If you use flightgear in any academic or research context, please read this message through and please send me a response. (Directly to [EMAIL PROTECTED] is preferred.)
--> Background <-- The primary flightgear server is running off of my University's networks. The machine is a combination of parts I have purchased out of my own money and others from the project have contributed, but it is consuming university network bandwidth. I was hoping that we would live happily under the radar screen here, and not draw attention to ourselves as consuming more than our fair share of the resources. However, in relative terms the FlightGear project is *very* popular. Apparently much more popular than anything else being done here at our Mechanical Engineering department. :-) The down side of this is that with the monitoring tools our network admins have, we are most definitely no longer under the radar screen. In fact the network traffic to/from the flightgear server dwarfs the traffic for any other machine here in the department. We are not even close to saturating even 1% of the available bandwidth here, but because we have the top machine by a significant margin (and maybe the network admins don't have enough real work todo) :-) this has become a concern. --> Request <-- I would like to be able to do a better, more definitive job at justifying our existence here. I haven't been specifically asked to do this, but I can see it coming down the pipeline. I sense there might be some pressure to boot us off the net if for no other reason than the network admins don't like their sense of symmetry thrown out of wack by an outlying data point. If flightgear is just a game, then flightgear is no better than some random mp3 server a student set up and (in the eyes of our network admins) we are just wasting bandwidth. However, if I can show the value of FlightGear to other universities, other research groups, student groups, etc., (i.e. any academic or research value) then I hope I can demonstrate that this is much more than a waste of bandwidth, that this project benefits the academic and research world, and that our ME department here gains prestige by being at the center of it all. So, I would like to ask anyone who uses FlightGear as part of some University research project, or class, or student project (anything research or academics related) to please let me know what you are doing so I can add this to my body of evidence to support our existence. I know I maintain a web page of project descriptions, but for this particular justification, I am looking for a paragraph or two that briefly describes the project, and then says something about how flightgear benefits the research, the project, the class, etc. A quick couple paragraphs via email would be great. I'm not looking for something that will take you all afternoon to do ... just 5 or 10 minutes worth of scribbling. Again, there isn't an immediate crisis here, but I sense something coming to a head and I want to either be ready when it comes, or preemptively present my justification in advance so that the crisis never arrives. Many thanks in advance, Curt. -- Curtis Olson IVLab / HumanFIRST Program FlightGear Project Twin Cities [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Minnesota http://www.menet.umn.edu/~curt http://www.flightgear.org _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
