Australia, China and Snowboard Shops Use Linux

Miscellaneous stories about Linux usage today: the Australian government has allowed (but not required) its agencies to switch to Linux. China is apparently going to go all-Linux for the 2008 Olympic games in Beijing. And business2.com has a story about chain of snowboarding shops (and other businesses) deploying Linux cash registers and desktops.

Comments

In the spirit of MLP

[King of the World]

In New Zealand the first semi-major national chain company has come out with a Linux box. Go to dse.co.nz and search for Mandrake. Until now it was only "mom and pop" (as American's would say) stores, and then you go an empty machine.

2 more years

[e8johan]

Just wait for two more years and some european goventment agencies will probably be dominated by open source software. The countries I'm thinking of are Germany, England, Sweden and Spain. All these contries have initialized open source studies or started with test installations of open source alternatives.

When looking at what software that is used, it looks like KDE has an edge in Europe, specially in Germany and Sweden. But also OpenOffice is actively evaluated.

Re:2 more years

[Kenzai]

Norwegian govt. agencies are already in the process of adopting Linux solutions, after the M$ govt. deal was booted. The University enviroments in Norway are solid in Linux kowledge (Unix too of course) great for recruitment (lets not forget TrollTech). There is a remote education system run on Linux by a facutly (ILS) at the Univ. of Oslo with several schools countrywide participating - at 1/3 of the price that IBM offered an equivalent commercial system based on M$.

I think this article is great and especially China who have already adopted Linux within several govt. agencies. The Olympics are of such importance to them internationally that they would not risk it on a unreliable OS (events like this rely alot on such systems - worked with it at the Winter Olympics in '94). China will make this work and it must really rattle the M$ cage!

My 0.02

Goodbye Sun?

[lpret]

I noticed that in the article one of their "two" user groups were high end programmers/engineers. There was a quote from a Verizon guy saying: "moving 300 programmers at its nationwide IT facilities from expensive Sun and Hewlett-Packard (HWP) workstations to less expensive models running Linux.".
Is this really a viable option? I'm not talking about "can get along with" software, but truly impressive and equal/better than Sun boxes? If so, and if it's only down to software, where does Sun stand in this?

I would submit for your approval. . .

[kfg]

the hypothesis that being Open Source (tm) is one of the things that can be legitimately considered as one of the parameters to decide whether it's "the right tool for the job"?

Indeed that being Open Source (tm) is a possible *feature* that might be valued?

KFG

Re:I would submit for your approval. . .

[Twirlip of the Mists]

I think, unfortunately, that your hypothesis is wrong in the majority of cases. Whether software comes with source code or not matters to some people, certainly, but not to most. And if it matters at all, it can just as easily be a liability as it can an asset.

Ninety-nine out of a hundred people literally wouldn't know source code if they saw it, so having it is no tangible benefit to them. In fact, it can easily be seen as a liability, because most of the software that is available in source code form is not supported by any vendor. If a company were to adopt a piece of open-source software that was only supported by an individual or a small group, and that individual or group were to stop developing and supporting that software, the company would have no choice but to accept responsibility for supporting the code themselves. (Or to quickly adopt something else.) That's a serious liability to, say, a company that makes point-of-sale systems.

Not every open-source program would be susceptible to such an event. But most of them would, and that-- if anything-- is what non-computer people will associate with the words "open source." "Open source," most often, means flying without a net.

Again, just to emphasize, I'm not talking about facts here. I'm talking about generalities, and the perceptions that are based on those generalities.

Wierd steganography in the Olympics article?

[tulare]

I was having to highlight over the text to deal with a wierd OS X issue where text randomly disappears (IE, Moz, doesn't matter) when I noticed a bunch of letters in the spaces between some of the words. The text isn't justified in any way that I could see, just left-aligned, so these weren't some kind of spacing tool, so I can't figure this out. I did a view source, and here's a bit chopped out of the article:

system<font color=white>U</font>and other information<font color=white>A</font>systems will be built for<font color=white>U</font>collecting, collating, disseminating<font color=white>E</font>and

Does anyone have any idea what the heck this is all about? One pattern I do seem to be noticing is that the "hidden" letters are all vowels.

Re:Wierd steganography in the Olympics article?

[Yohimbe]

Imagine you were the wire service that provided the article. This is a good way of identifying your text. A copy paste into an editor loses the color tags. Then they've gotta clean it. Its a form of copy protection. Security by inconvenience. (hey, isn't that what MS provides? ... (Obligatory MS baiting, as per Slashdot Rules Paragraph 1.2.b)

Re:Wierd steganography in the Olympics article?

[CurlyG]

Its a form of copy protection. Security by inconvenience.

That's a cool idea...

This is the sequence - anyone recognise it?

UUAUEAIAEUAUEUAAAAIAIUEUUIEIUAUIUUIAEAEEUEAAUEAEAU EEEUEAEUEIEAIEUEUIEIAU

I'd like to implement something like this, but I wonder if there's not a more subtle way to do it...

POS and Enterprise system on Unix/Linux

[DrainBead]

http://www.proiv.com/0025664A00363AEA/pages/4GL/$F ile/4gl.pdf is an interesting PDF on how Nandos Chickenland is moving to Unix/Linux (with the help of 4GLSystems) in their Enterprise Management Systems. While Linux is becomming more and more mainstream (even my technophobic Dad asked me about "that new thingy giving Microsoft headaches"), IMHO the future of a similar market penetration for Linux as M$ has (at least in the desktop market) is still far off. And perhaps it would be better if it never arrived?!?

Zumiez runs Evolution over Outlook as well...

[SystemOfTheAnimal]

My friend Kevin's dad owns Zumiez (which is the chain the article mentioned) and some of my friends are responsible for installing the Linux boxes they mentioned. In addition to the Linux cash registers, they also installed Evolution for the store managers to use. This was a conscious choice over Outlook.
So put your money where your mouth is and support Zumiez- they're a great company.