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Japan Considers Moving Away From Windows
dm24_99 writes "According to this article at Japan Today, the Japanese government is considering abandoning Microsft Windows in a plan to boost computer security within the government. The government is very interested in alternatives, especially Linux." Of course, like the bank reform being proposed, who knows when this will actually happen.
It's not just asian countries. A north american only needs look so far as...south america. While I can't find the article, there has been more than one south american country considering the switch to open source or actually doing it.
...First, they'll have to figure out the cost of changeover and supporting Linux, FreeBSD, etc. Software may be extremely cheap but supporting it could consume quite a lot of IT man-hours.
Besides, the Japanese are already heavily invested in commercial UNIX systems. I believe many Japanese government ministries are running minicomputers and mainframes built in Japan using UNIX.
Anyway, the Japanese should check with IBM Japan on this. After all, the biggest commercial supporter of Linux is IBM, and IBM definitely has the resources to do Linux installations from department servers all the way up to supercomputers.
Err ... do you know what a fiscal year is. A fiscal year beginning April 1. may very well begin April 1. 2003.
A fiscal year is a twelve month periode, but not bound to the gregorian year. The term is usually used in economics.
Look a monkey!
You people are taking something written by Japan Today seriously?
It's a faaarr left wing, marginal paper dominated by Western expats. The Japanese don't read it.
Wait until you hear it from Yomiuri or Asahi shimbun-- then bother to burn some brain cells.
Bear in mind that linux has a strong tradition of unveiling every security risk found no matter how small. Most holes found recently have been found by audits, not by intrusions in linux boxens. The more holes found and fixed the better. We have no idea of just how many holes there are in windows because we cant quip about it if we buy access to the code. An independant audit of windows is impossible. In linux whoever has the time and care can do an audit. Security should be discussed, bashed and nagged about constantly.
If you look at how many holes that have been found in the core of linux and GNU tools the numbers are in favour for linux by far. Its mostly addons and applications that have holes in them.
Dont forget that a serious admin can choose secure parts for his server and thus build an pretty much idiot proof server if he has the knowledge relatively easy. In windows thats impossible because "this is what you get, live with it".
The existence of theese linux boxens with different ftpd, httpd, sshd etc etc gives a diversified net, just like in nature. If you find a hole in an application there is less chance of someone else having the axact same config.
That said there are a lot to be done in linux security but i still think its a better choice for a server since you have the power yourself and you dont have to wait for someone else to do the job. If its important you can do it yourself and that is worth more than money if your data is sensitive.
HTTP/1.1 400
There is something (ok, better there was at least two years ago) called UniCon and UniKey. Which had support for japanese/korean/china simplified/china traditional characters. I'm not sure who developed this little piece of code, it might be that someone from TurboLinux, not sure tho, but it worked like a charm (for someone that doesn't know anything about this writings... ;> )
:))
You simply booted kernel in frambuffer, modprobed unicon and you had the ability to display the double-byte characters on your screen. Then for keyboard input you loaded unikey module and there was status line on the bottom where you could by pressing shift-space or ctrl-space or something like that, enter all syllables and the thing also checked if they are valid. You couldn't just write some nonsense...
So the support looked pretty much ok.. At least for me...
The Sig, the sig
There may be thousands of kanji characters, but those beyond the 1,980 characters that the Ministry of Education requires for passing the final high school exams in Japan are rapidly falling into disuse.
Newspapers, periodicals and manga (the Japanese equivalent of comic books) published in Japan usually conform with the Ministry of Education standard for ease of printing reasons. In fact, there are articles in Japanese newspapers and periodicals on kanji that are falling into disuse.
The answer is very simple. Money. The asian business community's simply cannot afford the Western licensing costs charged by Microsoft so many don't pay. Now that there is increasing Governmental software licensing enforcement, it's pushing company's towards a legalised solution, and Open Source is a good investment.
I actually thought you were sarcastic until I read till the end. Presuming you're a Brit, but surely,
I agree here with your thesis, but a small nitpick; English is definitely the global business language, but if my experience with my Chinese friends is any indication, Asian (ie Korean, Japanese and Chinese) users certainly seem to prefer an interface in their mother tongue rather than a generic English one, even if they read and write okay-ish English. So yes, Microsoft spends quite a lot on internationalisation, but no, this is despite English emerging as the de-facto business language for the world.
Interesting typo. ;-)
More than mere navel gazing.
Japanes fiscal years always start on 1 April. It's not an April fools thing at all. I work for a Japanese company, so I know.
As far as I'm informed even raising classes in school is around that period. They do not change like we do at the end of the summer. They raise in class "in the middle of the year". I might be wrong about this, but I'm sure about the fiscal year.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
There's 1945 kanji known as Joyu (sp?) that are the bare minimum needed for literacy - those are the ones you learn through high school and the ones that they pretty much stick to in newspapers and official documents. Plus in Manga, of course, where they have a larger percentage of 'semi-literate' and younger readers. Believe it or not, Japanese literature actually does get a bit deeper than this - they have books and magazines that use lots of difficult characters that must be supported in the fonts and character sets.
After the initial 1945, there's another 18,000 or so that, while less common, are certainly not 'falling into disuse' - some percentage are only used for names and such nowadays, buy that pretty much makes them a requirement. After all, how do you sell someone a computer incapable of displaying his name or the name of a polititian? Sure, you could spell it out in katakana, but that's just lame.
It gets trickier, because there are several encodings in common usage, such as JIS, Shift-JIS and EUC, all which must be supported in any viable operating system. As far as I know, Unicode is a latecomer and not really an important player yet in Japan. It does show promise, though. Until then, systems will have to transparently guess which encoding to use. One of the first words you learn in Japanese when dealing with DBCS information systems is Mojibake - garbage rendering of text.
The good news is that Linux does a great job of handling all of the encoding issues. I use it daily for this stuff and it certainly surpasses anything I've seen on Windows, though IMHO, Mac is a bit slicker. (No surprise there.)
As an aside, I was once venting frustration to a friend while studying kanji - "When are the Japanese going to give up this crap and just use roman letters like the rest of the world??"
"Never!" she replied, "Because once you've learned kanji, it's too fscking convenient!"
If you're really interested in this stuff, do a Google for 'Jim Breen', the professor from Monash who is possibly the leading expert in the field - he's also a hell of a nice guy.
-- My Weblog.
Internet exposed web servers make up perhaps 10% of the total server market.
I don't see how you can reasonably make any conclusions based on the statistics you just posted.
Most of the "other" webservers are Roxen server which was open-sourced recently.
Recently? Roxen (and Caudium, which was forked from it a couple of years ago) has always been released under the GPL.