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French Police Migrating To Linux
kernel_dan writes "According to heise online, la Gendarmerie Nationale française (French police) will be changing all their computers to Linux. The numbers: 35,000 computers by the end of this month and 80,000 by the end of the summer will be running Linux."
It'd be great if the moderators bothered to read the article. They are NOT switching to Linux, they are switching to OPENOFFICE.
"French police to switch to OpenOffice
The French police are planning to switch from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice, the French industry news service Toolinux reports. By the end of January some 35,000 PCs and workstations are to be equipped with the open source office suite; by this summer the number is to reach 80,000. The French police expect to be able to cut costs amounting to more than two million euros by this move. (Robert W. Smith)
(jk/c't)"
La gendarmerie nationale is not the same thing as la police nationale--the latter of whom I would call "the French police". The gendarmerie would be better described as "the French military police", since they are considered part of the armed forces whereas the police are civilian--although they do also take on roles analagous to those of US State troopers.
Did the submitter not read the article himself? It clearly says that the French Police will be migrating to OpenOffice from MS Office; nothing is said of Linux.
You realize there's a difference, right? And while this is an important change, it's not the same.
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$tar -xvf
Here's a new logo suggestion.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
The article reads, in full:
While it's good to see that le gendarmerie are going to be switching over to everyone's favorite underdog office suite, I don't see where this is the same thing as them all moving to Linux as well. Did a longer version of the article throw in that detail, or was the submitter or the editor getting carried away here?
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Microsoft move all internal support to linux - see their site.
Oh no, I misread that, it say 'we hate linux'. Fuck it, let's post the article anyway.
Linux has been being used for quite some years in various part of the french administration, but always in a quite silent way.
Lately the socialist administration of Paris made a study to follow Munich, but since the study actually showed that they first would have had to grow balls in order to have the courage to do it, they finally decided to continue to talk about it and do nothing. Behavior which can be accurately described as "the french way of life".
So it seems that only one of the 20 areas of Paris is doing a real switch (since they apparently had the only available pair of balls among the socialists), while the others will slowly change their park of machine, do a little linux danse whenever possible (which they were already doing - see 1st paragraph) and continue to give a little tongue job to microsoft once in a while in order to not infuriate our powerfull and friendly ally. (Behavior which can be accurately described as "the british way of life").
So this is how french life goes in french administrations: politics talks and do nothing, administration workers do the job and avoid at all cost to inform said politics about it.
It may seem confusing, but the "gendarmerie" is not the police. It is an army force dedicated to civil troubles and criminal investigation.
if not an "army force dedicated to civil troubles and criminal investigation"?
Down here we do have a lot of different police forces:
Each city can have its "city guard"... they must only guard the City's property.
Each state has up to three police forces: "military police" (they do rounds and prevent crime... they are called "military" because they have a military-like organization), "civil (or judiciary) police" (they investigate crimes) and "military fire corps" (they fight fires and do other disaster reliefs).
The Union has: the Federal Police (to investigate federal crimes... mostly border issues, federal government corruption, and drugs), the Army Police, the Air Force Police and the Navy Police. Our Marine corps exists but is just a part of our Navy corps.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
My friend Mr +1 Funny Modpoint seems to concur with you.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I'm off-topic here, but how did this litany of offensive xenophobic caricatures get modded as "interesting"? It shouldn't even qualify as "funny".
The moderation of these comments is unusually poor (see various "troll" and "redundant" moderations elsewhere). What's going on?
From the amount of detail, I'm quite sure he's from Paris or at least from France himself. It's a bit cynical, but not necessarily xenophobic...
(for the record: I'm Dutch)
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
Just talk of dropping MSO will get Ballmer or Gates on the way soon. Right now Gates is running around the yard in Brazil trying to get President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silvan back on the leash.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Actually.
First, i'm french so there cant be anything xenophobic when I badmouth french people.
Second, it is a national hobby to badmouth our administration. It is considered very "french" to do so; only foreigners wouldnt. [The problem is that it is working better every year, so it's getting more and more difficult; for instance try to read the comments where I say that some services have been switched to linux for years. The ministry of culture being the first, and long before linux was hype].
Third, even if you don't consider the cultural part of badmouthing them, french administrations have dedicated themselves to the task to turn the most people possible insane. Badmouthing them is the only to actually survive them. [An american friend of mine tried to get his papers to work in France. He dropped the idea after one day. Every thing that I warned him about happened in 4 hours.]
Fourth, yes I also badmouthed the british as having their tongue stuck in the usa's ass. But that's not xenophobia, that's common sense.
Fifth, I fart in your general direction.
And I'm of French descent but consider myself English (admittedly, it was a couple of generations ago when the family left France for England and Canada).
I don't much like England, or the rest of Britain/ United Kingdom, and tend to agree slightly with your comments. But I still consider them xenophobic and insulting. Even if someone is part of group X doesn't make it automatically OK for them to insult group X...
It just exclude the word xenophobic, xeno being foreigner, you just can't be called a "foreigner hater" when you show hate of your own group, or as it is the case here, a small part of it.
And there wasnt much hate either, apart from the comments on the french politicians which I sincerely despise. Ant this despise is shared by the ones I was talking about since they really don't rely on them or wait for them to have a task done.