Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 08/12/2002 The meeting was called to order at 7:30 by tibbetts. In attendance were Voting members: rax alex_c cfox tibbetts golem | arolfe nim Associate members: jhawk kcr deberg xela tytso rjbarbal ingolia hartmans dbj marc | jweiss Non-voting members: Prospectives: kilroi gschmidt jenselby Guests: Treasurer's Report: nim: We have fat piles of cash. Chairman's Report: hartmans: Move to repeal the policy that tallies for membership elections not go in the mail. xela: As the person who caused this policy to come into effect, there's a certain amount of embarrassment to go with this happening. marc: Do you feel that this not being in the minutes softened the blow? xela: No. <12-2-2, motion passes> jhawk: It would have been nice to satisfy objections before the vote. rjbarbal: I think most of the objections were answered in email. alex_c: I am going to sponsor rdm@alum.mit.edu for an account based on /afs/sipb/admin/text/guest-accounts-policy. I figure there will be comments. hartmans: First, some people have suggested I am not a current student and thus should not comment. If they feel this way they should speak up. It is clear that according to that policy any SIPB member is entitled to an account. i think that that assertion is inconsistent with the rationale in the policy and sort of inconsistent with what we ought to be doing. According to tat policy, we have this ability in order to FTGOS, and the reason that SIPB members are entitled to an account is that it will allow that to happen. In cases where it does not, I think we should not sponsor the account. As such I wish to propose a resolution to the board: It is the sense of the SIPB that: 1) All SIPB sponsored accounts are sponsored in order to FTGOS, including accounts for members. 2) When an account is created for a SIPB member, the same information should be provided as for a non-member sponsored account. 3) The text of the guest accounts policy should be streamlined to make member and non-member accounts as similar as possible. 4) As a general rule members are presumed to be using their existing account to FTGOS. jhawk: The person's name is Ronald Mabbitt '79, and that should be in the minutes. cfox: As an EC member alex_c, you have a mandate to FTGOS. How will this FTGOS? alex_c: It is SIPB's policy. cfox: is it one of SIPB's goals to further the policy? alex_c: Why is it a stupid policy? cfox: Policy aside, does this FTGOS aside from the policy? tibbetts: You can decline to respond. arolfe: I haven't seen whether he wants to FTGOS or not, which means that he falls into the same category as huge numbers of other members who may or may not be FTGOSing. And unless we are going to monitor them, it seems like we may be being sort of arbitrary. jhawk: I want to object to Camilla's contention that EC members have to always be FTGOSing. He should not have to prove that he is FTGOSing any more now than when he is eating a sandwich. cfox: When he is acting as an EC member- jhawk: I don't believe he is. golem: I believe it FTGOSes to keep in touch with crufty members and giving him this account does this. hartmans: it seems clear to me that he does not want to FTGOS with this account; it seems that he wants a free email account since mac.com is going away. If he wants to FTGOS, I think it is fine to give him an account. It happens to be that if it turns out he is lying (lying != being incredibly lame) we should dismember him, but that is my personal opinion. If someone is not willing to even assert that they will FTGOS, there is no reason to give them an account. marc: Any EC member who acts in accordance with policy should be assumed to be FTGOSing unless they are bending the policy. Either the policy is wrong or alex is being reasonable. xela: The assumption is that SIPB members FTGOS. Sam, under your policy why shouldn't we review accounts every year? hartmans: I agree that the presumption is important and we should make it. When someone says "I want a free email account" it is hard for me to presume that. xela: I assume that if he replies at all, he will have at least some intent to FTGOS. hartmans: And if he does, I think he should get an account. kcr: I think that it is not a big deal to give this guy an account. He was kind of peremptory about it, but SIPB members are never rude. Then there is camilla asking alex how this FTGOSes. Whether alex is presumed to be acting in accordance with the laws of SIPB god and man when he is an EC member is irrelevant; cfox can certainly ask how he is going to FTGOS, and that is a reasonable question. The other issue is Sam's sense of SIPB question, also reasonable, and not fantastically germane to the account. I think Sam's statement probably reflects people's reality a little better than policy. I think we do want to make the vague assertion that people have accounts to FTGOS. If not, what are they for? nim: There are 2 issues. The issue of whether we should give him an account it the same as should we let cruft keep accounts. We seem to be letting cruft keep accounts. I think we should give him an account. We should look at whether or not this is good later. jhawk: Nowhere does the email correspondence discuss mac.com going away, much less this as the reason. Maybe there was private correspondence. hartmans: This was in mail to sipb, not sipb-ec arolfe: I think it is FTGOSing to maintain this, and it is equally important for sipb to stay in touch with old members as vice versa. It is possible he has been away, has no idea what we do, and does not know how to get involved. We should give him the opportunity. hartmans: I agree, if he is interested and comes forward to say he wants to get involved. I think this counts as FTGOSing. I want to try to justify this policy change. A lot of times, basically I believe it will put us in a much better political position if people ask why we have guest accounts. We can better justify our actions to ourselves and others. marc: Up one metalevel, this guy is in the same class as Jeff. It may FTGOS to give him an account even if he does not do anything directly. There is some chance he will complain to Jeff and this will give us fallout. alex_c: I apologize for declining to answer before. I was just trying to do the right thing. I feel like slamming the door in this guys face is a violation of charter. When I learned that I would keep my account, it was my understanding I would keep it as long as I did nothing idiotic, not that i would lose it because of some technological accident or upgrade. jhawk: Could you clarify how your policy changes the old one? hartmans: I am proposing a sense of the SIPB. I believe it would require new accounts to be FTGOSing though it would not require that for existing accounts and it would not change review. It would make the belief that the accounts are to FTGOS and not an entitlement clear to external parties and holders. arolfe: Call the question. golem: I object. marc: I'd like to move the question. tibbetts: You're a bastard. tibbetts: All in favor of voting now: <14-1-3, voting now> <7-7-5, sense of SIPB does not pass> jhawk: Out of curiosity, I would appreciate a straw poll of voting members only. rjbarbal: I want to break it down into the four points. tibbetts: I like jhawk's version. <4-1-2, nothing happens> hartmans: It seems we don't have a consensus on my proposal. Someone could move on the account issue. tibbetts: I move we don't give him an account unless he comes back with a reason. marc: Is because I want one a reason? hartmans: Friendly amendment that if he gets back without claiming to FTGOS, he also gets no account. tibbetts: No. alex_c: Amend to mention that we should tell him this? Never mind. dbj: A variation on the resolution might be reasonable. I believe we should just offer him the account and tell him we are offering it so he can FTGOS, not make it contingent. Can I table this until after we contact him? hartmans: If you move to table it, alex_c can create the account. alex_c: I won't. dbj: Move to table this for 3 weeks; if we do not hear from him we should pick it up again. Before we make a formal motion to actually not give him an account, I want to talk to him. jhawk: Wouldn't it make more sense for tibbetts to withdraw his motion? jweiss: If you're thinking that hard have the vote. <5-5-7, not tabled> jhawk: It strikes me that you are in an extremely untenable position to assert that you don't want to create the account when you have sent email to him suggesting that he should reply to us and then follow that from more email suggesting he reply to him before he replies to us. rax: You're trying to say we confused him. jhawk: Yes. tibbetts: I do not plan to send him email, I bet alex_c does. xela: This motion puts the SIPB in a value judgment business. The SIPB sucks at value judgment. hartmans: I don't like this motion, because it seems unclear who evaluates the reason or if it can be evaluated. tibbetts: It is my vague intent that my reason be evaluated and the EC can sort it out. alex_c: Why don't I deal and come back next week? tibbetts: I withdraw my motion. alex_c: I'd like to apologize for not raising these objections when you provided an opportunity. tibbetts: That's fine, my opportunity was not as good as it could have been. golem: If SIPB had laser vision, our navels would be charred lumps of coal. Office Report: jweiss: I am planning to schedule an outage to upgrade Multics to 9.1 soon; if you care, talk to me. dbj: Unless someone knows we have a SCSI cable, I want to allocate $50 to buy a 68-50 pin SCSI cable. xela: Friendly amendment for $100. jhawk: $200 for 2? [dbj allocation: $50 for 2 68-50 pin SCSI cables] tibbetts: I move to allocate $100 to buy OS X.2. xela: Have you looked into developer accounts? tibbetts: It is under $200, which might give us the OS for free. It is not clear it would give us anything else for free. dbj: Is $100 enough money? tibbetts: Yes. [tibbetts allocation: $100 for OS X.2] tibbetts: MS office X for Mac. We allocated last year and cana and I dropped the ball. How much is it? I have heard $20 to a lot. I am going to allocate $500. I am pretty sure it is less but we want it. [tibbetts allocation: $500 for MS Office X for Mac] tibbetts : I would like a voice modem for the fax thing which we never did. $150 for a voice/fax/whizbang everything 56k modem. External. jweiss: Can you give me the explanation? tibbetts: The idea is we allow people to receive faxes on Athena without thinking about the problem using UIDs. The minimalist idea is that SIPB gets a fax. [tibbetts allocation: $150 for voice/fax/wizbang external modem] tibbetts: Since Arun is not here, move $1000 for 5 additional IPs for the vmware machine? jweiss: They cost $192/IP/year. hartmans: I'm not sure we need these. tibbetts: People currently use laptop addresses in order to conserve IPs. There is demand for more. dbj: I am sure we need more. I would like there to be addresses free you can only use actively at that moment. tibbetts: I just started tracking them. Actually, does SIPB have extra IPs floating around the office we don't keep track of? jweiss: There are probably fewer than 5 unreclaimed office heads. It would not be too difficult to do this. jhawk: What happened to the tunnel idea? ted-williams. tibbetts: It was rejected by ted-williams-maintainers. golem: We could use DHCP. tibbetts: We should pay for IPs and suck it up. [tibbetts allocation: $1000 for 5 additional IPs for VMware machine] tibbetts: How much is a gig DIMM? kcr: Like $400? tibbetts: PC133, for steve-dallas. Move to allocate $500 for a second gigabyte DIMM. tibbetts: Yes, it is often running out of RAM. [tibbetts allocation: $400 for a 1 gig DIMM for steve-dallas] jhawk: Someone has discovered they can change the cluster map by scribbling on our copy on the bulletin board. jweiss: Some number of the cooling units in the office are having some number of issues. If there is someone around the office during business hours, they should report this to someone who might be able to fix the problem. rax: So, deathtongue is wicked skank. I think we should get a newer PC. $1600 for a cluster config intellistation, only with DVD and a half a gig of RAM. jweiss: Is that not the cluster config? Is that enough for a machine and should it include a monitor? tibbetts: Yes and no. yak: zsr has a half gig. jhawk: How much faster would MS Word start? kcr: Much. tibbetts: I would estimate 4 or 5. jhawk: That might be worth it. golem: As a suggestion, would it be totally unreasonable to buy some sort of sun, and put a dell in its position? hartmans: What about zsr? tibbetts: They are all laughably slow except maybe zsr. jweiss: I would only feel comfortable rotating something into that spot if we have another one, and this is only true of the GX110. jhawk: How much of our budget is this? nim: 16/380. Out of what we have left and repeating allocations, 16/250-300. I anticipate we will run into a similar situation as last fiscal year. marc: Never mind. [tibbetts allocation: $1600 for IBM Intellistation] marc: The machine we are putting Office X on, does it have office? hartmans: No. marc: Ok. jweiss: Move to get rid of the old deathtongue at the discretion of the Office Czar in Charge of Special Operations when the new one arrives. tibbetts: Jonathon. There is this box labeled Gamadrid. jweiss: I will deal with that soon. kcr: There is a radio-controlled car siting on top of the filing cabinet. Whose is it? dbj: It lists alien and mwhitson. jhawk: We got a new receiver. It works. Someone should hook up the other two speakers. tibbetts: The USB audio widget still doesn't work because I suck or linux sucks. Someone else should look at it. Office Cleaning Report: xela: The office is a pit. MIT Computing Report: jweiss: The dialups are being upgraded to 9.1. This may lead to questions about pine or gnus. Computer Services: hartmans: sipb-debian is sucking, first because our mirror went away though that was fixed (thanks Adam). We seem to have issues fitting on one CD and thanks to the weekend lost we are behind and hosed but I will attempt to deal. Last week I was hosed but Antonio and Jen and Arun put in lots of work and things are still falling together. I do not know about docs; i will talk to Jacquie and find out. jhawk: I have not forgotten my attempts to get a UPS into 410T. arolfe: Today I started my first adventure with a SCSI hard drive which does not love me. hartmans: (1) SCSI chickens. (2) Alex and rax are lame, they should talk to me later. alex_c: Move to allocate $50 for physiotherapy for rax's fingers. tibbetts: Is that something they do in Australia? SIPB Backup Report: Publications Report: tibbetts: Did either alex_c or I deal with latex? alex_c : No; tomorrow. Orientation Report: nim : It's sooner than you think. IAP Report: xela: It's sooner than you think. CokeComm Report: Other: nim: The new system MIT has for dealing with money sucks a lot a lot a lot a lot a lot I hate them all. jhawk: The case against me was dismissed. Now I get to sue. arolfe: Every room at Random hall has asbestos, for some reason they though mine might not. golem: I move we allocate $100 for a mattress so that SIPB can stuff money in it. hartmans: Friendly amendment to make it FDIC-insured. tibbetts: Friendly amendment to make it not sleepable. nim: SIPB does not follow the student interface, it has the Jane interface which is fine. rax: I hate you all. tibbetts: Move that it is the sense of the SIPB that we hate rax too. Vote by acclimation? kcr: Objection. tibbetts: Withdrawn. You suck too Karl. Other Other: jweiss: The midnight Bike Ride is next weekend. If you are interested, especially if you are a ham, talk to me. hartmans: I would have appreciated if this meeting were short. The meeting was adjourned at 20:26. Minutes taken and submitted by rax.