trimmed... On Thu, July 15, 2010 10:04, Levi Pearson wrote: >> On 07/14/2010 04:21 PM, Levi Pearson wrote: >>> Seriously guys, this is a USERS group. Neither McBride nor Stallman would have anything useful to say about USING Linux. One of them is out to make a buck, and happened to end up on the wrong side of a lawsuit. The other is the leader of a social/political movement, and seems to be only really interested in advocating that movement. > > I'd love to hear him talk about his MIT AI Lab days and how the Lisp Machines there worked. I'd love to hear him talk about the > development of emacs and how he uses it today. I'd love to hear about how he was involved in developing gcc and the technical details about how it's put together (I've actually had to fix a bad port of gcc to an embedded platform I was using, so something like that would have been very useful to me at one point). I'd love to hear him talk about any of the cool things he might have done if he hadn't dedicated his life to lecturing and advocating about Free Software. I really doubt he'd talk to a group about any of that stuff. He'd talk about Free Software and why he believes it's so important. That's fine that he's passionate about that now, but I don't really care and I don't think it's particularly relevant to helping people get stuff done with Linux or their computers in general.
PLUG is at its best when we have local content experts showing off their latest trickery. Usually less than 15 people show up because they tend to be very specialized topics. Every now and then we just don't have the presenters to fill the schedule, and so we do something a little off-topic. Depending on the person/topic the "core" members might not come, but 50 people will show up who have never been to a PLUG meeting before. There are multiple demographics in the group, and not everyone is going to think that every meeting is interesting, relevant, worth attending, or valid. I need some help securing interesting local presenters. If we can get one every month, then I will schedule other "special interest" meetings on a different day. Would anyone like to nominate/volunteer someone to take on the role of PLUG Officer, who's chief role will be to fill the second Wednesday of every month with a local technical presenter? This is one of those positions where by doing it, you become in charge of it by default. Where is Jayce^ when you need his magic ninja Vulcan mind-meld brain twist to make someone do something without them knowing it? I'm more direct. I nominate Levi. ;-) In August we will have Brad Midgley talking about WebGL. I am working with some contacts at Dell try to to get one of their Linux experts to do a more systems oriented meeting in either September or October. I'm working on more too. Beyond that, things are looking thin. It helps a great deal when we can schedule 1-3 months out so that presenters have time to put together a great presentation for the group. -Ryan /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
