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Grex > Coop11 > #90: Agenda for the April 27 1999 Grex Board of Directors Meeting | |
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remmers
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Agenda for the April 27 1999 Grex Board of Directors Meeting
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Apr 21 11:43 UTC 1999 |
GREX BOARD OF DIRECTORS MEETING
DATE AND TIME: Tuesday, April 27, 6:30-9:00 pm
PLACE: Upstairs at Zingerman's Nextdoor
422 Detroit Street, Ann Arbor
AGENDA:
231 Gavel Banging - remmers throughout
23 Chairman's Report - remmers 10 minutes
606 Treasurer's Report - aruba 15 minutes
15764 Publicity Committee - mta 10 minutes
409872 Technical Committee - staff 20 minutes
15777 Credit Card info - dang 20 minutes
619 Future Planning - all 20 minutes
16102 New Business - all ?? minutes
418660 Gaval Cessation - remmers 0 minutes
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| 22 responses total. |
remmers
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response 1 of 22:
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Apr 21 12:09 UTC 1999 |
Please indicate in this item anything else that should go on the agenda.
Remarks:
(1) I've added a new regular agenda item: Chairman's Report. This
doesn't mean that the chairman will necessarily have anything
to report, but it's a fairly standard agenda item for other
bodies in which I've served. I've thrown it in so that if the
chair actually does have something to report, there's a slot
for it.
(2) The "Future Planning" item is an outgrowth of item:87 - the
"Plan the Budget Meeting" item. The sentiment emerged there that
long-range budget planning would be premature until there's a
long-range hardware plan in place. The purpose of this agenda
item is to discuss planning for hardware upgrades and budget
implications thereof. Input from the technical staff is eagerly
solicited.
(3) The numbering of agenda items is a continuation of the numbering
in the previous agenda (see resp:85,23), in which the item numbers
were 8, 216, 5624, 229, 21, 554, 14412, 374720. Again, a mint-
condition woodla goes to the first person to deduce the rule used
in generating the sequence. Some HINTS: I'm not sure that the
sequence is infinite, but I'm sure it's plenty long enough for
years and years of monthly agendas. No number appears more than
once in the sequence. It's best to think of it as a mapping on
the positive integers, with 1 mapping to 8, 2 to 216, 3 to 5624,
etc. Thus, for the current agenda, 9 maps to 231. A short computer
program that executes in O(1) time could be written to generate the
(N+1)st term of the sequence from the Nth.
(4) I apologize for the misspelling of "gavel" in the last item.
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aruba
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response 2 of 22:
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Apr 21 13:47 UTC 1999 |
I'd like to add an item for "surveying our stuff" to the agenda. We need to
generate a list of what Grex owns for some tax forms, and I'd like to form
a plan for how to do that.
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cmcgee
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response 3 of 22:
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Apr 21 14:04 UTC 1999 |
For your "Future Planning" item: people might use this as a time/place to
report social, legal or technological changes that might affect how Grex
operates. Future scanning is a way to be ready for change, rather than
respond to it.
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remmers
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response 4 of 22:
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Apr 21 14:46 UTC 1999 |
(In point (3) of my resp:1 one can make a somewhat stronger statement
about computability: The inverse function is computable in O(1) time.)
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remmers
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response 5 of 22:
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Apr 21 14:50 UTC 1999 |
Re resp:3 - Social and legal factors are important - and worrisome
sometimes - but are a bit broader than what I had in mind for this
agenda item. I think we need to have a hardware upgrade plan so that we
can budget for it.
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jep
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response 6 of 22:
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Apr 21 15:26 UTC 1999 |
Sure would like to have a mint-condition woodla, but I sure don't think
there's much chance I'm going to get one from remmers.
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lilmo
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response 7 of 22:
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Apr 27 00:40 UTC 1999 |
1. What's a woodla?
2. What's 0(1) time?
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mdw
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response 8 of 22:
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Apr 27 07:54 UTC 1999 |
It's not 0(1) but O(1) - and it's the mathematicians short-hand way of
writing down "order 1", which is one measure of the speed of an
algorithm. The speed of any algorithm can be expressed as a function of
"n" (where "n" is the number of items being processed). That function
can normally be written as the sum of simplier functions of n. As n
becomes very large, typically one of these subfunctions or terms becomes
dominant (much larger than all the other terms combined), and so one can
closely approximate the running time of the function by simply measuring
this one term. This term is very often the product of a positive
constant and n to some power, so it is traditional to ignore the
constant and say O(n^2), if the performance of the algorithm is nearly
proportional to the square of the number of items involved given a large
# of items. O(1) means that the algorithm always takes the same amount
of time when processing a large # of items, which means that given a
large enough # of items, such an algorithm will beat out anything based
on O(n^2), for instance. Of course, this is not the whole story - for
instance, for small and medium numbers of items, the O(n^2) algorithm
might have less setup time than the O(1) algorithm, and might still be a
winner. There is also the possibility that the O(1) algorithm is not
well-behaved for small values of n and either takes much longer than for
large values of n, or perhaps worse yet, isn't computable in a finite
amount of time.
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drew
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response 9 of 22:
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Apr 27 18:11 UTC 1999 |
Wouldn't O(1) be linearly proportional in time with the number of items? And
perhaps O(0) would be constant time regardless of number of items?
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aruba
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response 10 of 22:
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Apr 27 19:01 UTC 1999 |
A linear algorithm would be O(n). O(f) (pronounced "Big Oh of f") is the
"order" of a function f. In general the definition says that
f is O(g) if there are constants A and B such that
A|g(n)| <= |f(n)| <= B|g(n)| for all but finitely many values of n.
(|x| is the absolute value of x.)
So for instance, a bubble sort makes n(n-1) comparisons and some lesser number
S(n) of swaps in the process of sorting n items. So the time it takes to run
is
f(n) = cn(n-1) + sS(n)
where c is the time it takes to do a comparison and s is the time it takes
to do a swap. Since
(c/2)n^2 <= f(n) <= (c+s)n^2
for all but finitely many n, f is O(n^2). So you can say that a bubble
sort runs in O(n^2) time.
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remmers
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response 11 of 22:
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Apr 27 21:05 UTC 1999 |
Okay folks, stop horsing around with mathematical generalities and
figure out my numbering system!
Also, nobody has addressed lilmo's question about woodlas.
Getting back to business, here - at the 11th hour - is the final agenda:
GREX BOARD OF DIRECTORS MEETING
DATE AND TIME: Tuesday, April 27, 6:30-9:00 pm
PLACE: Upstairs at Zingerman's Next Door
422 Detroit Street, Ann Arbor
AGENDA:
231 Gavel Banging - remmers throughout
23 Chairman's Report - remmers 10 minutes
606 Treasurer's Report - aruba 15 minutes
15764 Publicity Committee - mta 10 minutes
409872 Technical Committee - staff 20 minutes
15777 Credit Card info - dang 20 minutes
619 Inventory of our stuff - aruba 10 minutes
16102 Future Planning - all 20 minutes
418660 New Business - all ?? minutes
10885168 Gavel Cessation - remmers 0 minutes
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lilmo
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response 12 of 22:
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Apr 27 22:25 UTC 1999 |
Re resp:8 - Sorry, I'm reading this on a library Mac, and in the font it
chose, I can't tell the difference between O and 0, unless they are right next
to each other (and then barely).
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mdw
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response 13 of 22:
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Apr 28 08:44 UTC 1999 |
0 times anything is 0. I think an O(0) function would be saying "it
takes no time at all", or at least I think that's the most sensible
interpretation.
15779
621
16154
420012
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remmers
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response 14 of 22:
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Apr 28 13:25 UTC 1999 |
(By Jiminny - Marcus appears to have figured it out!)
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remmers
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response 15 of 22:
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Apr 30 01:23 UTC 1999 |
(The mint-condition woodla has been delivered to Marcus...)
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lilmo
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response 16 of 22:
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Apr 30 21:34 UTC 1999 |
What's a woodla ?!??
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keesan
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response 17 of 22:
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May 4 19:37 UTC 1999 |
Why are my zeros now showing up as a capital O with a diagonal slash through
them whereas a while ago they were an O with a dot in the middle? Same
hardware at my end, same Procomm settings. (I think).
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pfv
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response 18 of 22:
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May 4 20:05 UTC 1999 |
differnet - and better - font. DEAL WITH IT.
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remmers
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response 19 of 22:
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May 5 12:44 UTC 1999 |
*Something* must have changed at your end.
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ryan
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response 20 of 22:
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May 5 13:14 UTC 1999 |
This response has been erased.
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keesan
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response 21 of 22:
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May 10 21:22 UTC 1999 |
I think I must have changed computers - the VGA monitors have the little dot
in the O and the TTL I am now using has a slash instead. I have also noticed
that the m is different with a Graphics Plus instead of straight Hercules
card in this same computer running the same TTL monitor.
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dang
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response 22 of 22:
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May 10 23:31 UTC 1999 |
The basic font, as used in DOS, is stored in the ROMs of the graphics
card. Thus, changing graphics cards would change that font.
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