I'm not a "dirty" person, but I also don't wash my hands all the time (of course I do after taking a crap, but thats a bit different).
Antibacterial soaps have only landed us in more trouble, since the bacteria left are resistant to them. I do like the idea of the new alcohol based cleaners though, since they aren't antibacterial.
I don't stress out about making sure my pork is cooked all the way through, I don't scrub down my kitchen with bleach every day, and I also never get sick. Compare this to others I know that are neat freaks, and tend to get really sick a few times a year and seem to get horribly sick every time they eat something a bit off. I've eaten the same shitty chinese food or tacos as someone else and while they were getting violently ill and had the shits for a few days, I didn't feel a thing.
Agreed. I have a bachelors in game design. About a year before I graduated I came to my senses and realized I didn't want to work for 80 hours a week, sleep under my desk, and get carpal tunnel by 25. Not only that, but I realized that the type of programming I'd be doing is BORING. Its not like you get to play the game when your tweaking on a game engine, and you never finish it yourself. Its not the same sense of accomplishment you feel when you write a 50 line perl script that does some cool data translation or something.
I thought it was funny that every year about 100 kids would come in to the program, and each year you'd see about half of them gone. 50, 25, and down to about 12 by the junior year.
I always think its funny whenever this subject comes up on a forum like this, everyone thats not seen it done before calls everyone else an idiot.
When I was younger my dad showed me how to dowse with a coat hanger bent into an L shape. We were looking for the sewage line from the back of our house, because we'd just moved there and didn't know where the septic tanks were at. After walking around for a bit, I noticed the rod started lining up a certain way every time I walked past a certain spot. I showed my dad, he did the same thing, then we dug there and found the septic line.
I was maybe 10 years old, I had no knowlege of septic lines, the lay of the land, etc. All I was told was "hold this rod like this and walk around and you'll see it do something funny eventually." All we knew was that the line left the back of the house somewhere, and went towards a field, it could have been anywhere within about an acre of area.
I'm sure some of you don't believe it, but it works well enough I've seen DOT personel use it to find water lines under roads.
I like IT type stuff, but I realized I don't really enjoy programming which is what my undergrad mostly is. I figured management might be a decent direction to head, since I know and understand the lingo, the technology, and could actually make some informed decisions.
I'll be graduating next summer with a Masters in IT Management. (Undergrad in Simulation Design Engineering) 75k or so in loans, and the year I went to college they jacked up the interest rate to 6.8%.
And to everyone saying its unsecured debt needs to actually look into their facts. Student Loans can not be bankrupt on, if I don't pay, the gubmint will dock my pay. Which actually is a better deal that paying the loans, the max they can dock is 15% per check, and my loans will be way more than that to actually pay.
The loans are government backed, they should be no interest.
great idea, until the mesh collects ice on it, gets too heavy for its supports, and is sucked into the engine. Engines are designed to take a bird strike, but not a big ball of ice and wire mesh.
My gas company offered the option of using Checkfree. Had I opted in, it cost an additional 8$ to pay with my credit card, rather than sending in a personal check.
Instead I just use US Banks online Billpay option. Free, and cuts out the middle man.
I think this sort of thing is somewhat common among poorer schools. I was my high schools computer/network admin for 2 years. They had hired a guy, but he quit midway through my sophomore year for more money elsewhere.
We had an outside contracted company that kept our cisco gear and T1 connection going, but I took care of the file servers, any small network hiccups, and fixing the desktops for the teachers. In return I was given 2 free periods a day to do this and/or goof off.
I wasn't exactly the best of kids either, and got in trouble quite often. However I made it clear that if they suspended me, I would quit doing the work for free and just enroll in wood shop or something instead. Never got suspended or detentions, generally just a slap on the wrist after that.
I keep a shotgun under the bed. You better believe that if i'd woken up to masked men storming my house, i'd have opened fire. I shouldn't have to expect a swat team, and castle doctorine says I have the right to protect my house and person.
But what about mounting the satellite dish on a very tall pole, that can see over the top of the trees? It may take some fabbing, but it could be doable.
Or, if you have the cohoneys, climb the tallest tree you can find, and mount it towards the top. You could trim off one sides branches. You would have to run 3 or 4 guy wires to keep the tree steady in the wind though. It would be very doable however.
You could put a shack on the top of the mountain next to your satellite tree, and use a wifi link on the other side of the tree to shoot it down to your house, where another reciever could pick it up.
It'd be a project, but feasibly done in a weekend or two.
My school has a game design major, that I'm a part of.
The internet in the dorms was shittacular. Horrible horrible service, and we had to pay 30$ a month for it. And, the IT department, when called out on this bullshit, couldn't even give us a break down on how our money was being spent.
So, 3 years ago me and several friends sent an email out to everyone of importance around campus calling them out, basically saying it was bullcrap they advertise themselves as being all advanced at this university and having this gaming major, but the gaming major students can't even get online half the time in their dorms to play....games.
Within several hours, most faculty was writing back and agreeing with us. We showed up at a meeting, and the head of IT didn't have anything together at all.
Basically what happened was for a few months we could opt to be on a seperate network through the engineering department that wasn't managed by the IT department, but rather a professor in his spare time. And gasp, this network was far far superior and less buggy. It had 50% of the computers on campus on it, and 0% of the budget, yet still managed to be far more reliable.
Then, after the next quarter passed, we were allowed to get outside ISP service in the dorms. Alot of my friends get adelphia internet access. I just chose to move off campus, I was tired of dealing with it. You still had to pay the IT department for their crummy connection, on top of paying another ISP.
I own both the TGEA and the torque engine. I've also bought some other stuff from them like model packs.
First of all, their engine has little to no documentation. Generally, if you ask for help on their forums, they tell you to buy the book. There is a "torque game engine for beginners book".
That was a waste of 50$. The book sucks. Its not a reference book, its a simple walk through on simple beginner stuff.
Their model pack (I bought the adam pack) sucked. I payed 20$ for a model, it came with no documentation, and wouldn't work on multiplayer games. When a second player joined, Adam would quit displaying animations. This didn't happen with any other model. When I emailed and asked, I never got a response.
They also sell weapons packs. Don't buy these. You would think a weapon pack would come with scripts for the weapons, (and they even say they do) but these aren't the scripts you need to actually make the weapon behave like what it is. This script just ties the weapon to some internal engine stuff. You still have to write your own weapon script to make an AK47 act like one. Which honestly shouldn't be that hard, but it is. THERE IS NO EXAMPLES, WHAT SO EVER. Weapons are a HUGE part of any FPS game. But when I asked if anyone knew how to make a weapon semi-auto, I Just got dumb looks, no help. There were no docs anywhere on it. I had to sit there and screw around with it for a night to figure out there state machine in the weapon scripts. Their scripts don't even come with comments.
What REALLY pissed me off was when they started selling 1.5. I own 1.4 and the shader engine. 1.5 is 1.4 with some bug fixes and the light pack. I would have had to pay full price for it if I wanted it. Thats bullcrap. Thats like MS charging for Service Pack 2 for XP.
All there are is a bunch of script and code snippets to add stuff on to the engine. But most of these are severely outdated and not updated. If you read the comments, most of them go in order like this "Does this work on 1.2?" then "does this work on 1.3?" and so forth. Just people over the years tring to get them to work on the various updated engines. Most of the time they don't work, or break something else.
Then I made the mistake of buying a product from a company called dreamRPG. This was supposed to be the torque engine, but with all of the updates and stuff done and working already. Another waste of 150$. Their release builds are buggy as heck. They can't even take the time to make an example game (like garage games does actually do) that shows off what their product can do and that you can use as an example to build on. Its a piece of junk, and their forums and IRC channel are full of people asking the same questions you are with absolutely no answers.
I've never seen an impressive game built on torque. They're all cookie cutter games made from the same sets of code example snippets.
I'm a senior in a Game Programming degree, and I'm very fluent in C++ and several other languages. Their engine is frustratingly hard to figure out even the simplest things in.
If I could get a refund, I'd do it in a heartbeat. I feel very ripped off. I bought the torque game engine, and realized how bad it looked. So I bought the shader engine to fix that. Then I bought the DreamRPG package to fix the frustration of having no examples or anything to work with. Now I just have a huge pile of crap and I'm 500$ poorer.
The torque engine has been around for a long time, and gone through alot of fixes, bug patches, and updates. Its a pain to try to figure out at all because of all of this. Your much better off using a product like Ogre. The month or two you'll spend building up a decent workable base for a game engine is nothing in comparison to the year I've spent banging my head against the desk with torque. I've worked with both, and I prefer Ogre. You'll be able to read your own code, and there is a nice wiki with lots of examples.
I rent a room from a friend who bought a house while in college last year. The house cost 25k, and he's put maybe 5k into fixing it up. Nothing structural, just putting in new flooring and painting. It has a nice backyard and a 2 car garage with a second story on it for storage. The house has 2 bedrooms, kitchen, dining room, entry room and living room. Definately a nice livable house, for a hell of a price.
So yeah, I'd say its doable. It just really depends on where you live.
Or my 3d guy can be smart and use Lightwave or maya. I'm sorry, but Blender sucks. Bad. Every single 3d guy that I know that has tried to use it just laughs at it. Its horrible. Maybe in ten years it will be up to snuff.
For 100$ you can get torque. It was the best investment I ever made. I'm a gaming and simulation major at college, and I needed something for my senior project. I still have a year left before I have to start on it, but I decided to get a jump start.
99% of things you want to do can be done with the scripting langauge in torque, which in my opinion is very C like. Milkshape will let you export your models to.DTS format which is what torque uses, and you can do all of your mapping with Valve's Hammer Editor, which is a very nice editor.
I'm working on a project with 2 friends, ones a character modeler, ones a mapper, and I'm the progamming guy to put it all together. most of what I want to do has already been done before, so all I have to do is look on the torque forums to find step by step directions on how to do everything from adding flashlights, adding vehicles, night visions, or anything else I could possibly want.
And, if you buy the upgraded lighting pack for 50$, the torque engine looks very pretty.
I know exactly what your talking about, it happens all the time to my at school, the PCs we have have non-shielded speakers.
But...I just realized, it never happens at home. I have a set of 5 year old Klipsch 2.1 Speakers, that I would assume have better than normal shielding.
Right now I'm sitting in a computer lab full of 30 alienware top of the line computers with Samsung Syncmaster 19" monitors.
I go to school for a Gaming and Simulation engineering degree. To attract more students, one of the things we wanted to get to show off was a lab of alienware. We had a bunch of grant money, and a very limited amount of time to spend it before it was taken back from us, so we had to make some quick decisions.
We bought about 4 DLP projectors, some firewire DV cams, a nice security system for the lab, a 60" Plasma screen with the touch thingy on it so you can use it as a touch screen, and 30 alienwares. We also bought some biometrics stuff, Ibuttons for everyone in the degree so we can get into the lab without a key, and a bunch of other stuff.
Anyways, I don't know of any problems that we had with them. I'm friends with the lab tech, and the only thing I have seen go wrong in the 3 months we've had them is 2 of the samsung LCD monitors were DOA and one died a few weeks later. Everything else seemed fine.
I learned 4 other languages before I learned VB. I was rather suprised at how powerful it really was. I had been told all along "VB is for idiots, blah blah blah", and then I took a GUI programming class, and the langauge we used to write our little example GUIs in was VB. It was amazing how quickly I could get a nice looking application up and running and doing something useful.
BUT. If you want a an easy to learn, object oriented langauge, I VERY highly recommend python. Its not incredibly speedy (there are libraries out there to speed it up), since its an interpreted language, but getting real things done very soon is extremely easy.
I am a gaming and simulation major at a small university, and the first langauge the freshman learn is python, then the second quarter they learn C. Python spoils them, quite frankly. Thankfully, I learned C first, then C++, java, and then python, but I have to say, given a choice as to which langauge I would use for any given console application (I have yet to do GUI with python), hands down it would be python.
I was the only one in my algorithims class that knew python, when I took the class. Other students were extremely jelous that I could more or less type in the pseudo code off the board and have a working program, where as it would take them hours to get an algorithim functioning properly in C or Java.
I go to a small state school in Southern Ohio (Shawnee State Uni)
It is NOT a requirment to have a laptop for any classes. However 1) you can borrow a laptop at the library (and for use ONLY in the library) 2) They are currently installing campus wide wireless, and have it up and working in about half the buildings right now, and it should be up everywhere by the end of the year. 3) If you want, you CAN use financial aid to pay for a computer. HEll, you can use financial aid to pay for anything. I use it to pay for my rent, groceries and everything. There aren't any good jobs around here, so I basically take out as much as I would if I lived on campus from student loans, but then they cut me a check for about 2 grand a quarter that I use to pay for rent, food, utilities, sometimes clothes, and stuff like that. I don't neccessitate alot of gas money or anything because I live about 10 blocks from campus and can ride my bike there when its above freezing. I do work on campus as a tutor and Student assistant, but I don't make too much, about 50$ a month, and that is basically my beer and snack food fund.
I am in the an engineering degree, Gaming and Simulation design engineering to be exact, and we are asked to have either a laptop or a small ITX computer. There are labs, and if you have the ITX computer you can just plug it into the keyboard, mouse, monitor and network jacks.
I have a laptop, but I never take it to class. I find it pointless. We have class in computer labs, every bit of software I need is already there, I don't have to use a 15" screen and touchpad, and I can save my notes that I type in class to my FTP server at home, or if thats down, email them to myself. Most of the time I don't take anything to class other than myself.
The way I feel is, a properly configured campus wouldn't NEED laptops. Put cheap desktop computers in every lab, make it so you can save to a central server, and once your home, you can FTP in and get your files. Thats how we have it set up in my engineering building. Very time saving, and you don't have to lug around 7 or 8 pounds of gear.
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I'm not a "dirty" person, but I also don't wash my hands all the time (of course I do after taking a crap, but thats a bit different).
Antibacterial soaps have only landed us in more trouble, since the bacteria left are resistant to them. I do like the idea of the new alcohol based cleaners though, since they aren't antibacterial.
I don't stress out about making sure my pork is cooked all the way through, I don't scrub down my kitchen with bleach every day, and I also never get sick.
Compare this to others I know that are neat freaks, and tend to get really sick a few times a year and seem to get horribly sick every time they eat something a bit off. I've eaten the same shitty chinese food or tacos as someone else and while they were getting violently ill and had the shits for a few days, I didn't feel a thing.
Agreed. I have a bachelors in game design. About a year before I graduated I came to my senses and realized I didn't want to work for 80 hours a week, sleep under my desk, and get carpal tunnel by 25. Not only that, but I realized that the type of programming I'd be doing is BORING. Its not like you get to play the game when your tweaking on a game engine, and you never finish it yourself. Its not the same sense of accomplishment you feel when you write a 50 line perl script that does some cool data translation or something.
I thought it was funny that every year about 100 kids would come in to the program, and each year you'd see about half of them gone. 50, 25, and down to about 12 by the junior year.
I always think its funny whenever this subject comes up on a forum like this, everyone thats not seen it done before calls everyone else an idiot.
When I was younger my dad showed me how to dowse with a coat hanger bent into an L shape. We were looking for the sewage line from the back of our house, because we'd just moved there and didn't know where the septic tanks were at. After walking around for a bit, I noticed the rod started lining up a certain way every time I walked past a certain spot. I showed my dad, he did the same thing, then we dug there and found the septic line.
I was maybe 10 years old, I had no knowlege of septic lines, the lay of the land, etc. All I was told was "hold this rod like this and walk around and you'll see it do something funny eventually." All we knew was that the line left the back of the house somewhere, and went towards a field, it could have been anywhere within about an acre of area.
I'm sure some of you don't believe it, but it works well enough I've seen DOT personel use it to find water lines under roads.
Agreed, but work is picking up most of the tab.
I like IT type stuff, but I realized I don't really enjoy programming which is what my undergrad mostly is.
I figured management might be a decent direction to head, since I know and understand the lingo, the technology, and could actually make some informed decisions.
Ok, caught me. But its not normal "unsecured" debt, like I said if they aren't payed you cannot bankrupt out of them.
I'll be graduating next summer with a Masters in IT Management. (Undergrad in Simulation Design Engineering)
75k or so in loans, and the year I went to college they jacked up the interest rate to 6.8%.
And to everyone saying its unsecured debt needs to actually look into their facts. Student Loans can not be bankrupt on, if I don't pay, the gubmint will dock my pay. Which actually is a better deal that paying the loans, the max they can dock is 15% per check, and my loans will be way more than that to actually pay.
The loans are government backed, they should be no interest.
great idea, until the mesh collects ice on it, gets too heavy for its supports, and is sucked into the engine. Engines are designed to take a bird strike, but not a big ball of ice and wire mesh.
My gas company offered the option of using Checkfree.
Had I opted in, it cost an additional 8$ to pay with my credit card, rather than sending in a personal check.
Instead I just use US Banks online Billpay option. Free, and cuts out the middle man.
I think this sort of thing is somewhat common among poorer schools.
I was my high schools computer/network admin for 2 years. They had hired a guy, but he quit midway through my sophomore year for more money elsewhere.
We had an outside contracted company that kept our cisco gear and T1 connection going, but I took care of the file servers, any small network hiccups, and fixing the desktops for the teachers. In return I was given 2 free periods a day to do this and/or goof off.
I wasn't exactly the best of kids either, and got in trouble quite often. However I made it clear that if they suspended me, I would quit doing the work for free and just enroll in wood shop or something instead. Never got suspended or detentions, generally just a slap on the wrist after that.
You betcha.
I keep a shotgun under the bed. You better believe that if i'd woken up to masked men storming my house, i'd have opened fire. I shouldn't have to expect a swat team, and castle doctorine says I have the right to protect my house and person.
Stupid Question,
But what about mounting the satellite dish on a very tall pole, that can see over the top of the trees?
It may take some fabbing, but it could be doable.
Or, if you have the cohoneys, climb the tallest tree you can find, and mount it towards the top. You could trim off one sides branches. You would have to run 3 or 4 guy wires to keep the tree steady in the wind though. It would be very doable however.
You could put a shack on the top of the mountain next to your satellite tree, and use a wifi link on the other side of the tree to shoot it down to your house, where another reciever could pick it up.
It'd be a project, but feasibly done in a weekend or two.
It is if they have a major based around it.
Not to say they should give it precedence over internet in the library, but on nights and weekends...
My school has a game design major, that I'm a part of.
The internet in the dorms was shittacular. Horrible horrible service, and we had to pay 30$ a month for it.
And, the IT department, when called out on this bullshit, couldn't even give us a break down on how our money was being spent.
So, 3 years ago me and several friends sent an email out to everyone of importance around campus calling them out, basically saying it was bullcrap they advertise themselves as being all advanced at this university and having this gaming major, but the gaming major students can't even get online half the time in their dorms to play....games.
Within several hours, most faculty was writing back and agreeing with us. We showed up at a meeting, and the head of IT didn't have anything together at all.
Basically what happened was for a few months we could opt to be on a seperate network through the engineering department that wasn't managed by the IT department, but rather a professor in his spare time. And gasp, this network was far far superior and less buggy. It had 50% of the computers on campus on it, and 0% of the budget, yet still managed to be far more reliable.
Then, after the next quarter passed, we were allowed to get outside ISP service in the dorms. Alot of my friends get adelphia internet access. I just chose to move off campus, I was tired of dealing with it. You still had to pay the IT department for their crummy connection, on top of paying another ISP.
I own both the TGEA and the torque engine. I've also bought some other stuff from them like model packs.
First of all, their engine has little to no documentation. Generally, if you ask for help on their forums, they tell you to buy the book. There is a "torque game engine for beginners book".
That was a waste of 50$. The book sucks. Its not a reference book, its a simple walk through on simple beginner stuff.
Their model pack (I bought the adam pack) sucked. I payed 20$ for a model, it came with no documentation, and wouldn't work on multiplayer games. When a second player joined, Adam would quit displaying animations. This didn't happen with any other model. When I emailed and asked, I never got a response.
They also sell weapons packs. Don't buy these. You would think a weapon pack would come with scripts for the weapons, (and they even say they do) but these aren't the scripts you need to actually make the weapon behave like what it is. This script just ties the weapon to some internal engine stuff. You still have to write your own weapon script to make an AK47 act like one. Which honestly shouldn't be that hard, but it is. THERE IS NO EXAMPLES, WHAT SO EVER. Weapons are a HUGE part of any FPS game. But when I asked if anyone knew how to make a weapon semi-auto, I Just got dumb looks, no help. There were no docs anywhere on it. I had to sit there and screw around with it for a night to figure out there state machine in the weapon scripts. Their scripts don't even come with comments.
What REALLY pissed me off was when they started selling 1.5. I own 1.4 and the shader engine. 1.5 is 1.4 with some bug fixes and the light pack. I would have had to pay full price for it if I wanted it. Thats bullcrap. Thats like MS charging for Service Pack 2 for XP.
All there are is a bunch of script and code snippets to add stuff on to the engine. But most of these are severely outdated and not updated. If you read the comments, most of them go in order like this "Does this work on 1.2?" then "does this work on 1.3?" and so forth. Just people over the years tring to get them to work on the various updated engines. Most of the time they don't work, or break something else.
Then I made the mistake of buying a product from a company called dreamRPG. This was supposed to be the torque engine, but with all of the updates and stuff done and working already. Another waste of 150$. Their release builds are buggy as heck. They can't even take the time to make an example game (like garage games does actually do) that shows off what their product can do and that you can use as an example to build on. Its a piece of junk, and their forums and IRC channel are full of people asking the same questions you are with absolutely no answers.
I've never seen an impressive game built on torque. They're all cookie cutter games made from the same sets of code example snippets.
I'm a senior in a Game Programming degree, and I'm very fluent in C++ and several other languages. Their engine is frustratingly hard to figure out even the simplest things in.
If I could get a refund, I'd do it in a heartbeat. I feel very ripped off. I bought the torque game engine, and realized how bad it looked. So I bought the shader engine to fix that. Then I bought the DreamRPG package to fix the frustration of having no examples or anything to work with. Now I just have a huge pile of crap and I'm 500$ poorer.
The torque engine has been around for a long time, and gone through alot of fixes, bug patches, and updates. Its a pain to try to figure out at all because of all of this. Your much better off using a product like Ogre. The month or two you'll spend building up a decent workable base for a game engine is nothing in comparison to the year I've spent banging my head against the desk with torque. I've worked with both, and I prefer Ogre. You'll be able to read your own code, and there is a nice wiki with lots of examples.
Garage Games, if you read this:
Make some fucking documentation. P
I know that windows 98 OEM came with all that stuff there.
but I'm pretty sure XP does not
I'm a gaming and simulation design engineering major.
I really hope they don't find any way to blame this on video games, like most school shootings.
This is in a brief history of time. Thats been out for well over 10 years.
I rent a room from a friend who bought a house while in college last year. The house cost 25k, and he's put maybe 5k into fixing it up. Nothing structural, just putting in new flooring and painting. It has a nice backyard and a 2 car garage with a second story on it for storage. The house has 2 bedrooms, kitchen, dining room, entry room and living room. Definately a nice livable house, for a hell of a price.
So yeah, I'd say its doable. It just really depends on where you live.
Or my 3d guy can be smart and use Lightwave or maya. I'm sorry, but Blender sucks. Bad. Every single 3d guy that I know that has tried to use it just laughs at it. Its horrible. Maybe in ten years it will be up to snuff.
I thought I should include the site to get it from.
www.garagegames.com
For 100$ you can get torque. It was the best investment I ever made.
.DTS format which is what torque uses, and you can do all of your mapping with Valve's Hammer Editor, which is a very nice editor.
I'm a gaming and simulation major at college, and I needed something for my senior project. I still have a year left before I have to start on it, but I decided to get a jump start.
99% of things you want to do can be done with the scripting langauge in torque, which in my opinion is very C like. Milkshape will let you export your models to
I'm working on a project with 2 friends, ones a character modeler, ones a mapper, and I'm the progamming guy to put it all together. most of what I want to do has already been done before, so all I have to do is look on the torque forums to find step by step directions on how to do everything from adding flashlights, adding vehicles, night visions, or anything else I could possibly want.
And, if you buy the upgraded lighting pack for 50$, the torque engine looks very pretty.
I know exactly what your talking about, it happens all the time to my at school, the PCs we have have non-shielded speakers.
But...I just realized, it never happens at home. I have a set of 5 year old Klipsch 2.1 Speakers, that I would assume have better than normal shielding.
Right now I'm sitting in a computer lab full of 30 alienware top of the line computers with Samsung Syncmaster 19" monitors.
I go to school for a Gaming and Simulation engineering degree. To attract more students, one of the things we wanted to get to show off was a lab of alienware. We had a bunch of grant money, and a very limited amount of time to spend it before it was taken back from us, so we had to make some quick decisions.
We bought about 4 DLP projectors, some firewire DV cams, a nice security system for the lab, a 60" Plasma screen with the touch thingy on it so you can use it as a touch screen, and 30 alienwares. We also bought some biometrics stuff, Ibuttons for everyone in the degree so we can get into the lab without a key, and a bunch of other stuff.
Anyways, I don't know of any problems that we had with them. I'm friends with the lab tech, and the only thing I have seen go wrong in the 3 months we've had them is 2 of the samsung LCD monitors were DOA and one died a few weeks later. Everything else seemed fine.
I learned 4 other languages before I learned VB. I was rather suprised at how powerful it really was. I had been told all along "VB is for idiots, blah blah blah", and then I took a GUI programming class, and the langauge we used to write our little example GUIs in was VB. It was amazing how quickly I could get a nice looking application up and running and doing something useful.
BUT. If you want a an easy to learn, object oriented langauge, I VERY highly recommend python. Its not incredibly speedy (there are libraries out there to speed it up), since its an interpreted language, but getting real things done very soon is extremely easy.
I am a gaming and simulation major at a small university, and the first langauge the freshman learn is python, then the second quarter they learn C. Python spoils them, quite frankly. Thankfully, I learned C first, then C++, java, and then python, but I have to say, given a choice as to which langauge I would use for any given console application (I have yet to do GUI with python), hands down it would be python.
I was the only one in my algorithims class that knew python, when I took the class. Other students were extremely jelous that I could more or less type in the pseudo code off the board and have a working program, where as it would take them hours to get an algorithim functioning properly in C or Java.
I go to a small state school in Southern Ohio (Shawnee State Uni)
It is NOT a requirment to have a laptop for any classes. However
1) you can borrow a laptop at the library (and for use ONLY in the library)
2) They are currently installing campus wide wireless, and have it up and working in about half the buildings right now, and it should be up everywhere by the end of the year.
3) If you want, you CAN use financial aid to pay for a computer. HEll, you can use financial aid to pay for anything. I use it to pay for my rent, groceries and everything. There aren't any good jobs around here, so I basically take out as much as I would if I lived on campus from student loans, but then they cut me a check for about 2 grand a quarter that I use to pay for rent, food, utilities, sometimes clothes, and stuff like that. I don't neccessitate alot of gas money or anything because I live about 10 blocks from campus and can ride my bike there when its above freezing.
I do work on campus as a tutor and Student assistant, but I don't make too much, about 50$ a month, and that is basically my beer and snack food fund.
I am in the an engineering degree, Gaming and Simulation design engineering to be exact, and we are asked to have either a laptop or a small ITX computer. There are labs, and if you have the ITX computer you can just plug it into the keyboard, mouse, monitor and network jacks.
I have a laptop, but I never take it to class. I find it pointless. We have class in computer labs, every bit of software I need is already there, I don't have to use a 15" screen and touchpad, and I can save my notes that I type in class to my FTP server at home, or if thats down, email them to myself.
Most of the time I don't take anything to class other than myself.
The way I feel is, a properly configured campus wouldn't NEED laptops. Put cheap desktop computers in every lab, make it so you can save to a central server, and once your home, you can FTP in and get your files. Thats how we have it set up in my engineering building. Very time saving, and you don't have to lug around 7 or 8 pounds of gear.