[23556] in Hotline Meeting
[Carla Fermann : Just FYI]
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jerry Burke)
Fri Jul 29 16:56:51 1994
Date: Fri, 29 Jul 94 16:58:57
From: burke@MIT.EDU (Jerry Burke)
To: hotline@MIT.EDU
------- Forwarded Message
To: burke@MIT.EDU
Cc: accounts@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: [32648]
Subject: Just FYI
Date: Fri, 29 Jul 94 16:16:47 EDT
From: Carla Fermann <carla@MIT.EDU>
Hi Jerry,
This message was sent to "accounts" earlier this month. None of us
replied to it, and as far as I know it no one forwarded it on to your
group yet. I'm very sorry for the delay in passing this along.
Just so you know -- this person also had his ID number changed and
registered for another athena account and then complained when we
wanted to deactivate one of his accounts, so it isn't actually true
that he has always played by "our rules"....
Carla
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Subject: No subject found in mail header
From: solman@MIT.EDU
To: accounts@MIT.EDU
Date: Tue, 05 Jul 94 18:17:37 EDT
I appologize in advance if I've sent this to the wrong place, but I've just
been severely screwed over by IS and I don't know of any other place to
complain. I've also included a suggestion which will substantially increase
the utility of project Athena to the students of MIT.
I just lost five hours of work (half recoverable, half not) because one of
your workers logged me out after I went to the bathroom. I couldn't possibly
have been gone more than five minutes, but he logged me and several other
people out. At least one (and I think two) of the others returned shortly
thereafter (after spending under 20 minutes away) and was also pissed.
There were several machines free in this cluster of 12 at the time.
Over the years I have seen several dozen students leaving their theses
running, get logged out by the friendly neighborhood IS people.
I have been yelled at for using empty private classrooms when nobody was
scheduled and complied with your request, wasting about fifteen hours over
the course of the past year while I waited for a computer to open up
instead.
I have never reconfigured a cluster computer despite many instances in which
doing so would have been infinitelly more convenient to me and would not
have annoyed anybody else.
In short I have played by YOUR set of rules despite the fact that through
my eyes they seem to be based on making my life and the lives of the
other students infinitely more inconvenient.
I am therefore ENOURMOUSLY pissed that I was logged out before my twenty
minutes were up.
I was told a year ago that you couldn't let students use the private
clusters during off hours, because you didn't have enough people to get it
ready for the private classes, so I am making a suggestion now which will
make all of the students much happier and allow them to get much more work
done (Which is, as I understand it, the job of IS). Stop paying people to
log students out, waste their time and destroy their theses. Instead have
these same people evacuate the students from the private clusters 15 minutes
before they are needed, thus makign additional clusters available.
This simple little action will make athena substantially more useful.
JWS
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