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The System Administrators of Kitchener-Waterloo got together for dinner on System Administrator Appreciation Day:

A smattering of local sysadmins

One System Administrator: John

Another System Administrator: Bob

Two System Administrators, Jeff and Jean

Three System Administrators: Tim, Laurel, Rigas

Systems Administrators discuss Android Systems Administration

The Bills

More pictures in the gallery

Pictures by Laurel L. Russwurm from Waterloo Region is Awesome and by Bob Jonkman, used under a CC BY 4.0 license.

The Kitchener-Waterloo chapter of the Ubuntu Canadian Team had a wonderful Ubuntu Release Party today. Laurel Russwurm baked a cake and I made some devilled eggs:

Quantal Cake and Devilled Eggs

If you squint a little you can make out the Ubuntu logos…

Ralph brought the official Ubuntu banner:

At the Kitchener Quantal Quetzal Ubuntu Release Party

That’s Jeff, Sergiane, Raul, Ralph, Karim, Bob, and Henrique.

Then it was time to cut the cake:

Cutting cake is serious business!

And the second shift finishes it off:

The rest of the partygoers

That’s David, Gord, Bob, Ralph, and Darcy.

Many thanx to Paul for hosting and The Working Centre for the use of St. John’s Kitchen!

Pictures taken by Laurel L. Russwurm and used under a Creative Commons — Attribution — CC BY license.

They say on the Internet Pictures, or it didn’t happen. So I just want to give you my assurances that the System Administrator’s Appreciation Day Dinner did actually happen!

27 July 2012, Egg Roll King Restaurant

System Administrator Appreciation Day Dinner, 27 July 2012 at the Egg Roll King Restaurant. Clockwise from left: Willem Jonkman, Bob Jonkman, Becky Nguyen, Wael Khawaja, Hamin (sp?), Rodney Martin, Sergiane Nascimento, Tim Laurence, Henrique Nascimento, Gui Nascimento.

Willem and Bob

Bob and Becky

Wael and Hamin

Rodney and Tim

Henrique and Gui

System Administrators out for dinner. Clockwise from left: Sergiane Nascimento, Tim Laurence, Henrique Nascimento, Gui Nascimento, Laurel L. Russwurm, Willem Jonkman, Bob Jonkman, Becky Nguyen, Wael Khawaja.

Cheese Wontons for dessert!

Bob Jonkman, System Administrator

–Bob.

Visit the official System Administrator Appreciation Day web site.

All pictures courtesy of Laurel L. Russwurm and released under a CC-BY-SA license.

Copy Bunny Conga Line

One area, however, where I think the media companies may have more reason for optimism with streaming than Doctorow believes is with video. Music and video may diverge more strongly in regards to streaming than in other aspects of digital distribution. While storage is getting cheaper every day, high definition video remains relatively sizeable, and generally there is not as much repetition as with music, decreasing the inherent inefficiency of streaming.

You say that now. When Napster first hit the Net it was said that while music was readily available, movies were safe from copying because of their relatively large size.

And in the 1990s when the photographers were all up in arms about pictures getting copied, it was said that other arts (like music and film) were safe from copying because of their relatively large size.

And in the days of the BBS when people were swapping highly compressed GIFs it was said that full colour pictures were safe from copying because of their relatively large size.

And when home taping was killing music, it was thought that movies were safe from copying, not because of their relatively large size, but because the technology to copy movies cost tens of thousands of dollars and was available only to studios.

The only reason that hi-def movies aren’t being downloaded or streamed^[1] is because North American service providers offer such miserable bandwidth to the consumer. Hi-def will succumb to swapping, sharing and copying as soon as the ISPs realize they can make a buck by providing the bandwidth to do so.

Next, it’ll be complete libraries of music that get compiled and copied. Then the complete catalogs of the studios. “Have you copied Warner Brother’s holdings yet?” “Got ’em, but I’ll swap you Sony for Disney”.

Soon, everyone will have everything. That’ll put an end to file copying.

[1] From the “I Told You So” department: I originally wrote this as a comment on “Why Streaming is not the Answer” in 2009. A quick search of ISOHunt or TorrIndex shows that the relatively large size (10s to 100s of Gigabytes) of hi-def files isn’t slowing down file copying at all.