Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 6 April, 1981 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by William M. York. In attendance were William York, Richard Lawhorn, Harold Ancell, Richard Kovalcik, Gary Palter, Steve LeBlanc, Mark Nahabedian, Jeannine Mosley, Barry Margolin, Charles Hornig, Wendy Rowe, Katharine Marvin, Benson I. Margulies, and some users. Late were: David Plummer, Penny Berman, John Gonzales, Ron Mabbit, and Jean-Pierre Tanaka and Penny Berman. USER INTERRUPT: Warren Smith $100 for text processing. Has $300 already. Has been text processing and learning pascal. He was told about our very limited budget. Motion to give the $100. Motion passes. The minutes of the meeting of 30 March were read and accepted as corrected. USER INTERRUPT: Les Watts. Unspecified amount to meeting by DCP for Baker house newsletter. Richard Lawhorn: Move to reject due to lack of money. Benson: we haven't the cash, we should not spend it on a newsletter instead of students. Steve LeBlanc: we had best wait until after the treasurer tells us what the news is. Move to defer. Richard: not accepted as friendly. There is a motion to table this, till we go through the treasurer's report. Passes. ***** BANG **** John Gonzales was declared active at this point. Gary Oberbrunner was declared active. Jeff Schiller came in at this point. Treasurer's Report: ~$92,000 year to date, plus ~$3,000 so far this month. Wes gave the chairman another $10,000 to cover us for the year. That's all there is, folks. Benson: we should talk to Corbato to see if any extra deficit will be covered, and if we can get any. That nothwithstanding, we should turn off new applications right now. If we do not successfully avoid overspending on this special $10,000, we will look like utter and complete fools. We have just gone and attracted the attention of Corbato and Low, and we had best keep our act clean. Wendy & Richard: we agree. John Gonzales: we still can't afford the end-of-term crunch. Barmar: if we stop giving new applications we won't have this problem. Penny: what is being proposed specifically? Richard: we can cut down the $400 per day a lot by trimming overhead. Harold Ancell: we can slide under the budget if we cut off new accounts. Wendy concurs. Wendy Rowe moves to stop taking new applications at all. Benson: friendly amendment: amend to stop all auto applications. Desperate people can still be taken to meeting. RK: this is an awful thing that we should never do. We did not promise to get in under this $10,000, we should never turn people away. Naha: paint the student center terminal room. that will cut down usage. Harold: we did too much text processing, that was our failure. The real screw case will be the number crunchers. Perhaps just terminate text processing? Charlie Hornig: what is the motion: The motion is: The procedure of auto'ing applications is to be discontinued through the fiscal year. Applicants are to be informed that it is very likely that there will be no money available. Penny: text is as important as crunching. DCP: we should not argue about text versus crunch now. More importantly, lack of auto's will screw people finishing papers. There had better be a student login message as well. Barry: tell people to go hassle the administration, let them know who really is at fault. Harold: no, some number crunching is impossible off the computer. Benson: all this is beside the point. We have not enough money to continue under an auto policy. RK: we may get more money, we should not do this. Richard: in 1975, we did just this. Worse, we turned off existing applications. Barmar: call the question. Bill: if we get more money from Corby, then we will have a week of screwage. Is this important? Benson: this is unlikely. The executive committee can act instantly in any case. And Corby said that covering a deficit through us after the fact would be really questionable. Explanations of how SIPB funding covers the Center deficit followed. Motion came to a vote. Motion passes. Charlie: last time we did this we gave people two weeks to come in and reapply, and cut off everyone that did not. RK: that is not the first thing we can try. We can cutoff people who have not used since February first. We should not necessarily do a disk cleanup until we decide whether retrievals cost more than the disk storage. DCP: we have just screwed the person from Baker who had a personal application as well as the one for the newsletter; it that was not auto'd. Barmar: move to do a cleanup from Jan 24. RK: I am not sure that everything will be on the tape. Perhaps we should move the cleanup date back. CAH: everything is on there. Benson: perhaps we should only clean the directories of inactive users. Do all our retrievals happen from people who had a few inactive files? RK: more useful, give people a hard time before doing a retrieval. WMY: this is correct. Also, do many retrievals at a throw. Save them up. Also, Center retrievals are probably cheaper. Steve LeBlanc: are accounts for a year? does anything we give to users warn them about disappearing files? Perhaps this is unecessarily fascist to delete without warning. General: we have done this before. Ron Mabbit: should we charge user's accounts for cost of retrieval? General: no. Motion to cleanup to Jan 24 81 0000.0 comes to a vote. Passes. Penny: How about ECS? perhaps we should governer ECS. General: no, without CPU charges the governer is a bad idea. Richard: move to turn off ECS. RK: this is awful, it does not spend much money. This should go last. Barmar concurs. Richard: $10 per day. Steve: it should go first, it is not justified projects or anything. RK: we should make the ECS limit $50 per day if people are worried. Benson: ECS is a very efficient use of money. We should leave it on. Barmar: we have no communications with ECS users, we should leave it on. Various: we can have it print a message. Wendy: will it make the difference in making it under budget? Richard: no. Various comments on where the money goes followed. Steve LeBlanc: how useful is this thing? Various: very. 10 people per day use it. People who we do not give money to will use ECS. Motion comes to a vote and fails. Benson: motion to put a short leash on sipbadmin accounts. a small cutoff to limit usage to sipbadmin stuff, not hacking. General: sipb members should not need cutoffs to know not to hack on their sipbadmin accounts. Richard: motion to cutoff the SIPB project. This is marginalia. Various: naha has no other money. CAH gave us the list of nonzero people on the project. Bill: the right thing is this: I tell you as chairman, spend as little money as you possibly can. Benson: can we get back 1000 records on nbdd by moving public library hacks source and bound components to tape? RK: no. General: it isn't worth the trouble to do this stuff in nbdd. But people should be encouraged to cut down storage. However, the dynamic part of the public library can go to nbdd. Bill: perhaps another user cutoff is appropriate. Should we cutoff as of the beginning of this term? Gary: Same time as cleanup would be appropriate. Bill: these people could be turned back on without a meeting unless someone specified otherwise. Some discussion of whether we should make policy to turn off applications after a term followed. No clear consensus. Motion to cutoff users who have no usage since Jan 24 1981 who were added before that date comes to a vote. Passes. Coop users stop using accounts and we keep charging for disk. Sometimes they do not tell us that they have stopped. One person is $190 in the red. disk charges only happens once a month, which is where trouble comes in. We have to decide whether to try to collect from them. Perhaps this is our fault, because we did not tell them enough about how disk storage charges work. Perhaps we can make a better arrangement with the Center about these people. An entry on the policy statement would help. Richard: SIGN UP FOR PHONE CALLS! Chairman's Report: The chairman went to Wes and got us $10,000. The real question is next year's budget. There are two proposals. The first asks for $100,000, and notes that this is a minimum, governed by tight money. The second requests $120,000, and justifies the increase by increate in demand. It notes that we would have to cut services to fit into $100,000. KYM: the budget should state what we think we will spend, and they should cut if it they choose. Benson: the second warns everyone what is going to happen if we only get $100,000. It also has the opportunity to perhaps get more. We should send it. CAH/WMY: there will be a capital budget request submitted later. Barmar: move to send the second letter. RDM: state it more strongly. They will cut it. Benson/WMY: we can indeed get the spending in under $100,000. This year was special. We can do it without major screwage. Various: they will call us irresponsable anyway. We should ask for more. Consensus: the proposal should say 120K, but not say "we can survive on $100K." Benson went to a student government luncheon. All the organizations explained what they did for a living. Not much happened. Benson, Richard, and Bill went to a FinBoard meeting. We talked to them about the ADB proposal. They apologized about not telling us about the status of the proposal. Barry Landau came in today to talk to us. They want to get this proposal passed, but it is a part of a big political hassle between them and the ADB. The Finboard meeting was very random. A formal dinner was served to the FinBoard chairman. They will give us our publication budget. Bill and others went to the GA meeting. The resolution calling for the GA to ratify our selection of chairpeople came up. Boy was the GA greasy! Parlimentary crazyness and the works. The resolution failed, because the ungreasy dorm rep's were basically reasonable. The chairman went and talked to the UAVP about all of this, he seemed quite reasonable, and thought that the motion was twitish. The comments about "grease" and "twits" apply only the GA floor leader & friends, not the UAP/UAVP or anything else. Fred Richardson report: Steve LeBlanc: he really wants to do this this summer, I will not be here, will someone else do it? No volunteers for now. Office Report: The book signouts were redone. Return books! The SIPB mailing list was moved from NAMES > to files on SIPB; Noone picks up OK2RUN lists. People should do this. Benson is going to GC the grey shelves. Clean up your stuff. CAH: move to do a 370 purge of users like the one on multics. Benson: should we dump their disks on tape? Bill: leave that to CAH -- he will see if it is practical. Motion passes to cut off as of a month ago. Computer Services: We finally broke a spinwriter thimble. New policy statements are in. Give them to users. Tooooo late, it would seem. Still no doc on the super/subscripts. Flame at Benson. There were problems with HSSP. They started using the vt100's, which they are not supposed to. They were given a special startup to prevent it. There are aliases for all sipb pseudo-users. spb(r m ...), using the first letter of the second word. Process_io_log missed the Student2 project. Thats big bucks. This will be corrected. Remember to new_user people on ALL projects. Global AML: RK wants to know what happened about it. Benson will find out how to do it. Vote for our AML programs. Use Soley's aml_death program to vote for all the programs... aml_ok [aml_death] will vote for all the programs under review. We get mail (programs) mailed to jjs or C.SIPB instead of the student center. Watch for them. Flaming occurred about SIPB at MC versus SIPBADMIN at MC. What are they for? DCP: don't bother SIPB at MC with things that need to be done in the way of online administration. Penny: SIPBADMIN does not get used at all. Benson: SIPBADMIN at MC is WRONG. People should send to SIPB. Anyone on SIPB should be willing to see it and deal with it. If they are not willing to fix it they should not be members, let alone on the list. DCP: it is an interface for people to ask us for things. Benson: no it isn't. We have not agreed to that. No consensus was reached. Telecommunications: The spinwriter needs to be called in. The ribbon holder is broken. We found the bug that caused multiple spacing. Do not type random characters on the keyboard while the frob is printing. This will be fixed soon. Publications Report: There are new NUMS. Minor fixes were made. Seems that we don't need too many of them for the rest of the term. Other: There is a new version of the Pocket Guide. Applications: User interrupt earlier of $100 for Warren Smith for text processing. Given. John W. Miller, unspecified, to meeting by ACW. previously had $450. Rejected. Les Watts, unspecified, for text editing for Baker House letter, etc. Never applied before. Motion to give $30 for personal resumes only. Given. John C. Gonzalez, unspecified, for personal text editing. Previously had $400. Deferred to meeting for amount and justification. Kirk E. Holmes, $100, for a continuation for a text editing account for term papers and courses. Previously had $300. Rejected. Michael K. Tamada was given a warning form for having a large overrun on Coop on Multics. Total appropriations: $1600 without Coop Autoed: $1600 Student: $1320 370: $150 To Meeting: $130, all Student. Coop: $130 Other Other: People feel that major policy changes should be sent to SIPB at MC: in particular that there will be no more autoing of any applications, due to budgetary considerations. It has been decided that the motion passed earlier in this meeting concerning the autoing of applications does NOT apply to COOP. Much flaming insued as to who ended up doing COOP work, and to the amount of hassle it involved. The concensus of the meeting was that there was indeed a problem with the accounting and work that needs to be done, and that only the treasurer is really qualified and knowledgeable to handle it. People are encouraged to be more sensitive to the work that needs to be done, and try to take on more responsibilities so that the office of treasurer was not so burdensome. The Office has a Japanese cylinder that has been solved by three people now. Hoffman brought a tiny cube that must be played with carefully. Johnathan Taft donated a Superticket to the office, that he wanted partial compensation for. It will live in HBD. Course Six Steak Fry is Friday, and is guaranteed 2 steaks apiece. Unfortunately, they are limiting it to 250 people. Shhhhhhhh. The meeting was adjourned at 23:28. Minutes taken and submitted by Benson I. Margulies