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Paris Accelerates Move to Open Source
* * Beatles-Beatles writes to tell us that the city of Paris is moving to open-source software a little faster than originally intended. As a part of the strategy to 'reduce its dependence on suppliers' they anticipate replacing both server and desktop applications with free and open-source software. From the article: "Earlier this year, volunteers among the city's 46,000 staff were invited to download and install open-source software to their desktops, including the Firefox browser and the Open Office.org productivity suite. Now, the city is planning to migrate all the users of one city department or all of those in one of the city's 20 districts, not just the volunteers, to test a larger migration. The city has 17,000 workstations, up from 12,000 in 2001"
Paris went open source since her famous video went to the internet.
Oh, wait...
That should keep her Sidekick from getting hacked again.
by distributing 100 dollar laptops with Red Hat Linux to every rioting teen
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
There is a french version of open office?
Never mind TFA, this is just payback time for the 'freedom fries' jibes... None of your nasty closed-source software - we will 'ave the free(dom) software instead!
:-)
Oh, and I spit in your general direction!
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Now that's a new combination...
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Good Job France -- seems that the French/Freedom fry equality is true - they really do stand for freedom.
the rioters burned all the Windows licenses.
France surrenders!
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Employees don't see cost savings, so they need to see feature benefits. Hard to tell if there are enough new or better features to justify the the move.
I bet they will need support... and therefore, they will buy OO (oops, StarOffice) from Sun rather than instructing their employees to download it from the net. Therefore, they will just exchange one company for the other.
Good for Sun, good for OpenOffice... bad for Paris Hilton =)
http://www.automatiq.se
They are planning on pissing off a lot of people and want to lessen the surface area exposed to retaliation.
"As a part of the strategy to 'reduce its dependence on suppliers' they anticipate replacing both server and desktop applications with free and open-source software."
So basically they moved from the whims of closed-source suppliers, to the itches of open-source suppliers.
Some of the French youth are extremely happy about getting their hands on Firefox.
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
From the article: The city is also responsible for IT matters in its primary and middle schools. There, it has installed Open Office on 2,150 computers, and plans to bring the total to 3,500 by the end of March, it said. French high schools are run directly by central government.
B-b-b-but those poor kids won't learn how to use Microsoft Windows! How will they ever succeed in the real world?!
(This is sarcasm, folks, regarding a commonly-cited reason for American school systems to standardize on Microsoft Windows.)
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
Hmm, I hope they hurry the hell up and do the conversion BEFORE the city gets burned down around them. :)
Ok, Ok, some of us just can't resist a bit of taunting the French. Actually I do hope it can be pulled off for a change, getting tired of reading about conversion projects started and then scrapped as things either get complicated or Microsoft's wallet opens to local politicians.
Democrat delenda est
Liberty, equality, brotherhood. The tagline for the French republic. So they have to use free software , or they'd be breaking their ideals. Like "God bless America and the separation of church and state". I'm suprised the French don't use more free software, given their hate for America and the anglofication of their language, of which computers are a big cause. I used a French version of windows ocne. Only the very front was translated, any error messages, anything practically not visible at first view was still in English.
And thank the French language for having separate words gratuit and libre, to distringuish the meanings of free. No excuse for the open source buzzword coerupting ouyr message there.,
je donne vers le haut !
So who do they actually turn to when they need software support with open-source apps??
This could have a much bigger impact than just 17,000 users. Just about the only time I have to dig out IE is to access some crazy government site that I HAVE to use, but can't get to work with anything but IE. It might not be ideal, but if it becomes the case that Parisians can't pay their taxes or something unless they use Firefox, well that's got to be good for Firefox. After all, after being forced to try it, they might like it!
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
With MS, there is only one place to get real support; MS.
With nearly all (or perhaps all) OSS products, you can get support in a number of places. Other companies are offering OO support. Of course, Sun does good support, so I would not be surprised to see them win the contract. But OO is not a monopoly.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I'm recycling a comment from another AC in another Scuttlemonkey/**Beatles-Beatles post. This guy's getting worse than Roland Picklepail:
Am I the only person who has noticed the numerous stories that get posted by *--Beatles-Beatles? Am I also the only person who has noticed that the link used in is name is a constantly changing URL (depending on the story) with pointers to various scammy sites? Is it not obvious what he's doing? He's using the awesome PageRank of slashdot do promote his sites based on searches that have the word Beatles in them.
It's a small price to pay for free advertising. Find a story, summarize it in 5 minutes, post to slashdot, and get a pagerank boost that advertisers would pay hundreds (or maybe thousands) for. (Text links on high-ranking sites is big business - just ask oreilly).
Slashdot should at least put a ref=nofollow in the links to submitters (or better yet, only link the submitter's name to his/her user page).
In closing, a quick bit of WHOIS shows that all the sites linked by **B-B are registered to Carl Fogle. Carl, cut this crap out.
IIRC, It was the Windows boxes that were broken into, and then accessed the sidekick. The sidekick was suppose to be open to the network, os it did what it was designed to do.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
....is what has their experience been during this migration? What are the things they've tripped over? This sort of info would be handy to combat the FUD that the PHB's have stuck in their heads.
Also, is this the largest migration to an open source environment that anybody has heard of? That piece of info would be nice to know.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
The unemployment soared to 30%. Pundents blame the lack of supply chain jobs.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
We should definitely change the name to "Freedom Source".
Wait for it...
Wait...
It runs faster.
In Finland, my home city had a widely publicised project to start using open source software. In the end, the project was scrapped, with the only thing achieved being that MS lowered it's licensing fees somewhat.
Only a few weeks ago the City anounced it would purchase a new MS software for all of its computers.
This was probably due to proficious wining and dining on the part of MS.
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
*I* managed to see the humor, sarcastic as it was.
Yeah! Another post related to France. I can't wait for the flow of rioting cheese eating surrender monkey hate posts to follow. Boycott France, United we stand and God bless america.
0
The French Scapegoat http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/10/19/193648/4
(Score 5: Offtopic.)
... how to properly insult the stupid french over this. But then I saw that, really, this represents the french surrendering to our open source power.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
...you support malaria, riots, and car-torching.
I read
And when you make this reference to France as a nation that surrenders, you are referring to Viet Nam, right? Where France gave up and the U.S. had to show 'em how it's done?
My sister in law is student in "teacher's school" (no idea how you call that in english) in france.
She'll be a teacher in primary school next year. They have computer courses to be able to teach children how to use a word processor, web browser or graphic editor. What's interesting is that they learn everything on free software, are given a cd full of OSS (for Windows), and encouraged to distribute it around them.
They're told not to use commercial software with children, simply because their parents are not necessary wealthy enough to pay for the stuff at home so it would create ineqalities among the children. Very good idea if you ask me. Now if they could make a program to build very cheap computers and give one to each child it would be even better. But that's a start.
but closed minds.
The right to burn a car is your fundamental right to exercise your Liberty in the Sixth Republic of France. Note, however, that when burning a car, you need to carefully check, whether the the design of the car is Free; that is, it is licensed as GNU GPL. If it is, you're obliged to use a version of Molotov's coctail that's formula is licensed under a GPL compatible license to ignite the car, as the coctail is then linked to the car by the fire and is as such, becomes a derivative work of it.
Those using a non-Free or a non-GPL-compatible version of Molotov's coctail when burning a car shall be subject to a fine of up to 10,000 F and the material costs of the burned car.
*ducks*
“Wait for Hurd if you want something real” –Linus
Why not do what we did: make your office PDF free?
.rtf, anything sent outside the office gets converted to .pdf before sending. Your method makes you a troll, apparently.
.doc format.
Because PDFs work, and if it ain't broke, don't fix it? Anything that's edited in-office is
The files are enormous
It depends how you make them. I can LaTeX up a file and the resulting pdf will be (typically) 30->100kB in size. Others are just comprised of scanned pictures, and the largest I've seen is 2.5MB. If you think that's enormous, get some more storage (it's really cheap nowadays) and then look at the
the readers are bloated (and at 56+ Meg just to open a fucking file, I'd call "bloated" generous)
Evince is using 40.4MB to read a typical PDF with standard text/pictures for me, and that's hardly putting strain on the total memory. While Firefox is using over 100MB.
and they're a pain in the ass to alter
Some people might consider that a strong point. Try printing it out and writing on it if you need to edit it so badly.
Could somebody please tell me why people use PDF's in the first place?
Because they're what you see is what you get, anywhere? Compare that with almost all word processor formats where the layout is dependent on fonts, printers, the program, all sorts of things. Not to mention that it's well-supported.
Stop complaining about the file format just because you've been using them badly. PDFs were never intended to be a word-processor format, so stop treating them as one.
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
Now we know the true cause of the riots. They were obviously financed and sponsored by Microsoft in retaliation.
This sort of info would be handy to combat the FUD that the PHB's have stuck in their heads.
So, you're assuming that anybody who doesn't want to go OSS "FUD" stuck in their head? I use very little OSS in my business, and I can assure you that "FUD" has nothing to do with it. If anything, I'd like to see an end to the FUD that OSS zealots constantly are trying to stir up. I can't even begin to count the hours that I've wasted because of OSS zealot FUD. Personally, I wouldn't have wasted hours and hours playing with the OSS that I did, just trying to get BASIC functionality, if not for the zealots screaming about how Linux and other popular OSS apps are "easy to use". Please, take your own FUD and shove it up your ass.
It a) used to be FF, and b) it's now.
... is Linux!
+5 Informative
No I do not think it is the largest. For example by the end of 2005 the 70,000 workstations used by the French Gendarmerie will use Open Office. This is the biggest French migration. The Gendamerie hope to save 2 million euros per year. 10,000 computers bought since 2004 will have OO preinstalled. The Gendarmerie say this saves 75 euros per PC for an MS Office license.
The Gendarmerie say it is not just a simple question of money. Managing Microsofts complicated license structure was becoming a nightmare for the Gendarmerie - reason alone for the migration.
The Gendarmerie is also redevloping in Java a number of standard VB macros written for word to automate form filling. The idea is to leave open a possible future migration to Linux. XML will be used as a storage format along with PDF and open document formats. Stephane Kimmerlin for MS France says it is not a victory for OO, the Gendarmerie only used a fraction of MS Office's features so didn't really need the power offered by MS Office.
In France the interior ministry will move 50,000 workstations to Open Office, the finance ministry is moving 8,000 PCs to OO, the public works ministry is looking to move 60,000 PCs to OO and Customs have migrated 16,000 PCs to OO and its use is mandatory since January 2005.
Hope that proves useful.
David
ps I've consulted for the French Education ministry for their Antares project - a Java based system for managing recruitment which used JBoss and also Weblogic.
First, they start with beheading a stupid queen.
Then, a bunch of punk ass kids get away with acting out violent Grand Theft Auto scenes.
If that weren't enough, they made the gov't admit systemic racism to boot.
Now they're all going open source? What the $!@# is goin' on? I guess you can really have your cake and eat it too!
I'd pack up, move to Paris and join all that debauchery if I weren't scared piss of the US gearin' up for Operation Liberate France! Them nuke-totin' anarchists will not be allowed to get away with all this terrorism.
My issue with the French stems largely from WWII as well. To my mind, their reaction to the Nazis cost them all rights to any future griping. Any group of people who is sufficiently mentally defective to vote to allow the Nazis into your country so that they don't bomb your musems, is too mentally defective to be allowed a voice in any future decisions.
Sure, Mr. Hitler, come on in. Round up our Jews, our staunch Catholics, our Gypsies, and kill our people. Just, please, oh please don't bomb our musems.
What a bunch of logic that was!
2 cents,
Queen B
HDGary secures my bank
Just because France is doing this and (if you listen to the likes of Bill O'Reilly) they're sworn enemies of America?
Honestly, if London, Berlin, Dublin, Madrid or any other European city had opted for OSS, would it have been viewed as a political news item?
This bollocks is, well, a load of bollocks.
it is no wonder. I predict much more of this. Willing or unwilling I consider MS to blame. A simple dumb click by a dumb user should not allow a rootkit that cannot be removed get installed PERIOD! How is it that WinXP has option "Hidden files and folders - Show hidden files and folders" yet these files are still hidden. I PAID YOU FOR THIS, YOU WORK FOR ME! GOOD GRIEF CHARLIE BROWN.
Oh yea, and Registry entries are hidden Also! Where is the option to display hidden registry entries? It must exist, yet I cannot find the option to turn it off.SONY found it! I do not think I will be interested your new fangled SOL file system now. You can't get the old one working right. If MS cannot fix this problem they should get out of the operating system business. If u think Linux is to niche just opt for solaris. Game over Bill. I almost wish this problem hit me then I would have cause to go after these thugs.
I sure hope the CIA has at least infected China's version of the CIA and the Iranian's and the Russian's CIA.
In reality some dumb ass 16 year old has already done it and the CIA is clueless.
Gizmos Gagets For Ninjas
Am I the only one who originally read the title as "Particle Accelerators Move to Open Source" and was preparing a "Beowolf cluster of strangelets" reply before realizing the truth?
Bah stop blaiming the world and improve F/OSS instead.
/dev/null.
I'm not cross and I'm not attacking the parent, it will take a lot of work to do all the things mentioned below in one single distribution which is one of the reasons it hasn't been done already. It wont only take coding skills it will also take management skills and dealmaking.
I love F/OSS but there's never going to be any progress in the desktop market if we can't realize that for the end-user MS Windows is actually a generation or two in front of Linux and other F/OSS OSes.
I said for the end-user, not for the administrators and IT staff, but for the average, common, end-user who used years to wrap their heads around a GUI, doubleclicking, and getting comfortable enough to actually use the tools they need in their job.
If all the F/OSS programmers are so darned smart why don't they realize how "dumb" the end-user is? That it is shallow simplicity which is what it will take to really challenge MS and Apple? The worst part is that there are so many areas for improvement and simplifying the experience for the end-user beyond the best that MS or Apple manage to provide but it always seem to boil down to catfighting about implementation which completely removes any kind of aim and then it all just peters out into
Think I'm trolling? I'm not. Tell me how many car manufacturers demand that the customers must be mechanics to drive their cars? Until the day that the "community" wakes up to this problem F/OSS OSes will never win a significant share in the desktop market.
1 automagic, default secure, choice-free, autoupdated, autoconfigured OS with an easy to use firewall like Firestarter, an easy to use Antiviral program (even if it doesn't do anything but provide an additional layer of email-cheking; you'll not have to explain anything about *nix & viruses), an easy to use, instinctual, and selfcongruent FULLY INTERNATIONALIZED wysiwyg word editor that doesn't eat system resources, 1 -one- default intuitive (= learn 2-3 rules and you know it all) GUI configured to be exactly the same as MS (do NOT tempt yourself with adding choice, it will only add confusion). Copy & paste and click & drag for ABSOLUTELY EVERY program on the OS. Professional support, interactive education material, and complete up to date, clear, concise, easy to understand information. Include Flash, Shockwave, real full Java and other stuff like that which 99% of all Windows desktop users are used to and do it OUT OF THE BOX. 0 -zero- compiling of ANYTHING unless the user wants to: that means precompiled binaries without dependencies following autopackage or klik style as the norm. Remove the incentive to use a server OS as a desktop OS or vice versa. Hide root and make any absolutely neccesary use of sudo transparent to the end-user. Sand-box everything possible by default. Get support for hardware at any cost so that it will never be a question for the end-user. Make everything the dektop requests of updates of programs and drivers extremely transparent for any IT staff, provide tons of hooks for the IT staff to monitor the the health of the desktop system, NIDS, HIPS and so on.
The only change the end-users should notice is how much easier stuff is and how much they DON'T have to do and DON'T have to learn unless they absolutely want to. The question the developers should ask themselves is "how can we make it unneccesary for the end-user to know this or do that unless they want to?"
The above simply does not exist as of now in any Linux desktop distro (if anyone actually thinks otherwise they're deluding themselves terribly), and to make it worse there are about 20 runner-ups that are somewhat close (but not anywhere near as close as they like to think) which simply just fragments a miniscule market and hinders its growth.
Ease of use != Perl dogma translated to the OS! Wake up or shut up.
TFA makes no mention of Iraq, Chirac, or demonizing.
was the whole bit about "This fine british paper" that Powell presented. A paper from, suposedly british intelligence origin, describing all the Über-Threats from Iraq and the dangers coming from them. When it hit the news that the entire paper was copy and pasted from an american students essay posted on the internet, related to Desert Storm in 1991 - copied with exact same typos and all - I was laughing my head off for half an hour. I still crack up today just writing about this. ... The sad part is that they usually do.
Absolutely hilarious with cheap and phony shams polititians use to try to get away with things.
"Fine british paper." An instant classic. Absolutely.
...
As a matter of fact I've been laughing to tears again the last 5 minutes at the end of this post.
Monthy Python really pales compared to the bizarness of this incident.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Who the fuck cares about what Chirac said? Or what Bush said? Chirac is renowned for his "cloud-speak", few politicians can best him when it comes to saying nothing while speaking a lot (do a poll about it in France and you'll see). And Bush is renowned for trying to say more than he's actually able to ;)
No, what was said and not exactly subtly implied in the UN is what mattered.
You obviously didn't listen to Dominique de Villepin in the open sessions of the UN security council or you wouldn't be so incredibly ignorant as to say what you do. The practical effect of what Villepin actually said in those sessions was that France would use it's veto and it's as simple as that. France tried to convey an impression in the UN that they did so on behalf of other countries without veto powers, an odd situation were it seemed like they weren't truly comfortable with vetoing on their own behalf... And please realize that the UN weapons inspectors were already on overtime, for years! Blix himself testified to the open sessions that they were being continually obstructed and derailed by the Baathist regime to the degree that they couldn't be sure that they actually performed a function. I know because I listened to him in those sessions, all of them. Blix were right of course, plenty of Iraqi surveillance equipment was found embedded in the quarters provided to the inspectors, something Blix and his fellow inspectors had been totally convinced of from their inspection experiences.
Saddam responded too little too late (except for a massive attempt at obfuscation) and France, Germany, China, and Russia didn't manage to protect their economic interests even with France vetoing. Why is that so? It's because the matter at hand wasn't whether France or other nations approved but whether Saddam would actually comply or not. That was the crux of the matter and he never complied in any significant way, quite contrary, and as such he didn't even try to help those who had an interest in avoiding the war in the UN, leaving them with egg on their face (believe me they realized, just like the US GOP realized themselves when much of the intelligence (both US and international including French and German agencies) proved wrong). There is a reason they've all moved on from this matter you know (all but parts of the uninformed populace of course).
Neither could you have followed BBC World News coverage or any direct news media coverage of the same public UN security council meetings (note plural, all were shown live and unedited on BBC World News).
Freedom fries was and is stupid but by god so too is the crowd that doesn't have anything more insightful to do politically than regurgitate bush-bashing. A bunch of clueless hypocrites who by the consequence of what they're saying actually supported the continuation of Saddams tyranny no matter what they themselves claim. Compare the numbers from for example Amnesty International on Iraqi deaths in an average year of Baathist rule to even the most critical assesments of Iraqi deaths in the first year of US occupation and you'll find something to ponder.
Doubt me, it's good to be critical, and find the transcripts of the open security council sessions starting with resolution 1441 and onwards and read them. I think you will be surprised. But at any rate please stop forming your opinions from soundbytes in either one or the other direction because that isn't knowledge or understandng, it's simply shallow tripe.
Nuke-totin' anarchists...
:)
Would that be the frappé force frappe? Don't worry, they're only into making souffle (not to be mistaken for a mushroom cloud)
Hints for those who don't get the puns:
frappé = mad
force de frappe = military might
force frappe = nickname for the french nuclear forces
souffle = breath/"breeze" and also the name for a specific kind of dishes filled with air
Or is that too demanding and confusing for Slashdot readers? Gratuit, gratuito, or gratis, the word exists in one form or another in almost all european languages.
They are just doing it because it's free.....! NoMorePoints.com soon to be NoMoreFreeLoaders.com
I mean, look at it this way....
With a fire wall like that, they sure as hell won't need security.... "I try to root your box!" "Hon hon hon! yahr beurx eeeez on fahr!!!!!!"
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
Chirac's opposition to the war is not really the French issue with we right wingers. Chirac using France and Europe as a counterpoint to American power is. In other words, Chirac sees France as the leader of an opposition to the United States simply for the sake of opposing it.
Chirac made numerous trips around the world decrying everything about American culture and as a consequence, the American people, and he's attempted to rally the world to his vision of France as the leader of a block standing against the American "threat". If he wants to view the USA as a threat, that's fine by him, but you can't honestly say France is a friend to the United States for painting us that way.
Thus, we on the right believe that to say the USA has alienated our "French ally" has missed the point. France is not our ally. She's a "friendly" rival because she wants to be, and I just don't see a reason why the United States needs to kiss up to France if France is going to be so petulant.
This is my sig.
Even the French understand irony.
Trust me, I work for the government.
Why can't Slashdot have an Edit button? Reposting as Plain Old Text:
I'm assuming the -s suffixes are pluralizations. Someone once told me that Pomme d'terre (Earth apple) is French for "potato". I've always strongly associated deep-frying ("fritere" in Norwegian) with French cooking.
German and Norwegian share a great number of words, idioms and grammatical constructs. A linguist once said that the easiest language for a Norwegian to learn is Low German. It's apparently not the same as regular German, but having the name, I'm guessing it's in the same ballpark. German is easy enough. A Norwegian can allegedly speak the language fluidly after only 6 months in Germany.
It kinda spoils the fun of linguistic nationalism each time you stumble across what seemed an ultra-Norwegian word and it turns out to be borrowed from German.
But talking about the manufactured evidence that supposedly incriminated Iraq in the eyes of the hypocritical invaders (Chinese military occupation and genocide in Tibet seems to be perfectly acceptable for both Blair & Bush!), it's the story of the one mentally unstable Iraqi refugee, a pathological liar nicknamed Curveball, that explains how crazy unverified rumours were processed into "undeniable facts" by the wannabe aggressor regimes.
In the run-up to the war and long into the invasion the "wholly-embedded" US media was scarily jingoistic so it is a minor relief that the "patriotic" war-journalism has finally given way to some soul- and fact-searching.
How U.S. Fell Under the Spell of 'Curveball' The Iraqi informant's German handlers say they had told U.S. officials that his information was 'not proven,' and were shocked when President Bush and Colin L. Powell used it in key prewar speeches. (LA Times, November 20, 2005)
It is a long and detailed chronicle of an empire hell-bent on starting a war, and how media-massaged 88% popularity ratings make it easy for the most hapless of Führers to manipulate the state machinery and the populace of "the greatest democracy".
I wonder how many americans are still boycotting produce from the democratic and anti-war Old Europe but have no trouble buying Chinese imports and thereby aiding and abetting the oppressive and expansionist dictatorship there? Actually almost the whole planet was against the war but the fact that some sycophantic governments took decision to participate in the "grand coalition of the billing" against the popular opinion camouflaged that fact from the american public for a while. Meanwhile the Chinese state propaganda machine is still having a field day reporting about the American military quaqmire while the Communist Party is busy creating alliances with anti-Bush developing countries around the globe.
The most unfortunate long-term result of that American uni-lateralism may not be the civil war and splitting of Iraq into smaller ethno-religious states but the split between the USA and Europe which will benefit the Sino-Russian neo-imperial block. With moral-free business ties reigning supreme so far above the so-called "western values of freedom and democracy" that it isn't even funny, the politically bullied or already occupied neighbours of those authoritarian powers will be the biggest losers in this sad saga started by a handful of neo-cons backed by the american religious far-right.
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
Americans only got the second hand reaction to that. You should have been in Britain when one of the newspapers uncovered the story... funfunfunfun. I think Tony Blair aged about 10 years in 1 day and journalists looked like they were doing impressions of that infamous scene from When Harry Met Sally.
Prime Minister's Questions was also worth watching... incidentally, that's something I've always wondered about: why doesn't the U.S. have something similar. Forcing the guy on charge of the country to appear in front of elected representatives and answer any question thrown at him for 45 minutes a week is a great bit of democracy -- it also ensures that you never end up with morons in charge (you still get crooks and bullshitters... but stupid people... no).
a Beowulf cluster of misreadings. And all of them leading to a reply.
Our contract is up for renegotiation this year and I'm wondering if there are any other union contracts that direct their employers to make a move to Open Source as a cost saving measure to save jobs during budget cuts.
Also, can anyone recommend the most accurate reports that detail cost savings per workstation by moving to an Open Source OS or OpenOffice?
Abstinence is a government conspiracy. www.SafeSexZone.co
Forgot the LA riots, dude?
Look at the parent comment moderation. Yesterday it was +4 with already the reasonable flamebait score. Today modded down all by overrated. Nothing wrong in getting modded overrated, but it's quite a strange distribution, all favorable and "responsibly negative" ratings first, all cowardly unfavorable later. So what, you say? Imagine a beowulf cluster of a microsoft astroturfers' fake slashdot accounts.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol