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.
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.
now, of course, the debt is cancelled :-)