I'm on a quarter acre... I admit I don't have a huge house (1400 sq. ft), but it's a reasonable sized home in the suburbs, and I have good sized yard, which would be larger if it weren't for the garage in back (which means much of the yard is driveway). Most "smaller city homes" are much denser. And they tend to be multiple stories (which mine is not)
For Prince George's County, Maryland (just to the east of Washington, DC), the density residences (a duplex counts as 2 residences) in residential zones, not including apartments buildings are:
R-A Zone (Residential-Agricultural):
one per 2 acres
R-E Zone (Residential-Estate):
1.08 per acre
R-R Zone (Rural Residential):
2.17 per acre (3 per acre in a cluster development)
R-80 Zone (One-Family Detached Residential):
4.58 per acre
R-55 Zone (One-Family Detached Residential):
6.70 per acre
R-35 Zone (One-Family Semidetached, and Two-Family Detached, Residential):
6.70 per acre for single family; 12.44 per acre for duplexes
R-20 Zone (One-Family Triple-Attached Residential):
6.70 per acre; 12.44 duplexes; 16.33 townhouses
R-T Zone (Townhouse):
6.70 per acre; 8.00 duplex; 12.00 townhouses in a "transit village"
R-30 Zone (Multifamily Low Density Residential):
6.70 per acre; 8.00 duplex; 12.00 for triplex; 8.00 for townhouses (pre 1996, else 6.00)
If you're in an area with on-street parking, and a small setback (ie, a "walk-up", without much of a front yard) and a small backyard, you can get 12 homes per acre easily. If it's detatched homes, in a city, 6-8 per acre could provide for a huge home.
Well, now imagine that there's also a group trying to tell you that you have to reduce your number of machines, and move them all to virtual machines. Oh, but we don't support your 10-15 year old OS, so you're going to have to port everything. What? The person who wrote the software's been gone for 8 years? Yeah, we're going to port software we don't know, and risk losing a satellite.
What about the webservers? Those are easy to consolidate... you're just going to have to move it all to ColdFusion. And um... okay, we'll support PHP, too. What? You're running custom CGIs? Oh, no, we don't support that. You need over 100TB of storage, as we can't NFS mount from the main data archive as it's behind a firewall? Oh, well, maybe it's best you keep running your own webserver.
And the sad thing is... every time someone new gets in charge, they start the same thing all over again.
We are *not* all alike. Yes, there are some things that can be consolidated, and we're doing what we can, given the sysadmin time that's not tied up documenting security risk or whatever new paperwork's popped up this week that was due three weeks ago but we were never told about.
It's kinda like physicists encountering a new subject -- you see some patterns when you look at it from a distance, assume it's all the same, and that you can generalize everything... and then fail horribly in delivering what they promise. (What percentage of IT projects fail? How many were because they didn't fully understand the problem, and made bad assumptions?) How many of the people involved in the report are trying to sell hardware, services or other 'solutions' to the government? They're not the ones fielding e-mail from pissed off people telling you how the government's wasting money because you can't keep the most important image ever up on your website for them to see whenever they want, and that one picture is the only reason that your agency should even exist... nevermind that whole science thing.
um... I think I'm starting to rant. I'm still pissed off about the whole great new 'one card' crap the US government went to, so it now takes *3 MONTHS* to get a replacement badge. And they want to force a requirement that we have to use it to log into machines? (so they force us to buy card readers for each desktop) That's great, 3 months that I can do my job the next time I lose my badge again.
Yep, definately ranting now.
You know how companies could save millions of dollars? Stop overpaying their CEOs who have no idea what the hell they're talking about.
Before the HD standards were finalized, you could get higher resolution TVs, because there was no limit set.
Samsung and a few others had "Quad HD" monitors (3840 x 2160) on the market for a while, but I believe they've all been discontinued. (and it also cost something like US$25k)
At the ISP I used to work at more than a decade ago, if we had a customer who wasn't responding to notices by e-mail, we'd move them to a special IP pool, where given ports would be redirected to proxies to make sure they got the message (eg, you're behind on your payments).
You could use this to give them a message they've been infected, while still giving them access to domains / hosts or their anti-virus software.
Of course, in those days, it was all dial-up, so we assigned IP addresses as they came in... you could still do something when they refresh their DHCP lease. If they get static addresses, your router rules could get big pretty quickly, and you risk a bad rule screwing everyone's traffic up.
At least in the DC area... are the local PBS stations. I'm not sure which one it is, but there's one that makes me almost jump out of my skin when the show ends, and they go to commercial.
Hopefully the legislation doesn't actually include the term 'interrupting' in the volume limits, or the commercials in between shows (like all of the ones on PBS) will be exempt.
Geeks are the guys in the circus sideshow who bite heads off chickens:
geek S: (n) geek (a carnival performer who does disgusting acts) S: (n) eccentric, eccentric person, flake, oddball, geek (a person with an unusual or odd personality)
If it's a live chicken, what do you need cooking for?
I'm burned out over my current project, but not on programming in general.
Part of the trick was finding places to work where I'm *not* stuck on long, boring projects doing the same thing day in and day out.
I know someone who just does prototyping work -- get hired on at some new company, build a prototype, then get out before they make him refactor it, etc. He would *never* work at a CMMI certified place, as it's too much of a drain on his talent -- get in, maybe get a few stock options, and get out before it stops being interesting.
In the agency I work for, we used to get noticed of meetings / workshops / retirements, etc. at least once a week that way. (Look, I can insert clip art!) Luckily, it's gone down in the last year.
Unfortunately, my mom's a recently retired staff officer from a DoD organization, so I still get notices of newborns, holiday parties, etc, as those one-slide power point files.
It means that it has to take over for some other interface protocol, and then, once it's finished that, it can take over some other interface. The only problem is the random messages send to some device named 'Al' that's not actually on the network.
Actually, I don't know that they've outright banned them, but since about that time, there's been a policy that US government owned removable storage is not to be used in non-government owned machines, and non-government owned storage is not be used in US government owned machines.
It wasn't just this incident that lead to it; there were incidents of people going to conferences and passing around USB sticks with the presentations, and then everyone coming back from their conference and putting a whole bunch of infected machines onto the network.
It's possible that the military's got even stricter rules on the matters, I don't really know, but for the agency I work for, the ban's on *all* writable removable media, to include external hard drives, cell phones that charge over USB, etc. (unless it's a government owned device).
You said you're dealing with physical science. From what you describe, I'd guess that you're dealing with earth science, from what we call "small science". (lots of smaller investigations that can be done with a small team, rather than the multi-million dollar satellite or sensor grid projects).
I'd suggest talking to one of the following groups:
There's a hell of a lot more groups out there, but those two larger groups would be able to stear you towards more specialized groups that deal with a specific scientific discipline.
The problem is, most IT people have no idea what do with science data -- it'd be like going to a dentist because you're having a heart attack. They might be able to give general advice, but have clue what specifics need to be done. Likewise, IT might be people who are really good at diagnosing hardware, but they might suck at writing code. Not all IT specialists are cross-trained in enough topics to deal with this issue effectively (data modeling, UIs, database admin, programming, and the science discipline itself).
There's a field out there called 'Science Informatics'. It's not a very large group, but there's a number of us who specialize in helping scientists organize, find, and generally manage data. Think of us as librarians for science data.
Most of us would even be willing to give advice to people outside our place of work, as the better organized science data is in general, the more usable and re-usable it is. There's even a number of efforts to have people publish data, so it can be shared, verified, etc. And most of us have a programming background, so we might be able to share code with you, as we try to make it open source where we can, so we don't all have to re-solve the same problems.
Because each discipline varies so much, both in how they think about their data, and what their ultimate needs are, we tend to be specialists, but there's a number of different groups out there, for example:
There's also Bioinformatics, Health/medical informatics, chemical informatics, etc. plug in your science discipline + 'informatics' into your favorite search engine, and odds are you'll find a group, or person you can write to to try to get more info and advice.
Recently, NSF just funded a few more groups to try to build out systems and communities : DataOne and the Data Conservancy, and I believe there's some more money still to be awarded.
They're still looking for enough users to commit to open up the beta, but Stack Exchange (the folks behind Stack Overflow, Server Fault and Super User) have a proposal up for an question & answer astronomy site:
I don't think I've seen him in anything recently, but his role as the Marquis De Carabas in Neverwhere shows he could pull off an eccentric character... even if that was 14 years ago.
Don't ask generic nerds -- ask library nerds : code4lib. They have a pretty active mailing list.
Also, there's oss4lib which is specifically for open source software, but I haven't seen much activity on their list in a while, and I think most of us are on both lists. (there's also a few cataloging specific lists, but they get to be all library-sciencey, with discussions of RDA and FRBR and cataloging aggregates).
Satellite TV often won't work for smaller municipalities, as they also need a return feed for the TV channel(s) they're broadcasting to Comcast (or Verizon, in our case, as we didn't opt for a channel when our town signed the agreement w/ Comcast)
I think the bigger problem is in how the petitions are validated. I hear stories about how petitions have been thrown out for various reasons (suspicion that the signatures were forged, not having a statement of what the petition was for on the signature sheet, collecting signatures from out-of-state people, etc.).
But Is there any confirmation that the people are who they say they are?
I've signed a few petitions, and I can't remember them ever asking me for ID for them to copy down identifying information (like my bank does when I make a large withdrawal)
So, if we have a contentious petition -- what's to stop someone from going and giving the information for the neighbor they don't like, or head of the local scientology chapter, a politician they didn't like, or anyone else just to be a general prick?...
Don't get me wrong -- I'm for this transparency change, but I think transparency in government involves more than just releasing the names of the people, but it's going to be difficult to balance against the risk of identify theft or having someone copy their information from one petition to another.. (and I don't have a good solution to the problem; I wish I did.)
... it didn't make solar physicists seem cool--it made them seem like complete gits you wouldn't put in charge of a beer-run, much less the most important mission in human history.
It's all relative -- maybe 'cool' was the wrong word. Perhaps 'less of a social pariah' would've been better.
Disclaimer -- I work with a bunch of solar physicists. I've learned there's a social pecking order, sort of like the Geek Hierarchy -- in this case, however, it's mathematicians at the bottom (everyone needs to work with them once in a while, but they just hope they've had a bath that day if it's a face-to-face meeting)
But there's a few of us who know who he is (by reputation... I actually know Roberta Shaffer, also mentioned in the article, and I think I'm on a mailing list or two w/ Aaron Swartz)
But I hadn't heard anything since the election and his trying to be appointed to the head of the printing office... it's a shame he didn't get it. He's been a big force in getting government documents from behind paywalls.
Read the article if you don't know who he is -- he's done a lot of public good.
A few years ago, I started a new job -- I was hired to do a small task, expected to take 6 to 12 months (government contracting). At the time, I had been unemployed for 7 months, and so had taken a lower pay rate, thinking it was an easy job, and I'd use the tuition benefits to continue work on my master's degree.
My second day on the job, someone quit and I got handed his task. My third day on the job, in a meeting w/ HR for the company, I was told that if my job changed significantly, they could get me a promotion. I told her that it had already happened. She must've thought I was joking as *nothing* was done about it.
Every couple of months, I brought it up with my manager. (mind you, my manager didn't deal with my tasking -- it's government contracting, so the ATR (civil servant) tells me what to do, my manager only dealt with making sure we were complying with contract requirements and HR issues). I had meetings with my manager's boss, and I think at one time even his boss. It was nothing but a run-around.
They told me they couldn't do anything 'til the annual raises. When I got a 7% raise and bitched, they acted like I should be grateful. I stayed on as I knew the contract was up for rebid. (and told my manager and ATR that if the company I worked for won, I was quitting). It dragged on something like an extra 6 months because of one of the losing companies bitching that it was unfairly awarded.
Of course, the sub-contractor that I was passed off to said they didn't want to re-negotiate anyone's pay, and it took my ATR and manger (now working for the new prime contractor) telling them that they needed to make an exception for me, and that I should get a 20-25% raise.
Because of my being difficult, I got less than a 20% raise (they had said they wouldn't hire me unless I gave them a paystub, but I had blacked out all of the amounts that could've been used to calculate my pay rate... I missed the 'year to date' amount, and they didn't know I had gotten a raise 2 months before, so they had thought they were offering me a 22.5% raise.)
In the end -- it was 2 years to get the issue resolved. If I hadn't switched companies, I don't think it would've gotten changed, as L-3 Communications was absolute dicks to me on the issue the whole time.
So, the moral of the story -- if you approach them, and they don't do something about it quickly -- walk. Well, line up a new job first -- if they start giving excuses as to why they can't do anything, start looking for a new job, as it's a sign they don't care.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm on a quarter acre ... I admit I don't have a huge house (1400 sq. ft), but it's a reasonable sized home in the suburbs, and I have good sized yard, which would be larger if it weren't for the garage in back (which means much of the yard is driveway). Most "smaller city homes" are much denser. And they tend to be multiple stories (which mine is not)
For Prince George's County, Maryland (just to the east of Washington, DC), the density residences (a duplex counts as 2 residences) in residential zones, not including apartments buildings are:
R-A Zone (Residential-Agricultural)If you're in an area with on-street parking, and a small setback (ie, a "walk-up", without much of a front yard) and a small backyard, you can get 12 homes per acre easily. If it's detatched homes, in a city, 6-8 per acre could provide for a huge home.
Remember that article a couple of weeks ago about really old computers used at NASA?
Well, now imagine that there's also a group trying to tell you that you have to reduce your number of machines, and move them all to virtual machines. Oh, but we don't support your 10-15 year old OS, so you're going to have to port everything. What? The person who wrote the software's been gone for 8 years? Yeah, we're going to port software we don't know, and risk losing a satellite.
What about the webservers? Those are easy to consolidate ... you're just going to have to move it all to ColdFusion. And um ... okay, we'll support PHP, too. What? You're running custom CGIs? Oh, no, we don't support that. You need over 100TB of storage, as we can't NFS mount from the main data archive as it's behind a firewall? Oh, well, maybe it's best you keep running your own webserver.
And the sad thing is ... every time someone new gets in charge, they start the same thing all over again.
We are *not* all alike. Yes, there are some things that can be consolidated, and we're doing what we can, given the sysadmin time that's not tied up documenting security risk or whatever new paperwork's popped up this week that was due three weeks ago but we were never told about.
It's kinda like physicists encountering a new subject -- you see some patterns when you look at it from a distance, assume it's all the same, and that you can generalize everything ... and then fail horribly in delivering what they promise. (What percentage of IT projects fail? How many were because they didn't fully understand the problem, and made bad assumptions?) How many of the people involved in the report are trying to sell hardware, services or other 'solutions' to the government? They're not the ones fielding e-mail from pissed off people telling you how the government's wasting money because you can't keep the most important image ever up on your website for them to see whenever they want, and that one picture is the only reason that your agency should even exist ... nevermind that whole science thing.
um ... I think I'm starting to rant. I'm still pissed off about the whole great new 'one card' crap the US government went to, so it now takes *3 MONTHS* to get a replacement badge. And they want to force a requirement that we have to use it to log into machines? (so they force us to buy card readers for each desktop) That's great, 3 months that I can do my job the next time I lose my badge again.
Yep, definately ranting now.
You know how companies could save millions of dollars? Stop overpaying their CEOs who have no idea what the hell they're talking about.
And yet, that's old technology (Apple released their 30" monitor in 2004 ... that's the same one they still sell today. Even earlier than that, IBM sold a 200dpi greyscale monitor back near 1999/2000 that was 2560x2048, intended for doctors viewing x-rays.
Before the HD standards were finalized, you could get higher resolution TVs, because there was no limit set.
Samsung and a few others had "Quad HD" monitors (3840 x 2160) on the market for a while, but I believe they've all been discontinued. (and it also cost something like US$25k)
At the ISP I used to work at more than a decade ago, if we had a customer who wasn't responding to notices by e-mail, we'd move them to a special IP pool, where given ports would be redirected to proxies to make sure they got the message (eg, you're behind on your payments).
You could use this to give them a message they've been infected, while still giving them access to domains / hosts or their anti-virus software.
Of course, in those days, it was all dial-up, so we assigned IP addresses as they came in ... you could still do something when they refresh their DHCP lease. If they get static addresses, your router rules could get big pretty quickly, and you risk a bad rule screwing everyone's traffic up.
At least in the DC area ... are the local PBS stations. I'm not sure which one it is, but there's one that makes me almost jump out of my skin when the show ends, and they go to commercial.
Hopefully the legislation doesn't actually include the term 'interrupting' in the volume limits, or the commercials in between shows (like all of the ones on PBS) will be exempt.
Geeks are the guys in the circus sideshow who bite heads off chickens:
geek
S: (n) geek (a carnival performer who does disgusting acts)
S: (n) eccentric, eccentric person, flake, oddball, geek (a person with an unusual or odd personality)
If it's a live chicken, what do you need cooking for?
I'm burned out over my current project, but not on programming in general.
Part of the trick was finding places to work where I'm *not* stuck on long, boring projects doing the same thing day in and day out.
I know someone who just does prototyping work -- get hired on at some new company, build a prototype, then get out before they make him refactor it, etc. He would *never* work at a CMMI certified place, as it's too much of a drain on his talent -- get in, maybe get a few stock options, and get out before it stops being interesting.
Only once a month?
In the agency I work for, we used to get noticed of meetings / workshops / retirements, etc. at least once a week that way. (Look, I can insert clip art!) Luckily, it's gone down in the last year.
Unfortunately, my mom's a recently retired staff officer from a DoD organization, so I still get notices of newborns, holiday parties, etc, as those one-slide power point files.
No, no.
It means that it has to take over for some other interface protocol, and then, once it's finished that, it can take over some other interface. The only problem is the random messages send to some device named 'Al' that's not actually on the network.
Actually, I don't know that they've outright banned them, but since about that time, there's been a policy that US government owned removable storage is not to be used in non-government owned machines, and non-government owned storage is not be used in US government owned machines.
It wasn't just this incident that lead to it; there were incidents of people going to conferences and passing around USB sticks with the presentations, and then everyone coming back from their conference and putting a whole bunch of infected machines onto the network.
It's possible that the military's got even stricter rules on the matters, I don't really know, but for the agency I work for, the ban's on *all* writable removable media, to include external hard drives, cell phones that charge over USB, etc. (unless it's a government owned device).
Better not tell 'em what NASA's site is called, then.
You said you're dealing with physical science. From what you describe, I'd guess that you're dealing with earth science, from what we call "small science". (lots of smaller investigations that can be done with a small team, rather than the multi-million dollar satellite or sensor grid projects).
I'd suggest talking to one of the following groups:
There's a hell of a lot more groups out there, but those two larger groups would be able to stear you towards more specialized groups that deal with a specific scientific discipline.
The problem is, most IT people have no idea what do with science data -- it'd be like going to a dentist because you're having a heart attack. They might be able to give general advice, but have clue what specifics need to be done. Likewise, IT might be people who are really good at diagnosing hardware, but they might suck at writing code. Not all IT specialists are cross-trained in enough topics to deal with this issue effectively (data modeling, UIs, database admin, programming, and the science discipline itself).
There's a field out there called 'Science Informatics'. It's not a very large group, but there's a number of us who specialize in helping scientists organize, find, and generally manage data. Think of us as librarians for science data.
Most of us would even be willing to give advice to people outside our place of work, as the better organized science data is in general, the more usable and re-usable it is. There's even a number of efforts to have people publish data, so it can be shared, verified, etc. And most of us have a programming background, so we might be able to share code with you, as we try to make it open source where we can, so we don't all have to re-solve the same problems.
Because each discipline varies so much, both in how they think about their data, and what their ultimate needs are, we tend to be specialists, but there's a number of different groups out there, for example:
There's also Bioinformatics, Health/medical informatics, chemical informatics, etc. plug in your science discipline + 'informatics' into your favorite search engine, and odds are you'll find a group, or person you can write to to try to get more info and advice.
Recently, NSF just funded a few more groups to try to build out systems and communities : DataOne and the Data Conservancy, and I believe there's some more money still to be awarded.
They're still looking for enough users to commit to open up the beta, but Stack Exchange (the folks behind Stack Overflow, Server Fault and Super User) have a proposal up for an question & answer astronomy site:
http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/51/astronomy
Yep, the Cisco-certified network admin juror who voted guilty wasn't "technically savvy enough to understand what IT pros do"
I don't think I've seen him in anything recently, but his role as the Marquis De Carabas in Neverwhere shows he could pull off an eccentric character ... even if that was 14 years ago.
Don't ask generic nerds -- ask library nerds : code4lib . They have a pretty active mailing list.
Also, there's oss4lib which is specifically for open source software, but I haven't seen much activity on their list in a while, and I think most of us are on both lists. (there's also a few cataloging specific lists, but they get to be all library-sciencey, with discussions of RDA and FRBR and cataloging aggregates).
Satellite TV often won't work for smaller municipalities, as they also need a return feed for the TV channel(s) they're broadcasting to Comcast (or Verizon, in our case, as we didn't opt for a channel when our town signed the agreement w/ Comcast)
I think the bigger problem is in how the petitions are validated. I hear stories about how petitions have been thrown out for various reasons (suspicion that the signatures were forged, not having a statement of what the petition was for on the signature sheet, collecting signatures from out-of-state people, etc.).
But Is there any confirmation that the people are who they say they are?
I've signed a few petitions, and I can't remember them ever asking me for ID for them to copy down identifying information (like my bank does when I make a large withdrawal)
So, if we have a contentious petition -- what's to stop someone from going and giving the information for the neighbor they don't like, or head of the local scientology chapter, a politician they didn't like, or anyone else just to be a general prick? ...
Don't get me wrong -- I'm for this transparency change, but I think transparency in government involves more than just releasing the names of the people, but it's going to be difficult to balance against the risk of identify theft or having someone copy their information from one petition to another.. (and I don't have a good solution to the problem; I wish I did.)
Doesn't anyone bother to read the RFCs? (probably not, they're too interested in trying to sell domains to make money)
It's all relative -- maybe 'cool' was the wrong word. Perhaps 'less of a social pariah' would've been better.
Disclaimer -- I work with a bunch of solar physicists. I've learned there's a social pecking order, sort of like the Geek Hierarchy -- in this case, however, it's mathematicians at the bottom (everyone needs to work with them once in a while, but they just hope they've had a bath that day if it's a face-to-face meeting)
They're still working on making sure there's an equivalent of Top Gun for every profession:
... etc.
Why can't the solar physicists get an unrealistic movie that makes them seem cool, too?
But there's a few of us who know who he is (by reputation ... I actually know Roberta Shaffer, also mentioned in the article, and I think I'm on a mailing list or two w/ Aaron Swartz)
But I hadn't heard anything since the election and his trying to be appointed to the head of the printing office ... it's a shame he didn't get it. He's been a big force in getting government documents from behind paywalls.
Read the article if you don't know who he is -- he's done a lot of public good.
A few years ago, I started a new job -- I was hired to do a small task, expected to take 6 to 12 months (government contracting). At the time, I had been unemployed for 7 months, and so had taken a lower pay rate, thinking it was an easy job, and I'd use the tuition benefits to continue work on my master's degree.
My second day on the job, someone quit and I got handed his task. My third day on the job, in a meeting w/ HR for the company, I was told that if my job changed significantly, they could get me a promotion. I told her that it had already happened. She must've thought I was joking as *nothing* was done about it.
Every couple of months, I brought it up with my manager. (mind you, my manager didn't deal with my tasking -- it's government contracting, so the ATR (civil servant) tells me what to do, my manager only dealt with making sure we were complying with contract requirements and HR issues). I had meetings with my manager's boss, and I think at one time even his boss. It was nothing but a run-around.
They told me they couldn't do anything 'til the annual raises. When I got a 7% raise and bitched, they acted like I should be grateful. I stayed on as I knew the contract was up for rebid. (and told my manager and ATR that if the company I worked for won, I was quitting). It dragged on something like an extra 6 months because of one of the losing companies bitching that it was unfairly awarded.
Of course, the sub-contractor that I was passed off to said they didn't want to re-negotiate anyone's pay, and it took my ATR and manger (now working for the new prime contractor) telling them that they needed to make an exception for me, and that I should get a 20-25% raise.
Because of my being difficult, I got less than a 20% raise (they had said they wouldn't hire me unless I gave them a paystub, but I had blacked out all of the amounts that could've been used to calculate my pay rate ... I missed the 'year to date' amount, and they didn't know I had gotten a raise 2 months before, so they had thought they were offering me a 22.5% raise.)
In the end -- it was 2 years to get the issue resolved. If I hadn't switched companies, I don't think it would've gotten changed, as L-3 Communications was absolute dicks to me on the issue the whole time.
So, the moral of the story -- if you approach them, and they don't do something about it quickly -- walk. Well, line up a new job first -- if they start giving excuses as to why they can't do anything, start looking for a new job, as it's a sign they don't care.
I'll soon have a few hundred TB of images.
How can I get them to mirror my data, so I can offload the traffic to them?