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On 10/06/11 18:18, Jack Oley wrote:
Grant, I don't know if Micro Men is available on iPlayer. But I'm sure it will be repeated at some stage. We're living through a very exciting time in human history, I'm confident that such monumental change, the most radical since societies came into existence, in such a compressed time scale, will be the subject of much historical discussion for decades to come! Linux and open source has got to be one of the most salient features of this period.
Yep, and if you want to discuss classic hardware AND Linux I find one of the best places to go is the Museum Of Computing in Swindon. Dianne one of the helpers there runs Ubuntu and they have held an Ubuntu Demo Day before (this is going back about 4 years now I think). I've been up there a couple of times, the first time round I got to look at their store room, it was a retro geek's dream, lots of old kit to play with.
I'd love to set something like that up down here in Devon, alas I wouldn't know where to start.
I tell my kids about the olden days, how you had to wait 10 minutes for a game to load if you were lucky. I introduced one of my step daughters to Basic programming on an Acorn Electron which we picked up from a car boot sale for £3 which she was interested in. I'm hoping that I can get my other daughters interested too (I'd love to get a Logo turtle and a BBC Micro so they can experience the excitement of typing in commands to draw things, which was one of my passtimes on the old Amstrad CPC).
What are the group's thoughts on the cloud? I think that there's a lot of advantage in terms of user friendliness and up to date security, etc., but the flip side includes security (!) and for me, the most negative aspect, dependence. Too much reliance on the Net is foolhardy.
I kind of agree, I kind of like the idea, I've not really looked into it much myself but I do think that for some it might not be too great (such as folks with poor net connections). Then there have been reports about the Microsoft BPOS (hosted Exchange I believe) going down and things like that (the Amazon outage for instance).
> Local contingencies are an absolute must and SSDs, cheaper chips and
smaller form factors are facilitating this. Synthetic and 'artificial' intelligence will help greatly with security, back up and efficiency, but there's an ever increasing green price to pay for all of this so I think we have to use the cloud judiciously, not just chuck our lot in. Gratuitous, 'always on' connection is unwarranted, un-needed (for most private users) and undesirable.
What I'm eventually planning on doing is getting a low powered box (maybe a VIA EPIA or even a Pogoplug or whatever they're called) and taking it over to my mum's house and bunging a couple of drives on it. Then she can backup her photos and stuff to it, plus I'll be able to do off-site backups of the important stuff on my server to it, and backup her photos and stuff. I just haven't got round to it yet (it's on my Todo list, along with getting a cheap Atom board for my server).
Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq