2000.10.03 Meeting Notes

News

• FBI played around with creating a program that detects from certain elements in a picture (no, not particularly sexual elements) if it's porn. The search brings back "pornographic" pictures of landscapes, farmers markets and dogs. (D'oh!)
• Barnesandnoble.com challenge Amazon.com's 1-click patent.
• Mir has fungus problems- it's so bad, the fungus eats metal! The Russians are also having money problems- it would take $60 million to get Mir down to earth in a controlled manner instead of, say, wiping out Paris.
• University of Texas management school guy says that copies of Windows will end up costing a thousand dollars if Microsoft split.
• Pete ndorsed non-Napster-banning schools, such as the UC system, Harvard, Princeton, Georgia Tech, University of Florida, University of Michigan.
• Red Hat 7 is out, xfree 86 4.0 is out. Thousands of bugs are listed for Red Hat.
• Networkingcomputing.com lists their top 10 people of the decade. Tim Burners Lee is #1, Bill Gates is #2, Linus is #3...
• Mark David Chapman didn't get parole. Oh, what a tragedy.
• Stephen Hawking thinks the world will be uninhabitable in the next millennium.
• Microsoft bought 2.4 million shares of non-voting Corel stock.
• The Digital Divas won their battle with Microsoft!
• www.capalert.com lists 120 wrong things in the South Park movie.

Committee Reports

• Demo - The next LUGOD Demo will be at the Davis Food Co-Op from 10am until about 4pm on Saturday (Oct 7th).

• DCN - On September 28th, LUGOD met with Richard Lowenberg of DCN. They are interested in possibly helping staff Linux Demos that LUGOD hold. They are still (slowly) refurbishing old PCs. Richard is interested in writing an article about LUGOD's "Installfests" and "LERT" projects in DCNews, DCN's electronic newsletter. He also gave us contacts at the Yolo County Library (whom LUGOD wishes to donate Linux-related books to) and the Woodland Community College (who may be interested in using Linux). DCN is interested in developing server-based applications for the community using Open Source development tools, and then releasing it as Open Source for other communities to use. Minutes from this meeting are available. The idea mainly revolves around a community listing search engine / events calendar / etc.

• Other LUGs
  
  • October 4th - SVLUG in San Jose. EFF.
  • October 5th - SVBUG (BSD club) in San Jose. FreeBSD co-founder.
  • October 11th - SacLUG - no Topic.
• Installfests - Next Installfest will be Sunday, October 8th (date changed!) from 10am until 6pm at EUII Room 1131 at UC Davis. Taos Mountain will be sponsoring with help and free pizza!

• LERT - No news.

Other Business

• Financial Report - $43.40 was collected in voluntary donations.

• Other Donations - Roland Minden donated the book "Learning Debian" to LUGOD. Seth Nagao donated a burned copy of Corel Linux 1.0.

• Business Cards - LUGOD ordered and received 1000 LUGOD business cards. Some were passed out during the meeting. If anyone would like a stack, contact Bill Kendrick.

• Officer Nominations - Nominations for LUGOD officers are now being accepted. Elected positions include "root" (Chairperson), "sys" (Vice-Chair), "typescript" (Secretary), and "/dev/null" (Treasurer). Voting will begin at the next meeting.

• Bylaws and Constitution - A small meeting will be held on Wednesday evening to discuss changes to LUGOD's ByLaws and Constitution. The suggested changes will be presented at the next meeting.

• Woodland Community College - We have gotten in contact with Francisco Rodrigues of the Woodland Comm. College and they are interested in getting our help with Linux. More as things progress.

• LUGOD T-Shirts - Bill Kendrick is still accepting orders for LUGOD T-shirts. Example are is available online. They will be dark blue with white screening and cost about $9.00 or $10.00.

• Family Feud Game - Mark Kim is creating an answer buzzer for Pete Salzman's upcoming "Linux Family Feud" game.

• Yolo County Library - The Yolo Library is interested in any Linux- and Unix-related books LUGOD has to offer (new and used). We have contacted New Riders and O'Reilly publishing asking if they're willing to help. New Riders has offered to donate 10 books of our chosing to the library.

Presentation

• Nicole Carlson talked about Parallel Programming using "MPICH," an Open Source and portable implementation of "MPI," a message passing interface.

  Notes are available online

Attendance

• Bill Kendrick
• Jen Rutherford
• Pete Salzman
• Joel Baumert
• Rhonda Bailey
• Roland Minden
• Steve McMahon
• Henry House
• Seth Nagao
• Paul Bertain
• Jeff Duncan
• Melissa Hardenbrook
• Foo Lim
• Chris Osborn
• Rob Dawson
• Nicole Carlson
• Daniel Holmlund
• Joe Arruda
• Evan Scarisbrick
• ... and 3 others

Meeting Quote