Slashdot Mirror
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"
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.
Hmmm- learn your WWII history-e w/3DRV4RIE2IBVW/104-1606606-3940704?_encoding=UTF8
Here are some book to get you started. I am not a big francophile, but nor am I a France hater. But the Poles played a big part in liberating Paris.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/richpub/listmania/fullvi
And All I Ask is a Tall Ship And a Star to Steer Her By
Of course, the whole "french fries" fiasco was even funnier considering that french fries aren't even named after France - it's the way they're prepared that gave them their name, and the word just happens to be the same in (contemporary?) English.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
"Given their hate for America" ? Duh? France doesn't "hate" America any more than any country in the world, and probably like America more than most countries in the world. As for the "anglofication" of the language, well the Elders try to prevent it, but most of the youth use a lot of english words (like "cool", "joystick", "chat"), and a lot of english words are also commonly used ("parking", "joystick", "week-end", etc...). Many efforts are made to keep the french language and culture alive though. And I think it's great because the french culture is good (a lot of renowned book authors or poets for instance). Not "the best culture in the world", because no such thing exists, but definitively a great one.
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.
I use a French Windows everyday, and basically everything is translated, except maybe the Blue Screen Of Death. I think what you saw could be third-parties software error messages not translated. Microsoft actually did a great job (aaar! don't mod me down!) translating their OS's to French (I don't know for other languages).
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.
Just for the people who don't know: gratuit means free (as in beer), libre means free (as in open source and freedom). So Firefox is gratuit and libre.
PDF let anyone see something as it is meant to be printed. On other platforms that do not use Adobe's Acrobat Reader, the pdf viewers are pretty lean.
For the niche that PDF fills, nothing else works as well. Postscript (which PDF is just a variant) is even larger, and other options such as DVI are not well supported.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
Funnier still is that the UK and US governments deliberately mis-quoted Chirac, they claimed Chirac had promised to block any vote for war in the UN. What Chirac actually said was that he would not vote for war unless the weapons inspectors were allowed to complete their inspection and confirmed the presences of WMDs. Which is quite reasonable if you ask me...
But that didn't stop Bush & Co from demonising the French and starting a nationwide backlash against them just to prevent their reasonable criticism from being heard. I don't have any great love for the French but we should at least criticise them for something they did actually do.
This is by far not the biggest migration to openSource in France, actually, the only reason why you see it in Slashdot is because it mentions "paris", it doens't even make the subtitles of French opensource portals. The whole French administration is slowly turning to opensource, currently for instance the Gendarmerie (police) is updating all their 40.000 PCs to OOo + Firefox/Thunderbird, the Tax administration announced last week that they are currently deploying Oo on their 80.000 Pcs and have already registered an immediate 29Million benefit because of it (2006 licence fees), the Police Nationale (the other Police administration besides Gendarmerie) has been using Oo for 2 years already etc. An official from Gendarmerie explained that leaving MSoffice for OpenOffice had an immediate benefit beside the very cost of the licences, they were able to disolve a whole department with several people paid only to make sure that the thousands of Gendarmerie buildings in France (metropolitan and abroad) were using legally licenced MSoffice suites ! Cops were paid to make sure that the licences were all paid instead of working on the street to arrest thieves...
Thank you to point out that dishonnest misquoting.
But you ought to point out that the bias in the translation was setted up from second one: The Associated Press _in French_ misquoted Chirac and was translated that way. Tony Blair then used a somewhat-more-distorted-again quote in the Commons in his great discourse to justify this war before this temple of Democracy.
In the US it became something like "we must attack Saddam because he must be a real ennemy for the Frogs to defend him". Hum... Indeed, I am too pretentious of a frog, sorry: France was just bashed to provide a convenient red-herring and to distract the crowds from the already too many lies, distortions and so on that were already used at that time.
To be honest, I was working in the axis of Paris main military airport at that time (Villacoublay), and it is certainly true that French diplomacy used many planes to convince many countries not to support the war at that time. Maybe does this explains why the US and the UK warmongers were so angry. The point is and will remain, to quote and translate Chirac correctly, that this region (the Persian Gulf) was not needing another war at that time.
I am not Remy Mouton, unfortunately: http://remy.mouton.free.fr/art/
now, of course, the debt is cancelled :-)