Ubuntu

French Police save MILLION of EUROs with Ubuntu Linux

Now the French are not liked globally for whatever reason you like. I for one think it’s a fine country with some odd politics. Love or hate them the Linux community is absolutely in love with them right now. The French Police have moved to using Linux and are saving huge amounts of EURO CASH!

“A recent report has revealed that France’s national police force has saved an estimated 50 million euros since 2004 by adopting open source software and migrating a portion of the organization’s workstations to Ubuntu Linux. They plan to roll out the Linux distro to all 90,000 of their workstations by 2015.”

With Windows XP now being well over 9 years old and nothing decent coming from Microsoft it’s the only option some places may have. While there is nothing wrong with XP, it’s still working, at some point we have to move forward. Only issue is now we are in a bit of a lurch, Vista is, in my opinion, a total flop and should be sent to the same place ME was sent to. Vista is still at least 1 to 2 years from being ready, and will take even  longer to be accepted by IT departments globally. Then there is the pricing. WIth so many decent Desktop, and Office Suite option available to us right now for FREE, it’s hard to make a case to keep going down the Windows desktop/office path.

I applaud the French Police and hope we see a flurry of information about how the upgrades are going, how they are making it happen and I really want to know the minute Microsoft calls them and offers them all the Microsoft core products for FREE to just say they have replaced Linux again…..

C’est superbe! l A France magnifique! l A Linux magnifique!

WKOW - Bashes Ubuntu and they end up paying for it

Ubuntu is a decent OS, and by the looks of everything coming out of Redmond (Microsoft) latley it’s starting to look better each day. Maddison, WI local TV station WKOW and it’s local help the people person took up some poor woman assertion that DELL was screwing her out of her college education. While blame is ofter easy to point this was a stretch at best.

The young woman, Abbie Schubert, ordered a DELL Laptop from you guessed it, DELL. I would consider her an uneducater buyer who should have maybe gone into Best Buy and not used and computer to order her computer. You have to go out of your way to find the DELL Ubuntu site and order a DELL with Ubuntu. If she would have gone to the main DELL site and just ordered a laptop no one would know who the hell she is and I would not have a post this week.

So she ordered this DELL Ubuntu Laptop, which t no point said Windows or anything about WIndows when she ordered it. I don’t know how she assumed WIndows would end up on it, unless she is really that stupid, and I don’t want to start calling her stupid, but the question begs to be asked.

Then the reported asserts that the Virizon Software won’t load on Ubuntu…well no duh? It won’t load on a Mac either you dufus. And that it didn’t come with Microsoft Word. The world does not rotate around Microsoft Word. While it’s nice to have Word, you don’t need it. I have not used it on my personal laptop in over 4 years. I have even attended college and turned in “word” documents that were typed on Open Office and no one as the wiser.

Lastly I would like to point out the part of the story that I talk a lot about in my personal and buisness life. Running a computer today is like knowing how to operate the shower, or turn on the TV, or drive and operate your car. You need to be able to use a computer and understand what you are doing. I am not trying to be a super geek or dictate anything, I am just making a point. There is a very large group of young people out there who do undrstand computers and do “get IT” and in the next 10 years they are going to start taking over the work market and the colleges becasue computers are just things in their lives and the OS does not matter and the programs do not matter. They all know what they are doing and they are good. What I have learned bout computers in the past 20+ years they come out of high school with and then move onto college.

The follow up story from WKOW takes into account that a fairly large group of people who get it and stand by Ubuntu made contact with them for the poor light they shed on the poor little OS. I commend the station for being bold enought to do a folllow up peice.
Now if we could only get the IBM i devotees of the world to stand up like that in the work place the next time someone says something dicouraging about he IBM i or even threatens to remove it.