[H-GEN] Room Bookings Update

[Robert Brockway]

On Wed, 14 Jan 2009, Arjen Lentz wrote:

> These days everybody has a computer, and Internet. Most just use it,
> and don't care that much about what's going on inside.
> SOME will have some hassles with how things work and need a bit of
> help, and a FEW will want to dig more and see what makes it tick.

Very true.  Clubs will get a mix of the super-hard-core, students starting 
out and other random individuals I guess.

> HUMBUG is about the latter two, I would think. But do remember where
> THEY come from (as opposed to where WE [the old hands] come from), as
> it's different worlds entirely.

I remember the Internet before NAT[1].  I'm not the only one around here.

[1] This comes to mind as I was reflecting recently on a discussion on 
AusNOG about the use of NAT under IPv6 and it occured to me that a lot of 
the participants in the discussion had never known the Internet without 
NAT being common.

>> As far as I can remember we have always been Windows
>> hostile.  Seems reasonable to me, as we are essentially an
>> open source club.
>
> It does not seem reasonable to me at all.
>  a) there are a lots of OSS apps and tools for the Windows platform.
> Think Firefox and OpenOffice, to keep it very very simple.
>  b) anyone even remotely interested in running an OSS OS will 99.99%
> certainly be running Windows now. Being self-rightious geek
> smartypants who feel that OS choice is a religion that anyone in the
> real world actually cares about, may not be the most inspirational
> approach  or yielding the best results.
>
>  c) if they are running Windows now, getting them to try some OSS
> stuff on Windows first is actually a very good approach, rather than

This is an approach endorsed by Software Freedom Day.  A lot of the cdroms 
given out on SFD have OSS s/w for MS-Windows.

> Having a box of Ubuntu CDs handy (ordered from shipit,ubuntu.com)
> might be good. Apart from being very kind to simple users (with liveCD
> and installer combined), if you stick the CD into a Windows box it
> also contains some of the most common OSS stuff for Windows; so it's
> all-in-one. Naturally, some among you will insist that Ubuntu sucks
> and brand Y is clearly better and must be used, however I would

Ubuntu sucks - brand Y is clearly better and must be used!

Oh sorry, got carried away there.

Actually I like Ubuntu for the desktop :)

Rob

-- 
I tried to change the world but they had a no-return policy