Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 16 August 1982. The meeting was called to order at 19:30:00 by WER. In attendance were WER, CBF, and GMP. CBF moved to dispense with the reading of the minutes. Passed by white ballot. GMP moved to adjourn; passed, 1-0. Meeting adjourned at 19:30:27 Minutes taken by an anonymous but present member. Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 16 August 1982, take 2. The meeting was called to order at 19:40 by WER. In attendance were WER, CBF, /c, Steve, DCP, RK, and GMP. Late were Barmar, RSL, WMY, HDT, and Lai. The minutes of last week's meeting were read, corrected, and accepted. The minutes of the half-minute meeting earlier today were also read and accepted. During the reading of the minutes, Barmar entered. He was followed by RSL, WMY, and HDT carrying dentistry equipment scavanged from the obviously junked dentist's drill and combination tool they found outside Ken's after supper. Treasurer's Report: There is no treasurer present, either current or former, and we still have no budget. Wes is on vacation for two weeks, so WER hopes we will be able to fake things again at the end of this month the way we did in July. The Finboard proposal had been sent, and they approved it. They gave us money for publications for both last year and this year. There is some fuzziness about whether last year's money went away with the fiscal year, but it was salvaged. Last year's money will arrive when someone who can sign checks returns for the fall. Chair's Report: Rumor hath it that space in Bldg. 11 is so tight that both the SIPB and Wes will be moved elsewhere, probably far away. In Bldg. 11, according to the latest plan, will be the terminal room (second floor), ARCS (third floor), and Publications (penthouse). IPS has complained about Bldg. 11 not having enough space (for instance, none for consultants or User Accounts), apparently to no avail. WER went to Wes last week to suggest that SIPB should be near the terminals, and he was very cranky and unhelpful. The day after this happened WER went by Wes's office to drop something off and he tried to be extra nice to her. WER intends to talk to Corby and maybe Paul Gray to try to fix the space problem, but they're both on vacation now. RK suggested that we consider going through student activity channels to get normal student activity space. WER forgot to mention this during the meeting, but did speak about it just before: TZS recently announced her resignation from the Board. TZS said she had intended to do this at the beginning of the summer. (Note from HGA: "No, she decided not to resign.") Office Report: WER got tired of the soda tracked on the floor, so she dismantled the Pepsi stack and removed the offending can, which was in the middle of the bottom box. The list for recording long distance calls is on the corner of the red bulletin board (near the Spinwringer). Use it. /c finished interfiling last year's applications into the archives, and made three observations: (1) for an other-than-first application, remove all previous staples and use one new one; this will avoid unstapleable-to rats' nests. (2) Unless you're terribly rushed, look up the user's old applications even if s/he claims to not have applied before; some users just forget. Also, some members have been sloppy and not looked in the archives even when the user indicated s/he had previously applied. (3) /c found a continuation of a "learn" application with notes from both the taker and adder that each felt uneasy about giving the user more funds for this vague purpose, but neither felt there was anything specific to send the application to a meeting about. Members should feel able to send any application to a meeting if they feel funny about it. JIS countered that not autoing a vague but technically fundable application is a hassle to the user. CBF added that members should make sure users sign the application, and should ask lots of questions of users who re-apply, and look up their spending. WMY chimed in that /c found a purple application in the archive files; someone must have goofed. Policy on autoing: Students applying for st** accounts can be autoed when under the auto limit, and members of the MIT community can be autoed for Coop accounts. Non-students wanting st** accounts must go to the meeting. WER made a mistake about this last week. Barmar explaned about the COOP folder in the applications drawer. It is equivalent to a bin with a letter; applications should go there after being read at a meeting and added. This does separate Coop and st** applications, but it makes life easier for the treasurer. CBF brought up the subject of consistency of amounts given on first applications, and a long discussion ensued. CBF said that first applications (typically 50 pages of papers) should get only $50 initially, so that the users would have to see us and thus could get advice (they probably aren't really going to type all those papers), we could keep our allocated load down, and our users would be nudged to spend the smaller chunks of money carefully. He felt users on short time schedules or on continuations could be given $100. WMY argued that requiring re-applications this way would be a hassle to the users and an extra burden on members, and that the end-of-term cutoff should be adequate for such careful management of funds. It was agreed that people trying to apply for doing coursework for the next term should be told to apply when the term begins. RSL suggested that CBF's policy apply only to entirely new users. JIS pointed out that each application causes more SIPBAdmin spending. The spending curve was considered; displaying the slide at LSC only four weeks before the term ended seems to have caused re-applications from previous users much more than new first applications. We should limit displaying of slides and distribution of wallet cards to the beginning of terms. Someone asked what the default application amount means. WMY's opinion is that it is what to give when you can't figure out a more correct amount. Is our application-taking procedure too complex? Most of it is useful. Do we trust members to have judgment about giving out funds, or should we have rules added to the auto limit etc. to promote consistent treatment of users by whatever member happens to help them? JIS asked for a motion. CBF moved that "first applications should generally be given for $50 unless the member believes there is good reason to do otherwise. Examples of good reasons are work that must be completed in a time period that would make a second application impractical, or a user obviously experienced enough to know what he needs." It passed 2-0. It was not clear from more discussion whether the matter was settled. Computer Services Report: clean_up caused a user to lose by not parsing bad arguments well; it is getting fixed. The default cutoff date should now be moved to the end of the fall term as 1 Sept. is too close to be reasonable. Barmar pointed out that the default cutoff is for when no better cutoff date is apparent. GMP moved that the cutoff be changed to 1 January 1986; WMY, in the tradition of MCR meetings, moved an amendment that the author of that motion be changed to RK. The cutoff was really changed to 1 January 1983. Telecommunications Report: The Next House 113 works, but the phone man thought the terminal was broken. It's time to order more Spinwringer ribbons. WER wondered whether to order a whole or a half gross, since 9700 use might cut down Spinwringer use. She will consult with Jay before ordering; we have three boxes of ribbons left. WER filled out the paperwork for selling the modems (2 Novations, 3 AJs), and Wes signed it and sent it to Earl Fuller at the Property Office. WER was impressed at our complete records and how easy it was to look up ancient facts in them. She asked the Property Office to not advertise the modems in Tech Talk until September, so students would have a chance to buy them. ZBT called when their Z19 started displaying doubled characters. Someone must have gone into the terminal and frobbed the duplex switch; WER told them how to unfrob it. ADP's Z19 is broken and should be looked at. A phone company guy called from MacGregor today and asked if we had a disconnection order for the dataset there. JIS told him we didn't. WER explained that we do have a move order out for that dataset, and she will follow up and figure out what's going on. Several people complained that the orange book is poorly indexed and hard to discover the current state of a terminal from. This means that anyone other than WER can't understand what's going on. WER will try to make things clearer. Last week the right hand Student Center VT100 was called in by a user there, who said that when powered up it went through its self-checking routine and displayed an error number. GMP pointed out that the error 4 means disconnected keyboard, and is very frequent. Line 7789 on the office phones is somehow broken; it sometimes blinks as if on hold on some phones when it's actually being talked to on another. RK noted that breakage to the office phones and dataset should be logged in the log book and called in for fixing. We should send letters to those dorms that haven't given us terminal room keys yet. Publications Report: Yellow wallet cards will be done soon. We are out of runoff wall charts; more should be made. WER has rewritten the teach_emacs text, and has worked on the NUMS and Emacs handout text. The NUMS master should be done tomorrow, and should be sent to Beane as we have only 10 NUMS. The NETS also need work (WMY should help document his x9700 tool), but that will take time and we have only 10 NETS left, so the old NETS masters should go to Beane for 50 copies. Annual Report Report: Barmar and CBF have been combining the applications data and WMY's drained PDT data into one huge database. There were some errors due to misspellings which Barmar corrected. He will generate some statistics in the next few days. Except for these numbers and the list of Board members, the report is done. R/O Report: Our phones are on the table. The phone man reported that three of the lines worked and he was fixing the last one. The lines should be tested to make sure they are discrete. WER will buy dry munchies and lemonade stuff the weekend before the tour; Steve has volunteered to get vegies the day or so before the tour. WER hasn't been able to reach the Experimental Music Studio guy; she will keep trying. We have 6-120 to start and 39-530 to end the tour. Other: Professor Erengil, visitng from Turkey, got a $10 Coop account for some ECS work. He was used to working out his problems on a TI57, and had trouble with English, BASIC, and the notion that a computer could be larger than his calculator. WER rewrote his TI57 program into ECS-language, and CBF gave him an ECS start_up to keep from further confusing him (he had been typing his program straight at Multics). /c helped make his program work and WMY arranged to print it out. He decided at one point to get another $10 worth of time for another little program, but when he got his hands on his printout (which he could happily bring home to show his wife), he changed his mind and gave the $10 to the SIPB. It went into HBD. Applications: Warning - Michael Candan had applied to do PL/I, but the only things on his dir were someone else's humanities papers. When these were found his $50 continuation application was not added. He called about something else and CBF asked about these files. Candan claimed he thought doing papers was within our policies and the papers were a friend's whose account had run out. However, we have never given an account to the person named in the papers. To Meeting - Rebecca Leaf, $40 on Multics for resume and cover letters, brought to meeting because she is an alumna. Given. Auto - Multics: $1140 st**, $125 Coop 370: $100 During the reading of the autoed applications Lai entered. Leaf came in and was informed that she had won. Other Other: RDM has returned from Fornicalia. There was a brunch expedition Sunday to the Top of the Hub. The meeting was adjourned at 21:35. Minutes taken and submitted by /c. ------- ---(1)---