I think we've distributed the award to all of you by email, and tonight we're going to Gloria passed out some of the items that we will be acting on. So I wanted to first of all ask, are there minutes? There are no minutes, right? No, there are no minutes. Okay. The minutes have been reviewed by the chairman and vice chairman and then posted after the last meeting. The second issue is to review the articles in the warrant and just to make sure that we have everybody's agreement on what we're actually going to review. So Article 1 is an important committee that's to moderate that we don't really need to worry about that. Article 2 Capital Budget School Module Classrooms, that's a finance article. Anyone have any problems with that? Article 3 is the Capital Budget Thompson School Expansion, that's also a finance article. So it's appropriate that we look at. Articles 4 and 5 are also financial articles. They are not going to be presented by the finance committee, they're presented by the community, presented to town meeting by the community preservation committee, which by state law presents its articles directly to town meeting. And nonetheless, they're financial articles and if you say demon, we'll review it and support it. Article 6 is a bylaw amendment vacant storefront, maintenance registry. I don't think that's finance article. And then Article 7 is acceptance of legislation, use of parking meter revenue without appropriation. So this is sort of a mixed bag. It's acceptance of legislation, so it's actually an article of the Board of Selectment that will be before town meeting. However, it does transfer money on a steady permanent basis from the general fund to the town manager for the use of acquiring and installing parking meters without having to go to town meeting to appropriate funds. So I don't know what your thoughts about that article. My sense is that the town meeting will probably want to know what we think about that article. Yes. Article 8, acceptance of local speed limits. I don't think that's the same thing with Article 9. Article 10 is a zoning bylaw and Article 11 is also a zoning bylaw. So that leaves just a few articles, the school budget articles, the CPA articles and Article 7. So if we work expeditiously, we probably can get out early and not have to go back next week. That's by the second day. That's by the second day. Five or five. Okay. So on the agenda that I sent out, I asked that the CPA committee do a short presentation on articles 4 and 5. And then at 8 o'clock the town manager will bring up article 7 and the following that the superintendent schools will be here and the town manager and superintendent will review the capital articles. So I see CPA is Eric. There you are. Eric. Yes. Would you like to tell us about these articles? If you stand over here, I think the cameraman will be appreciative of that. That's good. And if our chair's voice arrives, he'll just do a sloppin' and pretend like nothing happened. So hi, Eric Helmut, the vice chair of the CPA community. So the two articles before you regarding CPA appropriations stem from applications that were actually received and vetted during the previous main application cycle. And we didn't forward these to annual town meeting at the time because of their somewhat special nature. The committee was and is very supportive of the substance and the goals of these and very much believes that there is a solid public purpose and public interest in them. However, this being new to the town and these entities being private entities rather than town entities on the advice of town council and special town council that we've retained for CPA matters. We decided to put it off for a few months to give us time to draw up the somewhat more complex agreements that are necessary to ensure the public purpose of these grants. And to do some legal research and homework about the deed restrictions. So both of these properties in the description of the work is right in front of you. So I won't go into that. Representatives from both entities are here to answer any questions you may have about the work. But both of these properties are owned by private nonprofits. And the public interest in this, of course, is that both the recent Russell House and the old Schwann Mill are precious historic resources that are integral to the character of Arlington, which is really a bull's eye for what that portion of the CPA law is about. It's for preserving such resources. So with that in mind, we just had to do our due diligence and make sure that there is a public purpose because under Massachusetts law, specifically the anti-aid amendment in order for a municipal entity to commit public funds to a private entity, you have to make sure that the public's interest is foremost and is served. Part of that purpose can be public access. And in both of these cases, the Jason Russell House and the old Schwann Mill, there's ample public access. Tours that are held regularly for free and by schoolchildren and all that. And another important aspect of public access is the acquisition of a deed restriction, a property restriction for historic purposes that ensures the perpetual use of that property. And the reason that that's key to the public interest is that that really locks down what the private associations can do with that and ensures that the public interest in historic preservation is perpetual. Hello. Hi. Are you done yet? No. I'm sorry, I didn't think I was late. We've got a little fight. Talk it. Okay. Oh, yes. Not a good team, so we don't have to bring, right? Don't say that. Don't worry. All right. So where are we now? So I explained why we delayed these and what do the folks here are. They want to discuss the specifics and they don't have to, but they can. And the whole public purpose thing and the deed restrictions. And I did not get to what Tom Council told me today about the, Okay. Do you want to say that? Am I as well? Yes, since I did. So we have, Tom Council has reviewed the historic preservation restrictions that have been proposed for both properties and a draft of the grant agreements that these grants would operate under. And it tells me this afternoon that we have agreement, mutual agreement in principle on the key aspects of these. There are a few details to be worked out still, but he is confident that we're going to go in this as is the special town council for CPA routine by this committee. Right. What we did this summer was hire an outside council who is a historic preservation lawyer, a man named Kevin bot. He's from Anderson Prager. Luckily, the town council's office already had an agreement with him because he's done other work for the town. We found him through the Lexington CPC. They had just had work done at the Monroe Tavern. So he'd been helping the town of Lexington with the same sort of grant agreements and legal requirements. So he was adept at it. Now he's given us sort of a boilerplate, which is very helpful for us and for Doug. So the reason that this is an unusual request is that these are not town owned properties. And for the most part, historic resources are not owned by the towns and cities in the Commonwealth. We are lucky because we do actually own quite a few. We own the Woodenware Robbins house, which brings in a lot of revenue to the town. And we are lucky to have the Jason Russell house. It's probably one of the most important American revolutionary buildings in the country to have it in Arlington is terribly important. The Old Schwab Mill also is an important part of history. And the oldest continuous mill in this part of the world. And it is an ongoing mill where people, they still are making the frames.  But it's both entities are incredibly important to the tourism efforts of town and bringing money back to the town. So we thought that their requests are very respectful, small, and ones that I think that we would like to see town meeting approved. Any questions? So I understand just from what you said, my first password is that we've already voted and approved the sum of money for the two respective projects. Is that right? No, we have not. Why does it say voted? Well, that's just because it's a draft. It's a draft. All right. This doesn't come out before our committee before the first time. No, it hasn't. It's come out. The voted is our committee vote. And then we have to go to the finance committee, the board of select one, and the capital planning committee. Those other two entities have voted to support it. And we're hoping you will as well. Let me clarify one thing. So Bill is right. This is a draft of the finance committee that would present the town meeting if we support these. And we just wrote up the article so that you would see what it would look like in a town meeting. It doesn't mean that you can't edit them across the mountain, down or whatever. Charlie, could I just, just to, there's a further point of clarification on the votes. I understand the confusion. By law, and this is a little unusual, that the CPA committee has to actually put forth the main motion on CPA articles. So what you see there in voted was actually our vote on the main motion. So what we're asking, so that doesn't represent a proposed FINCOM vote. What we're asking tonight is for your questions, your consultation. And we hope a vote of support. Thank you, Aaron. I have a little wording concern. The Jason Russell House wording doesn't include Jason Russell House. And as I read it, it sounds like the Historical Society could use the money for anything they wanted. Right here? Oh, in the vote? Yeah. I think you should just put the address in for both. Yeah, that's fine. That's fine. Yeah. Jason Russell House is fine. That's just not the motion. That's fine. Thank you. Yeah. That's why we have this one. And Charlie, I assume that what will actually end up in our report is the same kind of thing we had in class. We just have to support the motion of the, we'll say in the comment that this is a vote of the Community Preservation Committee. And this is, we support or don't support their recommendations. Any other questions? Steve. So when town meeting approved the OCOC CPA budget in the spring, and it was a $94,000 reserve on time. So it's this article, just so I can, we can also learn this. Is this $55,000 coming out of the $94,000, or is it coming out of this year's budget? The $94,000. Okay. Thank you. No, is that true? Yeah. Well Charlie, don't worry that I thought that one. My understanding is it comes out of the, it comes out of the $1.5 million. Right? No Charlie, what I was saying, just, and it probably, we didn't sort of have an insight into this. When we did the budget for the FY, when we did the appropriate for the CPA at town meeting, we had a budget of $1.5 million that was a $94,000 reserve fund that wasn't designated to any. But that's right, but that's money they spend, for example, on the wire. No, no, that's true. And we actually would like to spend it out of the $94,000 from last year because we'd like them to be able to begin their work soon. So if we were to put it in the 2018 budget, they couldn't do the work until July 1st. Yeah, there was a bunch of reserve for FY 2017 CPA funds that, town meeting reserved for, for its future appropriation. But that was out of last year's money. So the current fiscal year's money. Okay. So just, once I've done this, you just repeat again, are these two sums, have been or have not been appropriated by town meeting? They have not been appropriated by town meeting. If they are appropriated by town meeting, we will ask the comptroller to take them out of the $94,000 historic preservation reserve. Okay. Well, is the 2017 budget a reserve fund? Yeah. So Charlie, what I was just starting to clarify, what I was asking and looking at it right now is, when we approve the appropriation, how many last year? 700,000 was specific open space recreation projects identified. Right. 300,000 was identified historic. 400,000 was identified affordable housing. 80,000 was the administrative reserve. And then they had a bucket that was called project reserve for 94,000. That was money that they just weren't going to put, like, made into a reserve fund and come back in the future year. Dispended. That's what they said. So I was just, but my question to them was sort of, is it coming out of that 94 or is it coming out of the following year? It's coming out of the 94. The purpose of that was actually to enable specifically what we're asking Tommy to do, which is to fund a project out of FY 2017 CPA resources. Do, does your committee have some means of closing the loop on these projects? In other words, is there some way in which when the project is complete, it can be reviewed by rule? In particular, could you then use those results to come to town meeting and talk about, you know, this was really done well, blah, blah, blah. Or maybe this didn't work so well. We have to change things. Absolutely, John. And I think that we, in our first year, found that we learned a tremendous amount. And then we designated a project around learning more and more. I met this afternoon this evening with Jim Feeney, who is the assistant town manager. He's going to be assisting us with that closing of the loop. And I'm really grateful to have him on board because he's, you know, for instance, last year we voted to do the Woodamore carriage house, which is under the auspices of the Health and Human Services Department. They have a lot to do. They don't really need to be overseeing construction. They will be because it's in their name. But Jim Feeney is going to be the person that really keeps up with the billing, keeps up with the inspection of what's going on. He's the person that's making sure that the procurement for the town is being done correctly. And I just can't tell you how grateful I am that we have him as part of this effort because I think there are a lot of things that we can learn. And he was saying tonight, there's a new project that's coming in that's very similar to the Spy Pond project that's on meeting approved last spring. And he thinks there's some overlap. And he wants to see if we can do lessons learned from the Spy Pond one so that we don't have to redo it for the Great Meadows master plan that's coming in. So that's exactly what we're going to try to do. That's good. Thank you. A question on the deed restriction. Is there a duration to that or is that? It depends on, it's supposed to be in perpetuity. If it's held by the Mass Historical Commission it is. And I believe it is for the town. And they've got, that's one of the things that we're working out. We want it to be like an affordable housing. You know, easement that gets filed with any new affordable housing. We're hoping that that's the case that it's in perpetuity. One question. Have you had any reimbursement from the state that match fund was? We will in November. I think the first week of November. And luckily, I don't know why, but that Governor Baker, who actually adopted the CPA when he was a selector, put an extra $10 million into the fund. So we should get more than we expected, but we don't know quite yet. Any other questions? I have one. This may be related to the activities of Jim Feeney, but is there a process to actually audit these projects as they're going along to make sure that the money is being spent? Consider a project of $35,000. It actually might get done for $25,000 and somebody might walk away with the other $10,000. I'm just wondering. There are probably these scallywags behind it. Nothing personal. Any radical questions? We do have grant agreements and we will be watching. They are honorable people, both the boards for both of these two places are very honorable people, but we're going to watch them. And Jim will do that. Also, the Comptroller, he's being very, very careful, which is a very good thing because he reaches new, this is new for us and new for him. And so he's got a lot of procedures in place. The Community Preservation Committee will be approving all the bills that come in, but Jim will be bringing the bills to us with Amy. And so we will really have an idea of what's going on. And it's a small town. We go by the area quite a bit and we'll be watching. Measure the number of bank hands? Yes. And there's a requirement for document. The grant agreement is a requirement that expenses be documented and backed up. We don't allow our grantees to just say, well, please give us a check for extra money. Jim and I talked tonight about was there a way we could get a quarterly report? Or something for the entities? I mean, we're lucky we have the Park and Recreation Commissioner. We have a Housing Commissioner. We have a Conservation Commissioner. And we have the Redevelopment Board and Historic Commission. And they can report on their projects. But I think for those projects that we can't get reports from, we'll ask Jim to make sure that we get written reports quarterly. Great. Other questions? Okay. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate you taking the time to come out tonight. I hope I didn't talk to anyone. Perfect. We're out of time. So the next is the town manager, who might be a little too late tonight. But the deputy town manager is here. I'm trying to think of a second answer. We need one out of eight. But we are seven months away. Thank you. We want to vote. Yeah, we have seven minutes. So let's, first of all, is there any discussion on Article 4? Comments? Four. Four. Four. We have a couple of minutes just so that's our efficient staffer. But now we can get home earlier if we use the time appropriately. So the first is the Jason Russell lines. So any comments or questions? So I've entertained a motion by someone to ask the finance committee to support the Community Preservation Committee on Article 4. Who is recommended? Provided they put in the address. Yeah, provided they put in the second. Second. Second. All in favor? Opposed? Hearing no objections. Yes. So Article 5, the appropriation for the old Charmville $1,000. Again, assuming that the address is appropriately inserted into the vote. Yeah. Any discussion? I will say that they certainly put in a lot of effort into creating this document that they put together for their application. I admit that I have not read the whole thing. Actually, yes. Brian Verrigan, I went to the CPA review committee last year and I first provided that. So second. Second. All in favor of supporting the CPA Committee on Article 5? Aye. Opposed? Hearing no objections. Thank you. Thank you. So, very timely. Thank you for your follow-up. Thank you very much. Good luck to all of you. Thanks for coming. Thank you for coming. Thank you. Anyone else appreciate it? Thank you. So, Adam, we just finished the CPA articles. And I think Kathy's body said that she was going to be coming tonight. So I trust that you will be in part of the 70's. Excuse me. Which is part of your article. The committee decided that 4, 5, 7, and the two of the CPA articles will be in part of your article. So I'm going to jump right in. Thank you. Sorry, I just arrived. I had a Chamber of Commerce at their annual dinner tonight with their citizen of the year award. So I'm going to show my face here. And then try to get there right on cue. So Article 7 is the article itself, the action that we're asking the town meeting, is acceptance of state law. So I don't believe there's an actual recommended vote needed by the finance committee. I don't know if it was with money or town funds. I definitely felt and I know the chairman felt that it was appropriate for me to discuss it tonight. So in short, earlier this summer, the Municipal Modernization Act was passed that literally had hundreds of mostly small changes to the way statute treats things, the way we need to do things with local government. So on a go forward basis, there's probably going to be a number of things that we're slacking in the finance committee and town meeting are asked to take a look at as we go through all of them and decide whether or not we want to take advantage of some of those updates. This particular update dealt with how communities can acquire and install parking meters and how they can pay for them. The prior state law said that a city or town could acquire and install parking meters without appropriation and then pay for those that acquisition and installation over the period of five years. It simply said that a town could do it. The new law says that any town that accepts this section of statute can acquire and install parking meters and for a period of five years pay for that acquisition and installation out of the revenue collected. So we entered into the agreement to install the parking meters, which are actually installed literally this week. Maybe some of you have seen the holes going into the ground and all in the center. Before the Municipal Modernization Act passed, but since it passed and it changed the need to have local acceptance, talking about it with Sandy, the Comptroller, Town Council, we felt like it would be appropriate to move this forward. So not that we would necessarily legally fall out of compliance, but we want to stay in compliance with the current reading of the law. So just to sort of walk through the function of it, I put together just a quick chart in the document that I passed around. The top box are just two estimates of what we think in terms of a range of what we might be able to collect from the meters that are being installed. We're installing 225 meters. They're going to be metered for 12 hours a day. Hourly rate is one, and then we use two occupancy rates. These were recommended as a range by the parking meter company that we ended up buying the meters from. So you can see on the high end, if we achieve 85% occupancy rate, the estimated annual revenue of just over 700,000, 50% occupancy revenue of 421,000. Most likely, as with most ranges, it'll probably be somewhere in between those two figures, but that gives you a sense of type of revenue that we're talking about being collected by the meters. So below that, you can see the second box, projected annual meter and parking management costs. I have it broken up into several categories. The only category that I'm talking about spending without appropriation is the first line, the equipment lease. That's the annual amount over five years that we owe for the acquisition and installation of the meters. So what we'd be saying is, without any town meeting appropriation, we collect the revenue, put it into a fund, the controller will segregate it into a fund, and it pays those annual, they actually are quarterly, but they add up to that annual figure, lease payments to the company. Everything else there would need to be appropriated. I don't think the law allows for those other expenses to be spent without appropriation, but I wanted to paint a picture of what, both in that second and that third box, the total costs we can see through this parking management plan, because the statute also says that you should not be setting your fees higher than the cost of acquiring, installing, operating, managing, enforcing, and other parking and traffic related activities. So that's what we have laid out here. The only thing I'll mention is, in the second box, starting with administrative salaries, administrative expenses, and enforcement salaries, those are the actual budgeted figures from the FY17 budget for parking, so those are already budgeted amounts. I think that covers it. So, basically, again, what we're doing is asking for acceptance of the statute that will allow us to do this so that we, we're likely better to put it, stay in compliance with the action that we already set. Thank you, Adam. Questions? Peter. So, I don't quite understand where this would go with your budget. So, everything other than the equipment lease would be budgeted just like any departmental operating budget. What we're saying is for the equipment lease, it will be segregated into a special fund and then directly pay the equipment lease. What I would probably do in terms of reporting in the town meeting process is maybe report it in either an appendix or ask that the finance committee as an appendix to the finance committee report maybe something like a revolving fund so that there is some reporting on what's going on out of the fund. My question was, I didn't ask it very well. Other mail equipment lease, where will the other costs be grouped into one line item? No, we'd probably break it out with a little more detail than what the parking budget currently has. I think the parking budget just has salaries, longevity over time, and then printing and other expenses. I think we'd break it out a little more in detail in the parking budget next year. After five years, will we own the meters? We will. And will there be equipment maintenance included for the five years in this $51,997? Yeah, they will service the meters. We have to pay for the parts, but they will service the meters. And then after the five years, there'll be presumably some new budget for replacement or whatever. Just a question on the line. I'm a credit card processing. I think the meters will accept credit cards. Will there be a fee on top of the ticket to offset this expense? In other words, to the user, if you decide to use a credit card, will there be a premium for the use of that? We're just charging one amount, and the town will pay the fee. There's actually two parts of the credit card processing. The meter itself charges a 12-cent meter company for processing it, and our own credit card processor charges us a 13-cent, so basically a quarter for every credit card processing. And in the future, it may not be enough to justify it out, but in Boston, for example, they have a parking app that you can pay your meter with a credit card. Will that technology be available? It is compatible with that, yes. The company is called IPS. They have their own app, and they're compatible with other apps, so we've taken a look at a few of them. We're not ready to roll it out yet, but it absolutely is ready to do that. I was curious, in some other towns with the half of the parking meters, if you use your credit card, then it's a minimum amount you're paying, so you can't do it hourly if you use a credit card. Are you going to be able to do that here? Because in other towns, if you use the credit card, then you're paying a minimum of two to four hours, as opposed to just hour by hour. I think we agreed on a one hour minimum for the credit card, but nothing more than that. I think that's what we agreed on. You say the people who install these act on the service, so we don't count they're not going to hire anybody to service you? At least the first five years. What are we going to pick up the money and count it? Right now, we have the ranks. They pick up the multispace meters. We're going to continue to work with them for the single space meters. Quite frankly, we're not totally positive or confident that they will be able to handle it in the manner which we want them to. So if that doesn't work out, we'll look at whether or not we want to look at another firm or consider hiring somebody to collect them. They will do it. Okay. Do you happen to know how the costs of paying someone to empty the meters for the coins compared to the costs of the credit card isn't actually cheaper for the town if they use the credit card or is it a comparable cost? That's a good question. You know, I actually don't know that I can intelligently answer that. John? Is there some... I presume these things are all computerized and probably on the web as well. Each meter on the web. Can you get a... It is connected, yes. So do you get a report of how much revenue you've taken in? So you close the loop on ranks as well. Exactly. Every transaction. Just to throw something out. I happen to observe in Washington, I think also in Arlington when they go around to take the coins from the meter it's almost... It's very automated. In other words, if the device goes in the meter gets empty and then closes and then a little flap goes back to the meter and it appears that it's really a device that precludes kind of the chargers. It's true. It's very secure. I think that's general insurance. Basically in the multispace meters it's like a box you pull out and you put an empty box in and in smaller ones it's a smaller little unit that comes out and you can put an empty one in. I think, you know, whether it be parking collections or bus fares or whatever it might be, people always say you built a better mousetrap in the past where you just open something in coins. I think it is more for us. Other questions? I have one. Is the rate variable are you going to be able to... Friday night in high demand if you raise it? The answer is yes, the technology would less. I don't think we're ready to take that policy step but the technology... If the board is like my board tomorrow it can be programed to do it. The apps that you're referring to can they alert somebody up there to be meters... My understanding is they would alert you if you're running out and then allow you to feed the meter from your apps so you wouldn't have to go back up to the board. So it's quite possible to get pretty high utilization So what are the 12 hours that they'll be... 8 to 8. What's the I see the budget amount enforcement time has been increased because... What time does enforcement end? So because the meters and the multispace meters and the lots have gone to 8 o'clock, they used to be 6 we now do have coverage. I think we'll take a couple months to see how enforcement goes with the three offices we have and if we need to add further staffing... I think if we need to add further staffing there's plenty of revenue to justify to achieve the parking management goal. Which are hours going to be? Yeah, hours. When are the meters going to be on? 8 to 8, Monday through Saturday nothing uncertain. So what you said Adam was that everything except the equipment is already in the budget. So this is a pretty important set Yep. Other questions? Alright, great. So moving on to the next subject is the articles human three. Dr. Modi is here. We have the actual wording that's going to be true of the articles of the motion for article 7. I don't have it on me but that's select as what is we recommend on being adopt X, Y, Z section it's a very, it's like a one sentence. How to say anything? Why don't you come over here? So article 2 is funding for the yeah, cast those around please. Article 2 is funding for the modules at Odyssey and article 3 is funding for the expansion of the Thompson School. So Let's go over it by the way. I send this recommendation to probably recently for the capital plan but also more formally last night to the school movement in a moment. As you know, there's been a lot of discussion over the last few years about the overcrowding of Odyssey and the need for modular classrooms. It is true that Odyssey remains overcrowded over capacity and it is true that there are a lot of pressures on the building for sure. But as you know from the work that we did last year as a community we're moving forward with relieving that situation by having a 6th grade school at the gifts which we are currently working on the design for. So this year we had an increase in students of close to 80 in fact and one of the things that the school committee voted was to have a half cluster which is two classrooms. A cluster for those of you not sure what that means is there are looping of classrooms for math, science, social science, history and English and they form a small community within school. A half cluster you have two people teaching two subjects and therefore have to be certified in both subjects. Each of the grades have half clusters so we have 3.5 clusters at each level. But in order to do that required quite a bit of disruption to the school over the summer we had to find two classrooms at work we had to convert one of them to a science room it had a domino effect to the whole building and leading up to what my recommendation is. They understand it. So there was a lot that was done in order to accommodate these additional students in the building. We're looking at one more year of this before we move to the 6th grade of gifts and we were much thought about we talked about it over the summer and we really were able to look at it more closely and see how it was working when school started. The recommendation is not to add any modulars at Audison next year. There was a number of reasons which I've outlined in this recommendation but there's quite an investment of time, energy, money into reconfiguring the school that would work this year. A lot went into putting in a schedule which is a very challenging thing and those schedules are the most challenging. We're going to have an increase in students next year. It's going to be in the neighborhood of about 40 students dispersed across the three grades because essentially we're picking up the 40 because the 8th grade which is in the 300s is moving to the high school and all the other grades are going to be in the 400s. So we have it it's working, it doesn't mean that it's not tight, it is particularly where we see that the feeling is in the corridors when students change classes the cafeteria and just the time it takes from somebody from the 6th grade to move down to the music room so it's just because the student of our students adding a modulator to is not going to appreciably in fact it's not going to do anything for the poor problems of the school and it would have the effect of first of all taking up a lot of space in the parking lot which is a huge problem up there parking. We have a major issue that we don't have enough parking for all staff but more importantly it's very expensive, it's very disruptive adding modules which we've gone through in this district takes a lot of time of our facilities department of our custodians, of our administrators teachers, it's just time consuming and the feeling of administration that Addison was at the time devoted to incorporating a modulator, changing the schedule rearranging things again would be best served toward planning for the move to Gibbs which is going to take a while as well as planning for how Addison itself is going to be reconstructed reconfigured I should say when the sixth grade moves so the staff is aware of this and there's joint strong recommendation from all the entire administration over there after looking at all the different factors so that's a good news in terms of money that we would have to raise for but it's not the expense of it was just one of the factors involved, it wasn't the entire factor but as I said to Mr. Foskett that when we go to reconfigure any Addison the following you're probably going to need some funds to do some work there so that it's we can there's a little bit that is made a little bit nicer especially since we're going to have a very nice school for the sixth grade so that's the essentials of it I know you've heard we've needed eight modules ten modules and that would be true that would be absolutely true if we did not have the sixth grade going to Gibbs we are bursting at the seams there we could handle this one more year beyond next year it's not possible it's just too many kids in that building we keep incrementally growing so I applaud the administration and the teachers who are standing this and we'll make it work thank you Dr. so that's you're recommending that you're not going to go forward with that request so our vote would just be no action so to avoid debating no action or let's move on to shall I add a question once the sixth grade moves out of the junior high school does that relieve the congestion and so forth up there significantly I wish they'd all come over and watch the change in classes especially as the sixth graders try to make their way across the school down to a gym or down through a music room I think that's where they feel the most when I say reconfigure right now those are familiar with middle school seventh and eighth grade are in the same way ones on one floor on the other but their half clusters are not there they're in different parts of the building so I think some thoughts going to need to go into how do we want the seventh grade to be together in the eighth grade and where do we want to put some of the world language classes from where they are so there's a lot of thought that needs to go into that as well and there's going to be a lot of moving that's going to go on there so the more we can have a year where teachers don't have to do another shifting around the better because they are going to be shifting the following year and I have a question about elementary I'll wait till I go three in a bit what's the current enrollment of eighth grade students at the US I'm just trying to get a handle on what's coming in versus what's leaving 375 375 375 are leaving roughly 435 maybe it's 94% are coming in 84% 84 students but the next year we'll be same on the right Steve if we had nobody right now we have let's say 1,211 students in the school assuming attrition between fifth and sixth grade they're expecting 1,250 students under a pocalyptic scenario where literally nobody left would have 1,300 kids living there so we could say we're expecting 1,250 Armageddon will be 1,300 at the risk of evading a no action article any other question I'm just worried that because Paul's going to have me watch the game okay thank you so the next article is article 4 which is the expansion of Thompson School the committee that this is an article which this is a subject expense that was voted by the citizen of the town to be excluded from limitations of proposition to have in the death exclusion referendum last spring so did that comment out of the most garbage I don't know if you talk about the need being met not surprising last night we really summarized it very succinctly last year the school lower task force wanted to defer a final recommendation on Thompson addition to see what would happen with enrollment this year with the expectation that if we met the expected enrollment growth or exceeded it then I would be an indication because the previous year there had been fewer students than expected well I think the number expected this year was 448 and we have 465 as of today we continue to enroll students so we have definitely exceeded that the number that was expected so last night the school room and task force unanimously voted to amend that we go forward with the addition in terms of my recommendation about this I was looking at the we have a new set of numbers from Dr. McKibbin who did our forecasting last year we asked him to do an early forecast based on our August 11th numbers in anticipation of needing to bring into the school enrollment task force which he did and what we saw there was actually something a little bit closer to what his first forecast was because remember last December there was some moderation of it but when you look out over the next 10 years for Thompson you're going to see kindergarten that are in the 80's it doesn't really even so when you get into the 80's that is four classes you pretty much will have four classes actually to say the truth probably over 75 because you don't want to have kindergarten to be 25 so we know that we're going to have four kindergartens for the foreseeable future and as in right now the first grade the second grade all have four third, fourth and fifth three so as we progress each year we're going to be having another three going out four coming in and so each of the next three years we need done classrooms so if Thompson was built with 19 classrooms we need 24 and so the addition will provide five classrooms and then the sixth you can't build five really on a school the sixth one will actually satisfy another need of the building which is more core space for activities gym Thompson is no different but we overlap a lot of gym classes because we just don't have enough we don't have enough space for all the classes so that's the recommendation and I think Adam wants to talk to I don't want to talk about the cost does everybody have this spreadsheet so what I provided here I actually opened the bids for the Thompson construction yesterday and I've just given you two brief scenarios one is the low bidder that we received and the second is the second low bid the reason I've given you both is so the low bid is a company that we don't have any familiarity with and our OPM doesn't have any familiarity with so we want to let them make sure that there's nothing in their decam files that would give us concern or reason to not accept them the second low bid is a company called G&R that built the Thompson originally and is doing distracting projects so we have a great deal of familiarity with them and should we find a reason to kick out the low bid I could not see as going past the second low bid so you can see in the low scenario we're at just over $3.8 million in the higher scenario where we to go there we're just over $4 million so what I would be asking the finance committee to consider tonight is voting to approve an appropriation of $4 million which would certainly be enough to cover the costs expected in the low bid just short of what we would need in the second low bid but Superintendent and I Sandy spoke today and whether it be through some portion of school funding or potentially further conversations with the capital plan we think we'd be able to bring that $49,000 gap if it was necessary one other thing has the language the language so you'll notice that the very wise recommendation of Sandy once again the Municipal Modernization Act updated updated the ability of what a town can do when it receives a bond premium when it borrows formally those would be held into a separate account that would need to be either further appropriated or rolled into free cash the next year now if a premium is being received without any further approval it can actually reduce the cost that is being borrowed so we had this review by by inserting the last part of the language there we would have the ability to do that when we went out tomorrow if a bond premium is being offered by the bottom line could that somehow be used to cover the $4 million gap no I don't think so for two reasons one is because this is subject to debt exclusion the state requires you to if we didn't have this language in here now the state would require us to amortize the premium out over the term of the bond so that the amount of excluded debt that applies to people's tax bills the increment would come down a little bit to reflect that premium so it's the net that they have to pay so in other words you can't use that money for a different purpose you would have to reduce the taxpayers so by doing this instead what we're doing is just borrowing less than we otherwise would so that the net effect of the taxpayers would be the same does that make sense no okay yes I'd say in a different way we still couldn't spend more than was appropriated so even if we reduced a $4 million borrowing by let's say it was the premium was exactly $49,000 we still wouldn't be able to spend $49,000 over 4 million questions did I hear you correctly that this second lowest bid was the contractor I hope this could help your last chance well I think after this excellent presentation there are no further questions so thank you very much for taking the time to come out today thank you jelly I got a question for you how's the the stratum going with the the monitors up there the monitors it's going very well yeah they were teachers like them they're air conditioned they're a little more spacious than I think the teachers thought they would be that the other concern of course was what about all of the special about library lunch music and teacher work so we have multi-purpose the old cafeteria and it's quite it's divided so that we have a library and a little part of it and cafeteria teaches room up on the stage that's where music is so it's being every every inch of being utilized but it's going very well unfortunately there was some vandalism over the weekend but that's all been screwed up I was watching it there's so much people and I was cruising by a couple times I kept looking how the heck are they going to get this together they they worked very hard my hats off to the people who were managing the project and to DPW too because another issue came up was what about parking yeah and so DPW came in and put an asphalt parking lot which will then have to be taken up again after the project's over and new irrigation put in and build the store how's the how's the contractor doing the progress do you want to schedule in fact I think there might be a house schedule I know it's really happening they're doing well okay so going directly to article 7 the parking meter 7's parking meter congratulations any discussion on that I think is there a recommendation for a motion no matter what so a motion by Bill for a favorable action on the parking meter article supporting the action of the force weapon and it's been seconded all in favor I propose hearing no objections as best unanimously on article 3 which the superintendent has asked to have removed a motion no action is in order programs by article 2 all in favor I propose hearing no objection that's also passed article 3 for the supporting the motion presented by the town manager for four million dollars of debt authorization according to the wording that's presented in your draft report this is the drafters at the handle well I think it's the same thing it should be seconded moved and seconded any discussion all in favor I propose hearing no objections that's also passed thank you very much appreciate you coming out


So shall we start yeah, I have my own Not this year maybe next year I already did at the risk five the room actually Yes, thanks for the introduction. Thank you all for coming and when I'm mentioning it. I mean Most of the talk will be about the same topic. I have already Spoken about the risk five the room. So if you have seen that there is no reason for you to see see it again Unless you would like to discuss and again, this is as usual This is this is something I always do more or less like an opinion piece to spark some discussions So please I had please go ahead and disagree with me So for those who don't know me I've been working in operating system domain for some Some time I have been working on the Helena West project since 2004 I have been working at the Charles University in Prague on the formal verification of Helena West and quite recently, I mean Not longer than two years ago. I have joined Huawei where I'm doing the same stuff Micro kernels and formal verification and stuff like that so I would like to tell you that Microkernel multi server systems are better than monolithic systems. That's it. Thank you No, no really seriously. I mean This has been I would say an informed opinion of many people for many many years And gradually we got some I would say qualitative evidence that this statement is true But I mean qualitative evidence is still just basically a form of a point of an opinion Now we are gradually also getting Quantitative evidence that the monolithic operating system design is flawed So you have probably noticed there is this paper Co-offered by our friend Gernel Heizer who has been who have We had the privilege to see today and this paper basically Looked on several critical Vulnerabilities in the window Linux kernel and tried to try to estimate if this these vulnerabilities would have been mitigated if there were If we would consider State-of-the-art micro kernel design such as a CL4 and yeah I mean you can read the summary here you can read the entire paper and it's pretty much convincing So, I mean, this is this is a single piece of evidence that we are getting in the right direction We are going in the right direction with with micro kernels but and this brings me back to my original talk at Foss damn micro corner the room in 2012. We are paying some price The price is with the performance overhead and if you if you were there if you remember remember my talk I said that it's a it's a fair price According to my opinion. So, I mean there is no free lunch but you know the safety security availability other guarantees that the micro kernel provides are You know counterweighted by by some performance overhead that we need to pay But is it really? Is it really necessary? Is it really unavoidable? Let's let's look on on this The micro kernel ideas are not particularly new. I mean the the earliest incarnations were already set in 1869 But you know there was and there is still some disconnect between the software design and the hardware design designing hardware used to be complicated expensive it require usually required a huge company to back it and You know, therefore The operating systems have been written for the CPUs only after the CPUs were out So not not not before. I mean even having a powerful emulation tools like QMU stuff like that that that was not always available so You know something happened that the hardware designs got stuck in in certain ways I mean really is try to think about something Revolutionary in in hardware design that hasn't been there already in IBM SSM 370 I mean Memory management. It was there virtualization. It was there. IOMMU. It was there offloading You know computations to to dedicated hardware devices I'm talking about You know so called data channels. So how what was the exact name? I don't remember it was there already So so there's nothing new under the sun and the problem is that micro kernels suffer because You know the the current hardware is being designed for the monolithic kernels in mind or with the monolithic Kernels in mind and therefore We need to pay the performance panel penalties due to the fine-grained design due to the need of crossing Coursing the other sparse space barriers due to the IPC mechanisms and stuff like that So let's try to change it. Let's try to Design the hardware in a better way or in a way that is more suitable for for for the requirements of the micro kernel systems I really think that there is this vicious cycle that the CPUs currently don't support the micro kernels properly Therefore micro kernels suffer performance penalties when running on them compared to to the multi monolithic systems Therefore micro kernels are still not considered, you know the true mainstream I mean, yes, we have them on safety critical and mission critical devices We have them maybe in some embedded devices, but yeah, you can have my co s which is running on Mac But just as a single server micro kernel, but still, you know, we are talking about Linux And we are talking about making Linux more secure and stuff like that, which is crazy I mean the only way how to make Linux more secure is throwing in throwing it out and Since the Linux is since the micro kernels are still not in the mainstream There is no strong push on the hardware manufacturers to actually provide CPUs with Proper micro kernel support and this closes the vicious cycle. Well, there has been a lot of effort spent on On this box already I mean for the past 25 years People have been trying to squeeze out every single CPU cycle from their micro kernel code to make the IPC Run as as smoothly and as as quickly as possible, but it was given given the You know limitations of the hardware they had so so and I mean we have been trying on this too, right? I mean, this is the reason why we are meeting here. So so now let's focus on this part So let's focus on on the requirements on the hardware and let's focus on creating better hardware to support our micro kernels To finally get rid of this this trade-off between safety and performance security and pay for my performance I got some ideas. I Have to say these are very rough ideas and again This is something where I would like to spark a discussion I would like to spark, you know or inspire people thinking about the actual mechanisms that could be done to to make this happen and ideas are targeting, you know the obvious culprits like the IPC and Context switching and stuff like that So first about the problem with the IPC in the micro kernel multi-servo systems the finer the architecture It is the better for for safety and security availability dependability, but you know The more we are paying due to the address space Due to the need to move due to the need to move data between other spaces, so I mean the I probably don't need to explain the problem in very much detail But compared to the military kernels where communication between subsystems is just a function call in in a micro-cone multi-servo system But this the same communication is implemented via IPC Which means that we cannot use all the registers for actually passing the arguments Because some registers are reserved for something else. We need to switch to the kernel level to the kernel privilege mode and Switch the address space and then switch back We potentially need to do some scheduling in between in case the IPC is asynchronous Of course, this is not necessary and if we are moving Larger amounts of data. We either need to copy them between the other spaces or establish some kind of memory sharing Which again might be a little bit costly. So what to do about this? One thing that is probably would be probably quite simple just implementing richer Call or jump instructions instructions that would actually switch the address space by themselves so that you know We would we would save at least the single Kernel roundtrip where the kernel the only thing that the kernel is actually doing here is changing the address space This could be done by by by the hardware or by the CPU and it could be as simple as just switching the Current address space identifier.  I'm not proposing You know moving some kind of policy from from the operating system to the CPU that would be crazy so how to how to do it implement by Having something like a call gate That would be cashed in some kind of hardware cash Like something like a TLB. So so, you know, the first time this call happens Obviously, it will trap into the kernel the kernel will check, you know, the permissions capabilities and stuff like that and set up an entry into this into this hardware cash and and Consequent calls will be then done just just by the CPU I Believe this could be really very simple Regarding the asynchronous IPC where there is probably some need for buffering of the messages. I also think this could be optimized I mean, even nowadays like some like like somebody already mentioned at my talk yesterday This could be, you know, this this Message buffering and message message passing could be optimized by, you know, making sure that you don't trash The messages from our cash lines. That's fine. But again, I would imagine that The the CPU could could do it even more intelligently. So basically using the the cash lines as fixed size buffers for for the messages And it's not a problem that it's a fixed size because in most of the micro kernels I have seen that are using asynchronous IPC The kernel buffers are also fixed size for obvious reasons that the user space cannot, you know, exhaust the kernel memory So again, I would see that there is a clear separation between the mechanism That could be very very efficient very fast very lean and the policy that will obviously still stay stay in in software If you remember spark v9, this reminds me of the registers stack engine that they have there Or stack stack engine. What was the term stack engine or just a second? AI64 is it? Itanium, okay, okay. Well spark has has some things in more So how about the bulk data if we really need to move a lot of data between between the the processes or tasks Currently the current best optimization we have is memory sharing which actually works quite quite quite nice quite fine the only problem is that The memory sharing needs to be established and and simply Turn down and if this if this is happening too often this this causes the performance penalty And also donate the data needs to be page aligned So it's not really very useful for sharing, you know Scatter data structures. It's fine when you and you need to share, you know blocks Blocks of data that needs to be written to a block device driver or read from a block device driver But it's not not very useful for really, you know graph Structures and trees and stuff like that. So again an idea That could be something that could be done is to have a New simple layer of memory of hardware based memory management that would map virtual addresses to cache lines Because a cache line is usually something like 64 or 128 bytes, which is much more reasonable granularity for for this scatter data structures And of course again We need to you know sit down. We need to create a model. We need to evaluate it We need to implement it in an emulator to be sure how well this will perform What should be the parameters? What should be the size of the of this translation buffer? Stuff like that, but I really believe there is some possibility to to make this work Context switching, I mean we have somehow somehow avoided parts of this context switching In case of the IPC, but still the problem is that in a microkernel multi-server system. There are more active processes or more active tasks than you know, you know in a moralics moralistic system so there will be still some context switching and you know all That our hardware is currently doing is basically masking latency and We have very efficient mechanisms for masking nanosecond latency That's called the caches. We have quite efficient mechanism for masking millisecond scale latencies that's you know IO buffers, but the Context switch is precisely in the middle. It's on the order of microseconds and We have really nothing to to mask this latency So, I mean I wouldn't say we don't have we don't have anything There is a hardware mechanism quite often used which is multi-threading and This is precisely why why we have multi-threading to be able to somehow make sure that that the Allus or or or parts of the of the CPU have always something to do despite There is some data data or dependency or waiting for some data But this does not scale too many many threads I mean usually have just a couple of hardware threads and We can do conduct switching in in software so how about combining this and having again something like like a Hardware support for Unlimited number of execution contacts some of them the most frequently used would should be cached in some hardware cache and having some dedicated instructions that is you know extensions to to Efficiently operate with with these hardware contacts Again, this will keep the scheduling policies and stuff like that mostly to the to the operating system but the physical mechanism of You know quickly switching to a different workload when when our current workload is being blocked on the hardware level Because it is waiting on some some data that could be done autonomously. We could even think about you know Somehow connecting some other external event triggers to this like interrupts or exceptions And this would Allow us to do even more stuff. I believe I have a slight about this here Yeah, that would allow allow us to do very simply or very elegantly purely user space based interrupt processing currently the interrupts always trap into the kernel space and and In a microkernel environment what the kernel does it generates some kind of IPC message that is then being forwarded to to the user space driver if we would be able to do the fast contact switching using the hardware It is just a single step further to extend it to the interop interrupt delivery to the user space drivers Which would not only make some things faster it not only would this allow us to gather it of of Pulling in in case we are dealing with some very latency sensitive device Where actually, you know even even in a moralistic system the pulling can Sorry, the interop processing can be so expensive that pulling despite stupid is more efficient but it would also, you know solve the final, I would say it the final Compromise regarding the elegance of the microkernel design and that's the fact that we still need some device drivers in the microkernel like the timer with with Direct delivery of the interop of the timer interrupts to user space timer driver We would not need any timer driver in the microkernel and Possibly even moving the scheduler out of the microkernel, which again, you know is something like a Holy Grail of many people Yeah, something would need to be done with the level trick interrupts, you know the usual pain point Again, I would say that there is some possibility to have some integration with the platform interop controller That would autonomously mask the source of the of the level trick interrupt when it happens so that there is no no issue with this endless Reassertion of these Capabilities, I mean this is really just just this is a stretch I mean, I did not really find very much useful ideas in my head about what could be done with capabilities on the hardware level But at least at least something I mean if we just consider the the narrow use case of capabilities as as object identifiers Again, the microkernel would always need to be in charge of, you know making sure that that The methods called on a capabilities are permissible for that whole of the capability and I wasn't able to think about any any Allegant hardware mechanism how this could be avoided, but at least for the actual access to the object The capability ID or the capability reference could be somehow embedded Within within the pointer itself and then the hardware would be able to autonomously check whether whether the access to that given object Is allowed by the current context If you think about a risk 5128 128-bit variant I believe you you must You could wonder what would be the actual use of 128 bit long pointers I'm not sure that you know a flat 128 bit pointer is really so useful Maybe it is maybe I'm wrong but we could easily divide it into 64 bits for the object offset and 64 bits for for the capability reference and This could work quite elegantly By the way, I mean this would be probably even more useful for some some Managed languages like I don't java.net stuff like that because there are always dealing with the VMs running those The those manage this manage code is always dealing with the fact that they need to do a lot of bound checking on the objects If this could be a floated to the hardware, it would probably help them a lot Okay Some ideas do do you have something to add to this? Yeah, please and Yes, and I believe I Believe I have it have it here.  So what I'm now going to present unless there are other commands or objections There are some some cases or some some prior art which somehow leads in into the same direction Well, I would like to convince you that it is possible to do something like that It's even possible to do something like that with the hardware we currently have So imagine the possibilities if we can actually change the hardware. Let's think out of the box So so the first Reference is you know, just just a basic paper rather old about Actually offloading some of the micro kernel functionality to hardware. This was this was done by by basically modifying and soft core FPGA CPU and They were moving, you know, actually complete operations like thread creation and Context switching so so I mean the context switching is something more or less in In the line what I have suggested, but the thread creation is probably too heavyweight. I would say but nevertheless, they were able to To measure reasonable performance improvement something like 15 to 27 percent and You know just speaking about the ways how the hardware could could optimize IPC This has been also done in practice in the wild on on the massive parallel architectures So so again having having a lean hardware mechanism for efficient message passing that is somehow connected to to a reasonable Software abstraction for it. So this could probably work About you know the other space switching There is an interesting paper from from the barrel fish people about space jump, which is basically a programming model where where a Single process uses multiple multiple other spaces at once and this in that case that was Not targeting some performance improvement. It was targeting, you know, just just Or it was just entertaining the what would be the possibilities and benefits of such a programming model for For let's say data-centric applications. So, I mean, this is not so much relevant to what I have been talking about But but I mean there are approaches and they were able to implement this on on barrel fish Obviously on in Dragonfly BSD. So it did not require a huge modification to to the kernel abstractions And if you if you are old enough like me, you might remember that If you are running an x86 CPU in 32 bit mode or probably even in the 16 bit mode You can still have the task state segment, which is basically hardware based context switching It it does not have a dedicated, you know hardware cache for that It just uses you know, regular memory for caching the context, but still I mean performance wise it's it's still competitive to to the to the software base approach even the linux kernel use use this mechanism previously and They stopped using it not because of the performance, but because they just wanted to have a more portable approach. Yes Yeah, but that was probably just a very, you know artificial limit because some in some index in some, you know You know the global description table could not be it was basically, you know based on the selectors and Yes, yes, so it was something like 16k or something like that. Yeah, but I mean that's that's a technicality I'm not mentioning it that this is the way we should we should do it I'm just mentioning it because it has been done. So let's look at let's have a look on it and let's improve it Thank you Okay about the cross address space calls there has been actually quite nice paper by some of my colleagues from Huawei Who have who have used the VM func VM func instruction or the VM functions? extension to the Intel VTX Which is something like that. It's it's a mechanism that allows you to basically do cross VM calls By setting up some call gates and then then, you know, just You know using a single instruction to to pass the the registers from one one VM to the other So it does the the wall switch and address space which I mean switching the extended page tables on the hardware level and And actually this paper contains an evaluation which where they where they took a rather complex application something like a web server That uses uses the open SSL library and they have separated Some of the you know encryption functions so individual function calls From the rest of the of the of the binary into a dedicated VM and they have used this VM func instructions to to you know Change it from a normal function call to this to this cross VM call and their performance evaluation was quite quite interesting Because the VM function was as costly as just a single system call So it was not I mean it was more costly than than just a jump or just just a call But not huge not more costly Definitely cheaper than going to the to the hypervisor or good going to the kernel going to the hypervisor making the the address space and VM switch in software so again, I mean if we would Think about this mechanism in more detail if you would try to improve it Maybe this could really be helpful for for the micro kernels. Actually, my colleagues are working on some suggestion in that area and They will they will they will Publish a paper or they have already a pipe paper accepted at your sis this year So if you are interested into this have a look Yeah, this is this is what you have mentioned. This is the cherry capability models So an evaluation of how how the capabilities could be implemented on the hardware level again the this allowed them to To this was evaluated on a FPGA soft core, but the performance evaluation was very positive And it allowed them to have basically bite granularity memory protection You know again the limitation is that they have used 64-bit nips So so they had to somehow squeeze in the the bounce and starting addresses somewhere So so there their obvious decision was to have dedicated capability registers like an extension to do to the MIPS ISA Which they they they self-confirm that this is not so so flexible. So how about using using the 128-bit pointers and embed the the capability I need the fires directly in them Actually, if you look on Intel MPX, this is a similar idea that again has been already implemented in some of the newest Intel CPUs According to what I have read The implementations is not so great. I mean the performance benefits compared to software bound software based bound checking is is very minor and the overhead is of a step of setting up this thing is not good, but Yeah, if Intel even do it does it so one why not try harder Okay, so to sum up I really think that We have done as as the micro kernel community a lot of work first Explaining to people that software Dependability or computer system the bed dependability safety security stuff like, you know things like that are important and Those goals cannot be achieved by using a poor Software architecture like a monolithic architecture. I mean this applies not only to operating systems. It's obviously applies everywhere see microservices, but I mean we have been always struggling to to Explain to people that they are They have to pay some price for for these for for these assurances It's funny that when When there are vulnerabilities such a specter or melt meltdown Suddenly everybody accepts a five to ten to fifteen percent performance slowdown Just to get you know the assurances. We were always thinking we are having But if we we would propose that we can have more assurances we can have safer safer, you know systems We just have to pay a small price for it. I mean that that we are certainly being rejected so Let's think about the thing out of the box and let's design our hardware in such a way that Nobody could complain anymore And maybe Sorry, I need to mention my colleagues from from from Huawei who have contributed to to the ideas I have presented but what I wanted to say also that if you really would like to do something about this practically I am opening a new R&D lab in Huawei, which will be located in Dresden and obviously the location was not chosen randomly and We would like to have a very very balanced mix between basic research so something like I have presented here something like 40 percent and Obviously some practical development. We won't be you know making products We will be an R&D unit still but we will obviously try to contribute to to our product lines Which is also good because we have clear or we should have clear requirements from our products and you know our companies producing a lot of hardware and If you would be interested in working on this, please let me know please contact me by any means one side note We own high silicon, which is one of the One one of the major risk or one of the major arm Chip producers, so we have the possibility to actually you know change the hardware That's it. Thank you And if there are any questions, yes, please Okay From Berkeley to try object support and all of them paid most of that stuff had been implemented in microcode So it was hardly slow But flexible Now why did these approaches fail? I think the idea was Moore's law killed them because regular general-purpose processors got fast enough So it killed them. We are no longer in that situation. So that might be the point of time where it's actually worth Yes, yes Yes, thank you for the comment just to quickly summarize for the stream basically your idea is that we are in the precisely good Moment in time to do some do something like this because Moore's law is no longer applying And stuff like that. So we need to do something to improve the performance in generally speaking And I would add to to your command my command that we have a risk five now And this is a huge opportunity to actually, you know, create a totally new open modular hardware Architecture that actually might have some industrial traction. So let's let's take the opportunity I mean, I mean, there wouldn't be in principle against of but on the other hand We have a full arm arm license. So we could even change arm if we would like. Thank you


It's OK to start. Welcome, everybody. I'm very impressed how full the room is. So there seems to be a big interest in disaster recovery. And as the first presentation, I will show you very basic things about the kind of disaster recovery which will further on presented today here. First of all, why does it matter? In particular, disaster recovery with relax and recover is currently used more in enterprise environments on thousands and thousands and thousands of server systems. So we are not talking about something which we plan for the future. We are talking about something which is in production use. The topics, what does disaster recovery mean, what do we mean here, this disaster recovery? How does it work? What is not meant with disaster recovery, as we understand it here? And now, the particular implementation of a disaster recovery tool, relax and recover, what is it, how does it work, how to set it up, its advantages and also its disadvantages. It's important to avoid false expectations, to know where its limits are, and then finally, a bottom line. What do we mean with disaster recovery? A disaster means the system got destroyed. It doesn't matter how it got destroyed. Messed up essential files, broken disks, a complete destruction of the system. For example, with ButterFs, you can do snapshotting and get it back. But this does not help if your ButterFs file system gets corrupted or if your disk breaks down. So you need something which works on bare metal hardware, on an empty system. There's no requirements, which kind of disaster can happen, everything. From this, it follows that to recover, it means you must be able to recover on an empty system on a bare metal machine. This means disaster recovery is reinstalling from scratch. There's nothing on the system. So it is essentially an installation. But there's a restriction. As it is now, let's say it works best on same or on full compatible hardware. It can be done on a little bit different hardware. Even more interest than expected. No, it's fine. For me, it's fine. Yes, but emergency exit is right there. And it looks like a window, but they prepared for something so you do not jump out and hope for the best. There are stairs outside. So either come in or please stay out. OK, now it's sufficiently silent again. So I said disaster recovery means to reinstall the system from scratch on new compatible hardware. And it means, because it's an installation more than restoring files, it's more than a backup. You must prepare the hard disk. Then you restore the files. And finally, a bootloader must be installed, basically an installation. How does it work? While your system is up and running, you must save the payload of the system. I call it the payload. It's the files. You create a backup. And we have talks here about backup solutions. This is one part of the whole disaster recovery. And it's, of course, the most important part. Because the files, your own files are your value. Anything else can be done. It needs more time manually. But if you lose your files, you are completely lost. Then while your system is up and running, you prepare for reinstalling from scratch. This means you need to create an installation system that can recreate your system. I call this installation system a recovery system.  It runs in the main memory of your computer. And this, from there in, it prepares the hard disk, puts the files on it, installs a bootloader, and then you boot this system from the hard disk. The same kind happens here, too. You have an installation system which runs in the main memory of your computer. And then it does all the same things. This means a recovery system is a recovery installation system. I add the word recovery only to make a distinction between a new, real installer and this one. And there is an installer, a system installer, not an installer of an application software, a system installer. Now, when your system got destroyed, your boot, you're already prepared recovery installation system. And therein, you run the recovery installer. And the installer does what an installer does. It prepares the storage, stores the system payload. In this case, it means it restores the files from the backup. It installs a bootloader. Then you can reboot your new install system. This is all what it does. What disaster recovery is not meant to do, at least not how we discuss it here, is system configuration. The system configuration is the same as it was before. You get the same disk partitioning. You get the same mount point, the same file systems. And then the rest of the configuration, which is in files, is restored from the backup. So you have the same configuration files. And the bootloader is also reinstalled as it was before. There are very limited adaptations, only as far as needed, for example, unique IDs. Or if there is a well-known place where a MAC address is, then this is adapted, but nothing more. The next point is no system migration. You can use it to migrate a system on a little bit different hardware, but it's not the intended usage. And depending on how different the new hardware is, it may be much easier to start from scratch on the new hardware. It depends. If you have thousands of servers and you move them to new hardware, you can invest a few days to get it automated. So it depends. But on your laptop, I think it's a little bit overkill if you buy the next newest best from a different company. I think it's not meant for this use case. And therefore, it's no competition, this various kind of configuration or migration tools. We do something different. We do the bare metal initial things. And we try to do this thing good. Now, what is relax and recover? It is a disaster recovery framework. It is not meant as just install, just run, and just be happy solution. In some well-known generic cases, it works. It even just works. For example, now a little bit at what is meant on some SUSE systems, it just works. Because I run it on SUSE systems, I test it on SUSE systems, in particular, on SUSE Linux enterprise systems. When you install it as the defaults are, then it just works. When you do your special settings, then it may not work. Relax and recover complements the backup. It is not a backup tool, but it calls a backup tool. By default, it's plain tar. But it also, and this is very important for some more professional usage, it has built-in support for many third-party professional backup tools. This built-in support means it knows how to call the backup tool. And it knows how to include the important parts of the third-party backup tool into its recovery system. So you can restore your backup on the new hardware. It is meant for experienced users. It has a command line tool, but there is no graphical user interface. And now one of the most important things, it's written in pure bash scripts. Oh, that's not a programming language. That's ugly. That's terrible. And whatever it is. But this does not matter. When you are on the new bare hardware and you have nothing. You have always a bash. And it's the native language of the system administrator.  So it has no special requirements. It is meant to be adapted and enhanced as needed for your particular use case when you have a little bit of special use case, you may have to adapt it. How does it work? It's the same as before. There are two commands. The one command is called make backup, mcar backup. And it does two things. It makes an installation system, the rear installation system, the rear recovery installation system. And it calls a tool by default tar to make a backup. After the system was destroyed, I have to say something to the step before. The recovery system is made as a bootable EZO image. After the system was destroyed, you boot on the new hardware the bootable EZO image, the rear recovery system.  And it's called rear recover. What does it do? The same as described before. It prepares storage. It stores the payload. It restores the backup. It installs a bootloader. And then you are done. How to set up relax and recover. There's a configuration file. And it contains ETC rear local.conf. And it contains bash variables and bash arrays. And the values of this bash variables and bash arrays determine how it works. If you need to recreate special things that's not already there in rear, you may have to adapt the scripts, the bash scripts. I think it's now the advantages of relax and recover. It's generic. I already told this. It's all pure bash scripting. So if you're an experienced user, you can easily adapt and enhance it. But often, if you have special things, you must adapt and enhance it. It's small. There's no GUI. So you can run it on a system with not too much memory. The recovery system that was created on the already running system is specific for this one kind of system. So if you run it on two different hardware, a little bit different should work. But on two different hardware, it may just fail.  There is not all and everything included to run on all and every hardware. You can do this. There are options to include a lot of things if you know what the target hardware is. So if you have to migrate 1,000 servers to a new hardware, you can use rear to do this. But then you have to know what to do. It does not magically work there. And the last advantage, it's, from my point of view, the biggest advantage. It is fast. It is not exactly fast to configure it. You need to do something. But it is fast when you need your system back. So reinstaller runs directly shell commands. There's nothing in between. And my own experience on SUSE systems, rear is long, long done with recreating the whole system, a system not with a terabyte of data on it. So basic operating system, two or three gigabytes of basic stuff. It's long, long done. While just or out just is still in its startup phase and trying to get things set up and done. So you are done with rear. This is not something against just and out just. This is something against big and fat installers. There's a lot of graphical things that work on any system. They are, of course, they must be a lot slower. But rear is incredible fast. The limitations are, I already told it, what the recovery system can do. It's small. So if something is missing and you run it on the new hardware, let's say a driver for the network card is missing, then you are lost. It's not there. You cannot make your network card. You cannot use your network card on the new system. So again, you must prepare for it. As long as your system runs and you must have your new hardware already there, you prepare for it and then it runs fast as lightning. To deal with the limitations is you must verify it. And I would even recommend to do your actual deployment on the new hardware as a rear recovery installation. You test it, you try it, and then the final step is to get the system on the new hardware. It's a deployment with relax and recover. Then you know this step works. If now this hardware breaks down, you take the next one and you know this step works. And be prepared for manual intervention. It means know your system. If you are clueless how your partitioning is, how you're networking is, then it gets hard, this plane working on the command line. But now, for me, the most important part is the bottom line. And it's not about relax and recover. It's a general statement. Regardless how a system was installed and regardless what you use for disaster recovery, in the end, a disaster recovery installation will be your final system installation. All this graphical nice thing is before. Call it just whatever they're called. After a disaster, this is a final installation. You may decide to do your disaster recovery by running the installer of the Linux distribution. Then you basically do not have a disaster recovery procedure. You just start from scratch. Laptop falls down the stairs, crashed apart. You buy a new one, plug in the DVD from the Linux distributor, and start from scratch again. So this is not meant with disaster recovery procedure here. But if you have any kind of disaster recovery procedure at the end, this one will be the procedure which does the final system installation for you. If you have 1,000 servers, 10 of them get installed via the disaster recovery procedure. That's, for me, all I had to tell you as initial information. So thank you very much.


Hey everybody, welcome back to Magic White Doxie. My name is David and this is the 13 decks of Halloween. That's right. We're going to do 13 days, 13 deck reviews of the spookiest decks in my collection. Actually, there's plenty of decks in my collection that would qualify as a spooky or Halloween themed deck, but these are just 13 that I grabbed kind of at random, kind of not, that we're going to show to you for the next 13 days. So get ready. Here we go. The Dia de las Muertos deck from the Edgy Brothers. This was a Kickstarter project. If you don't know Dia de las Muertos, it means Day of the Dead. It's a Mexican holiday. David Edgeley, he's the artist on this. He also did the Edgar Allan Poe deck a while back. Also Halloween themed. If you want to learn more, you can go to edgybrothers.com. This was also printed from the United States playing card company. The reason why you picked it, of course, it's got skulls on it. It looks Halloweeny. It's a themed deck around Day of the Dead, and it's kind of like that sugar skull aspect where it's the skulls with the flowers on it. It is a totally customized deck. Everything has been touched from the courts to the pips. You do get a double ended gaff card included in that, and it makes for a really cool Halloween themed deck. That is it for this review. Tune in tomorrow. We're going to look at the Brad Fulton October deck.


I'm going to slip in some things from the course that I teach because we didn't get to get to everything yesterday, and some people wanted me to finish. So let me just do, I'm not going to go through the course, but just one part of it. One of the things that I've done in my class that turned out to be really successful is I have classes that are about this big, and as you know, some lectures are inaccessible to lots of people, people with ADHD, people with language trouble, people with second language learners, lots of people, lectures don't work at all.  So one of the things probably you do here also in university is people are paid to be note takers so that there's notes available for people who need notes from lecture. Well, I think that's a colossal waste of time and money. Largely because note takers are not usually very good. So I was trying to think, how can I make the lecture more university design? It's a standard lecture, which is again, not a great instrument, great for some people, terrible for others. But how can I get it so that it's a bit more accessible? So a number of things happen. The whole thing is videotaped so you can watch it slower, faster, watch it at home. It's available an hour later on the web so that you can do the whole, see the whole lecture again. Okay, that's not that interesting. And almost no students ever listen to a lecture again. You've heard me once, you don't wanna hear me again. And so that doesn't happen. But the second thing that I did was actually something that is really neater and it shows you DL. What I do is I ask five people, so it'd be a group like this, and every night that there's a lecture, five people are official note takers. It's just part of being in the course. You have to take notes once during the course. And the key thing is, and here's where technology is key, is that within 24 hours, but I actually give a little leeway as you'll see, you have to put your notes up so all of your classmates can see them. So after lecture, there's a video available to the lecture, and within a day or two, there's five people's notes of the lecture. All right? Now the question is, these are, and I wanna point out that this is all of them are Harvard graduate students in education. So this is a very, what's the word, homogeneous group in some way.  What I want you to see is what kind of notes they take, okay? So I'm gonna show you notes from, so roughly the same lecture, although I fudged in one case because I wanted to show the variety.  So this is one graduate student's notes, and you can see what was I talking about. I was talking about exactly this, ooh, what great timing. Talking about the same topic we're talking about today. And Ruth, you heard about Ruth in Perfect Pitch, blah, blah, blah. So here's Michelle Berkowitz's notes.  Bulleted points, you know, da-da, she's in the problem of da-da-da-da, upper motor neuron, stuff you, blah-blah-blah, break, da-da-da, okay? All right, this is what most people think notes are like because that's what your English teacher thought notes looked like. Oops. Oh, I guess I can just click this, can I? Get back, am I up there? Yeah, so let's look at somebody else's notes. So this is a classmate, same class. And he realizes, huh, these notes are gonna be on the web. So they're native on the web, why not use the web? So he puts them, and everything here, he's got tons of links out to other things. Now some of you would say this is kissing the apple here for the professor, and it definitely is, but in terms of the theme for today, you know, he's networked, he said, well, there's a lot of sources on the web.  So he's connecting and actually embedding this in knowledge, which is fabulous, and I get to use it next year, which is fabulous. Ms. Kim, again, same notes, but these all gets filtered through their brains. Look how hers is. Hers is, dear classmates, she writes a letter. It's not an outline, it just, here's my takeaways. So she says, it's like a travelogue, it's like her journey, like it's a postcard back, and it's completely her own take. She doesn't try to be literal with what I did, but it was like I was on vacation and here's what I heard.  You know, but it got, you know, anyway, so an epistle sent to her classmates. Sorry, they're switching back and forth. I don't know why that, oh, was that showing up? Maybe it's just what I'm showing up here. But more interestingly is that over the time, more and more diversity starts to come out as people see, oh, there isn't one way to take notes. So usually somewhere along during the course of the class, someone will come out like Miss Goldsmiths, whoop. Well, I can't take a click on that. There we go. It's hitting that, how do I get, how do I stop from hitting that? I've done this before, but oh, cancel. I don't want to do that. Well, I'm sorry, I made this slide in a way that I can't quite get to that number four and this is one of the ones I really want to show you. I should be able to do this without clicking. Yeah, I don't want to take the time to go in the slide. I'll show it to you later. So she is more inclined nonverbally and so she does the whole lecture in three drawings and she does it very well and it's beautiful and she just is doing, you know, I'm not going to do that opening again but I've got the three slides and it becomes more and more visual and actually then people see it and they go, wow, her notes are really better than the outline, who knew? Not for everybody, but for a lot of people and then more people start to draw and do things like that because they go, oh, what we're trying to do is convey what happened in the lecture and there's lots of ways to do that. Let's do, this is the one that was most helpful to me as a faculty member and this is the one where the guy called me and said, okay, I'm not quite done, I need another couple of days and I said, okay. So what he did was he took the entire lecture and spent days going through the New Yorker cartoons, all of which are on the web, and illustrated all of my points with cartoons. So I'm not going to have you read the whole thing but it's just, it'll take a second, here we go, so just cartoons. He puts a few words in there but he finds a cartoon to make the point. Isn't that amazing? This guy looking for a good grade, I grant, but the great thing is, the nice thing is he is co-constructing the lecture with me through his own brain and I have a new lecture, a better one, because we've co-constructed it. Then, of course, then quickly people start to realize like Jeff took the slide of Grace and I on the motorcycle last night, people realize, eh, pens and paper and all this, so sooner or later someone does this. And I thought, by the way, I mistook this. I thought the person was not paying attention in class and was really getting aggravated because I don't know who's taking note on any particular day. So here is, I've got to read you this because you can't see it. Hi, my name's Grace. So this is another kind of epistle except that he's got this little iPhone so he just takes a picture of himself. That's me. In case you missed it or simply want to relive it, here's what happened on Tuesday night. I'm wearing, it's all about him. I'm wearing a blue shirt. This is, you know, this is the Facebook generation. I'm taking my shirt off now. You know, it could be anything. I'm staying in New Jersey, Parliament Center. I stole it from my mom's laundry basket. I'm also wearing jeans and boots. Dr. Rose enters the room at 7.02. Okay? And then he just takes pictures and whenever they get good at this so whenever I say, okay, now the most important point is and up comes the cell phone and people just press record. And then they don't have to write any notes at all. But he just takes pictures. There's me in the lecture hall. That's his ginger ale, et cetera. So you get the idea. What's fabulous about it and the first time I did it, knock me out too. And it's because it's such a perfect UDL exercise because you think you gave the same lecture to everybody. You think that this is my lecture but it's not your lecture. It is 200 people's lecture and the things, it's not only did they express it differently but if you really read them they got completely different things out of it. Not just that they were mistaken but that they were in fact taking it in through their brains which are very different and they took in very different things. So it's a rich exercise. It's fun and the students like to see each other's notes and I recommend it to you that are teaching in college and universities and they say you should have a paid note taker say I have a better way to take notes.