Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 11/27/2000 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by nathanw. In attendance were Voting members: dmaze tibbetts alex_c nathanw yak nim amu golem jmorzins kolya sly | lgdean Associate members: cana belmonte cfox zacheiss mycroft tytso klmitch lnemzer rjbarbal jhawk | ocschwar Non-voting members: Prospectives: aletta int18 eisenbud xela dbailey | lael Guests: Treasurer's Report: '() Chairman's Report: '() Office Report: tibbetts: We have an office. golem: The office fire alarm went off. nathanw: That is, the building fire alarm. tibbetts: I still haven't returned the Belkin switch. I suck. Belkin will RMA it, so I don't need to deal with NECX. sly: I got office supplies last week. We have whiteboard markers, erasers, and ibuprofen. If we start to run out of first aid supplies in the monolith, people should let me know. If I'm feeling really inspired at some point, I'll put a sign up in the monolith. Office Cleaning Report: cfox: kcr and I took apart lnitp and vacuumed it out because its fan was noisy. This had the side effect of accidentally testing 'mkserv xcluster' on 8.4. Its fan is significantly less noisy than it was. dmaze: As of an hour ago, it was still making unhappy fan noises. cfox: Maybe we should ask hotline to look at it. tibbetts: The fish went off today. It'd be nice if the fish didn't go off before 5 PM since a lot of people are screensaved and not in the office. MIT Computing Report: tibbetts: There's now a cluster in 33-202. Computer Services: sly: www is lonely. It must want somebody to visit it. It keeps crashing. nathanw: I just crashed charon. sly: Do we have ClariNet stats? kolya: About 150 hosts are using it. xela: Dialups? tibbetts: Cluster machines? kolya: All of them except express.dialup. 20 cluster machines. jhawk: Has any thought been given as to criteria for deciding whether or not we should keep it? tibbetts: ClariNet costs us $6,000, right? [$6,900] In the course of a week, it sounds like there are fewer than 150 users who use it at least once a week. [disagreement about this figure] I can make up statistics to back up my point and we can fight about it. jhawk: If we spent that money this year, it would leave us with some amount of discretionary funds. How much would this be? amu: We have $11,600, less $6,900 for ClariNet. sly: About $4000. jhawk: $11,600 is what we had this year after ClariNet? xela: $11,600 minus ClariNet is what we have left. jhawk: So we're spending more than half of our discretionary money. sly: We have to decide tonight since Jane says the decision needs to be made by 1 Dec. jhawk: I thought we had discussed trying to talk to the user base and get some idea of the actual number of people using it. golem: I propose that the best way to find out is to pull it and find out who complains. xela: There are well-tested methods of finding out how many people are actually use it. tytso: The fact that nobody has really tried to get stats suggests that there's not interest in keeping it. My personal opinion as someone who worked to bring ClariNet to MIT is that its time is long past. amu: I read it. I could probably read it off the Web, but don't like to start a Web browser. tibbetts: For $6,000 you could find somebody to write the scripts. kolya: We also feed it to Lincoln Labs, LCS, EECS, and the math department. jhawk: It would be appropriate to inform them. We could tell them that we don't have money for it, but if they each want to give us $2,000 we can continue it. cfox: Would sending mail to people we feed it to help give us an idea for use? golem: Can we have a straw poll for who wants to keep it? [kill: many, keep: few] tibbetts: All people in favor of keeping it are users. jhawk: Move that, if they do not take umbrage to it, the treasurer and news maintainers approach our downstream customers about paying for ClariNet. [tibbetts seconds] tytso: If we were going to discontinue it, it'd be nice to give people more warning. If one of the people wanting to keep ClariNet wants to deal, that'd be more effective than a vague motion. dmaze: What happens if they say "no"? sly: If we don't pay the bill, it'll go away anyway. It's not clear that that's true, but given the advance notice on the bill, it's very likely that service will just stop on 1 Dec. The Treasurer has also been trying to find somebody to at least tell her who to talk to for the past month or so. tibbetts: The motion does throw this on sly. sly: I'd like to amend it to have jhawk put a time limit on it. xela: January 1? jhawk: I will not. January 1 is a fine date, but I don't want to pick it. sly: That's fine. [not a friendly amendment] [amendment: white ballot] [motion fails 5-7-n] tibbetts: Move that we don't spend money on ClariNet unless someone talks to our downstream customers and convinces them to pay enough money to pay for it. If they only provide part of the money, we can figure out what to do later. tibbetts: (tries again) Move that the SIPB should not spend money on ClariNet. [jhawk seconds] mycroft: This is a poorly worded motion. We should add a clause to the effect that we can spend money... tibbetts: Move to not renew the ClariNet allocation. [jhawk seconds] [motion passes 12-3-2] jhawk: For those reading minutes, the vote against my motion is not presumed to mean that we shouldn't talk to our downstream customers. cana: Whoever else might be talking to the downstream customers, I'll deal with LCS. yak: Move to not buy 10 bushels of plums. tibbetts: We should collect statistics on how many users are eating plums. kolya, can you do that? sly: jis approached me last week wanting to talk to me about www. That's all he said. I'm going to try to talk to him about both www and getting more money to pay for network costs. SIPB Backup Report: zacheiss: Yeah. nathanw: For once, I believe him. Publications Report: jhawk: We're out of current cluster cards. I'll send mail to sendpubs. nathanw: Will the new cluster cards have the Building 33 cluster? Orientation Report: '() IAP Report: xela: We have 14 classes. We're sort of in a holding pattern. I can still arrange things if you're interested in teaching classes. The IAP Guide should be coming out this coming week. CokeComm Report: tibbetts: Doesn't have Mountain Dew. klmitch: There's lots of candy on the floor. Are we concerned about mice? cana: The Dr. Pepper fan club demands Dr. Pepper. mycroft: I think we should collect statistics on the usage of Dr. Pepper. tibbetts: We could use a CueCat to collect statistics. Other: jhawk: Are the minutes of last week's meeting coming out soon? dmaze: They went out before the meeting. klmitch: I may be a special student next term. Other Other: jhawk: Amtrak Acela Express tickets go on sale Wednesday. Apparently there's an Event at South Station at 9:30 on Wednesday. dmaze: A Debian Application Manager formally poked me. People should sign my GPG key. jhawk: NetBSD 1.4.3 was released this weekend. 1.5 is imminent (this week). The meeting was adjourned at 19:53. Minutes taken and submitted by dmaze.