Open Source Saturday
Details
Sniff, sniff... do you smell Pi?
Quickly:
XBMC on a Raspberry Pi
Syed will demo XBMC (formerly known as XBox Media Center) running on the silent and cool (both meanings) Raspberry Pi. I think he said he will both, display and serve, media from a USB hard disk.
Afterwards, bring some pennies because there will be a raffle for a Pi! Just the computer board, no case or power supply, but he might be tempted to throw in a SD card preloaded with XBMC. The idea is if the cost of the Pi is covered, Syed will donate the remainder to OSSat to help defray the cost of a meetup.com subscription.
News!
Britain is doing some really good things in the Open vein...
https://www.gov.uk/design-principles (These rock!)
Summary: Keep the $ (or £) in the local economy, and get better ROI when you own it. Also... FILE FORMATS DO MATTER!
"Saying the proportion of central government procurement from SMEs has risen from 6% in 2010 to more than 10% now, Maude will add: "We know the best technology and digital ideas often come from small businesses but too often in the past they were excluded from government work. "
"In the civil service there was a sense that if you hired a big multi-national, who everyone knew the name of, you'd never be fired."
"We weren't just missing out on innovation, we were paying top dollar for yesterday's technology."
"One great example of the potential from small businesses was when we re-tendered a hosting contract. The incumbent big supplier bid £4m; a UK-based small business offered to do it for £60,000.
We saved taxpayers a whopping 98.5%. I don't think we can make savings of that scale everywhere but hard-working people expect us to try as hard as we possibly can."
For lunch the usual... The Wild Turkey by the bowling alley on Walnut is a North Dallas institution, burgers and beers.
Cya here, then there!
---- Caution: Generic Meetup description follows ---
We are a group of some serious, and some not-so-serious, geeks that want to see the Open Source Ethos spread and help as many people as will let it. During the meetings, which are pretty much an excuse to get together and have fun, we catch up on topical and industry news, projects, code releases, recent technical problems and solutions...
There are sometimes presentations - anything open source but if it is software then running on more than 1 platform is preferred (Linux, Mac, Win, etc.). Mobile is an exception due to Apple's refusal to let FOSS code onto their IOS platform - so we talk about Android a lot more.
I you have an itch to scratch that can be solved by technology, bring it on in! You well always get an educated opinion and sometimes a useful answer too. The group is not homogeneous around one specific technology, or industry, or language or nationality. What we have in common is our desire to make our lives better, and the set of people in "our" is everyone, everywhere.
Join us afterwards for lunch! Hope you have a hunger for adventure. ;)
98.519% Geek content by volume.
John Fields
Open Source Saturday