On 06/08 05:14 , Robert 'Bob' Jensen wrote: > Things change over time. This was discussed at several meetings before the > decision was made. No one currently in the LUG has the time to maintain or > even pretend to maintain a website. We want a place to upload files, post > meeting info, automate meeting reminders. Yahoo was chosen as the best > option until we have time and resources to DIY.
Fair enough. I've been a Linux sysadmin for well over 10 years now; and not to sound like an old fart, but I've seen things change over that time... much of it being my perspective. Linux isn't just for geeks anymore; it's mainstream now. It's not such a radically better alternative to Windows... in the best tradition of free-market competition, Microsoft *has* made Windows a lot better (mostly in that it doesn't crash every day like it used to). Now there's OSX, which has stolen away the non-hardcore crowd (i.e. everyone who can live with Apple's UI choices, and isn't a Free Software zealot). So we don't define ourselves in the same way we used to -- there's less to be opposed to. It's been a while since I was really in touch with the current crop of Linux Geeks. The last time was when I met Maddog Hall at a restaurant with some local geeks to celebrate the Unix date being 1234567890 (or whatever it was... sadly I'm not enough of a geek anymore to remember). I realized that I didn't have much in common with them anymore. I stopped being a computer geek several years ago. These days I'm a guns & political philosophy & economics geek, with occasional forays into airplanes and rocketships. I still use computers, but I don't try to change the world with them anymore. I remember back in they day, when it seemed like every geek worth his salt had a mailserver and webserver set up; and we didn't think it any big deal to set up a mailing list, and we didn't care too much about places to post files (just post them to your webserver!), and a calendar was something you stuck on your wall. That was probably a heavily biased view, but that was my perception of it. I shut down my co-lo server long ago, I mail multi-MB files via gmail now, and I even visit web fora (I still find them abhorrently slow compared to mailing lists; but better at categorizing information and making it persistent). I can understand that we're not the geeks we once were; we've gotten older and gotten other things to do with our time. So I can understand the desire to simplify things, and eliminate local complexity by using a service that's available and 'free'. My concern is the same one we used to have about proprietary OSes and office suites... if your data is locked up in a proprietary format, do you really own it? In the same way, if you give your information to yahoo (or google or whomever), how much control do you have over it? Effectively almost none, possession being 9/10ths of the law. I know my personal information leaks out all over the place; but I also know I don't worry about it enough. So I try to keep it in mind and avoid too much leaking when I can. It's a sliding scale tho... the leaks need to be appropriate to the rewards. Yahoo groups are a pretty minor leak in the grand scheme of things; but yahoo is a convenient central place for information about you to be aggregated by anyone who cares to look. I don't know all the ways yahoo's information can be accessed; so I assume that to mean that everyone all over the world can see everything (it's the safest assumption). I'm not going to tell people what to do with their lives and their data (I joined the Free State Project and moved to NH specifically to fight that sort of thing); I just might not participate in certain ways of doing things. :) -- Carl Soderstrom Systems Administrator Real-Time Enterprises www.real-time.com _______________________________________________ scalug-list mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/scalug-list
