Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2016-04-18 The meeting was called to order at 19:32:13 by slz. In attendance were Voting members: ikdc, dzaefn, bpchen, slz, iannucci | vasilvv Associate members: jhawk Prospectives: foner acarney duffield Guests: medasaro Administrivia: slz: Today membership elections for duffield and foner slz: The EC met last Friday to review existing sipb policies, series of changes made, most of the policies kept; most of them were clarified or updated; most of the obsolete policies were removed. A complete list will be sent shortly. I think the most important think that I should say is that the code of conduct has been renamed to the SIPB Social Advice. hackathons have a standing allocation of $200 per hackathon acarney: Maxberry PI suffered some error and wouldn't turn on, my friend matthew diagnosed the issue (Failed capacitor which destroyed a couple diodes and a transformer). Matthew can fix this. I would like to allocate $150 toward parts and compensating matthew to fix this. slz: Seconded, motion to white-ballot. Objections? dzaefn: How is this going to be made a budget item? slz: It is parts, and we will contact OIS & Finance to find out how we can pay people. [$150 allocated...] dzaefn: SIPB currently has more than $10000 in its funds. This does not include unprocessed RFPs which come to about $100. I believe the fiscal year ends in June; we should figure out how to spend the rest of our budget before then. acarney: I had some trouble with MIT and didn't know how to submit RFPs, so I'm submitting around $850 worth of RFPs as well. slz: If you have any servers or big bulk objects you want to buy, you should figure this out. dzaefn: I wonder if we should redact information about the budget from the minutes. jhawk: Historically, we have neither redacted financial figures nor discussion of redacting them from the minutes. slz: I would like to make two standing allocations: one for SIPB publicity, and one for study breaks. I think this could be a great outreach strategy for making us known to Course 6's, and we should allocate around $? per study break. We will probably vote on this next time when more people are around. jhawk: Maybe if this is a first-time thing, you should make a regular allocation.... slz: We have gotten a new officehead named jebediah-kerman, alias jeb, after the fearless Kerbonaut. The Vice Chair, lujan, and I installed Debathena with Ubuntu 14.04 on it this afternoon. Project Reports: foner: We have 2-3 cluedumps coming up in the next few weeks. csvoss expressed interest in writing an Ask SIPB column. slz: The Raspberry PI 3s have arrived; we are still waiting for the peripherals, so very soon you will be able to hack on them. slz: SIPB will be running a Retrocomputing exhibit at the Open house on Kresge this Saturday; I would really like someone else to be in charge of this on that day. acarney: I will happily organize things up until Saturday, but I cannot be there on Saturday. iannucci: velum tape... foner: oh it exists! slz: SIPB hackathon will definitely become a thing, but it will probably not happen next week. lujan is writing a whole new website just for this purpose. Other: '() Other Other: acarney: Matthew also has an original Pong set. slz: We're clearly in the middle of a mini-spring-break. slz: Taxes! They're due tomorrow. Membership elections: [vasilvv enters] slz: Please introduce yourselves. foner: I'm Lenny Foner; I've been around on and off since the '80s. I revived the Ask SIPB tradition since it's been around 6 years, and one of the things I find most interesting about SIPB is its educational mission. Back in the day I did documentation. The Cluedumps have been going well; so has Ask SIPB when I can get people to do them. duffield: I'm Austin Duffield; I've been coming around to SIPB meetings since the beginning of this year. This year I helped organize the conference LibrePlanet; it was lots of fun, some of you came. dzaefn: How do you double-space the Media Lab? foner: You build E14. Now we have two Media labs and they take up twice as much space. dzaefn: How do you double-space a protest outside Stata? duffield: You move it inside Stata! slz: Please redact that from the minutes. iannucci: You're in the office, it's late at night, and someone comes in and asks if they can rent a computer. What do you do? duffield: I tell them they can rent the Nook if they email the right people. slz: What if sketchy cluster lady comes in and asks to borrow one of the office machines. foner: I'm going to go out on a limb and say "no". iannucci: And if they get pushy? foner: I would ask them to leave the office. duffield: In all seriousness, if there's someone trying to steal a computer it's a police thing. foner: I would try to de-escalate the situation; if they don't leave then it's probably time to call the CPs. iannucci: Here's another scenario. A person who is notionally an adult comes into the office and says, "Does anyone want to help me start a business?" What do you do? foner: Ask if they can find a person from Sloan. iannucci: They tell you they don't know what a Sloan is, but they have developed an algorithm that can compress anything, including the compressed output itself. duffield: I would ask them if they can decompress it too. vasilvv: Redirect them to the Media Lab. bpchen: You get to choose one book to add to the SIPB Library. What do you choose? ikdc: "How to install Linux on a dead badger"? foner: I would order either "A Fire upon the Deep" or "Acts of the Apostles" as an example of why computer security really matters. duffield: We need a new McMaster. dzaefn: You're in the office late at night, and someone walks in, and they're on fire. Now the SIPB office is on fire. You can save one object from the SIPB office on the way out. What do you save? duffield: I would save our venerable SIPB chair. slz: What if I weren't there? iannucci: What if there were an object in this room created specifically so that we could ask this question, say a box. What would you call this object? duffield: ... [slz demonstrates the Save In Case Of Fire Box] duffield: Oh, the Save In Case Of Fire Box! ... This is the crap you want to save?? slz: This is a bag of envelopes containing CDs with OTPs. foner: They aren't sealed?! Those might not be /One/-Time-Pads! vasilvv: There's a Frisbee in there, so that once you save the box and you're asking yourself "What now?" the answer is "Play Frisbee". jhawk: What do you think the end state of the cluster renovation will be? duffield: I don't know much about it. They're reducing some space? foner: I haven't seen it. jhawk: They're making space for the DSL. bpchen: Say we have $9000, and you have to allocate it. What do you allocate it to? duffield: Gold. foner: Adding space and servers to XVM, refreshing the lowest-end computers that people still use. dzaefn: INOQUXYZ. Pick three of those letters, and find a kerberos starting with each of them. foner: iannucci, quux, x_x jhawk: Do you want a hint? duffield: Yes jhawk: sipb alumni of your living group duffield: quentin... ikdc: I feel like I haven't made much of an impression. vasilvv: Since we're in the area of those questions, please list as many architectures in this room as you can. duffield: RISC foner: SPARC duffield: amd64 foner: alpha duffield: arm foner: 68000's probably in that printer. duffield: power jhawk: Some would say that some of SIPB's most popular services are mechanical. Do you think there are any relevant capital or efforts we should be applying in that place? [jhawk is tossing a stapler repeatedly in his hand]. duffield: I think our mechanicals are in order. [jhawk motions as if to juggle two staplers] foner: Not for long! medasaro: What was the capacity of the floppy drive shipped with the original IBM PC duffield: 8 kilobits. foner: More like 800K. [jhawk holds up three fingers] foner: jhawk's giving me a hint. vasilvv: Are either of you familiar with "Bubble memory"? Please come up with a hypothesis of what it is. duffield: You store data in bubbles in some fluid? I know you can pass bubbles through mercury; maybe you could float bubbles up and it would represent bits when they hit the top. [foner gives a more reasonable description of bubble memory] duffield: Cube of dollars foner: Variety of license plates duffield: Paper plates foner: 9-track write rings iannucci: Without opening your eyes, is the word gullible on the ceiling or not? duffield: yes. jhawk: Austin, reach out with your left hand, a little further back..... duffield: It's a hard drive platter? slz: What is it labeled as? Please hit it with this gavel. [duffield flails at bell #3 with the gavel, eventually striking it] foner: A banana... a shark banana. There's a bell over there. slz: Those are bell #2 and bell #3. Extrapolating from the size of these bells, please name one reason why bell #1 is not hanging from the ceiling. duffield: Presumably bell #1 is very large. [ikdc climbs over cluttered chairs to acquire bell #1. slz hits bell #1 with the gavel] slz: I move bpchen to ask the Question. bpchen: duffield, why do you want to be a SIPB member? duffield: Because this group is full of lots of really cool people, and maybe if I join this group I will be a really cool person. I have sort of known people who were in sipb for a really long time and have always thought that the group was a neat place that I'm glad existed, and I'd like to be a part of it growing forward. slz: I move ikdc to ask the Question to foner. ikdc: foner, why do you want... foner: I had an epiphany a while back about how important SIPB's educational mission is to me, and I'd really like to contribute to that, both through the stuff I've been doing, and other stuff like having sipb be a resource for questions like "Have I been building this in a secure and private fashion." I've been around SIPB off and on for a long time, and I'd like to be be more a part of it than a prospective. slz: I close the questioning process. Anyone who is not a current SIPB member, please leave the room. [foner, duffield, acarney, and (matthew)] leave. [Closed meeting] [foner is elected SIPB member 7-0-0] [duffield is elected SIPB member 7-0-0] slz: Congratulations. Please talk to the secretary after the meeting. The meeting was adjourned at 20:33. Minutes taken and submitted by ikdc.