Freshman MIT Students Automate Dorm Room 290
Inessa writes "Two freshman MIT students have automated their dorm room, complete with a big red party button which generates an instant party. Their custom-engineered system is called MIDAS, the Multi-Function In Dorm Automation System. According to the MIT News office, "Gone are the light switches and glaring fluorescent lights of a typical dorm room. Zack Anderson and RJ Ryan's room has several lighting schemes, remote web access, voice activation, a security system, electric blinds and more ... With the touch of one red button, their dorm room becomes a rave. The lights go out, the blinds close, the displays read, "feel the energy" as a voice repeats the same phrase over a deep bass beat.""
Video (Score:5, Informative)
they got nothing on the DDF guys (Score:1, Informative)
The disco dance floor [mit.edu] guys did it sooo much better than this gimmick. And they had a girl!
how we manage (Score:4, Informative)
Usually you can pay extra to ditch the roommate, but this may involve a much longer walk to class. If the school is uncrowded and/or you claim to have some sort of mental issue (Asperger's, severe ADD, etc.) you might be able to get a regular double to yourself, with or without paying double.
Many places have dorms for married students, regularly visited by the stork.
Re:It May Look Nice... (Score:5, Informative)
If they want, they don't have to move out for three years. On most halls at East Campus, you can squat your room as long as you want (except that they'll probably have to keep squatting it as a double).
I bet everything has been screwed or nailed in, modified and altered to accommodate all this equipment. Who allowed them to do this?
Joe Graham. ("Kids making illegal modifications to their rooms? I'm on it!")
Last time I checked you weren't allowed to mess around with dorm rooms.
At East Campus, you actually are allowed to mess around with dorm rooms. Murals are painted everywhere, and all sorts of cool shit happens. The building is so old that nobody cares anymore, except for the Cambridge Fire Department. And if you keep the room's door locked during inspection, they don't have to know about it.
Nice system and all, but -10 practicality. Maybe it would have worked better in a house or apartment. They should have worked more in how it looked and how it was to be set up instead of just building it.
Yeah, but by the time they live in a house or apartment, they won't have the free time to do this kind of stuff. Heck, next term they probably won't have that kind of time.
Re:Thanks, Mom and Dad (Score:2, Informative)
Re:MIT's drug abuse problem (Score:1, Informative)
Since when is Boston the same city as Cambridge?
"I've spoken to a lot of managers at high-tech companies that won't hire fresh MIT grads because a)they don't know anything actually useful and b)they think they know everything, so when they're doing something wrong, they don't listen to coworkers, team leaders, and managers."
Your experience with high-tech companies is apparently very limited, and I suspect entirely made up. Go to an MIT recruiting fair sometime, they're in that city across the river.
"My favorite example is the manager who told me about the MIT programmer he hired that wouldn't use constants...he's plug in the same number 50 times in his algorithm, instead of defining a properly named constant...and his variable names were hilariously bad. Basically, it was clear he never learned proper programming techniques. Despite the manager's insistence that he define constants, etc (ie follow company coding standards), the guy kept doing it his way."
Sounds like a bad manager to me. Why would he ever hire an inexperienced programmer?
"Ever wonder why so many MIT grads work for other MIT grads?"
No, not really, it's pretty obvious.
"It's because they're un-employable by anyone else."
Just... NO.
How did this troll ever get modded up to a 4? Mod parent down.