SprintPCS still offers the first incoming minute free on all but the cheapest plans.
I could have sworn that voicestream was CDMA (at least in Pgh, since they just bought Ariel) in the US, and GSM abroad - like you'd have to buy a tri-band phone.
I think Carnegie Mellon is credible, especially since CMU's got CERT - which specializes in security vulnerabilities. Altough I believe CERT is still funded by the government (department of defense).
Anyway, everyone knows that Penn State students are only good at drinking and rioting.
I guess things quiet down when the students are gone. Only a school in the middle of nowhere could be so excited over a crane arriving!
Penn State usually has lots of news. It was on 20/20 earlier this summer for being the biggest drinking school in the country. And it made national news a month or so ago for riots at the Arts Festival.
Here's a copy of the Carnegie Mellon press release on the topic. This is from the CMU 8 1/2 x 11 News, which is also posted on the CMU bboards. It includes some info not in the other articles, so I figure I'll post it here:
(The "8 1/2 x 11 News" is published each week by the Department of Public Relations. The newsletter is available on the official.cmu-news and cmu.misc.news bulletin boards.)
NSF Awards $45 Million to Supercomputing Center for "Terascale" Computing
The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) has been awarded
$45 million from the National Science Foundation to provide "terascale"
computing capability for U.S. researchers in all science and engineering
disciplines. Through this award, PSC will collaborate with Compaq Computer
Corporation to create a new, extremely powerful system for the use of
scientists and engineers nationwide.
Terascale refers to computational power beyond a "teraflop" -- a trillion
calculations per second. While several terascale systems have been
developed for classified research at national laboratories, the PSC system
will be the most powerful to date designed as an open resource for
scientists attacking a wide range of problems. In this respect, it fills a
gap in U.S. research capability -- highlighted in a 1999 report to
President Clinton -- and will facilitate progress in many areas of
significant social impact, such as the structure and dynamics of proteins
useful in drug design, storm-scale weather forecasting, earthquake
modeling, and modeling of global climate change.
The three-year award, effective Oct. 1, is based on PSC's proposal to
provide a system, installed and available for use in 2001, with peak
performance exceeding six teraflops. To achieve this, PSC and Compaq
proposed a system architecture, based on existing or soon to be available
components, optimized to the computational requirements posed by a wide
range of research applications and which, at this level of performance,
pushes beyond simple evolution of existing technology.
The brain of the proposed six teraflop system will be an interconnected
network of Compaq AlphaServers, 682 of them, each of which itself contains
four Compaq Alpha microprocessors. Existing terascale systems rely on other
processors, but extensive testing by PSC and others indicates that the
Alpha processor offers superior performance over a range of applications.
Development of this system will draw on a history of collaboration between
PSC and Compaq, and represents an extension of PSC's history of success at
installing untried, new systems -- resolving the myriad of unanticipated
hardware and software glitches that come up -- and turning them over
rapidly to the scientific community as productive research tools.
The PSC terascale system, to be located at the Westinghouse Energy Center,
Monroeville, will be a component of NSF's Partnerships for Advanced
Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program, supplementing other
computational resources available to U. S. scientists and engineers.
"The PSC has -- with its partners at Carnegie Mellon University, the
University of Pittsburgh and Westinghouse -- an excellent record of
installing innovative, high-performance systems and operating them to
maximize research productivity," said NSF director Rita Colwell.
"We're pleased that NSF's terascale initiative gives us this opportunity to
use PSC's proven capability in high-performance computing, communications
and informatics in support of the national research effort," said PSC
scientific directors Michael Levine and Ralph Roskies in a joint statement.
"Working in partnership with Compaq, we'll create a system that enables
U.S. researchers to attack the most computationally challenging problems in
engineering and science."
"Compaq is looking forward to working with the National Science Foundation
and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and we are committed to the
success of the terascale initiative," said Michael Capellas, Compaq's
president and CEO. "With our AlphaServer systems and Tru64 UNIX, we are
providing the technology infrastructure for some of the most advanced
computing projects in the world. This is further proof of Compaq's
leadership in high-performance computing and our commitment to help open
new frontiers in science and technology."
Development and implementation of the terascale system, including software
and networking, will draw on fundamental research in computer science. A
significant strength of PSC is its tri-partite affiliation with
Westinghouse and with Carnegie Mellon University and the University of
Pittsburgh and the pooled computing-related expertise of faculty and staff
at both universities.
"This award, which comes as the culmination of a national competition,
recognizes PSC's leadership in high-performance computing and
communications," said Jared L. Cohon, president of Carnegie Mellon. "And it
provides another key building block for our region's technology future,
enhancing our international stature in the development and application of
advanced computing technology."
"A gap exists between the computing resources available to the classified
world and the open scientific community," said Mark Nordenberg, chancellor
of the University of Pittsburgh. "It is ideal that PSC, a world leader in
acquiring and deploying early the most powerful computers for science and
engineering, can contribute to filling this gap. This award also
demonstrates the unique scientific strengths that exist in Pittsburgh when
its major research universities partner with each other and with leaders in
industry."
"Today's terascale award is one more in a long list of PSC's major
achievements," said Charlie Pryor, president and CEO of Westinghouse
Electric Company. "Westinghouse is proud of PSC's contribution to the
nation's scientific community and is pleased to have been associated with
PSC since its inception."
Under the proposal, PSC will by the end of this year install an initial
system with a peak performance of 0.4 teraflops. The six teraflop system,
which will use faster Compaq Alpha microprocessors not yet available, will
evolve from this system. The four-processor AlphaServers use
high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnect technology developed by Compaq
through a U.S. Department of Energy advanced technology program.
The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center is a joint effort of Carnegie Mellon
University and the University of Pittsburgh together with the Westinghouse
Electric Company. It was established in 1986 and is supported by several
federal agencies, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and private industry.
# # #
An artist's rendition of PSC's terascale system and examples of potential
research applications are available at:
http://www.psc.edu/publicinfo/tcs
This page on the PSC website gives detailed descriptions of the planned uses of this supercomputer...
Including Storm Prediction, Protein Folding, Turbulence Studies, Earthquake Preparedness, AIDS Research, Cardiac Fluid Modeling, Oceanic Phenomena, Electromagnetics and Fluid Dynamics.
They've also got some pretty neat animations of some of all of the above.
According to their website...
"PSC operates five supercomputing-class machines: a 512 processor Cray T3E, two eight-processor Cray J90s, a four-processor Alphaserver 8400 5/300 system, and an Intel cluster with 10 4-processor compute nodes."
This page provides a description of the work researchers plan to do with the new supercomputer.
I'm sorry you didn't have a better teacher - that makes the world of difference!
We didn't do the AP thing, we did University of Pittsburgh College in HS. It worked out nice. I've heard people talk about the AP header files, and I don't get the point of them, we had to implement everything ourselves. Maybe I misundertand their purpose?
In my second year, our book was terrible too. We spent so much time fixing the book's sample programs it wasn't funny.
You cannot use yourself as an example. Most people who read slash are not only intelligent but have an extreme interest in computers.
Most students who take CS classes are not 'techies' - not even close.
And by the end of the year my extremely good C++ teacher couldn't have 'normal' kids working on a project like that. Fourty minutes a day. Five days a week. That's it. Techies? Sure! Normal kids? Heck no!
You are not 'normal' students. I am not a 'normal' student.
There is an huge difference between the towers of hanoi and lets say, OpenNap. Basic CS students are going to have NO CLUE how to even begin to approach that kind of a project. You probably did when you were in high school, because you were extremely interested in computers.
Most students who are in CS classes in high school, aren't extremely interested in computers. So you have to target the class at the LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR. This sourceforge idea is great for advanced students, but not for normal students.
It's like asking students who are supposed to be learning linear motion how to launch a satelite!
I agree. Having a great teacher makes a significant difference. My CS teacher (Calc teacher too) was amazing. He would jump up and down amd preach about the 'feel good feeling' that you get when your program works perfect. I would be much further behind without him.
In my second year of CS in HS my instructor and I set up my class on a mozilla qa project. netscape even called the school and was going to give us computers and they were whipping up a press-release.
Then my teacher's father died and he was out of school for a week and we had to spend the rest of the year catching up on class topics - so we never had time to finish the mozilla qa stuff.
Sorry, I didn't mean to flame - I'm just used to beginning CS students. At my school the upper-level people (like you and I) actually helped teach the normal kids in class...
This is a nice idea for another type of class, maybe say a graphics design class, but html does not teach students CS concepts!
Also, school boards / administrations get very very picky about a school's public image. Every bit of content would have to be approved by umpteen-million people.
I've got a little experience - I've almost been sued over my high school newspaper's website.
How can you say it's best to learn programming on your own?
I think most people are missing the point of HS CS and even college CS. It's not to teach someone Java or Perl or whatever: they're intended to teach logic/cs basics to students, so that no matter what language the future brings, they'll be able to learn it and adapt!
Students need logic and basic CS concepts taught to them by someone who knows what they're doing before they learn programming languages.
This would be a great idea if every high school cs student was a super-nerd like most of slashdot readers. But they're not.
I just graduated from high school, where I took three years of CS (C++ 2 yrs, independent study 1 yr). Granted, I had an amazing teacher. He could have been making a whole lot of money or inventing some amazing stuff, but instead, he really cared about helping kids learn. But that's another subject.
But a lot of kids taking CS were there only because they needed another elective. Or their parents pushed them because "computer people make so much money." And more importantly, most students are just learning important basic CS topics like functions, variables, etc. It's important to remember that these students need taught not only the specifics of their language, but the logic required to be a good programmer.
So anyway, the reason it's hard to make projects exciting is because all of the exciting projects are way too complicated!
Thankfully, my school didn't do AP CS, insted we used the University of Pittsburgh's College in High School program (CHS).
We got PITT credit for the class, based on multiple tests and projects completed throughout the year, not just one stupid AP test. I took AP chem, and I thought it was the biggest waste because the teacher tried to teach to the test, and we ended up learning nothing productive.
I also had a very good CS teacher, who also taught me Calc.
While some schools laugh at AP credit, Pitt credit seems to work. Carnegie Mellon usually takes Pitt credit (I'll be a freshmen there this year).
But anyway, Pitt CHS requires Pascal before C++ to teach basic CS concepts. You have to remember that most of the kids in the class have no idea what variables or functions are.
Slashdot Mirror
RedX, thanks for the link.
SprintPCS still offers the first incoming minute free on all but the cheapest plans.
I could have sworn that voicestream was CDMA (at least in Pgh, since they just bought Ariel) in the US, and GSM abroad - like you'd have to buy a tri-band phone.
Anyone know for sure?
You're missing the point.
Maybe he deserved a bit of questioning... but the confiscation of his equipment is out of hand.
Ahhh!
It's bad enough that Gore and all of the other union-loving Democrats are holding a rally at Carnegie Mellon tomorrow.
How anyone could vote for such a lying sack of crap is beyond me.
key word: trying.
You can now read your AOL email via IMAP. There's even a wizard to set it up in NS6 PR1/2. I'm pretty sure it's just imap.mail.aol.com
Altough IMAP can be a pain in the ass - especially when used with Mulberry.
I think Carnegie Mellon is credible, especially since CMU's got CERT - which specializes in security vulnerabilities. Altough I believe CERT is still funded by the government (department of defense).
Anyway, everyone knows that Penn State students are only good at drinking and rioting.
I guess things quiet down when the students are gone. Only a school in the middle of nowhere could be so excited over a crane arriving!
Penn State usually has lots of news. It was on 20/20 earlier this summer for being the biggest drinking school in the country. And it made national news a month or so ago for riots at the Arts Festival.
Then again, the most exciting things going on at my school are: An Invisible computing aura and Fading beauty.
W2K isn't based on the DOS kernel, it's based on the NT kernel. DOS does not exist in Windows 2000!
Altought NT does provide a CLI, and attempts to emulate DOS for most DOS programs.
Here's a copy of the Carnegie Mellon press release on the topic. This is from the CMU 8 1/2 x 11 News, which is also posted on the CMU bboards. It includes some info not in the other articles, so I figure I'll post it here:
(The "8 1/2 x 11 News" is published each week by the Department of Public Relations. The newsletter is available on the official.cmu-news and cmu.misc.news bulletin boards.)
NSF Awards $45 Million to Supercomputing Center for "Terascale" Computing
The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) has been awarded
$45 million from the National Science Foundation to provide "terascale"
computing capability for U.S. researchers in all science and engineering
disciplines. Through this award, PSC will collaborate with Compaq Computer
Corporation to create a new, extremely powerful system for the use of
scientists and engineers nationwide.
Terascale refers to computational power beyond a "teraflop" -- a trillion
calculations per second. While several terascale systems have been
developed for classified research at national laboratories, the PSC system
will be the most powerful to date designed as an open resource for
scientists attacking a wide range of problems. In this respect, it fills a
gap in U.S. research capability -- highlighted in a 1999 report to
President Clinton -- and will facilitate progress in many areas of
significant social impact, such as the structure and dynamics of proteins
useful in drug design, storm-scale weather forecasting, earthquake
modeling, and modeling of global climate change.
The three-year award, effective Oct. 1, is based on PSC's proposal to
provide a system, installed and available for use in 2001, with peak
performance exceeding six teraflops. To achieve this, PSC and Compaq
proposed a system architecture, based on existing or soon to be available
components, optimized to the computational requirements posed by a wide
range of research applications and which, at this level of performance,
pushes beyond simple evolution of existing technology.
The brain of the proposed six teraflop system will be an interconnected
network of Compaq AlphaServers, 682 of them, each of which itself contains
four Compaq Alpha microprocessors. Existing terascale systems rely on other
processors, but extensive testing by PSC and others indicates that the
Alpha processor offers superior performance over a range of applications.
Development of this system will draw on a history of collaboration between
PSC and Compaq, and represents an extension of PSC's history of success at
installing untried, new systems -- resolving the myriad of unanticipated
hardware and software glitches that come up -- and turning them over
rapidly to the scientific community as productive research tools.
The PSC terascale system, to be located at the Westinghouse Energy Center,
Monroeville, will be a component of NSF's Partnerships for Advanced
Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program, supplementing other
computational resources available to U. S. scientists and engineers.
"The PSC has -- with its partners at Carnegie Mellon University, the
University of Pittsburgh and Westinghouse -- an excellent record of
installing innovative, high-performance systems and operating them to
maximize research productivity," said NSF director Rita Colwell.
"We're pleased that NSF's terascale initiative gives us this opportunity to
use PSC's proven capability in high-performance computing, communications
and informatics in support of the national research effort," said PSC
scientific directors Michael Levine and Ralph Roskies in a joint statement.
"Working in partnership with Compaq, we'll create a system that enables
U.S. researchers to attack the most computationally challenging problems in
engineering and science."
"Compaq is looking forward to working with the National Science Foundation
and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and we are committed to the
success of the terascale initiative," said Michael Capellas, Compaq's
president and CEO. "With our AlphaServer systems and Tru64 UNIX, we are
providing the technology infrastructure for some of the most advanced
computing projects in the world. This is further proof of Compaq's
leadership in high-performance computing and our commitment to help open
new frontiers in science and technology."
Development and implementation of the terascale system, including software
and networking, will draw on fundamental research in computer science. A
significant strength of PSC is its tri-partite affiliation with
Westinghouse and with Carnegie Mellon University and the University of
Pittsburgh and the pooled computing-related expertise of faculty and staff
at both universities.
"This award, which comes as the culmination of a national competition,
recognizes PSC's leadership in high-performance computing and
communications," said Jared L. Cohon, president of Carnegie Mellon. "And it
provides another key building block for our region's technology future,
enhancing our international stature in the development and application of
advanced computing technology."
"A gap exists between the computing resources available to the classified
world and the open scientific community," said Mark Nordenberg, chancellor
of the University of Pittsburgh. "It is ideal that PSC, a world leader in
acquiring and deploying early the most powerful computers for science and
engineering, can contribute to filling this gap. This award also
demonstrates the unique scientific strengths that exist in Pittsburgh when
its major research universities partner with each other and with leaders in
industry."
"Today's terascale award is one more in a long list of PSC's major
achievements," said Charlie Pryor, president and CEO of Westinghouse
Electric Company. "Westinghouse is proud of PSC's contribution to the
nation's scientific community and is pleased to have been associated with
PSC since its inception."
Under the proposal, PSC will by the end of this year install an initial
system with a peak performance of 0.4 teraflops. The six teraflop system,
which will use faster Compaq Alpha microprocessors not yet available, will
evolve from this system. The four-processor AlphaServers use
high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnect technology developed by Compaq
through a U.S. Department of Energy advanced technology program.
The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center is a joint effort of Carnegie Mellon
University and the University of Pittsburgh together with the Westinghouse
Electric Company. It was established in 1986 and is supported by several
federal agencies, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and private industry.
# # #
An artist's rendition of PSC's terascale system and examples of potential
research applications are available at:
http://www.psc.edu/publicinfo/tcs
I think most of the supercomputing centers in the US are connected to the vBNS, so that would be a start.
This page on the PSC website gives detailed descriptions of the planned uses of this supercomputer...
Including Storm Prediction, Protein Folding, Turbulence Studies, Earthquake Preparedness, AIDS Research, Cardiac Fluid Modeling, Oceanic Phenomena, Electromagnetics and Fluid Dynamics.
They've also got some pretty neat animations of some of all of the above.
According to their website... "PSC operates five supercomputing-class machines: a 512 processor Cray T3E, two eight-processor Cray J90s, a four-processor Alphaserver 8400 5/300 system, and an Intel cluster with 10 4-processor compute nodes."
This page provides a description of the work researchers plan to do with the new supercomputer.
The center is a joint venture between Carnegie Mellon, The University of Pittsurgh, and the old Westinghouse Electric company.
It's also intersting to note that the PSC & CMU formed the NCNE Gigapop that provides the internet to CMU, PITT, WVU, and Penn State.
I'm sorry you didn't have a better teacher - that makes the world of difference!
We didn't do the AP thing, we did University of Pittsburgh College in HS. It worked out nice. I've heard people talk about the AP header files, and I don't get the point of them, we had to implement everything ourselves. Maybe I misundertand their purpose?
In my second year, our book was terrible too. We spent so much time fixing the book's sample programs it wasn't funny.
Again, we're missing the point here.
You cannot use yourself as an example. Most people who read slash are not only intelligent but have an extreme interest in computers.
Most students who take CS classes are not 'techies' - not even close.
And by the end of the year my extremely good C++ teacher couldn't have 'normal' kids working on a project like that. Fourty minutes a day. Five days a week. That's it. Techies? Sure! Normal kids? Heck no!
All of you are missing the point!
You are not 'normal' students. I am not a 'normal' student.
There is an huge difference between the towers of hanoi and lets say, OpenNap. Basic CS students are going to have NO CLUE how to even begin to approach that kind of a project. You probably did when you were in high school, because you were extremely interested in computers.
Most students who are in CS classes in high school, aren't extremely interested in computers. So you have to target the class at the LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR. This sourceforge idea is great for advanced students, but not for normal students.
It's like asking students who are supposed to be learning linear motion how to launch a satelite!
I agree. Having a great teacher makes a significant difference. My CS teacher (Calc teacher too) was amazing. He would jump up and down amd preach about the 'feel good feeling' that you get when your program works perfect. I would be much further behind without him.
In my second year of CS in HS my instructor and I set up my class on a mozilla qa project. netscape even called the school and was going to give us computers and they were whipping up a press-release.
Then my teacher's father died and he was out of school for a week and we had to spend the rest of the year catching up on class topics - so we never had time to finish the mozilla qa stuff.
I'm trying not to flame here but none of the above is CS!
That is all IT stuff!
Functions, classes, recursion, inheritance... That's CS.
Sorry, I didn't mean to flame - I'm just used to beginning CS students. At my school the upper-level people (like you and I) actually helped teach the normal kids in class...
This is a nice idea for another type of class, maybe say a graphics design class, but html does not teach students CS concepts!
Also, school boards / administrations get very very picky about a school's public image. Every bit of content would have to be approved by umpteen-million people.
I've got a little experience - I've almost been sued over my high school newspaper's website.
This is unrealistic. Most high school CS kids can't even program linked lists correctly!
You all are forgetting that these students are beginners, and that most of them aren't computer dorks!
How can you say it's best to learn programming on your own?
I think most people are missing the point of HS CS and even college CS. It's not to teach someone Java or Perl or whatever: they're intended to teach logic/cs basics to students, so that no matter what language the future brings, they'll be able to learn it and adapt!
Students need logic and basic CS concepts taught to them by someone who knows what they're doing before they learn programming languages.
This would be a great idea if every high school cs student was a super-nerd like most of slashdot readers. But they're not.
I just graduated from high school, where I took three years of CS (C++ 2 yrs, independent study 1 yr). Granted, I had an amazing teacher. He could have been making a whole lot of money or inventing some amazing stuff, but instead, he really cared about helping kids learn. But that's another subject.
But a lot of kids taking CS were there only because they needed another elective. Or their parents pushed them because "computer people make so much money." And more importantly, most students are just learning important basic CS topics like functions, variables, etc. It's important to remember that these students need taught not only the specifics of their language, but the logic required to be a good programmer.
So anyway, the reason it's hard to make projects exciting is because all of the exciting projects are way too complicated!
I just graduated from high school...
Thankfully, my school didn't do AP CS, insted we used the University of Pittsburgh's College in High School program (CHS).
We got PITT credit for the class, based on multiple tests and projects completed throughout the year, not just one stupid AP test. I took AP chem, and I thought it was the biggest waste because the teacher tried to teach to the test, and we ended up learning nothing productive.
I also had a very good CS teacher, who also taught me Calc.
While some schools laugh at AP credit, Pitt credit seems to work. Carnegie Mellon usually takes Pitt credit (I'll be a freshmen there this year).
But anyway, Pitt CHS requires Pascal before C++ to teach basic CS concepts. You have to remember that most of the kids in the class have no idea what variables or functions are.