC, 2 hours to Syracuse, 3 hours to Boston, 3 hours to Lake Placid, etc.)

As someone who grew up, went to high school,and lived in Troy, escaped to NYC, and then transferred back to (and graduated from) RPI, I can say that Troy (and the surrounding area) definitely has a lot to offer (it's been described as other alumni friends of mine not from Troy as a great place to raise a family) - so there is good reason for tech jobs to move there.

The biggest problem thus far, however, has been local opposition and people afraid of expansion. About 2 or 3 years ago, the Rensselaer Technology Park tried to bring lots of jobs to the area and spark the Tech Valley thing, but locals in the Town of North Greenbush, where the tech park is located, killed the plan. The proposed chip fab plant was to be a boon to the area, but local squabbling (always a problem in parochial Albany and Rensselaer Counties) got to it before it could take root. Unless there have been significant changes in very recent history, my guess is that the local hometown opposition ("we don't need no stinkin' chip fab plant!") will continue to be vocal.

For what it's worth, though - President Jackson, RPI and SUNY Albany could really lead the region into great things - IF the locals allow it. Not to mention the kick-ass, two-time NCAA (1954, 1985) champion hockey team! ;)

Surelyann, RPI's current president, has been very supportive and pivotal in trying to secure "high-tech" employers and industry to come to the Troy/Albany area (yes, I left out Schenectady on purpose - not because GE doesn't bring good things to life, but because they're not really as attached to the initiative as the pols in Albany.)

As part of this initiative, locals have come up with the moniker of Tech Valley to describe the upper Hudson region. The area does have a lot to offer, housing is cheap, sprawl is relatively low (stay away from Colonie, though) and as RPI used to describe in their admissions info, "It's not in the middle of nowhere, it's in the middle of somewhere!" (2.5 hours to NYC, 2 hours to Syracuse, 3 hours to Boston, 3 hours to Lake Placid, etc.)

As someone who grew up, went to high school,and lived in Troy, escaped to NYC, and then transferred back to (and graduated from) RPI, I can say that Troy (and the surrounding area) definitely has a lot to offer (it's been described as other alumni friends of mine not from Troy as a great place to raise a family) - so there is good reason for tech jobs to move there.

The biggest problem thus far, however, has been local opposition and people afraid of expansion. About 2 or 3 years ago, the Rensselaer Technology Park tried to bring lots of jobs to the area and spark the Tech Valley thing, but locals in the Town of North Greenbush, where the tech park is located, killed the plan. The proposed chip fab plant was to be a boon to the area, but local squabbling (always a problem in parochial Albany and Rensselaer Counties) got to it before it could take root. Unless there have been significant changes in very recent history, my guess is that the local hometown opposition ("we don't need no stinkin' chip fab plant!") will continue to be vocal.

For what it's worth, though - President Jackson, RPI and SUNY Albany could really lead the region into great things - IF the locals allow it. Not to mention the kick-ass, two-time NCAA (1954, 1985) champion hockey team! ;)