[SWLUG] Carmarthen Meeting - what was discussed

[Daniel Morris]

On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 11:55:27AM +0000, Sam Radion wrote:
> Thought it might be handy to post what was discussed at the Carmarthen meet,
> feel free to add the bits I missed or forgot:
> 
> Seagate Drive failures -
> http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.channelregister.co.uk/2009/01/21/seagate_firmware_fix_breaks_barracudas/
> 
> Internet access for children and the Radio 4 PM report on children at most
> risk being aged 11-14 and from professional families
> 
> Sites we like:
> www.photoshopdisasters.com
> http://thedailywtf.com/
> 
> The conficker worm attacking a hospital network
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/20/sheffield_conficker/
> 
> Alan's move to intel
> *http://ostatic.com/blog/alan-cox-bids-farewell-to-red-hat-moves-to-intel*
> **
> The impermanence of digital data and the loss of old storage formats
> 
> Anything else?
> **

Carmarthenshire County Council's recent Beeching moment, to eradicate
the choice of Welsh medium secondary education in East Carmarthenshire.
http://www.carmarthenshire.gov.uk/English/education/schools/Pages/Consultations.aspx

(the report is linked at the foot of that page, but it is encoded in a
proprietary format, created & controlled by a convicted monopolist...)


Comparison of current Virtual Machine experiences, with VirtualBox & Xen
http://www.virtualbox.org
http://www.xen.org


Off the dole and into work by starting your own business. The viability,
challenges, excitement, responsibilities and rewards in a potential new
venture for one SWLUG'er - incorporating the ARS Digita Ferrari
http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/


FireFox, ThunderBird and SeaMonkey, which does what!
http://www.mozilla.org


Working around websites that demand proprietary or non-standards
conformant browsers in order to deliver content. Developing sites to
cope with browsers that render differently.


Recent licensing changes to Qt
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20090114-nokia-qt-lgpl-switch-huge-win-for-cross-platform-development.html


Fresh research into "the myth" that data has to be overwritten many times
on a hard disk to ensure it can't be recovered 
http://sansforensics.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/overwriting-hard-drive-data/

(Dafydd showed a different article on his phone which questioned the
validity of the paper's findings in the footnotes)


There was other stuff too!

 Daniel