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Freshman MIT Students Automate Dorm Room
Inessa writes "Two freshman MIT students have automated their dorm room, complete with a big red party button which generates an instant party. Their custom-engineered system is called MIDAS, the Multi-Function In Dorm Automation System. According to the MIT News office, "Gone are the light switches and glaring fluorescent lights of a typical dorm room. Zack Anderson and RJ Ryan's room has several lighting schemes, remote web access, voice activation, a security system, electric blinds and more ... With the touch of one red button, their dorm room becomes a rave. The lights go out, the blinds close, the displays read, "feel the energy" as a voice repeats the same phrase over a deep bass beat.""
And I mean that in the good way, not in the bad at sports way.
This inculcation of curiosity and resourcefulness is what makes studying at MIT truly unique. No wonder it is one of the premier educational institutions in the world.
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Concept is nice, but really, in a dorm room of that size the party mode is pretty useless. Adapt it to a basement/dining room, and we can talk.
Wuwu, party for two.
they couldn't solve the "where do we get chicks from?" problem. or maybe, these oxygen gas bottles are of some use after all..
Why, when we were in college, we couldn't afford to have all of that expensive automation gear. We had to get up off of our asses and actually turn lights off on and on, and we liked it that way. In-room fridge? Hah! We were so poor, we had to keep a little piece of Velveeta frozen on the dorm room window sill, saving it up for our big Friday night celebrations. But tell that to kids today, and they won't believe you. No sir.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Why is it I get the feeling that there is a reason these guys have that much time on their hands?
Nice work and all that, but most decent parties at college include three staple ingredients
1) Alcohol
2) Women
3) Alcohol
Though alcohol appears twice this is on purpose, once to get you drunk enough to ask, then a woman to ask, the second to get her drunk enough to agree. Now an automated party system that achieved that... the guys would be millionaires by next Wednesday.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I bet their dorm room still smells like dirty laundry.
the party button pushes you!
Build it and they will come... Or was that baseball?
Deleted
While they're at it, they'd better install that Korean female robot wearing something slinky - because they'll never get any real women in there... and at least she won't collapse in hysterics when told to "feel the energy"...
All programmers are lazy. Why do people program? To make things easier... because we're lazy!
Isn't this a repost from a few months back? I guess all that partEing made the geeks lap in memory. ;)
Hey, 1989 called, they want their party terms back...
I like the tape recorder saying stuff in a female voice like "What a nice set ballpoints you have?!", "Obesity makes me hot!" and "With you, olfact is what it should be in a mate selection process."
Couldn't resist.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
What, MIT is co-ed now? Mortifying.
the "off" button.
Be sarcastic if you must, but their next upgrade is to integrate a chick magnet into the system. Activating 'party mode' by default spawns a Babe-Level Management Routine (BALMER), which controls the Magnet. Preset desired peak and sustained chick levels are set in the Application Data Layer, and MIDAS carefully manages the Chick Magnet to maintain the ambient babeness at the level desired for the activity. When the security cameras, IR sensors, or seismographs determine that levels are exceeded, the Magnet is taken off line or dropped to a lower power level (From "Ferrari" to "Porsche" all the way down to "Ford Fairlane").
It all looks very impressive on paper, but they're having trouble getting enough juice to those magnets, and as yet have been unable to give the BALMER anything but a dry run.
The lights go out, the blinds close, the displays read, "feel the energy" as a voice repeats the same phrase over a deep bass beat."
Appearantly, these "freshmen" haven't been out of their dorm room since the early 90's
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
"feel the energy" . . . I'll bet THAT never gets old!
Adherence to the truth is a form of disloyalty.
Now comes the hard part: make friends to utilize their party room.
These guys have been 'aving it tiny in a smaller venue for rather longer: The Miniscule of Sound at 1.99 m2! (gallery here)Come back when you've got it in a broom cupboard....
I read about this 18 days ago...since when did /. become so slow? I'm a consistent reader and all, but this is a little disappointing.
Someone gets in through remote web access and continually makes it party mode.
sent from my slashdot browser.
I am pretty sure the same button inflates their "girlfriends" as well!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I want to install some automation devices in my new house. I'll be seeing what I can take from this article. ;)
[%] Cingular Ringtones
It's all a nice setup, but when happens when these kids have to move out of that dorm? (Due to a pile of dirty laundry growing legs and chewing on wires)
After running a few LAN parties, I know full well, set up is half the time of take down.
So assuming these boys have been at this whole Dorm Party System for a couple of months, dare I say a year? How are they going to take all this down?
I bet everything has been screwed or nailed in, modified and altered to accommodate all this equipment. Who allowed them to do this? Last time I checked you weren't allowed to mess around with dorm rooms.
So are they going to sell the whole system to the school as an example to future students how useful MIT is? Or will they sell it to another group of freshmen?
They are going to have to move out sooner or later. I feel bad for the system. Its either going to be torn down or abused as a teaching resource.
Nice system and all, but -10 practicality. Maybe it would have worked better in a house or apartment. They should have worked more in how it looked and how it was to be set up instead of just building it.
With some planning they could have made some money, but I won't mess up my dorm and forfeit my damage payment for the system.
-10 Practicality, -5 Damage Deposit, +5 L337ness...
You can watch a video here of it in action.
we had to keep a little piece of Velveeta frozen on the dorm room window sill
When I went to school, Velveeta hadn't been invented yet. We had to walk in all manner of weather conditions to the vetrinary science buildings, uphill both ways, and steal milk from the cows, which we then had to curdle in the bathroom sink. Only then could a Friday night celebration be had.
paintball
As a student, I don't have the money to go buying lots of expensive hardware (but I wish I did...) so how do these guys? Oh, and the text to phone alarm thing, wasn't that in Veronica Mars?
How long before this is retailing on Think Geek?
Skot Nelson music is my saviour / i was maimed by rock and roll
At a single voice command the door swings shut and locks, bars secure the window, the lights dim, room oxygen is reduced by 20% creating a lightheadedness, and the audio system repeats the phrase "Give in, you know you want me".
Is it just me, or is this 10x as complex and imperceptibly better than "hey, lets get a bunch of x10 shit and control our $300 party lights".
The disco dance floor guys did it sooo much better than this gimmick. And they had a girl!
[Been there (MIT), seen that. Some of the most amazing projects were done by students who never completed their studies. Of course, many of them went on to be entrepreneurial millionaires, while the rest of us became 9-5 drones...]
"party mode" also involves 2 guys with bras on their heads and a barbie doll.
Quickies. Empty classrooms. The shower. Behind the bushes. Right on the main campus lawn if she has the right kind of skirt or dress... not that I'd know about THAT one. :-)
Usually you can pay extra to ditch the roommate, but this may involve a much longer walk to class. If the school is uncrowded and/or you claim to have some sort of mental issue (Asperger's, severe ADD, etc.) you might be able to get a regular double to yourself, with or without paying double.
Many places have dorms for married students, regularly visited by the stork.
Does it run Linux?
Problem is, those usually aren't the good women. (a brainy guy wants a brainy gal -- an IQ difference of more than 30 points makes a relationship very awkward and painful)
The good ones are often to distracted by their own academic success to think about starting a family. They have a meaningless career, then panic at age 40 when they realize that menopause is coming soon. Whoops. Should have thought about that earlier.
It's called drugs and rap music. More fun and more portable!
friends. Although, judging from how they've tricked out their room, they're probably in short supply of those.
I'm sorry. The number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
I lived at home and worked full time through college (at a much cheaper school than MIT) and picked and chose carefully which books I bought (I have copied whole textbooks in the library at 5 cents/page.) We all had our dreams then, but we knew that's all they were.
Sillie Frosh.... I remember when I used to be into crazy stuff like that, with a PC pimped out with lights and loud fans and all that crap...... I eventually got over it though....... Although that is controllable, and that makes a big difference. I personally think it's cool too, although the party mode would be overkill for me. I guess it is this sort of motivation that makes an MIT student though.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
The alternative view is that, no matter how poor their social skills or bad their body odour, when they patent their invention and license it for millions of dollars, they are going to have to fend of the avalanche of babes targetting them with the proverbial manure-covered prodding implement.
Stick Men
These kids have too much money...
Ryan - http://www.thecosmotron.com/
The "party" movie? Started out looking like amateur gay porn to me.
I showed the clip to my wife and the only thing she said was "They don't have partys" and walked out.
MIT nerds make lights and sounds appear with the touch of a button. Where's the story? If they could get girls to appear, now that would be a story!
"Having lived in the same city as MIT for over a decade..."
Since when is Boston the same city as Cambridge?
"I've spoken to a lot of managers at high-tech companies that won't hire fresh MIT grads because a)they don't know anything actually useful and b)they think they know everything, so when they're doing something wrong, they don't listen to coworkers, team leaders, and managers."
Your experience with high-tech companies is apparently very limited, and I suspect entirely made up. Go to an MIT recruiting fair sometime, they're in that city across the river.
"My favorite example is the manager who told me about the MIT programmer he hired that wouldn't use constants...he's plug in the same number 50 times in his algorithm, instead of defining a properly named constant...and his variable names were hilariously bad. Basically, it was clear he never learned proper programming techniques. Despite the manager's insistence that he define constants, etc (ie follow company coding standards), the guy kept doing it his way."
Sounds like a bad manager to me. Why would he ever hire an inexperienced programmer?
"Ever wonder why so many MIT grads work for other MIT grads?"
No, not really, it's pretty obvious.
"It's because they're un-employable by anyone else."
Just... NO.
How did this troll ever get modded up to a 4? Mod parent down.
The downside would be having to hit a button every 108 minutes after sexual exhaustion sets in.
Sorry, but I would not dump all MIT grads in the same bucket. They're just like anyone else - there are the folks who can't work with others and need to do things their own way, even when their way is the hard way, and then there are the truly brilliant and personal folks. I've worked with MIT grads at software companies and some of them have been simply amazing - although not the best. The absolute best architects and programmers I have worked with were the folks who picked up programming out of necessity on the job back when standards were only beginning to emerge, and loved the work so much they went to technical schools to immerse themselves in good programming and design courses. I suppose it comes down to experience and practicality; if all you know is theory you're not going to be any good in solving real-world problems.
I would not discount all MIT grads based on one negative experience you've had.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
FTFA: "... 3 video cameras, one of which is on continuous recording mode..." I don't know about the rest of you guys, but the idea of being under constant surveillance would make me a little freaked out. I mean, imagine if one of these guys DOES have a girlfriend (remote chance, I know...) and he brings her back to the room for some alone time while his roomie is away. There is no privacy in that room. I would suggest having a "no surveillance" mode where all cameras and recording equipment get shut off.
according to inside sources at ThinkGeek, dorm automation packages will be ready to ship beginning of the second quarter next year (April 1, 2007)
However, with my newly-released Preprogrammed Magnet-Intensifier Pro (P.I.M.P.) juice, all the trouble is only a thing of the past..
The new, enhanced version is even more powerful that it eliminates the need for a UPS (Uninterruptible Probability of Scoring) unit.
disclaimer: PIMP juice may contain traces of nuts.
"This inculcation of curiosity and resourcefulness is what makes studying at MIT truly unique. No wonder it is one of the premier educational institutions in the world."
I read "inculcation" as "inoculation", and was hoping you could provide me with information on the curative properties of binge drinking and pot smoking...
Of course they made it a red button... that's always the button you're never supposed to press.
I've spoken to a lot of managers at high-tech companies that won't hire fresh MIT grads because a)they don't know anything actually useful and b)they think they know everything, so when they're doing something wrong, they don't listen to coworkers, team leaders, and managers.
As a manager at a high tech company, my experience has been entirely different. While we don't get a lot of MIT graduates coming to the west coast, the ones who have worked for me have been fantastic in terms of being bright, energetic, as well as good with both working on technical problems and dealing with people. I'd believe that a school like MIT could produce some freaks, but I'd love to get more of the same of what I've experienced in the past.
> Sounds like a bad manager to me. Why would he ever hire an inexperienced programmer?
b ject=false&FirstRow=0&SortOrderDirection=&SortOrde rColumn=GuardianTeachingScore&Subject=Computer+sci ences+and+IT&Tariff=6&Go=Submit
So... inexperienced programmers should become experienced by... ?
Assuming they did a computer science degree, it's rather odd they got through their entire degree while refusing to use constants, however a computer science degree is not a degree on programming. Sure, some institutions will train their students to a level where they can hit the ground running in a programming job, in the environment they're used to. However, where I work and did my degree (St. Andrews university), the focus is definitely on the why, rather than the how (so, topics such as software engineering, language design, logic, to name a few), and currently we're second best in the UK for Computer Science:
http://browse.guardian.co.uk/education?SearchBySu
The key problem was not their level of programming experience when hired, but their unwillingness to learn better techniques.
As a college student and a full-time employee, I find it incredibly difficult to keep up with things. There are dozens of cool ideas I'd love to implement, but they sit on the back burner due to lack of time and money. Maybe these two are like the many freshman I see on campus. Mommy and Daddy pay for everything. So they blow off their studies, have no major financial debts, and four years later have no degree. But hey, they did do this awesome party room!
well, if this wasn't mit it wouldn't be in the news, /. or otherwise.
I would however like to throw out to whomever listening that the interesting between-the-lines of all this is that this sort of DIY, as easy as this particular project was, behavior is not only tolerated but celebrated at MIT. where I went to college, a little place call Moravian, the students were barely literate. In fact they were stupid. Which wouldn't be so bad if they were all women and attractive, but they weren't. Building such a device would confuse the troglodytes that roamed about and perhaps induce rage.
sometimes i wonder how different my life would have been if i went to MIT, not considering whether or not i'm MIT material in the first place. The college I went to was so bad that I think I got dumber by attending. People I could learn from or network with later in life were few and far between, and the kind of experimentation that inspires technical thought leadership was shunned and in fact punished if brought into the classroom.
It's almost as if the social impact of computing is in fact as imporant as the craft itself.
"The system is down! The system is down!"
"Hey The Cheat! I told you, no more light switch raves!"
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
You would certainly be right if he happened to be a computer science major. Either he was not or the parent completely made him and the story up.
My buddy Chris built the "BITCH" at MIT's ILG Fenway House. It stands for Bathroom Integrated Tracking something something, he tortured an innocent acronym to make it. Anyway, in a classic Boston Brownstone (right on the Fens, beautiful) they have 4 bathrooms and up to 25 people. So, each floor has a box with LEDs that light up when different bathrooms are in use. No indication of when the automatic Out-of-TP warning lights go in.
And what's kitchen pantry without an Athena terminal? 8)
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
The lights go out, the blinds close, the displays read, "feel the energy" as a voice repeats the same phrase over a deep bass beat.
You obviously can't teach good taste.
if(!toilet_paper) roll.replace(new roll);
Rich bastards :-p
...Now accepting donations for me :-)
I'm jealous!
HIS car computer was about $1000 US AND installed in a older BMW.
All my dreams he has done (carputer, go karts, touchscreen entertainment systems), due to him and/or his family having such money.
-jhp
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
...I'll build my own party button. With blackjack. And hookers.
So when were Mitch and Chris planning on sneaking Kent's car into his dorm room? Or freezing the floors into ice?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/
"But this one goes to 11!"
Dude.. how do we get the chicks to over look the camera's....
Sir, if i had some mod points, i would give you them ALL!
:)d
good post
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
So you didn't get accepted to MIT, huh?
I'm sure your fall-back school was okay, and now it's just a matter
of demonstrating the ignored brilliance and ability.
Then the grad schools or recruiters or whatever will pay attention.
simple: advertising and media
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Forget the party button and the blackjack.
This clip screams "Real Genius."
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/
I'd imagine MIT grads are a lot like grads from other schools. They have a couple advantages: the reputation and difficulty of courses that they passed, and the environment. Being surrounded by people as talented and enthusiastic as you works wonders.
However, what's vastly more important than simply getting good grades for the top jobs and especially graduate work is demonstrating your ability. Come out of any halfway respectable school having published a paper in a decent journal (or at least written a good paper), done some sort of other neat research, written (and sold!) some great programs, etc, and you have a huge advantage over someone who's merely got the grades and the school rep.
Professors in college are mainly there to teach you how to properly teach yourself and give you the fundamentals in the field you've finally chosen. As long as you got a couple professors who know what it is to research and work in industry that aren't total bums, they should be able to impart all the necessary wisdom to you. Being instructed by Nobel Laureate Professor X. Winnar or Fields Medalist Q. Bert Hawtsauce is nice for letters of recommendation, I'll give them that, but in my experience hasn't shown much of a difference as far as undergrad learning.
To make up for the environment at my smaller and less tech-oriented school, I spent semesters and summers abroad at programs targeted to people in my situation. Going to those programs were invaluable, they were funded by the government, and they gave me a chance to really get immersed in my subject with students who felt as passionately about it as I did. It also gave me some amazing contacts in terms of notable names in my field, one of whom has offered to fund my grad studies.
So really, like most other things, it's your talent, the effort you put in, and lots of plain dumb luck. Had I chosen a more highly ranked school I would've come out of undergrad with amazing amounts of debt, and I don't know if I would've really improved on my grad outlook. This way, I have something like $10k in low-interest government loans and I'm getting fully funded with a very nice stipend at a good grad school.
Trust me- EVERY college has a drug and alcohol abuse problem. Even the goody-goody religious ones.
You only find this stuff at EC. After 4 years here at MIT, EC is definitely the most unique group of students. I have to give them credit for the creativity they have, from the disco floor, to their annual rollercoaster during rush, to their naked parties. If you think of MIT students you think of EC. Although, there are "normal" students and "normal" parties at MIT. Baker has the best dorm parties, EC the most unique, Senior Haus the most drug-filled, but they all contribute to the great diversity at MIT.
Go karts aren't that great. I had one when I was maybe 12 years old. I saved up for a couple years and paid most of the cost myself. Luckily, we had a big yard (1 acre), and a couple times my dad took me and the go kart somewhere else to ride.
Once, the centrifugal clutch got full of mud and jammed in the engaged position. My dad chased the riderless kart around the yard and tackled it, hurting his thumb in the process.
If you're a licensed driver, you could conceivably find a place to ride whenever you want, but at that point, it becomes more fun to just drive somewhere and do something else, possibly with other people. Plus, you'd need more horsepower to get an exciting ride, due to additional weight; and if it's a modern kart with a roll cage, you'll need it tall enough for your height.
Hell, for the cost of a go kart, you could do a lot of riding at a commercial go kart track on one that you don't have to fix, fuel, or pull the start cord...and get to race against other people too.
I suppose if you live near a forest with lots of trails that allow motorized vehicles...but then you'd want something with more ground clearance, designed for rough terrain.
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
The first rave happened in the 1960s. Here's audio-visual evidence
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Cambridge is definitely in Boston. Greater Boston & Boston City are 2 different things. I think most people mean Greater Boston or Metro Boston when they say Boston. If I can get drunk in downtown Boston, anywhere I can stumble to is still Boston. My opinion, Cambridge is one of the nicer parts of Boston. I would live there if it wasn't so cramped, had better parking, and if I could afford it. It is also a great place to work, but BU's porn mag is way better than Harvard's porn mag. Cambridge isn't always better than Boston.
IMHO, Cambridge would not be Cambridge if it wasn't right next to the city of Boston. It is pretty dependent on the entire area, just as any other city or area in/near Boston is. This is all beside the point though. The real point is that anyone in Cambridge, Boston, Brookline, Dorchester, you name any city near Boston, are all watching & reading the same news. If there is an alcohol related death, or changes in policy at MIT, we are all as likely to hear about it. You pointing out that he is technically not in the same city does not discredit his opinion on the past and/or present alcohol & drug problem at MIT.
One of the most depressing but yet accurate statements I have every heard came from my SCUBA instructor. This guy was in the Canadian Forces and was the Canadian equivalent of the US Navy Seals.
:-(
After going cavern diving one day he told me:
"Women control half of the money, and all the sex in the world".
I want to slit my wrists
Libertas in infinitum
I just heard of the system, havent actually seen it... but if it's as I heard it is, imo it's a far superior party system.
From what I heard: some students at harvey mudd made something which impressed me more in terms of automating parties... it simply mixes drinks. And by simply I mean it could hold something like a dozen different types of boozes and you could give it a drink name it had programmed and it would pour and mix the correct amounts of the various alcohols(and non-alcoholic beverages should one desire). iirc it could also measure fluid levels and know which drinks it could or couldnt make based on how much of each alcohol it had left.
Sure, the MIT system touches on more things. But blinds, music, lights, party effects(especially if it's a pre-existing single system with basically on/off) are all really simple things to do, even when inebriated.
On the other hand streamlining the process of making drinks is nice with a larger croud. Second, always being able to quickly mix up a good drink is an honest improvement over what an inibriated person could do easily/quickly.
So, as far as parties, imo the harvey mudd system does more for you, even tho it touches on fewer different systems.
Its cool to look at, but the real question is, are they actually putting it to use? -Photoud.com
The chicks are geeks. Some of them are probably reading this now, and hoping to have a chance to check it out. .... Like most geeks the chicks at MIT will want to see upgrades, new versions and bugfixes.
Have you really seen this???
Sounds too good to be true.
While the tirade about no one hiring MIT grads is flamebait, I have to agree about the drug use at MIT. The stress at MIT hard to imagine. Everyone has to deal with it in some way, and drug and alcohol are some of the means.
There are other means - the Assassin Guild's games, endurance sex, Sport Death, long distance running... but I have to say that everyone I knew did something that would seem plain weird to a normal person. I cannot explain why MIT gets to you that way, all I know is that every time I go back there, for a party, a lecture, or just because, I feel as if I enter purgatory. There is a miasma of bad karma in the air, and no, it's not just the smell fo unwashed bodies.
MIT does teach a few things though - MIT grads usually don't give up easily, can work quite well under pressure and with little rest, and enjoy technology. It's great, if not for themselves, then for their bosses.
No good deed goes unpunished...
Except the room will be my own bedroom in my house, I have a 20' ceiling so I built a second floor in the room that attaches to the attic. I'm buying a few old web cams, going to convert a few of them to show infrared light for nightvision type use, them I'm going to put infrared LEDs inside the room so I can take video with the lights out. There will be a switch to open and close XMMS, LCD screen and keypad to jump to songs, I'd be able to search through songs from the couch without taking out the mouse and keyboard. There's going to be a skylight that's motorized with a motorized screen too. A 56" Sony HDTV, I'm hooking it up to my computer, and PS3. Also going to get a nice stereo once I figure out which one to get. It'll have more appeal to females because it's not a dorm room at MIT, plus I have a bar that I built in my room, it's nice doing this stuff in your dorm, but even nicer in your own home :-).
steal milk from the cows, which we then had to curdle in the bathroom sink.
When I went to school, the cow hadn't even been domesticated! We had to capture wild buffalo and breed them over and over again. You kids don't appreciate the hard work we had to do so you could milk 'cows'. And a bathroom? Don't get me started.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Once again freshman prove they have the right stuff...
to be total losers.
Oh, I forgot....everyone needs a "party" button because the average lame a$$ isn't capable of selecting music, turning out the lights or making bass noises.
their robot's mouth
http://web.mit.edu/zacka/www/sara.html
doesnt have an uncanny resemblance to a blow up doll. and what do you think that robotic arm is used for?
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
install one of these babies in the hatch
just think about it, a party every 108 minutes!
Gentlemen, the way to get laid is to learn guitar.
If you just look at women as sexual objects then I'm sure you'll end up with someone who will be manipulative. On the other hand, if you actually like women, and are careful in your selection process, you might actually find something more meaningful.
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
This is almost as cool as my lava lamp was back in the '60s.
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
We weren't even allowed to put blue-tac up on the walls in my day.
Hey, he doesn't go to MIT so he must know more about the college than anyone else. His hearing things on the news makes him an expert.
Mmm, Goodale 210. Right next to the kitchen! That room is now a nice green color. The heavy bag is gone, but now there's a lofted couch, a projector and screen, and The Big Board.
We don't field a lot of IM teams any more. That seems to be 5th West's job these days.
Yes, it is still called the Beast from the East, but we don't know why. Do you? Let us know at donkeykong dot mit dot edu slash w slash History
At least, that's my first impression.
Hey, maybe they're working tirelessly on their education, and have several patents that are the source of plentiful royalties, or something.
But I'm skeptical at this point.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
"You don't live in Boston, so you don't hear about what MIT is often in the news for: students getting really hammered, and occasionally falling out of dorm room windows and getting killed."
I, however, have not only lived in the Boston area my entire life, but I am an MIT grad as well. I have never heard of a student falling out of a dorm window. Jumping, yes. Falling out drunk? No.
10 years ago, one student did die from a drinking related incident, and about 6 or 7 years ago, a student died from a drug related incident. I would not call this being often in the news for drug/alcohol related deaths.
Big deal. We did this back in 1970 in West Quad at the U of Mich, with black light flourescent tubes, a really cool theramin, a light show that was actually the visual recording level-meter from a torn-apart reel-to-reel tape recorder..the whole babe magnet thing. Unlike these wimps, the highest tech item we had was a 40 watt RMS Lafayette Radio stereo receiver. We also discovered that when we wanted the instant party to end (a critical feature they apparently DO NOT DEAL WITH) we could put on Procol Harum and within 5 minutes the room would be cleared! Something about the lyrics; 'The corpses were rotten..' 5 karma points to whoever correctly identifies the song and the album..
My first Course VI class at MIT, they didn't even really teach the programming language they used. You pretty much had to pick it up on your own, the lectures were on much deeper topics than how to code "Hello world".
And I call BS on the GP that the programmer wouldn't use constants for love nor money. There couldn't be anything else involved?
We had a simular system for our Quake Team Fortress Gamer system at a former company I was employed at in the 1990s. One of our engineers Ben Kamen took the results of our noon Quake frag fests and would broadcast the top 15 frag list on a LED marque sign. We also had the Web-Page score history online. He designed an Auto-Quake system that started at 12:00 - 1:00pm and for after hours play 5:00pm. It was awesome! Those signs have been around for a while. He was the first to use the LED Marque sign in our office Quake automation system.