(svalente) SIPB provides services to the MIT computing community. We do it because it's fun to help people. It's fun to feel useful. SIPB prospectives are expected to help people. The two most common ways are answering questions on the phone and in person, and maintaining a program in the SIPB locker. You are free to come up with new ways to be helpful. A good question to ask anyone (member, prospective, random person crossing Mass Ave, yourself) is ``How can I help?''
(abbe) There's no rule that says you have to be working hard at learning something or writing some program whenever you come into the office. A lot of prospectives come into the office as a place to log in instead of in a cluster, to read mail, send zephyrs, etc. It's generally a good thing to sit in the office and try to answer questions when people ask them, too, but you don't have to answer them, or know the answers. If you're totally unwilling to ever try to help a user who comes into the office, even when you do know how to help them, people probably would think this is bad, though.
(abbe) Sitting in the office and studying manuals is certainly not the only thing you can do. Especially if you're like me, and don't learn much from staring at a manual, or necessarily find it very interesting. Knowing C is also not necessary. It's a useful programming language, but SIPB is not ``Student group-of-people-who-like-to-read-manuals board'' or ``Student C-programmers-incorporated Board.'' There are a number of things SIPB tries to do, which are our purpose for existing. Basically, SIPB members want to improve computing at MIT by helping users, providing them with services that might not be available to them otherwise, and providing useful documentation on computing. (I'm missing lots of other specific examples...) For example, SIPB gave out accounts on old crufty systems back before athena existed. SIPB offered a machine you could dial up into from a modem before athena had dialup servers.
Prospectives aren't expected to be experts on anything when they become prospectives. (And members aren't expected to be experts on everything when they become members...) Nor are they expected to do all their learning in the SIPB office. If you want to find out how to program in C, you certainly don't have to pick up SIPB's copy of K&R, sit at a SIPB machine and read it, and write code. If, however, you wanted to learn about running linux on a PC and doing athena things on it, it might be useful to try asking one of the SIPB members who built most of athena for quiche-lorraine, the PC in the SIPB office which runs linux. The office is a resource, not an obligation.
(svalente) True. SIPB is a student activity a/k/a a social group. More and more often, I find myself thinking: ``I'm bored, I'll go hang out in the SIPB office.'' I know that I can find some friends to talk to and some bad music to listen to in the office. It's not really meant for quiet study.
(svalente) Whatever you feel like. Most SIPB members have never written any programs in the SIPB locker. The few that have used this method: 1) realize there's something you'd like to see on athena. It has to interest you personally. Don't write something because other people are interested in it. 2) write it. (This step may take longer than you think.) 3) if it's useful to other people, install it in the SIPB locker. (If you don't yet know how to accomplish this step, don't worry. It's peanuts compared to the first two steps.)
Programs written through this method include discuss, nawm, and xzwrite.
(abbe) I'll make an analogy that might help. It's along the same lines as the difference between doing an assignment in your high school physics class, and doing random physics problems in your physics textbook because you think they're fun. Your teacher isn't likely to count the random physics problems as part of your physics assignment, even if they were harder, or you found them interesting, or whatever. Nor will they let the random problems replace the ones you were asked to do.
Now, SIPB projects are not an assignment, of course. But the other difference is that a project you do on your own is something you thought was necessary, and you're responsible for. If you wrote a program, you'd keep it in your own homedirectory, etc. You wouldn't need anyone to think it was a good idea besides you. A SIPB project, on the other hand, is often something related to a service SIPB already provides, or wants to provide. It's approved or suggested by SIPB in some way.
Hence, it's a SIPB project to offer to put information about the IAP classes SIPB is sponsoring into xmosaic, like mwhitson did. It would also be a SIPB service to say to some SIPB members, ``Hey, there's this program that I've seen elsewhere that I have the source to that isn't on athena, and I think it would be cool if SIPB supported it. I'd like to compile it and maintain it.'' Then you could offer to do it at a meeting, and if people though it was cool for SIPB to support it, you could work on it as a SIPB project. It would not be a SIPB project to teach a class on ``Introduction to Scheme'' or ``A Warmup for 6.001'' or ``How to Type'' because SIPB didn't decide that we wanted to teach a class on those things, or that they were necessarily relevant to the kinds of things SIPB wants to support. They would be your classes, not SIPB classes. This doesn't mean that we wouldn't want to sponsor a class on these topics, just that you didn't try to get us to sponsor it. (Also, classes tend to be taught by people who have already showed to SIPB members that they know the subject they're teaching on.)
(abbe) Being a prospective means that you are interested in what goes on in the office, and that it IS your place to ask things, either about a conversation that's going on, or at random. If you do want to know what people are talking about, it is perfectly reasonable to ask. If it's none of your business, someone will tell you that. Or if they explain and you're totally lost, you can say you're lost. If they were talking about something important that they need to keep talking about, then they'll say ``Ask me later.'' if they have time to explain it then, great. You'll learn something. Listening to a conversation is a contribution, even if you know nothing about it, or aren't an expert ... because YOU learn.
(svalente) I felt like that before I knew most of the members. It's not easy to jump into a conversation you don't understand with people you don't know. You don't have to. However, jumping into the conversation may be the best way to get to know the people and understand the topics.
Also, people talking in gibberish are generally not working. Generally, they're flaming about some topic that interests them, which may or may not turn out to interest you.
For example, say you walk into the SIPB office and hear the following comment: ``Whoever wrote the AFS to NFS translator should be disemboweled!'' Say you don't know what an ``AFS to NFS translator'' is, or what ``disemboweled'' means. Simply ask me (yes, I was the one making that statement) ``what does disemboweled mean?'' and I will happily waste hours of your time explaining what the ``AFS to NFS translator'' is and why I hate it. And you will probably never speak to me again, but that's besides the point.
(svalente) It's certainly not easy to intrude, but it generally is your place to do so.
(abbe) As for people who seem to be working on private, secret projects --- If i'm working on something at my machine, typing away, and you ask me what I'm doing, I would say something similar. If, for example, I were writing top secret code for the CIA and I'd be shot if anyone knew about it (which i don't think is the case for anyone around here), I would tell you to go away. If I was sending mail to my best friend at another college, I would say that, and you probably wouldn't be interested. If I was working on something for a SIPB project, or something you would find interesting, I would probably say that. Or if I were working on it, and I was in the middle of getting something done and wanted to finish my train of thought, I might say that, too, and ask you to wait. None of these things are bad ... and a lot of them might result in you finding something out. But you don't have to do anything like that. If you don't want to learn by asking people about random things, you don't have to. You can decide what you do want to learn, and work on learning it.
(svalente) SIPB members generally believe they're experts, but don't let that fool you. :-)
(abbe) Last time I checked, most people don't take everything in their minds and write it down somewhere. If they want to share specific things with people, and people always ask for them, writing them down might be a good thing, but in general, knowledge is knowledge. It doesn't need to be stored on-line, or in a book. It might be more useful that way, but if every person who knew the same things tried to write them down, we'd have a hell of a lot of duplication going around. It's not like I'm intentionally keeping a secret from you by not having a file in my public directory stating everything I can remember about my childhood, or every neat thing I remember learning in 8.02, or every UNIX command I know how to use and how it's used.
(abbe) If you want to write a C program that digitizes microphone input on the Suns and outputs in in modified form, there is some knowledge you need. First, you need to know how to program in C. There are a lot of ways to learn how to do that, some of them could involve SIPB members, and lots more of them have no reason to. Your choice. You might want to find out how sun digitized sound is stored, what format, etc. You might want to start from scratch and read lots of books. You might be able to get help from SIPB members, who have seen information about Sun sound in other places, maybe read books on it, or whatever. It's not a requirement that each member learn how to do each thing that might be imaginable or possible with a computer; I don't know of anyone who has thought about this. But someone else might. The way to learn is to ask around. You might be more likely to find someone in SIPB who knows about it than to find someone randomly sitting next you in class who knows about it, but we don't guarantee knowledge. Asking where someone got a particular piece of knowledge and where it's stored is rather pointless. Like, where did you learn how to read? How do I go about learning to read? There are a lot of answers to that question. Or, ``How do I learn to do research on something?'' You just try. You ask other people where to start.
(abbe) I tried to give you a general idea of the goals of SIPB before. Of course people aren't expected to dedicate their lives to SIPB. They aren't even expected to dedicate n hours a week to it. It's your own choice. If you don't seem to want to devote anything at all to SIPB, it's likely that you probably won't become a member anyway. And if you don't have time to devote for a while, you might become inactive if you are already a member, or wait a while to be considered for membership if you're a prospective. You'd still be a member or a prospective, you just would not be considered someone who's currently doing much with SIPB. As for ``at the expense of performance in class", there are a decent number of people in SIPB who think that doing things for SIPB and other random computer things are more fun than their classes, and let this take a toll on their classes. This is a bad thing, though. It's not a requirement for membership in SIPB, and most SIPB members try to encourage each other to go home and tool when they need to.
Question: Is this supposed to be fun? I suppose it can be, but knowing where to find the information can be difficult.
(abbe) If you don't enjoy helping people or learning about things, then there's not much SIPB can do about it. Don't try to be a prospective if you don't enjoy what you're doing, maybe you're making the wrong decision.
(svalente) I consider the SIPB office to be one of the fun places on campus to kill some time. But then again, I'm weird.
Hope this helped. We are, after all, here to help.