Slashdot Mirror
McDonald's Germany Moves to SuSE Linux
sglafata writes "Novell has made an announcement that McDonald's is moving towards Linux. 'With more than 30,000 restaurants around the globe and more than 1,200 in Germany alone, McDonald's is the undisputed market leader in the fast food sector.'"
There is actually a much more interesting press release on the Novell website about NetWare and McDonald's Brazil. It is unclear whether or not Germany was running SCO Unix on the servers before the switch to Linux, but SCO is apparently not a worldwide McDonald's affiliate, as McDonald's Brazil has been running NetWare for 15 years. This article also gives much more information about the IT infrastructure of McDonald's, since the slashdot article just made me think "How many DNS, FTP, and Proxy servers can McDonald's Germany possibly have?". McDonald's Brazil, which is about the same size as McDonald's Germany, has 6 giant servers in different locations accross the country, and each one has a huge database for all of the information of each restaurant, plus the administrative information. You have to remember that a lot of the IT related stuff is for McDonald's huge corperate staff, not the people taking your order. The other interesting thing is that McDonald's is completely centralized, so if a server failure occurs, and the in-store machines can't connect with a central database, they apparently can't take orders or give receipts out at the actual restaurants.
Okay, I wasn't going to be a dick about this, but it has been repeated three times without anybody mentioning it, so I gotta step in and point out that a co-op is a place where the shoppers have a financial stake in the management.
A "coop" is a house for animals like a chicken coop.
A "coup", as in the French phrase "coup d'etat" is a striking victory. It was also used as a reference to the Native American tradition of touching one's enemy in battle to demonstrate your dominant skill and control over the battle.
A "coupe" is a type of car body.
To "coo" is to speak in a murmuring tone much like that of a pigeon.
So, this time I'm going to let you all go. But if it happens again. . . well, I'll kick your fucking asses.
I know you're not serious but you should know that Germany is experiencing what is most kindly referred to as a tech slowdown, and more honestly referred to as: Today, there are nearly four hundred long-term unemployed, well qualified (Masters' degrees or more) tech specialists looking for a job in my (small) city alone. And my city is peanuts compared to Frankfurt. It's tiny.
So don't try this at home, at least unless you have two degrees and preferably a PhD as well as being mother-tongue bilingual in German and English, and maybe in another language too, have kept German-style Letters Of Reference throughout your professional career and you have friends in reasonably high places or are naturally lucky. In a year or so it should be safe to try again (goes my optimistic viewpoint), but in the meantime there are better places to be, like just about anywhere else, except for on LinuxTag of course.
The German tech scene has been in trouble for a while now, probably ever since CeBIT ceased being anything but an intrabusiness marketing forum. As with everywhere, the year 2000 was a fun time here, but this spring's CeBIT was just depressing. New and cool stuff is mostly coming from elsewhere - German industry has done what the tech industry does at times like this, which is to dump R&D and fall back on selling management 'skills'. Curled up like a stunned hedgehog, in other words, and never mind the obvious prick jokes.