[Glastonbury] Sedgemoor IT Cluster

[Sean Miller]

Martin Wheeler wrote:

> Seems to be M$-specific; and hell-bent on sending business back to Wales.

Reading up on it, I think Steve moved to the area from Wales. Perhaps he 
is just trying to exploit synergy between the new group which is still 
in its formative stages and the old which is now established and running...

It isn't M$-specific, btw, as it is working fine on my Linux Firefox... 
probably the warning message needs a bit of updating to list the 
browsers that it does work well on... I'd assume that if Firefox is okay 
then most Gecko-engine browsers would be... there's also that one on Mac 
whose name escapes me that it would be useful to test the site on...

> Now, WhyTF would I be interested in a site like that?

It's the purpose of the site, rather than the design, that should be 
most important. I signed up anyway... let's see what happens :-)

> Guess we'd better invite them along to our next monthly meeting (next 
> Wednesday, 7.00 pm), and show them what sort of professional (and 
> semi-professional) expertise a bunch of 60-odd Linux-using folks 
> already provide in and around this area.
> Then maybe *they*'d like to join *us*?

The group should form links with this organisation I think... mutual 
help etc.

> [And remember -- we're not just Sedgemoor. Our catchment area goes 
> from Plymouth to Cheltenham; Southampton (hi! Martin) to Minehead.]

Who said we were? We hold our meetings in Mendip District... but 
Sedgemoor is but a hop and skip away...

> Only joking folks -- we're _real_ friendly in this cluster. Just don't 
> push the M-product too much, OK?

I suspect that Martin and Bill Gates are actually brothers, and the 
whole Wheeler thing is just a deception... you wait, it'll come out one 
of these days... their sibling rivalry as children, the time Martin 
broke Bill's abacus because it couldn't calculate in hexadecimal (though 
was remarkably intuitive to the casual user), the time that "Old Mam 
Wheeler-Gates" had to break up the two because Bill liked to put wide 
frames around his photos in the album, whereas Martin used none... oh, 
and the fact that Bill used to leave cookee crumbs around the bedroom 
floor, which drove Martin up the wall because he felt treading on 
cookees when going to bathroom was an invasion of his privacy...

Ah, the stories will out...

> Pity the Business Link folks are Microsoft-only too -- I've never been 
> able to get them in the least bit interested in what Linux has to 
> offer to SMEs in this area -- although quite a number are using SUSE 
> or RedHat.

I just joined that one too... figured that if I were trying to get more 
involved with IT work locally it'd be wise to sign up... I am currently 
trying to investigate Samba a bit... could be very useful for securing 
shared storage, considering neither XP Home now 98/ME really has any 
decent form of user authentication...

> (I should know -- I trained 'em!)

Who else..

> And never in a month of Sundays will they get a Linux training course 
> out of Business Link!

Never say never... it is just a case of presenting the case for Linux in 
a balanced way, and at present that balance says desktop is still 
dominated by Micro$oft... so we need to promote Linux as a server-side 
technology, for example what I mentioned above regarding Samba. Much 
cheaper than Windows 2003 (!)

Fact is that folks like HSBC will send banking software and hardware to 
these SMEs and say "use this to transmit your payments/money movements" 
and that will be Windows or Mac certified, more than likely... you could 
use Win4Lin, VMWare, Wine or whatever but would it be supported by HSBC? 
Would have to be careful on that one...

Problem is that the "total cost of ownership" for an SME starts to rise 
the minute they move away from what their suppliers are promoting as 
standard. Therefore it is for us to start to act on suppliers to get the 
Linux Desktop accepted more widely and then, at that point, to start 
trying to influence Business Link to encourage it to SMEs... but maybe 
it's a bit early.

Sean (expecting total agreement from Martin... not ;-))