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UIUC Unveils the Worlds Most Advanced Building
Eagle5596 writes "The University of Illinois at Urbana
Champaign, one of the top Computer
Science programs in the world has just officially opened their new $80
million Siebel
Center. The department head describes the building as a
single computing entity, meant to be programmed and to interact with those
in the building via RFID tags in their ID cards.
This is probably one of
the biggest and most expensive projects in ubiquitous computing ever
launched, touching on all the important issues in this field, from privacy to the ultimate question about the usefulness of such a system. Several papers are covering this including the Chicago Sun Times, and the Chicago
Business"
Considering that the only scientifically-verified consequence of overexposure to radio waves is radio burns -- and that only happens at very high energy densities -- I wouldn't worry about cancer.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Well, I being a current inhabitant of this "amazing" building... have yet to see this wonderful technology. Sure, I didn't really read what's been said in the papers about it, cus I know what's actually happening here. It's really stupid, the whole building. When I first walked in, my inital reaction was that the 70's threw up on it. They still haven't finished building the damn thing. And it's got way too many bugs (just like a CS building should....) like the pretty light fixtures that hang in the conference rooms cast a lovely shadow onto the projector screen. Plus, the screen in my conference room doesn't have a switch to lower it. But it's nice to know that a screen should exist. They've just installed all this RFID stuff and touch screen kiosks today... so it doesn't look like crap for the Grand Opening.
I wouldn't believe all the hype if I were you. Just like everything else, including the project I'm supposed to present at this Siebel Center Open House, it's a lot of buzzwords and catch phrases...it doesn't really do what I say it does... But a man can dream can't he?
But on another note, the elevator shafts provided a lovely rappelling trip... to bad they had to install elevators in them. (Which I mananged to crash and get stuck on the 3rd floor...like software-wise not bloody death crash)
But I'm stuck here until I graduate... what fun it will be to break the rest of it. It is however nicer than our old building... Thank you Mr. Siebel for giving us a lot of money before your company started to fail, and thanks for not asking for it back.
All electronic locks I have ever seen default to unlocked when the power goes off. This is the way they are built, not wired. So if the power goes out, they WILL unlock (and they did unlock too, when the power went out). This is probably required by the fire code so that people are not trapped in a burning building.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
This is doubly funny because in the movie 2001, HAL is actually designed at UIUC...