CIS News: December 2003

Changes slated for cluster printing services

The advent of the computer age brought predictions of a paperless society. Books, phone directories, and all manner of information was to go online, so who would need paper and ink anymore?

Obviously, a lot of us still do. Reams of paper and boxes of toner are transformed into huge stacks of printouts. These are all the more noticeable in public computing areas such as Brown's clusters. Online availability of information has not lessened the need for hard copy. In fact, Brown's public printer queues have experienced a continuing increase in usage over the last few years.

As the amount of printing has grown, so to has the amount of unretrieved output, creating mounds of wasted paper. A new initiative by CIS will work toward reducing paper waste in clusters and heightening users' awareness of bad printing habits.

Starting in the spring semester, print release stations will be introduced into the clusters. Before output can be printed, the person requesting it will need to manually release the print job(s) at the stations situated next to the printers. This entails locating the job(s) in the queue and entering a user-set password (tied to the job). Unreleased jobs will sit in the queue and are eventually deleted. Other universities who have introduced such stations have reported almost immediate decreases in printer output of around 25%.

The print release stations are the first step in a move toward a print quota system, which would limit the number of free pages that can be printed, with a charge per page beyond that quota (to be determined). This change should further deter unnecessary printing (other schools experience a 50 to 60% drop in volume) and may be used to help recover increasing supplies and maintenance costs.

Users are also being encouraged to develop good printing habits that could save resources and time lost by sorting through needless print jobs. Printing tips are available on the CIS Documentation pages.

New versions of computational software

The following new products or updates to existing products are now available on Brown's software download page: Mathematica 5.0 (Windows), Mathematica 5.0 (Mac) and Tecplot 10(Mac). Please notify the Help Desk if you have problems installing this software.