G L O B A L A C C E S S Volume 1, No. 4 January, 1988 MUMPS means your never have to say you're sorting. $VIEW(Editor) While I still have Symposium-on-the-brain (I am writing this the night before Thanksgiving), I would like to register a pro- test over a quirk of Symposium scheduling of which I am personal- ly a victim. I have had a long relationship with DEC iron, thus my interests (MUMPS, PDP-8s/DECmates, and TECO, to name a few) tend to be both traditional and non-mainstream. I submitted sessions in all of these areas for the upcoming Anaheim Sympo- sium, knowing full well that because of the subject matter, my audiences would be small at best. However, after the wheels turned, the calliope played, and the Sessions-at-a-Glance popped out the back end, I was appalled to find that EVERY ONE of my sessions had ended up at a horrendous time (ranging from 10:00 PM Monday to, I kid you not, 3:00 PM Friday). The combination of a narrow-interest subject and a difficult time slot spells disas- ter--forget about OUT the door, my people won't even come IN the door. I would like to take this opportunity to beg the Symposium scheduling people: in the future, please take care not to sched- ule the truly obscure sessions at inopportune times. It would be much less destructive to schedule sessions of somewhat wider in- terest (such as VAX High-End Magtapes or VMS Ada) in the small rooms at those times, and it would provide a more equitable bal- ance of resources. $DATA The MUMPS SIG Steering Committee is undergoing a major re- organization. Brad Hanson (Group Health Insurance, Minneapolis), a new face to DECUS leadership, has assumed the post of Symposium Coordinator; and Bob van Keuren (UserWare International, San Diego), lately with Commercial Languages/Languages & Tools, has taken over as Session Notes Editor. Discussions to fill several other positions (Seminars Coordinator, Library Committee Repre- sentative) are currently in progress. Finally, Mark Berryman is stepping down as SIG Chairman. He will be replaced by Chris Richardson, who has served the SIG as Symposium Coordinator and as Seminars Coordinator. Mark will continue as SIG Represen- tative to the MUMPS Development Committee. Both Mark and Chris are to be commended for the enormous efforts they have expended to resurrect the SIG over the past three years. At an informal meeting in Nashville, two representatives of SIG Council advised the MUMPS Steering Committee that the SIG was under serious scrutiny concerning its future existence. They also asked that the Committee prepare a presentation, to be given in Anaheim, to support the SIG's continuation. Before that could occur, and with no further notification to the Committee, on September 27 SIG Council voted to demote both the MUMPS and IAS SIGs to Special Interest Committee status. It is not clear that SIG Council even has the power to enact such a change, since the Chapter bylaws state: "Duties of the Board of Directors shall be: ...to license new sub-groups of members and, as necessary, to revoke licenses previously issued...." Furthermore, this vote was conducted in the absence of the IAS Chairman, and after the MUMPS Chairman was forced by illness to leave early. Despite all of the above, the Steering Committee is proceeding with efforts aimed at answering the questions which occasioned this event. They are being assisted in this endeavor by Sam Whidden, Lan- guages & Tools Chairman, who has been named mentor to the SIG. Together, they will attempt to set this to rights as rapidly as possible. $HOROLOG January 22 Submission deadline for March newsletter Dec. 7-11 Fall '87 Symposium; Anaheim, CA Feb. 8-12 Canadian '88 Symposium; Toronto May 16-20 Spring '88 Symposium; Cincinnati, OH June 13-17 MUG '88 Conference; New Orleans $ORDER("Ship") During the past three or four years, it has become stylish "DEC-speak" to contort the use of the verb to ship. A typical example runs something like, "VMS V4.6 is shipping now, but V5.0 will ship by Easter." This seems to be part of the current bu- reau-/corpocratic trend to write in the passive voice and, in general, confuse responsibility by never specifying an agent for anything. On this one, however, the good old internal compass and the dictionary are solidly together: forget it, it's just wrong. In fact, I have even seen fluent (non-DEC) English speak- ers dissolve into hysterics when I described it to them. When used in the sense of "to send or carry from one place to anoth- er," to ship is a transitive verb. That means that it requires both a subject to do the sending and an object to be sent. Ob- viously, one or the other is missing from the sentence above. And, if we follow normal rules of English syntax, it turns out to be the object. Thus, the sentence works out to mean, "VMS V4.6 is busily sending [unspecified], but V5.0 will be sending [ ] by Easter". If you want to relieve VMS of its tedious mailroom job sending hyperspace to all of us in DECland, you had better stick to the King's (or at least Daniel Webster's) English, admit your guilt, and say, "We are shipping VMS V4.6 now, but we will ship V5.0 by Easter." $NEXT The March issue will contain highlights from the Anaheim Symposium. In addition, stayed tuned for the next episode of "As the Stomach Turns," in which Sam and the boys try to put Humpty MUMPty back together again. $NEXT($ORDER)="Comprise" $RANDOM "Things are more like they are now than they ever were before." --Dwight Eisenhower