Unless you go to something like PLoS, where *everything* is published, you're still going to end up with duplication of effort.
Just think of how many GradStudent-Years of work would be saved for every 'I tried (x) and it didn't work' paper, as we won't have 20 more researchers trying to do it.
I don't know that the Open Notebook concept works in all fields (remember the Haumea controversy?), but we need to be moving in that direction.
I just want to go back to the days of the cell phones where you'd press the power button... and it would turn on.
Not give you a 'booting up' screen or 'loading java' image/video for 3-5 minutes.
Now, if we still had the 100+ hr standby times, I might not have to turn my cell phone off so often, but it's still pretty crappy when you turn your phone back on after the plane lands, and you're already in baggage claim before you can finally check your voicemail.
Yep. When I changed virus scanners a few years back, it found hundreds of infections on my system... because I save my spam for when I need to train new filters.
The bigger problem is going to be people with infected files on a webserver that they're serving to the world... JPEG exploits, word macro viruses, etc.
And it's compounded by the fact that some virus scanners don't bother scanning for older infections, so they can save CPU cycles & size of the virus definitions.
Very few sysadmins that I know have degrees in computer science.
They have degrees in science, engineering, or for some, no degree at all. All focused on problem solving skills, but no so much on the heavy math that comes from CompSci degrees. We need to worry about getting things built and keeping them working -- the most efficient way to sort something doesn't really come up too much.
And as someone who has worked for a university... I was surprised how none of the IT staff taught classes. Some of the CompSci faculty hadn't been in the industry for 10+ years, and would show slides w/ 15 year old computers in them. It was cringe-worthy.
I'm guessing that Code for America, Open Source for America, or Civic Commons would have some experience in dealing with these issues, and have suggestions:
I read the title, and get all excited... and then read the summary to find they're not talking about the Girl Scouts, Nabisco, or other things that might involve sugar and chocolate chips.
And now that I got my hopes up, I'm going to go see what's in the vending machine. There's usually animal crackers, at the very least.
As the drives don't ship with them, and there only seems to be one on the market right now ($50 from Apple), there's lots of room to say, make more than one length available, or maybe other manufacturers. I mean, they're active cables, so that should count as a 'device' right?
Then there's all the mini-DisplayPort adaptors now rebranding themselves as 'thunderbolt' adaptors... so there's a couple dozen right there... (VGA, DVI-D, DVI-DL, miniHDMI, etc.. and those are already available from more than one company).
See? I'm sure we can even get to 200 if we count it right.
Discovery, Syfy, etc would go away or refocus more on catering the lowest common denominator
SyFy (I pronounce it like 'sippy', but with f in place of p, as it's not SciFi): wrestling, ghost hunters, paranormal witness, fact or faked, etc.
Discovery: man vs. wild, pitchmen, dual survival, man/woman/wild, ghost lab, etc.
They're not already catering to the lowest common denominator? I admit, I like Survivorman... but the other survival shows grate on me. And I might watch more of The Colony if they have two groups, both thinking they're the 'good guys' and the other group is a bunch of actors in there to harass them, but I'd rather watch Rough Science.
"senior review panel recommends" does not mean "Congress has approved".
Until there's a budget passed, senior reviews mean nothing. And if Congress puts in enough mandates on NASA's plate without increasing the budget, something's gotta get cut.
If the budget's cut, are they going to give up on the JWST, or Kepler and dozens of other smaller projects that are returning results now? Are they going to grab money from earth science, heliophysics, the manned space program, or somewhere else? Maybe I'm just cynical, but I don't think it's a good time to be in astronomy at NASA.
Maybe I'm biased, as I just helped to organize a session & other activities for a conference a week ago, and I'm helping with another one two weeks from now...
But not all conferences are the same. Yes, there are the ones where it's just people up there talking, and you'd have gotten the same things from a paper... but for smaller conferences, you can have more of a conversation with the people... get some time in for Q&A, ask the presenter for clarification or more information. And then there's the collaboration aspects. I've been invited to give lectures because of talking to people at conferences. My only peer-reviewed publication was because of a discussion at a conference until 2am that I ended up writing up. I just gave a talk on something that was basically a summary of a 2hr conversation at a workshop last summer.
And as for everything of importance showing up in peer reviewed publications -- not a chance. There is tons of stuff in some fields that gets shown as slides or presentations and will most likely not be published. Hardly any of the science informatics stuff at the AGU gets formally published... we're all too busy building systems. Almost all done in posters. And we then have coversations at the posters, over lunch / dinner / drinks, or afterwards over email.
I'm not going to say that all conferences are good... I've been to some that were downright painful... so I've learned to avoid those. Well, except for one, where it was their first year, and I took the approach of becoming one of the organizers to make it better.
And if you're relying on peer review, unless you're the reviewer, you're not going to be able to comment until *after* it's published. Which means it's just too late for the really idiotic ones.
That's not to say they're not a time suck... if you're doing a poster or presentation that could take a week or two (more if you have co-authors). Then there's all of the trip planning... if you have to do paperwork, and reimbursement once you get back. But the big problem is little sleep, jetlag, plus lots of people in cramped spaces and wanting to shake hands... and you're just asking for illness. One year I came down with a sore throat, and tried going straight back to work after getting back... turned out it was bronchitis, and took 2 months to recover.
I've lost 2 months due to brochitis from a trip, and there's the trip planning,
Amazon is using the idle time of their huge cloud when it's not being used for christmas shopping... so the cost of CPU is relatively cheap. Bandwidth and storage is *not* with most cloud sevices.
So, say I need to calibrate a year's worth of SDO/AIA data... that'd mean pushing to them somewhere in the range of 500TB of data, and then pulling it back again. They've changed their pricing so the transfer in is now free... but if I'm doing the math right, that'd cost somewhere on the order of $30k for the transfers, and if we assume we're pushing it in and deleting it as soon as it's done, we don't need a lot of storage. For other processes, people *do* need the storage, which runs around $100/TB/month, so $50k... per month.
It's not as impressive, but it's more cost effective in the long run to build in your own processing near the data. Would it be nice to redo two years of calibration in a day, rather than the ~3hrs to process 1 day's data that it takes now? Yes, but we don't have the funding to pay for it. (every launch delay costs money (gotta keep the scientists employed, store satellites in machine rooms, pay for offices, etc.)... and that money, without fail, gets taken from the actual running of the mission and the data analysis.
What I'd personally like to see is more large scale infrastructure coordination, and for any project where the PI team's composed entirely of physicists yet they're designing and implementing their own data system be immediately de-funded.
I'm not going to say that everyone should be using iRODS or OODT or whatever the next new sexy thing is... but a physicist writing the drivers that run the tape drives? That's a sign something's gone horribly wrong, and yet it's still happening.
Most water treatment plants discharge a higher quality of water than the rivers they inject into, but you're right, it's not sterile, and it hasn't been treated with ozone, chlorine or reverse osmosis. They may removed pathogens, but that means it's reduced, not that they're all necessarily gone. It's also impossible to test for every last pathogen (as we'd have to know what they all are, and have tests for them, and be able to do it in a fast enough time for it to be useful).
That all being said, there's a movement to make sewage treatment and drinking water treatment a closed loop -- discharge the treated water above the intake for the drinking water, so that in times of drought, you still have water that can be cleaned to use.
There's also two kinds of treatment plants -- sanitary sewers have a nearly constant discharge rate (it may fluctuate, but not dramatically), while ones like Blue Plains that serves Washington, DC is comined sanitary + storm -- so at times of high rain, the discharge is so much that they have to send some of it straight into the river without treatment... those are the ones that you *really* don't want to go swimming near.
What comes from toilets is 'black water', but 'grey water'. Grey comes from showers, washing machines, etc. It's specifically that which has been used, but has a low risk of pathogens in it.
From the article, it sounds like they're using a blend of the two... but they never linked to the March 15th Jim Brown blog post. From reading his blog, he states, "We worked with the WSA to build a side-stream plant about five miles west of our data center that diverts up to 30 percent of the water that would have gone back into the river", while the article linked to states "about 30 percent of the water is diverted from the WSA system".
The article makes it sound like they're getting the water *before* it would have been cleaned by the water treatment plant... from the blog post, I'd say it's after it's been treated, and getting it before it would have been sent back to the river. So it's treated wastewater, which would've already gone through some sort of system to remove pathogens.
It's kinda hard to get the government rate on hotel rooms if you're not allowed to show it to anyone.
And nope, we never had that training... it's not like at the Pentagon, where they had big huge signs telling you to take off your badge when you left.
For years I had a card condom (the little plastic thing that you use to protect your badge... I'm not sure what they're officially called, so I've been calling them 'card condom' in hopes that it'll take off) that had two sleaves with some supposedly RFID-blocking backing in between... so I kept my badge in there backwards, so you'd only see the back unless I specifically flipped it open (when pulling up to the guardhouse at the gate)... no one ever said anything to me about it when I was just walking around.
Personally, I think the CAC Card is a waste of tax payer's money... some high-tech, expensive card that's less effective security than what we had before. (the cards are so expensive to issue that they give them for 5 years, rather than have them expire at the end of your contract... I know, because 5 years ago, we had a rebid get disputed, so we were getting new badges every one or two weeks for months 'til it got resolved). They'll let you into places that most people have no reason to be there (I went to my mom's retirement at a military base, and showed them my ID as I was signing in at the visitor's center, and they asked me why I was getting a visitor's badge if I had the new badge... which makes me suspect that a janitor or a caffeteria worker could get onto a military base with no questions asked). It's got no indication of access rights on it (so I can't tell from a glance who should/shouldn't be in the building, like the older badges), yet it's got all of my access on it, so when traveling, I can't leave my door access card behind while only carrying the picture ID needed for the hotel room rate when traveling.
Federal government agency ID (that required 4 rounds worth of securty checks to get, as I was a system administror... one to come in for the interview, one to start working there, one to get a picture badge issued, one more to get root)
State university student ID
Expired military dependant ID
Current generation federal government ID (the 'CAC card' as some people call them)
The problem was that the first three of 'em were at the same time. It went down something like this: (I show my agency badge). "You need to show a government issued ID." "It was issued by NASA". "I can't accept that." "They let me fly here showing this" "I can't accept it, you need to show other ID" (I show my student ID). "We don't accept student ID cards". "It was issued by the University of Maryland, which is under the state government, so it's a government issued ID". "No, we don't take student ID cards, I need to see something else". (I pull out my military dependant ID). "I have this, but it's expired." (he writes 'no ID' on the boarding pass, and sends me for a pat down).
Note... he never asked for a driver's license, which yes, I had on me. He just kept repeating 'government ID', but then kept rejecting them when I showed them.
Now technically the first one didn't comply with the full requirements, because it didn't have my height or eye color on it, but I used it for years without problems (it didn't have any identifying information other than a last name and a picture, but it was a hell of a lot more functional than the current one, as it had in HUGE text what the damned expiration on it was).
The sad one was when I got rejected because I gave my new 'unified' government ID. The guy's not rejecting it, he's just turning it over in his hands, looking at both sides... spent a minute or two looking, finally, I asked him if there was a problem, and he replied "I've never seen one of these before", to which I replied, "You're wearing one". "I mean a NASA one" "It's the same as yours, but it says NASA on it" "Do you have some other ID on you?" (I then pulled out my driver's license, as I didn't have the others on me).
... and the really sad thing... back in high school (before 2001), I worked summers for a DoD office that was across the street from the Pentagon. One day, I was making the mail run, and realized I didn't have my wallet, which had my military dependant ID, which was my normal picture ID, as the summer badge didn't have a picture on it. I dug through my bag, and managed to find a Photon (sort of like laser tag) ID -- a hand-filed out crappily laminated card, but it had my name and a picture... and the guard let me in (without even going through the metal detector, as I had the summer badge)
You all are just making it way to easy w/ the setups for Red Dwarf references:
LISTER: What makes you think these aliens exist?
RIMMER: They must do, Lister! There's so many things that are strange
and odd. So many things we don't have any explanation for.
LISTER: Like, um, why do intelligent people buy cinema hot dogs? Do you
mean that sort of weird and mysterious thing?
RIMMER: No, Lister, I mean like the pyramids. How did they move such
massive pieces of stone without the aid of modern technology?
LISTER: They had massive whips, Rimmer. Massive, massive whips.
RIMMER: All right, then, the Bermuda Triangle. Go on, explain that one.
You know all the answers.
LISTER: No, I agree there. That is a genuine mystery. How did a song
like that ever become a hit? It defies all reason.
RIMMER: I just don't know why I bother. I'd get more sense out of a
squashed hedgehog. Lister, don't you ever stop and wonder: why are we
here? What's the grand purpose?
LISTER: Why does it have to be such a big deal? Why can't it be like,
like, human beings are a planetary disease? Like the Earth's got
German measles or facial herpes, right? And that's why all of the
other planets give us such a wide berth. It's like, "Oh, don't go near
Earth! It's got human beings on it, they're contagious!"
RIMMER: So you're saying, Lister, you're an intergalactic, pus-filled
cold sore! At last, Lister, we agree on something.
LISTER: What do you believe in, then? Do you believe in God?
RIMMER: God? Certainly not! What a preposterous thought! I believe in
aliens, Lister.
LISTER: Oh, right, fine. Something sensible at last.
RIMMER: Aliens, Lister, with technology so far in advance of our own we
can't even begin to imagine.
LISTER: Well, that's not difficult. Mankind hasn't even got the
technology to create a toupee that doesn't get big laughs.
LISTER: Oh god, aliens? Your explanation for anything slightly peculiar
is aliens, isn't it? You lose your keys -- it's aliens. A picture
falls off the wall -- it's aliens. That time we used up a whole bog
roll in a day -- you thought that was aliens as well.
RIMMER: Well we didn't use it all, Lister. Who did?
LISTER: Rimmer, aliens used our bog roll?
RIMMER: Just 'cause they're aliens doesn't mean to say the don't have to
visit the little boys' room. Only they probably do something weird and
alienesque like it comes out of the top of their heads or something.
There's lots of technology that has gotten better price per watt... but they all sucked at watts per area, so it wasn't worth installing them. (as you have similar installation cost for labor, with a longer payback period)
There's nothing to stop you posting to your own website some 'tutorial to using (whatever)'...
Of course, you then have to hope that you haven't decided to document stuff that the developers have deprecated but haven't bothered documenting.
The sad thing is that the programmers who write the code are typically the *worst* at writing documentation -- they may developed their own jargon or niche terminology which makes reading the docs no better than reading the code directly. Imagine reading some MVC framework documentation that never explains what MVC is. (replace MVC for any other methodology).
The program might make perfect sense to those who wrote it, but unless others have the same experience and mindset, it's a hurdle for others to try to understand.
This might be the most problematic part -- we have parents who are working more and more hours. It's difficult for most families to get by on a single income, so we have many families who aren't getting the kids 'til near 6pm, get home, get dinner made, eat, and they have little time to check the kid's homework before it's time to get to bed.
It's going to take years for people to scale back their lives (all of the new construction near me are farms getting turned into 5 acre lots with big massive mansions... who the hell really needs that sort of house?) Or to get employers to pay more so that the second parent doesn't need to work, or can work part-time so they're home in the afternoon with the kid.
I know couples who work staggered shedules -- one starts early but is off by 3pm, so they can pick up the kids at a reasonable time, while his wife does the child wrangling in the morning to get them to school. Growing up, my mom worked 1/2 days when I was in elementary school, so she was home in the afternoon (but we were latch-key by high school).
And on the 'don't pass to the next grade' comment... I'd also ask why we work in whole year increments. It might make more sense to work in smaller bits, so if someone's not doing well in one topic, they don't have to repeat the whole thing. (it could be you work by quarter or semester, or it might be separating out math vs. english). Of course, I also went to some schools where kids were left to do the assignments on their own, and the teacher actually helped those who had troubles, so they never got to the point of being held back. (and for 3rd and 4th grade, my teacher was teaching two grades at the same time... so 1/2 the class would work on their own, while she taught the other grade)
Before someone mods you down, the head of the Finish education system (rated at the top), completely agrees with you -- they specifically avoid the competition aspects of education:
With America's manufacturing industries now in decline, the goal of educational policy in the U.S. -- as articulated by most everyone from President Obama on down -- is to preserve American competitiveness by doing the same thing. Finland's experience suggests that to win at that game, a country has to prepare not just some of its population well, but all of its population well, for the new economy. To possess some of the best schools in the world might still not be good enough if there are children being left behind.
It's about cooperation, not competition. They let the teachers judge the progress, not standardized testing from on-high. There are no private schools. There are no fees for education (other than taxes).
If something like this happened at my work, they would get fired for negligence and possibly charged with fraud for falsifying reports and billing for work that they weren't doing.
Of course, I also work at a place where things like that could (and have) gotten people killed.
The problem with naming servers after their functions is that in most shops, a server does more than one thing. And they often get moved / repurposed / whatever.
So that machine that's now ldap-ny-02? Well, last week it was web-ny-05. A couple months from now, are you going to remember that name change, and that web-ny-05 had that flaky power supply / fibre card / etc?
Oh, that service that had been running on lasco05? We moved that to the 'new' lasco03. (and there have been how many machines named lasco03?)
I've worked in a lot of places, and these days with clusters, virtual hosts, etc, you often have a different public-facing name (which will get used when people call in a problem... how are they to know that some service is 5+ machines behind a load balancer? Or that all of the web sub-domains are really on the same server? Even if you don't plan for the abstraction, it already exists due to these different aggregations.
If you give the hardware one name when it comes in, and only use aliases for each of the public services, you don't have to worry about recycling names just so there's no service interuptions.... and, true story, I've even worked in place with a machine named 'teller' after Edward Teller (the last article), as all of our mail servers were named after scientists... but when I moved it for testing, I renamed the pair for that cluster to 'penn', and we later added a 'copperfield' and 'houdini'... but we had to scrap the physicist names when our director didn't believe us that the spam filters weren't rejecting his e-mail because it was going through a machine named 'lovelace', and it was named after Ada Lovelace, not Linda Lovelace.)
I've worked with machines named after cheeses, spices, cartoon characters, music albums, movies, adverbs, muppets, states, rivers, tv-characters, the boss's family, periodic table, hashes of the service/location/os, astronomical phenomena,
They've been doing it since AR#9999, which was in June 2002.
And it's NOAA's doing -- they have a number of different formats they use for distributing information, but they're all fixed-width ASCII files, and very few of them actually use the 5-digit forms. To the best of my knowledge, all of the 'space weather' related products use the 4-digit values, but it's most obvious on the SPE catalog, as that's over a longer period:
(and for those who wonder why I know this... it's because I've written parsers to ingest these files into databases so scientists can do statistical analysis... and there's evidence that some of these have been maintained by hand over the years... take a look at the SPE catalog -- there's a Jan 2012 event listed, but the header says it runs through March 2011. (they at least tell you what time period they analyzed... as they have multi-year gaps between some events... most catalogs don't do that)
Slashdot Mirror
Unless you go to something like PLoS, where *everything* is published, you're still going to end up with duplication of effort.
Just think of how many GradStudent-Years of work would be saved for every 'I tried (x) and it didn't work' paper, as we won't have 20 more researchers trying to do it.
I don't know that the Open Notebook concept works in all fields (remember the Haumea controversy?), but we need to be moving in that direction.
I just want to go back to the days of the cell phones where you'd press the power button ... and it would turn on.
Not give you a 'booting up' screen or 'loading java' image/video for 3-5 minutes.
Now, if we still had the 100+ hr standby times, I might not have to turn my cell phone off so often, but it's still pretty crappy when you turn your phone back on after the plane lands, and you're already in baggage claim before you can finally check your voicemail.
Yep. When I changed virus scanners a few years back, it found hundreds of infections on my system ... because I save my spam for when I need to train new filters.
The bigger problem is going to be people with infected files on a webserver that they're serving to the world ... JPEG exploits, word macro viruses, etc.
And it's compounded by the fact that some virus scanners don't bother scanning for older infections, so they can save CPU cycles & size of the virus definitions.
Very few sysadmins that I know have degrees in computer science.
They have degrees in science, engineering, or for some, no degree at all. All focused on problem solving skills, but no so much on the heavy math that comes from CompSci degrees. We need to worry about getting things built and keeping them working -- the most efficient way to sort something doesn't really come up too much.
And as someone who has worked for a university ... I was surprised how none of the IT staff taught classes. Some of the CompSci faculty hadn't been in the industry for 10+ years, and would show slides w/ 15 year old computers in them. It was cringe-worthy.
I'm guessing that Code for America, Open Source for America, or Civic Commons would have some experience in dealing with these issues, and have suggestions:
...and sure enough, it looks like Civic Commons has a page on legal policy, which includes ''Legal Issues and Best Practices With Converting/Contributing In-House Developed Code into a Reusable FOSS Project". Also take a look under Chapter 4, as there's a bit of a discussion about code releases using FOIA. The others might have stuff, too, I didn't look too thoroughly.
I read the title, and get all excited ... and then read the summary to find they're not talking about the Girl Scouts, Nabisco, or other things that might involve sugar and chocolate chips.
And now that I got my hopes up, I'm going to go see what's in the vending machine. There's usually animal crackers, at the very least.
As the drives don't ship with them, and there only seems to be one on the market right now ($50 from Apple), there's lots of room to say, make more than one length available, or maybe other manufacturers. I mean, they're active cables, so that should count as a 'device' right?
Then there's all the mini-DisplayPort adaptors now rebranding themselves as 'thunderbolt' adaptors ... so there's a couple dozen right there ... (VGA, DVI-D, DVI-DL, miniHDMI, etc .. and those are already available from more than one company).
See? I'm sure we can even get to 200 if we count it right.
Why wouldn't they? It's pretty cool when it happens:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9139000/9139971.stm
http://www.livescience.com/7585-shark-pregnant-males-required.html
(although, not so much in insects ... those happen all the time)
SyFy (I pronounce it like 'sippy', but with f in place of p, as it's not SciFi): wrestling, ghost hunters, paranormal witness, fact or faked, etc.
Discovery: man vs. wild, pitchmen, dual survival, man/woman/wild, ghost lab, etc.
They're not already catering to the lowest common denominator? I admit, I like Survivorman ... but the other survival shows grate on me. And I might watch more of The Colony if they have two groups, both thinking they're the 'good guys' and the other group is a bunch of actors in there to harass them, but I'd rather watch Rough Science.
"senior review panel recommends" does not mean "Congress has approved".
Until there's a budget passed, senior reviews mean nothing. And if Congress puts in enough mandates on NASA's plate without increasing the budget, something's gotta get cut.
If the budget's cut, are they going to give up on the JWST, or Kepler and dozens of other smaller projects that are returning results now? Are they going to grab money from earth science, heliophysics, the manned space program, or somewhere else? Maybe I'm just cynical, but I don't think it's a good time to be in astronomy at NASA.
Maybe I'm biased, as I just helped to organize a session & other activities for a conference a week ago, and I'm helping with another one two weeks from now ...
But not all conferences are the same. Yes, there are the ones where it's just people up there talking, and you'd have gotten the same things from a paper ... but for smaller conferences, you can have more of a conversation with the people ... get some time in for Q&A, ask the presenter for clarification or more information. And then there's the collaboration aspects. I've been invited to give lectures because of talking to people at conferences. My only peer-reviewed publication was because of a discussion at a conference until 2am that I ended up writing up. I just gave a talk on something that was basically a summary of a 2hr conversation at a workshop last summer.
And as for everything of importance showing up in peer reviewed publications -- not a chance. There is tons of stuff in some fields that gets shown as slides or presentations and will most likely not be published. Hardly any of the science informatics stuff at the AGU gets formally published ... we're all too busy building systems. Almost all done in posters. And we then have coversations at the posters, over lunch / dinner / drinks, or afterwards over email.
I'm not going to say that all conferences are good ... I've been to some that were downright painful ... so I've learned to avoid those. Well, except for one, where it was their first year, and I took the approach of becoming one of the organizers to make it better.
And if you're relying on peer review, unless you're the reviewer, you're not going to be able to comment until *after* it's published. Which means it's just too late for the really idiotic ones.
That's not to say they're not a time suck ... if you're doing a poster or presentation that could take a week or two (more if you have co-authors). Then there's all of the trip planning ... if you have to do paperwork, and reimbursement once you get back. But the big problem is little sleep, jetlag, plus lots of people in cramped spaces and wanting to shake hands ... and you're just asking for illness. One year I came down with a sore throat, and tried going straight back to work after getting back ... turned out it was bronchitis, and took 2 months to recover.
I've lost 2 months due to brochitis from a trip, and there's the trip planning,
Amazon is using the idle time of their huge cloud when it's not being used for christmas shopping ... so the cost of CPU is relatively cheap. Bandwidth and storage is *not* with most cloud sevices.
So, say I need to calibrate a year's worth of SDO/AIA data ... that'd mean pushing to them somewhere in the range of 500TB of data, and then pulling it back again. They've changed their pricing so the transfer in is now free ... but if I'm doing the math right, that'd cost somewhere on the order of $30k for the transfers, and if we assume we're pushing it in and deleting it as soon as it's done, we don't need a lot of storage. For other processes, people *do* need the storage, which runs around $100/TB/month, so $50k ... per month.
It's not as impressive, but it's more cost effective in the long run to build in your own processing near the data. Would it be nice to redo two years of calibration in a day, rather than the ~3hrs to process 1 day's data that it takes now? Yes, but we don't have the funding to pay for it. (every launch delay costs money (gotta keep the scientists employed, store satellites in machine rooms, pay for offices, etc.) ... and that money, without fail, gets taken from the actual running of the mission and the data analysis.
What I'd personally like to see is more large scale infrastructure coordination, and for any project where the PI team's composed entirely of physicists yet they're designing and implementing their own data system be immediately de-funded.
I'm not going to say that everyone should be using iRODS or OODT or whatever the next new sexy thing is ... but a physicist writing the drivers that run the tape drives? That's a sign something's gone horribly wrong, and yet it's still happening.
Most water treatment plants discharge a higher quality of water than the rivers they inject into, but you're right, it's not sterile, and it hasn't been treated with ozone, chlorine or reverse osmosis. They may removed pathogens, but that means it's reduced, not that they're all necessarily gone. It's also impossible to test for every last pathogen (as we'd have to know what they all are, and have tests for them, and be able to do it in a fast enough time for it to be useful).
That all being said, there's a movement to make sewage treatment and drinking water treatment a closed loop -- discharge the treated water above the intake for the drinking water, so that in times of drought, you still have water that can be cleaned to use.
There's also two kinds of treatment plants -- sanitary sewers have a nearly constant discharge rate (it may fluctuate, but not dramatically), while ones like Blue Plains that serves Washington, DC is comined sanitary + storm -- so at times of high rain, the discharge is so much that they have to send some of it straight into the river without treatment ... those are the ones that you *really* don't want to go swimming near.
What comes from toilets is 'black water', but 'grey water'. Grey comes from showers, washing machines, etc. It's specifically that which has been used, but has a low risk of pathogens in it.
From the article, it sounds like they're using a blend of the two ... but they never linked to the March 15th Jim Brown blog post. From reading his blog, he states, "We worked with the WSA to build a side-stream plant about five miles west of our data center that diverts up to 30 percent of the water that would have gone back into the river", while the article linked to states "about 30 percent of the water is diverted from the WSA system".
The article makes it sound like they're getting the water *before* it would have been cleaned by the water treatment plant ... from the blog post, I'd say it's after it's been treated, and getting it before it would have been sent back to the river. So it's treated wastewater, which would've already gone through some sort of system to remove pathogens.
It's kinda hard to get the government rate on hotel rooms if you're not allowed to show it to anyone.
And nope, we never had that training ... it's not like at the Pentagon, where they had big huge signs telling you to take off your badge when you left.
For years I had a card condom (the little plastic thing that you use to protect your badge ... I'm not sure what they're officially called, so I've been calling them 'card condom' in hopes that it'll take off) that had two sleaves with some supposedly RFID-blocking backing in between ... so I kept my badge in there backwards, so you'd only see the back unless I specifically flipped it open (when pulling up to the guardhouse at the gate) ... no one ever said anything to me about it when I was just walking around.
Personally, I think the CAC Card is a waste of tax payer's money ... some high-tech, expensive card that's less effective security than what we had before. (the cards are so expensive to issue that they give them for 5 years, rather than have them expire at the end of your contract ... I know, because 5 years ago, we had a rebid get disputed, so we were getting new badges every one or two weeks for months 'til it got resolved). They'll let you into places that most people have no reason to be there (I went to my mom's retirement at a military base, and showed them my ID as I was signing in at the visitor's center, and they asked me why I was getting a visitor's badge if I had the new badge ... which makes me suspect that a janitor or a caffeteria worker could get onto a military base with no questions asked). It's got no indication of access rights on it (so I can't tell from a glance who should/shouldn't be in the building, like the older badges), yet it's got all of my access on it, so when traveling, I can't leave my door access card behind while only carrying the picture ID needed for the hotel room rate when traveling.
Let's see ... I've had rejected:
The problem was that the first three of 'em were at the same time. It went down something like this: (I show my agency badge). "You need to show a government issued ID." "It was issued by NASA". "I can't accept that." "They let me fly here showing this" "I can't accept it, you need to show other ID" (I show my student ID). "We don't accept student ID cards". "It was issued by the University of Maryland, which is under the state government, so it's a government issued ID". "No, we don't take student ID cards, I need to see something else". (I pull out my military dependant ID). "I have this, but it's expired." (he writes 'no ID' on the boarding pass, and sends me for a pat down).
Note ... he never asked for a driver's license, which yes, I had on me. He just kept repeating 'government ID', but then kept rejecting them when I showed them.
Now technically the first one didn't comply with the full requirements, because it didn't have my height or eye color on it, but I used it for years without problems (it didn't have any identifying information other than a last name and a picture, but it was a hell of a lot more functional than the current one, as it had in HUGE text what the damned expiration on it was).
The sad one was when I got rejected because I gave my new 'unified' government ID. The guy's not rejecting it, he's just turning it over in his hands, looking at both sides ... spent a minute or two looking, finally, I asked him if there was a problem, and he replied "I've never seen one of these before", to which I replied, "You're wearing one". "I mean a NASA one" "It's the same as yours, but it says NASA on it" "Do you have some other ID on you?" (I then pulled out my driver's license, as I didn't have the others on me).
... and the really sad thing ... back in high school (before 2001), I worked summers for a DoD office that was across the street from the Pentagon. One day, I was making the mail run, and realized I didn't have my wallet, which had my military dependant ID, which was my normal picture ID, as the summer badge didn't have a picture on it. I dug through my bag, and managed to find a Photon (sort of like laser tag) ID -- a hand-filed out crappily laminated card, but it had my name and a picture ... and the guard let me in (without even going through the metal detector, as I had the summer badge)
You all are just making it way to easy w/ the setups for Red Dwarf references:
Red Dwarf, Season 1, "Waiting for God"
(Red Dwarf, Season 2, "Kryten")
There's lots of technology that has gotten better price per watt ... but they all sucked at watts per area, so it wasn't worth installing them. (as you have similar installation cost for labor, with a longer payback period)
There's nothing to stop you posting to your own website some 'tutorial to using (whatever)' ...
Of course, you then have to hope that you haven't decided to document stuff that the developers have deprecated but haven't bothered documenting.
The sad thing is that the programmers who write the code are typically the *worst* at writing documentation -- they may developed their own jargon or niche terminology which makes reading the docs no better than reading the code directly. Imagine reading some MVC framework documentation that never explains what MVC is. (replace MVC for any other methodology).
The program might make perfect sense to those who wrote it, but unless others have the same experience and mindset, it's a hurdle for others to try to understand.
You missed an important one:
This might be the most problematic part -- we have parents who are working more and more hours. It's difficult for most families to get by on a single income, so we have many families who aren't getting the kids 'til near 6pm, get home, get dinner made, eat, and they have little time to check the kid's homework before it's time to get to bed.
It's going to take years for people to scale back their lives (all of the new construction near me are farms getting turned into 5 acre lots with big massive mansions ... who the hell really needs that sort of house?) Or to get employers to pay more so that the second parent doesn't need to work, or can work part-time so they're home in the afternoon with the kid.
I know couples who work staggered shedules -- one starts early but is off by 3pm, so they can pick up the kids at a reasonable time, while his wife does the child wrangling in the morning to get them to school. Growing up, my mom worked 1/2 days when I was in elementary school, so she was home in the afternoon (but we were latch-key by high school).
And on the 'don't pass to the next grade' comment ... I'd also ask why we work in whole year increments. It might make more sense to work in smaller bits, so if someone's not doing well in one topic, they don't have to repeat the whole thing. (it could be you work by quarter or semester, or it might be separating out math vs. english). Of course, I also went to some schools where kids were left to do the assignments on their own, and the teacher actually helped those who had troubles, so they never got to the point of being held back. (and for 3rd and 4th grade, my teacher was teaching two grades at the same time ... so 1/2 the class would work on their own, while she taught the other grade)
Before someone mods you down, the head of the Finish education system (rated at the top), completely agrees with you -- they specifically avoid the competition aspects of education:
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/
It's about cooperation, not competition. They let the teachers judge the progress, not standardized testing from on-high. There are no private schools. There are no fees for education (other than taxes).
If something like this happened at my work, they would get fired for negligence and possibly charged with fraud for falsifying reports and billing for work that they weren't doing.
Of course, I also work at a place where things like that could (and have) gotten people killed.
The problem with naming servers after their functions is that in most shops, a server does more than one thing. And they often get moved / repurposed / whatever.
So that machine that's now ldap-ny-02? Well, last week it was web-ny-05. A couple months from now, are you going to remember that name change, and that web-ny-05 had that flaky power supply / fibre card / etc?
Oh, that service that had been running on lasco05? We moved that to the 'new' lasco03. (and there have been how many machines named lasco03?)
I've worked in a lot of places, and these days with clusters, virtual hosts, etc, you often have a different public-facing name (which will get used when people call in a problem ... how are they to know that some service is 5+ machines behind a load balancer? Or that all of the web sub-domains are really on the same server? Even if you don't plan for the abstraction, it already exists due to these different aggregations.
If you give the hardware one name when it comes in, and only use aliases for each of the public services, you don't have to worry about recycling names just so there's no service interuptions. ... and, true story, I've even worked in place with a machine named 'teller' after Edward Teller (the last article), as all of our mail servers were named after scientists ... but when I moved it for testing, I renamed the pair for that cluster to 'penn', and we later added a 'copperfield' and 'houdini' ... but we had to scrap the physicist names when our director didn't believe us that the spam filters weren't rejecting his e-mail because it was going through a machine named 'lovelace', and it was named after Ada Lovelace, not Linda Lovelace.)
I've worked with machines named after cheeses, spices, cartoon characters, music albums, movies, adverbs, muppets, states, rivers, tv-characters, the boss's family, periodic table, hashes of the service/location/os, astronomical phenomena,
They've been doing it since AR#9999, which was in June 2002.
And it's NOAA's doing -- they have a number of different formats they use for distributing information, but they're all fixed-width ASCII files, and very few of them actually use the 5-digit forms. To the best of my knowledge, all of the 'space weather' related products use the 4-digit values, but it's most obvious on the SPE catalog, as that's over a longer period:
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ftpdir/latest/SRS.txt
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ftpdir/latest/SGAS.txt
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ftpdir/latest/dayobs.txt
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ftpdir/latest/dayevt.txt
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ftpdir/indices/SPE.txt
But if you look at the long-term products, they use 5 digit AR numbers:
ftp://ftp.ngdc.noaa.gov/STP/SOLAR_DATA/SOLAR_FLARES/FLARES_XRAY/2010/xray2010
ftp://ftp.ngdc.noaa.gov/STP/SOLAR_DATA/SOLAR_FLARES/FLARES_XRAY/docs/xray.fmt.rev
Although they occassionaly bounce back and forth, eg:
ftp://ftp.ngdc.noaa.gov/STP/SOLAR_DATA/SOLAR_FLARES/FLARES_HALPHA/Events/2010/f_event.10
(and for those who wonder why I know this ... it's because I've written parsers to ingest these files into databases so scientists can do statistical analysis ... and there's evidence that some of these have been maintained by hand over the years ... take a look at the SPE catalog -- there's a Jan 2012 event listed, but the header says it runs through March 2011. (they at least tell you what time period they analyzed ... as they have multi-year gaps between some events ... most catalogs don't do that)