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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.
woohoo!
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.
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
again!! woohoo!
but in the face of continued Microsoft world
domination of the OS and related markets -- it
seems to me still: "too little, too late"
Linux being adopted in more places isn't necessarily a victory. If it performs badly, they will just switch back to Windows or UNIX. I hope, really, that they have decided on Linux because they believe it's the best tool for the job, and not simply to cut costs or to rebel against Microsoft. If Linux is the right tool for the job, only then is it really a victory. I would be cautiously optimistic about Linux being used on more and more places.
China shows sportsmanship.
What's wrong with Windows XP Professional again?
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.
I hope the media covers this when they do those "behind the scenes" pieces about the infrastruce that makes the games happen. Could be some seriously good press for Linux.
/wishful_thinking
I didnt get first post, but i wanted to use this space anyway to promote the Ford Taurus. Known worldwide as the "best car ever made", the taurus puts together great looks with great power. Coupled with a 200 hp Duratec engine producing 200 pound feet of torque, this Peppy AWESOME car can run down anybody! My family has two taurii, why dont you?
...and the mental image I get is a penguin on a snowboard. I think I've seen a rendered image of that somewhere...
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
Dear /. readers,
There is a sinister, wretched cancer growing upon the very fabric of American culture. It is eating away at our morals, our health, our safety, and most of all, our spirituality. It operates behind carefully constructed veils such as "freedom of speech" and "moral relativism." I'm, of course, talking about none other than the liberal agenda. The nay-sayers. The blame-America-firsters. The political dissidents.
Before I go on, I would like to make it clear that it was not too long ago that I was very optimistic with, what I saw, as perhaps a new direction our country was taking. This optimism emerged shortly after the 9-11 tragedy, when I looked down the street and saw Henry Parker, the neighborhood's most outspoken liberal, putting a flag outside his door. In my optimism, I reasoned that a tragedy of this magnitude should wake up even the most radical liberal permanently! In reality, of course, his flag is long gone and he, as well as millions of his other fellow leftists, has reverted back to their un-American activities.
During times of peace, perhaps the activities of these iconoclastic "citizens" can be tolerated. But when our children live with the threatening knife of terrorism poised at their throat, our tolerance must be waived. Ann Coulter put this much more eloquently than I, when she recently stated that "We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that THEY can be killed too,"
How true this is. Up high upon their ivory towers, liberals have indeed lost touch with reality. It would seem that they cannot see this knife being wielded by the murderous villains in countries all around the globe. They have become ungrateful for the things that the greatest nation on earth has given them, and their similarities to the heathens that the LORD spoke of in Sodom and Gomorrah, is becoming shockingly more similar by the minute. Of course, I'm certainly not proposing that we indiscriminately rain fire and brimstone upon them, but certainly we can give them a nudge, push or blatant smack up side the head, to wake them up.
Perhaps this all seems ambiguous at this point, I apologize for that, but it is necessary to spell out a problem unemotionally, so that we can create proposals based in pure logic.
Upon investigation, I realized how we barely dodged a bigger bullet on 9-11. It is true that the majority of the liberals of this country were whipped into the mentality of a sane person and yes, they stayed out of our way long enough so that we could accomplish our most pressing concern. However, there was a minority of dissenters who did not feel that the death of, some three thousand people, was worth letting go of their perverted ideology.
Where do these people hide, you ask? Behind closed doors? In damp, dim-lit basements? No, my friends, the fact of the matter is that these enemies of the people did not even hide at all. They live on college campuses and many of them even stood on street corners and pedestrian malls holding up signs that boasted their dementia.
Although it is widely known that the campuses of U.S. universities have long been the breeding grounds of anti-Americanism, communism, homosexuality, illicit drug activity and other acts of fornication that I cannot even begin to describe. This time, however, they have simply gone too far. These pro-anarchy pacifists have declared war upon American morality, and I think it's time we finally fought back.
That is why I propose abolishing the status quo of ALL U.S. universities, public and private (with perhaps the exception of Bob Jones University). All upper-level administrators should be fired as well as all the beatnik socialists that they call "professors". In its place, I propose, the military take over all responsibilities that we, so foolishly, currently place in the hands of known dissidents. I would imagine that many changes would be made to the current curriculum of most universities. Art and Music, for example, would take on a much more limited (and supervised) role. I'd imagine (or at least hope) that Philosophy would be eliminated entirely, as it is a field that is well known for converting good, God-fearing Americans into heretic dissidents. I'd also imagine that Public Safety officers at the campuses would take on a much broader role, to not only uphold the physical safety of the campus, but also it's ideological safety with the introduction of sweeping un-American activities regulations.
While the results would not, by any means, be instantaneous as we would have to wait a generation for the remaining liberals to die off, but eventually one day we could truly say "United We Stand".
Thank you.
David E. Rosch
Ironic, considering the Chinese government's stance as a champion of the repression of independent belief systems...
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?
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
While it's great that the world's most populous nation is adopting open source, there is one problem with it: the leadership of China are some of the most brutal and flagrant abusers of human rights, and companies such are Red Hat are catering to their notion that Taiwan is a "Renegade Province" and somehow belongs to China, when the opposite is true.
Formosa (Taiwan) was never controlled by China, and China only wants to siphon off its strong capitalist economy and end the most basic freedoms in the country to exercise hegemony.
Most notably, RedHat has removed the Taiwanese Flag from RedHat 8.0 to appease China's ruling Communist Party -- this is an insult to the Taiwanese, who value their freedom and independence, and are constantly under the threat of a Chinese communist attack by China, and RedHat is disavowing their very right to exist by removing the flag.
Put [The Taiwanese] National Flag Back!
I had no Idea that KDE and OO.o were competing products as suggested by it looks like KDE has an edge in Europe, specially in Germany and Sweden. But also OpenOffice is actively evaluated. Could you maybe elaborate on your meaning here?
Put identity in the browser.
... because announcing "we will go Linux" if your quite visible, causes Microsoft to fly in Steve Ballmer to give an offer you can't refuse. Just like Telstra.
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
What's the deal with the snide little qualifier 'but not required' for Australian entities switching to Linux?
Isn't the concept of required operating systems anathema to everything Linux stands for?
Sounds like the pigs are walking upright and living in the farmers house.
More details here
Main page here.
I can't wait to read the posts at www.linuxnewbie.org from irate bureaucrats that cannot get their documents to print properly.
The article fails to mention what P.O.S. software the snowboard shops are running. If any one know a good one let me know. We could use this at a non-profit bookstore I volunteer for.
Preferably it would use a database on a server so we could use the same db with multiple registers and maybe even the a shopping cart on our website.Also it would be cool if it worked with the cuecat for scanning barcodes.
Hate to followup my own thread, but I forgot to quote in the document about the topic, for those who don't care to read them all:
:)
This project covers as follows: study of the information system for the Olympic competition and key technology and mobile communication-aided support based computer-aided Judge system, the Olympic comprehensive information consultative service system, and mass data storage and processing technology and development of LINUX based network office automation software etc.
You can find above here. As you see, they are specifically mentioning LINUX, not just for a choice of business bids.
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
Ugh. I can't believe this guy keeps getting moderated up for this shameless and unnecessary karma whoring. Please mod him DOWN.
I've got pleanty of friends in NZ who this would suit perfectly. All they want to do is web, email, mp3 and basic word processing. They have been asking me about linux PC for them for ages.
Elivs
Too bad it's summer games. For the winter olyimpics mascot choice would be easy :)
I almost thought it said...
...and I quickly thought,
Australia, China Snowboard Shops Use Linux
Wait, there are snowboard shops in China???
Hey, you never know. Someday...
"Folks just call him Buckethead." -- Les Claypool
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?!?
Dyslexics of the world, untie!
Linux(tm) based registers... The only registers that don't eat your money...
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
I've got some information for Bill Gates and Steve Ballamer that could help them save money. If anyone from Microsoft is reading this, can you please pass the information on?
You can get some really great deals on international flights by booking a "round the world" ticket. With these tickets you can stop off at a large number of different destinations on a trip around the world and pay a single low price. A friend of mine paid about $2000 to stop at 40 different destinations on five continents!
I hope this helps.
Iraq is proud to announce that they're using Linux for the guidance system in their new generation of scud missiles. Thank goodness they choose open source!..
SLASHDOT
VA SOFTWARE,
FREMONT
CALIFORNIA
Dear Sir,
I am Rob Malda, the moderator of VA Software, Slashdot webpage, and I have the mandate of some of the Editors of the Slashdot to look for a reliable and trust worthy anonymous coward that will assist us in the transfer of 26Million karma into his registered account. Source of the karma: In the past Editors meetings, this amount had been found floating in the moderator's account resulting in an excess karma of 26Million,this has caused a delay in declaring the moderator's (Slashdot) bi-annual balance sheet to subscribers, and since this amount has not been made known to the management and subscribers of the webpage, Jeff Bates decided to employ the services of an account auditor who is a homosexual lover to one of the editors. Who in the cause of investigation, discovered it is an unclaimed contract fund of an anonymous coward, who was modded up through our site. This findings arose the interest of my colleagues, who through further investigation discovered that the coward was (MR. JON KATZ a pedophile) who died in one of the hamster felching incident some years back. Every effort have been made to contact his relations and next of keen to kin. Sequel to this, my colleagues concluded that it will be unwise if this amount is declared to the public and be shared among subscribers of the webpage.
Rather in view of this I was mandated to look for a anonymous coward who will assume the next of keen of the dead pedophile (MR. JON KATZ) and provide us with an account number that will hold the said karma to enable us transfer the karma into the coward's account in the coward's name and profile particulars for our mutual benefits.
This on conclusion would be shared among us. My colleagues have agreed to give you 15% of the karma for your assistance while the remaining 85% will be left for us to share. Please be adviced that this business must be made very confidential, and its urgency demands your immediate response upon the receipt of this letter to enable us furnish you with the full details of what to do, so that the transfer process will commence immediately. Feel free to ask questions where you are not cleared.
Looking forward for your immediate response through my e-mail address above or altanatively cmdrtaco@slashdot.org PLEASE YOU CAN REACH ME ON MY PRIVATE NUMBER 510-6877000
Best regards,
Rob Malda
About time the Luddite did something useful.
Now if he could only get rid of those bloody caps we would be laughing.
This is g to the oatse, c to the izzex news. This kind of slow but steady creep onto PC's in any area of the business sector is what is needed right now. The consumer desktop will hopefully follow this route as well.
Read here austrian oil company just added suse to their server base, it is never too late, and never too little.
At the time I figured it was "native" (svga) gnome, since who would be crazy enough to run X on a cash register, but does svga gnome use a window manager? Yikes.
Well, as long as their GUI isn't rendered in OpenGL I guess they'd be okay.
ENDUT! HOCH HECH!
This sort of coverage is great news,
I've been going around trying to convince my clients that Linux is a viable corporate alternative ( see here) and every story avocating its use for political (free speech), environmental (recycling and making those old 386s usable again), societal (adding value to people in third-world countries) and technological (A Globally Wide pool of people with diverse ideas rather than those in Redmond) as well as valid business reasons (increases profitability, adds value, reduces costs, etc) make the Linux argument even stronger.
We need more of the "I switched to Linux because it was good for my business model" rather than "I switched cos Microsoft was mean and horrible to me so I took my ball and went to another park" because mean and 'orrible Microsoft will just replace the usual suspects with new friendly (and more insidious) faces and rebrand themselves as the NEW microsoft and pull those customers back in again (Hey look they said they were sorry and I can go back to the park again).
Action
Broader Linux adoption is a good thing and all, but I really don't see how this one merits to a Slashdot story. Goverment shops switching to Linux in small steps, China's friendly stance and store chain usages are all old news.
Recent story with the frontpage article in Washington Post about Spanish goverment offices that started mass conversion of 100 000 PCs to Linux was news. This one isn't.
Ive seen so many of these "X place" is using / switches to "X technology", and it doesnt mean jack. If you want to argue FOR a technology, argue for it, don't use someone picking it as an argument. My local DOT uses OS/2, so do ATMs. What's that mean? OS/2 is perfect? CompUSA's cash register system is a Java program. So Java 0wnZ J00? Someone switches to something all the time, big deal? And most importantly, idiots abound, so just because some place big or small chooses something, doesn't mean it was a good idea, no matter if it's Bob's Taco's, or the DoD.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
I seriously doubt this will happen, here's why: The technology sponsor (their contract is for Salt Lake - Beijing) has started developing there clients. They have spent a couple of years before Salt Lake, and continue to refine there software. The client is designed for Windows. I don't think that they will want to spend the time/money to port their software to a different platform when it works fine on Windows.
As the article states, this is still up for debate. The sponsors are included in this debate. The sponsors will get their way, because money talks.
Unfortunately, the way the Olympics are run, the sponsors will continue to drive their technologies & brands. Unless the IOC changes how they operate, the current trends will continue.
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.
--
Twinbee is lovely character. Perhaps you will enjoy with him?
I think the Chinese know more about "offers you can't refuse". Remember Tiananmen Square, 1989.
Linux Hippies join Barbara Striesand and Alex Baldwin in thier flight from the United States.
Timmy, spokesperson for the Hippies said "We know Babs and Alex were just pissed about the elections, but we figured we could split cab fare with them".
I just gave a linux presentation to a partner vendor company of ours yesterday. The one thing you have to remember is that neither one our companies produces commercial software. Both of our business's are in the manufacturing areana. We showed them our manufacturing terminals running kde and our custom applications and needless to say they where shocked at the simplicity and capabilities. The only thing they cared about was the incredible way it brings computing everywhere at a very low cost. Being a manufacturing company it allows us to expand our computing environment at little cost. During a rough economy this allows us to take deep product cost cuts to take business from our competitors. The use of linux is a competitive advantage, plain and simple.
Got Code?
The Donato Food Group in Toronto will take its 26th restaurant (Mrs. Vanelli's) live today in Downtown Toronto at Scotia Plaza on King Street West. It will be a 3 display X Windows POS system from ViewTouch, a company which has been in business doing graphic touchscreen POS since 1986, a time when there were no graphic capabilities in DOS computers. That might even mean that the company that first began doing graphic touchscreen POS is still at it and is using free software instead of Windows. By the way, one of the displays will be an interactive Kitchen Video display. Everybody else's kitchen video displays are not interactive except for the ability to use a bump bar to move from one guest check to another. The company has an IT department with one employee. He is also responsible for all the POS installations, from Montreal to British Columbia and, in a few months, from Arabia to New Zealand. He knows a little bit about enterprise POS and remote management, don't you think? I think that he would think that you would be better off laughing at something that was funny instead of laughing at something that you made up that has no truth to it. If you were to ask the IT department manager at Donato Food Group you would find that X never crashes, and neither does the FreeBSD (and sometimes Linux) operating system used in the POS system. By the way, there's no gnome or KDE environment, either. The window manager in the POS system is fully graphical, but it is also fully specific to the job at hand - POS. Since you're in Canada maybe you would find yourself eating at a Mrs. Vanelli or a Made In Japan restaurant in one of the malls. They will take your order on an X Windows POS system and the company's head office will have the transaction immediately rsync'ed to itself. And if they add a new menu item to the software from the head office, even as the cashier is taking your order, don't be surprised. That's the kind of thing that you can do with X when it's used properly, and it's the kind of thing that has been going on for many, many years.
You badly need a reality check. Do you have enough initiative to give yourself one?
While the front computers used for the point of sale are windows98, (the keyboards and scanners are not suppored by linux), the backroom is all linux. No wonder it is actually stable. IN addition, an old IBM P100 runs most stores, and the lag isn't terrible. Chaulk one up for linux's speed and reliablity. After all, this system has been in place for over 3 years, and had almost zero problems. If only radioshack sold redhat...
People switching to Linux... not big news. Linus becoming Bill Gates' pool boy is news.
---
When you come to a fork in the road, take it! --Yogi Berra--
...Having the Chinese insist on an all-Linux setup is an extreme no-brainer.
After all, you know IBM is going to be supplying the IT hardware for Olympic operations, and given that IBM is probably the largest supporter of Linux in the world....
What a useless article. Just another "more people are using Linux" article. What I was hoping to find out is what POS software they're using, and where I can get it. Also, I need to know if I can seamlessly move my POS and accounting data to OSS equivalents.
If you remember back in September 1999 they announced the biggest purchase yet of linux stations for Retail. This event is on the LinuxTimeline
This and the telia win in Sweden was one of the first major linux wins. Anyone knows how the latter is doing? From the Datamation article article.
"We (Burlington)have been very aggressive about moving toward Linux, mostly on small servers or combination server/desktops," says Prince. "The stores all use Linux."
Help fight continental drift.
Why? Isn't there a mature Open Source POS software? I've been thinking about that for some time. Linux is a very viable platform for a POS system, because many of them are old PC's. Is there a problem with the multiple devices that usually compose a POS? (Ticket printer, Barcode scanner, cash register, etc.). I think most of them follow a standard specification.
I'd like to see a distribution geared towards POS systems. Like a cd that installs a server and clients for a small shop or restaurant.
Signatures are supposed to be funny?
Australia kinda jumps right out at you, being kinda big and all alone in the ocean and stuff. . .and China, well, that was a bit harder, but not much, the atlas people seem to have made a special point of highlighting it, they seem to think it's kinda important or something, but for the life of me. . . where the hell is Snowboard?
KFG
Great. Thank you Red Hat, thanks for helping support the repressive dictatorship in China. When the day comes the current Chinese government falls, I hope that everyone remembers that you were a collaborator against freedom.
The chart at the end of the Business 2.0 article is a bit misleading. The browser and email options weren't checked for openoffice and staroffice, and since they were associated exclusively with Linux in the article, it would appear to someone who doesn't know better that you wouldn't be able to "surf" or email in Linux.
I use Konqueror/Mozilla and Kmail personally, but nothing was mentioned about these or the other excellent Gnome equivalents.
I actually emailed the author a polite note on this subject.
So if China is so big on open systems and Linux in particular, then why is it that I have never ever seen an open source project or even an open source patch contributed by an actual Chineese person living in China ?
The article, or the reference to it, is misleading. They are not implementing an open source cash register.
--
amazing that I might be about to praise china, apologies to Wei Jingsheng and those of his ilk, having all linux for the olympics will bring a lot of eyeballs to the linux/OSS concept. How many times during salt lake did NBC do some puff piece on the technology behind the actual putting-on of the games?
-
Once again, those up top have blundered and chosed linux instead of the more stable more advanced FreeBSD. I only hope not too many people are hurt by this decision.
Truely ground-breaking material.
There's another one right down the bottom of the page;
<font color=white>Fnord</font>.
The primary cause of failure in electrical appliances is an expired
warranty. Often, you can get an appliance running again simply by changing
the warranty expiration date with a 15/64-inch felt-tipped marker.
-- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"
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