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UMBC's 10,000 undergraduates and 1,500 graduate students come from 42 states and 71 foreign countries. Over 3000 of our students are majoring in one of our IT programs -- Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Information Systems, and Digital Imaging. We are developing new programs (e.g., electronic commerce and also have a number of non-credit certificate programs available including a new program in information security.

We an excellent computational environment with lots of SGI, SUN and Linux workstations and servers. We are also part of the Internet2 system and have several other high speed connections to the Internet.

We enjoy a great location on a 500-acre campus in the suburbs of Baltimore just to the north of DC which present lots of opportunities for internships and coop jobs are area government labs (NASA, NSA, NIST, NRL, ARL, SSA, GAO, etc) and industrial centers (IBM, Hughes, Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, CSC, etc).

Although we don't have a winning football team (ok, we don't even have a football team) we do have the number one college chess team in north and south america (winner of the Pan Am Championship in two of the past three years).

As always, your milage may vary.

You might be interested in checking out ecTechWeb which is a directory of news, information and internet resources of interest to developers and researchers relevant to electronic commerce. It's maintained by UMBC's Institute for Global Electronic Commerce

You might be interested in checking out ecTechWeb which is a directory of news, information and internet resources of interest to developers and researchers relevant to electronic commerce. It's maintained by UMBC's Institute for Global Electronic Commerce

It is little known that in reality (you know, as opposed to books about heroic efforts of british folks) Enigma was solved by polish scientists (notably Marian Rejewski) in years 1928-1939.

All data and a reconstruted working model of Enigma was submitted by polish intelligence to the british and french intelligence, after it become impossible to continue work in occupied Poland.

All misinformation you can read nowadays is partially result of a cold war, lack of appreciation, and probably imperial "superiority" of Brits and other allies who prefered to claim the glory for themselves.

In Great Britain methods created by Poles were enhanced and deployed on larger scale, but please don't ignore that this is not entirely british effort !

http://www.gl.umbc.edu/~lmazia1/ Enigma/enigma.html

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Marek Moskal

Geeks in the Streets in Baltimore was actually done by the UMBC Linux Users Group. Perhaps you could meet with your local LUG and set it up with them? There's sure to be one near you.

If you don't give your kids the media and information they need at home, they will go elsewhere to find it. Parents who feel the need to keep budding geeks from exploring the world of information around them--whether inspired their own decision or from the influence of government, community or their family physician--will simply cut themselves out of an inevitable loop that will form with or without their help.

Please consider this is coming from a nineteen year old college student. I don't claim to know how to raise small children (or even relate to them, sometimes), but I know what it's like to have grown up in the early stages of the information age, and how important it was to me to be connected into the world.

About five years ago, my father decided that all the time I spent talking on BBSs, Usenet and email was affecting my schoolwork. Perhaps it was, although I prefer to think of it as not letting my education get in the way of my learning. As punishment for my poor grades, he locked up all the telecommunication devices in the house, including a Practical Peripherals 2400 that was serving as my life line to the digital world.

At this point in my life I was regularly logging into 8 local BBSs, and particpating in FidoNet and and the Fido-esque nets out there, and also running a small UUCP leaf node from the computers to communicate via e-mail and receive an early Usenet feed from a benevolent sysop at a local COCOT company.

Did the removal of my ability to communicate make any difference in the degree that I was actually getting this information? No. I didn't spend as much time at home because I'd be over at friends houses clandestine QWK packets onto disks and sneaking them back into the house in my Chemistry textbook, or pulling out my secret 300 baud acoustic modem once a week when the house was empty to keep my UUCP feed from overflowing my provider's spool.

Did it keep me from telling my father about all the neat things that I was reading and doing in the BBS community and on the Internet? Hell, yeah. Usually I would tell him all about the neat things I was reading on comp.dcom.telecom or the programming or politics newsgroups and we could talk about it, but it was impossible to discuss the latest tech news without letting him know that I was logging in without his permission.

Thankfully, he realized this, and not long afterwards we discussed the situation and worked out an agreement so that he could feel like my studies were coming first, and I could still get access to the information and to discussions with my online peers.

The free flow of information and ideas is now, and will probably always be integral part of my life. I'm glad I had the opportunity to expand my horizons and understanding through interacting with others over the Internet so early on, and I would hate to see that chance denied to other young people.

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Geeks Into the Streets is a Baltimore area ad-hoc group that works to bring 'net access to poor children. Jeff Covey, who started the whole thing, maintains Andover's Linux.DaveCentral site. Our good friend Joe "the mad Russian" Valadorsky of Amnet Computer contributed a LOT of equipment and expertise, and a whole LOT of others have chipped in with parts, labor, advice, and encouragement.

All of this was an outgrowth of the UMBC LUG that meets at University of Maryland Baltimore County.

Any LUG could do this. This just happens to be an excellent, very helpful and public-minded bunch. If you want to learn more about how your LUG could do something similar, please contact either me or Jeff. We're both *more than happy* to help other people get involved in community "geek outreach projects" by starting their own ad-hoc groups.