Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 18 Oct. 82 The meeting was called to order at 7:35pm by WER. In attendance WER, DCP, CBF, Naha, RK, clm, PLJ, eliza, BCN, ACW, GMP, psr, Steve, dinarte, Barmar, J9, RDZ, LAI, JIS, rsl (briefly), TZS (briefly), JSL (briefly). A motion by CBF to not read the minutes. The discussion centered on whether or not people read the minutes, and the claim was made that we need to read the minutes in order to correct them. ***User Interrupt*** KKYee. $60.00 ->mtg, for text editing. Given. CBF warned him that he is not likely to get any more. Benfer. unspecified ->mtg. $70.00 given. CBF also warned him that he is not likely to get any more. *** end user interrupt *** Back to the motion. The chairman thinks it is a good idea. The secretary doesn't. Motion to read minutes at the meeting at the chairman's descretion. Passed. Since many people did not anticipate the new policy, today's minutes will be read. The minutes of the meeting of last week were read and accepted as corrected. TREASURER'S REPORT Spending: MTD $5739.20 YTD $21567.46 last week: $2157.24 week before: $2141.23 spba/spb $591.83--this is 10% of month-to-date Jay says that we could go to the Provost's office and say that we need more money and they would probably give it to us. RDZ volunteered to help. Barmar suggested that we mention the IPS courses. JIS wants to know why we are suddenly spending more money in the last couple of weeks. CBF says that it is because of the text processing. JIS says we should bring a budget proposal to the Provost's Office w/ real figures. JIS argues that some of the powers-that-be at MIT believe that MIT should not be funding text processing for its students. JIS doesn't want to throw the issue wide open. CBF on the other hand, says that this is a good time to throw the issue wide open. Barmar pointed out that MIT is currently looking into text editing. Should we be funding IPS courses? JIS doesn't think we should. CBF doesn't think it will be significant. RDZ agrees that we should come up w/ some kind of proposal & specific explanations of where are money is going. PSR brought up the question of getting a slice of Multics. Barmar said that we SHOULD be funding IPS courses. Back to getting our own pie slice of Multics. CBF thinks that if we mention the pie slice to the Provost's Office when we ask for more money they will not like us to ask them for money in the future. CBF thinks that a small junta should meet to discuss who we should talk to and what we should ask for. CBF gave us figures for month-to-date spending broken down by shift and hours: SHIFT-I ALL OTHER TOTAL money $956.09 $4307.00 $3351.65 hours 134 799.91 833 $/hr $7.13 $4.19 $5.10 This means 22% of our spending was on shift one. Motion by RK to cut off shift one. CBF would rather ask for money than turn off shift one because he hopes that we have left the stone age when people were expected to adjust their schedules around the needs of a computer. Given the current situation, however, he feels that we will have to turn off shift one. RK reminds the board that you can do twice as much computing on other shifts. JIS thinks we might be able to negotiate getting shift II rates during shift-I. CBF considers this an excellent argument for getting our own computer. DCP asked about the most-preferred-status question, & JIS said that that was irrelevant. PSR said that if we turn off shift-I we will spend about $1.00 per user who comes in desperate at 11:00am. Naha said there was nothing wrong w/ handing in papers late. CBF does not think we should encourage students to hand in papers late, and sympathyzes w/ people who trust our office for getting output in a hurry more than they trust the operators. We could give SIPB_user_1 for emergency shift one usage. It is suggested that we should give each user a shift-I cutoff. The problem w/ this is that it is a per month limit, & users may screw themselves. Amendment by JIS to get rid of a 1000 records of nbdd. The technical details of this were also discussed. Dies for lack of second. Amendment by KAM to put a $10.00/month limit on shift-I. W/ a friendly amendment from JIS to warn them about exactly what this implies. Barmar mentioned that people who have already spent their $10.00 will be in trouble. Passed. Motion passed as amended. Members can turn on shift one for users with a good reason. RDZ wants suggestions for a time for the way-above-mentioned junta to meet. RDZ seems to have become in charge of this meeting, which is scheduled for 11:00 am Saturday. CHAIRMAN'S REPORT WER saw Herb Richardson. He did not say anything that she had not already heard. He is supposed to be in charge of looking into where computing is going at MIT but he isn't talking about it. He said there would probably be personal computers used in classes, but he wouldn't say anything specific. The IPS Annual Report came out. It does not mention the SIPB at all. WER will mention this to them. Barmar said someone had complained that we did not mention funding IPS courses in our Annual Report. CBF went to talk to Betsy Shoemaker, who has taught 1.00 for the past few years. For the past few years it has presumed prior experience. The course tries to be much better than 2.10. It was news to Shoemaker that her course was replacing 6.030. Eliza is taking 2.10, and she and Barmar said that 2.10 was much the same as 1.00. Course I is offering 1.00 both terms instead of one because of our 6.030 letter. OFFICE REPORT There are open office hour slots on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. This is totally unacceptable. People should sign up, especially freshmen, especially Dinarte and Eliza. The winning chair is back. Only take a continuation for additional funding, not changing projects or cutoff dates. Check user' spending and make sure that people read the policy statement. Motion by RK to say that only active members can take applications. We have already decided take inactive members off the SIPBadmin project. Passed. Inactive members must get a co-signiture of an active member, except where explicitly exempted by the chair. (There was temporarily a motion to remove inactive members from SIPBadmin, but it was withdrawn by its author (RK) when he remembered that the issue had come up earlier and the board had then passed a motion to remove inactive members from the project.) COMPUTER SERVICES WER thinks we should make the $200.00 text-editing limit a policy or stop telling people it is. CBF thinks we should warn them. Motion by Barry that we should indicate to users that there is some kind of limit at $200.00 which will be difficult to pass. Passed. ***User Interrupt*** Stork, Cristoff. last week's defferred application. $100.00 ->mtg. He is here this time. Given $60.00. There is a new handout in the drawer (w/ the NUMS etc.) describing the fonts available from the Spinwriter. RK finished process_paper. Steve found out that we can't get early printouts of the student directory due to privacy issues. RK says that we need to know who is a student and would like an update every month. He suggest that we go to Wes Burner and get a letter saying that we desperately need this information. Steve will try again. Users should be registered on the projects by their userid's, not their last names. TELECOMMUNICATIONS REPORT Where should we put the concentrator? WER will talk to Paul Gray if we can't find space. RK thinks that we should perhaps talk to Dennis Barron (but RK doesn't want to be the one, & sympathizes w/ the poor person who does). CBF will do it in January. Whoever wants to do it before then should do it. DCP says "It's not going to work," to anyone who wants to hear him. There ensues a technical discussion that the secretary does not understand. WER is going to send mail to Dennis Barron even though she does not know what to say. At this point Barmar took over chairing the meeting. Someone should take the UDS modem over to Fenway. RK will do it only if the entire board will nominate him and admit that no one else is competent to do it. PSR will take it if someone will tell him how to get there (but he will only do it during daylight). We still haven't gotten terminal room keys for all the dorms. We have gotten a key from Burton, EC, effectively from Senior House, and a great excuse from MacGregor. (Sorry, I do not know what the great excuse was; it was only mentioned as such at the meeting, not explained). BCN will send the dorms a letter. We need another modem. CBF thinks that it shouldn't be a Vadic, but after some discussion it is decided to table this until there are more people. If DEC complains when you tell them that we have equipment on service contract, give them the contract number. CBF has put it in many accessible places (ask him). TERMINAL REPORT CBF read the TTR's. PUBLICATIONS REPORT We got 300 NUMS, 300 NETS, and we will get 300 Emacs handouts as soon as someone goes to Beane. Hell froze over last week, and a box of manual updates walked around campus (dragging Penny and RK along with it) and got themselves collated. IAP REPORT Barmar talked to Dorothy Corbett about IAP courses. They will be charging $30 and $40 for their courses. He told her not to mention us at all for the first guide. We should think about what we want to about IAP courses. NB: for current IPS courses (not IAP courses) we are subsidizing all but $10.00. Barmar brought in the forms for the text processing course and the lisp course. He has also written up a description of an intermediate multics course and an advanced lisp course. OTHER APPLICATIONS Morais, Dinarte R. $50.00 ->mtg. He is a member. Given. Smith, Warren D. $100.00 ->EC but it failed, so ->mtg. Given $50.00 Schnitzler, Raymon A. $50.00 ->mtg. Given. Panzer, Diane C. $50.00 ->mtg. She is staff. Given, w/ the proviso that we tell her we are only giving her this once. Steven Chamberlain. Warning form. Writing something which appeared to be for an organization, OCBP. Promised not to do it again. Ralph Embom. Warning form. Typed a paper for Karen Y. Spencer. He promised not to do it again. SCEP $50.00 given by EC. John Zilber $10.00 given by EC. Total appropriations: $ (without Coop) Autoed: Student: $2540.00 370: $0.00 JCF: $140.00 EC: Student: $60.00 370: $0.00 To Meeting: Student: $390.00 370: $0.00 Coop: $20.00 OTHER OTHER Allegro Non Troppo will be showing. Have fun. Something about an assassin session. The meeting was adjourned at 10:55pm. Minutes taken and submitted by Katharine.