Slashdot Mirror

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! ;)

Don't forget there are a few good colleges around here. Among them is RPI, which I recall being one of the first to get a chip going over 1GHz (1.2 GHz if I recall, before it melted). Add to that SUNY Albany, which is a pretty good state school, and there's GE Power Systems down the street, as well as Plug Power (Fuel Cell developers). Quite a few technical developments have come out of this area.

There has been talk about locating a semiconductor research center for years. Land is cheap, it's an easy drive to Boston and NYC (and IBM's HQ in Armonk, as noted). Plus, you have a reliable supply of labor (full-time and co-op) from nearby engineering school RPI (wonder why they're not involved?)

I went to school in Troy, NY at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the've been talking about this kind of expansion before. I believe, however, that there's been some resistance from the local population because they're afraid of pollution.

However, I think people will change their tune when they realize how many jobs something like this will create. And believe me, the capital region of NY can use all the jobs it can get.

There is a lot of good educational material on the web. Take Project Links for example.

One of his best books is also "The Futurological Congress".

There are many more:

Stanislaw Lem

The writing of Stanislaw Lem

Yes, it is the same Lem.

See
this link for the bibliography. Everything he has
written is noteworthy (unlike Asimov, Simak and other
great sci-fi writes who also produced a lot of junk)

• Here are some links for further education:
• RGML (RDF Graph Modeling Language)
• (RDF) Model and Syntax Specification
• The DARPA Agent Markup Language

With the date for this moment set around 2012 and with no replacement technology in sight...

I've seen so many people say something like this, and each time I get really vocal. CMOS will die. Eventually. Big deal. We're counting oxide thickness in angstroms now ("how many atoms are in that?"), but get this -- gate tunneling leakage, source to drain leakage, they're making this a technology we wouldn't want to take further. That's right, DC current is becoming astronomical.

Replacements? The first one I think of is BiCMOS. That's our old standby. Current FET beta ratios are quoted at 100, but it's lower for each newer technology. Bipolar, on the other hand, is 300. That means that a bipolar transistor is 3 times as strong as a FET in terms of current it can source (or sink). Bipolars are big, and currently yield poorly. Throw the weight behind the technology and I bet we get some of that learned down. (For the curious, it yields poorly because to make a pnp transistor out of n silicon, you have to dope a big bowl of p, smaller bowl of n, but really hard to overcome the p you just did and finally a pretty small bowl of p, exceptionally hard to overcome the n you just did hard. Think about how CMOS makes a p type FET on p silicon -- light n to make an n well, then you can dope your source and drain.)

Oh, and Research is being done all the time to replace CMOS.

"No replacement technology in sight". Bah. Maybe for consumers. I'll throw my professional weight behind this: "All CMOS replacements have their own strengths and weaknesses, just as CMOS does. Some of them are already better at what we have CMOS do."

Its also worth mentioning that recent implementations of sort in the C++ STL use the introspective sort algorithm instead of quicksort, which gaurantees the worst-case performance isn't quadratic.

For it being the 'holy grail' in software development, it seems like the poster could have dug up some sort of linkage for those not hip with exactly what STL truly is all about...

For the ill-informed, please see the following links concern the C++ Standard Template Library (STL):

*** Mumit's STL Newbie guide

*** Standard Template Library Online Reference Home Page

*** Another Informational Link

There, I feel much better.... and hopefully you do, as well!!!

alexhmit01 wrote: study the liberal arts more and you'll be a more well rounded person

I agree whole heartedly... with one caveat: one should not study the liberal arts EXCLUSIVELY. The liberal arts (e.g. history, sociology, and literature) are all means of understanding *people*. As such, they should be required for all students, including technically-oriented ones.

Unfortunately, most schools (and colleges and universities) fail to perceive the corollary: the technical arts (e.g. math, science, and engineering) are **JUST** as necessary. The technical arts are means of understanding the *universe*.

At Rensselaer Polytechnic, my alma mater, students in technical fields were required to take 24 credit hours in "Social Sciences and Humanities". Students in business and liberal arts were required to take only *12* credit hours in math and science.

If a technical person can't be well rounded with less than two semesters of liberal arts, how can a non-technical person possibly be well rounded with only *one* semester of math and science. The United States (and modern education in general) needs to increase its emphasis in the technical arts.

As to knowing that it's a slow burn: I watched the video (my new version of mplayer works quite nicely, thank you).

Given the longer description in the body of the article, I'm not sure where the 'explosion' tag comes from (other than journalistic hyperbole).

• 
  And at some schools ... there's no difference.
  

Anybody else remember the Doom II Aliens total conversion?

A friend of mine had found it, played it through, and told a bunch of us to set aside our Saturday afternoon for it. He was the computer attendant in one of the school's least popular labs and he told us he'd lock all four of us in while we played this game undisturbed. We were to bring headphones.

With the lights off, and the headphones in our ears (no music), it was very easy to immerse ourselves in the Alien world we saw in the movies. We had precisely one rule: No respawning.

I didn't find it extremely replayable, most of the enjoyment was based on having absolutely no way of knowing what would happen next. I was a decent Doom II player, but I didn't have a good familiarity with the maps -- I was roasted on maps that everyone else knew. This time was different, none of us knew the maps. It was the first time I played a co-operative game and had it actually work. And work it did! Looking like the dorks you see in the movies, we physically jumped back when some of those creatures came at us.

I still tip my hat off to those copyright infringing guys. You are truly talented.

What stack of legalese? When I regsitered at , I didn't sign any stack of legalese. I didn't even have lab fees (having done Chemistry elsewhere)

No kidding. My first job was with Le Grand Bleu here in the Research Triangle Park, NC area. There I was, fresh out of school , and I found myself writing very-close-to-kernel code. (Remember, this was back in the days when Linux barely existed if at all, during the last spastic twitchings of the reign of Bush the Elder.)

The OS internals themselves were pretty slick (multi-threading, flat memory model), and the driver interface was decent, even in the 2.0 days, but Christ, IBM couldn't market lemonade in the desert. No TCP stack, no developer tools without mortgaging your soul, and as far guaranteeing compatibility on other manufacturer's 386 boxes, well, you were on your own.

Having said that, it was a great OS to cut my driver-writing teeth on, even if the APIs were butt-ugly to behold (definitely MSFT's influence there; IBM preferred things to be more Unixy IIRC).

If you wonder what it was like watching a product being made and poorly poorly marketed, I'll say this much: I was getting totally fscking tired of watching great developers get screwed. IBM recruited, and got, a wide array of very talented technical people, only to have their efforts (as developers and evangelists) stifled by suits. Yes, the same kinds of suits who gave MS-DOS to MS in the eighties, and who never had a clue about the PC software market until it was too late. Despite the developers' best efforts, IBM management and marketing always managed to find a way to lose to Microsoft. Really snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. They had either no will to win, or not enough brains to do it. Quite a few of us just ended up leaving in disgust.

Again, that was another life. My main dev platform these days is the Penguin, and I'm using MacOS X at home. I still don't have much of a tolerance for x86-based machines, let alone their corporation-generated OSes. And I'll never return to a large mega-monolithic corporation for a job if I can help it..

RPI uses pokemon names plus hyphen then 2 digits for DHCP client naming...

I was raised on DOS. Started with 1.1, and went from there. As far as I was concerned, 5.0 was the mecca. I went kicking and screaming into the "GUI revolution", stopping briefly by Win 3.1 on my way to OS/2 (2.0?) and quickly to OS/2 Warp.

Even then, everything beyond WYSIWYG was just eye candy, and my 486 dx2 66 (with 32 megs of RAM!) was a little slow. Not that it wasn't "pretty good" for the time, it was! I still preferred Word Perfect 5.1 for word processing, and the print preview button for WYSIWYG as a combination of efficiency and page accuracy.

Based on what I actually did, for a while I was labelling myself as a member of the "Operating System of the Semester", because that's about as often as I switched. Did I pay Microsoft for everything I used? No, but I actually had licenses (trading favors/work/things/trinkets) for unused licenses -- M$ got their money, and no copyrights were violated (I still don't buy the whole prohibition of transferring ownership). I just couldn't afford to do all that expirementation and learning! But my skills were growing quickly. Eventually, I went to NT 3.51 server and had enough spare parts to go to Linux 2.0 (Slackware '96 was my friend) on a different machine. I couldn't do everything I needed to for my classes with Linux, but I had NT there to do that for me (no games under 3.51, remember? kept my GPA from falling too far).

Then I realized that, in order to compete, I had to learn Win95, because potential employers were asking about that. I traded for WinNT4.0 workstation, and that gave me the GUI experience I needed for a job. I really resent having to do all that grey-market trading to get the experience I felt I needed, but at this point I feel I'm pretty well rounded. My workplace bought me a computer with Windows 2000 Professional (and I'm competant there), a workstation (with AIX on it, so I'm still good), and at home I have two computers, one with Linux (2.2.flavor-of-the-month) and one with OS/X, my current favorite.

Before I left, my school was replacing all the UNIX machines with Windows machines because of an Intel/M$ grant to do so. The CompSci classes were changing their curriculum to accomodate, but there was an underground movement to "upgrade" all those machines to Linux so CompSci wouldn't have to change their curriculum ("But it worked on GCC in my dorm!" was a realistic thing to hear when working against Visual C).

Will CS students switch from Microsoft? I hope so -- if only to learn what the alternatives are and their strengths/weaknesses. The ultimate question is, what will they do about it? Will they keep their non-Microsoft tendencies, or switch back?

I'm about ready to give back a Windows 2000 Professional license to my company, because I've recently learned that Wine can do everything I need to in order to do my job, and Linux is more what I prefer anyway. Sure, I'm just one engineer, middle management is making all the purchases, but I'm one more in a growing culture here. Our voices will be heard. I'm not saying that as some zealot trying to change the world, but as one engineer who thinks that there's a more efficient way of getting work done, and it happens to cost less in licensing fees. After all, money is what managers care about. If my manager can avoid one more license, and get increased efficiency out of me, what do you think he'll do?

Yeah, he'll probably blacklist one of my favorite news sites in the name of efficiency.

3. If this circuit is based on HBTs, then why are people talking about Pentiums and Athlons? No way in hell you could implement a VLSI (or rather an ULSI) circuit with HBTs. Am I missing something? Somebody needs to tell These guys that you can't do a VLSI design in HBTs. Google fails to find me the Exponential 705, a PowerPC using bipolar current mode logic (CML). Didn't quite make it to market because the manufacturers couldn't bring the defect density down fast enough before IBM and Moto came in with the 750/740. Maybe the X705 proves your point? Are you stating that the VLSI in HBTs is not cheaply manufacturable? My personal opinion is that CMOS will not see us to the end of time. We may need to go BiCMOS, bipolar, or something else new and different. 2GHz CMOS processors are never in the DC state where CMOS saves power, they're 100% in the AC state charging and discharging capacitive loads, and leaking current like seives. If we went to bipolar CML, we'd see current like a 1.5GHz CMOS processor, whether we operated it at 500MHz or 5GHz.

I stand corrected, but the French are still to blame.

From http://www.rpi.edu/~wysmuj/files/journal.txt

ELEPHANTS,NEIN NUMB AND FEET (curiosity) (*)
Lucas used several linguists to create languages for the aliens. The one which Nein Numb speaks is based off a Kenyan dialect. By accident or design, one of his lines ends up sounding like, "One thousand herds of elephants are standing on my foot" in this language.

Anyway, they don't need more money, they just need to read more google groups

It's been about 6 years now, and I'm starting to get the itch to finish my last year of school, but due to still needing/wanting to work, it's not possible for me to go back to the original school. ( I went to RPI in New York, and currently work in Chicago area, so the commute would be hell ).

I started looking into local schools that I could attend to finish up. Most wanted me to attend them for at least 4 semesters before they'd grant a degree, and then there's the problem of transferring credits from one school to another, etc. I finally found a school that would let me finish the way I wanted. DePaul University ( a respected institution ) has a School for New Learning. That allows adults who previously skipped or ( like me ) never completed college to apply whatever previous college credit they have, along with taking into account your work experience, towards a BA degree. You can also continue on in the same manner towards an MA as well.

DePaul is located in the Chicago area, but it is quite possible that similar programs exist near you. If you haven't finished a degree yet, but have several years of experience in your industry, this type of program definitely seems the way to go.

At the college I addended, the Computing Center was actually a Depression-era stone church. The architects had built a new building inside the church, and the machine room provided the heat for the building! I'm not suggesting that a home server room will heat the entire house (unless you're installing an S/390), but an HVAC contractor may be able to come up with a way to use the server heat productively.

At the college I addended, the Computing Center was actually a Depression-era stone church. The architects had built a new building inside the church, and the machine room provided the heat for the building! I'm not suggesting that a home server room will heat the entire house (unless you're installing an S/390), but an HVAC contractor may be able to come up with a way to use the server heat productively.

The link to sprouts mentioned in the original query seems to have an error in attribution.

"Sprouts is an interesting paper and pencil game for two players. It was invented in Cambridge in the 1970's."

There's a bunch more info on game play, theory, and mathematical background on the game at that link, as well as this link: http://www.forum.swarthmore.edu/news.archives/geom etry.research/article399.html to a strategy by John Conway on a strategy for game play.

As an aside, I knew a guy at RPI who in 1981 or so wrote a program to play the game and graphically display the results... if you wanted it to, it would show all the possibilities as it tried different moves, too! Pretty amazing feat considering the capabilities of the computers we had available at the time.

To relieve a bit of stress from kernel.org, heres the gzipped tarball...

http://beresm.stu.rpi.edu/~mike/linux-2.4.13.tar.g z

I'm currently a student at RPI, and my Physics I course has a post-quiz taken on the net at the end of each class. We use WebAssign for this task.

Not that I particularly like the idea. It's cute, but webassign is a poor implementation if I've ever seen one.

Plus, I rather feel that if I'm going to be doing work beyond multiple-choice BS, someone should have to look at it in order to grade it.

Gödel's Incompleteness Thm (AFAIK) says that a system P, which might be complete, can't have its completeness proven in its own system.

Anyways, I can't find the book I am looking for, but Godel's theorem is basically says that given any formalized system of logic, one can generate a self-referrential statement that is neither true nor false.

Thats not actually the theorem, but it is, I think the best explanation of it for the laymen.

An example, in English, is:

"This statement is false".
Is this a true statement, or a false statement?

One can easily generate a symbolic example as well. I would do it myself, but here's a site that's done it better :)

Here's the Puzzle

I'm probably not supposed to talk about this (NDA's and such), but this story hits pretty close to home. Dunno if anybody remembers Aimster (which technically, I guess, is still around and trying to figure out a way to survive). Four of the original developers (me and three of my friends) were RPI students that were persuaded away from our Junior/Senior years to devote all of our time to the company. Since then, quite a few more developers have been brought on, almost all from RPI.

Well, classes started two weeks ago, and Aimster's in an awful lot of trouble. On top of the financial woes stereotypical of most startups, its full-time development staff has been reduced from about 12-15 down to one or two. Why? My personal reason for leaving: after a year away, I realized just how much fun going to school really is, when compared to the "real world," and also how important it is to finish school now, while I'm still motivated enough -- the longer you're away, the harder it is to go back. Several developers are continuing in fairly limited part-time positions while taking classes, but classes are the priority.

The missight that I feel I made when I decided to leave school was this: I chose to believe that a company that hadn't even existed a month yet would be able to give me everything it said it would; also, I leapt at an opportunity for "quick-and-easy" gains without thinking about long-term effects.

This isn't to say that I think working at Aimster was a bad experience, or a waste of time -- I even got more than half of what they said they'd give me(!). But if another company approached me and promised me the world if I would just leave school, they'd have to deliver it up front -- and even then I might not take their offer :)

By the way: I bear no animosity toward anyone at Aimster, at least no more than you bear toward the rollercoaster after you get off at the end of the ride.

they've had them for at least a week now. aren't we special?

...but this is a great way to meet women. Agreed. Whenever a female friend of mine had computer problems and I couldn't help, my statement was, "You have two choices. One involves pizza, and the other involves either a tight shirt or a short skirt. Both involve standing in the hallway and announcing that you're having computer problems." Every woman but one chose to offer pizza. Women's view of RPI: The odds are good, but the goods are odd. Men's view of RPI: Women are like parking spots. All the good ones are taken.

...but this is a great way to meet women. Agreed. Whenever a female friend of mine had computer problems and I couldn't help, my statement was, "You have two choices. One involves pizza, and the other involves either a tight shirt or a short skirt. Both involve standing in the hallway and announcing that you're having computer problems." Every woman but one chose to offer pizza. Women's view of RPI: The odds are good, but the goods are odd. Men's view of RPI: Women are like parking spots. All the good ones are taken.

This ties in neatly with our fifth film (No. 1 in the series), "A Matter of Life and Darth", in which Luke, who has unraveled the secrets of time travel (in "Makin' Wookie", learns that Darth Vader is a half-droid and may be the real father of both Han Solo and See-Threepio.

Ok, I have to go buy some more tinfoil and rewrite my pamphlet debunking the Clone Gunman theory. More later, if Lucas' minions don't catch up to me first.

-rpl

You think that's bad? Here's a guy who juggles while reciting pi:
http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~moorthy/moorthyjug.html

you can easily extend IE to do approximatly what you want (this feature is pretty well documented at msdn.microsoft.com, though i had never heard of it until i stumbled across it). go to the text for the registry entries here, take the text, save it in a text file with the .reg extension, double clicking it should add it to your registry. Then whenever you select text in IE and right-mouse click whatever actions you have added will show up in the menu (you have to start a new browser to see this).

this registry file is formatted for Win2k (there is probably an easy conversion to NT4.0, but I know that this form won't work out of the box)

j

<sigh>... which also means that I may not need that force-field to protect me from you.

(yeah, the mr2 really is my car, the blazer ran a red light)

---

<sigh>... which also means that I may not need that force-field to protect me from you.

(yeah, the mr2 really is my car, the blazer ran a red light)

---

www.dvorakint.org

www.catskill.net/evolution/typing

http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~whuang/misc/dvorak.html

A few of y'all from RPI may know me. I was a teaching assistant there, and taught Intoduction to Engineering Electronics for 2 years (fall 97-spring 99). We dismantled these cameras for one of our labs and reworked the flash trigger mechanism to go off in the dark. Not too complicated, but anybody thinking of taking these things apart needs to be specifically warned about the capacitor. Flashes need high voltages to flash. In this case, the voltage was measured to -300 to -312 volts. This is not only enough to hurt, but enough to burn you. Not seriously, mind you, but the two white spots on your thumb will certainly hurt like a bitch. Take care and short the capacitor out with a paperclip after you remove the battery. Always treat it as dangerous until you've removed the battery and shorted the paper clip. Now that you've been warned about that, this can be a really cheap (free, if you go the right lab) way to build a high voltage generator that runs off AAs. With this kind of voltage, you can build coin flippers or crude linear motors (read as coil gun). They can be put in parallel to give more current (between 6 and 9 in parallel will be enough to blow a flash bulb in a very bright explosion of glass). YMMV. Don't do this at home. This explanation is provided for scientific purposes only and not intended to suggest anything destructive.

Nor really... The AI in games is minimal at best when compared to the capabilities of AI in a theoretical sense. The problem is that AI is difficult to design and takes alot of time, and developers are out to make money, so they invest in technologies that will immerse the player in the game to get them addicted to it.

Its a new type of addiction for me, because I'm not playing to see how far I get, or see how big my avatar will get, its to see what he does next when he's off my leash. Was he watching when I was throwing the rocks, and start throwing villagers? Was he watching me pickup and move villagers to do the same?

So, it may be a long time before some really sophisticated AI gets into games, if ever. Think about it, if a chess computer can beat the world champion, don't you think there are strategies in many of these games that would be similarly difficult to beat?

If you want cutting-edge AI, don't look at games, look at OSCAR at the U of Arizona, or at the MIT Media Lab , or at the stuff going on at CMU or RPI. That's where the real progress and research is being done. Not in some programming sweatshop at EA.

There's actually an excellent book on this topic by Rob McChesney, former NPR reporter and currently a Professor at the Universiy of Illinois called Rich Media, Poor Democracy . I read it for a class here at RPI, and part of what it detailed was the evolution of radio (which lead directly to television) and the big battle over educational value of the medium. Basically, teachers wanted to use it for education, while various companies, such as RCA, didn't. Basically, all the PBS stuff is just an extension of this same fight. Interesting how history repeats itself.
---------

The site was an interesting experiment on human nature, more than on the technology.

It showed that people will abuse any chance they hve to make other people miserable, where there is no accountability.

It is facinating to watch . Even when they begged (your sign, as above) their heating bills were double normal...


--

This message brought to you by Colin Davis

I think it's funny that the only people willing to bash RPI did it as anonymous cowards. Anyway, I went to RPI. It's a decent school. I know there are better, I'm sure there are worse ... but the environment there gives you enough freedom to really learn what you want to learn, and not deal with the stuff you don't want to deal with. There's some brilliant people there, and like any school there's some complete retards ... but like most places, if you're able to seek out the truly brilliant people, you can learn a lot from them. I'd like to think that's what I did in my four years there.

Anyway, whatever the school is missing ... at least now we can afford to buy it.

I'm about to graduate from RPI and on the hunt in the Houston, TX area, finding the search to be very difficult. It seems that employers are looking for several years of experience, and the market, especially for fresh graduates, is no where near as hot as it was a year ago.

For perspective, I've worked solidly in programming positions since January 99, and have years of formal training in the major engineering languages (C,C++,Java). Toss in a good (3+) GPA, some OpenGL, ASP, VB, SQL, and XML, along with tons of leadership experience, and one would think I've done just about everything right. Even so, I'm sending out 10+ resumes a week, and barely getting anywhere. I've been picky though, avoiding VB&SQL jobs as often as possible. Starting to think it's time to give in and go for everything though...

Attending RPI now, and having several friends who are majoring under IT, I would have to say it really isn't that great. It's good in the sense that you get a broad variety of classes, but they have no free electives and they end up taking classes that are redundant and stupid to begin with. What kind of major has a class devoted to proving the major actually exists (IT, myth or reality)?

Anyway, RPI is cool, but it's not the place for a liberal arts/CS degree.

The answer to your question is not as clear-cut as you would like. The answer really depends on the universities that you are considering, as I'm sure each one has a slightly different definition of "Computer Engineering". To make matters worse, companies suffer the same lack of uniformity in defining these titles.

Generically speaking, you have five (or more, depending on how you break things down) different types of technical folks involved with computer development (both hardware & software):

1) Electrical Engineers (EE): deal with things like designing processors, peripheral equipment (video cards, sound cards, hard drives, etc.) & physical networking medium. You can think of these folks as designing the actual physical boxes that sit on your desk. (There are also scads of other engineering disciplines involved in designing the actual boxes: Chemical, Materials, Mechanical/Heat-Transfer, but you aren't interested in those, right? :-)

2) Computer Scientists (CS): covers a wide range of job responsibilities. Computer Scientists can do just about anything related to software. That said, most people I know who call themselves Computer Scientists prefer to work on low-level software that is algorithm intensive. Typical examples include operating system kernels, networking protocols (network through session or presentation layers on the OSI model), system libraries, programming language development, compiler design, numerically intensive applications, just to name a few.

3) Computer Engineers (CE): typically act as the glue between the hardcore hardware geeks (Electrical Engineers) and hardcore software geeks (Computer Scientists). Your typical Computer Engineer integrates hardware and software, and as such has to be conversant in both (to a point). Computer Engineers might design hardware (say, a disk controller), or software (a RAID driver) or both. Some computer engineers also get involved in higher-level hardware design (like designing a system architecture, with the low-level software needed to support it). A lot of Computer Engineers get involved with embedded applications (automobile computers, robotics, networking cards, etc.).

4) Software Engineers (SE): this is a VERY broad brush to paint people with. I know Software Engineers (by title) who write operating system code, and I know some who write no code, but are more involved with large software system architectures & project management. In the academic sense, Software Engineers typically operate at the highest level: designing large software systems, implementing quality control schemes & doing very little (if any) coding. In my (limited) industry experience, Software Engineers are typically applications programmers who dabble in the activities that define an "academic" Software Engineer.

5) Information Technology (IT): this is newer, and even less defined than Software Engineering. IT people do a range of activities: maintaining corporate networks, system administration, web design, database administration, help desk staffing, software testing/verification, programming, etc. This is really a catchall for things that don't fit in other categories.

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science are relatively straightforward, in that most schools have these departments by name. Computer Engineering usually falls under the auspices of one of these two. In my experience Computer Engineering is more often mated with EE in schools with stronger engineering programs, while the reverse is true of schools that have stronger science programs.

Software Engineering is not, in my experience, available as a named major to undergraduates, though it is increasingly popular as a graduate major. Typically, Software Engineering-type courses will be offered by a Computer Science department, but not always (this was not the case at RPI, where I went to school). If your ultimate goal is to become a Software Engineer (as described above), your best bet is to major in Computer Science and take a long, hard look at courses offered by the EE/CE department.

IT is a fledgling major at schools that do offer it (which I don't think is too many). At RPI it was (is?) largely a joke: basically CS for those who can't hack CS. This might not be true anymore at RPI, or at other schools (but I doubt it).

My advice is to delay declaring a major as long as possible. Most universities won't make you do it until you are a junior. By then you should have experienced enough to make up your mind.

Good luck!.

FANTASTICALLY DANGEROUS CAPACITOR EXPERIMENTS
http://www.amasci.com/amateur/capexpt.html

It was written up by Gary Hawkins in the old "Extraordinary Science" magazine published by the now-defunct Int'l Tesla Society. His technique was identical to the one used by Bert Hickman.

So is this a case of "100th monkey syndrome?" More likely the "quartershrinker" idea was spread by word of mouth.

Another venerable website for electrodynamic shennanigans:

RPI "Can Crusher"
http://hibp.ecse.rpi.edu/Can_Crusher/home.html">

((((((((((((( ( ( ( (o) ) ) ) )))))))))))))

All serial storage has an access time problem, however. You may have to wait a couple of seconds to get the data you want from the moonbounce recirculation.

-Martin