Nope, it had been approved, went through peer review (and was accepted) without a single mention of that. I was going through some system to check to see if my paper was formatted correctly when I gave up. I was told that wasn't even the system to submit the paper to.
And I've never published in EE before... the workshop was 'Solar Astronomy Big Data', and I've only dealt with journals from solar physics, science informatics / data science, and library & information science. There's always been an exemption for work that was done on government funded time.
Their form allowed you *some* rights as it was government funded (eg, to publish it to any required repositories) but they still wanted the copyright. Even my boss (one of the workshop organizers) thought it was over-reaching.
AGU had some assinine rules that kept me from publishing in their journals (they counted posters and talks posted online as 'published', so wouldn't accept any papers from me.)... but I also cut my ties to them this year (after having been very active with the Earth and Space Science Informatics focus group; was nominated to be secretary last year) when I realized that in their response to an RFI on public access to federally funded research, they called themselves a 'publisher' and never a 'scientific society'... that was the last straw, as I already knew that I disagreed with just about everything in their statement.
The top 100 most cited papers are actually a motley crew of methods, data resources and software tools that through usability, practicality and a little bit of luck have propelled them to the top of an enormous corpus of scientific literature.
The article itself never mention 'data resources' that I saw, but there's a problem in many fields that the standards are to cite the 'first results' paper for that data... for which the results portion may have already been disproved or otherwise be crap. There are a number of efforts working on being able to cite 'data' separately from 'results of the data', and in a manner that's consistent across all disciplines (as we don't know in advance who might make use of our data). You also run into problems, as the paper being cited may describe the initial release of the data, and not be useful to determine which edition was used (as that may be significant to recreate their results). See the Joint Declaration of Data Ctation Principlies, DataCite (metadata schema + DOI registry system), and the 2012 CODATA-ICSTI report, "Out of Cite, Out of Mind: The Current State of Practice, Policy, and Technology for the Citation of Data".
There are similar issues with software citation -- everyone's citing the announcement of the existing of the software, but how can you track who might've relied on a buggy version to let them know that they may need to re-run their analysis? I'm not as active in this field, but the arguments remain the same (giving proper attribution, documenting everything to make it reproducible, etc.). See the 2013 Knepley et.al paper, "Accurately Citing Software and Algorithms used in Publications" and the work of the Software Sustainability Institute (which also covers topics on writing better research software, as was alluded to in the article)
It's probably also work mentioning that our current ways of tracking 'importance' of papers are flawed. See the Altmetrics Manifesto for a collection of links to efforts to come up with other metrics and CiTO, the Citation Typing Ontology to enable a way to classify why something was cited (it might be for criticism; in most of the cases in the article, it would be "uses method in", which not all disciples feel needs to be cited).
After getting the final submission rejected 6 times. (The first failure was because it was PDF4, and they wanted PDF5... as if the couldn't up convert... so I tried giving them the original source for them to use, but giving them ODF and DOC files resulted in font screwups... so I tried generating the PDF through other mechanisms... but they complained I had bookmarks (none of which showed up in Abobe Acrobat Professional)... then their website said I had sent them too many PDFs (3), so I had to use their other methods...
After spending hours on trying to get their damned website to accept my paper, I then got told by my boss that IEEE *also* makes you sign over copyright of your paper to them... why, because you use their damned MS Word template that they can't even generate a clean paper from?
So I said fuck it, and withdrew the paper, and withdrew from the workshop (which is today) entirely. Never again will I even consider submitting a paper to IEEE.
"Direct Deposit" of your paycheck would be an example of ACH. Your company's bank doesn't want to make individual deals with every last bank that their employees might use... so they go through a clearing house that makes all of the connections for them.
Credit cards go through a clearing house, too, and it's not actually run by Visa or MasterCard.
The thing is... the clearing houses make only a small fraction of the tranaction... nowhere near the transaction fees that the credit card companies collect (which is based in part on how likely someone's going to request a chargeback, but can also be a 'we don't like your type of business' penalty). I want to say that there's a third significant factor that might affect the fees, but I don't work in the industry... a few of my former co-workers do, and I got the quick brain dump over drinks a couple months back. (and I paid the tab in cash... *grin*)
As spectrum so important, why are they sold at all? Shouldn't they be leased out, so it can be revoked if it's not being used for a given number of years, to put it in the hands of companies that aren't just going to sit on them to keep it out of the hands of their competitors, or other actions not in the public interest?
And as they mention IRS tax issues (I assume for capital gains), why aren't they at least subject to property taxes? (although, that probably just gives companies more incentive to set up shell corporations in tax havens)
You might not even have to start from scratch. I'd wager that ACT (A Conference Toolkit) could be customized to fit their specific needs.... but they still haven't explained why it is that Event Brite or Brown Paper Tickets wouldn't work for them, other than expense. I guess they just assume that volunteer programmers are 'free' vs. the opportunity cost.
If nothing else, you then don't expose yourself to some security mistake because you rushed to put something together. Or some other simple mistake, like the conference I attended where everything was managed by e-mail... only it seems their hosting service got flagged as a spam relay, and over 50% of the e-mail never went through. (so the organizers never got many people's talk proposals, and they had to scale back the meeting from 3 days to 2).
Unless things have changed dramatically*, there are rules that make it harder to use commercial cloud computing, as not all can guarantee that the services will only be hosted in the U.S.
Most agency cloud computing efforts are for internal number crunching (eg, scientific computing), not public facing websites. When they *have* gone and done it, they couldn't come up with a viable cost model for different groups to be willing to convert to the service. (Oh... you can't tell me the price, because you need to break-even, and you don't know how many people will agree to use it? Okay, that's a decent price; it's not that much more than what we pay now... oh wait, I have to pay for 3 VMs for prod / test / dev?)
The problem w/ building up a cluster to scale is that it means that you have inefficiencies of having idle machines; the way to get around this is to have lots of unrelated services running on the same system so that they shouldn't all need to max out at once.
In practice, it's often easier to switch to a 'low resource' version of the site when you start getting hit heavy -- drop all of the pretty images cluttering up pages, and just serve the basic content. Webserver tuning also helps dramatically... as simple as splitting your static content off to a seperate server (so that you can repoint it at a CDN if necessary), while your local servers take the brunt of the dynamic requests. (and possibly make the site less 'interactive' in times of high load.)
* which wouldn't surprise me, as I work for a federal contractor and we seem to be the last ones to know about policy changes... I once spent more than a year dealing with waiver paperwork only to find that by the time it had been granted that it had been allowed for 6+ months.
My apologies... I was going with the general U.S. definition of assault (which varies by state), as this is a U.S. based website and the "Freedom of speech is a fundamental right" argument is a typical American attitude due to the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
I didn't think that the UK had such attitudes, the 2013 Defamation Act came about in part from people suing for journals libel because they published facts about that person and "libel tourism" in general.
Their next alternative was people with dwarfism, but many of them suffer from problems that shorten their lifespan considerably. Actually, I kid... the article *actually* said:
As reasonable as an all-female Mars mission is from an economic perspective, some might find the idea offensive. After all, it'd be an expedition that fails to represent half the world's population; an all-female Mars crew would strike many as exceptionally biased.
Threatening to hit someone when you're in person is assault. Yet, if done over the internet, you can threaten to kill them, rape them, burn their house down, etc... and that should be legal?
Calling in a bomb threat isn't free speach, no matter if you were 'joking' or not. Screwing with people's lives, even if it's only one person and not a 'terroristic threat' shouldn't be, either.
And the strange thing is... I'd normally agree with you about the freedom of speach and people need to grow a thicker skin... but once you get threats of violence, that's drawing the line.
I've had a stalker, and even though she was just crazy, not violent, I can say that you will *never* understand what this can do to a person. I knew who my stalker was (she worked with me, and management wouldn't do crap about it; luckily, we worked different shifts)... but you start panicking every time you see someone in a crowd that might be her. You shut down when someone that you've chatted with on mailing lists meets you in person for the first time and expresses enthusiasm for meeting you.
So, in summary : fuck you and I hope you die in a fire. (yay freedom of speach!)
If you're gonna switch to FreeBSD anyway why not just a generic 19" x86 server ?
Price, and reliability. Dell rackmount servers hold up fine, but they're way overpriced. As for the generic 'built for linux' type servers, we've tried a few, and had way too many problems with them. (We got some machines from Penguin per the recommendation of another site involved on a project... of the 4, two were RMA'd... one had to be sent back a second time).
As I'm a federal facility, RMAs can add a week to however long it normally takes... gotta blank the drives, fill out the paperwork to get the item untagged, fill out the shipping paperwork (even when freight's paid for, gotta declare what's going out), take it to the shipping warehouse... wait... wait for shipping and receiving to x-ray the returned item & tag it... wait for shipping to deliver to our building (and they only deliver on Tuesdays & Thursdays for our building, due to staffing cutbacks)... blank drives again (can't trust what came in as we didn't install it), install a fresh OS, reload from backup. (I left out the unrack / pack / unpack / re-rack, as you'd normally have to do that... but that doesn't take much time, unless they send you back something diferent and the rails don't match).
The machine that had 2 RMAs I kept as a spare, rather than put it into service for anything that mattered... it just wasn't worth dealing with the headaches from it... not only was there the 2 months from RMAs, but procurement takes between 1-4 months, depending on if anyone bothers bidding when the SEWP request goes out.
Say what you will about Apple's OS... the hardware's very reliable, and the minis are cheap enough that it can be put on a government purchase card when you need one without waiting 2 months. My only issue w/ running Mac Minis as servers is the single-tap power. Well, that and thunderbolt, but there's two thunderbolt taps on 'em now, so one for the storage, one for the KVM. (but I won't need the KVM if I'm not running MacOS).
ipfw's been gone for a while... but they've made a lot of other stupid choices that might be good for general users, but make things a pain when you're administering lots of machines.
For instance, pushing all updates via the iTunes store; we have a centralized account that we put everything under... so an iWorks update comes along, and sysadmins have to go and enter the password on each machine.
The 'server' package under the App store to get the server OS... WTF? For apache, the config files are absolute crap now as there's a ton of if/then logic to alter the config if it's server or client.
And dear god, their replacing some languages (eg, perl), with wrappers that decide which version to call based on what system & user level config is present.
I've lost track of how many things have annoyed me ; I've been sitting on 10.6.8 for a long time now, but after this whole 'shellshock' issue, I was forced to upgrade to something that's still being supported... and absolutely hate it.
The only good news is that they *finally* updated the mini... which means we'll finally be getting new hardware to replace our xserves. (the cancelation of which should've been the clue that they didn't care about 'enterprise' type stuff anymore). I'm thinking of putting FreeBSD or similar on 'em though, rather than MacOSX.
they estimate past heat tallies were 48% to 152% too low
I still don't understand if this discovery is a good or a bad thing... but can someone please explain to me how you can estimate that a value is more than 100% "too low"?
I would assume that you would measure heat absorbtion in BTU or Watts, or something that can't go negative (ie, not in degrees Farenheight, which is a temperature, not a measure of stored heat)
If the NSF grant process is like the one for NASA, there's still a little bit of flexibility for the program manager after they've gotten the scores.
I know because I was on a panel that specifically gave two proposals 'poor' reviews (the lowest possible), and the program manager asked us to consider changing it. In this case, he's a rather nice guy, and it may just be that he didn't want to have to write the 'your proposal sucks' letter to them... but those of us on the panel knew that there is _no_ way for them to fund a 'poor'. They have leeway with any other score, and could give something with a marginal rating some seed money (fund 'em for a year, so they might be able to put in a more competitive bid next round).
We told the program manager that no, we wanted to make sure that there was no possible way that those two proposals could get funded.
I don't even drink coffee, but when I go with other people, there are plenty of coffee shops out there (some Starbucks, some not) that ask for your name.
It stands out to me, because one of my co-workers ends up with 'Richard' on his cup, because he doesn't want to waste 5 min repeating his name and then trying to tell them how to spell it.
In my opinion, the larger conferences tend to be a complete waste of time -- they're basically a time for press releases by vendors who want to sell you something. You get the same thing with the mid-sized conferences in the D.C. area with the 'free for government employees' conferences.
My preference is towards mid-sized conferences (under 1000 attendees), where you actually have a chance to get to talk to people and do some networking... of course, employers don't always like these, as part of the networking may be your finding another job elsewhere.
Really small workshops (20-200 attendees) are very educational, but they're so small that there's generally an expectation that they're more about collaboration and discussion. I've been to a few that were either 'by invitation only' (typically my boss is invited and sends me in his place; for one I talked my way into an invite; another required everyone to submit an abstract and they selected ~50 people to attend based on them). They tend to be strategy related -- what issues does the community need to be aware of & working on.
You also have the more 'academic' vs. 'practical' conferences in some fields... the academics present on research but often end up missing what I believe are the really key questions that they need to be asking. Practical conferences can also be tiring, if you end up with talk after talk of people coming up with effectively the same solution to a given problem.
From the sounds of things, what you're looking for is training, not conferences. Some conferences do offer training either before, during or after the conference... and for the pre- / post- stuff, you may not need to register for the main conference.
As for who pays... it depends. At my work, training is handled seperately from conferences... for conferences, I get reimbursed for my expenses (travel, hotel, food, registration). For training, I get registration back (provided it meets with their requirements for 'training', but not the rest of it unless it's 'company directed training' (they told me to go, vs. my asking to go). In many cases, I've worked with my manager to get listed as 'teleworking' during the conference, so they'll pay my salary while I'm there, but I pay the rest of the costs.
My neighbor's kid refused to learn to read... so I started playing Fluxx with him. (specifically, Zombie Fluxx).
As he had to read the cards to be able to play (or reveal his hand to someone else at the table), it finally pushed him over the edge to read. Once he got to the point where I was fairly certain that he had memorized the cards, we switched to Pirate Fluxx.
These days, he uses his reading skills for reading books on Minecraft -- I saw him at the library last week checking one out.
I work as a programmer & sysadmin supporting a solar physics archive. Although most scientists these days have to learn how to program to some degree (to be able to analyze their data), there's still a large number of IT people who work in these fields -- as programmers, sysadmins, DBAs, etc.
So, if you're in the Tucson, AZ; Menlo Park, CA; Princeton, NJ; or Seattle, WA area, keep an eye on the LSST hiring page.
There are likely to be other projects out there hiring, but I don't know what their various situations are. (I just know that LSST was soliciting at the last American Astronomical Society meeting). You can also look to universities, especially if you have kids (as future tuition benefits for dependants can be quite significant).
I know a hell of a lot more about astronomy & solar physics than I do before I started this job. I'm by no means an expert in the field, but my work does help the scientists do their research and improve our knowledge of the field.
Corporations can do whatever they can to show no profit, and therefore, no taxes.
If rich people were to try to make enough charitable contributions or whatever other deductions to drop their taxes to zero, they'd still get hit with the Alternative Minimum Tax. (those with a low enough income can still get away with this)
Why don't we have an AMT for companies? A sort of 'if you're making over a billion dollars in gross receipts, you still have to pay the U.S. 10%' or simply 'then these deductions aren't allowable'... you could have things in there like:
Money spent on lobbying
Money spent on advertising
Salary costs over ~5x minimum wage (calculated per person... so no hiring a bunch of minimum wage people to offset the CEO's pay)
Obviously, lobbyists and legislators will hate the first one. Newspapers & TV stations will hate the second one.
You can't check out a book from the Library of Congress. There are plenty of other 'non-circulating' books at most public libraries (eg, they won't let you take home volumes from an encyclopedia, textbooks when a teacher has asked that they be put 'on reserve').
What this does is allow libraries & archives to do a few things:
Keep backups of their holdings.
Reduce risk in letting patrons look at the mateirals (as they don't touch the originals)
Reduce long-term costs. (keep the physical books at 'off-site storage' (ie, warehouses in less expensive areas), and not have to worry about how fast it'd take to access them if they're requested).
Free up space for other purposes (meeting rooms, computers, etc.) while still having access to the whole collection.
Free up librarians. (many archives have 'closed stacks' where you request a book, and a librarian goes down to get it for you... this means they don't have to do that).
That being said, there are some drawbacks -- if the physical books are being placed into deep storage, they're not getting inspected, so should something go wrong (eg, mold start to develop), it may progress further before someone notices.
I'd actually be interested in seeing the full text of the decision, to see if there are limits as to how many digital copies can be viewed at once -- if a teacher puts a book 'on reserve', and the library scans it... can 4 students view it simultaneously if the library only owns 3 copies?
Yep... but we get to argue for why we need new hardware when they can't keep up with the load. And many of 'em are intended for 'public outreach', so they justify their continued funding by how many people look at their website, not just how much data they serve, or how many people cite their systems in peer-reviewed papers. (ISWA and iSolSearch may be exceptions to this)
There have been other times that were much worse, such as when a slashdot 'editor' (I use that term loosely) decided to add a comment for people to use one of the movie maker CGIs and set the defaults higher so as to use maximum bandwidth. (and it gave you a slideshow of JPGs, so not nearly as effecient as SDO's premade quicktimes... and it was back when our network was only on a 100Mbps uplink)
(and I'm listed as a backup sysadmin for one of the systems I linked to... however, NASA decided I'm not a sysadmin (and kicked me off of the useful mailing lists), in an attempt to get the number of people w/ sysadmin credentials down. (as many scientists were listed as sysadmins, so they could administer their own desktops))
If you want a picture / movie that's actually based on this event's data... use iSWA.
Select the 'ISEP' tab, and then choose one that mentions 'CME WSA' and looks like a swirl. (there are three of 'em... pressure, velocity and density... although I think something went wrong in their pipeline, as the pressure and density ones are *really* glitching out... I don't know if that's one they generate every 15 mins, though)
You'll notice that even though the center of the cloud is expected to go ahead of the earth, they're predicting it'll be wide enough that we'll still get hit by it.
(disclaimer : I work for the Solar Data Analysis Center at GSFC)
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, it had been approved, went through peer review (and was accepted) without a single mention of that. I was going through some system to check to see if my paper was formatted correctly when I gave up. I was told that wasn't even the system to submit the paper to.
And I've never published in EE before ... the workshop was 'Solar Astronomy Big Data', and I've only dealt with journals from solar physics, science informatics / data science, and library & information science. There's always been an exemption for work that was done on government funded time.
Their form allowed you *some* rights as it was government funded (eg, to publish it to any required repositories) but they still wanted the copyright. Even my boss (one of the workshop organizers) thought it was over-reaching.
AGU had some assinine rules that kept me from publishing in their journals (they counted posters and talks posted online as 'published', so wouldn't accept any papers from me.) ... but I also cut my ties to them this year (after having been very active with the Earth and Space Science Informatics focus group; was nominated to be secretary last year) when I realized that in their response to an RFI on public access to federally funded research, they called themselves a 'publisher' and never a 'scientific society' ... that was the last straw, as I already knew that I disagreed with just about everything in their statement.
The article itself never mention 'data resources' that I saw, but there's a problem in many fields that the standards are to cite the 'first results' paper for that data ... for which the results portion may have already been disproved or otherwise be crap. There are a number of efforts working on being able to cite 'data' separately from 'results of the data', and in a manner that's consistent across all disciplines (as we don't know in advance who might make use of our data). You also run into problems, as the paper being cited may describe the initial release of the data, and not be useful to determine which edition was used (as that may be significant to recreate their results). See the Joint Declaration of Data Ctation Principlies, DataCite (metadata schema + DOI registry system), and the 2012 CODATA-ICSTI report, "Out of Cite, Out of Mind: The Current State of Practice, Policy, and Technology for the Citation of Data".
There are similar issues with software citation -- everyone's citing the announcement of the existing of the software, but how can you track who might've relied on a buggy version to let them know that they may need to re-run their analysis? I'm not as active in this field, but the arguments remain the same (giving proper attribution, documenting everything to make it reproducible, etc.). See the 2013 Knepley et.al paper, "Accurately Citing Software and Algorithms used in Publications" and the work of the Software Sustainability Institute (which also covers topics on writing better research software, as was alluded to in the article)
It's probably also work mentioning that our current ways of tracking 'importance' of papers are flawed. See the Altmetrics Manifesto for a collection of links to efforts to come up with other metrics and CiTO, the Citation Typing Ontology to enable a way to classify why something was cited (it might be for criticism; in most of the cases in the article, it would be "uses method in", which not all disciples feel needs to be cited).
After getting the final submission rejected 6 times. (The first failure was because it was PDF4, and they wanted PDF5 ... as if the couldn't up convert ... so I tried giving them the original source for them to use, but giving them ODF and DOC files resulted in font screwups ... so I tried generating the PDF through other mechanisms ... but they complained I had bookmarks (none of which showed up in Abobe Acrobat Professional) ... then their website said I had sent them too many PDFs (3), so I had to use their other methods ...
After spending hours on trying to get their damned website to accept my paper, I then got told by my boss that IEEE *also* makes you sign over copyright of your paper to them ... why, because you use their damned MS Word template that they can't even generate a clean paper from?
So I said fuck it, and withdrew the paper, and withdrew from the workshop (which is today) entirely. Never again will I even consider submitting a paper to IEEE.
"Direct Deposit" of your paycheck would be an example of ACH. Your company's bank doesn't want to make individual deals with every last bank that their employees might use ... so they go through a clearing house that makes all of the connections for them.
Credit cards go through a clearing house, too, and it's not actually run by Visa or MasterCard.
The thing is ... the clearing houses make only a small fraction of the tranaction ... nowhere near the transaction fees that the credit card companies collect (which is based in part on how likely someone's going to request a chargeback, but can also be a 'we don't like your type of business' penalty). I want to say that there's a third significant factor that might affect the fees, but I don't work in the industry ... a few of my former co-workers do, and I got the quick brain dump over drinks a couple months back. (and I paid the tab in cash ... *grin*)
As spectrum so important, why are they sold at all? Shouldn't they be leased out, so it can be revoked if it's not being used for a given number of years, to put it in the hands of companies that aren't just going to sit on them to keep it out of the hands of their competitors, or other actions not in the public interest?
And as they mention IRS tax issues (I assume for capital gains), why aren't they at least subject to property taxes? (although, that probably just gives companies more incentive to set up shell corporations in tax havens)
You might not even have to start from scratch. I'd wager that ACT (A Conference Toolkit) could be customized to fit their specific needs. ... but they still haven't explained why it is that Event Brite or Brown Paper Tickets wouldn't work for them, other than expense. I guess they just assume that volunteer programmers are 'free' vs. the opportunity cost.
If nothing else, you then don't expose yourself to some security mistake because you rushed to put something together. Or some other simple mistake, like the conference I attended where everything was managed by e-mail ... only it seems their hosting service got flagged as a spam relay, and over 50% of the e-mail never went through. (so the organizers never got many people's talk proposals, and they had to scale back the meeting from 3 days to 2).
Unless things have changed dramatically*, there are rules that make it harder to use commercial cloud computing, as not all can guarantee that the services will only be hosted in the U.S.
Most agency cloud computing efforts are for internal number crunching (eg, scientific computing), not public facing websites. When they *have* gone and done it, they couldn't come up with a viable cost model for different groups to be willing to convert to the service. (Oh ... you can't tell me the price, because you need to break-even, and you don't know how many people will agree to use it? Okay, that's a decent price; it's not that much more than what we pay now ... oh wait, I have to pay for 3 VMs for prod / test / dev?)
The problem w/ building up a cluster to scale is that it means that you have inefficiencies of having idle machines; the way to get around this is to have lots of unrelated services running on the same system so that they shouldn't all need to max out at once.
In practice, it's often easier to switch to a 'low resource' version of the site when you start getting hit heavy -- drop all of the pretty images cluttering up pages, and just serve the basic content. Webserver tuning also helps dramatically ... as simple as splitting your static content off to a seperate server (so that you can repoint it at a CDN if necessary), while your local servers take the brunt of the dynamic requests. (and possibly make the site less 'interactive' in times of high load.)
* which wouldn't surprise me, as I work for a federal contractor and we seem to be the last ones to know about policy changes ... I once spent more than a year dealing with waiver paperwork only to find that by the time it had been granted that it had been allowed for 6+ months.
My apologies ... I was going with the general U.S. definition of assault (which varies by state), as this is a U.S. based website and the "Freedom of speech is a fundamental right" argument is a typical American attitude due to the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
I didn't think that the UK had such attitudes, the 2013 Defamation Act came about in part from people suing for journals libel because they published facts about that person and "libel tourism" in general.
Their next alternative was people with dwarfism, but many of them suffer from problems that shorten their lifespan considerably. Actually, I kid ... the article *actually* said:
Threatening to hit someone when you're in person is assault. Yet, if done over the internet, you can threaten to kill them, rape them, burn their house down, etc... and that should be legal?
Calling in a bomb threat isn't free speach, no matter if you were 'joking' or not. Screwing with people's lives, even if it's only one person and not a 'terroristic threat' shouldn't be, either.
And the strange thing is ... I'd normally agree with you about the freedom of speach and people need to grow a thicker skin... but once you get threats of violence, that's drawing the line.
I've had a stalker, and even though she was just crazy, not violent, I can say that you will *never* understand what this can do to a person. I knew who my stalker was (she worked with me, and management wouldn't do crap about it; luckily, we worked different shifts) ... but you start panicking every time you see someone in a crowd that might be her. You shut down when someone that you've chatted with on mailing lists meets you in person for the first time and expresses enthusiasm for meeting you.
So, in summary : fuck you and I hope you die in a fire. (yay freedom of speach!)
Price, and reliability. Dell rackmount servers hold up fine, but they're way overpriced. As for the generic 'built for linux' type servers, we've tried a few, and had way too many problems with them. (We got some machines from Penguin per the recommendation of another site involved on a project ... of the 4, two were RMA'd ... one had to be sent back a second time).
As I'm a federal facility, RMAs can add a week to however long it normally takes ... gotta blank the drives, fill out the paperwork to get the item untagged, fill out the shipping paperwork (even when freight's paid for, gotta declare what's going out), take it to the shipping warehouse ... wait ... wait for shipping and receiving to x-ray the returned item & tag it ... wait for shipping to deliver to our building (and they only deliver on Tuesdays & Thursdays for our building, due to staffing cutbacks) ... blank drives again (can't trust what came in as we didn't install it), install a fresh OS, reload from backup. (I left out the unrack / pack / unpack / re-rack, as you'd normally have to do that ... but that doesn't take much time, unless they send you back something diferent and the rails don't match).
The machine that had 2 RMAs I kept as a spare, rather than put it into service for anything that mattered ... it just wasn't worth dealing with the headaches from it ... not only was there the 2 months from RMAs, but procurement takes between 1-4 months, depending on if anyone bothers bidding when the SEWP request goes out.
Say what you will about Apple's OS ... the hardware's very reliable, and the minis are cheap enough that it can be put on a government purchase card when you need one without waiting 2 months. My only issue w/ running Mac Minis as servers is the single-tap power. Well, that and thunderbolt, but there's two thunderbolt taps on 'em now, so one for the storage, one for the KVM. (but I won't need the KVM if I'm not running MacOS).
ipfw's been gone for a while ... but they've made a lot of other stupid choices that might be good for general users, but make things a pain when you're administering lots of machines.
For instance, pushing all updates via the iTunes store; we have a centralized account that we put everything under ... so an iWorks update comes along, and sysadmins have to go and enter the password on each machine.
The 'server' package under the App store to get the server OS ... WTF? For apache, the config files are absolute crap now as there's a ton of if/then logic to alter the config if it's server or client.
And dear god, their replacing some languages (eg, perl), with wrappers that decide which version to call based on what system & user level config is present.
I've lost track of how many things have annoyed me ; I've been sitting on 10.6.8 for a long time now, but after this whole 'shellshock' issue, I was forced to upgrade to something that's still being supported ... and absolutely hate it.
The only good news is that they *finally* updated the mini ... which means we'll finally be getting new hardware to replace our xserves. (the cancelation of which should've been the clue that they didn't care about 'enterprise' type stuff anymore). I'm thinking of putting FreeBSD or similar on 'em though, rather than MacOSX.
They explained this on the "History" channel.
It was aliens.
(you know, I think I prefered it when they were the Hitler Channel, and 95% of their shows were WW2-related)
I still don't understand if this discovery is a good or a bad thing ... but can someone please explain to me how you can estimate that a value is more than 100% "too low"?
I would assume that you would measure heat absorbtion in BTU or Watts, or something that can't go negative (ie, not in degrees Farenheight, which is a temperature, not a measure of stored heat)
If the NSF grant process is like the one for NASA, there's still a little bit of flexibility for the program manager after they've gotten the scores.
I know because I was on a panel that specifically gave two proposals 'poor' reviews (the lowest possible), and the program manager asked us to consider changing it. In this case, he's a rather nice guy, and it may just be that he didn't want to have to write the 'your proposal sucks' letter to them ... but those of us on the panel knew that there is _no_ way for them to fund a 'poor'. They have leeway with any other score, and could give something with a marginal rating some seed money (fund 'em for a year, so they might be able to put in a more competitive bid next round).
We told the program manager that no, we wanted to make sure that there was no possible way that those two proposals could get funded.
I don't even drink coffee, but when I go with other people, there are plenty of coffee shops out there (some Starbucks, some not) that ask for your name.
It stands out to me, because one of my co-workers ends up with 'Richard' on his cup, because he doesn't want to waste 5 min repeating his name and then trying to tell them how to spell it.
Oh, you think you're kidding ... but the problem isn't just bash ... it's that Apple uses bash in place of sh.
So most programs that shell out (php, perl, etc) are potentially vulnerable no matter what initial shell they were called from:
A little tri-corder like device that could help me find my security badge in my house.
If they have stickers I could put on other things, too, even better.
In my opinion, the larger conferences tend to be a complete waste of time -- they're basically a time for press releases by vendors who want to sell you something. You get the same thing with the mid-sized conferences in the D.C. area with the 'free for government employees' conferences.
My preference is towards mid-sized conferences (under 1000 attendees), where you actually have a chance to get to talk to people and do some networking ... of course, employers don't always like these, as part of the networking may be your finding another job elsewhere.
Really small workshops (20-200 attendees) are very educational, but they're so small that there's generally an expectation that they're more about collaboration and discussion. I've been to a few that were either 'by invitation only' (typically my boss is invited and sends me in his place; for one I talked my way into an invite; another required everyone to submit an abstract and they selected ~50 people to attend based on them). They tend to be strategy related -- what issues does the community need to be aware of & working on.
You also have the more 'academic' vs. 'practical' conferences in some fields ... the academics present on research but often end up missing what I believe are the really key questions that they need to be asking. Practical conferences can also be tiring, if you end up with talk after talk of people coming up with effectively the same solution to a given problem.
From the sounds of things, what you're looking for is training, not conferences. Some conferences do offer training either before, during or after the conference ... and for the pre- / post- stuff, you may not need to register for the main conference.
As for who pays ... it depends. At my work, training is handled seperately from conferences ... for conferences, I get reimbursed for my expenses (travel, hotel, food, registration). For training, I get registration back (provided it meets with their requirements for 'training', but not the rest of it unless it's 'company directed training' (they told me to go, vs. my asking to go). In many cases, I've worked with my manager to get listed as 'teleworking' during the conference, so they'll pay my salary while I'm there, but I pay the rest of the costs.
My neighbor's kid refused to learn to read ... so I started playing Fluxx with him. (specifically, Zombie Fluxx).
As he had to read the cards to be able to play (or reveal his hand to someone else at the table), it finally pushed him over the edge to read. Once he got to the point where I was fairly certain that he had memorized the cards, we switched to Pirate Fluxx.
These days, he uses his reading skills for reading books on Minecraft -- I saw him at the library last week checking one out.
I work as a programmer & sysadmin supporting a solar physics archive. Although most scientists these days have to learn how to program to some degree (to be able to analyze their data), there's still a large number of IT people who work in these fields -- as programmers, sysadmins, DBAs, etc.
So, if you're in the Tucson, AZ; Menlo Park, CA; Princeton, NJ; or Seattle, WA area, keep an eye on the LSST hiring page.
There are likely to be other projects out there hiring, but I don't know what their various situations are. (I just know that LSST was soliciting at the last American Astronomical Society meeting). You can also look to universities, especially if you have kids (as future tuition benefits for dependants can be quite significant).
I know a hell of a lot more about astronomy & solar physics than I do before I started this job. I'm by no means an expert in the field, but my work does help the scientists do their research and improve our knowledge of the field.
Corporations can do whatever they can to show no profit, and therefore, no taxes.
If rich people were to try to make enough charitable contributions or whatever other deductions to drop their taxes to zero, they'd still get hit with the Alternative Minimum Tax. (those with a low enough income can still get away with this)
Why don't we have an AMT for companies? A sort of 'if you're making over a billion dollars in gross receipts, you still have to pay the U.S. 10%' or simply 'then these deductions aren't allowable' ... you could have things in there like :
Obviously, lobbyists and legislators will hate the first one. Newspapers & TV stations will hate the second one.
You can't check out a book from the Library of Congress. There are plenty of other 'non-circulating' books at most public libraries (eg, they won't let you take home volumes from an encyclopedia, textbooks when a teacher has asked that they be put 'on reserve').
What this does is allow libraries & archives to do a few things:
That being said, there are some drawbacks -- if the physical books are being placed into deep storage, they're not getting inspected, so should something go wrong (eg, mold start to develop), it may progress further before someone notices.
I'd actually be interested in seeing the full text of the decision, to see if there are limits as to how many digital copies can be viewed at once -- if a teacher puts a book 'on reserve', and the library scans it ... can 4 students view it simultaneously if the library only owns 3 copies?
Yep ... but we get to argue for why we need new hardware when they can't keep up with the load. And many of 'em are intended for 'public outreach', so they justify their continued funding by how many people look at their website, not just how much data they serve, or how many people cite their systems in peer-reviewed papers. (ISWA and iSolSearch may be exceptions to this)
There have been other times that were much worse, such as when a slashdot 'editor' (I use that term loosely) decided to add a comment for people to use one of the movie maker CGIs and set the defaults higher so as to use maximum bandwidth. (and it gave you a slideshow of JPGs, so not nearly as effecient as SDO's premade quicktimes ... and it was back when our network was only on a 100Mbps uplink)
(and I'm listed as a backup sysadmin for one of the systems I linked to ... however, NASA decided I'm not a sysadmin (and kicked me off of the useful mailing lists), in an attempt to get the number of people w/ sysadmin credentials down. (as many scientists were listed as sysadmins, so they could administer their own desktops))
If you want a picture / movie that's actually based on this event's data ... use iSWA.
Select the 'ISEP' tab, and then choose one that mentions 'CME WSA' and looks like a swirl. (there are three of 'em ... pressure, velocity and density ... although I think something went wrong in their pipeline, as the pressure and density ones are *really* glitching out ... I don't know if that's one they generate every 15 mins, though)
You'll notice that even though the center of the cloud is expected to go ahead of the earth, they're predicting it'll be wide enough that we'll still get hit by it.
(disclaimer : I work for the Solar Data Analysis Center at GSFC)