Very good! You've brightened my Friday evening.
John
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Testbed Support for GridPP member institutes
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Burke, S (Stephen)
> Sent: 14 January 2005 16:52
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Looking for LHCb files at Birmingham LCG site
>
>
> Testbed Support for GridPP member institutes
> > [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Gordon, JC (John)
> > said: The user sets the lifetime for each file. You can set
> a maximum
> > lifetime for the SA MaxPinDuration.
>
> Well, except that we only have classic SEs and they have no
> way to set a lifetime or anything else.
>
> Those of us at RAL have just been to a seminar by Jenny
> Schopf about her "ten biggest problems with grids"
> (incidentally, she said that nearly all grid users are
> unhappy, and examples of successful grid projects are very
> rare - but LCG is one such. I can't imagine what the others
> are like ...)
>
> Anyway, she used an analogy about cars, which started me
> thinking about how I would characterise our situation in
> those terms. What I think we have are lots of separate groups
> of people building components, like wheels, brakes, gears,
> steering assemblies, engines etc. Some of them are
> well-designed and some not; some of the well-designed ones
> are well-made and some not.
>
> Then there is a totally different group of people trying to
> take those components and assemble a car out of them.
> Unfortunately they find that nothing fits together, e.g. the
> wheels and brakes are different sizes, so they have to build
> their own components to get them to fit. Then they find that
> the brakes overheat so they add a water jet to cool them -
> and then realise that they need a water tank to hold the
> water. And there is no reverse gear in the gear assembly, so
> they add a button which completely reverses the gearbox
> action. And there are no indicators at all. And so on and so
> forth ... (oh, and some people have put a huge amount of
> effort into building things like propellers and control
> systems for sails). And every so often someone comes along,
> takes away one of the components, and replaces it with
> something totally different which they claim is much better.
>
> About 30% of the way into the process some people come
> along and say they want to enter a formula-1 race; they are
> dismayed that the vehicle looks more like a Mini, and anyway
> can only go 2 miles before it runs out of petrol and has a
> top speed of 15 mph. They can't understand how anyone could
> possibly have designed such a thing, they must clearly be
> incompetent, so they go away to do it themselves from
> scratch, despite having less expertise and less manpower than
> the people already doing the job ...
>
> Stephen
>
> PS It is Friday evening :)
>
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