The Student Newspaper of Worcester Polytechnic Institute
W e a t h e r ... Today: Sunny. H ighs 50 to 60. T om orrow and T hursday: Chance of rain. Highs 50 to 60.
Tuesday; April 21, 1998
Volume Twenty-six, Number Twelve
Faster than the speed of lightning!
Sp o r t s.
WPI's Campus Network receives a major upgrade this year by Christopher Stank Business Manager Over last summer and into this fall the WPI network was intro duced to a new area. This new area was the wireless Greek network. This network included the connect ing of all the Greek houses via a 10Megabit wireless network. Most of the Greek houses were brought on line shortly after the first of the year. However some did not complete their wiring on time, so they came
on line when they were ready. WPI is currently undergoing technological upgrades. Most us ers have seen the increased perfor mance of the newly acquired Novell File Servers. The file servers Fuller and Higgins were upgraded to Dual Pentium-Pro 200MHz processors with 512 Megabytes of RAM. This summer a third Novell File Server is possibly going to be replaced with a Pentium-II 233MHz processor or something similar. In addition to the upgrade of these File Servers,
most of the Servers on Campus have had their network cards up graded to 100-Megabit Cards con nected directly to the backbone. Also two new web servers were brought online earlier this year. This summer three of the Unix servers will be replaced with faster machines. Garden will be upgraded to Dec Alpha 533Mhz processors with 512 M egabytes o f RAM. Bigwpi and Blazer will be upgraded to a single Dec Alpha 533Mhz pro cessor with 512 M egabytes of
Vocal recitals: A final performance by Ken Gagne Newspeak Staff On Saturday, April 18th, two WPI seniors held vocal recitals. Jo n R ey n o ld s co m p le te d his capstone requirement for a minor in m usic, w hile J e ff A lderson completed his sufficiency degree requirement. Both are ECE ma jors, and are members of both the WPI Men’s Giee Club and Simple Harmonic Motion, the a capella group, and both were involved with WPI M asque’s musical pro duction, Quilt. Additionally, Jon
is a member of Skull, and Jeff is a member of Alpha Phi Omega. Reynolds began with a pair of Latin pieces before moving on to more enthusiastic melodies. Sev eral numbers were composed by the B roadw ay genius Stephen Sondheim, such as “Sorry-G rate ful” and “Johanna” in his third act, which closed with a riveting rendition o f “I, Don Q uixote,” from “ M an o f La M an ch a” . Reynolds left the solo scene and dedicated the fourth act to per forming with his closest friends. He tried to entice Jenny Kimball
to stay after a one-night stand in “Barcelona”, before compar ing the pains of love with his twin brother Chris in “Agony” . Finally, he dedicated “Change in My Life” to his girlfriend. This tune was sung a c a p e lla , as Reynolds is famous for, along with other members, past and present, of Simple Harmonic Mo tion: Jeff Haynes, Jeff Alderson, Mike Driscoll, and Brian Steiner. A lderson’s perform ance was shorter, but no less impressive. Like Reynolds, he opened with a See Vocal, continued to page 3
Newring something to remember Juniors and Seniors came to Higgins House last Wednesday to see the new WPI class ring unveiled. Examining the new design are (from left) Chad Tino ‘99, Amy Sinyei ’98, and Chris Neumaier ’98. The Alumni Association, in cooperation with student body members and Jostens, worked together for a year to come up with a single new design for WPI. The two towers of Washburn and Boynton are shown on one side with the class year while the school mascot goat is shown on the other along with Earle Bridge. The top of the ring features WPI’s official seal on a garnet stone.
PHO r o C O U R T ESY OF WPI NEWS S E R V IC E
RAM. The Garden lab, located in Fuller Labs, is going to be upgraded with new X-Terminals. When this happens a new 100-Megabit line is going to be dropped to a hub to which these computers will be con nected. This will alleviate the cur rent traffic load that exists between the ADP, Garden and Zoo Labs. The two coax segments that cur rently connect the Garden, Zoo and ADP labs will only connect the ADP and Zoo Labs. When Network M anager Sean O ’C onnor was asked why he did not want to add in another coax segment to try to alleviate the speed problems that are associated with these labs, he stated that, “We can’t just patch the network, we need to be able to provide for the future, and coax is not the way to go.” During this summer the current network is going to be undergoing a major overhaul. The backbone is going to be upgraded to dual full duplex O C 12 (with a speed of 622Megabits). Residence Halls will be upgraded to OC3, where each chas sis will have the capability of hav ing 4 OC3 (with speeds of 155megabits) uplinks to the backbone. In most cases the chassis arc go ing to use only one because this going to be a huge upgrade from the current 10-Megabit connection that is currently in place. The chas sis are going to be upgraded to Bay Network multi-back plane chassis, where they service ATM (Asyn chronous Transfer Mode - which is a high speed, cell-based transfer protocol commonly used in high speed Wide Area Networks), Fast Ethernet and Ethernet for the 100Megabit back-plane, which is dif ferent from the 10-Megabit back plane. During the summer four aca demic buildings will also get up graded to OC3 uplinks to the back bone. The upgrades are expected to take only a weekend. The back bone will be upgraded in one day, and the academic buildings will be brought online the next day. Once all the academic buildings arc on line the residence halls will be brought on line. When O’Connor was asked why he did not want to reuse the cur rent equipment, he replied, “I do nol want lo play with the old equipment because most of the equipment is five years old and is seriously out dated.” He docs not plan to reuse any of the dorm equipment, but he See Network, continued to page 2
T h e N a t io n .
New test have shown that people with higher education have better health.
A&E Don't Panic! The speech at the end of the universe... Douglas Adams speaks at Clark U.
News.................................... 2,3 National News....................... 4 Sports.............................. 5,6,11 SGA Agenda.......................... 8 International House...............8 Announcements................ 8,13 letters to the Editor.................9 Arts & Entertainment.........9,10 Club Corner......................... 12 Classifieds............................ IS , Comics.................................. 15 Police IMg............................16 What's Happening................16