Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 9 November 1981 The meeting was called to order at 19:33 by Richard Kovalcik, Jr. In attendance were RK, WER, GMP, CAH, DMK, HDT, JR, Lai, JSL (asleep) and a user. Late were: HGA, Barmar, c/, WMY, Naha, ACW, J9, Alan, DCP, PAE, LRH, RLL, ED The minutes of the meeting of 2 November 1981 were read and accepted as corrected. HGA, Barmar, c/, WMY, Naha, ACW, J9, Alan, DCP came in during this. WMY took over the meeting at this point. *** User Interrupt *** SCEP - 1981-2 computer budget - see attached budget proposal. Totals: Fall: $358, Spring: $534, Total: $892. They got ~$7,900 from many other sources for other purposes. A large part of their costs are printing costs, approx. $160 in the fall and $210 in the spring. Members were suggesting other alternatives. WER suggested that we give them the fall budget now, and hope they can find another source for the spring, so that we don't have to give them all the money in one shot. DCP moved that we give them all the money, but in two allocations of $400 and $500. DMK amended it to only approve $400 for the first semester, and wait for them to reapply later. Given. WMBR (Cleotis Evans) - $30 until January - has had $600 so far this year. To continue making logs and text editing. Given. PAE, LRH came in during this. Marantz, Joshua - wants to master Lisp and do more text editing. Has had $100 so far. He was text editing reports for a summer employer. ACW pointed out to him that we cannot fund work for personal gain. He did not get payed further for them, so we will not bother worrying about it. He was warned about doing this in the future. He has two more 5-page papers this term. Given $30. Wilson, Shawn - $100 - to do another 40-50 pages, and no more work for the Tech. He sometimes has to use shift 3. He has had $100 so far ($25 of it was just given this week). Given. Charles River Fencing Club - $50 - to write a constitution for the new official MIT fencing club. They are trying to get approved by the Alumni Association. LRH queried as to whether the organization could get the money out of their dues and stuff, but they are not yet fully organized. Given. HSSP - $50 - for a BASIC course. They don't need much, because the students are not allowed to use the terminals, so the teacher will type the programs in, run them, and return the results to the students. Given. *** End User Interrupt *** Treasurer's Report: The Treasurer's Report is in Jay's bin. The Burton terminal situation of last year is confusing. Their terminal was broken from about January to March of 1981. We will prorate their fee for last semester. If anyone, i.e. freshmen, is interested in being an apprentice Treasurer, see Jay. MTD Multics: $3449.91 ($600 SIPB/SIPBADMIN, $1.21 XVIISIII, $662 storage). YTD (exc. Nov., JCF, and 370): 24,309.73 Multics, allocated but not spent: $21,000 There are too many IOU's in the cashbox. Chairman's Report: Multics isn't dead anymore! The Marketing Group is putting up the money to make up the budget cut that was planned. The true test of this is whether WMY's application gets approved. Monte Davidoff is going to Tandem. There will be about seven openings in the near future. WMY is getting concerned about the CCE. Virginia Polytech is getting rid of their 1-CPU 1Meg Multics. Do we want it? Theoretically it could run 20-30 people. The list price is over $3 million, the IPC has put in a bid of $300,000-$500,000. It was GMP's birthday last week. There will be cake at the end of the meeting. Office Report: There is a turntable in the office. It was donated by RK, who got a new one. ACW thinks there are three issues: do we have room for it, is it OK, and if both, do we want it? We will see if it works out. RLL came in during this. Someone has been putting output on the desk, and it gets lost. This happens with dailies and weeklies, too. Gary is testing new software for the daemon so it will ask for the password echoing. JIS called in te SpinWriter for maintenance, but they didn't come. We will call them back. The SpinWriter daemon got hung this morning. The daemons were getting fatal process errors today. We lost (and just now found) a screw from one of the brown chairs. The SIPB_print password was turned off, but RAR said he would turn it back on. Do we want to buy an electric clock for the office, to replace the battery-operated one on the wall. The current one loses about five minutes a week. Barmar will look into the cost. What is our policy about about randomly deferring requests? JIS deferred many of RK's requests, because they would take a long total time. Computer Services: Closed session enterred: Chen, Ta-Ko - WARNING - a thesis was found in her directory. Her husband's Coop account ran out of money, so she copied it to her account. She was given come-to-office, she called us, and the account was turned back on when the dir was fixed. She later came to the office very angry about our actions, and was upset about our treatment of her at that time. She was also upset that we had the nerve to look at her segments' contents. She didn't understand the concepts involved in her abuse of the account. ACW moves that the board apologize to her for this mistreatment and censure the members involved, and that we reconsider our attitudes towards such users. This motion never did get voted on. RK thinks he was not wrong in the way he acted, and does not feel that we should apologize because of whatever was said. We feel it is necessary that we be able to look at users' files in order to continue to perform our service. It is imperative that we be courteous to our users, under any circumstances. HDT suggests that we put more information about the security of files and our access to them in our documentation. ACW thinks we owe her an apology, whether she was guilty or not, for being insulting, and WER agrees. RK claims never to have called her a thief, just that she stole from us, and there is a difference. Lyman thinks she was pulling a sob story on us, and ACW got taken. Lyman proposed two motions: 1) all members should be courteous when dealing with members of the MIT community at all times; 2) if the majority so decides, we should send her an apology; 3) that we should amend the Policy Statement to specifically state that we have the right to look at their files in order to ensure that our funds are not being misused and take whatever compensation is necessary. J9 amended (3) that we send the users a login message so saying. Barmar amended (3) to also say that the default access is read to the world. (3) Passed. (1) Passes. (2) If we send an apology, it should be for the discourtesy shown to her. When dealing with a user, and you feel that it is leading towards discourtesy, you should end the discussion and ask the person to come to meeting. Passes. There was discussion of whether we should revote and allow associate members to vote. We will not. The door opened. Remember to emphasize the policy statement to new users. bx_admin was broken, due to the change in the definition of the copy_switch. This was fixed. There are several other fixes that need to be done, and any members who want some experience fixing them should talk to RK. People seem to be deleting messages in JJ's mailbox without taking the action necessary. This was happening this weekend when spool_ecs_plots blew up. Barmar is working on the Coop policy statement. can_type=replace becomes the default for video terminals next week. Telecommunications Report: Senior House's Bell 212 has been ordered. Next House's dataset has been ordered, and a room is set aside for it. MacGregor's dataset installation will be finished very soon. Chuck Libby (our fiscal officer) called to find out what we are ordering. The Orange Book (record of living groups' interactions with us) is completed. ED came in during this. DEC Field Services' phone number has changed. GMP told us what the new one is. The 11/10's memory board was fixed. The Chaosnet is moving along. Publications Report: Do we still have manuals that should go to living groups? Yes, and they are pretty obsolete. Should we get revised manuals for the dorms, or send the old ones to the dorms (we have to do one or the other, and stop being losers). Barmar will price manual racks. We got NETS and Runoff wallcharts this week. NUMS need to go now. Annual-Report Report: We have an Annual Report. They managed to incorporate Jay's financial report. We want to send them out this week or next. RK moved that the Report be sent to the printer after JIS' comments are incorporated and it sit on the board for a day. Passed. We discussed how many we will print, and to whom they have to be sent. Everyone involved in the production of the Annual Report was commended. IAP Report: Preregistration is not necessary for our IAP Courses. We will keep a tick-mark count of calls about IAP Courses. The funds for a microphone for the LISP Course were not approved. However, the IAP funds coordinator has offered to let us borrow his portable speaker system. Other: HI-Multics and LL-ASG are back on the ARPANET. Does the office want microfiches of S-1 documentation? Yes. A quote was read out of the minutes of May 26, 1975 was read by GMP. Applications: Chen, Ta-Ko - $50 - to try different types of writing. Resumes and letters. Has had $50 and a Warning Form. Given. Lloyd, Dane - $25 - to write resume. Has had $250, and written an 80-page paper. Given. Rune (Kwan Lee) - to enter an 80-page special free publication, which Graphics Arts would typeset. Given $120. Rivkin, Kenneth A. - $50 - writing papers for several courses. Has had $100. Given. Chiarchiaro, W. J. - $20 by EC - to finish paper with deadline. He claimed to be using mostly shift 2, but the records show him using mostly shift 1. Huang, Kuan-Tase - $75 - doing project papers for courses. About 60-pages for two courses. Has had $100, some of which was for courses for last term. Given. Schwartz, Steven - $25 - to finish the work he has been doing. The ECS spooler broke down and he had to log in shift 1 to plot it. Since it is after 11pm, we will not process the autos now. WER will do them tomorrow. Total appropriations: $2590 without Coop Autoed: Student: $1515 370: $100 To Meeting: $955, EC: $20, all Student. Coop: $64.64 Other Other: The Air Force paid LRH. On 11/27 he will be leaving for three weeks, and then will be getting certified as a flight instructor. If he can find five people who want to learn to fly from him, they will be able to buy a plane for training purposes. This would end up costing the students half as much as it normally would. See him for details. People express tentative and non-tentative interest. Camex had its end-of-fiscal-year party the other night. Today they started two new employees in one day, and they went through two cases of champagne at the party. ED is worried about them becoming too large. There is an article in the Globe about Stratos today. The shuttle didn't go up last Wednesday. People were planning to go to Florida to watch the launch on Friday, but it was postponed to this Thursday morning. J9, ACW, WMY, and c/ are planning to rent a car and go. If there are four more people, then they can also come with them. There is also a possibility that LRH will fly there. J9's car got a new battery, and she took it home. She took out the radiator today, and found out that it is yucky. Barmar is trying to organize a group to go to "Fiddler on the Roof" on Friday. See him. Steak Fry is this Thursday. It is $5 and $6. The meeting was adjourned at 23:29 to birthday cake. Minutes taken and submitted by Barry Margolin.