Our libraries (Prince George's County, Maryland, USA) are like that... it's actually a county library system, but they can either get books from another branch in the system, or put in an ILL (Inter-Library Loan) request to get it from one of the neighboring counties, some of the public universities, etc. Also, not all of the branches have the same books; They all have the basic stuff (novels, DVDs, kids books), but when it comes time to do serious research, the smaller libraries (like the one I volunteer at), only have books for elementary school; you have to go to a medium-sized library to also have middle school books, and the large-sized libraries have research materials up through high school, so I'll often have to order stuff I'm interested in.
I think the consideration for buying it is in how obscure it is, and the liklihood of someone else wanting it. If it's too strange, they won't do it, but for most stuff, they have no problem. (each branch has funds set aside for these purchases).
Our big round of funding cuts a couple of years ago we went from being on the verge of approval to have late hours one night to being closed two days a week.
Just because you haven't been in a library in years doesn't mean they're dying out. With the recession, I'd say my local library is busier than ever.
Want to watch a movie tonight for free?
Need a computer to search for a job or fill out a job application?
Need a book for resume advice?
Want to try out a cookbook before you buy it as you're doing more cooking at home and need some more variety?
Kids need a place while their parents are working a second job? (okay, this one's a bit of a problem; not all kids are well behaved)
All are available at your library. Some even loan out video games. (ours doesn't, but we organize video game nights for the kids; I'm working on organizing a 'video game swap' at the next one so people can trade the games they're not playing with other people)
And those are just the reasons for the busier times; I see the same parents picking up an armload a week for their kids to read. When the kid's going through a book a night, it adds up, even at $0.99 ebooks. And this way, you don't have to worry about the kid breaking a $100+ ebook reader, or get one for each kid.
If anything, the reason they're not going to survive is because of budget cuts due to loss of tax revenue. There's been a concerted push to get politicians to back up when they say 'We support education' to fund the libraries, or explain what they really mean is 'We support schools', even when most of their time is wasted teaching to standardized tests.
People forgot about it due to the ong solar minimum, but if this many things are dependant upon GPS, they're going to want to find some contingency plans:
Even if the launch itself were cheaper, you then have to look into getting the payload over to the launch location... and that might not be a risk they're willing to take.
When there were massive flight delays for some of the groups that I've worked with, they've talked about trying to get into the queue at Vandenberg, rather than Canaveral, but that'd require either trucking it across country, or a flight. Even with launch delays at Canaveral, it was costing them more to hold it on the ground at Canaveral than it would've cost to hold it at Goddard... but bringing it back to Maryland and then to Florida again was decided to be an unacceptable risk.
I know what you're thinking -- they test these things for vibration on launch, and such, but I don't think that's the same forces as a hard landing from an airplan or hitting a pothole; also, they'd get a cargo plane large enough to ship it... you can't just send it fedex when it's an oversized load. And for cross country, they have to map out the route so they don't run into any overpasses they can't fit under, etc.
As someone who's both managed university systems and who's specifically requested that their directory information not be made public as per the Buckley amendment, I can tell you that it's taken very seriously.
The problem was, they were using people's SSNs as unique identifiers throughout the system. It was event printed on your student ID card. That's what needs to fixed -- the government needs to force companies/colleges/whatever to stop using and exposing people's SSNs all the damned time.
Some of the games I might've voted for if they were in an Apple II category, eg. Sim City. (for the SNES? hell no)... and Oregon Trail didn't even make the list!
And the Mac wasn't represented, either (eg, Dark Castle)
And text based games (there's more art than just graphics)
And where's KC Munchkin? (Odyssey 2)
DOS doesn't even make a showing 'til the N64 era, which means stuff like Commander Keen doesn't get credit.
Hell, they didn't even have cabinets... so no vectorex games, either. And I didn't see the Atari Lynx, Gameboy, or any hand helds in there.
Exactly... you just relay your mail through the ISP's outbound mail relay... so long as you're not sending spam (or something that they think is spammy), you're fine.
I personally wish more ISPs would block 25 outbound, as it can significantly cut down on spam and virus propogation.
(disclaimer: I worked for a small ISP about 11 years ago; we'd allow 25 out on request, but this was back in the day before viruses were spreading spam for the most part)
Sure, spam filters (particularly for mailing lists) helped kill it, but it also doesn't help when you have so many clueless people who don't know it exists who then hit 'reply all' to the message, and thus reveal to everyone that they were added in on the message when they perhaps shouldn't've been.
Hell, I can't even get people to stop using the mailing list for our department rather than for our building when they report 'someone left their car lights on' or 'I found a set of keys'... there's more than one department in our building, and there's some of us who aren't in the same building with 90% of the department... and those are blatantly obvious in the headers.
I was actually talking with my flatmate about that very topic as soon as we saw the commercial for Flrefly on the Science channel (and *not* on the 'syfy' channel (note, I refuse to pronounce 'syfy' like 'sci-fi'; I prefer a pronounciation that rhymes with 'iffy')
But, shows seem to make no sense based on what the channel claims to be for:
wresting on syfy
Star Trek on BBC America
reality television on History (if it was following an archaelogist, sure, but 'Ax Men'? It was better when it was still the Hitler Channel)
almost everything on MTV
anything repetitive on Discovery (we discovered crab fishing and ice roads are dangerous... how many seasons ago? And I have no idea what we're supposed to 'discover' about watching people make motorcycles)
... and I admit, Survivorman and An Idiot Abroad aren't really science (maybe a few of the skills that Les teaches are based in science), but they're both damned good shows.
Or at least, it won't be funding public television and their programming (Sesame Street, etc).... but that's only what I know based on stuff that was reported on public television; I haven't read the budget myself, so it's possible that there's other for-profit TV channels that'd get some sort of funding for education stuff, like cable in the classroom or similar.
Anyway, the PBS press release from yesterday regarding their funding:
I'm guessing the abnormal artifact is from the fact that SAM (aka MEGS-SAM) isn't a typical telescope -- it's a pinhole camera that exposes one section of the MEGS-A CCD on SDO/EVE.
We fix our streets. The problem is, we have a state highway running through the town (Main Street), and we have a number of county roads, too.
About 90% of the complaints are about the county roads, as there's a stretch of road that was supposed to have been resurfaced 2-3 years ago, and they still haven't done it; they replaced a section out last year (during rush hour), and they're supposed to replace out another section or two this year where the potholes are particularly bad.... but they're not maintaining their roads, and when we report potholes to them, they take anywhere from a week to a month to do something; in some cases, they keep calling for an address of where "the" pothole is, and we have to explain it's not just one pothole, there's a dozen in less than a block, and when they finally come out, they patch *one* of the holes, so we have to keep calling and pestering them for them to fix one at a time.
And also, if they're in Maryland -- the state last year cut the state funding to municipalities for road maintenance by 90%, but they didn't make the cuts until after the municipalities were required to have passed their budget. (and state police aid was also cut significantly), so it's possible that they just don't have the money to do it.
The press release was originally scheduled for Wednesday, so they'd have time to get the data down from the spacecraft, and generate the maps necessary for making the movies as if the camera were flying around the sun. Note at the bottom of the story:
You'll be hearing much more about this from NASA and gogblog as we approach February 9.
Unfortunately, someone leaked to the press last week that the spacecraft would get 360 degree coverage, and so they moved up the press conference on Friday:
"PC Pro has a blog exploring the misuse of the word 'app'"
Really, a whole blog dedicated just to misuse of a single term?
Oh, wait... no, it's just a single post on an already existing blog... you're using the term 'blog' incorrectly.
(and then there's the whole issue around the coining of the term 'weblog' in the first place to refer to online journals, as the term that had previously been used to describe the logs from webservers for a years if not a full decade before anyone had ever heard of a 'blog')
We've had enough time for most people to forget what the original Slashdot was like, but we *know* we didn't like v.2 ('New Slashdot').
The only difference is, they didn't claim that they were bringing back the old version, and then instead substitute some inferior item that they insisted was really the original version, when lots of people could tell it wasn't, they just knew it wasn't as bad as 'New Coke'.
Yes, it's always obnoxious when they bring a contractor who's basically incompetant who ends up giving you more work to do and is getting paid many time over what you are...... but I'd say this is one of those times when they're useful. Think about it -- some person with the right skills gets brought in to do one well-defined task. Once they're done, they're let go. They might be paid even more per hour than the 30% premium... but they've not given benefits (vacation, health, education, etc.) so the cost to the company stays at a similar level.
If they want the job security, then they're offered to be brought in at a lower salary... they'll get benefits to partially even things out, and the value of knowing it's a long-term job, but they're then brought to be more in line with what would be reasonable for someone without the other necessary experience. (and that assumes they're shown to be a team player... you could also just let 'em go, even if you're not in a 'right to fire^H^H^H^Hwork' state.
disclaimer : I'm a municipal elected official, and we just had the local planning board (which covers two counties) for a parking study.
The trick is, you want to have open parking spaces, because open spaces mean that people can use the shops, but you don't want to make it so that people park for too long in the prime spots. So, you have to go to tiered pricing with different time limits:
parking lot, a few blocks from the city center : unlimited time, cheap rates
on street, a couple blocks from the city center : 2-4 hr limit, moderately priced
on street, in the city center : 1-2 hr limit, higher prices
Sometimes you don't need to raise prices, you just need to lower the time limit... we've got a few shop owners who park their vehicles on main street as there's 2 hour meters with no limit on time... but I'm guessing they'd be less likely to hog those spots if they had to go out every hour to feed the meters, even if the rates per hour were the same.
"generally not" means nothing-- there's the 'dual use' category, which is civilian stuff that might have military applications. They've had to keep raising the definition of 'supercomputer' some of the early G4 apple powerbooks qualified.
I remember seeing some behind the scenes stuff from Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and they had sensors on a full-sized, over the shoulder sized video camera, so someone could control the camera's position as the animation played out.
(I think it was on "Science of the Movies")... so the technique's been done... maybe the novel part is that it's generic to work with other systems?
When I worked for GWU (yes, I know, they prefer 'GW', but the damned domain name is 'gwu.edu'), their software licensing actually went through the University of California's licensing agreement. As GWU's in Washington, DC, and a private school, it seemed rather odd to me, but I've learned that a *lot* of government agencies have terms in their bulk contracts allowing other groups to buy at the same rate if they meet some qualification (eg, small towns can buy off contracts from other states / counties / cities).
The California contract was rather nice in that it not only covered the university, but all full time staff were allowed one install at home for any of the software covered in the license.
Now... of course, site liceneses aren't always great... when I did contract work for a state government back in the late 90's (you know, when MS was being tried as a monopoly by the justice dept.), we had a site license for OSes... but we couldn't get a single one of 'authorized vendors' to sell us a machine without an OS, or even a non-MS OS at the time. So we'd have to pay for the OS all over again with each new machine purchase, and then we'd have to re-install Windows NT when they came in. (we'd get win95 or win98 installed, as it was cheaper than NT). So you do more work, and you'd still not get any savings.
I process the donations for the local library's book sale. We get those people who give us stuff that's fairly new (eg, their last year of reading material), but we also get days when someone drops off 10-20 boxes of books overnight... some of it's so old there's no bar code, so I'd have to type in every last item.
And it's not just the title that's important for the descriptor -- was it a signed copy? Was it a first printing? Is it the large print version?
I was told that years ago, there was someone who'd go through the work of selling the stuff on e-bay or amazon, and it might be worth it, *if* I had a scanner like this, but there's no way in hell and I'm going to type in the name of every book. And that'd still leave me maybe 1/4 of the pile, as many of the donations pre-date bar codes. (but well, a 1920s printing of Othello, in good condition? maybe it has value... I don't know)
The requirement for "data center" is 500 sq. feet. So all they need to do is cut them into smaller blocks (eg, shipping containers, or just moving the walls), and suddenly, although it's now more "data centers" each one won't qualify, and so will reduce the count.
Or, we change the usage of the rooms -- that stack of cases of paper in the corner? That room's no longer 'devoted to data processing', and therefore, not a 'data center'. We already store spare parts in our 'not a data center' (also, my boss's office, but when we move, he won't be co-located, so I don't know if it'll be added to the count), but someone might argue those parts are indirectly for 'data processing'.
And poof... data centers magically disapear, for loss money than it'd cost to consolidate, without all of the headaches. (okay, the walls could create dust, which the machines might not like... the cases of paper is potentially a less risky option).
Slashdot Mirror
Our libraries (Prince George's County, Maryland, USA) are like that ... it's actually a county library system, but they can either get books from another branch in the system, or put in an ILL (Inter-Library Loan) request to get it from one of the neighboring counties, some of the public universities, etc. Also, not all of the branches have the same books; They all have the basic stuff (novels, DVDs, kids books), but when it comes time to do serious research, the smaller libraries (like the one I volunteer at), only have books for elementary school; you have to go to a medium-sized library to also have middle school books, and the large-sized libraries have research materials up through high school, so I'll often have to order stuff I'm interested in.
I think the consideration for buying it is in how obscure it is, and the liklihood of someone else wanting it. If it's too strange, they won't do it, but for most stuff, they have no problem. (each branch has funds set aside for these purchases).
Our big round of funding cuts a couple of years ago we went from being on the verge of approval to have late hours one night to being closed two days a week.
Just because you haven't been in a library in years doesn't mean they're dying out. With the recession, I'd say my local library is busier than ever.
All are available at your library. Some even loan out video games. (ours doesn't, but we organize video game nights for the kids; I'm working on organizing a 'video game swap' at the next one so people can trade the games they're not playing with other people)
And those are just the reasons for the busier times; I see the same parents picking up an armload a week for their kids to read. When the kid's going through a book a night, it adds up, even at $0.99 ebooks. And this way, you don't have to worry about the kid breaking a $100+ ebook reader, or get one for each kid.
If anything, the reason they're not going to survive is because of budget cuts due to loss of tax revenue. There's been a concerted push to get politicians to back up when they say 'We support education' to fund the libraries, or explain what they really mean is 'We support schools', even when most of their time is wasted teaching to standardized tests.
People forgot about it due to the ong solar minimum, but if this many things are dependant upon GPS, they're going to want to find some contingency plans:
Even if the launch itself were cheaper, you then have to look into getting the payload over to the launch location ... and that might not be a risk they're willing to take.
When there were massive flight delays for some of the groups that I've worked with, they've talked about trying to get into the queue at Vandenberg, rather than Canaveral, but that'd require either trucking it across country, or a flight. Even with launch delays at Canaveral, it was costing them more to hold it on the ground at Canaveral than it would've cost to hold it at Goddard ... but bringing it back to Maryland and then to Florida again was decided to be an unacceptable risk.
I know what you're thinking -- they test these things for vibration on launch, and such, but I don't think that's the same forces as a hard landing from an airplan or hitting a pothole; also, they'd get a cargo plane large enough to ship it ... you can't just send it fedex when it's an oversized load. And for cross country, they have to map out the route so they don't run into any overpasses they can't fit under, etc.
As someone who's both managed university systems and who's specifically requested that their directory information not be made public as per the Buckley amendment, I can tell you that it's taken very seriously.
The problem was, they were using people's SSNs as unique identifiers throughout the system. It was event printed on your student ID card. That's what needs to fixed -- the government needs to force companies/colleges/whatever to stop using and exposing people's SSNs all the damned time.
Some of the games I might've voted for if they were in an Apple II category, eg. Sim City. (for the SNES? hell no) ... and Oregon Trail didn't even make the list!
And the Mac wasn't represented, either (eg, Dark Castle)
And text based games (there's more art than just graphics)
And where's KC Munchkin? (Odyssey 2)
DOS doesn't even make a showing 'til the N64 era, which means stuff like Commander Keen doesn't get credit.
Hell, they didn't even have cabinets ... so no vectorex games, either. And I didn't see the Atari Lynx, Gameboy, or any hand helds in there.
Exactly ... you just relay your mail through the ISP's outbound mail relay ... so long as you're not sending spam (or something that they think is spammy), you're fine.
I personally wish more ISPs would block 25 outbound, as it can significantly cut down on spam and virus propogation.
(disclaimer: I worked for a small ISP about 11 years ago; we'd allow 25 out on request, but this was back in the day before viruses were spreading spam for the most part)
Sure, spam filters (particularly for mailing lists) helped kill it, but it also doesn't help when you have so many clueless people who don't know it exists who then hit 'reply all' to the message, and thus reveal to everyone that they were added in on the message when they perhaps shouldn't've been.
Hell, I can't even get people to stop using the mailing list for our department rather than for our building when they report 'someone left their car lights on' or 'I found a set of keys' ... there's more than one department in our building, and there's some of us who aren't in the same building with 90% of the department ... and those are blatantly obvious in the headers.
I was actually talking with my flatmate about that very topic as soon as we saw the commercial for Flrefly on the Science channel (and *not* on the 'syfy' channel (note, I refuse to pronounce 'syfy' like 'sci-fi'; I prefer a pronounciation that rhymes with 'iffy')
But, shows seem to make no sense based on what the channel claims to be for:
Or at least, it won't be funding public television and their programming (Sesame Street, etc). ... but that's only what I know based on stuff that was reported on public television; I haven't read the budget myself, so it's possible that there's other for-profit TV channels that'd get some sort of funding for education stuff, like cable in the classroom or similar.
Anyway, the PBS press release from yesterday regarding their funding:
http://www.pbs.org/about/news/archive/2011/pbs-statement-elimination-funding-public-broadcasting/
I'm guessing the abnormal artifact is from the fact that SAM (aka MEGS-SAM) isn't a typical telescope -- it's a pinhole camera that exposes one section of the MEGS-A CCD on SDO/EVE.
See: http://lasp.colorado.edu/eve/instrument/eve_megs.htm
As a municipal elected official ...
We fix our streets. The problem is, we have a state highway running through the town (Main Street), and we have a number of county roads, too.
About 90% of the complaints are about the county roads, as there's a stretch of road that was supposed to have been resurfaced 2-3 years ago, and they still haven't done it; they replaced a section out last year (during rush hour), and they're supposed to replace out another section or two this year where the potholes are particularly bad. ... but they're not maintaining their roads, and when we report potholes to them, they take anywhere from a week to a month to do something; in some cases, they keep calling for an address of where "the" pothole is, and we have to explain it's not just one pothole, there's a dozen in less than a block, and when they finally come out, they patch *one* of the holes, so we have to keep calling and pestering them for them to fix one at a time.
And also, if they're in Maryland -- the state last year cut the state funding to municipalities for road maintenance by 90%, but they didn't make the cuts until after the municipalities were required to have passed their budget. (and state police aid was also cut significantly), so it's possible that they just don't have the money to do it.
The press release was originally scheduled for Wednesday, so they'd have time to get the data down from the spacecraft, and generate the maps necessary for making the movies as if the camera were flying around the sun. Note at the bottom of the story:
Unfortunately, someone leaked to the press last week that the spacecraft would get 360 degree coverage, and so they moved up the press conference on Friday:
Really, a whole blog dedicated just to misuse of a single term?
Oh, wait ... no, it's just a single post on an already existing blog ... you're using the term 'blog' incorrectly.
(and then there's the whole issue around the coining of the term 'weblog' in the first place to refer to online journals, as the term that had previously been used to describe the logs from webservers for a years if not a full decade before anyone had ever heard of a 'blog')
We've had enough time for most people to forget what the original Slashdot was like, but we *know* we didn't like v.2 ('New Slashdot').
The only difference is, they didn't claim that they were bringing back the old version, and then instead substitute some inferior item that they insisted was really the original version, when lots of people could tell it wasn't, they just knew it wasn't as bad as 'New Coke'.
Yes, it's always obnoxious when they bring a contractor who's basically incompetant who ends up giving you more work to do and is getting paid many time over what you are ... ... but I'd say this is one of those times when they're useful. Think about it -- some person with the right skills gets brought in to do one well-defined task. Once they're done, they're let go. They might be paid even more per hour than the 30% premium ... but they've not given benefits (vacation, health, education, etc.) so the cost to the company stays at a similar level.
If they want the job security, then they're offered to be brought in at a lower salary ... they'll get benefits to partially even things out, and the value of knowing it's a long-term job, but they're then brought to be more in line with what would be reasonable for someone without the other necessary experience. (and that assumes they're shown to be a team player ... you could also just let 'em go, even if you're not in a 'right to fire^H^H^H^Hwork' state.
Astrometrics has to do with precise measurements of the celestial objects.
Astroinformatics has to do with the data systems used to store & process astronomy data.
(I'm a member of AGU's Earth and Space Science Informatics group, but we don't really deal with the nighttime folks; all of my data's solar)
It's not Java that's the security problem ... it's the user sitting at the machine.
If you got rid of them, there wouldn't be the problem.
disclaimer : I'm a municipal elected official, and we just had the local planning board (which covers two counties) for a parking study.
The trick is, you want to have open parking spaces, because open spaces mean that people can use the shops, but you don't want to make it so that people park for too long in the prime spots. So, you have to go to tiered pricing with different time limits:
Sometimes you don't need to raise prices, you just need to lower the time limit ... we've got a few shop owners who park their vehicles on main street as there's 2 hour meters with no limit on time ... but I'm guessing they'd be less likely to hog those spots if they had to go out every hour to feed the meters, even if the rates per hour were the same.
"generally not" means nothing-- there's the 'dual use' category, which is civilian stuff that might have military applications. They've had to keep raising the definition of 'supercomputer' some of the early G4 apple powerbooks qualified.
I remember seeing some behind the scenes stuff from Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and they had sensors on a full-sized, over the shoulder sized video camera, so someone could control the camera's position as the animation played out.
(I think it was on "Science of the Movies") ... so the technique's been done ... maybe the novel part is that it's generic to work with other systems?
I personally suspect that the people who are smiling all the time are the ones who are insane.
The ones who frown at least have a chance of being connected to reality.
When I worked for GWU (yes, I know, they prefer 'GW', but the damned domain name is 'gwu.edu'), their software licensing actually went through the University of California's licensing agreement. As GWU's in Washington, DC, and a private school, it seemed rather odd to me, but I've learned that a *lot* of government agencies have terms in their bulk contracts allowing other groups to buy at the same rate if they meet some qualification (eg, small towns can buy off contracts from other states / counties / cities).
The California contract was rather nice in that it not only covered the university, but all full time staff were allowed one install at home for any of the software covered in the license.
Now ... of course, site liceneses aren't always great ... when I did contract work for a state government back in the late 90's (you know, when MS was being tried as a monopoly by the justice dept.), we had a site license for OSes ... but we couldn't get a single one of 'authorized vendors' to sell us a machine without an OS, or even a non-MS OS at the time. So we'd have to pay for the OS all over again with each new machine purchase, and then we'd have to re-install Windows NT when they came in. (we'd get win95 or win98 installed, as it was cheaper than NT). So you do more work, and you'd still not get any savings.
I process the donations for the local library's book sale. We get those people who give us stuff that's fairly new (eg, their last year of reading material), but we also get days when someone drops off 10-20 boxes of books overnight ... some of it's so old there's no bar code, so I'd have to type in every last item.
And it's not just the title that's important for the descriptor -- was it a signed copy? Was it a first printing? Is it the large print version?
I was told that years ago, there was someone who'd go through the work of selling the stuff on e-bay or amazon, and it might be worth it, *if* I had a scanner like this, but there's no way in hell and I'm going to type in the name of every book. And that'd still leave me maybe 1/4 of the pile, as many of the donations pre-date bar codes. (but well, a 1920s printing of Othello, in good condition? maybe it has value ... I don't know)
The requirement for "data center" is 500 sq. feet. So all they need to do is cut them into smaller blocks (eg, shipping containers, or just moving the walls), and suddenly, although it's now more "data centers" each one won't qualify, and so will reduce the count.
Or, we change the usage of the rooms -- that stack of cases of paper in the corner? That room's no longer 'devoted to data processing', and therefore, not a 'data center'. We already store spare parts in our 'not a data center' (also, my boss's office, but when we move, he won't be co-located, so I don't know if it'll be added to the count), but someone might argue those parts are indirectly for 'data processing'.
And poof ... data centers magically disapear, for loss money than it'd cost to consolidate, without all of the headaches. (okay, the walls could create dust, which the machines might not like ... the cases of paper is potentially a less risky option).