Location: The Working Centre 58 Queen Street South, Kitchener, ON (plan)
Date: April 11th, 2016
Time: 7:00 PM
As a counterpoint to last month’s terrifying meeting, let’s discuss the ways that system administration has gotten easier and more effective. We can share tools and techniques that have made a big difference in our systems administration practices, and talk about our glorious utopian future.
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Announcements
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– Ubuntu Release Party: April 23?
+ not enough interest?
+ Sign up at https://framadate.org…
– Laptop Rescue Mission: April 16, 4-8pm
Media Manipulation
– John Berger: Ways of Seeing
– ORLAN: Plastic surgery as performance art
What Should We Celebrate?
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Open source
– It has lasted long
– Many companies have put FLOSS into hardware: TVs, fax machines
+ But these devices are locked up tightly
– Free Software movement wants to make the software reusable for anybody
+ But Android apps are often not FLOSS
+ Google has a layer on top of the kernel that is proprietary
– Kik controversy?
+ There were some tools on a server including “Left-Pad”. He had one application called “kik”. The company Kik got mad.
+ The guy took down his repo
+ Then all the tools went away
+ But then Kik went down too!
+ Lessons: everybody is dependent on everything else on the Internet
* But now other people’s code need to be accessible
+ Lesson: Big companies can bully small companies
+ It was a trademark issue, not a copyright issue
+ Should free software include being able to use the name you want?
Virtualization
– Makes lots of experimentation possible
– Software defined networking
– Can be done on small/cheap machines
– eg Virtualbox
– The software is available for no cost
+ This is an outcome of FLOSS
Computer Recycling
– Some people on limited incomes are running Linux?
– MRR program: Windows + Office for cheap (low income only)
– Linux machines running Xubuntu (for everybody)
– The cost ranges: $60 – 120 for desktops, $30 – 75 for laptops
– Now people on limited incomes have phones
– Desktops are cheaper and good for creating things
Microsoft is less evil now
– More responsive to customers
– Powershell is good
– Microsoft is not FUDding FLOSS any more
+ you will be able to run Bash
+ .NET is being open sourced
Looking up information
– Open forums
– Open bugtrackers
– Stack Exchange : superuser, stackoverflow
+ Sometimes the moderators are jerks, though
+ They are getting less good
– Technet is often good
– ss64.com for DOS commands
You still need to weed out the garbage.
Alternatives to Google
– startpage, duckduckgo: alternatives to search
+ Ixquick is dead
Technology
– Cost is getting lower
– Storage is cheap enough that tapes are less necessary
Remote access
– You can access a lot of servers remotely
– Communication: videoconferencing
– Collaboration tools
IndieWeb, Self-hosting
– Mumble servers
Maker culture
– Cheap computer (RaspPis, Arduinos)
– Kids are learning to hack and modify stuff
– Coding as basic literacy
– Easy programming languages like Python
Demise of Flash and Java
– There are still diminishing but HTML5 is coming
Package management
– Everybody has learned the lesson of apt
– Every application includes its set of dependencies?
Accessibility of apps
– ninite.com
– App stores with thousands of apps
– Chocolatey, nuget
– WPKG
– Configuration management: Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Saltstack
Software is cheap for nonprofits
– Techsoup
– Office 365
Cheaper phone stuff
– VoIP
– Asterisk
– Alternatives to Bell/Rogers
– Fongo
Grand Conclusion
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Everything is all bad