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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/
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!
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.
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
You are probably right in the sense that they will find it necessary to have some consultant firm help them out, but using open source software probably protects them from being so dependent on one firm.
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.
If they were using Office XP and switched to OO.o 2 I know well from personal experience that the employees will see the benefits, especially in Word vs. Writer. Writer can export a document as a pdf without needing a 3rd-party macro or a program you use as a printer, plus it's FAR more stable. Writer's UI is better organized as well, IMO.
FF vs. IE? You gotta kidding me. More stable, more features, blocks pop-ups by default, etc.
One problem, though and I've mentioned this before; there's no open souce alternative to Acrobat Pro. Not even plans for one that I know of. That really sucks; we need Adobe-free computers, what with their exorbitant costs, product activation, and so on.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
Wait for it...
Wait...
It runs faster.
One problem, though and I've mentioned this before; there's no open souce alternative to Acrobat Pro. Not even plans for one that I know of. That really sucks; we need Adobe-free computers, what with their exorbitant costs, product activation, and so on.
Why not do what we did: make your office PDF free? I hate PDF's with every fiber of my being. The files are enormous, the readers are bloated (and at 56+ Meg just to open a fucking file, I'd call "bloated" generous), and they're a pain in the ass to alter.
Could somebody please tell me why people use PDF's in the first place?
I feel like if at this stage, enough people said "NO" to PDF's, then it would just die on the vine. Right now, if any of our vendors send a PDF, I bounce it back with a message that we don't use PDF's, and it has yet to be a problem.
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
Of course, openoffice is translated in dozens of languages among them French (and the translation is of very good level).
How is that modded to insightful?
France does not hate America and doesn't really care about the anglicization of the French language. Only a few really vocal conservatives care about anglicization and they go "shopping" and "park" their cars next to the "building".
Also your comment about a French version of Windows being poorly translated is false. It is very easy to have a completely French computer if all you install is French versions of the software you want. Mix and match your software and you could see Korean and Elbonian on your computer.
Please stop with that fallacy about France hating America. The only thing France hates about America is now at record lows in approval ratings. Seems you have more in common with the French than you might expect.
"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.,"
gratuit = gratuito (esp) = without cost
libre = libre (esp) = free
those languages (fr and esp) are more subtle, english is way to easy
cheers
[JL] IH8U
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.)
...you support malaria, riots, and car-torching.
I read
"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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
"...since when are the French a 'race'?" since no other group will claim them--they must stand alone. Oh shit, guess that was more French bashing.
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.