Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 27 April 1981 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by William M. York. In attendance were WMY, GMP, Barmar, c/, RK, DMK, Naha, KYM, J9, JSL, WER, Jay, RLL, Alan. Late were: ACW, KHS, DCP The minutes of the meeting of 20 April were read and accepted as corrected. USER INTERRUPTS (many in a row); David Dorer: 5-6$ to finish report already mostly complete. RK: move to give $6 to finish. Given. He also wants another $15 to do another report. RK: move to reject, it is new work. Motion passes. He nets $6. Gavin Duffy: $100 to finish 1/3 done paper for political science. Has total of $350, reduced to $200, $40 more than actual allocation. (see last week) RK&RLL: what did you do with the account so far? Duffy: A paper for Minsky. He is not writing it linearly, so it is hard to stop at this point and produce something useful. BIM: what is the minimum to get something useful? RK: we should give $50. Alan: move to give $50. Passes. Sarah Slaughter: unspecified amount to process questionaires on the socialization of MIT students. Must be VS/1 for SPSS. c/ the budget is tight, can't this wait till summer? They need to do a run by late May. The whole project is projected at $250. The initial run might get in under $75. BIM: if we just ran it through Consistent System, we might get it done for very little money. c/ move to give $15 to run once on Multics. BIM will help. Given. Treasurer's Report: We spent $2000 last week, quoth RLL. Total spending to date this month is $8000, and billing ends tonight. WHEW. Coop ran out of money yesterday, we added $2000. We spent $100,000 year to date. We are spending Wes' extra 10K. We spend about $300 every day but Saturday, which is much lower. Could the absentees run interactively? No. Chairman's Report: The chairman wrote a letter for the budget proposal. It was read and smiled upon at the meeting. What can Wes do to us? Could he tell us not to do text processing? This seems unlikely. Do the statistics tell which people processed text? No. Our overhead may show in the report to our embarassment. The Tech wrote an inaccurate article about the budget situation. The secretary's letter to the Tech was being reviewed at the time, so it was a bit too late. The reporter talked to the chairman on the phone, and then got the story slightly wrong. They printed a number for the center's total budget that appears to be their cost for paper. Roger came in to talk to us about this. The fifth floor was upset about the content of the article. They are under the mistaken opinion that The Tech is a newspaper. Any volunteers to write a letter of correction are gladly accepted by the chairman. Naha will try as will WER. Office Report: BIM told everyone to look at a blackboard object on the subject of piled-high trashcans. Put members' output in their output bin, not in the mail bin. RK: can we tell when a coolie job is done? If the slip is floating around the office, we can't tell if it is done. If you do not finish a job, put it back in the box. Write done jobs in the log book. The log book was exhibited to everyone, and that ceremony was logged. Be nice to the plant. But do not stroke it. Blackboard messages should have date, time, and taker of message. It would help if it was the correct date. The chair went off to the chair hospital. [Le chair est faible ...]* The manual rack now has labels in the slots to tell you where to put the manuals when (WHEN, not if) you put them back. There are used chairs available from the equipment exchange. We will go look at them. Computer Services: RLL: WRITE THE NAMES OF PEOPLE WHO PAY FOR COOP IN THE CASH BOOK. WRITE THEIR USERID'S. Naha: There were problems with the Student Center terminal room on Saturday, all the terminals seem to have hungup. We do not understand this. Barmar: the extraneous acl's for *.Student/*.Student2 were went away. Perhaps they were never there. RK: move to put SIPB_test on the Coop project, so that motd's et. al. can be checked. RLL: it could spend lots of money, real money, that we have not allocated. BIM: SIPB_test is available to any SIPB member. We do not let *.SIPBADMIN hack the Coop project, why should they be able to log in and spend money? GMP: we should be able to trust members. Alan: we should give it $10, that is enough to do something reasonable, and cannot screw us. WMY: even with this account, the damage is limited to $10 plus quota. This is much less serious that adding users to the PMF. The motion is to give $10 to the user SIPB_test.Coop. The motion passes. How do we fit all these Student's onto one project? We cannot. BIM: I like the StudentA through StudentZ approach. It makes it obvious where to find any particular user. WMY: we can make this be only five projects and use alphabetical ranges. This wins over date-oriented because users do not move from project to project. What do we do with users from this year carried over? We move them over to the new projects. BIM: move to do this. Project names will be of the form StudentAL etc. Aliases all in lower case. Demographic analysis of the post office will determine the break points. There will be links in >udd>Student to the user's home directories in the new projects. Carried over users will be moved. This will begin with the new fiscal year. What is the policy for applications over the summer? Can we extend someone into the summer without a to meeting application? RK: we should defer applications for the very end of the fiscal year until May 18'th when we know if we have money. That is, people who are cutoff from 18 May to the end of the fiscal year have been effectively deallocated, and must reapply. There was a motion to implement that proposal. Naha: we have allocated it, why shouldn't they be able to spend it? GMP: so that what little money we have goes to people who we really want to give it to. Clarification of policy: you can auto an extension into a new term. BIM: there is an amendment to require an application with a new amount for the summer. The existing allocations are revoked. The motion is to automatically defer these people to May 18. We will do a dump/cleanup at the end of the term. Motion is: everyone is turned off on May 23rd. Any applications for use after May 23rd will be deferred till May 18th when we will see how much money we have. Motion passes. Still no access to unbundled source. Ford is apparently going to do the global AML, so we do not have to. Work has happened on the user meeting. It will be Wednesday at 7pm in 9-150. There was a slide. There was even cheering for the slide. Also some booing, but we expected that. Show up for the meeting. Fliers were posted by the Coolie. Kudo's for WER. The projects are StudentAD, StudentEH, StudentIM, StudentNS, StudentTZ. Telecommunications: SIPB sold a terminal to CDT. We tried to sell him a DecWriter, but we could not convince him. So we sold him an Ann Arbor instead. The hardware proposal goes to Wes tomorrow. Do we want a data lamp and a CD lead control on a 113 dataset for the NRSA? Yes! The SpinWriter is still broken. Perhaps they await the part? They will be called. (The ribbon holder clip is broken.) Publications Report: McCormick has manuals in a box. East Campus has correct manuals in a rack. Should we put manuals out in non-locking racks while waiting for new racks? Jay: move to buy 5 manual racks that lock. Can we convert non-locking racks? Not clear. Jay will look into it with c/. WER: a new policy statement is on the board. Read and comment. Should there be runoff control arguments on the wall chart? WMY: just look for comments in the mail. GMP: we must remember to update all those manuals in the field with new updates and new manuals. We need to make it clear to publications that we own N manuals, and that we are entitled to N updates of them. Jay: perhaps we should have manuals for other computers than Multics? GMP: we tried to order CMS manuals last year, but they were out of stock. How about EECS? no consensus on this. We will have a command that sets up the SIPBTEXT environment and search rules etc. for non SIPB users. The font catalog will be improved to clarify the use of DC1. Annual Report: no significant action. Other: Elections next week. Freshman letter must be sent. RDM investigated a CWBeane charge account. They want a letter on letterhead with credit references, a bank, and we must spend a minimum amount per month and per order charged. It seems inpractical. We have a card to get into NCC as JJS. The NCC is in Chicago. When the phone call list gets full, put a blank piece of paper on top. Applications: Lin Ho got two userid's because Steve LeBlanc did not check for previous applications. $50 to meeting for Mistry to learn pl/1, text editing by DMK. Rejected. $100 to meeting by DMK for Awwad for numerical applications. Rejected. $30 Naimon to reedit a UROP proposal. to meeting. BIM: move to give $10. Given. WARNING Giandomenico, preparing papers for other people. Actually, runoff-ing and printing papers for other people (Gene Chang). The papers are edited elsewhere. BIM: this is wrong. This is just like Knox, who we rejected last week. JSL: I violated policy to prevent a user from losing completely. WMY: That sounds dubious. BIM: I think we should pull the allocation. These people are just like a whole list of people we rejected. JSL: THE FACTS TEND TO BE IRRELEVANT!!!!!!!! BIM: move to tell this person that we do NOT approve of the use of his account for Gene Chang's work. This is alowed to die noteing that JSL told him not to do more than one paper from Chang. JSL: how about a mailbox that ran runoff over the things sent to it. BIM: this is awful, it encourages the misuse of EECS. $30 for Williams to meeting. Revision and extensive rewrite of a paper. Has $70. Motion to give $30. She is graduate student in EE. Given. Extension for Bude on Student through the summer. Deferred to May 18 as per earlier motion. No Auto; To Meeting: $111 Student; 0 370; Coop: $200; Other Other: There was a trip to Cape Ann. J9 aquired a steering wheel for the price of three cups of coffee. The result is a car that works. J9 fould a 1948 tandem bicycle frame in the garbage. She got a note from Schwinn explaining it. JSL will improve the design process for steak fry steaks. There will be an aurora tonight. There will be a trip to look for it. * [The flesh is weak] The meeting was adjourned at 2245. Minutes taken and submitted by Benson I. Margulies