Paris Accelerates Move to Open Source 225
* * 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"
Submitter is a link spammer, does /. care? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Not really cracked (Score:3, Informative)
Re:[grin] (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:[grin] (Score:5, Informative)
Not so great in Finland (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Hui! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:liberté, eqalité, fraternité (Score:2, Informative)
gratuit = gratuito (esp) = without cost
libre = libre (esp) = free
those languages (fr and esp) are more subtle, english is way to easy
cheers
Re:liberté, eqalité, fraternité (Score:4, Informative)
"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.
Re:Employees don't see cost savings (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Why use PDF? This is why (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Not really cracked (Score:1, Informative)
Didn't she just choose the name of her dog as password?
Re:[grin] (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:One thing the article doesn't cover.... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:[grin] (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:[grin] (Score:5, Informative)
now, of course, the debt is cancelled :-)
Re:WWII In France (Score:1, Informative)
No one voted for the nazis, but when the nazis succeeded invading France, a part of the military decided to sign a treaty giving some autonomy to half the country (south) rather than having it all as occupied France. Some other refused the decision and went on fighting with the British (the USA only came at the end of the war, not doing much before being attacked by the Japanese).
Re:Submitter is a link spammer, does /. care? (Score:1, Informative)
carl fogle developer 5url.com 4120 manhattan ave nyc, ny 11224 Tel: 718 996 7672 Fax: 718 996 7672