On Sun, 2008-04-13 at 12:43 +0100, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
Hello John, Welcome to the list
On Sun, 2008-04-13 at 11:28 +0100, John Herd wrote:
A. > Thanks for the reply Brett. Is there an active turnout of folks to meets
or is the mailing list the main outlet?
Turnout varies, not huge as the meetings are split between Norwich and Ipswich, The Ipswich meet usually hovers around 5-6 people (they are very organised and take notes and everything, you should find their notes on www.alug.org.uk to get an idea of what they do)
Norwich meets are generally slightly larger, but the Norwich meet has been longer established.
Also we have a kit meet every so often, generally they have a higher turnout, often someone will demonstrate something they have been playing with at those, other people bring stuff they have broken in the hope that a tamed geek will fix it.
The Ipswich meets sometimes have a tutorial/bring and tell session, subjects like Mastering the Gimp, Virtualisation options, Legacy Game emulation and Film editing/DVD production have been covered in the past.
The Norwich meets are a bit more free-form, with discussion often staying on technical subjects but sometimes drifting to a gadget someone brought with them and in the example of the one just gone a two sided rant by me and Adam about customers in the service industry :)
Thanks for the answer, both sound pretty good.
I think the BBC's been surprised at how popular iPlayer has been judging by the number of complaints from ISP's about bandwidth...
I think moving forward we are going to see more of that, when I first got broadband it was hard to find content that actually needed the bandwidth (piracy aside). Now with the on demand services cropping up as well as things like youtube etc average people are actually making use of their connection.
Although the whole ISP's asking for kickback from the beeb to supplement their service costs is a slippery slope. As a licence fee payer I would strongly object to some of my fee going to ISP's that have oversubscribed their systems, even more so when it is for a system to which I have limited access because the BBC won't release a linux client.
There was a broadband provider price war and IMO many providers are selling their services at a price that is unsustainable if people actually start using it.
The demand for payment is interesting as it's the likes of the beeb and You Tube that generate the interest in broadband in the first place. I suspect though that the super cheap broadband has to end when the market finally consolidates into the two or perhaps three players with deep enough pockets to survive long term at which point one wonders if they'll cook up a cartel....
If there are any lurking Debian/Ubuntu users around please get in touch: I'm always happy to chat, although I can't say I'm the most technical of users out there. I have to say that I've stuck with GNOME because it's there.
Ubuntu here, there are also a lot of Ubuntu and Debian users on IRC, Ignore the bit about the IRC meetings on Monday evening, in reality it makes no difference what time/day you are on there, generally it is active from 9AM-1AM. Generally IRC is a extension of the Social meets, Discussion will frequently drift away from Linux/OSS more that it would with the list. http://www.alug.org.uk/wiki/moin.cgi/IRC
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