Item 167. APRIL BOARD MEETING Megan Heberlein (eeyore) Sat, Apr 15, 2000 (22:55). 61 lines, 27 responses. Well, once again, I'm running behind, thanks to my wonderful work scheduale, and a grumpy computer. But here goes. :) Attendees were: Board: Eric, Greg, Meg, John, STeve, Jan Non-Board: Mary, Mark, Jessica, Scott, Steve, and login Mermaid, whose actual real-life name I didn't catch (Sorry!!!) Gavel banging commenced at 7:05. Chairman's report: Eric reported that he has hundreds of fonts, and that he really has nothing ever to report during the Chair's reports. Treasurer's Report: Gregory reported that we made money in March (I could give all the exact numbers and such, but they are just going to look exactly like the numbers that he posts in here and Agora every month, so I give up on that.) Online charging seems to be working appropriately, although some potential security problems were discussed. The stock of the Grex store was also discussed.....we wondered if maybe it was time to come up with a new T-shirt design, since we haven't sold any in a really long time. We are also hoping to soon have the credit card system up and running to buy merchandise from the store and for random donations. Publicity Committee Report: Misty wasn't there to make a report. We did, however, discuss the TOP idea. Eric is going to run as point person for that, as he works there every year. After some discussion, it was decided that we'd like to run TOP on donations, rather than take the money out of the General Fund, with possible makeup coming out of the Silly Hat Fund. Tech Committee: STeve reported that he had access to a SUN4-370 to use for disk formatting & differential disks. We still want a seperate machine for development disks. The new disk is not yet installed, and /var is full. There is a problem with backups since our tape drive is either down or dirty. Brief argument ensued between STeve and Scott over whether or not Scott had ever cleaned a tape drive before. There have been requests to raise the !tel line limit, or to find more than just the last tel with !huh. It was pointed out that ms-p (?) would take care of that problem. Jan is partway to setting upf a webpage to let people reset their own password. Arlo Committee: Scott enjoyed making Arlo paranoid by trying to point out to him that he (Arlo) only to eat crackers, while his mother Valerie got the good stuff (Hommus). We later also learned that he has a vocabulary of 30-40 words, including meow, dog, mommy, and daddy. Pico License: Nothing could be decided without Marcus there. We need to find out if Marcus now can own the code now that Netty (?) (the origional owners) are gone. If he does, will we be allowed to make changes? It was decided to look into prices of Confer and Yapp as backup plans. New Business: The auction is still going. New items are still wanted, but it's looking like it's going to a small auction in the end. There are a few items that the bidding is closed on, but need followup to get money from the bidder. A tape disc will be borrowed to make backups, and then there will be partitioning to free up /c again. Meeting ended 8:14. Next meeting will be May 10th. Same Bat-time, same Bat-place. 27 responses total. ---------- (167) #1 E R Bassey (other) Sat, Apr 15, 2000 (23:47). 4 lines. Netty --> NETI ;) See conf:agora,2,95 item 2 resp 95 for the latest on the Top of the Park situation. It seems we've scored a coup. :):) ---------- (167) #2 Carson! (carson) Sun, Apr 16, 2000 (00:00). 2 lines. (I was just thinking "it's time for a new T-shirt design" earlier today.) ---------- (167) #3 Jan Wolter (janc) Sun, Apr 16, 2000 (00:04). 14 lines. I looked into the price of Yapp. The Yapp homepage is at http://armidalesoftware.com/yapp/yapp.html The prices are positively humorous. Version 3.0, the web version, can be had for a mere $3,000. But Backtalk is better and costs less, so we don't need that. Version 2.3, the command-line version that clones picospan, costs $9,995 for a unlimited license. (Yes, version 2.3 costs more than three times as much as version 3.0, but you get a measly 45 hours of support with 2.3). We could probably get by with the 128 user license, which is only $5,550. We'd probably qualify for a 15% non-profit discount so it'd only be $4,717,50. Maybe we could save a few more bucks if we pass on the support contract, though it's not clear that that is possible. If we decided we really wanted it, we should talk to Dave Thaler and see if he is serious about these prices. ---------- (167) #4 Megan Heberlein (eeyore) Sun, Apr 16, 2000 (00:14). 2 lines. Sorry about the Netty vs. NETI idea....I have very little actual computer background, so sometimes it all sounds like Geek to me. :) ---------- (167) #5 Joseph L Gelinas (gelinas) Sun, Apr 16, 2000 (00:32). 1 line. Yeah, but I see NETI every time I start up Picospan. ---------- (167) #6 Pete Vassoff (pfv) Sun, Apr 16, 2000 (01:22). 10 lines. I think Thaler's prices are lower ala' mnut/grex NP.. ($100 is what I recall) And, yapp is simply a cut ABOVE picospan, although not "that great" - (OK, "that great" is REAL SUBJECTIVE).. IAE, yapp is simply a superset of picospan - certainly more friendly - (the source is still.. umm... "obtuse" is polite). I'd offer YACS, but I ain't ready, nor will it suffer sun/solaris, being written for linux and NS, at the moment. ---------- (167) #7 Michelangelo Giansiracusa (spooked) Sun, Apr 16, 2000 (03:22). 2 lines. I was a notable no-show at the board meeting - sorry (: Especially to Rye (mermaid)! ---------- (167) #8 Megan Heberlein (eeyore) Sun, Apr 16, 2000 (11:21). 1 line. Thanks for a name....I felt so awful as I was posting this up! ---------- (167) #9 E R Bassey (other) Sun, Apr 16, 2000 (13:49). 1 line. Mic, you're the one who missed out, not Rye! ;) ---------- (167) #10 Don Joffe (don) Sun, Apr 16, 2000 (19:54). 2 lines. I guess I've been mnutting too much. What's this about TOP and replacing picospan? ---------- (167) #11 (still a) Wing Nut (hhsrat) Sun, Apr 16, 2000 (21:52). 7 lines. Grex is planning to sponsor a movie at Top of The Park (TOP). This has absolutely nothing to do with the system command top which shows Memory Usage (if I'm not mistaken). As far as replacing picospan, I think that's more an issue of being able to get/modify the source to picospan than the functionality of Picospan (which seems fine to me) ---------- (167) #12 James Howard (jp2) Sun, Apr 16, 2000 (21:59). 6 lines. I hate to bring up such an evil thought, but has anyone considered rewriting Picospan? A lot of newer ideas could be implemented (like threaded discussion) and some necessary features (ignoring all posts from user x) making this a very attractive solution. What brough this up now? ---------- (167) #13 Joseph L Gelinas (gelinas) Sun, Apr 16, 2000 (22:11). 5 lines. I think it was the discussion of perceived problems with the way scribble works (or doesn't). And, as noted, there are other improvements possible. I think there is already an item for discussion of the license of Picospan. Perhaps it would be best to continue the discussion there? ---------- (167) #14 C. Keesan (keesan) Sun, Apr 16, 2000 (23:05). 5 lines. Jim has a SUN SLC. (He will not tell me if it is a computer. 'Keyboard and mouse'. And it works. It says it has 16 megabytes. He asked ROss to tell him what sort of hard drive it is and Ross decided to use it for a Mac and erased the operating system. Grex is welcome to the computer if it can find the operating system to use with it. ---------- (167) #15 James Howard (jp2) Sun, Apr 16, 2000 (23:58). 1 line. Re 14: Would the single-user version of Solaris 7 work? ---------- (167) #16 Marcus Watts (mdw) Mon, Apr 17, 2000 (00:19). 3 lines. Maybe, but why? I don't know what hardware architecture the SLC has - sun4 bad, sun4c possibly good, sun4m good, sun4u best. I know sun has dropped support for the sun4, but they may should still support sun4c. ---------- (167) #17 Jeff Kaplan (kaplan) Mon, Apr 17, 2000 (19:30). 8 lines. In resp:0 there is a topic "Pico License". I don't think there's a question about our license to use the PIne COmposer, a text editor that is part of the pine package. Picospan the conferencing software is a different thing. Regarding resp:12, if you want threaded discussions, there are plenty of places you can go. Most people in the grex conferences prefer the item and response scheme as is. And you can use a twit filter to ignore posts from user x without any modification to Picospan. ---------- (167) #18 C. Keesan (keesan) Tue, Apr 18, 2000 (15:00). 4 lines. Marcus, do you want to come look at the Sun computer? Jim says it is not a computer because he does not have the operating system on it. We have some strange arguments about meanings. My first computer came without a hard drive - was it a computer? ---------- (167) #19 John H. Remmers (remmers) Tue, Apr 18, 2000 (16:23). 1 line. A computer without OS is still a computer. ---------- (167) #20 Dark Skyz (darkskyz) Tue, Apr 18, 2000 (19:21). 2 lines. my definition of computer is electronic circuitry which can respond to user input in a programmmable way. ---------- (167) #21 Marcus Watts (mdw) Tue, Apr 18, 2000 (19:50). 28 lines. Sure I could come in & look at it sometime. All suns came with rom boot code; this is a very crude OS but an OS nonetheless. On the newer suns the boot code even understands forth so you get a "higher level" language for free, just by having the hardware. Even on the older suns the boot code was smart enough that you could enter & run machine language programs. The very simplest computer system I've ever heard of is the RCA Cosmac (CDP1802) microprocessor, some LEDs, wiring, & a battery. The Cosmac was not a really brainy microprocessor - even a Z80 makes a Cosmac look pretty dumb. The Cosmac did however have several interesting features. One was that it didn't need much external logic to run. Another was that there was only 1 "halt" opcode; the other 255 possible bytes values all corresponded to legal instructions. The external wiring merely connected the address lines to the data lines, in such a way that the one invalid opcode could never happen. The result is that the cosmac would "see" a rom containing 64k of "random" but legal instructions, which it would execute. The LEDs were hooked up to the address lines, and so would flicker in a pseudo-random sequence which was long enough to look "random" to people. Since the COSMAC had about 16 bytes (128 bits) it was pretty likely it was going to be looping for a very long time before the pattern started to repeat. So, basically, this whole deal was a microprocessor driven "random" light flasher. Input: 1 (the power switch) Outputs: up to 9 or 16 LEDs RAM: 16 bytes (the register bank in the MPU) ROM: 64K of "wire" programmed data. Chip count: 1 ---------- (167) #22 Steve Gibbard (scg) Tue, Apr 18, 2000 (22:34). 2 lines. Solaris (the Sun operating system) is available for free for non-commercial use. http://www.sun.com ---------- (167) #23 C. Keesan (keesan) Tue, Apr 18, 2000 (22:58). 2 lines. So does grex want this machine? Or does a grexer want it? Free to grex. How would this compare to a PC computer in speed? ---------- (167) #24 Marcus Watts (mdw) Wed, Apr 19, 2000 (20:07). 6 lines. Compared to a modern pentium? Probably pretty slow. I'd guess it to be about the speed of a 386. A lot will depend on how much memory it has, and what OS is installed - solaris 8 (if it will even run) is pretty big, so it's quite likely to spend a lot of time paging & be a lot slower than sunos (which is much smaller). It may also be possible to run linux and netbsd/openbsd. ---------- (167) #25 David Brodbeck (gull) Tue, Apr 25, 2000 (23:46). 17 lines. I have a SPARCstation SLC, so I can give you a little info. It's a Sun 4/20 architecture, meaning it's a SPARC processor running at 20 MHz. It has no built in disk of any kind; they were meant to either be connected to an external SCSI disk or (more commonly) network booted off a central server. Video is a black-and-white framebuffer driving the internal 17" monitor. It also has 12-bit uLaw sound, two serial ports (on one DB-25 connector), and an AUI network port. 16 megabytes, in the form of 4 4-meg parity SIMMs, is the maximum amount of RAM. The serial port pins are configured so a normal cable plugged into the DB-25 port will connect to the proper pins for port A. Port B requires a special splitter cable. IIRC this was Sun's first computer that sold for under $6,000. It features completely silent operation. (No built-in disk, and no fan.) It will run Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD, or SunOS 4.1.4, all of them slowly. No, I don't want another one. ;> ---------- (167) #26 C. Keesan (keesan) Fri, Apr 28, 2000 (12:31). 2 lines. Does anyone know anyone who might want this computer? Should we simply recycle it? We need the space. ---------- (167) #27 David Brodbeck (gull) Fri, Apr 28, 2000 (23:26). 3 lines. I don't know of anyone. They're pretty common, as Suns go, since they were popular with colleges. I once bought a lot of 10 for $15 at a surplus auction. (Some wag asked me if I planned to set up my own computer lab.)