The Berlin-based union of the German police issued a press release two days ago, where they said that their “Poliks” system to handle reports isn’t stable and reliable enough. Taking up a report into that system often would take between 30 and 90 minutes, which would be awkward. Also, the 73 million Euro system would crash far too often. This years’ consolidated downtimes summed up to more than 50 hours.
The demand of the police union now is to drop the Microsoft-based software and to reconsider the usage of free and open source systems instead. The saved money could then be used to pay the officers their full christmas gratification.
You can download the (German .pdf, 42kB) press release here. Until now, the German police was one of Microsoft’s “reference customers” - you can download their success story (German .pdf, 287kB) here.
Considering Germany was one of the countries who had adopted Firefox very early on as socially popular browser. It seems natural for them to have the same stable base as Firefox offers as a browser for their OS.
Could it be that the lag time was caused by Microsoft OS to “police” their copy of Windows?!?
..while there are ample historical reasons to police German police organizations, I would submit there are even more ample reasons to police Microsoft’s police-ing of German police organizations, especially considering Microsoft’s own organized reluctance to produce records such as e.g. email for it’s own corporate history beyond 30 days, could Microsoft fear being policed? ;o)
Score one for Linux and open source!
Just another example of how crappy Micro$oft really is…
Just say “NO” to Ballmer and his thugs.
http://www.badvista.org/
L8R
The slogan must be: Boliks to Poliks
I don’t have anything useful to say either.
Way to go FOSS!
Well, Germans are known for efficiency and productivity, sometimes at the expense of “friendly” methods.
And before I get flamed, I’m of primarily German descent and typing this on an Ubuntu laptop. They’d be better off with a specialized system to streamline entry and data access, they need high security, and being able to use lower computer resources allows computers a much longer useful lifespan before being replaced. This sounds like a perfect place for Linux.
Linux wont give you any problem and that is very clear.LOL.