Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 09/2/96 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by yonah. In attendance were Voting members: hartmans, kretch, fubob, cat, yonah, rjbarbal, ~fastcart, djib, marthag, bert, abbe~, nygren, len18~, beaners, danw, rshah, svalente | sit, cordelia Associate members: jhawk, ghudson, marc, mhpower, eichin, jtkohl, jweiss | warlord, srz, raeburn Non-voting members: Prospectives: amu, annmarie, jhbrown, klmitch, tlai, jdaniel, pipa, jfmurphy, daveg, emhavens, katyking, bbbaker | aurora Guests: Treasurer's Report: ghudson: I move to allocate up to $150 for IEEE 1003.1-1996, better known as the POSIX C language bindings for system services with extensions for realtime and threads. White ballot passes. Chairman's Report: Introductions. yonah: [push to EC meeting] I move to make "voting members" for this meeting be the union of voting members now and those in two days, and "members eligible for EC" to be those members who will be in two days. Passes 6-0-0 [pop] Chairman election: marthag: I nominate yonah [second] accepted. bert: I nominate cat [second] accepted. mhpower: I nominate marthag [second] decline. count: yonah=13, cat=2, abstain=3 Vice-chairman election: warlord: I nominate cat [second] accepted. count: cat=16, abstain=1, invalid=1 Treasurer election: marthag: I nominate hartmans. declined. cat: I nominate kretch. [second] accepted. abbe: I nominate fubob. [second] accepted. warlord: I nominate Bean. [second] declined. beaners: I nominate nygren. declined. The candidates are fubob and kretch. count: kretch=10, fubob=8, invalid=1. yonah: We will now have elections for two members at large of the EC. fastcart: I don't want to be EC. beaners: 3 bert: 2 cordelia: 2 danw: 8 fubob: 5 harrisj: 2 jmmikkel: 1 mkgray: 4 mwhitson: 1 nathanw: 4 rjbarbal: 4 svalente: 2 Winners are fubob, danw. hartmans: [push to old EC] I move to approve elections. yonah: second. Passes 6-0-0 [pop] [yonah passes gavel to himself] yonah: I'm now the chairman. yonah: I move to nominate aurora (Heather Harrison). [second] many-1-3 Office Report: warlord: The office is here not only to serve the members of the SIPB, but to serve the MIT community. There have been members of the SIPB using the SIPB for their personal computers--sitting here with the door locked doing work. I move that no member should be logged into the office working with the door locked and the lights out. danw: second. abbe: I think that while the goal is reasonable, there are times when it is reasonable to break this rule. I don't want to have this as a hard and fast rule. ghudson: I may be busy doing something that I don't want to be distracted from. I think it's stupid of the SIPB to tell me I can't be doing something to FTGOS other than answer user questions. bert: I would like to amend the motion to include non-SIPB work. [warlord accepts as friendly ammendment.] ghudson: I still object. I don't think it costs us. warlord: It costs us a lot. cordelia: I think it comes down a fundamental difference: should the SIPB be serving the users as a primary goal. I think it does, I think that is the goal of the motion. aurora: [Gave example where user asked question, then came back later because the answer given didn't work, saw the member still inside the office with the door closed and lights off, and thought that the member was hiding.] kretch: I agree that SIPB has communication problems. It's reasonable to expect people not to be wanting to help users all the time. marthag: There is another reason to keep the door shut. If you're going to be in the office for a short period of time. Prospectives come in when you open the door; you have to wait for them to leave. This can be a problem if I'm short on time. The office is not only for answering questions. marc: If I come to the office and it's closed and I don't want to deal with user questions. warlord: First of all hiding in the back doesn't mean you won't be seen. marc: Motions are a bad way to set policy. The OLC office has blinds; maybe we should get some also. nygren: It is a problem when people want to work in the office for long periods of time with the lights out. I can see reasons for short periods. I think we should strongly discourage it, but leave it up to the discression of members. abbe: I think cordelia said that people should have a responsibility to keep the office open. I am one the strongest proponents of the kinder gentler SIPB, but having a hard and fast law isn't going to change the perception of the SIPB. cordelia: I said that with privileges come responsibility. We have prime real estate. In response to prospectives logging in, you can tell them before hand. We don't have statistics to say people will like us less because the office is closed. abbe: I think there are times when having the door open is worse than having the door closed. jhawk: I have a logic problem. I don't understand what the lights have to do with this. warlord: If the door is open, the lights should be on. jhawk: I've certainly been in the situations of being paged for external work, and had to be logged in and using the phone. I don't think it's an abuse of SIPB privileges. danw: We got lots of money and free stuff from groups on campus and they don't do it just because we're good at playing angband. len18: I think we should be open and available between about 10 AM and 3 AM. I think this motion would be reasonable between those times. warlord: Mostly the reason I made this motion was to get the discussion going; I'm going to withdraw the motion. srz: This discussion has gone on for 30 minutes. I have better things to do with my time than listen to this, especially since there are better forums for it. bert: I would like to move that it be noted as a standing policy of the SIPB that if the door is open the lights should be on. ghudson: I don't think it creates that's hostile of an environment to have the lights on. fails 6-16-7. abbe: What list should further discussion be on? yonah: whither-sipb jhawk: I don't think these things should come up as motions; I think they should come up in email first. marthag: The Mac is off the net. I don't know why. I move to spend up to $200 to fix the problem. [second, white ballot]. fastcart: Is my cart in the way where it is? yonah: No, except possibly during meetings. jweiss: The last uncollected item that was claimed during the coat rack purge was claimed. I'm going to get rid of the unclaimed stuff to disappear. The SIPB has passed motions to get rid of milo and the RT. If people don't expect me to deal, they should let me know. Also, snork will be the RT to stay around. klmitch: Meadow is toner low one. jweiss: I move to allocate up to $400 to buy 2 toner cartridges. [second] [white ballot] MIT Computing Report: jhawk: It appears that the newer CD drives on the newer sparc 4's don't support pass-through audio. mhpower: It appears that a decision was made that SIS passwords would be usable the day after registration, instead of having a 2 week waiting period as before. Computer Services: svalente: Use the beta sipb locker; attach sipb-new. Don't attach sipb-new on unsupported platforms. SIPB Backup Report: yonah: rtfm-maintainers were lame last week. marthag: so were charon-maintainers. jtkohl: What is the status of the RTFM migration? mhpower: Now there are more rtfm maintainers who are news.answers maintainers. This should help migrating the scripts. Publications Report: aurora: I'm rewriting iZephyr. If changes should happen let me know. jhawk: Mail was sent about cluster cards. sit: I move to allocate $200 to make 100 copies of iAthena and Installing Redhat-Athena. [second, white ballot.] jhawk: When using the vacuum on keyboards, remember not to vacuum keys. R/O Report: fubob: Tours happen Thursday at 1845 in lobby 7. I move to allocate $100 for food. [second, white ballot] Also, six volunteers are needed. IAP Report: yonah: The preview guide deadline is this Friday. jhawk: We should get an IAP sucker. Both cordelia and jtkohl are interested in volunteering, unfortunately, they aren't interested in volunteering themselves. CokeComm Report: jweiss: people should learn the difference between redeemable and non-redeemable bottles. Other: jhawk: cmitch is leaving MIT. jhawk: The first public sendmail 8.8 beta is out: ftp.sendmail.org:/ucb/sendmail/.beta/sendmail.8.8.Beta.1.tar.gz ghudson: A Beta of Qmail has been released; it's a sendmail replacement. jhawk: qmail may have the potential to cause really serious problems with Internet email because it opens multiple simultaneous outgoing connections to the same host in parallel. This may be Very Bad. mhpower: Sometime recently, anon.penet.fi was shut down for legal reasons. A finish lower court said that email on the Internet is not protected by finish privacy law. jtkohl: Full details in privacy digest. jhawk: An new XFree86 beta will be out in a few weeks. jhawk: The MBone was affected by a nasty bug in cisco's PIM implementation that resulted in all PIM routers getting sick and multicasting a constant 150kbps. Fixing this problem required having each individual PIM router be fixed, and there are still remnants of it. jhawk: Followup to last-week's X11 security hole: there's another overrun in libX11 (pertaining to displays > 128chars). Fix is not in XFree86 3.1.2F. mhpower: Lynx 2.6 was released four hours ago. Other Other: abbe: License to Kill will be showing at my apartment. aurora: It's Bean's birthday. [everyone sings happy birthday as ice-cream cake is brought in] The meeting was adjourned at 21:05.