Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 08/10/98 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by elliot. In attendance were Voting members: elliot jmorzins yak yonah yandros klmitch pipa | jered gisele magdalen Associate members: mhpower mycroft marc jmmikkel jweiss jhawk jemorris abbe mcmullan eichin | wesommer Non-voting members: Prospectives: lnemzer jmercado xela "Martyn Peck" lockhart golem tb Guests: Treasurer's Report: yandros: He's playing softball. Chairman's Report: Office Report: klmitch: The office is a bit of a pit over here. Why are all these cables on the floor? jhawk: Those are temporary, from when there was a whole pile of disks. I don't think they're getting in the way of anything. yak: The mac has lots of operating systems on it. I think it would be nice if it had fewer on it. I'd like to make MkLinux go away, reinstall Rhapsody, have MacOS running under the Blue Box on Rhapsody, and disconnect the BeOS drive and leave it there for when Jen gets back from Germany. I want MkLinux DR3 to go onto gene. jweiss: updating os's seems like it's well and good.. why is it related to _removing_ os's? yak: I'd like to make milq less unstable. Put mklinux on gene (jmercado volunteered to do this), put Rhapsody DR2 on milq. mycroft: gene is too slow for mklinux. Don't touch the contents of the small disk on the top of the stack. pipa: gene is too slow for mklinux. Gene doesn't have a head; this may make development work difficult. As far as updating machines, I think you should go for it; I think this is a cool idea. jhawk: I heard justifications for why things should be kept, but would like to know why you want to remove things. yak: [Gives ways to use gene without a head.] Rhapsody DR1 is worse than Rhapsody DR2. Mklinux DR2 will go away because there's DR3. The BeOS disk will be disconnected but not erased. I'll back up MacOS before I change the machine. I want to get blue box running under Rhapsody. jhawk: [doesn't want yak to summarily nuke things] yak: [says he won't] marc: are there any technical difficulties with leaving mklinux on milq? yak: there are no difficulties; it's another hard drive that causes us to worry about the flaky SCSI chain. If people want it there I can leave it; but I'd rather remove it. yak: I am not going to have a bootable macos partition; the machine will boot into rhapsody, and blue box can be run from there. jweiss: I think it'd be good to have a bootable partition, for the sake of users who might want to use the mac. yak: Anything that users could conceivably still need will still be there. eichin: We don't have any machines in the office that run Win32 operating systems. There is a PC emulator for the Mac, Virtual PC from connectix, that looked very nice. It's $150 or so; I propose getting it. marc: A number of months ago, we were promised a wintel machine from I/S. This hasn't materialized, due to allocation issues. I think we should probably just by a Wintel machine, rather than some emulator thingy. tb: Could you give a reason for getting a wintel machine that is not addressed by having an emulator running on a Mac? marc: Users have questions that seem to be system-level; I'm not sure playing with a software emulator will show us how to answer these questions. eichin: The emulator is a hardware-level emulator. (You can run NetBSD on it.) pipa: I like the idea of having a windows95 machine, whether it's an emulator or a machine jhawk: Let's close discussion. Move to allocate up to $200 to purchase the emulator. [vote: 9-1-6 : passes] yak: We should get office 98 for the Mac; it's better than Word 6. pipa: I agree. Users have documents made with word 8, and Frame or Applix can't read there. jweiss: Move to allocate up to $600 to purchase an upgrade to Office 98 for the mac. It should cost less than this. mhpower: objection: I think there's been sipb members who work for MS; past discussion indicate that we may be able to get a donated copy. jmorzins: it's my understanding that it should cost closer to $200-$300. jweiss: calls the question [vote: 11-1-3 : passes] jhawk: xcb's system board was replaced; the machine is still panic'ing frequently. It should get a new system board this week. Office Cleaning Report: jhawk: It looks like the office hasn't been vacuumed this month. People should ask the cleaning people to clean it. pipa: People should pay attention to the distinction between the recyclable-bottle and non-recyclable-bottle blue bins in the back. jweiss: The filters were changed last week. Don't know if the rest of the air paths in the overhead units were vacuumed. MIT Computing Report: jweiss: 8.2.9 goes public tonight. pipa: Delphyne went down last night. jweiss: Delphyne was hosed out of the water by a client. Computer Services: yonah: There were an amazing number of users who reported delphyne going down, because the List of Universities was unable during those 10 days or so. SIPB Backup Report: pipa: UFS backups are being done now. Publications Report: jhawk: We have more Athena reference cards. They're pink. jweiss: Do we need to stock up on things before rush? pipa: Is somebody dealing with getting the Welcome to Athena packets? elliot: We usually get a big box of them magically. abbe: Keep an eye out for freshman grabbing one copy of everything just because they're there.. R/O Report: pipa: R/O is in three weeks. jhawk: Is it still called R/O? [mumble: maybe it's just called O Week.] IAP Report: CokeComm Report: pipa: CokeComm names are highlighted if you owe me money. Give me money if you owe it to me. I'll make a run next week. pipa: Try to keep empty cans segregated into different flats, for Coke and Pepsi products. LaVerdes likes them this way. jhawk: I'm not sure this idea is feasible, given space constraints back there. People have a tendency to put flats on top of air vents, which is not reasonable. wesommer: I think it can be done... Other: Other Other: jweiss: Come on the "Boston, by bike, at night" bike trip this weekend. pipa: I got a motorcycle license recently. magdalen: Has anyone seen a softball glove? It's been missing for a while. jhawk: I've lost a knife (red Victorinox), and wonder if anyone's seen it. jweiss: Chad's here. Stare at him. The meeting was adjourned at 20:03. Minutes taken and submitted by jmorzins.