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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!
the rioters burned all the Windows licenses.
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
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.
You are really going to try to Karma Whore with likening it to real war where people are getting killed?
They wouldn't be if we had stopped to listened to the French. Hey, here's a bright idea, why don't we actually have a dialogue with our allies instead of pouring their wine down our gutters when they dare to disagree? It's just possible they may have a good point of two.
TW
Wait for it...
Wait...
It runs faster.
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.
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.)
"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
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...
Listening to someones does not mean agreeing with them. This is a common misconception of partisans everywhere.
I would have been quite happy with honest disagreement rather than demonizing the dissenter.
I know I'm way off topic here, but many of the biggest problems of this administration can be linked directly with building a climate where only yes-men are listened to. If you allow honest dissent then you get to see a much clearer picture of how things look, you gain advanced notice when things aren't going so well and you gain valuable insight into the flaws of your plan. If you don't listen to honest dissent then you voluntarily put blinders on, people become afraid to tell you about problems and you gain the false impression that your plan is perfect, even though it would be much better if you just tweaked a few things.
Even if you believe that the Iraq war was a good idea, which I do not, certainly you can see how doing a few things differently might have helped. Some people told Bush to take more troops. Some people gave Bush advice that more resources were necessary to rebuild Iraq when the war was done. Some people told Bush that we would face guerilla fighters after the war who would refuse to surrender. If Bush had listened to this dissent then he may have still prosecuted the war, but he would have done a better job of it. Less people would be dead, Iraq would be more stable and we'd be that much closer to bringing everyone home. Pouring out wine and renaming fries helped ensure that these dissenting views were marginalized and ignored. Frankly, it helped ensure in my mind that our president does not have the capacity to lead wisely.
TW
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?
You are really going to try to Karma Whore
yeah Damn that Anonymous Coward, such a blatent karma whore there is hardly a single discussion where he hasn't got at least 5 or 6 +5 modded comments.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html