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VLUG Meeting Minutes 1999.12.14
Sadly inaccurate attendance figures
| Total | 45
| | VLUG members | 31
| | First-timers | 9
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Announcements
Carl Constantine welcomed us all to the last meeting of the
year,
preserving a discreet silence on issues of decade, century, and
millennium.
Andrew Willard presented the commercial message, describing the club's
CD-ROMs, including the new Corel Linux download version (R rated). He also
had a nifty computer case to display, with Tux laser-etched on it, and
collected orders and cases for etching. Randy Esdon listed the discounts
available to club members. New this month: CompuSmart and Bolen Books.
Carl announced that the meeting was being recorded for MP3ing on the club
Web site, and based on the success of the previous one, he'd shanghaied
Matthew Skala into helping with the MP3 presentation in the new year.
Matthew then did his usual count of members, first time visitors, and total
number of people in the meeting.
Chris Halsall announced that once again, VLUG would be having a presence
at COMDEX in Vancouver; he solicited volunteers to talk to him if they'd
like to go help at the show, January 19-21. As presenters, we'd get free
passes to the show.
Carl gave us the latest Linux news:
- VA Linux IPO: 800% increase opening day, and then consistently dropping
since then, but that's beside the point.
- RedHat stock broke $300, and is still maintaining over $200/share.
- Corel still has age restriction problems. RMS (Richard Stallman, of the
Free Software Foundation) has come out in support
of their position, on the "minors can't sign contracts" argument.
- RMS also says we ought to boycott Amazon, for their attempts to enforce
a software patent
- PGP (the commercial version) has received US export approval
- Serious CERT security advisory released on the US version (linked with
RSAREF) of SSH1. This does *not* affect versions compiled
without RSAREF, such as the versions most people in Canada will be using,
but it might affect people who downloaded an RPM or similar from a US
distribution.
Presentation
John McIntosh, on Squeak (Smalltalk development).
BREAK
Joke
(Presented by Carl, from Sunday's User Friendly)
| Scientific, or Metric standard calculator
| $15
| | Telescope
| $270
| | Mars Lander
| $135 million
| | Look on the scientists' faces
| Priceless
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Presentation
Matthew Skala, on GNU Privacy Guard (cryptographic software).
Adjourned
To Boston Pizza for the usual refreshments, around 9:30.
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