Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 06/17/91 The meeting was called to order at 19:30:00 by jcbourne. In attendance were Voting members: marc jcbourne gamadrid mhpower warlord bjaspan | amgreene Associate members: raeburn jcb ambar eichin jtkohl Non-voting members: Prospectives: ckclark padrelou mcmullan geoff Guests: Treasurer's Report: Has anyone dealt with VMS? Chairman's Report: warlord: We have too many chairs. mhpower: This isn't the "chair" report. Little Elves Report: Still nothing about these little guys. Whatever they're doing, they're being real quiet about it. Some folks are getting suspicious that they are up to no good. Office Report: It's a pit. Did the air-conditioning vents get done? [It was supposed to have been done last week. Anyone know anything about it? --ed] We got bitched out for our carpet being dirty. We're spilling Coke and stuff on the carpet and Student Center Managers feel that if it needs cleaning more than once a year, they'll start charging. About the alarm on the door: jcb says that there is a sale on Radio Shack's infrared eye thingy for $40. Do we want one? Straw poll: Do we want to spend $40 dollars for this thing? Motion to get the thing. Seconded. For: ~6 Against: ~4 [jcb and/or jcbourne will look into getting one --ed] MIT Computing Report: There's an Athena thing (party) happening on Thursday, so all of the consultants will be out. So anyone who is a volunteer consultant is encouraged to play consultant for a while on Thursday. There seems to be less network lossage lately. Themis is back up. Talos is bouncing from time to time. Computer Services: No progress on IRC. garfield is gone, has been reinstalled. mcmullan is going to deal with recompiling the client in /mit/games. Ronald-Ann Backup Report: marc: Derek, you can do it. warlord bought four new tapes today. He will deal. He wants to use the new backup software, but marc says it doesn't work. Publications Report: Any volunteers to help revise Iness Athena? bjaspan, warlord will volunteer to do some work, but not edit it. ambar volunteers to be editor, but she will make warlord and bjaspan do all the work. (There's a "professional" editor for you.) R/O Report: Umm... The letter needs to go in on Friday. jcbourne will hand it in on Thursday. [There's a mocking copy on the bulletin board; source is in /mit/jcbourne/frosh95.tex. --ed] amgreene was just talking to binkley, and is volunteering our terminals for the R/O people. IAP Report: ...much resounding laughter... CokeComm Report: CokeComm has lots of spiffy new highlighters, so watch out...! jcb suggests using CokeComm's profits to help out the StereoComm. Send mail to jcb@athena if you have other suggestions about what to do with the profits. ---- Letter from jcb inserted here ---- Zippy-Sez: DIDI... is that a MARTIAN name, or, are we in ISRAEL? The CokeComm Balance Sheet program now sends you mail if your balance is negative (thanks to marc the perl god). You have been warned. CokeComm Account Status as of 2:30pm Saturday 15 June 1991 Accounts: Current People: +$287.37 People who aren't around much: -$45.02 -------- Total Liabilities: $242.35 Value of Inventory: Sodas: +$154.80 Juice: + $70.20 Fla.Vor.Ice: + $4.05 -------- Total: +$229.05 Cash on Hand: +$57.44 Total Assets: +$286.49 Profit (Assets - Liabilities): +$44.14 CokeComm is solvent! (And there was much rejoicing.) ---- snip - End of insert - snip ---- Other: What is the current status of Highland? We have a disc player that is sick, but what shall we do with it? We need to find out who has taken their service contracts. What shall we do with the tape player in the back? Shall we chuck it? Geoff was at usenix last week. Lots of neat stuff which the secretary isn't going to type in here. :-) Well, apparently he has all of his notes on-line, so I will insert them here: ---- Another cutting ---- June, 1991 Usenix Geoff Collyer I spent most of my time in the halls rather than the sessions since that's usually where the interesting stuff is and since whizzy multi-media stuff doesn't really interest me. 81/2 Rob Pike talked about and demonstrated 81/2, the Plan 9 window system. (Plan 9 is a fast new distributed system from Bell Labs.) Someone wrote an X server for it, so X clients can run under 81/2. It's really fast, network-transparent, and can trivially run copies of itself in its own windows. Plan 9 Current Plan 9 platforms are Nextstation, MIPS Mag- num, Sparcstation SLC, and SGI 4D (for CPU and file servers, notably). The DEC MIPS would be easy, since the compiler exists; Tom Duff estimates a few days' work. A 386 C compiler for Plan 9 may appear, which would really open it up. Bell Labs is looking for interested Universities with some hardware to dedi- cate and a serious interest in exploring Plan 9; a letter of intent from a professor will do. There is a Plan 9 Lion's book. new rc Tom Duff has designed a better rc (the Plan 9 shell) but isn't sure if he'll implement it. X There was near-universal agreement that X11 is too big, too slow, and too hard to program. The sole exception seemed to be Mark Linton, who thinks it's just fine. Rob: ``I come not to praise X, but to bury it.'', ``more is less; freedom is standard; mechanism but no policy'', ``the emperor has too many clothes, but his privates are (still) showing''. Rob says decide on good policy, then implement it as efficiently as possible. 4.4BSD 80% of the kernel and 80% of the utilities are now freed. Code has been ansitised, but headers still compile with classic compilers. Vax and tahoe are orphans; supported machines are 68k, 386, sparc (not sun 3), mips (notably Sony), RT. Posixiation is happening; .1 is done, .2 is in progress. 4.3 vegas is due out in July, will be available by ftp. 4.4 due out 6-9 months after vegas. The 20% of the ker- nel not yet freed includes exec, tty driver, clists, probably ptrace. Bitnet CSnet is dying in a month or so, Bitnet will inhabit the shell of CREN and previous promises to join the Internet name space have been renounced; they plan to keep using .bitnet; we have not yet begun to fight. NNTP nntplink 3.0.1 is due out in a week. A new NNTP is due out in August, with some NNTP 2 support. rn 4.4 is now in beta test, it excludes trn support. ---- snip - End of insert - snip ---- A friend of warlord's says about usenix: "It was sort of like sipb meets Hee-Haw." There is no other other. Other Other: jcb brought in some office toys. He has brought some magnetic liquid and some REAL STRONG (3kGauss) magnets. (Please don't stick the magnets to the cabinets as there is LOTS of magnetic tape and stuff in them.) ambar's kittens are still up for grabs (This means you, Julie.) amgreene says: "Fuzzy seems like a neat boss" cj gets back Weds. (...and there was much rejoicing!) Yay! The high yesterday in Philadelphia was 100 degrees. There is no other other other. The meeting was adjourned at 20:01:51. Minutes taken and submitted by gamadrid.