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Grex > Coop12 > #94: Minutes March 21, 2002 Board Meeting | |
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mooncat
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Minutes March 21, 2002 Board Meeting
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Mar 26 23:04 UTC 2002 |
Starring, in order of appearance: (pre: 7 pm) Mooncat*, Mary*, Other*,
Aruba*, STeve* (with a brief KRJ visit) and MDW*, (* indicates Board
Member)
1. Gavel Banging: 7:17 pm
2. Chairman's Report: See #7
3. Treasurer's Report: In February we took in $493, Spent $433.
Two new members (Thank you!)
So far we have collected $363 in March
Membership is at a low 84 paid, and concern is beginning to rear it’s
ugly head. (please make it go away! ap) Discussion regarding how to
get more paying members, including those long-time members who have
thought about contributing but just haven’t quite done it, or have
forgotten to renew their memberships, current plan- MOTD message.
(which is currently up) Also, do we want to do something in
appreciation of our members?
Bank Account: Interest rate dropped from 1.74% (when Mark/Aruba opened
the account) to 1.25% (as of 3/21).
4. Publicity Committee: Anne/Mooncat reported in for Bhelliom- re-
opening Grex store in progress (getting prices, making item, etc.) to
get rid of old items.
New items? Do we want to find a way to get new shirts, perhaps
with a new design? Could we maybe put Grex shirts up for sale in
consignment shops around town(s). Much discussion, no conclusion at
this point.
5. Technical Committee: “Marcus (MDW) has done wonderful things!” says
STeve. MDW has loaded OpenBSD on one of the machines (mentioned in last
month’s meeting minutes) and is running Solaris on the other. The BSD
seems stable and useful for something, but there are some bits missing
(like a debugger). Operating system isn’t quite doing what it should
be. Gut feeling: too early to tell, target time a year from now. Need
to come up with a series of ‘Metrics’ to see if the platforms will do
what we want them to do. STeve and MDW will be putting together a list
of ‘Things New Grex Platform MUST Be Able To Do’ and post it in the
garage conf for discussion.
Other than that, again it has been a rather quiet month. A few re-boots
have been needed.
6. Schedule Next Meeting: Thursday, April 18, 2002 7:00 pm, Zingerman's
Next Door.
7. Reporting Paperwork: Eric/Other spoke to his advisor (father) and
the conclusion there was that we did need to send in the forms. This
fit with the decsion the rest of the board had pretty much come to so
there was agreement with this assessment. Forms have been sent in sans
cover letter.
8. New Business: Art Fair; an anonymous source has contacted us with
the idea of getting a booth at Art Fair. Talk followed regarding the
ever popular Art-On-A-Stick and how Grex could capitalize on this
(tangented over the method one would have to use to actually cut
computer pieces apart without completely shattering it?), maybe we
could sell T-shirts. Problem- Who would man the booth and who would
take charge of organizing this?
Auction- when do we want to do another? Decided to start the
next auction in September (give people time to find items to donate and
others time to save!) and Anne/Mooncat agreed to assist as an
additional auctioneer.
9. Bang Gavel: 8:48 pm
These are the events as I saw them. Please let me know if I’ve missed
anything.
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| 136 responses total. |
devnull
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response 1 of 136:
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Mar 26 23:38 UTC 2002 |
How much has membership actually declined? Like, what's the high? How
has it varied over time?
It also seems to me that the things that really make grex work are:
1) The staff
2) The users, who make the interesting discussions happen
3) Having enough money to pay the bills
Now, a declining number of members might mean that there's correspondingly
a declining number of users, in which case, recruiting more users and
having some of them happen to become members might be the right solution.
A declining number of members might also make it harder to pay the bills,
but my understanding is that grex's finances are quite solid at the moment,
so this isn't an immediate concern.
Do we have any meaningful statistics about how many users there have been
over time? I think number of people contributing to the agora conference
would be a more useful measure than the number of poeple running newuser,
or the size of /etc/passwd.
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aruba
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response 2 of 136:
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Mar 27 02:20 UTC 2002 |
It is certainly not time to panic about the size of the membership.
Here are some numbers for membership in each half-month since the beginning
of 2000:
93 87 98 97 90 99 92 88 94
95 89 102 96 88 100 91 89 93
95 92 103 90 91 100 90 90 92
91 96 100 87 95 99 89 97 91
93 97 100 90 94 96 87 98 88
90 94 97 90 97 95 87 95 84
As you can see, membeship has been approximately constant for a long time,
though there have been low points before. I like to see it above 95 though.
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ea
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response 3 of 136:
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Mar 27 04:38 UTC 2002 |
As far as getting new T-shirts, has Grex considered a website such as
CafePress.com? They let you design your own shirts, give you a website
from which to sell them, print them on demand, and then give some amount
of profit to the seller. This has a few advantages and a few
disadvantages when compared to the traditional "Grex Store"
Pro:
Grex does not have to maintain inventory
Designs can be changed at will
Grex sets the sale price
More than just T-Shirts
No up-front costs
Can ship around the nation, easily, with no work from local Grex volunteers
Con:
No on-hand inventory, makes it harder to distribute at gatherings (such
as walks, TOP events, etc)
Base prices are a little steep (they set base price, Grex sets sale price)
Turn-around on each sale is about 3 weeks
not sure how long it takes for payments to grex following orders
will they be around in 3? 5? 10? years?
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aruba
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response 4 of 136:
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Mar 27 04:57 UTC 2002 |
Valerie has been advocating CafePress instead of buying a bunch of shirts
like we did last time. I think you summarized the pros and cons pretty
well.
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jp2
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response 5 of 136:
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Mar 27 15:32 UTC 2002 |
This response has been erased.
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janc
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response 6 of 136:
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Mar 28 01:46 UTC 2002 |
Well interpretations of Marcus's findings on OpenBSD on the Sparc64
vary. I've always thought it was an absurd idea to try to run Grex on
such an immature release, and Marcus's findings seem to me to be a
solid demonstration of the fact. Grex needs to be running on proven,
reliable software. OpenBSD/Sparc64 still has major functional holes.
It's not only not proven, it's barely begun to be usable.
The "we have a year" business is silly too. Yes, the last two machine
upgrades took us a year each. At the time, I considered that cause for
serious embarassment. Now all the sudden it's the baseline, and we
don't even have to worry about the fact that Sparc64/OpenBSD doesn't
work very well, because we're sure that someone somewhere must be more
efficient than we are, and will actually get it fixed and totally up to
production quality before we can install and configure it.
Oh, well. Just wanted to register for people who don't read the staff
conference that staff is not unanimous on this OpenBSD/Sparc64 stuff.
Probably discussion belongs in the garage conference, not here.
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ea
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response 7 of 136:
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Mar 28 03:27 UTC 2002 |
#5 - admittedly, I've only purchased from them once, and it was when
they were still fairly new.
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cmcgee
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response 8 of 136:
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Mar 28 13:13 UTC 2002 |
Thank you Jan. Normally I wouldn't look into the Garage conf, so I
appreciate the other point of view.
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janc
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response 9 of 136:
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Mar 28 15:06 UTC 2002 |
One correction to a typo in #6: There is no discussion of this in the 'staff'
conference. It's all in the 'garage' conference.
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cross
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response 10 of 136:
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Mar 28 17:13 UTC 2002 |
Regarding #6; I agree with Jan 100%. OpenBSD on UltraSPARC just isn't
there yet; it's likely it won't be there a year from now, either. AMD
hardware running OpenBSD is there right now, has a much better price/
performance ratio, and is much better understood than Sun stuff. Sorry,
but there it is.
I'd personally like to see more than just STeve and MDW putting together
a list of things ``the next grex must do,'' for two reasons: 1) it's good
to have more than just two people's input on a system used by 30,000, and
2) STeve and mdw are the people pushing SPARC over AMD's x86 clones. I'm
slightly concerned about their objectivity. Sorry guys, but there it is.
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mooncat
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response 11 of 136:
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Mar 28 18:58 UTC 2002 |
re #10- I probably should have made this more clear in the minutes, but
my impression was that while STeve and Marcus would be coming up with a
list they would also discuss it in the garage conference and get input
from other people.
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cross
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response 12 of 136:
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Mar 28 23:07 UTC 2002 |
Regarding #11; That's great. btw- I want to be clear that I'm not
in any way question either Marcus' or Steve's integrity.
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mdw
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response 13 of 136:
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Mar 29 03:33 UTC 2002 |
It is possible for two perfectly logical people, starting with the same
facts, and both exercising great judgement and objectivity, to reach
completely opposite conclusions.
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cross
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response 14 of 136:
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Mar 29 03:48 UTC 2002 |
That's true in an abstract sense, but this is a technical argument, with a
basis in mathematics and good engineering. Therefore, it's up to you to
present a compelling engineering argument, which to date, I'm afraid you
haven't done. So far, all we have is your assertion that SPARC is ``better,''
but not backed up with any hard data. And, your non-technical arguments have
been, in my opinion, less than compelling. I believe the last one was
something along the lines of, ``we don't want a really fast machine because
too many people will use it.'' Perhaps I'm totally on the wrong page, but
that was my interpretation.
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other
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response 15 of 136:
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Mar 29 06:30 UTC 2002 |
Nothing I have heard or read in discussion on this topic has been
translatable to that.
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cmcgee
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response 16 of 136:
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Mar 29 14:01 UTC 2002 |
Whether or not this argument has a basis in mathematics and good
engineering, it sounds like there are policy implications as well. While
I can follow most well reasoned engineering explanations, I also
appreciate the non-technical opinion comments. Keep at it folks! *grin*
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gull
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response 17 of 136:
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Mar 29 15:11 UTC 2002 |
One serious point in favor of SPARC, as I understand it, is that we've
already been given a SPARC machine, but we'd have to buy an AMD clone.
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spooked
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response 18 of 136:
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Mar 29 15:58 UTC 2002 |
I don't think this is true, gull. John Remmers is donating his x86
machine - not sure if it's Intel or AMD hardware exactly. And, in any
case, AMD/x86 hardware is cheap,cheap,cheap and readily available - unlike
SPARC. Notwithstanding this, I don't this the hardware per se is the
problem - it's the stability of the port which is of concern.
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cross
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response 19 of 136:
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Mar 29 20:08 UTC 2002 |
I think it's both the hardware and the stability of the software.
It seems logical that you want something that is fast, robust, cheap,
and easily upgradable/fixable/replaceable. Cheap and available spare
parts a must, with good software support.
AMD-based x86 machines give you this, while Sun's just don't. They might
in a year, but then again, they might not. Given the length of time it
took to get the sun4m port stable, I don't have too much confidence.
What's more, Sun's are slow (sorry, there it is; I've seen loads of
empirical data to back up the assertion that Sun's are slow compared to
AMD x86 machines), they're proprietary, replacement parts generally need
to be ordered from somewhere and can cost a lot. Sun's are expensive.
Brand new x86 server class machines can be bought for sub $1000, while
Sun's low-low-low-end el-cheapo workstations cost about that, but aren't
nearly as good. And software support for OpenBSD on UltraSPARC came into
existance, what, a couple of months ago? OpenBSD on x86 has existed for
years; it's really solid on AMD, and the quality reservations that have
been voiced about Intel are mitigated by using a different vendor.
The arguments I usually hear are that it's easier to have a stable and
robust port on Ultra hardware because it's simpler. I disagree; x86 has
a huge head start in this area, and it took the OpenBSD team *years* to
get things stable on sun4m. Why should I believe that they can do better
on sun4u? And, why did it take them so long to get sun4m support squared
away in the first place? PC's where ``there'' a lot more quickly, despite
being a more complex architecture. I hear that Sun's have higher quality
hardware, to which I respond that they used to, but quality has gone way
down in recent years. Look at machines like the Ultra 5 and 10, or the
Blades; they're not built like the tanks that were the SPARCstation 1's
and 10's. I hear that crackers are going to have less success mounting
a pre-scripted attack against a Sun, because most attacks x86, to which
I respond that script-based attacks are generally pretty easy to thwart.
It's likely that grex won't be running many stock servers to be attacked,
so will be mostly immune to script-based attacks anyway. Those attackers
with the technical ability to overcome THAT limitation aren't likely to
be daunted by a different architecture.
The last argument I heard was about speed not being a factor. (Note:
whoever wrote #15, I'm pulling this next part from #128 in the garage
group). Marcus had this to say towards the end:
It is common to think that performance problems are solved by
finding the "fastest" solution. Well, sometimes that works.
Sometimes it doesn't. It's a well-known traffic engineering
conundrum that building bigger and better roads merely leads
to more traffic, and ultimately, larger and even more desperate
traffic jams.
Marcus continues about general queueing principles, traffic loads, etc.
There's some statements about changing mailers to something more efficient
increasing mail load and thus increasing the network traffic load on
the network link (which, to my knowledge no one has ever measured to see
just how loaded it is, so it might not be loaded at all). I interpret
his argument to mean that grex doesn't really want a faster machine
because it'll be more susceptable to being loaded down, in which case
the question is raised: why change machines at all?
Oh, and about the issue of a Sun being available now, while an x86
machine is not, did not someone donate a large amount of cash to grex
specifically for the purchase of a new computer?
Okay, so *is* there a compelling reason for wanting to use SPARC hardware
instead of x86?
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keesan
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response 20 of 136:
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Mar 29 20:24 UTC 2002 |
I think the donation was for 'hardware' in general, not a 'new' computer
specifically. One of the reasons for using SPARC seems to be that the
volunteers find it more interesting to work on something less common.
If they are going to be putting in a lot of time, they want to learn something
new.
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cross
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response 21 of 136:
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Mar 29 20:31 UTC 2002 |
Regarding #20; I think that if you took a survey of the volunteers putting
in effort as grex's staff, you'll find that x86 would be new for them,
while SPARC is old-hat. Consider that grex has been running on Sun hardware
for it's entire lifetime. I gather from his comments that Marcus works
with it every day.
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janc
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response 22 of 136:
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Mar 30 00:26 UTC 2002 |
Re #17: First note that the person who donated the SPARC machines is Dan
Cross, who is obviously not their biggest fan. Also note that the machines
we have are not the ones we really want. I think people were talking about
at least an UltraSparc 5. We have a 1 and a 2. Good enough for developing
the software, but not very fast. John Remmers says he will be donating a
Pentium machine for us to do similar development on an Intel platform. I
think this was a 400 MHz machine. This also is slower than what we want, but
it is going to be much faster than the UltraSparcs, I think. We can afford
to buy a nice Gigahertz machine, especially if we procrastinate for a year.
At any price level, be it free or a couple thousand dollars, we will get much
more performance from an x86 machine. And this gap is only going to grow with
time.
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jp2
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response 23 of 136:
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Mar 30 00:28 UTC 2002 |
This response has been erased.
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janc
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response 24 of 136:
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Mar 30 00:57 UTC 2002 |
Last I saw, there were no PPC systems on the market that were appropriate to
use as a server for Grex. I don't think it is a viable option.
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