Like many of us here, I've had volumes of physics crammed into my head for three years at college. Go find a good school, get in, and take some physics courses. Or go buy a physics text book from a Tech school (MIT/RIT/RPI/CWRU/CMU/GaTech/etc). There's probably a marginally reputable one near you. If worse comes to worst, go on ebay and look for a textbook.
Don't expect to understand anything much past Classical (Newtonian) Mechanics. Quantum Mechanics is not easily grasped unless taught. It's extremely counter-intuitive. Thus taking a course is your best bet.
I'm so happy this is coming out on DVD in Director's Cut form. Way too cool.
One of the best Treks ever. More action in one movie than there was in the whole original series, at least believable action. All I can think of is Capt Kirk in one of those badly rehearsed street fights. He falls over the way he speaks. Slow and Delayed. Shatner put on his Acting cap for this movie though. Great stuff.
Linus seems to be more concerned with the wide-range functionality of the specific hardware than the "brand" of it. Making Linux work with x86-64 looks to be easier than making it work "properly" (eg with fully 64-bit page sizes, addresses, etc) with IA64. Then again, IA64 is so broken and slow, it really doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things if they can make a little go a long way with the Hammer. These small deficiencies the counterpoint poster to Linus makes reference to don't seem to be necessary to make things work..
Regardless of who's winning the CPU war, it's nice to see that Linux is running on all the competitors.
The irradiation is only used on mail which was in the contaminated facilities, or which was routed near them, or is currently Target Mail. Unless your mail is coming to you in a color that is not white, but yellowish, and in a plastic bag that says "This mail has been irradiated," then it has not been irradiated. I'm sorry to clarify the FUD that is spreading, but your compact flash cards are safe no matter which carrier you send them through, unless the shipper is incapable of using correct addresses and postage.
Only USPS Target mail is being sent through the ebeam irradiation, now that the contaminated facilites have been cleared out. Target mail is a piece of mail that looks suspicious enough to be held out and examined (not opened), and poses the threat of causing either physical harm to an employee, or fiscal damage to the USPS.
The CES is just repeating that which is printed on the back of the Iraddiation Notice Bag that all the irradiated mail comes in. Don't thank them for telling you your stuff may be messed up. The Postal Service already knew and told you before the CES started spouting FUD.
The guys from LSDVD had a presentation last month at RIT and showed us their player. It was completely fucntional, or at least as functional as you can get on Linux, since there is no media framework. It supported menus fully and was comparable to any wind-bloze player out there. Shame it's commercial, and the cash-mongers that bought the LSDVD guys, killed the project. The name of the company that has LSDVD is MGI. I believe it's www.mgisoft.com... Most of the LSDVD folks were pretty cool, but one was some sort of IP zealot. Oh well. Fully functional DVD player for linux killed because "There wasn't any interest for DVD on Linux." - Another fine example of why all software should be free.
Try to remember that within 20 miles of you, there are
probably at least a thousand people struggling to support themselves on $20,000 a year or less, and are paying out 6-10k of that to the
government.
I live 20 miles north of him. We live in one of the two States in the Union without a state income, sales or property tax (Yay NH). People making 20K/yr pay like $750 in taxes. I know, I'm one of them. I find it hillarious that you think people actually pay out money like that to anyone but their drug dealer. Then again, this is a Canada thread.:-P
I can't wait to see my computer glow deep purple.
Hell, I'd be able to expose photoresist with my processor. What's even better, all they need to do is crank it up a little more to start giving people cancer in five minutes flat.
Stop thinking so linearly. To use clocked devices at such high frequencies is dangerous. Ever heard of cell phones? A clocked device at 750 GHz will produce radiation in the visible spectrum, near the UV. crank it up a few GHz and you have a UV tanning salon in your own home. You'll be able to cook yourself from the outside-in. By the time this technology ever comes around, hopefully the photonics industry will have come into its own and replaced the clocked device arena with switched light devices.
but he didn't invent tv ping-pong, anymore than Msft invented 'Windows'. That honor goes to Ralph Baer, excerpt:
On 29th May 1972, Nolan Bushnell (later President of Atari) visits the "Magnavox Profit Caravan" at the Airport Marina Hotel in Burlingame, CA. He signs the guest book for Magnavox Odyssey Demo and plays the Odyssey Ping-Pong game hands-on. Later, he hires Alan Alcorn to design and build a coin-op version of the Ping-Pong game: PONG. This will mark the begining of the coin-op market.
I was about to chime in with that, but I read before doing so. Mr. Baer is a family friend, and I have spent many an amazing trips down gaming memory lane in his basement. Talking GI-Joe? Simon? Those are only a few of his masterpieces...
Anybody have any idea what the quality will be like? Close to current proprietary Win32 players? I supppose it won't feature hardware acceleration, so it's probably software-only, but I'd like to be able to have it comfortable at a smooth 30 FPS+ @ 1024x768 in 32-bit color.
The frame quality is as it is in a windoze player. Right now they are working on increasing the speed and a lot of other tweaks.
I'd like to say thanks and great job on another successful upgrade. I can feel the difference already. Morning surfing is quite improved. Keep up the good work, and don't let the trolls get you down, you guys are awesome. On a separate note, if I had that much hardware, I'd be the happiest son of a bitch in the world:-)
I think most people misunderstand what's going on here. The story is about the SiO2 insulator thickness. This oxide sits under the gate of the transistor which is used to control the flow between the source and drain. This is 0.07um OXIDE THICKNESS, which is NOT the same as the gate length. The gate length is the usual parameter quoted when referring to a process (i.e. 0.25um, 0.18um, etc).
Usually, it helps to understand the topic you're discussing. I grew a 700 angstrom (.07 m) oxide last week on my PFET wafers. If you were correct (which you're not) this article would be over fifteen years late in the coming. Also "wash and deposit" are not terms used in industry. We use "develope, etch and diffusion" since you forgot a step, too. The size which is referred to by.25,.18 m is the feature size. the gate/channel length is lambda which is half of this. Please, for your own sake, understand the topic at hand before posting.
Sounds like a.05m channel length to me. 1.5 nm Oxide thickness is mindblowing, considering I'm working with 70 nm right now. It's great to see silicon die decreasing in size. Too bad it doesn't relate to CPUs at all, at least not at such an early stage in the research. To get reproducible results on a large scale, entire processes will have to be reworked, this will take at least five years to even become anywhere near viable for a CPU. Oxide will get ICs to.07m, but it will take a while for the CPU usability of this process to reach maturity. We've had.25 micron for over ten years. It's only been in use for the past three.
Lithography is going to take a while for this stuff to catch up, too. The traditional Novolac/Diazonapthoquinone(DNQ) resist won't stand up at such a small feature size. It should be interesting to see if PolyHydroxyStyrene(PHS) can even hold up well at such a small feature size. 157nm Lithography is a ways off for industry. 193nm is nearly standard now, and it's an _extremely_ easy process to wreck.
Hopefully this will not prove to be as useless as the winmodem fiasco. I can't believe engineers would take something easily done in hardware, and waste precious clockcycles with it. I stopped buying and using modems a while ago, so I don't know if there are any improvements as of late, but I do know that Motorola makes generally good stuff, so hopefully this won't suck out loud for Linux users. I remember trying to get a winmodem to work in windows. It didn't even work in the environment it was designed for.
OK, sorry to burst your bubbles here, but this is a few years old, and this guy seems to have ripped it from the cDc (Cult of the Dead Cow) now, personally, I think the cDc should get credit for this story, since they are the original 'posters' of this pile of flaming boo-hah. (did I say that?) But I digress.. anyway.. Here's the ORIGINAL text/html http://www.cultdeadcow.com/cDc_files/ cDc-363/ Rock on cDc and all you dead cow lovers out there! !ooM moo, mo-fuckah Moo!
Re:Why would anyone use an alpha processor?
on
1.4-1.6 GHz Alphas
·
· Score: 1
Intel owns the former DEC Plant in Mass that used to build Alpha chips. IIRC Sumsung makes them now, and some other coprs may as well. Intel also owns the rights (copyright) to some of the older Alphas, because they baught it from DEC in late 97 - early 98.
It may be nice - however the installer doesn't seem to have Proxy/SOCKS support for those in firewalled/protected or otherwise networks. I think that's definitely going to inhibit the uptake of this beta.
I downloaded it perfectly thru my proxy. I don't know what problems others are having, probably misconfigured proxies.
I'm not sure why it's so little-known in the US (though it's certainly not *unknown*), because I think it's moderately popular in Canada. I was happy to see a project named after it:)
Personally, I've been enjoying "NUT" for over a year now... Here in Crochester, NY, we've got it at all the local supermarkets (Go Weggys!) and it's absolutelyl UNBELIEVABLE on bagels... But then again, Crochester is a hop skip and an hour car ride from Canada, so... you take what you can get. No alcohol, buit NUT allover the place! I almost fell over dead when i read the orig Gnutella article. Gnullsoft has some serious NAD.
Wrong. There is never, ever, ever a valid reason to hate someone. You might disagree, or oppose them, or even violently oppose them because they rely on violence. But you must never allow yourself to hate.
Once you have begun to hate and become violent against your opposition, you become that which you oppose so much. Hating racists, bigots, or those who hold unpopular opinions makes you just as morally corrupt.
While I understand your argument, and I agree with 75% of it, I cannot agree with providing a justification of hate, for hatred is never justified. Just ask Gandhi, Martin Luther King, or even Malcolm X in his final days.
We must not surrender to hate, even in the face of irreconcilable hatred.
While your point is one of "peace" it is completely unrealistic. Humanity does not possess the morality at this point in history, or any other for that matter to 'not surrender to hate.' People hate. People have hated for 10,000 years. It's a manifestation of the instinct fear, mixed with a little misunderstanding. I might be wrong, I'm sure there are some people out there who think they're above hate. More 'power' to them.
I can give you a damn near valid reason to hate someone. Imagine your spouse being raped and murdered. Good luck not hating the person who did it. Better yet, they rape and murder your entire family, all your friends, and your pets.... I'm not trying to piss you off. I'm trying to get the point accross that having an open mind is a good thing. Hate is natural.
This is just great. It's the first time a Slashdot story had my laughting out loud at work.
I almost peed my pants laughing so hard at this one. Unless the lawyers can get an exception (probably a goddamn 0x00000001), then everything they're "fighting" against is in vain. Thi is the most ironic, yet utterly stupid thing I have ever seen done by lawyers. This should win a Darwin Award.
however good our animation was the year we won, you should have seen it two years ago, when we got disqualified for sending it in on beta... it got the head of animation a job at Kinetix (sp?).
Beta schmeta! they disqualified you for that... that's ridiculous. You have my sympathy. You spelled KTX right, btw.
this isn't exactly the only place I'm looking. however, the bay area is chock-full of teams, and while many are well funded (*cough*gunn*cough*), there are simply not enough companies to go around, not to mention many who think we're insane. it's a lot easier for a company to sponsor a proven winner than a team in less-affluent area, with no track record, and the only engineering expertise coming from first and second-year engineering students. let's just say I'm an opportunist.:)
It takes an oppotunist to be a team leader. (Pardon me if I'm mistaken, you sound like one.) Our team leader for three years was Dick Gurall (PSNH). The man had vision like there was no tomorrow. We burned him out, though. He left the program in 98, IIRC. In either case. Show these possible sponsors the FIRST webpage, give them as much info as you can, sell it to them. Promise them advertising on the side of your machine if you have to (It's been done for years). Put their name on your team shirts. Remember that not just the big corporate sponsors are important. Joe's Hardware is important, too. Whatever the outcome with the finances, I with your team and yourself great success this year.
Two of my younger brothers have been involved in the FIRST competition in the last couple of years (THS in FL...Go Terriers!) and it sounds like a really good project. It's too bad that I live too far away to see their competitions. I suppose I could search out some in my area, though
My 'first' question is - where in FL are your brothers? and what team number are they on? Second is, where are you at? This year there are ten regional events, on the east coast, the west coast and Texas (I'm forgetting a few). So whereever you are, let me know, and I'll tell you where the closest event is to you.
speaking of helping out, a lot of teams need not only money, but real engineering help both in EE, programming, design, and construction. I was a member of the Gunn High School team (GRT -- we won animation a few years ago, seeded 5th two years ago, and made it at least to the semis last year) and now mentor a team from Berkeley High School which is run entirely by high school students and college mentors.
I remember Gunn. Your animation was very good for way back when.. I was on Team Blue Lightning a while back (95-98), I did the animation singlehandedly (well, damn close to it) in 96. I went to the Nationals in 96 as well. I am now searching for a team in Rochester, NY. RIT used to sponsor one, but they no longer do.
the Berkeley team has exactly 0 engineers helping and exactly $0 besides the entrance fee (which NASA is sponsoring). I know there are other teams in this situation, so if you can't help a team with your time, talk to your company and see if they will sponsor a team with money, tools, or by assigning engineers to work with the team. it's an investment in the future -- I know several very talented engineers who lacked direction until this competiton. many teams lack even the most basic tools, liability insurance (I won't pretend this isn't dangerous: a student from Palo Alto High School got his hand caught in a belt sander last year, and several bay area students almost cut off fingers. another good reason to have trained engineers to teach), and a place to work.
While slashdot is chock-full of engineers and scientists, this isn't exactly the place to go looking for help. Your team needs a grassroots effort, in your hometown. Financial help is great, but what's the point without engineers.. Make a list of all the local engineering/power/telco companies and contact them all and see if any of them would be interested in sponsoring the team, or providing equipment, or even a workplace for your team to build. Remember gracious professionalism (Woodie for President!!!!) and don't give up. Good Luck
I've been trying to get some folks together to do something a bit cheaper: Lego Mindstorm Battlebots. All the parts must be Lego (with the exception of the rubber bands. Many lego sets come with rubber bands, but they'll break and should be able to be replaced), and the winner is the battlebot that can still move under its own power. Battering rams to whack the legs out from under something, scooploaders to try to flip the bot...
You should look into the FIRST Lego League - This is a mindstorms-based robot competition. Information can be found at the FLL site at http://www.legomindstorms.com/fll/. This is geared for younger students, but it still an excellent foundation to build any type of competition from.
Slashdot Mirror
Like many of us here, I've had volumes of physics crammed into my head for three years at college. Go find a good school, get in, and take some physics courses. Or go buy a physics text book from a Tech school (MIT/RIT/RPI/CWRU/CMU/GaTech/etc). There's probably a marginally reputable one near you. If worse comes to worst, go on ebay and look for a textbook.
Don't expect to understand anything much past Classical (Newtonian) Mechanics. Quantum Mechanics is not easily grasped unless taught. It's extremely counter-intuitive. Thus taking a course is your best bet.
I'm so happy this is coming out on DVD in Director's Cut form. Way too cool.
One of the best Treks ever. More action in one movie than there was in the whole original series, at least believable action. All I can think of is Capt Kirk in one of those badly rehearsed street fights. He falls over the way he speaks. Slow and Delayed. Shatner put on his Acting cap for this movie though. Great stuff.
Linus seems to be more concerned with the wide-range functionality of the specific hardware than the "brand" of it. Making Linux work with x86-64 looks to be easier than making it work "properly" (eg with fully 64-bit page sizes, addresses, etc) with IA64. Then again, IA64 is so broken and slow, it really doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things if they can make a little go a long way with the Hammer. These small deficiencies the counterpoint poster to Linus makes reference to don't seem to be necessary to make things work..
Regardless of who's winning the CPU war, it's nice to see that Linux is running on all the competitors.
The irradiation is only used on mail which was in the contaminated facilities, or which was routed near them, or is currently Target Mail. Unless your mail is coming to you in a color that is not white, but yellowish, and in a plastic bag that says "This mail has been irradiated," then it has not been irradiated. I'm sorry to clarify the FUD that is spreading, but your compact flash cards are safe no matter which carrier you send them through, unless the shipper is incapable of using correct addresses and postage.
Only USPS Target mail is being sent through the ebeam irradiation, now that the contaminated facilites have been cleared out. Target mail is a piece of mail that looks suspicious enough to be held out and examined (not opened), and poses the threat of causing either physical harm to an employee, or fiscal damage to the USPS.
The CES is just repeating that which is printed on the back of the Iraddiation Notice Bag that all the irradiated mail comes in. Don't thank them for telling you your stuff may be messed up. The Postal Service already knew and told you before the CES started spouting FUD.
The guys from LSDVD had a presentation last month at RIT and showed us their player. It was completely fucntional, or at least as functional as you can get on Linux, since there is no media framework. It supported menus fully and was comparable to any wind-bloze player out there. Shame it's commercial, and the cash-mongers that bought the LSDVD guys, killed the project. The name of the company that has LSDVD is MGI. I believe it's www.mgisoft.com... Most of the LSDVD folks were pretty cool, but one was some sort of IP zealot. Oh well. Fully functional DVD player for linux killed because "There wasn't any interest for DVD on Linux." - Another fine example of why all software should be free.
Here's a shot of Smirnoff 100 to the Crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger. God Speed.
Try to remember that within 20 miles of you, there are probably at least a thousand people struggling to support themselves on $20,000 a year or less, and are paying out 6-10k of that to the government.
:-P
I live 20 miles north of him. We live in one of the two States in the Union without a state income, sales or property tax (Yay NH). People making 20K/yr pay like $750 in taxes. I know, I'm one of them. I find it hillarious that you think people actually pay out money like that to anyone but their drug dealer. Then again, this is a Canada thread.
I can't wait to see my computer glow deep purple. Hell, I'd be able to expose photoresist with my processor. What's even better, all they need to do is crank it up a little more to start giving people cancer in five minutes flat.
Stop thinking so linearly. To use clocked devices at such high frequencies is dangerous. Ever heard of cell phones? A clocked device at 750 GHz will produce radiation in the visible spectrum, near the UV. crank it up a few GHz and you have a UV tanning salon in your own home. You'll be able to cook yourself from the outside-in.
By the time this technology ever comes around, hopefully the photonics industry will have come into its own and replaced the clocked device arena with switched light devices.
but he didn't invent tv ping-pong, anymore than Msft invented 'Windows'. That honor goes to Ralph Baer, excerpt:
On 29th May 1972, Nolan Bushnell (later President of Atari) visits the "Magnavox Profit Caravan" at the Airport Marina Hotel in Burlingame, CA. He signs the guest book for Magnavox Odyssey Demo and plays the Odyssey Ping-Pong game hands-on. Later, he hires Alan Alcorn to design and build a coin-op version of the Ping-Pong game: PONG. This will mark the begining of the coin-op market.
I was about to chime in with that, but I read before doing so. Mr. Baer is a family friend, and I have spent many an amazing trips down gaming memory lane in his basement. Talking GI-Joe? Simon? Those are only a few of his masterpieces...
Anybody have any idea what the quality will be like? Close to current proprietary Win32 players? I supppose it won't feature hardware acceleration, so it's probably software-only, but I'd like to be able to have it comfortable at a smooth 30 FPS+ @ 1024x768 in 32-bit color.
The frame quality is as it is in a windoze player. Right now they are working on increasing the speed and a lot of other tweaks.
I'd like to say thanks and great job on another successful upgrade. I can feel the difference already. Morning surfing is quite improved. Keep up the good work, and don't let the trolls get you down, you guys are awesome. On a separate note, if I had that much hardware, I'd be the happiest son of a bitch in the world :-)
I think most people misunderstand what's going on here. The story is about the SiO2 insulator thickness. This oxide sits under the gate of the transistor which is used to control the flow between the source and drain. This is 0.07um OXIDE THICKNESS, which is NOT the same as the gate length. The gate length is the usual parameter quoted when referring to a process (i.e. 0.25um, 0.18um, etc).
.25, .18 m is the feature size. the gate/channel length is lambda which is half of this. Please, for your own sake, understand the topic at hand before posting.
Usually, it helps to understand the topic you're discussing. I grew a 700 angstrom (.07 m) oxide last week on my PFET wafers. If you were correct (which you're not) this article would be over fifteen years late in the coming. Also "wash and deposit" are not terms used in industry. We use "develope, etch and diffusion" since you forgot a step, too. The size which is referred to by
Sounds like a .05m channel length to me. 1.5 nm Oxide thickness is mindblowing, considering I'm working with 70 nm right now. It's great to see silicon die decreasing in size. Too bad it doesn't relate to CPUs at all, at least not at such an early stage in the research. To get reproducible results on a large scale, entire processes will have to be reworked, this will take at least five years to even become anywhere near viable for a CPU. Oxide will get ICs to .07m, but it will take a while for the CPU usability of this process to reach maturity. We've had .25 micron for over ten years. It's only been in use for the past three.
Lithography is going to take a while for this stuff to catch up, too. The traditional Novolac/Diazonapthoquinone(DNQ) resist won't stand up at such a small feature size. It should be interesting to see if PolyHydroxyStyrene(PHS) can even hold up well at such a small feature size. 157nm Lithography is a ways off for industry. 193nm is nearly standard now, and it's an _extremely_ easy process to wreck.
Hopefully this will not prove to be as useless as the winmodem fiasco. I can't believe engineers would take something easily done in hardware, and waste precious clockcycles with it. I stopped buying and using modems a while ago, so I don't know if there are any improvements as of late, but I do know that Motorola makes generally good stuff, so hopefully this won't suck out loud for Linux users. I remember trying to get a winmodem to work in windows. It didn't even work in the environment it was designed for.
OK, sorry to burst your bubbles here, but this is a few years old, and this guy seems to have ripped it from the cDc (Cult of the Dead Cow) now, personally, I think the cDc should get credit for this story, since they are the original 'posters' of this pile of flaming boo-hah. (did I say that?) But I digress.. anyway.. Here's the ORIGINAL text/html http://www.cultdeadcow.com/cDc_files/ cDc-363/ Rock on cDc and all you dead cow lovers out there!
!ooM moo, mo-fuckah Moo!
Intel owns the former DEC Plant in Mass that used to build Alpha chips. IIRC Sumsung makes them now, and some other coprs may as well. Intel also owns the rights (copyright) to some of the older Alphas, because they baught it from DEC in late 97 - early 98.
It may be nice - however the installer doesn't seem to have Proxy/SOCKS support for those in firewalled/protected or otherwise networks. I think that's definitely going to inhibit the uptake of this beta.
I downloaded it perfectly thru my proxy. I don't know what problems others are having, probably misconfigured proxies.
I'm not sure why it's so little-known in the US (though it's certainly not *unknown*), because I think it's moderately popular in Canada. I was happy to see a project named after it:)
Personally, I've been enjoying "NUT" for over a year now... Here in Crochester, NY, we've got it at all the local supermarkets (Go Weggys!) and it's absolutelyl UNBELIEVABLE on bagels... But then again, Crochester is a hop skip and an hour car ride from Canada, so... you take what you can get. No alcohol, buit NUT allover the place! I almost fell over dead when i read the orig Gnutella article. Gnullsoft has some serious NAD.
Wrong. There is never, ever, ever a valid reason to hate someone. You might disagree, or oppose them, or even violently oppose them because they rely on violence. But you must never allow yourself to hate.
... I'm not trying to piss you off. I'm trying to get the point accross that having an open mind is a good thing. Hate is natural.
Once you have begun to hate and become violent against your opposition, you become that which you oppose so much. Hating racists, bigots, or those who hold unpopular opinions makes you just as morally corrupt.
While I understand your argument, and I agree with 75% of it, I cannot agree with providing a justification of hate, for hatred is never justified. Just ask Gandhi, Martin Luther King, or even Malcolm X in his final days.
We must not surrender to hate, even in the face of irreconcilable hatred.
While your point is one of "peace" it is completely unrealistic. Humanity does not possess the morality at this point in history, or any other for that matter to 'not surrender to hate.' People hate. People have hated for 10,000 years. It's a manifestation of the instinct fear, mixed with a little misunderstanding. I might be wrong, I'm sure there are some people out there who think they're above hate. More 'power' to them.
I can give you a damn near valid reason to hate someone. Imagine your spouse being raped and murdered. Good luck not hating the person who did it. Better yet, they rape and murder your entire family, all your friends, and your pets.
This is just great. It's the first time a Slashdot story had my laughting out loud at work.
I almost peed my pants laughing so hard at this one. Unless the lawyers can get an exception (probably a goddamn 0x00000001), then everything they're "fighting" against is in vain. Thi is the most ironic, yet utterly stupid thing I have ever seen done by lawyers. This should win a Darwin Award.
Actually, it's not a school in California. It's Cleveland, Ohio. They were co-sponsored by NASA and TRW. But it is a real story.
Thanks for the correction. It is one of the greatest 'myths' floating around in FIRST, but we all knew it was true, just not the specifics.
however good our animation was the year we won, you should have seen it two years ago, when we got disqualified for sending it in on beta... it got the head of animation a job at Kinetix (sp?).
:)
Beta schmeta! they disqualified you for that... that's ridiculous. You have my sympathy. You spelled KTX right, btw.
this isn't exactly the only place I'm looking. however, the bay area is chock-full of teams, and while many are well funded (*cough*gunn*cough*), there are simply not enough companies to go around, not to mention many who think we're insane. it's a lot easier for a company to sponsor a proven winner than a team in less-affluent area, with no track record, and the only engineering expertise coming from first and second-year engineering students. let's just say I'm an opportunist.
It takes an oppotunist to be a team leader. (Pardon me if I'm mistaken, you sound like one.) Our team leader for three years was Dick Gurall (PSNH). The man had vision like there was no tomorrow. We burned him out, though. He left the program in 98, IIRC. In either case. Show these possible sponsors the FIRST webpage, give them as much info as you can, sell it to them. Promise them advertising on the side of your machine if you have to (It's been done for years). Put their name on your team shirts. Remember that not just the big corporate sponsors are important. Joe's Hardware is important, too.
Whatever the outcome with the finances, I with your team and yourself great success this year.
Two of my younger brothers have been involved in the FIRST competition in the last couple of years (THS in FL...Go Terriers!) and it sounds like a really good project. It's too bad that I live too far away to see their competitions. I suppose I could search out some in my area, though
My 'first' question is - where in FL are your brothers? and what team number are they on? Second is, where are you at? This year there are ten regional events, on the east coast, the west coast and Texas (I'm forgetting a few). So whereever you are, let me know, and I'll tell you where the closest event is to you.
speaking of helping out, a lot of teams need not only money, but real engineering help both in EE, programming, design, and construction. I was a member of the Gunn High School team (GRT -- we won animation a few years ago, seeded 5th two years ago, and made it at least to the semis last year) and now mentor a team from Berkeley High School which is run entirely by high school students and college mentors.
I remember Gunn. Your animation was very good for way back when.. I was on Team Blue Lightning a while back (95-98), I did the animation singlehandedly (well, damn close to it) in 96. I went to the Nationals in 96 as well. I am now searching for a team in Rochester, NY. RIT used to sponsor one, but they no longer do.
the Berkeley team has exactly 0 engineers helping and exactly $0 besides the entrance fee (which NASA is sponsoring). I know there are other teams in this situation, so if you can't help a team with your time, talk to your company and see if they will sponsor a team with money, tools, or by assigning engineers to work with the team. it's an investment in the future -- I know several very talented engineers who lacked direction until this competiton. many teams lack even the most basic tools, liability insurance (I won't pretend this isn't dangerous: a student from Palo Alto High School got his hand caught in a belt sander last year, and several bay area students almost cut off fingers. another good reason to have trained engineers to teach), and a place to work.
While slashdot is chock-full of engineers and scientists, this isn't exactly the place to go looking for help. Your team needs a grassroots effort, in your hometown. Financial help is great, but what's the point without engineers.. Make a list of all the local engineering/power/telco companies and contact them all and see if any of them would be interested in sponsoring the team, or providing equipment, or even a workplace for your team to build. Remember gracious professionalism (Woodie for President!!!!) and don't give up.
Good Luck
I've been trying to get some folks together to do something a bit cheaper: Lego Mindstorm Battlebots. All the parts must be Lego (with the exception of the rubber bands. Many lego sets come with rubber bands, but they'll break and should be able to be replaced), and the winner is the battlebot that can still move under its own power. Battering rams to whack the legs out from under something, scooploaders to try to flip the bot...
You should look into the FIRST Lego League - This is a mindstorms-based robot competition. Information can be found at the FLL site at http://www.legomindstorms.com/fll/. This is geared for younger students, but it still an excellent foundation to build any type of competition from.