No doubt.. kicked the crap out of me (Computer Engineering no longer, now at York - Admin Studies with a major in IT). I wouldn't be surprised if the Engineering program is one of the hardest programs in North America. I give lots of respect to all my former classmates. I've worked with other students and grads from CS and from other schools like UT, Ryerson, etc... I find that UW Engr students have an edge on other guys. I respect UT's program a lot, too, but the UW co-op really sharpens the UW guys... anyways, that's a thread for another day.
Yeah, I transfered over to York, where there are no engineering competitions or programs yet - Computer Engineering is starting this fall. I would drop by the Midnight Sun "office" every once in a while this past year (to visit my sister, while in Waterloo). It's really amazing how they pulled together. They were barely together for the qualifier everyone in ASC had to go through. However, they spent more time prepping afterwards, which really helped them gel, and get ready.
Anyways, it was good to see the competition between the Canadian team. Queen's really caught up. They were only 45 minutes behind the Waterloo team overall.
My sister was one of the backup drivers for the Midnight Sun VI team.. Heck, I'm wearing a Midnight Sun VI T-shirt right now! Anyways, This is UW's best placing so far in all their years racing. So congrats to all the guys and gals on the team!
Here's a vignette from one of her updates:
Driving the solar car: Is plenty of fun! I've driven through Missouri,
Oklahoma (where I experienced an unpleasant bout of dehydration), New Mexico,
Texas, and Arizona. The most beautiful places to drive through are New Mexico
and Arizona. NM has gorgeous mountain ranges and scenery that is taken
straight out of a Western movie. I drove through the Zule mountain range
into Albuquerque and also from Flagstaff to Kingman, Arizona. The stretch of
geography from NM into AZ is incredible. In the evening, as the sun sets, the
most beautiful hues of colours are reflected off the mountain ranges and the
stars are brilliant against the night sky.
Apparently, they were the loudest gang out there. Go Team! Now it's prep time for the World Solar Challenge.
E&CE 354, a compulsory Computer Engineering course, we are given a shell of an OS kernel, which is written by the profs/department.
It's the project component in this RTOS (Real Time OS) course. The hardware is the Motorola Coldfire board, interfaced to a PC or to a remote linux server (to compile on sparc, dl to Coldfire remotely - the prefered method). We write it all in C (and a small requisite amount of assembler for manipulating the stack).
We got knee deep in the stuff real quick. Working in groups of four (God help those with only 3 members - there were 4 project courses that term!), our group managed to do all the writing, testing, and demoing in 7 days of near around-the-clock group work. We basically went home only to shower during the coding. *Sigh* probably all Comp Eng's get wistful thinking of that course (or have near mental breakdowns).
Anyhow, we had to demonstrate working timer functions, interrupts, serial ports, scheduler, memory management, etc. The kernel was given to us as a skeleton, we put the guts into it.... some groups even wrote a game.
I've gotta disagree a bit there... First, those names have been entrenched in our collective consciences for a while, so mention of one of those names don't give me fits. It's just the derivatives of the above exhibit some feeble attempt at naming, or some lack of creativity that just makes me laugh. (Although I won't be surprised if the methodology of arriving at those names is similar to the ones now-a-days.)Sure, I guess some on your list may drive you mad, I wonder if the others drive you madder (sic).
I would *kill* to have acme.com - heh heh.(I wonder who's there..) I suppose as people get tired of these "wow" names, "alternative" naming conventions will start popping up - kinda like how Alternative music was alternative before... (and so goes the loop.) Fight the power!!!
Hmm... The Internet as living organism? What if we had AI that lived on the web... which sprouted "AI legs and arms" and if it went crazy! Oh, and not to mention nefarious government conspiracies (let's start with Echelon) trying to cover up the fact that the Net was alive.
Then it'll take over some poor soul's ghost and... (Boy it's been a long day...)
This is very cool. I'm glad to see more posts and info about OpenBSD. I've actually started using OpenBSD less than a month ago. I run a server (currently on RH 5.2 with patches roughly to 6.0) and I wanted to incorporate security. I've patched up my RH box as best as I could then, but I noticed that out of the box, RH Linux is quite insecure. (Of course simply installing OpenBSD won't make your system secure - you've gotta know what you're doing and continue to update your system as exploits are found.) Anyhow, I did an FTP install of OpenBSD 2.5 on an internal "testbox" and I was impressed. I had first read the "review" at Linux.com, and was intrigued yet "concerned" about the unfriendly partitioning program (I just didn't have the time at that time. Yeah, so I wanted a PartitionMagic type of thing... so sue me.)
However, I got my brother (high school, and *not* a Unix guru) to install it... heh heh. He got it up in one night (although messed up the swap partition setup). I'm running it on a P100 with a 1.7 GB drive (anyone want to donate old Pentium, Pentium Pro hardware??) on a 100TX internal network.
After I reinstalled it, I started looking at the ports, and installing other programs. I am very impressed! I thought I'd miss the RPM way of installing - but the "make" function automatically updates or gets the latest version -now that rocks.
The docs, man pages are Excellent! They've really paid attention to what's going on. The install and the post-install process is very tightly integrated - check the afterboot man page, for example. I like the layout of the files - it's not a big "mess" like in RH where you go, "What the heck is this for, and this, and this..."
But seriously, I'd like to see more info about OpenBSD!! When I checked for OpenBSD here on/. about a week ago, there were only some 3 posts about it. I'd like to know what other servers out there are running on OpenBSD - I'm really interested in which e-commerce sites run it.
I'm still going to run RH behind my firewall, but OpenBSD has garnered my respect... So cheers Theo and gang!
Have you tried CheapBytes? I'm not sure they have the *exact* image, but I was going to buy 2.5 from them.. for under $5 (plus shipping and handling). I know there are 2 actual CD's from OpenBSD's shipment, but with Cheapbytes, you get one... I don't know what they're cutting out - but if you want it cheap, they're the way to go. BTW: I've bought RH 5.2 from them before, and it's great. Now I'm waiting for the 2.6 CD's to show up...
Just wondering... Has anyone zenned out whilst working in Photoshop, Illustrator, or Pagemaker? Those programs pretty much demand that one hand work with the mouse and the other hit the CTRL-[key], ALT-[key], or even combination CTRL-SHIFT-[key] (and other permutations... of CTRL, ALT, SHIFT or Option, AppleKey in Macspeak).
Granted that I've gotta go from mouse/keyboard to keyboard/keyboard when I gotta type some stuff in, but there is no other way, and it has become second nature.
Pisses me off when I hear all "These kids are unbelievable nowadays" attitudes...
Funny, I'm not all that old (just 23), but sometimes that thought does cross my mind. However, I what I'm seeing more and more are "punk" kids. For example, my high school was largely tolerant of different types of people - I was (and still am) a geek, and was accepted by most people.
These punk kids I see are the ones that are largely intolerant and think that they're all that. There is little or no desire to understand other people or appreciate things/people outside their comfort zone. I'm seeing that these kids are the ones that help perpetuate the persecution and alienation of those considered geeks, nerds, or Not-Cool-Enough(TM).
*Sigh*, someone posted.. "Love is the answer", and I wholly believe that (and try my best to live that, too.)
On "Over My Head (Live)" Doug Pinnick King's X's vocalist, sings and tells the Woodstock audience to love their kids, even if they're freaks, weird... or else their kids will end up "fucked up...like me". Amen! It's sad seeing frustrated kids running around beating themselves up emotionally - or worse - because of the lack of love in their lives; and we (I'll lump us all) grownups resort to "percentage statistics" about this and that, and to profiling to try to combat the symptoms of this common human condition. Hello priorities here...
BTW: I do fit some of the criteria of the geek profile, but I was never persecuted for being "smart" or computer-literate, etc. (actually only for standing up for my Christian world-views to a friend once in class.) Sure, it's tougher to fix the matters of the heart - let's face it, the government is not up to task to it - I don't think it was ever their job. We, as "grownup" geeks, who have struggled through the high school experiences, the Slashdot community at large, have the onus to reach out and shape our communities slowly. Let's face it, the problem won't go away just with us complaining and philosophizing here - in fact, it'll probably get worse, starting with "geek profiling".
And about those punk kids, I've gotta give them some slack, too - give 'em some sort of role model for them to look up to, I guess.
I've heard great suggestions about sponsoring, hiring geeks, taking kids under our wings, etc. It's a dark world out there, and for those that have started stepping out to the light, let's help the younger ones.
"Inconceivable!" Patents are flying left, right, and center! And I'm getting quite an uncomfortable feeling from the latest patents news. Anyways, just reading from the Patent abstract, parts of it sound very similar to the perl module CGI::FastTemplate written by Jason Moore (Plug: which is absolutely solid, flexible, and fast). At the last company that I worked at, we employed FastTemplate in many of our projects. It's great that it allows both designers and the backend scripters/programmers can work concurrently on a site.
Technically, I'm not quite sure how it handles processes and if uses shared memory to store live data. Although I believe it is extensible to use shared memory. We've used it in many situations: for displaying "custom selections" of news, search results, etc. similar to what's described in the abstract.
I'm sure there are several more free-software solutions out there that are similar. Can anyone else concur?
Slashdot Mirror
dan
Yeah, I transfered over to York, where there are no engineering competitions or programs yet - Computer Engineering is starting this fall. I would drop by the Midnight Sun "office" every once in a while this past year (to visit my sister, while in Waterloo). It's really amazing how they pulled together. They were barely together for the qualifier everyone in ASC had to go through. However, they spent more time prepping afterwards, which really helped them gel, and get ready.
Anyways, it was good to see the competition between the Canadian team. Queen's really caught up. They were only 45 minutes behind the Waterloo team overall.
Dan
Here's a vignette from one of her updates:
Apparently, they were the loudest gang out there. Go Team! Now it's prep time for the World Solar Challenge.
It's the project component in this RTOS (Real Time OS) course. The hardware is the Motorola Coldfire board, interfaced to a PC or to a remote linux server (to compile on sparc, dl to Coldfire remotely - the prefered method). We write it all in C (and a small requisite amount of assembler for manipulating the stack).
We got knee deep in the stuff real quick. Working in groups of four (God help those with only 3 members - there were 4 project courses that term!), our group managed to do all the writing, testing, and demoing in 7 days of near around-the-clock group work. We basically went home only to shower during the coding. *Sigh* probably all Comp Eng's get wistful thinking of that course (or have near mental breakdowns).
Anyhow, we had to demonstrate working timer functions, interrupts, serial ports, scheduler, memory management, etc. The kernel was given to us as a skeleton, we put the guts into it.... some groups even wrote a game.
I would *kill* to have acme.com - heh heh.(I wonder who's there..) I suppose as people get tired of these "wow" names, "alternative" naming conventions will start popping up - kinda like how Alternative music was alternative before... (and so goes the loop.)
Fight the power!!!
Then it'll take over some poor soul's ghost and... (Boy it's been a long day...)
--
Humans love machines in AD 2029.
Anyhow, I did an FTP install of OpenBSD 2.5 on an internal "testbox" and I was impressed. I had first read the "review" at Linux.com, and was intrigued yet "concerned" about the unfriendly partitioning program (I just didn't have the time at that time. Yeah, so I wanted a PartitionMagic type of thing... so sue me.)
However, I got my brother (high school, and *not* a Unix guru) to install it... heh heh. He got it up in one night (although messed up the swap partition setup).
I'm running it on a P100 with a 1.7 GB drive (anyone want to donate old Pentium, Pentium Pro hardware??) on a 100TX internal network.
After I reinstalled it, I started looking at the ports, and installing other programs. I am very impressed! I thought I'd miss the RPM way of installing - but the "make" function automatically updates or gets the latest version -now that rocks.
The docs, man pages are Excellent! They've really paid attention to what's going on. The install and the post-install process is very tightly integrated - check the afterboot man page, for example. I like the layout of the files - it's not a big "mess" like in RH where you go, "What the heck is this for, and this, and this..."
But seriously, I'd like to see more info about OpenBSD!! When I checked for OpenBSD here on /. about a week ago, there were only some 3 posts about it. I'd like to know what other servers out there are running on OpenBSD - I'm really interested in which e-commerce sites run it.
I'm still going to run RH behind my firewall, but OpenBSD has garnered my respect... So cheers Theo and gang!
Have you tried CheapBytes? I'm not sure they have the *exact* image, but I was going to buy 2.5 from them.. for under $5 (plus shipping and handling).
I know there are 2 actual CD's from OpenBSD's shipment, but with Cheapbytes, you get one... I don't know what they're cutting out - but if you want it cheap, they're the way to go. BTW: I've bought RH 5.2 from them before, and it's great.
Now I'm waiting for the 2.6 CD's to show up...
Granted that I've gotta go from mouse/keyboard to keyboard/keyboard when I gotta type some stuff in, but there is no other way, and it has become second nature.
Funny, I'm not all that old (just 23), but sometimes that thought does cross my mind. However, I what I'm seeing more and more are "punk" kids. For example, my high school was largely tolerant of different types of people - I was (and still am) a geek, and was accepted by most people.
These punk kids I see are the ones that are largely intolerant and think that they're all that. There is little or no desire to understand other people or appreciate things/people outside their comfort zone. I'm seeing that these kids are the ones that help perpetuate the persecution and alienation of those considered geeks, nerds, or Not-Cool-Enough(TM).
*Sigh*, someone posted.. "Love is the answer", and I wholly believe that (and try my best to live that, too.)
On "Over My Head (Live)" Doug Pinnick King's X's vocalist, sings and tells the Woodstock audience to love their kids, even if they're freaks, weird... or else their kids will end up "fucked up...like me". Amen! It's sad seeing frustrated kids running around beating themselves up emotionally - or worse - because of the lack of love in their lives; and we (I'll lump us all) grownups resort to "percentage statistics" about this and that, and to profiling to try to combat the symptoms of this common human condition. Hello priorities here...
BTW: I do fit some of the criteria of the geek profile, but I was never persecuted for being "smart" or computer-literate, etc. (actually only for standing up for my Christian world-views to a friend once in class.) Sure, it's tougher to fix the matters of the heart - let's face it, the government is not up to task to it - I don't think it was ever their job. We, as "grownup" geeks, who have struggled through the high school experiences, the Slashdot community at large, have the onus to reach out and shape our communities slowly. Let's face it, the problem won't go away just with us complaining and philosophizing here - in fact, it'll probably get worse, starting with "geek profiling".
And about those punk kids, I've gotta give them some slack, too - give 'em some sort of role model for them to look up to, I guess.
I've heard great suggestions about sponsoring, hiring geeks, taking kids under our wings, etc. It's a dark world out there, and for those that have started stepping out to the light, let's help the younger ones.
Technically, I'm not quite sure how it handles processes and if uses shared memory to store live data. Although I believe it is extensible to use shared memory. We've used it in many situations: for displaying "custom selections" of news, search results, etc. similar to what's described in the abstract.
I'm sure there are several more free-software solutions out there that are similar. Can anyone else concur?
Dan
*My first post! Woo Hoo!*