You should make the distinction that RIT has an IT department and an Engineering department. There's a large difference between the two. People who can't cut it in the Engineering school drop to the IT department. And just about anyone can make it in the IT department.
RIT's engineering school is quite good. They were the first school in the nation to have an accredited microelectronic engineering program, with cleanrooms and supplies donated by Intel and AMD.
not as diverse as in NYC but they are diverse. Yes, each town is rather homogeneous but there is a great deal of variety between the different suburbs surrounding rochester and in the city itself (since the entire are is known as the "Greater Rochester Area").
Trust me, I've lived here my entire life, and I'm going to college in California. I prefer Rochester. The people are diverse, just look at the differences between the various highschools. You have many different ethnicity's represented in quite large and active groups.
But there is the problem that the entire country is too homogeneous. The problem that the majority of highschool kids dress in A&F, Old Navy, and American Eagle. The problem that 6-9th grade girls have become teenyboppers seeking to imitate britney spears. The problem that nearly all twenty-somethings have the same hair cut and dress the same way. But this problem isn't limited to Rochester, it happens everywhere.
This has been said before, but I feel it needs to be reiterated as previous posters have left out important information.
RIT, where this progress is being made, is the Rochester Institute of Technology.
The University of Rochester, (U of R), is not where this is being done.
The University of Rochester (about 4,000 undergrads) is a higher ranked school than RIT, since it is a national university. It consistently ranks in the top 30 in the oh-so-wonderful US News and World Report. RIT is a regional school (about 8,000 undergrads) but it is one of the top-ranked schools in the northeast. To call it an IT school is being rather harsh, RIT is a technical institute, along the same lines as Caltech and MIT, though RIT isn't as rigorous or demanding as either of those institutions. Contrary to what a previous poster said, RIT does have a computer science degree program. RIT also has a software engineering degree program. There is a large difference, and the school acknowledges this. Both schools are in the same town. They are also practically right next to each other in Rochester (I would know, I've lived in Rochester my entire life).
More on-topic, RIT is able to do such advanced imaging work because Kodak is based in Rochester. The George Eastman house is a historical landmark here in Rochester, and Kodak contributes a great deal to RIT and the U of R, allowing both of them to be at the front of their fields in a great deal of imaging technology. I work with an optical engineer who graduated from the U of R two years ago. RIT has a large film and imaging department. They are both good schools, neither deserves to be slighted.
Course, neither is as good as Caltech. And about U of R students being mad because they're confused with RIT students...don't bitch. I say I go to Caltech and people think I mean ITT tech.
a situation at my school? Microsoft signed some deal, and basically all of us students were able to acquire free copies of Visual Studios 6.0, WinNT 4.0 w/SP4. We had to sign an agreement saying we would not resell the software.
If I went to a German university and had software given to me for free does this mean I could turn around and sell it? Or, because I did not actually purchase the software and it was given to me am I prevented from doing this?
I don't understand how many people say this ruling makes sense. As mentioned by many other posters, it is nearly akin to being able to sell just the shampoo from a shampoo/conditioner pair sold shrinkwrapped together. Maybe it's more like buying a new car, pulling the engine out and selling that? Except selling the OS that runs a computer seems to me to be much more useful than selling the engine out of a new car.
Then again, what's to prevent the retailers from installing their OEM copies of the software, selling those systems without the OEM Software CD's, and then turning around and selling the OEM Software? Would they be able to get away with that, and how would they be caught? hmm...
You know/knew lots of people at tech? Techers are...unique.:) (and I'm being nice when I say that). but seriously...
I understand everyone being forced to fit the same mold. The guy in the room next to me just had his gf visit. She talked about how at her college (a state school with a couple thousand people) she would walk into class and be the heaviest girl in the room. This is coming from a 5'1", 110 pound waif. It's disgusting. She agreed it's disgusting. The health center at that school said that, unofficially, probalby 7 out of 10 girls had eating disorders.
I can relate a similar experience to yours at a concert. I went to the SnowCore tour, the only bands of note being Blink 182 and Primus. It was very very funny to see the hordes of bleached hair sweater vest yuppies and their make-up laden girlfriends moshing to Blink 182. Everyone looked the same. Then Primus came on. The sweater vests mysteriously vanished, and were replaced by a crowd that, albeit dressed in the same fashion as each other, were not cookie-cutter replicas of each other.:) In hs I was the only kid who wore only plain black clothes and a black trench coat. Here at tech there are...lots of them. But at least here there isn't pressure to fit any sort of mold. My ex visited me a few weeks ago. (she wasn't my ex then). She said how much she liked tech because her college (a state school in NY) was a place where everyone acted just like they did in hs. She was happy people were mature (for the most part) here at tech. We just have other problems like being socially-maladjusted pencil-neck geeks with monitor tans:).
To answer your question about what I would do if a balanced model was presented for an fps, I would probably take it. I can see models being done on the form of track stars (for the female model at least), since track stars never seem to have those insane proportions we see everywhere on tv and in movies. For guys? If I could get a model that looked like the picture of me on my webpage in my trench coat, I would be all over that. Too bad they don't model short white guys who aren't rippling with muscles.
It is disturbing how uniform everyone is becoming. Yes, this is partly because the media and pop culture are continuously bombarding us with images of gorgeous, athletic, funny people with great hair and great clothes, and everyone jumps up and says "ooh! ooh! I want in! I want to be popular!" I'm sorry I haven't been able to catch Freaks and Geeks on whatever network station, because they atleast had normal looking actors on their show, not like Dawson's Creek or Buffy. People are insecure, they want to belong to something bigger than themselves so they can feel more secure in knowing there are others like them. Yes, I'm generalizing horribly here but I'm tired and I don't want to do my phys set:). That and tech seems to have drained my vocabulary and eloquence...doh...
This is an interesting conversation the two of you have started. I hope you don't mind if I throw my two cents in:). I'm a guy, and I normally play a female model in fps's. Why? umm...I think they are more aesthetically pleasing, basically. Mainly I play tribes. I think the female model in tribes looks infinitely better in terms of balance and body proportions than the male model (the male model is soo top heavy and has chicken legs!). In the short time I played quake 2, I used the Athena model (female, blonde hair) because I'm blonde, and I always wanted a twin sister:). That and the model looks like Linda Hamilton, and Linda Hamilton kicks ass.
In RPG's I play a male character, because in RPG's I try and play myself. I also use female characters, because I have female friends. The female characters in RPG's I don't play as myself, I play them as my friends. My female friends I think of as fighters I make fighters, the ones I think of as mages I make mages, etc. It's much more fun to have a party of 6 PC's in Baldur's Gate composed of yourself, your girlfriend, and 4 of your close friends to go through the game and eradicate evil:).
Personally, I try and treat all players the same, because I expect most other female models in fps's to be guys as well, and I'm not going to underestimate them. In role-playing games, I play my character. I normally play a Paladin, so I'm polite and chivalrous to everyone, but that's mainly because that's the way I am. I'm running a clan on a competition ladder for Tribes. I don't let my team taunt, I don't like it. Here at school, I have to treat the girls with respect, because most of them are smarter than I am;).
Those are just my two cents. Personally, I wish more people at least tried to be polite in games, especially fps's. When I get totally abused by someone, I usually at least tell them "nice shot." Likewise, when I'm winning (which I'm happy to say is usually) I try and be a good sport about it. There's nothing more I hate than poor winners, so I try to be a good one. I wish more people were like that. Ok, I'm done ranting.
Thanks. As a EE I would love to see the kind of labs and setups they have there. Oh well, too bad I didn't get that internship there. The price of being a white male applying for a minority internship;)
Maybe someone could help me out here, but it seems to me that the NSA would be able to run whatever they wanted, probably something with support for multiple processors, and I wasn't aware of windows being able to support multiple processors well. I just thought the NSA would be able to at least come up with some native OS that only they would use since they are so secretive, and they have so many bright people.
Did anyone mention that Clinton's speech was at Caltech? It was very cool. They locked down the whole building where the speech was, crazy security. I have pictures of the Secret Service snipers that they put on top of some of the buildings:).
And darn, they had to cancel classes friday morning because of it.
You're right, 1600 light years is close. Astronomically speaking anyway. In terms of anything else...well the strength of an object's gravitational field varies as the inverse square law. Say you're at point A some distance r from the black hole. Now move to point B, distance 2r from the black hole. Now the gravity you feel is only 1/4th of the field at point A. So being 1600 light years away from a black hole pretty much precludes us ever feeling its effects. You could take the formula for the strength of a gravitational field and plug in numbers to see how big the black hole would be...ok hold on...oh this is great, for a black hole 1600 light year's away to have the same effect on use as the moon's gravitational field the black hole would have to have a mass of 3.5 * 10^39 kg. That's basically a 4 followed by 39 zeroes. The put that in context Our sun has a mass of 1.99*10^30 kg. So the black hole would have to weigh 10 million times as much as our sun for us to feel it as much as we feel the moon. hope that puts this in perspective:).
;) Way too big to evaporate. Most black holes have > 3 solar masses, and it would take over 100 billion years for those to evaporate from giving off Hawking Radiation. Oh, and they do evaporate with a huge explosion, but since it's going to take so damn long we really don't need to worry about it.
If the dark matter is as dense as many calculations suppose it to be, it would have a strong enough gravitational field to bend the light that went by it. So even if it were "transparent" there would still be distortion because the dark matter is so dense.
Actually, that's one of the methods for detecting dark matter and/or black holes. Astronomers lookd for instances of gravitational "lensing," where a very massive object has distorted the light from a distant star. By measuring the distortion we can get an idea of the mass of the object causing the lensing.
This isn't directly physics related, but it has been getting a good deal of media attention. JPL and NASA have been raked over the coals by the media for several recent mistakes they have made. Granted, these mistakes were not nearly as costly as previous successful missions have been. But now a good deal of JPL's funding for future missions has been cut. My question is this: Should popular opinion and political opinion have this much control over scientific research? Is it safe to assume that most of our politicians in the House of Representatives that decide how much funding JPL, NASA, and NSF receive do not have a good understanding of the nature of the research being done, and what that research entails? Should research into space exploration be continued because of the possible benefits even if public and political opinion feels that such exploration is a waste of money? Thanks for doing this interview on slashdot. moller
Here's a link to a Caltech Research group that is working with the UMass scientist who sent in the abstract to the xxx.lanl.gov site. This is the research group run by the phys prof I had last year for freshmen physics, all the work he does is on the Cosmic Microwave Backround Radiation (CMB). He showed us some very cool pictures that a BOOMERANG satellite had taken of the CMB. Consequently, this Slashdot article refers to information gleaned from another BOOMERANG run. More information than I can understand about this is here: http://astro.caltech.edu/~lgg/boom/boo m.html
Ok, so maybe the score wasn't exactly that, but there was the "hack" (for some reason we just call them pranks here) when some Caltech students took control of the scoreboard during the Rose Bowl (since the Rose Bowl is just down the street) and altered it to display the score
Caltech: 99 MIT: 16
or something like that.
Then there's the time that wonderful HOLLYWOOD sign on the hill was altered, using black plastic and duct tape, to say CALTECH.
Note that when UCLA students attempted to do the same thing to the HOLLYWOOD sign, they go in deep trouble. Everyone thought the Caltech students were brilliant and funny though.:)
I can't say much for NYC, but Rochester has some nice resources for visual effects. This is mainly due to Kodak's huge presence in Rochester. The Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and the University of Rochester both have very good visual design, computer graphics, photography and film departments, thanks to Kodak. I'm sure Xerox contributes in part as well (since they also have a large base in Rochester), but Kodak is the major player. In particular, the film school at RIT is exceptional.
He said something about it, like he doesn't want to work on a big government funded project or something. So he's doing superstring theory now and little things that give the rest of us nosebleeds. On the plus side, if I were a phys major I could take a class from him.:)
Most chips nowadays are in-system programmable, meaning someone just has to hook something up to them and upload the new program, software, whatever. If the machines are all wired together (most likely not wired, but wirelessly connected) then theoretically it should be easy to upload new information to them. Just like updating drivers on your sound card.
There's been discussion of this movement before, some people have dubbed it "Ubiquitous Computing." I know that Xerox's PARC facility is doing something with this, and we just had a building here at Caltech dedicated to the idea of Ubiquitous computing. http://www.caltech.edu/~media/Press_Releases/PR119 93.html
It's going to be cool. They're talking about putting a large transceiver on top of our largest building, giving palmtops to every student, and having wireless internet access to anyone with a direct line of site to the transceiver. We do this, then move on to toasters:).
Never mind that my friend who works at Compaq says he wouldn't buy one of their computers for himself. And I know a business that bought a network setup from Compaq, about 20-25 Celeron machines...and the damn things had NO FANS!!!
hey, maybe Compaq machines just work that much better with Linux, but the hardware is still kinda questionable.
But are you trying to come across as arrogantly as I am? I thought I was trying to have a discussion about colleges, but you insist on throwing some random insults in here. But hey, I'm just the dumb poor kid, I should be bowing before your vast wisdom and reasoning skills that you are demonstrating by easily providing a counterexample to every point I make, and even some I don't make. I'm sorry for insulting your lordship, I'll just go crawl back into my hole now.
so what was that about removing all doubt I'm an idiot? All I had to do was open my mouth?
There is a very good reason that intorductory EE classes and textbooks (such as this one) deal with synchronous design. It's easier than asynchronous design. This textbook was designed for undergraduate students, not for people who will be designing the next generation of microprocessors!
That being said, simply because current microprocessors aren't using a synchronous design ideology doesn't mean that synchronous design is dead. Take RAM. There's a reason it's called SDRAM, for Synchronous Dynamic RAM. The circuit that refreshed the RAM is a synchronous LFSR (Linear Feedback Shift Register). Synchronous design is not dead at all, it has its place.
Slashdot Mirror
You should make the distinction that RIT has an IT department and an Engineering department. There's a large difference between the two. People who can't cut it in the Engineering school drop to the IT department. And just about anyone can make it in the IT department.
RIT's engineering school is quite good. They were the first school in the nation to have an accredited microelectronic engineering program, with cleanrooms and supplies donated by Intel and AMD.
not as diverse as in NYC but they are diverse. Yes, each town is rather homogeneous but there is a great deal of variety between the different suburbs surrounding rochester and in the city itself (since the entire are is known as the "Greater Rochester Area").
Trust me, I've lived here my entire life, and I'm going to college in California. I prefer Rochester. The people are diverse, just look at the differences between the various highschools. You have many different ethnicity's represented in quite large and active groups.
But there is the problem that the entire country is too homogeneous. The problem that the majority of highschool kids dress in A&F, Old Navy, and American Eagle. The problem that 6-9th grade girls have become teenyboppers seeking to imitate britney spears. The problem that nearly all twenty-somethings have the same hair cut and dress the same way. But this problem isn't limited to Rochester, it happens everywhere.
Moller
This has been said before, but I feel it needs to be reiterated as previous posters have left out important information.
RIT, where this progress is being made, is the Rochester Institute of Technology.
The University of Rochester, (U of R), is not where this is being done.
The University of Rochester (about 4,000 undergrads) is a higher ranked school than RIT, since it is a national university. It consistently ranks in the top 30 in the oh-so-wonderful US News and World Report. RIT is a regional school (about 8,000 undergrads) but it is one of the top-ranked schools in the northeast. To call it an IT school is being rather harsh, RIT is a technical institute, along the same lines as Caltech and MIT, though RIT isn't as rigorous or demanding as either of those institutions. Contrary to what a previous poster said, RIT does have a computer science degree program. RIT also has a software engineering degree program. There is a large difference, and the school acknowledges this. Both schools are in the same town. They are also practically right next to each other in Rochester (I would know, I've lived in Rochester my entire life).
More on-topic, RIT is able to do such advanced imaging work because Kodak is based in Rochester. The George Eastman house is a historical landmark here in Rochester, and Kodak contributes a great deal to RIT and the U of R, allowing both of them to be at the front of their fields in a great deal of imaging technology. I work with an optical engineer who graduated from the U of R two years ago. RIT has a large film and imaging department. They are both good schools, neither deserves to be slighted.
Course, neither is as good as Caltech. And about U of R students being mad because they're confused with RIT students...don't bitch. I say I go to Caltech and people think I mean ITT tech.
Sounds good to me. Think about it: How many things do you own which you are legally obligated to never resell? Do you really "own" them in that case?
That's a very good question. I don't honestly know. Hmmm....
heh, if I couldn't resell things would a garage sale be illegal?
a situation at my school? Microsoft signed some deal, and basically all of us students were able to acquire free copies of Visual Studios 6.0, WinNT 4.0 w/SP4. We had to sign an agreement saying we would not resell the software.
If I went to a German university and had software given to me for free does this mean I could turn around and sell it? Or, because I did not actually purchase the software and it was given to me am I prevented from doing this?
I don't understand how many people say this ruling makes sense. As mentioned by many other posters, it is nearly akin to being able to sell just the shampoo from a shampoo/conditioner pair sold shrinkwrapped together. Maybe it's more like buying a new car, pulling the engine out and selling that? Except selling the OS that runs a computer seems to me to be much more useful than selling the engine out of a new car.
Then again, what's to prevent the retailers from installing their OEM copies of the software, selling those systems without the OEM Software CD's, and then turning around and selling the OEM Software? Would they be able to get away with that, and how would they be caught? hmm...
You know/knew lots of people at tech? Techers are...unique. :) (and I'm being nice when I say that). but seriously...
:) In hs I was the only kid who wore only plain black clothes and a black trench coat. Here at tech there are...lots of them. But at least here there isn't pressure to fit any sort of mold. My ex visited me a few weeks ago. (she wasn't my ex then). She said how much she liked tech because her college (a state school in NY) was a place where everyone acted just like they did in hs. She was happy people were mature (for the most part) here at tech. We just have other problems like being socially-maladjusted pencil-neck geeks with monitor tans :).
:). That and tech seems to have drained my vocabulary and eloquence...doh...
I understand everyone being forced to fit the same mold. The guy in the room next to me just had his gf visit. She talked about how at her college (a state school with a couple thousand people) she would walk into class and be the heaviest girl in the room. This is coming from a 5'1", 110 pound waif. It's disgusting. She agreed it's disgusting. The health center at that school said that, unofficially, probalby 7 out of 10 girls had eating disorders.
I can relate a similar experience to yours at a concert. I went to the SnowCore tour, the only bands of note being Blink 182 and Primus. It was very very funny to see the hordes of bleached hair sweater vest yuppies and their make-up laden girlfriends moshing to Blink 182. Everyone looked the same. Then Primus came on. The sweater vests mysteriously vanished, and were replaced by a crowd that, albeit dressed in the same fashion as each other, were not cookie-cutter replicas of each other.
To answer your question about what I would do if a balanced model was presented for an fps, I would probably take it. I can see models being done on the form of track stars (for the female model at least), since track stars never seem to have those insane proportions we see everywhere on tv and in movies. For guys? If I could get a model that looked like the picture of me on my webpage in my trench coat, I would be all over that. Too bad they don't model short white guys who aren't rippling with muscles.
It is disturbing how uniform everyone is becoming. Yes, this is partly because the media and pop culture are continuously bombarding us with images of gorgeous, athletic, funny people with great hair and great clothes, and everyone jumps up and says "ooh! ooh! I want in! I want to be popular!" I'm sorry I haven't been able to catch Freaks and Geeks on whatever network station, because they atleast had normal looking actors on their show, not like Dawson's Creek or Buffy. People are insecure, they want to belong to something bigger than themselves so they can feel more secure in knowing there are others like them. Yes, I'm generalizing horribly here but I'm tired and I don't want to do my phys set
This is an interesting conversation the two of you have started. I hope you don't mind if I throw my two cents in :). I'm a guy, and I normally play a female model in fps's. Why? umm...I think they are more aesthetically pleasing, basically. Mainly I play tribes. I think the female model in tribes looks infinitely better in terms of balance and body proportions than the male model (the male model is soo top heavy and has chicken legs!). In the short time I played quake 2, I used the Athena model (female, blonde hair) because I'm blonde, and I always wanted a twin sister :). That and the model looks like Linda Hamilton, and Linda Hamilton kicks ass.
:).
;).
In RPG's I play a male character, because in RPG's I try and play myself. I also use female characters, because I have female friends. The female characters in RPG's I don't play as myself, I play them as my friends. My female friends I think of as fighters I make fighters, the ones I think of as mages I make mages, etc. It's much more fun to have a party of 6 PC's in Baldur's Gate composed of yourself, your girlfriend, and 4 of your close friends to go through the game and eradicate evil
Personally, I try and treat all players the same, because I expect most other female models in fps's to be guys as well, and I'm not going to underestimate them. In role-playing games, I play my character. I normally play a Paladin, so I'm polite and chivalrous to everyone, but that's mainly because that's the way I am. I'm running a clan on a competition ladder for Tribes. I don't let my team taunt, I don't like it. Here at school, I have to treat the girls with respect, because most of them are smarter than I am
Those are just my two cents. Personally, I wish more people at least tried to be polite in games, especially fps's. When I get totally abused by someone, I usually at least tell them "nice shot." Likewise, when I'm winning (which I'm happy to say is usually) I try and be a good sport about it. There's nothing more I hate than poor winners, so I try to be a good one. I wish more people were like that. Ok, I'm done ranting.
they had snipers on top of Baxter, and in Beckman Behavioral (I think). Probably on top of Moore and Millikan as well, but I'm not sure.
Thanks. As a EE I would love to see the kind of labs and setups they have there. Oh well, too bad I didn't get that internship there. The price of being a white male applying for a minority internship ;)
Maybe someone could help me out here, but it seems to me that the NSA would be able to run whatever they wanted, probably something with support for multiple processors, and I wasn't aware of windows being able to support multiple processors well. I just thought the NSA would be able to at least come up with some native OS that only they would use since they are so secretive, and they have so many bright people.
Did anyone mention that Clinton's speech was at Caltech? It was very cool. They locked down the whole building where the speech was, crazy security. I have pictures of the Secret Service snipers that they put on top of some of the buildings :).
And darn, they had to cancel classes friday morning because of it.
You're right, 1600 light years is close. Astronomically speaking anyway. In terms of anything else...well the strength of an object's gravitational field varies as the inverse square law. Say you're at point A some distance r from the black hole. Now move to point B, distance 2r from the black hole. Now the gravity you feel is only 1/4th of the field at point A. So being 1600 light years away from a black hole pretty much precludes us ever feeling its effects. You could take the formula for the strength of a gravitational field and plug in numbers to see how big the black hole would be...ok hold on...oh this is great, for a black hole 1600 light year's away to have the same effect on use as the moon's gravitational field the black hole would have to have a mass of 3.5 * 10^39 kg. That's basically a 4 followed by 39 zeroes. The put that in context Our sun has a mass of 1.99*10^30 kg. So the black hole would have to weigh 10 million times as much as our sun for us to feel it as much as we feel the moon. hope that puts this in perspective :).
;) Way too big to evaporate. Most black holes have > 3 solar masses, and it would take over 100 billion years for those to evaporate from giving off Hawking Radiation. Oh, and they do evaporate with a huge explosion, but since it's going to take so damn long we really don't need to worry about it.
If the dark matter is as dense as many calculations suppose it to be, it would have a strong enough gravitational field to bend the light that went by it. So even if it were "transparent" there would still be distortion because the dark matter is so dense.
Actually, that's one of the methods for detecting dark matter and/or black holes. Astronomers lookd for instances of gravitational "lensing," where a very massive object has distorted the light from a distant star. By measuring the distortion we can get an idea of the mass of the object causing the lensing.
Hey, I know, let's get together and watch Sphere, Cube, and The Matrix, all in quick succession and then ponder the philosophy of each movie. ;)
This isn't directly physics related, but it has been getting a good deal of media attention.
JPL and NASA have been raked over the coals by the media for several recent mistakes they have made. Granted, these mistakes were not nearly as costly as previous successful missions have been. But now a good deal of JPL's funding for future missions has been cut. My question is this: Should popular opinion and political opinion have this much control over scientific research? Is it safe to assume that most of our politicians in the House of Representatives that decide how much funding JPL, NASA, and NSF receive do not have a good understanding of the nature of the research being done, and what that research entails? Should research into space exploration be continued because of the possible benefits even if public and political opinion feels that such exploration is a waste of money?
Thanks for doing this interview on slashdot.
moller
http://www.physics.ucsb.edu/~boome rang/team.html
Here's a link to a Caltech Research group that is working with the UMass scientist who sent in the abstract to the xxx.lanl.gov site. This is the research group run by the phys prof I had last year for freshmen physics, all the work he does is on the Cosmic Microwave Backround Radiation (CMB). He showed us some very cool pictures that a BOOMERANG satellite had taken of the CMB. Consequently, this Slashdot article refers to information gleaned from another BOOMERANG run. More information than I can understand about this is here:
http://astro.caltech.edu/~lgg/boom/boo m.html
Ok, so maybe the score wasn't exactly that, but there was the "hack" (for some reason we just call them pranks here) when some Caltech students took control of the scoreboard during the Rose Bowl (since the Rose Bowl is just down the street) and altered it to display the score
:)
Caltech: 99
MIT: 16
or something like that.
Then there's the time that wonderful HOLLYWOOD sign on the hill was altered, using black plastic and duct tape, to say CALTECH.
Note that when UCLA students attempted to do the same thing to the HOLLYWOOD sign, they go in deep trouble. Everyone thought the Caltech students were brilliant and funny though.
I can't say much for NYC, but Rochester has some nice resources for visual effects. This is mainly due to Kodak's huge presence in Rochester. The Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and the University of Rochester both have very good visual design, computer graphics, photography and film departments, thanks to Kodak. I'm sure Xerox contributes in part as well (since they also have a large base in Rochester), but Kodak is the major player. In particular, the film school at RIT is exceptional.
He said something about it, like he doesn't want to work on a big government funded project or something. So he's doing superstring theory now and little things that give the rest of us nosebleeds. On the plus side, if I were a phys major I could take a class from him. :)
Most chips nowadays are in-system programmable, meaning someone just has to hook something up to them and upload the new program, software, whatever. If the machines are all wired together (most likely not wired, but wirelessly connected) then theoretically it should be easy to upload new information to them. Just like updating drivers on your sound card.
9 93.html
:).
There's been discussion of this movement before, some people have dubbed it "Ubiquitous Computing." I know that Xerox's PARC facility is doing something with this, and we just had a building here at Caltech dedicated to the idea of Ubiquitous computing. http://www.caltech.edu/~media/Press_Releases/PR11
It's going to be cool. They're talking about putting a large transceiver on top of our largest building, giving palmtops to every student, and having wireless internet access to anyone with a direct line of site to the transceiver. We do this, then move on to toasters
Never mind that my friend who works at Compaq says he wouldn't buy one of their computers for himself. And I know a business that bought a network setup from Compaq, about 20-25 Celeron machines...and the damn things had NO FANS!!!
hey, maybe Compaq machines just work that much better with Linux, but the hardware is still kinda questionable.
But are you trying to come across as arrogantly as I am? I thought I was trying to have a discussion about colleges, but you insist on throwing some random insults in here. But hey, I'm just the dumb poor kid, I should be bowing before your vast wisdom and reasoning skills that you are demonstrating by easily providing a counterexample to every point I make, and even some I don't make. I'm sorry for insulting your lordship, I'll just go crawl back into my hole now.
so what was that about removing all doubt I'm an idiot? All I had to do was open my mouth?
There is a very good reason that intorductory EE classes and textbooks (such as this one) deal with synchronous design. It's easier than asynchronous design. This textbook was designed for undergraduate students, not for people who will be designing the next generation of microprocessors!
That being said, simply because current microprocessors aren't using a synchronous design ideology doesn't mean that synchronous design is dead. Take RAM. There's a reason it's called SDRAM, for Synchronous Dynamic RAM. The circuit that refreshed the RAM is a synchronous LFSR (Linear Feedback Shift Register). Synchronous design is not dead at all, it has its place.