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eeyore
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APRIL BOARD MEETING
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Apr 16 02:55 UTC 2000 |
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.
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| 27 responses total. |
other
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response 1 of 27:
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Apr 16 03:47 UTC 2000 |
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. :):)
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carson
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response 2 of 27:
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Apr 16 04:00 UTC 2000 |
(I was just thinking "it's time for a new T-shirt design" earlier
today.)
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janc
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response 3 of 27:
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Apr 16 04:04 UTC 2000 |
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.
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eeyore
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response 4 of 27:
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Apr 16 04:14 UTC 2000 |
Sorry about the Netty vs. NETI idea....I have very little actual computer
background, so sometimes it all sounds like Geek to me. :)
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gelinas
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response 5 of 27:
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Apr 16 04:32 UTC 2000 |
Yeah, but I see NETI every time I start up Picospan.
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pfv
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response 6 of 27:
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Apr 16 05:22 UTC 2000 |
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.
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spooked
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response 7 of 27:
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Apr 16 07:22 UTC 2000 |
I was a notable no-show at the board meeting - sorry (:
Especially to Rye (mermaid)!
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eeyore
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response 8 of 27:
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Apr 16 15:21 UTC 2000 |
Thanks for a name....I felt so awful as I was posting this up!
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other
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response 9 of 27:
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Apr 16 17:49 UTC 2000 |
Mic, you're the one who missed out, not Rye! ;)
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don
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response 10 of 27:
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Apr 16 23:54 UTC 2000 |
I guess I've been mnutting too much. What's this about TOP and replacing
picospan?
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hhsrat
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response 11 of 27:
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Apr 17 01:52 UTC 2000 |
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)
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jp2
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response 12 of 27:
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Apr 17 01:59 UTC 2000 |
This response has been erased.
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gelinas
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response 13 of 27:
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Apr 17 02:11 UTC 2000 |
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?
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keesan
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response 14 of 27:
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Apr 17 03:05 UTC 2000 |
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.
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jp2
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response 15 of 27:
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Apr 17 03:58 UTC 2000 |
This response has been erased.
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mdw
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response 16 of 27:
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Apr 17 04:19 UTC 2000 |
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.
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kaplan
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response 17 of 27:
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Apr 17 23:30 UTC 2000 |
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.
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keesan
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response 18 of 27:
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Apr 18 19:00 UTC 2000 |
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?
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remmers
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response 19 of 27:
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Apr 18 20:23 UTC 2000 |
A computer without OS is still a computer.
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darkskyz
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response 20 of 27:
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Apr 18 23:21 UTC 2000 |
my definition of computer is electronic circuitry which can respond to user
input in a programmmable way.
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mdw
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response 21 of 27:
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Apr 18 23:50 UTC 2000 |
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
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scg
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response 22 of 27:
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Apr 19 02:34 UTC 2000 |
Solaris (the Sun operating system) is available for free for non-commercial
use. http://www.sun.com
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keesan
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response 23 of 27:
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Apr 19 02:58 UTC 2000 |
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?
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mdw
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response 24 of 27:
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Apr 20 00:07 UTC 2000 |
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.
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