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French Military Police Switches to Firefox
Oslo_the_CKC writes to tell us that French Magazine Linux Pratique recently published an interview with General Brachet of the Gendarmie Nationale. In the interview he discusses why they have moved over 100,000 personnel over to Firefox and Thunderbird (70,000 and 45,000 respectively). This follows on last year's switch to OpenOffice.org so it seems like the French Military Police are enjoying the success of open source.
Another foreign government branch switches to an open source solution. Wow. How about "American corporation XYZ switches N hundred thousand employees to Firefox". That would be news!
but ferreal... who cares?
The more bricks that start falling out of the Microsoft monopoly will encourage extra bricks to fall and might take the entire wall down after some time. Don't forget street credibility! Every small step in the right direction is a small step in the right direction...
Dependency hell? =>
This would seem to be a pretty bold move - think about it. They're using software which wasn't blessed by the winPope at Redmond. Were it any other commercial organization, there would be an acknowledgement that somebody within the organization had to be pretty gutsy to press for a non-Microsoft solution to anything.
Unless the organization were, say, IBM or Sun or HP, for example. ;^D
For Christ's Sake.
20 comments - the majority of which are 'French surrender' jokes.
1) Some originality would be nice.
2) I thought 2006 was the year the American public would wake up to the way they're manipulated (can you remember having the same contempt for the french prior to their [justified] opposition to Iraq II?)
3) Leave the french-hatred to countries that have a reason to hate the french. Like New Zealand or just about anywhere in the South Pacific
4) Some originality would be nice. Every time there's a French story, its like reading fark.
5) Please see points 1 and 5.
My pics.
Oh please. The reason it made the front page is because it's a major switch to Firefox. Doesn't matter who switches, just that some large organization made the switch.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
I think all countries should be working on their own information exchange platforms.
How do you think Dept. of Homeland Security would feel if all of their computers were running on a closed OS manufactured by China?
It's like outsorcing your whole communication infrastructure to a different country.
Foreign countres would do well to consider switching all of their government computation to open source OSs, or developing their own. Firefox and OO are a good start though.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
It's joke, but it's TIRESOME.
I bet you still go around yelling "I'M RICK JAMES, BITCH!" at friends...
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
...Our first goal is to migrate all the upper layers of the workstation to Open Source Software to be independent of the Operating System.(...)
To me, this was the single most interesting line in the entire article. Telling everyone that they must migrate to another operating system in one big step is bound to meet resistance and hassles. Instead they get people familiar with their day-to-day software tools, so that migrating to Linux/OSX/whatever later is largely irrelevant. If people's word processor and email system are still the same, they won't much care what OS is running.
With this strategy Windows loses its special status and becomes just a commodity, providing only storage and network access. It also becomes replacable on a whim (or close to it).
A quote would be:
Note the omission marks. Or more correctly
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
I don't get it, just because they refused to send their young men and women into Iraq to fight for basically American politcal interests, folks hated them?! And don't give me this shit about the Iraq war is part of the War on Terror. Show me some evidence that Hussein was in fact harboring terrorists and/or financing them!
You must be kidding. The French were just trying to protect their under the table oil deals. The Americans catch hell over even the possible implication of doing anything for oil. The French do it and it is suddenly "okay". Give me a break.
Did it occur to you that we're making fun of all the people with an irrational hatred of the French, especially by making such an absurd inferrence?
If Bill O'Reilly says "Well, isn't that just like the french to surrender", he's manipulating his audience (if you think O'Reilly is saying something like that because he actually believes it, you're assuming he's a simpleton. I see people do the same thing with Bush- assume he's an idiot, not someone playing the fool and manipulating people.) If someone on slashdot jokes "Well, isn't it just like the French to surrender and use Firefox", they're making fun of people like Bill O'Reilly, not picking on the French.
Then again, complex humor has never been a strong suite on slashdot...
Oh, and you know what? As long as everyone is laughing, I have zero problems with people cracking jokes about each other. I love teasing my friends from Smith about attending a "finishing school", and they enjoy punching me (they hit like girls, so no worries.) As long as everyone stays laughing, it's a way to celebrate our differences. Or something like that. There are way too many people on this world who take everything so seriously and get offended at the drop of a hat.
Please help metamoderate.
... And this shit about we "rescued them in WWII! We owed them one! How about that! ...
v ision
No, we paid that debt in WWI. "On the 4th of July [1917], the 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry (2-16), paraded through the streets of Paris to bolster the sagging French spirits. At Lafayette's tomb, one of General John J. Pershing's staff uttered the famous words, "Lafayette, we are here!"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._1st_Infantry_Di
So, to use *your* phraseology, not mine, they owe us one.
Also, the French government that supported the US was the monarchy, not the current French government. "Current government" as in system of government, not the currenyly elected representatives. Do you think Lafayette would do business with Sadaam and make war on GreenPeace (literally, sink boat, kill member, rescue French agents/assasins from jail)?
I have no objection to political humor. But unlike other kinds of jokes, I think it's fair game to call political jokes on their accuracy. Nobody ever acts as if they really believe an actual priest, rabbi and minister went into a actual bar (Was the minister Methodist? What were they doing going into a bar?). But they do certainly act as if France was a nation composed entierly of cheese eating surrender monkeys.
Many people use political humor as a cheap way of advancing an unsupportable opinion. They get the same rhetorical and emotional impact as making a substantive argument -- possibly even more. But if they get called on it, they can always fall back on the craven excuse that it was just a joke. In fact, the stupider and less original the joke, the greater the dudgeon, in my experience. Peole whose humor is intelligent and incisive don't need to get defensive.
Giving opinions expressed as humor a pass on accuracy is pretty much an invitation for lies, stupidity and moral cowardice to rule the world, which I think none of us really want.
So, if you make a joke whose premise is that Al Gore thinks he invented the Internet, I think it's fair enough for somebody to challenge the factual accuracy. If I make a joke who's point is that GW Bush is stupid, it's fair enough for you to call me on that as well.
In short, it's one thing to be unoriginal. It's another think to think and act like a sheep. We all know where the sheeps' master intends them to go, in the end.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Read slashdot more often and read the comments please. Comments in this previous story say that this isn't the department of Culture who said it, but the SACEM (the French equivalent to the RIAA). And another, more recent story (I don't care about looking for it) says that this bill proposal has been heavily amended and turned into a legalisation of P2P and reverse-engineering for open source software among others.
(Apart from that I agree with the parent post. The anti-France stuff is just another reminder that a lot of high-school kids post to Slashdot.)
No, france opposed the war because of the French Military-Industrial complex. Did you miss the fact that the Iraqi airforce (when it existed) was made up French Mirage's? Or that if sanctions ended, it would be french oil companies set to make billions from Iraqi (and Iranian oil)?
In addition to being a bunch of CESMs, they have just as much corporate influence as the US does. Don't pretend they opposed the war on some hippy peace loving principles. Hussein was practically an ally of theirs.
It's amazing that the people who whine that we saved France in WWII so conveniently forget that Soviet Russia saved our asses in that same war... If it wasn't for the 20 million Russians who died fighting Hitler, who knows how much more bloody that war would have been for Americans.