Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 11/28/94 The meeting was called to order at Mon Nov 28 19:30:05 1994 by ghudson. In attendance were Voting members: ghudson gsstark tlyu hartmans jered warlord jhawk sekullbe jmmikkel svalente rjbarbal mwhitson cat | sorokin dkk yonah nygren abbe autumn Associate members: jweiss jcb mwhitson mhpower sekullbe srz yandros | jtkohl eichin marc Non-voting members: Prospectives: katzchen klmitch rshah grisha quijote aragorn mwp fubob daveg hobbit rrichkus cordelia cyruse elliot | ark3 sjens foley sipb7 seborn Guests: Treasurer's Report: The treasurer is not here. Chairman's Report: Introductions. The chairman walked in during her report. She gave an excuse. Office Report: The office is a pit. jhawk: the center puncher for the 3-hole punch is gone. Move to allocate up to $30 for a new one. Discussion. Can we get a replacement center widget? mhpower looked up the price--it's $29 from lab supplies. Motion amended to up to $40, and to get a widget if available. White ballot. passes. jhawk will deal. quijote: can we get system 7.5 for the Mac? It has really good Mac --> IBM file transfer properties. yandros, who had volunteered to look into it earlier, feels this is a worthwhile purchase. (With System 7.5, most _applications_ can translate from "application-for-DOS" format to "application-for-Macintosh" format.) Motion to allocate up to $100 for it. yandros feels we get system 7.5 questions at least twice a week. Guesses about waiting system 8 are not soon enough to be useful (7-8 months). many-0-5. Motion passes. Stuff is accumulating under tables. It should be dealt with. Do not put Lobdell trays in trash cans. yandros: wants to have an office purge some time this week. Please take stuff home before the office purge. *especially* coats off the coatrack. jered: Jessie's headphones have migrated somewhere. Please put them in her drawer. jered: OS/2 is now on dandelion-patch. There are instructions on the machine for booting any of the three operating systems running on it. gsstark: the CD player/tape player/receiver are back to their previous order. Don't put CDs lying down on top of the cabinet. yonah: the thinwire in the corner nearest the cluster is broken. If machines fall off the net, wiggle the thinwire with the masking tape on it. We need to get some more thinwire. jweiss says someone who works in E40 (besides him) should get some. harass any e40 employees you see. okay, only the sipb members. hartmans: dandelion-patch now has a copy of the ~root/.klogin file that is on yaz-pistachio. jered: OS/2 is alive & happy, but it doesn't have TCP. He will talk to shabby about getting OS/2 TCP. jhawk: there's a microphone from the former bill-the-cat on top of pickled, FYI. Feel free to use it. jhawk: the 31st IETF will be on the mbone next week. gsstark: bill-the-cat is broken (slow). We're looking into it. dkk has given it its 4th new srvtab in two weeks, in case anyone's curious. MIT Computing Report: jhawk: some time Fri. nite/sat, the Frame 4 and fortran license servers on gooshi failed--ops eventually fixed them. dkk: thanks to SIPB for telling the person on pager duty for telling them which machine it was. mhbraun (email to sipb-minutes): What happened was that 2 different SIPB members waited for a SIPB member that did Ops work to log in from NJ and they told him that the license server was broken. He then paged the person on pager duty. ... People should read /mit/opdoc/Pager.Info (you need to be on source-access to read it, so yell if you need it mailed to you) jhawk: discussion from skunks last Tuesday implied that athena is going to be buying up to 20 SGI machines. We'll probably get an SGI when the clusters do. Talk to yandros if you want to do SGI development work between now and then. There is one in the test cluster which is not accessible to most people. mhbraun says that people from SIPB have permission to do this in the E40 test cluster, more or less. talk to him or yandros about it before sauntering into e40 and taking over their machines, though. Computer Services: ghudson: we have 6Gb at E40. The 4Gb drive is ready for testing on rosebud2. Rosebud2 is now set up as a full AFS DB server. jweiss (by email): Actually, at the time of the meeting the 4G disk was undergoing tests in E40. jtkohl: do we want to provide disk space for sipb.mit.edu to be an ftp site for NetBSD? Discussion after the meeting, but basically the answer is yes. talk to him or ghudson. "Return of the Jedi": mhpower: there's a proposal by Suzana Lisanti to combine some of the services from web.mit.edu with some on www.mit.edu. They want us to maintain the activities pages (with pointers into techinfo), and eventually users' homepages. cordelia: are there administrative control issues? The webmasters will cope. SIPB Backup Report: mhpower: we're backing up some data from Brookhaven National Laboratory, since 14:28. The SIPB backup hasn't been done, nor are there formal plans to do so, but there should be. Publications Report: '() R/O Report: it happened quite a while ago. IAP Report: mwhitson: nothing more to say--look at the guide and check entries. jtkohl: people who want to teach a NetBSD course should get together. tlyu: when are we getting entry info from the IAP office to proofread? Are we getting it at all? naah. quijote: will we have a listing on our bulletin board of IAP courses? quijote will deal. Send him info. CokeComm Report: cat: LaVerde*s has to separate Coke products from Pepsi and from RC. Please keep flats separated to make their lives easier. Talk to cat if you're not sure which ones are bottled by which company. Other: jhawk: there's a new bolt in the ceiling. no, it's an old bolt. cordelia: a customizable alternative to www's comment gateway now exists on web-forms.mit.edu -- see brlewis's homepage for instructions. Talk to cordelia if you have questions. Examples can be found on the Technology Review homepage. jhawk: AOL has purchased ANS for $35M. jhawk: the mbone locker will be working for IETF. abbe: Delphi's catalog mentions rtfm a lot. they better have a mirror, or else. mwhitson: Views of the World internet editorial cartoons is available on the web. Look at http://www.mit.edu:8001/comics.html mhpower: the student center was closed. It was okay. cordelia: netscape was defeated by www.mit.edu today. jhawk: orf is back up. rjbarbal: there are at least 3 bugs in the new SIS system. He'll be complaining--talk to him if you know fo any more bugs. hobbit: heard on radio that nat'l library of medicine has about 15Gb of human body imaging data on the web. The data is at: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/extramural_research.dir/visible_human.html Other Other: jered: (from OS/2 documentation) "You can be your own producer with Video IN for OS/2, which gives you the ability to record digital video segments. The videos you create can be viewed on any computer that has OS/2 installed. No additional video hardware is required." the chairman doesn't understand why this is funny. please explain it to her. (but not sipb-minutes) svalente: after several months of being correct, the bursars office again thinks he owes them money. xiphmont report: Rumors that the republic of TwirlFish is sending two envoys to MIT are completely founded. mwhitson: TwirlFish something something are completely founded. Hell, make up your own. If it's funny, say it next week. hartmans: rumors that floating point is better than fixed point on pentium machines are completely founded. jhawk: dungeon 2.6a is now available in the games locker. adventure will be there later. svalente: please stop stealing his schtick. The Chair was really kind of bored while editing the minutes. The meeting was adjourned at Mon Nov 28 20:16:22 1994 by sorokin. Minutes taken and submitted by jcb.