It’s hard to know, at this point, how European bureaucracies could possibly render themselves more risible to the rest of the world. First Munich, then the sovereign bond implosion, and now … this. Apparently the French Gendarmerie have calculated that they can save €2 million a year by migrating from Windows to the Ubuntu desktop.
And the number of people they employ? 100,000. That’s, um, my calculus is letting me down here, but let’s just say somewhere between €19 and €21 per employee per year.
I’m going to resist the temptation to mention the provision of free eau de toilette in the bathrooms.
I’m going to resist the temptation to mention that the standard tactic of the French Gendarmerie (a force majeure I love and respect: Or, ça se fait necessaire, hein?) under conditions of extreme budgetary stress is basically to man road-blocks on busy tourist routes in Août when all good French people are under canvas somewhere else and gouge you for on-the-spot traffic violation fines of €75 a pop, no questions asked, no questions allowed, votre stinkin’ Euro papiers s’il vous plaites, Monsieur … vous n’avez pas de papiers requisites, alors, je suis désolé, mon ami, mais on connait que la loi c’est la loi, il faut qu’on démande encore €75 plusieurs …
... No, I would never stoop that low. Although les Flics would.
So, let’s consider the upsides on this exciting project.
By 2015, we expect that 90 per cent of the police force will be running Ubuntu, uttered Jean-Pascal Chateau, Commandant (I’m not making his name up) gnomically (well, I might be making that up, but it’s le mot juste, as it were). I believe he uttered this in 2010, about a year in. Expectations are a fine thing, and I’m sure he correlated his projections with prior art, eg the Munich gedanke-experiment.
Leaving that awkward little 10%, btw. Oh well, there’s always Samba.
So far, the police force has successfully deployed Ubuntu Desktop on 7,000 desktops and laptops across each police station. Wow, that’s a lot of desktops per police station … I think Canonical’s marketing department might have blown a fuse on that one. But, back to normality: only 61,000 to go, and I’m sure those 7,000 weren’t the low-hanging fruit, oh no.
It gets funnier. That €2 million? “And that’s not just down to licensing costs. The fact that we no longer need 4,500 dedicated departmental servers means that the savings just keep growing.”
So, you’re not even saving that paltry amount on licensing costs.
Don’t bother trying to wrap your head round that one and explain it. Just savour the unintentional hilarity. It gets better:
“We have a lot of personnel who work in the field. The fact that Ubuntu Desktop is so easy to use is a huge benefit. Agents can personalise their desktops to fit their needs. That means that they can access the same desktop environment no matter which workstation they log in from.”
Roaming profiles are too good for these scum, er, dedicated public servants. Can you imagine the horror on 100,000 faces, the first time they get hit by the BiannualForcedDeathMarch™?
Or, worse …
... Unity?
And my favouritest bit of all:
Each branch also uses Ubuntu Desktop Edition as a local server for file-sharing and software and anti-virus update distribution.
Anti-virus distribution?
Go on, read it. It makes Munich sound sane. And I’m not being unfair by picking on a Canonical press release, because you can type “French gendarmerie ubuntu” into Google (it helpfully autocompletes the “ubuntu” bit) and there are a dozen more silly little puff pieces like it.
Europe can do with a good joke, these days. And, since the passing of Inspector Clouseau, it is fitting that les poulets should volunteer the best one of all.
———
Never mind. At least the authoritarian forces of the centralized French state are giving back to the community. For the first time in two hundred years.
———
One further note.
I wonder how transparent the (one-off, obviously) costs of migration are?
No eau de toilette for you, mes petits poulets!
Comments
For reason’s sake, Dr. L. If you are gonna post a FUD—or anything for that matter—in a foreign langauge, at least make it a decent language like Spanish. In order to speak French, you have to have sneer at vowels and have a total disregard for the pronunciation of consonants(to semi-misquote/paraphrase Nero Wolfe).
Salir de esto, o el riesgo de ir ciego.
See, MUCH more comprehensible, AND vowels and consonants are prounounced as they actually sound.
Or more succinctly: No hacerlo o vas ciego.
?, ? ??? ??? ???????? ???????
For a few moments I’ve thought that TMR understands Unicode.
Parts do, but I guess not the comments. I’ll add the bug to my tracker.
Everytime I see a modern website/app not being able to understand unicode, a little piece of me dies…
Can‘t we just make UTF8 support mandatory in all programing languages (without having to include any extra headers), and punch the neckbeards who complain that this breaks the holy standard in the face.
???????, ?????? ??? ??????? ??? ??????!
That’s probably about as bad as my French … it says something about an English education in languages that I can probably do better in a subject I gave up, hurriedly, at the age of 15 than I can do in a subject I persisted with, half-way through University.
“J’a pitie de fou,” as Monsieur Thé never actually said.
I might have guessed that K. likes UTF-8. We’ll make a closet freetard of you yet … actually, I’ve been mucking around with Unicode for the best part of a year, and while C++ is a pain, Python is generally pretty smooth by design. Python 3.0 even more so, I’m led to believe.
And I hate to point this out to the Loons (not to K — that was a silly and insulting joke up there), but C#? Flawless victory!
So, no Cyrillic and no Greek, then. Interesting. It does do Haitian Creole, though:
Sispann nou sa, nan risk pou w pran randevou avèg!
Useful facility, that.
It should, of course, actually be “rendre,” but I’m not going to confuse TMR’s indexing one more time by correcting it.
It’s funny, but you run something by Google translate a couple of times, just to check it, and you sort of go “language blink.” It might be more of a curse than a blessing. “Aveugle” should also be in the singular, apparently (bloody silly second person plurals). I tried it in Bing translate:
“Empêcher cela, ou vous pourrez aller aveugle!”
Arguably better.
And, completely irrelevantly, I was looking up holidays on the Somme (well, we live in apocalyptic times, and I’ve always wondered what happened to my two great uncles), and found La ferme du vent des moissons described thusly:
“The stubble, the bakery, sowing, 3 cottages Gites de France approved (3 ears). Siutées on a family farm in the heart of the region Santerre.”
And yes, they did say “Siutées.”
The problem is, I can understand every last little bit of this, and I think the French are wonderful and charming. I don’t actually care what happens to Munich. But I do care what happens to the French.
Ah, don’t worry, maybe the criminals will use Upoopoo too … that would make France the safest country in the world!
Well, second safest, right after South Africa… right, Mark?
This is France, RC. France. Land of le style and le cool.
You don’t think a French criminal would use anything other than the latest iPad, do you?
Exactly.
Think about it… Upoopoo could kill them on sight (yes, first sight of it could be deadly for the poor French criminals).
As I said, Upoopoo could transform France into a paradise (assuming only criminals would be exposed).
...
Hmm…
Well, the paradise would be short lived… because I don’t think German criminals would be swayed by the Sight of Durden.
Well, I guess it was a good idea on paper…
Another thing that bothers me about this, and any other, Eurobuntu lunacy. What, exactly, are they doing with the other 90% of machines in the mean time? It beggars belief that they’re leaving them all on XP and W2K Server 2000. Or are they?
I mean, is there any actual planning involved in all this, or is it just one Loon with too much power concentrated in his hands?
Don’t get me wrong. I can see an argument for all sorts of roll-out projects based around, for example, Red Hat servers and Androids in the field and maybe even heavily locked-down Ubuntu desktops in certain environments.
But doing everything all at once over six years? That’s just insane.
Not to mention the fact that €2 million equates to an IT head-count of roughly forty people, for an organisation of 100,000.
Now, even assuming that the cost of administration is the same either way (and I don’t), you’d have to think that forty people are the minimum requirement for a technological shift of this magnitude.
Genuinely. I’d love to see the HR budget for les poulets 2009 versus les poulets 2011.
I don’t think they are breaking Enterprise contracts with MS.
If they did, wouldn’t that leave them without support for the majority of their infrastructure?
So where do the savings come from?
Do they just make them up, by creatively interpreting costs?
@DrLoser
I thought UTF8 is to the world what ASCII is to the US. Aka the most compatible encoding to excange text. Are there any other better encodings out there? The only other encodings I know of are the (8 bit) windows-12XX and the similar ISO 8859-X encodings, but the problem with these is the computer should know the language of the text so it can set the exact encoding approprietly, which creates all sorts of problems when exchanging text. For example, greek text (Windows-1253) is shown as an undecipherable mess of latin characters in foreign computers that have their regional settings to “western europe“. UTF8 is supposed to have fixed this by having one (16 bit) encoding for all languages, so this should make it the preferred method for exhanging text, right?
Eek! Don’t even think about touching those, young man.
I admit to a possibly irrational hatred of UTF-8 simply because it was drawn up by Plauger (I think) on the back of a napkin in a diner somewhere in Pennsylvania, if I recall correctly.
I have a visceral hatred for ugly hacks, but even I have to admit that this one works better than most.
Actually, what I do like is the idea of advertising your particular encoding via the first two bytes of a file. I mean, that couldn’t hurt, could it?
From the point of view of the file system, all you need to do is to read the first two bytes and react accordingly. Of course, it will never happen. One thing people forget about standards, proprietary or otherwise, is that they have to be in place before 99% of everybody pisses all over them and leaves a messy and intractable legacy.
Curiously, in this regard, Unix actually came up with the solution first.
This is how magic slap-bang scripting works.
Oh, and this one has caused me immense and insupportable pain at work, and I can only imagine it being multiplied across the Web by tens of millions of times or so …
Mime Types Must Die!
@RC:
I was under the impression that XP will be off-support in 2013 or so. I might be wrong.
On the other hand, Jean-Pascal is clearly a maniac.
I’d rather be wrong than a maniac.
@RC:
“Do they just make them up, by creatively interpreting costs?”
The question is … the I’ve forgotten what you asked in the first place.
Clearly you are a novice in the ways of French bureaucracy.
@RC:
And what makes you think that Shuttleworth gives a sh!t about South Africa?
One thing I’ve learned about expatriate South Africans in this business is that they have no intention whatsoever of paying back, even from a distance.
To a man, they are all “when we“s.
Things apparently went horribly wrong when they couldn’t just order the nougats around, and now they sit around sulking in (my experience only) Linux server basements.
Serves the pasty white wankers right, if you ask me.
Oh, oh, oh …
I just can’t help myself crunching the basic numbers, even without the help of an accountant and even the pellucid state of French bureaucracy.
Here we have 4,500 “servers” (God knows what), and they will magically disappear by 2015. Damn, forgot the Pixie Dust thing.
Okey dokey. Let’s assume (just for giggles) that the entire €2 million is saved purely through the improbable removal of every single server.
Do you know what that comes out as, over ten years?
It’s €444 per server. Over the entire ten years. And I’m not even amortizing it.
Oops, sorry, I need new contact lenses.
€4444. Out by a magnitude.
Over ten years. Without amortization.
@DrLoser So i guess your preffered multilanguage encoding is UTF8? Then why was I called a freetard? I didn‘t say i like it, i said everyone should support it.
@DoctorL
To the best of my understanding, XP remains supported after 2014, for a price…
But they would have to be crazy not to go with Win7/2008r2… hmm… come to think of it…
———————————-
Also, these morons claim €2 million savings per year – but then they muddy the water by saying that the savings do not come just from reduced licensing costs.
So it’s not clear how much (if any) of the supposed savings comes from using a free-as-in-beer solution.
Further, they claim they’ve reduced support infrastructure – but it’s not clear what that has to do with Windows or Linux.
You see, if their IT remained stuck in the 70’s (these idiots had to physically travel to workstations to install software – and they blame it on MS!!!) that isn’t a problem of Windows, it is however a problem of their IT management (who should be firing the incompetent morons, or, better still, be fired itself).
> To the best of my understanding, XP remains supported after 2014, for a price…
It’s not. It’s on extended support right now (meaning support for a price + free-as-in-beer security updates). This extended support ends in 2014 meaning end of lifecycle for XP.
@Kurkos:
Then why was I called a freetard?
Oh dear. “And I hate to point this out to the Loons (not to K — that was a silly and insulting joke up there) ...”
It’s common practice in England to piss around and use mock-offensive terms when talking to people you quite like. In this case, I quite clearly underlined the fact that I do not regard you as a freetard.
I suppose, what with you being genetically an Albanian, I can now expect a blood feud against my entire clan.
What a bummer.
They calculate 2 million euro? Remember what they calculated in Munich? This is so ridiculous…
@Chris:
Dis-le à la main, parce que le visage n’est pas en écoute
The correct title would be “Arrêtez cela, au risque de vous rendre aveugles !”.
Note the space between “aveugles” and the exclamation mark (which is IMO idiot).
@FBM:
Ahem. As I said, not but what, 22 posts above yours…
DrLoser:
“Genuinely. I’d love to see the HR budget for les poulets 2009 versus les poulets 2011.”
ChrisTX:
“They calculate 2 million euro?”
ReverseControllerSE:
“Do they just make them up, by creatively interpreting costs?”
While many would like to (be in the) know, only a select few can understand the twisted ways of the Eurocrats.
what kind of a retard would deploy ubuntu in a corporate environment. that thing has glaring bugs out of the box. i wouldn’t touch anything other than debian stable, rhel or suse or their stable derivatives.
forget about hardware related bugs, the amount of pure software bugs in linux distros have brings them down to 1990’s windows or mac releases.
You must be signed in to leave comments.