[Nottingham][Talk] *TODAY* Wed 15/03/2006 - Change of plan!

[Martin]

Folks,

Well, rather a fun good evening, and all change...

 From Ubuntu and OS X on PowerPC to:

Martin wrote:
> David Aldred wrote:
>> On Wednesday 15 Mar 2006 13:53, Martin wrote:
>> 
>>> Taking a wider and higher level view of what Josh was going to
>>> talk about, we can have a discussion on what it /is/ that sways
>>> people to prefer one OS over another and one desktop over
>>> another. What is it
[---]
>>> /How/ do we /use/ the things for what we do? Can it (IT!, ICT!!)
>>> all be done better?
> [---]
>> What makes one desktop better than another?  Difficult.  I've
>> always
[---]

And then to what actually happened!


Martin Garton wrote:
[---]
> Yes, thanks to Martin L. for stepping forward with his talk.
> 
> Although in the end we were so busy chatting about linux and other 
> things in general that we didn't actually have the actual talk.
> 
> We covered various subjects including recent intel cpu architecture 
> changes, LVM & raid setups and their use in multi-terabyte storage 
> scenarios.  Probably lots of other stuff I have forgotten also.
> 
> In addition, I demonstrated aiglx together with recent metacity with
> its compsiting manager on my laptop.  This gives nice (or not so nice
>  depending on your view) eye candy effects like shadows, wobbly
> windows (you have to see it really) and smooth gl based minimisation.
> 
> 
> I wanted to demo xgl and compiz also but haven't got them running
> yet. I did show a demo video of them though instead.  For those who
> asked that demo is available from:
> 
> http://www.freedesktop.org/~davidr/xgl-demo1.xvid.avi


We also:

took part in a smoking/no-smoking survey;

I mentioned an article on "Intel Developers' Forum Spring 2006: Will 
Intel's Core Architecture Close the Technology Gap?" at Toms Hardware 
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/03/13/idf_spring_2006/page2.html

Brief discussion about systems-on-chip and monolithic multi-core CPUs 
versus clusters, FSB/memory bottlenecks, cache, parallelism, threads, 
algorithms, programming languages and trends, diminishing returns of 
more than 4 execution units for a single task/thread, threads versus 
state programming, Hurd(!), PVM and others;

Watching soccer at 10am in the morning and America, hi Adrian;

Backups for multi-TBytes of data, hardware vs software RAID, SCSI, IO 
limits, LVM, filesystems, mounts, NFS, SMB, kernel;

Current kernel problems and SLABs;

We also descended into the kernel source to investigate /proc/kcore 
access rights and why the "That's very stupid" comment on the kernel 
maillist;

...And then suddenly the pub had closed and most of us had to escape out 
via the fire exit!


All good stuff, and a very entertaining video from Martin G! (I 
especially liked the window docking tricks and the video cube effect. 
Good fun.)


And nothing like the originally intended talks. This must be one of the 
best examples of the "Bazaar" method for a presentation as opposed to 
the "Cathedral" method.

And that got mentioned also, and also how well or not kernel development 
followed that model and whether there is also a third arrangement of a 
Cathedral /of/ many Bazaars...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/


Next meeting/social next Blue Moon Wed (2006/03/30 - ISO date format so 
as not to confuse Adrian ;-) ) Further details nearer the time (JIT!)

Cheers all,
Martin


-- 
----------------
Martin Lomas
martin at ml1.co.uk
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