On 2/25/08, Nick Rout <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Mon, February 25, 2008 2:47 pm, Raffael wrote: > > Andrew Errington wrote: > >> Why not have the box boot up with a randomly-chosen distro from the > >> archive it is holding? > >> > >> :) > >> > >> Andrew > >> (No, really, I'm just kidding. It's not a challenge.) > >> > > I like that idea! Really :D Whilst I'm sure setting up such a system would doubtless be a superb way of exercising young brains, if we were to implement such a scheme, mine would very rapidly lose its grip on reality. I'm so relieved to see the jest indicators.
> > By the way, today I was more successful in downloading some distros to > > my usb HD. I get up to 4.5 MB/s. Good! > > Here some comments: > > - first of all: thank you for running the Linux archive and the usb2card Thanks. We would be grateful if you could mention that we are active in the distro. reproduction business. > Chris S is largely to blame^h^h^h^h^h thank. Good on you Chris. Well it seemed a good idea once that it was pointed out that there was no canonical source of Linux in Christchurch. Please note that Wesley is an active co-conspirator. He should be blamed^h^h^h^h^h^h thanked too. [ ... wiki matters ... ] > > - In these instructions it says that you charge $5 for a CD and $7.50 > > for a dvd. I recommend to change that to a donation + costs price for a > > medium, in case they don't bring their own. > > > > I believe its a charge by St Albans Community Centre, not by CLUG. It is > outside our control. Not entirely. We can probably rejig the charge somewhat. > It does seem a little steep, but I have no problem > with them selling blank media to prop up their undoubtedly tight finances.. > The solution is to buy your own. I believe that both St Albans Community Centre, and CLUG have a moral right to make a small charge to run a Linux distribution reproduction service. There are a number of overheads which have to be covered the obvious one being the electricity needed to run the server. The St Albans Community Centre charges the general public a base rate of $2 per hour for access to a machine, and $1 for a CD. That means that there is a base charge of $3 for a Linux Distro. on CD. This is only very slightly more expensive than getting the data via http or ftp using a retail broadband provider, and it's very approximately half the cost of a bitttorrent download. For DVD volumes it's considerably cheaper than using your ISP. I thought that it would be fair to have a $2 component for CLUG which results in the $5 charge. If the membership really thinks there is an error in my rough and ready reasoning to come to a price please let me know. -- Sincerely etc. Christopher Sawtell
