Minutes of CSPC Meeting Thursday 4 Aug 1994 PRESENT: Paul Kelly (Chairman), Roger Bailey, David Clarke, Stuart Cox, Jeff Magee, Jim Murphy, Bob Pullen, Morris Sloman, Sylvana Zappacosta 1. Matters Arising from Previous Meetings 1.1 Phd Student Equipment - David presented email sent out to which was considered to close the outstanding actions. He thinks most current students have reasonable facilities and most requests will be from new students with a few specialised requests similar to the 2 we have recently received. 1.2 Terms of reference and CSPC policy document still have to be reviewed and sent out by Paul [ACTION phjk] 1.3 Cross mounting: Bob Pullen reported that initial monitoring of Dept. spine shows abnormally high collisions, but they are not sure why. Netman need to cure the current problem before they can run tests of before and after cross-mounting. [ACTION Netman (rcp)] 1.3 WWW: A draft policy statement prepared by Morris was discussed. Jim thought it would require too much work by a WWW publication officer. Students may want to provide personalised home pages, but the publications officer should not have to vet these individually. CSG should provide a home page template for student use. Department reference to student pages should carry a disclaimer to indicate that opinion are those of the student and not the department. Students (and staff) must be informed that information they publish must conform to our usual regulations concerning email etc. - registration form which staff and students sign, should be amended to give suitable warning. Roger to draft amendments to policy statement. [ACTION rb] 1.4 Bosnian Email distribution list Exec. committee was informed of the CSPC vote and a compromise suggestion was that Dushko should be allowed to have a distribution list but it should appear to be a personal one, and that he must ensure that it is not used for political purposes. 2. Recent Thefts A number of offices were broken into over the weekend 30/31 July. Memory was stolen from machines and some were damaged - overall cost of replacement parts will be about #8K but there is a #1K policy excess. Agreed that CSPC should fund replacements for CSG equipment until insurance claim settled, but not for research equipment. 3 Equipment Requests 3.1 Ellen Haigh memory upgrade (#100) - approved by chairman's action. A case for a new machine will be submitted in the future 3.2 Dave Thornley (PhD student) Mac Quadra - #2090 total. As the work is Medical research, related to project being funded by the Wellcome foundation, they or other sources should be approached for funding. The request was not endorsed by the supervisor - who might be able to help on getting outside funding. A suitable departmental machine will be loaned to the student over the summer while other funding is explored [ACTION jim]. [ACTION phjk] to inform student. 3.3 Secretarial Mac backup: Tape drive and software approved (#1460). [ACTION jim] Some concern was voiced over security of confidential data. [ACTION jim to check security of proposed scheme] 3.4 Mac Prolog Upgrade Although Prolog is used for both MSc and undergraduate teaching, this software is very expensive - 50 licences plus 15 extra manuals costs #4318 incl. VAT which includes a 50% discount. Previously we got software free and only paid for manuals. Sylvana should talk to Keith Clark and LPA and try to negotiate a bigger discount as 70 - 90% educational discounts for software are commonly available. [ ACTION sza] 3.5 Turing Software May be needed if approved by academic committee cost $600 + $300 per platform Case to be provided [ACTION rb] 3.6 Flood Wiring The College provided #30K towards departmental flood wiring of 1000 points suitable for Ethernet or future high speed ATM - total cost of contract #48K using external installers. Original request stated 18K would come from research funds, but now unlikely to be more than #8-10K. Could reduce the cost to about #38K by using some in-house labour. Committee approved #30K initial expenditure. Investigate additional source of funding: i) from minor works which included some wiring costs [ ACTION jnm] ii)research groups [ACTION phjk, mss] 4 Budget Some anticipated claims on the budget were discussed but there were too many unknowns for any decisions to be made. Maintenance cost estimates are needed [ACTION jim] All staff should be invited to submit requests for equipment/software for personal use or for teaching facilities [ACTION phjk] 5. Date of next meeting Thursday 8th September at 2.00.